Transcript Blurring the Disciplinary Boundaries

Blurring the
Disciplinary Boundaries
Theories of Area Studies
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. History of Confrontation
3. The Present Conflict
4. The Attack
5. The Middle Ground
6. Case Study: United States
7. Conclusion
1. Introduction
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The tension between the universal and the particular in the social sciences has
always been a subject of passionate debate, since it has always been seen as
having immediate political implications, and this has impinged on serene discussion.
Closely associated with these articles is that point that theory form the discipline and
data from the area studies ought to inform one another, but that in actual fact the
discipline has produced very little general theory useful to the analysis of the politics
of Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
These articles attempts to answer the question:
○ Why must one choose between area studies and discipline?
○ Rivals or partners?
2. History of Confrontation
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Initially, the conflict between the traditional disciplines and area specialization was
exacerbated because it was an early case of the academic world being buffeted
about by the currents of international politics and domestic change.
The explosive growth of American higher education in the 1950s and 1960s
coincided with the discovery that the classical European traditions and perspectives
could no longer describe the diverse richness of the real world.
Change sparked by demographic and economic forces was given broader
dimensions by a national need to understand between the non-Western world.
○ Africa and Asia in bidding for attention suggested the need for new intellectual
approaches and the end of older academic triation.
2. History of Confrontation
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The issues of the legitimacy of area studies was an immediate consequence of war.
The urgencies of wartime called from the trampling down the boundaries of
disciplines.
o World War 2 and the problem of understanding distant national enemies had
already proved the limits of conventional ways of organizing knowledge and the
need for new approaches for learning foreign societies.
3. The Present Conflict
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Area studies is a multidisciplinary by
inclination and training. Area
specialists prize a deep and detailed
knowledge of a people and their
political system.
o The professional audience of an
area specialists consists of
researchers from many
disciplines, each of whom has
devoted their scholarly life to
work on the region.
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The goal of the social science is not
to achieve deep understanding of a
particular area but to identify lawful
regularities must not be contextbound.
o The professional audience
of social scientist consists
of other scholars from their
discipline who share
similar theoretical
concerns and who draw
their their data from a
variety of regions of the
world.
3. The Present Conflict
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Traditional practitioners, known as area specialists, find themselves displaced by
social scientists.
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The shift from Area Studies to “social scientific” approaches to the study to the study
of regions abroad most immediately affects graduate training.
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As the social sciences increasingly marginalize area specialists, graduate students,
whose resources are limited, increasingly shift from the study of a region to instruction in
theory and methods.
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The shift from area specialization to “social science” also alters the balance of
power within the academy. Political science departments have long resembled
federations, with their faculty in comparative politics dwelling within semiautonomous Area Studies unit.
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The move toward a disciplinary-oriented view of comparative politics and the
declining resource base for Area Studies has shifted the political centre of gravity
back to the chairs, who can now apply disciplinary criteria, rather than area
knowledge, in evaluating and rewarding professional contributions.
4. The Attack
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Within political science, several forces have contributed to the attack upon Area
Studies. Some originate from the adjacent field of American politics.
Students of American politics possess an intellectual architecture that supports wellfocused debates and a cumulative research tradition.
o This framework is based upon democratic theory, with its themes of
representation, majority rule, and competitive elections.
The study of American politics approximated a "normal science," with increasingly
sophisticated forms of theorizing and means of empirical inference.
4. The Attack
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Students of American politics increasingly viewed themselves as social scientists,
but the system within which they labored, they came to realize, was singularly
devoid of variation.
Therefore, there arose among Americanists a demand for comparative political
research, and some of the most theoretically ambitious among them sought to
escape the confines imposed by the American political system.
o Result: exportation of social science methods to the study of foreign areas
4. The Attack
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In Designing Social Inquiry, King, Keohane, and Verba set
forth the steps of the positivist program:
o take counsel from theory,
o extract testable implications,
o collect measures,
o collect data,
o and thereby seek possibilities for falsification.
The celebrated standing of their work in comparative
politics provides a measure of the field's felt need for
guidance, as researchers seek ways to move from the indepth study of cases typical of Area Studies to more
sophisticated research designs required for scientific
testing.
5. The Middle Ground
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Exploration of analytic national narratives
Analytic narratives represent the use of game theory (an approach currently lodged
within the social sciences) to create logically rigorous and empirically testable
accounts of specific political situations.
o They may offer a bridge between the social sciences and Area Studies.
o To elaborate, the study of politics at the national and local levels.
5. The Middle Ground: National Level
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Area specialists stresses the distinctiveness of national political system.
o Emphasis on history: not sharing common political histories
o Emphasis on culture: different cultures possess distinctive political values,
reflecting the power of learning and thus of socialization in shaping human
beings.
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They also possess distinctive political institutions: polities based upon kinship
secured different responses to the use of power.
Differences in history, values, and institutions, area specialists contend, render
polities distinctive and valid generalizations difficult to extract from political data.
o They believe that information from diverse sources cannot profitably be pooled,
area specialists fail to experience diