The production of area-specific knowledge about the world has
no firm theoretical foundation. It seems to be an intellectual
by-product of modern state territorialism and of those state-supported
institutions of area studies which became prominent during the
heyday of the nation state, in the decades between 1945 and 1990.
Area studies in the university find their official justification
in itself because they effectively serve disciplines, professions,
business and national interests. The rationale for area studies
for itself derives from the need to understand the diversity
of human experience, which is increasingly embroiled in identity
politics and debates about cultural pluralism. University administrators,
legislators, and funding agencies now find the old rationale for
area studies less compelling and institutional support for the
production of area-specific knowledge depends more and more on
its utility for academic globalization, as the university, like
business and government, seeks to expand its operations around
the world and to establish it own authority in global culture.
Though scholars who produce area-specific knowledge are well endowed
with talent and resources, they find it hard to adapt to this
trend without sacrificing their old intellectual commitments,
because they have such a weak theoretical justification for doing
what they do. To sustain their enterprise, they need to theorize
area-studies in relation to globalization. This is the first in
a set of essays that work in that direction. It focuses on the
institutional history of area studies in the long-term process
of globalization.
Academic Institutions in
the American World
Discussions at the Social Science Research Council about the need
to reorganize area studies began several years before I joined
the Joint Committee on South Asia of the SSRC and American Council
of Learned Societies, in 1991. The immediate ground for debate
was financial, but very soon, accounts of the state of the world
entered debates about academic investment priorities, disciplines,
and area studies. Since then, many analysts have used claims about
contemporary world history to support contending positions in
the funding wars that rage in academic institutions.
In the nineties, Mellon, MacArthur, and Ford foundations have
funded formal discussions of the future of area studies in higher
education, graduate training, and academic research; and budget
cutting by the Congress has triggered intellectual efforts to
protect government funding for international programs, specifically
Title VI of the Education Act, which supports National Resource
Centers and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships
for graduate students. As arguments raged at the SSRC, I became
a Title VI center director at Penn, an assistant script-writer
for Title VI lobbyists on Capitol Hill, and a member of the Fulbright
Senior Scholars advisory board, as the Fulbright Program faced
budget cuts at the US Information Agency and a fifty-year evaluation
of its education and training programs.1
All these institutions look at area studies from their own perspective.
At the University of Pennsylvania, discussions have been dominated
by zero-sum budgeting, and in 1994, at a Provost's forum on international
studies, a dean said bluntly that if Title VI funding died, so
would Penn's area studies programs. Since then, one new Title
VI center has come into being with the deans' support and one
old center has lost Title VI funding, putting the program deep
jeopardy with the deans. Finance rules the roost. Universities
are today most responsive market signals from funding agencies
and donors, and from constituent demands broadcast by alumnae,
students, and legislatures. At the SSRC, debates are more academic
and they focus on forming arguments not only for getting funds
but also for influencing the foundations, where people who have
money to spend want to lead the academy and use their assets to
develop national institutions of higher education, research, and
training on desirable lines. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Congress
can only hear opportunistic political arguments to influence that
mythical voter on Main Street, where federal funding for Hindi,
Arabic, Korean, and Swahili must make sense to white bread America.
In each of these context of struggle over academic funding, accounts
of the current state of the world have come to the fore in arguments
about area studies. In each context, too, the target of attack
has been the same, that is, existing levels of funding for established
area studies programs. Direct federal funding for area studies
(which is only a part of all the funding for international education,
training, and exchange) totals around $60 million annually, and
it is enhanced by old PL-480 allocations for the purchase of library
materials. The federal dollars concentrate in the 115 or so National
Resource Centers that are supported by Title VI grants, and which
are spread around the country and attracting substantial additional
funding from other sources as well. For instance, the South Asia
program at Penn has an endowment that pays about 70% percent of
the value of the Title VI center grant, thanks to the recent performance
of the stock market. Graduate students who are supported during
their first two years on FLAS funding are supported by other university
sources for the rest of their studies. Books from South Asia constitute
12% of the total holdings of the main university library system.
Nationally, all the biggest Title VI area studies centers for
the study of African, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia,
and East and Southeast Asia have had similar success in raising
funds and accumulating assets over the past fifty years.
Federal allocations that support this accumulation came under
new critical scrutiny as the end of the cold war undermined the
single most effective lobbyist argument in support of area studies
on Capitol Hill. The military need for intelligence had always
been the secret weapon for Title VI lobbyists -- and when Ronald
Reagan tried to kill the Department of Education, Caspar Weinberger,
Secretary of Defense, protected international and area studies.
Foundations which had never acknowledged the cold war character
of area studies nevertheless responded quickly to events in 1989;
and so did the SSRC, which for the first time openly stated that
world politics does have an influence on the process of knowledge
production in the academy.
The end of the cold war and quickening pace of globalization are
now widely accepted as epoch markers that set off the 1990s from
previous post-WW2 decades. At the SSRC, former Vice President
Stanley Higgenbotham wrote several essays and many speeches to
describe the implications of the end of the cold war, but discussions
about the shape of the future have tended to focus more on the
implications of globalization, perhaps to avoid the embarrassment
of granting such heavy de facto, post hoc significance to the
cold war. Globalization has become much more prominent in the
American discourse about the world since the fall of the USSR.
A lurking assumption appears to be that (US-led) globalization
has no opposition, that this one process necessarily dominates
the world in which US the academy is working today and will be
working for as long as we can imagine into the future.
The historical moment in which we are now living is widely taken
to be the start of a new era. How this attaches to millennial
fantasies and to old-fashioned fin de siecle patterns of
cultural production remains to be seen. Thomas Haskell recently
captured our newest cliché about historical epochs by saying,
"The bloody contest between capitalism and socialism unexpectedly
came to an end in 1989 after a struggle that gripped the world
for a century and a half."2
Eric Hobsbawm called 1989 the end of "the age of extremes,"
saying about the nineties (in the past tense) that "citizens
of the fin de siecle tapped their way through the global
fog that surrounded them, into the third millennium ... certain
... that an era of history had ended." "They knew very
little else," he added, referring no doubt to his own grasp
of recent history.3
Like many legislators and intellectuals, leaders at the SSRC and
the Ford Foundation, , took all this to mean that new modes of
knowledge production are needed. By 1989, the SSRC and ACLS had
sustained about a dozen area studies joint committees for thirty
years. These area-specific, multi-disciplinary committees of faculty
representing US area studies used about half the SSRC operating
budget to generate short-term grant income for conferences and
research publications. Annual reports of the SSRC indicate that
these committees had an impressive record of productivity and
influence on area studies and the disciplines. The new critique
came down from the SSRC president, David Featherman, who launched
a strong disciplinary objection to area studies in general, saying
that disciplinary social science was more universally applicable,
globally useful, and thus more worthy of support than area studies
after the end of the cold war. He argued against area studies
in favor of "hard" social science of the sort that is
based primarily in departments of economics, political science,
and sociology, which use statistical data, formal models (often
mathematical), and positivist, explanatory theory. He proposed
reducing the power of the joint committees to allow the central
administration to reallocate funds accordingly.
In 1996, the new SSRC president, Ken Prewitt, eliminated all the
joint committees and the SSRC began to tap its way toward a new,
looser structure of "regional advisory panels." He clearly
favored more global forms of social science knowledge over the
established configurations of area studies, and he opened up the
Councils' options by pulling the plug on the old committees. In
1997, using Ford funding, the SSRC and ACLS held a joint meeting
including more than a hundred advisory panel members from all
the areas and disciplines represented by the two Councils, for
the sole purpose of discussing the condition and future of area
studies. The meeting began with a panel that described the current
turning point in history from the vantage point of several disciplines
and continents; and the emphasis fell upon the process of globalization
and the current transformation of Eastern Europe and regions of
the former Soviet Union. At the end of the meeting, area studies
had survived critical scrutiny, not because existing programs
were taken to be satisfactory but rather because participants
repeatedly substantiated the continuing and future need for area-specific
forms of knowledge in the social sciences and humanities.
The institutional outcome was mixed and uncertain -- and that
is the current condition of area studies in the university. On
Capitol Hill, Title VI, and all the Fulbright programs survived,
though they are living under sharper financial pressure and political
scrutiny. The SSRC built a loose, temporary structure of regional
advisory panels and centralized financial decision-making which
had been dispersed among joint committees. The main task at present
is to internationalize collaborations within area studies in order
to break it out of its old formation within the national territoriality
of the US academy, in recognition of the increasing trend of internationalization
within the scholarly community.4
The Ford Foundation has made similarly ambiguous moves, offering
support for area studies and dismantling its budgetary identity
in a more centralized administration -- more "streamlined"
or "lean" in nineties corporate parlance. The announcement
in The Chronicle of Higher Education is this:
The Ford Foundation, which has $9.2 billion in assets and awarded $350 million in grants during 1996, has abolished its regional directorships and consolidated its former eight programs into three. The three new programs include Peace and Social Justice, Asset Building and Community Development, and Education, Media, Arts and Culture. Ford president Susan V. Berresford, who was appointed in 1996, was instrumental in enacting the changes. Berresford believes that the foundation should devote more of its resources to supporting area studies programs and funding research into global issues.5
Globalization
Swamps Area Studies
Political scientists have paid the most attention to David Featherman's
argument to their discipline's relation to area studies, perhaps
because the cold war had implicated their field most intensely,
so that the new globalization presents more radical adjustments
and potential dividends. Debates in PS: Political Science &
Politics have focused particularly on the Middle East as an
area for area studies6
and on the role of theory in comparative politics.7
Christopher Shea catches the tone of these debate when he used
the headline, "Political scientists clash over value of area
studies: theorists say that a focus on individual regions leads
to work that is mushy."8
More generally in social science, however, an old opposition flared
up between social scientists who support and oppose area studies.
In the past, it had simmered at the boundaries of disciplines
over questions of inter-disciplinary collaboration.9
Some attention fell upon the question of area-specificity itself,10 but in the
new context of the 1990s, the opposition to area studies heated
up and produced a novel outcome. Hard disciplinarians like Robert
Bates began to argue that area studies did produce descriptive
work whose diverse empirical data needed to be incorporated by
universal theories in disciplinary methodologies; toward this
end, he promoted rational choice theory in political science.
On the other hand, cultural specialists like Arjun Appadurai argued
that new transnational processes drew from and transformed patterns
of life in every region of the world, so that we need to be understand
areas in their specific particularity in order to comprehend the
world; toward this end, he promotes an amalgam of anthropology,
history, and cultural studies that is now prominent at the University
of Chicago.11
Area studies thus entered the age of globalization. By 1992, three
positions had come into being at the SSRC. Advocates of universal
disciplinary knowledge opposed area-specific, inter-disciplinary
knowledge and their interaction produced a new intellectual
space for the formation of global knowledge that combines
the universality of social science with the area-specificity of
the humanities. This new form was dubbed "context-sensitive
social science" at the SSRC -- global in reach, local in
touch -- a place for the hard and soft social sciences to meet
and to argue about area studies. Softer, more descriptive social
sciences, especially history and anthropology, are most involved
in area studies and in collaborations with the humanities and
cultural studies; and they have been the most receptive to global
formations of knowledge, which are now applied widely in world
history and transnational cultural studies.
Scholars of universalizing social science continue to define theory
and method in the disciplines, and they can now collaborate with
(or at least tolerate) others who pursue those mushy, area-specific
forms of inter-disciplinary knowledge, simply by agreeing that
there is an emerging formation of global social science that
includes a cultural studies agenda. This seems to be the
framework within which Ford and SSRC propose to reconfigure area
studies.
The new kind of knowledge has global reach without being imperialistic
or domineering. It is international in its embrace and participation;
and includes all the multi-cultural voices of race, class, gender,
ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, and such.
It combines the universal powers of empirical, deductive sciences
with the critical powers and descriptive, interpretive subtlety
of cultural studies. Global in its vision, arguments, and relevance,
it is local in its data, application, and humanity. It keeps the
classical humanities -- language and literature -- at one remove,
however, because after all, it is defined in the form of a social
science.
This global knowledge is not area studies and its attitude
to area-specificity is utilitarian. It defines a domain outside
area studies, encompassing area-specific knowledge, giving it
new meaning and utility, so that area studies can participate
in the global agenda. But global and globalization studies do
not derive their theory from ideas about expansive or interactive
sets of area-specific knowledge. They are new renditions of universalizing,
Western science -- to anticipate my argument that they conceal
an area-specific set of universal aspirations.
There remains, therefore, a disjuncture between area studies and
global studies. Area-focused disciplinarians in history and anthropology
(including folklore), for instance, can remain committed to area
studies for itself, as they were in the old days,
before 1989; but now their attention to global forms of knowledge
-- to world history, global issues, or transnational processes
-- ushers area studies in itself into this newly context-sensitized
environment of social science, where disciplinarians who are actually
hostile to area specific as an end in itself can accept
area studies as a means to higher scientific ends.
This is a kind of environment in which Robert Bates and Arjun
Appadurai can both participate because of a shared interest and
involvement in globalization. Political scientist Ian Lustick
has a Ford-funded workshop at Penn on "Problematics of Identities
and States" that is good substantiation of the new science;
and it is also a model for new SSRC collaborative research networks.
Ian himself is a formalist and he becoming more attracted to mathematical
models of ethnic identity; but his workshop provides a welcome
home for all kinds of area-specific scholars; and Ian's own research
draws on a number of disciplines that pertain to the study of
the Middle East, though he does not want to be known as a Middle
East area specialist.
Globalization and global studies agenda now dominate conversations
about area studies in the university, and collectively, colleges
and universities will need to reproduce all the forms of knowledge
that mingle in globalized area studies, including language and
cultural studies, though each university does not need to provide
the entire bundle. Universities confront this challenge amidst
a diverse set of financial considerations, which include market
demand for each type of knowledge, and in hard money terms, professional
schools, sciences, and undergraduate education most preoccupy
the universities that must sustain area studies.
For professional schools and sciences, area studies at best
describe sites for the application of their own practical brand
of universal knowledge. Some regions of the world do have salience
for the conduct of some sciences -- for instance, geology -- and
there are many international scientific collaborations, some of
which are funded alongside area studies in the Fulbright programs.
Environmental scientists spend a lot of time in many world areas
but they are not concerned with area-specific knowledge
such as pertain to education and training in language and culture.
We have scientists on the Fulbright senior scholars program advisory
because work overseas is often useful for US scientists -- and
humanizing science was part of the Senator's plan -- but we do
not yet have people from business schools at Fulbright, though
some business schools do receive support in their international
efforts from the Department of Education. Penn's international
studies Title VI program was located in the Wharton school, and
the Lauder Program at Wharton represents one business school's
use of area studies for training international business executives.
Compared to the social science and humanities disciplines that
participate in area studies, professions and sciences command
vast financial resources, which they control in a way that is
actually hostile to the funding of area studies in and
for itself; area-specific knowledge merely provides background
knowledge and some useful tools for the pursuit of universal,
practical disciplines. Professional schools do not need area-specific
knowledge of the same kind that we need in the social sciences
and the humanities; and they will not pay for its production.
They might be willing to train students in language and area knowledge
for their specific professional purposes, but nothing beyond that.
Similarly, social scientists who are context sensitive work in
departments which are not; and they may want to incorporate
area knowledge, produced by years of language training and work
in the field by people for whom area-specific knowledge is the
work of their lives. But social sciences want to use area
knowledge more than to have it. In budget competitions,
they will join the sciences and professions in their support of
universal knowledge with global reach.
New needs for area studies knowledge are also coming from undergraduates
who want ethnic studies, heritage studies, study abroad, comparative
literature, women's studies, cultural studies and other new forms
of international knowledge. All area studies programs benefit
to some extent from this new demand on campus and they are seeking
support from appropriate interest groups that are represented
in their institution. For instance, Asian studies programs look
for funding for new faculty from the Asian-American and Asian
community in America, as African studies programs look for support
from schools of medicine, nursing, and public health that are
involved in research and training programs in Africa. Many undergraduates
who seek heritage courses in Latin American or Indian studies
are also pre-professionals who will work in a foreign country
or two during the course of careers in the global economy. These
are natural constituents for the institution of area studies within
globalization.
Perhaps the most important shift represented by the globalization
of area studies is the reduced role of the national state in its
organization, finance, and ideology. The global agenda provides
many new opportunities for area studies to serve the social sciences,
business schools, public policy institutes, medical schools, NGOs,
United Nations organizations, private enterprise, and governments.
Universities are thus developing new support systems for area
studies that cross the boundaries among schools and allow practitioners
of all the disciplines to expand their powers to operate anywhere
in the world. This has been happening for ten years, and many
major area studies programs operate today inside multi-school
institutes like those at Berkeley, Michigan, and Wisconsin, whose
directors report to the Provost. Thus the centralization of area
studies has been moving ahead at universities even longer than
at the SSRC and Ford Foundation.
The New Globalism
The current institutional trend indicates that area-studies will
develop to the extent that it makes a case for itself in the constellation
of interests that converge on globalization. Global interests
will not support area studies on their own account, because they
are best opportunistic in their appreciation of area-specific
knowledge and they will look to buy it anywhere as they weigh
the cost of investing in its production. For agents and scholars
of globalization, moreover, territoriality is odious; knowledge
attached in and for itself to any specific territory is
archaic and limited, low-tech and low-brow. Constraints on the
flow of ideas and information constitute obstacles for globalism,
and old fashioned area studies, like old fashioned states, obstruct
the movement of knowledge across their borders.
The new globalism is trans-national, post-national, and it associates
boundaries and territories of all kinds with old-fashioned confinement
and limitation. The 1997 World Development Report instructs
state elites on the management of their little bits of the world
economy, but beyond that function, states seem unnecessary; and
in globalization circles, the idea that a national state could
be a moral guardian of national interests, identities, and well-being
is clearly a thing of the past. This new world elite critique
of the national state has joined an old chorus of leftist critics
who have attacked the power of national states for decades --
a chorus that now includes Subaltern Studies and theories
of post-development. A left critique that stripped away the state
to liberate the little people in their localities has left them
open to globalization; and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities
might appear to be saying that national states and identities
are the legacy of a by-gone age when print capital fed the national
imaginaire.
The entire host of intermediary territories that lie between the
global and the local have disappeared in the discourse of globalism.
This was the domain of area studies. In global circles, therefore,
a musty, archaic odor accompanies area studies, and its traditional
funding. Area-specific forms of knowledge seem to be constraints
on intellectual mobility and global exchange.
The argument that there is an opposition between the single world
of globalism and the many little territories of area studies conceals
the territoriality of globalization itself and the historical
position of area studies within it. A new home for area studies
in a world of globalization will begin to emerge as we better
understand the long historic interaction of area-specific knowledge
and globalization.
Area studies programs in the US came into being to serve the globalization
of America at mid-century, when the allocation of federal funds
sought to increase American knowledge of world areas to improve
the global conduct of US policy. National interests propelled
area studies and globalization; they all supported one another.
This "national" included government, business, foundations,
and universities, which all began to globalize their understanding
of America's world more strenuously after December 6, 1941. Global
America had previously centered on Europe, though it also included
East Asia and Latin America, and to a much lesser extent, territories
of British and French imperialism in Africa, Asia, and the Middle
East. After 1945, a new global US view of the world spawned area
studies.
But area-specific knowledge of the world did not begin with the
cold war. It came along with modernity and it constituted not
only nationality but also imperialism. From the eighteenth century
enlightenment, imperial territorialism elevated scientific, universal
knowledge which could encompass and comprehend all the narrow,
traditional, partisan, and idiosyncratic forms of knowledge that
preceded and contested modernity. Modern nationalism combined
scientific, imperial knowledge with a populist hyper-enchantment
of tradition to create a distinctively new kind of national claim
to territories all over the world; and after World War Two, the
earth was covered with national states for the first time. Divided
among regions of culture, history, and political economy, this
new world of national states provided a reality ground for the
conceptualization and organization of area-specific knowledge.
Knowing all the regions of the world became the key to globalization,
which embraced national territories of culture and power that
were the subject of area studies.
A big shift in the nation-state system would thus necessarily
destabilize area studies, and so it did, after 1989. But this
shift continued a process of globalization that was the big force
at work in 1950 as much as was in 1990. Globalization could indeed
be said to have begun long before 1492, and its actual pace has
been faster at various times in the past than it is today -- for
instance, in the 1880s. What is new today is not the fact of globalization
but rather its recognition as a central historical process and
utilization as a theoretical basis for efforts to reorganize knowledge
and power in the world. As an ideological phenomenon, globalism
is a geographical expression of European universal ambitions,
which embrace area-specific knowledge for its global ends and
rejects any form of area studies which would confound a comprehensive
comprehension of its world. Globalization will obviously not provide
a stable intellectual or institutional home for area studies scholarship.
Real Life in Global Territory
Though the US is the home of the new globalism, its intellectual
life and culture is both isolationist and expansive, imperial
and parochial. US public support for its worldwide war machine
coexists with a small-town fetishism for an intensely local, face-to-face,
peaceful, family-style, "we don't even lock the doors"
kind of social order that US media call "the American way."
Much the same could be said for the hometown cultures of British
and French imperialism in the nineteenth century, when modern
globalization got underway. Territoriality and globalization use
one another, and imperial territorialism includes and even fosters
its own opposition, at home and abroad. Questions about perspective,
intention, experience, and participation in globalization emerged
after World War Two, as they Americans entered the world of old
empires, and area studies inherited all the complexities of global
territory.
The term, "globalization,"
defies precise definition, [but it] conveys a sense that international
forces, whether technological, economic, or cultural, are driving
more and more developments in the world around us, and thus it
seems to crystallize the hope of some that we will finally
achieve a global society and the fears of many that their
lives and jobs will be threatened by forces beyond the control
even of national governments.12
(emphasis added)
Globalization is an impersonal, objective process, unfolding
out there in the world; but it is also a personal project
for proponents of an integrated world economy and culture. Proponents
of globalization as a project are also the leading experts on
the process of globalization and the leading advocates of the
globalization paradigm for the social sciences. People who are
most adamant about the revolutionary implications of globalization
for the production of knowledge are most prominent at central
points in the expansion of global economic and cultural power,
most of all in the US.
American images of a radically changing world in which Americans
will take the lead have been popular for at least a century. Woodrow
Wilson was of course a major figure. All along, however, expansionists
have fought with isolationists, and dreams of the radically different
future have had to face commitments to a conservative past. These
conflicting cultural positions have characterized an objectively
expanding American political economy, and we can seen them also
in the cultural history of European imperial powers.
Specific opportunities and anxieties arise in the centers of globalizing
power. Wide open opportunities beget anxiety about chaos and barbarism,
which in turn justify national investments in global military
and political power, as in Robert Kaplan's famous 1994 article
in The Atlantic Monthly. More pervasive chaotic global
movements that are described politically by J.Rosenau and culturally
by Arjun Appadurai give the double impression that globalization
has no direction, center, or guiding logic, and also that globalization
is moving out from centers of international financial and media
power according to the universal logic of business competition.13 The desire
to find or make order in the chaos of the new world economy remains
a pervasive theme that scholars of globalization address in various
ways. Stephen Kobrin's forthcoming paper in the Journal of
International Affairs, for instance, argues that we will need
"some sort of authority at the center" of the new world
system (p.27).
Effective economic governance in the postmodern integrated
world economy will require a marked strengthening of international
institutions such as the World Trade Organization. They may well
acquire taxation and enforcement powers if territorial jurisdiction
is no longer effective.
Where is the center of the world system? It appears to be somewhere
in the international processes which lie behind the Uruguay Round
of GATT, where the WTO was born, in 1995. David Korten argues
that the WTO is already "the world's highest judicial and
legislative body," which when it achieves full ratification
will provide a means for any member country to challenge
any law of another member country that it believes deprives
it of benefits it expected to receive from the new trade rules.
This includes virtually any law that requires imported goods
to meet local or national health, safety, labor or environmental
standards that exceed WTO accepted international standards.14
at is the connection between the WTO and Main Street, USA?
There is a serious disjuncture between the process and project
of globalization and territorialities and communities that are
formed at the national, regional, and local level; it needs to
be sutured by area studies scholarship. One of the central regions
of globalization in the contemporary world -- perhaps the central
region -- the US, is occupied predominantly by forms of knowledge
and consciousness that are distinctly hostile to and ignorant
of globalization. US political discourse is territorial both in
the expansive and the enclosed sense of that term. Knowledge in
the university reflects that disjuncture and alienation, as pointed
out brilliantly Jane C. Desmond and Virginia R. Dominguez, who
describe the alienation of American Studies from Area Studies
as an opposition of the study of the Self from the study of the
Other.15
This opposition pertains within every national educational system,
and also at lower levels of spatial order within the nested territories
that comprise the real world of everyday life for most people
in the world of globalization. Schools accentuate and institutionalize
a personal sense of being a Texan or North Dakotan in America
or a Tamil or Bengali in India. Shahid Amin has shown that in
India, the village past occupies a place in the world of knowledge
outside the national past.16
But Amin does not tell us that this separation is sanctioned by
official knowledge that is sustained by government and by ruling
elites, who in India, as in America, help to produce the localism
and regionalism of political identity. Territory and community
are not natural; and they are also socially stratified, so that
some people participate both in the local and the global and occupy
positions of leadership in regions of power, while other people
live essentially trapped in local and regional forms that they
identify as their own. All the world's territorial powers generate
knowledge that both separate and connect people in the globalization
process; but globalism as a form of knowledge only captures that
small strand of activity and knowledge that pertains to expansive,
free movements across the real boundaries within which most people
live.
Institutions Fail
Little islands in the sea of American Studies of the Self which
dominate the social sciences and humanities, area studies programs
are weak, scattered enclaves. Their occupants have thus reacted
quickly, if not wisely, to the challenges posed by the rising
tide of globalization; they have had very little time or opportunity
to reflect collectively on their condition; and to sustain themselves,
they have had to run for the money. The programs came into being
with national funding initiatives to address the needs
of globalizing America. Once established, they depended on this
funding and remained isolated from American studies of the Self.
Their intellectual life became connected more to the external
aspect of America than to its internal politics. As their role
in US globalization diminished, they worked hard to sustain funding
inside the universities and nationally. Some scholars have raised
and strengthened dikes around their little enclaves of expertise.
Others are shifting to American Studies of the Self by joining
ethnic studies programs. Others are learning to swim the heady
currents of the new globalism. The scattered inhabitants of all
the little islands that constitute the archipelago of area studies
are thus abandoning their territory because they do not see that
their islands together constitute intellectually coherent, political
space. Their institutions have failed to sustain the promise of
area studies.
In the 1950s, a new set of funds were directed at the universities
to give them a new interest in foreign languages and in foreign
area studies. Social scientists who were already most involved
in these fields of study-- historians, political scientists, sociologists,
geographers, and anthropologists -- took advantage of this funding
to link themselves with language and humanities programs. This
produced an alliance between modernization theory and classical
orientalism. The social sciences of modernization, development,
state building, and cold war competition thus became allies for
scholars of classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Persian, and
Arabic who developed new modern language programs, strategically
adding Japanese, Hindi, Tamil, Turkish, Vietnamese, Malay and
the like according to the institutional profile of each institution.
In Asian and Middle East studies, classical languages retained
their supremacy, however, and today, for instance, we have four
full professors who specialize in Sanskrit at Penn, while all
our modern South Asian language teaching is supported by untenurable
faculty. By contrast, centers in Latin American Studies grew up
around the interests inherited from a very old US engagement with
its colonial territory to the south and from European language
studies in Spanish and Portuguese. African studies and Southeast
Asian studies were built virtually from scratch.
African studies was by far the most radical innovation, closely
followed by Southeast Asian studies, because these new area studies
fields had so little to build on within existing faculties when
they were founded. They were least encumbered by alliances among
old faculty interests in the classical and European languages,
philology, orientalism, and literary studies.
Troubles over the relationship between area studies and the disciplines
have arisen recently only in part from a national funding crisis
(which has undermined many twentieth century institutions, including
welfare systems and states around the world), but also, significantly,
because the funding base for area studies must now move away from
its dependence on external funding. Such funding will continue
to benefit area studies, but all external funding agencies insist
on more and more local institutional support, and universities
do not conceptualize their own priorities within a collective
of universities that must together produce a certain totality
of knowledge. This collective conceptualization of universities
in the nation lay behind federal funding; and it is gone.
Now it would be up to the universities to reformulate some kind
of collective image of themselves, so that each would contribute
rationally to the national (or global?) process of knowledge production.
Knowing their own place in the world of knowledge would be essential
for this purpose.
Faced with shaky outside funding and seeking support locally in
competition with the professions, sciences, and social sciences,
area studies programs have demonstrated a gross intellectual inadequacy,
which has further weakened their capacity to generate political
support. The old institutions of area studies emerged from a set
of opportunistic alliances cobbled together across disciplines
and departments. These have been very productive -- and they still
are -- but their intellectual output was has not been reinvested
in the reproduction of intellectual capital for area studies.
Arguments in favor of area-specific forms of knowledge
have essentially remained opportunistic, tied to the rationale
for the flow of funding from government and foundations. Thus
when area studies were immediately challenged by the social sciences
at the end of the cold war, the social sciences won, hands down,
because area studies had no theory of itself for its self-protection,
no intellectual mastery of its own fate.
Global forms of knowledge and their advocates will not generate
the funding for area studies unless the necessity for area-specific
knowledge is clearly and widely understood. But instead of building
its own intellectual foundations in the university, the intellectual
benefits of area studies have gone into the disciplines, including
language teaching .
As area studies specialists have worked for local funding, for
tenure, and for promotions in their disciplinary departments,
they have also joined inter-disciplinary programs in ethnohistory,
comparative literature, women's studies, Afro-American studies,
ethnic studies, and transnational cultural studies, which do not
define themselves by area, but by the intersection of disciplines.
One of the critical arguments for area studies program -- that
they provide a productive space for inter-disciplinary collaboration
-- has been usurped by other inter-disciplinary programs. The
institutions of area studies -- and the process and logic of area-specific
knowledge production -- have not been intellectually reinvented
or theoretically reinvested with the creative energies of scholars
who were trained in area studies programs.
Some scholars have maintained their institutional and personal
interest in their own particular area studies territory. African
Studies in particular has paid attention to its own legacy of
productivity. But the volume on Africa and the Disciplines,
published strategically in 1993, has no analogue for other world
areas; it expresses a specifically African studies intelligence
and interest. It does not seek to provide a theory or intellectual
rationale for area-specific knowledge or for area studies in
general.
There is no theory of area studies or of area-specific knowledge,
only a set of institutional, personal, and fragmented disciplinary,
market, and professional interests that converge chaotically on
questions of funding. The organizations that should have taken
the lead in forming a broad theoretical basis for area studies
-- the associations: ASA, AAS, LASA, and MESA -- have done nothing
except tout the importance of their own world area, which in the
case of African studies has included exceptional efforts to theorize
connections across world areas -- most particularly with Latin
America, but also, to a lesser extent, Asia.17
But this kind of cross-area work has for the most part been a
project within the disciplines of history and anthropology or
an effort to increase the vitality of one area studies project
by drawing upon its relations with others.
Scholars working within their own disciplines and across disciplines,
and to some extent, across areas, area studies scholars have transformed
the substance of area-specific knowledge very substantially in
the last twenty years. But divided by discipline and by their
separately institutionalized area studies interests, they have
not bothered even to describe, let alone to theorize, area-specific
knowledge as such. When their funding is threatened, institutional
interests retreat into a competitive defense of their own area
studies program, drawing upon the competitive strength of their
faculties and departments. A broadly based theory for area studies
that would make sense of the historical development of area-specific
forms of knowledge would require a kind of collaboration that
does not yet exist.
A Site for Area Studies
Area studies presents an academic counterpoint to globalization
and a critical perspective on the new globalism. Area-specific
knowledge can that seriously that specifically American
combination of rustic parochial isolationism and elite imperial
expansionism -- it is not merely a feature of globalization but
a also a breeding ground for new global theories and anxieties,
at the approach of the millennium.
Globalization is site-specific, as each region of the world constitutes
the center of its own global experience. Area studies scholarship
articulates diversity and territoriality in the changing world
of globalization.
The SSRC solution to the problem of reorganizing area studies
is thus a logical one: the Council is working to internationalize
area-specific scholarship and to extract area studies from its
American moorings. Putting globalization in the perspective of
all the various regions of the world, rather than seeing it as
a single process -- implicitly centered in the capitals of global
enterprise -- reveals a vast patchwork of world territories which
have been both increasingly integrated and differentiated during
the long history of globalization. Europe, Africa, and China assumed
their modern identity as world regions during the process of globalization.
Old conventional wisdom holds that globalization has been driven
by European expansion. Between 1917 and 1989, bipolar images of
a "world of extremes" kept that conventional wisdom
in place by generating an image of a globe torn between two opposing
European options, communism and capitalism. A more complex landscape
of cultural difference and historical differentiation is now coming
into view, because bi-polarity is dead and people from all world
regions now participate in many global discourses, which run the
gamut from eco-feminism and human rights law to arms control and
structural adjustment. Non-European contributions to modernity
and the world economy are becoming more apparent.
In this new landscape of world history, some regions and groups
are clearly more powerful than others. Some people and regions
have more to gain from globalization. In much of the world, globalization
is fearsome and hated. In general, it is seen as being distinctly
American, and much of its guiding ideology and imagery today is
made in the USA.18
Area studies represents an academic articulation of globalization
and territoriality outside America. Area studies institutions
in the US began with the official intention of furthering US power
in each world area, but they have moved well beyond that old project
with the expansion of world academic networks and with the arrival
in the US of scholars from every part of the world who now form
the cutting edge of area studies. World area studies are now domesticated
inside the US by the global participation of scholars who take
their own native regions of cultural difference and experience
very seriously. At the same time, many American scholars have
become partially expatriated by their constant travels and studies
in other countries, which they feel seriously, as foreigners,
to be home.
In world territories of knowledge and experience, boundaries of
difference are widely understood as being permanent and necessary.
The regional languages and literature's of the world are not dying
out. Despite the influence of Hollywood, there are many times
more films produced in Indian languages than in English, and they
circulate throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast
Asia, as well as in the US. Most of the world does not speak or
read any global language. Three quarters of the world population
speak non-European languages and most global intellectuals are
at least bilingual, because no one global language is enough,
and never will be. National states produce the world's currencies,
protect private property, sustain capital accumulation, and regulate
financial markets. The World Bank's World Development Report,
1997 says that national states are essential for the world
economy. Many forces that drive these states operate primarily
inside their borders. The well-stamped passport is the sign of
a global citizen, who at every stop feels the scrutiny of a serious
state.
Global intellectuals move among world regions of cultures and
states. Globalizing disciplines represent their common language.
Area studies embrace the fact that most global citizens live in
territories where the local language is not global and will never
be. Globalization has always sustained regional difference and
particularism, as it does on Main Street, USA.
An appreciation of the multiplicity of sites from which world-changing
circulatory processes have emanated historically needs to be at
the center of any effort to reconceptualize area studies. In this
context, the West is not a single site but rather a set of localities
lumped together variously amidst a circulation of elements that
emanate from various other places. Where does the reification
of "the West" or "Europe and the US" as a
single force in world history come from? What is the location
of this theory? Certainly it is enshrined in American social sciences
and area studies. It needs some serious reconsideration.
Globalization is perhaps best defined as a process of multiplication
in the number of sites in which circulatory movements intersect
and from which circulatory movements emanate. More sites
produce expanding circles of rippling waves that intersect at
more sites over time. The waves that spread out from Europe were
not unitary or determining of historical outcomes. They provoked
local emanations elsewhere, which hit European sites from all
directions.
But modern globalization needs also be understood as a
project within capitalism, as a universalization of capitalist
competition, and as a process of European expansion. Defining
the term only by the spreading of Western capitalist power
is inappropriate, but the spreading influence of multiple sites
in the world over other sites proceeded after 1492 with the increasing
power of Western peoples and capitalist countries over the peoples
and resources of the earth. Globalization is not only a process
but also a project, an ideology, and its operations need to be
understood in the context of other processes and projects. There
is already a critical literature on the globalization project,
which indicates that it should not be assumed to provide the intellectual
basis for academic studies of the world at the end of this century.
Herman Daly put the matter simply in his farewell address to the
World Bank in 1994: "Cosmopolitan globalism weakens national
boundaries and the power of national and subnational communities,
while strengthening the relative power of transnational corporations."19
If students in each part of the world are going to understand
their real "place" in the world, they need to understand
that national borders are zones of tension amidst global circulatory
process that change all kinds of boundaries. Getting out of the
US mentality into the competing and various formations of territory,
space, locality, region, and identity that define the world of
ethnicity and medicine might be a good way to begin expanding
the scope of area studies and collaborations among area studies
programs in the context of globalization.
The University of Chicago has appointed
scholars specializing in cultural and regional studies, mainly
concerning Asia, to create a new cadre. In an age of changing
national boundaries and cultures, it has initiated a new process
of constituting the disciplines. This initiative will bring together
40 scholars to form a gender-studies center. The texts are being
broadened to include the history of films and medical culture.
The university's globalization project inspires rethinking of
area studies by focusing on the relationship between regional
and national cultures.
12
Peter Hall and Sidney Tarrow, "Globalization
and Area Studies: When is too wide too narrow?, SSRC working paper,
nd (1997), p.1.
13 J.Rosenau,
Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity,
Princeton, 1990; and Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, 1996.
14 David C.
Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, Earthscan Publishers,
London, 1995, p.174
15 "Resituating
American studies in a critical internationalism," American
Quarterly, 48, 3, September 1996, 475-91.
16 Shahid
Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1992-1996,
Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1996.
17
See the Confronting Historical Paradigms
volume and Fred Cooper's development conferences, and Frederick
Cooper, "Conflict and Connections: Rethinking Colonial African
History," American Historical Review, December 1994,
99, 5, 1516-1545
18
See Anthony King, Editor, Culture,
Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for
the Representation of Identity, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1997.
19 Quoted
in Korten, When Corporations Rule, p.173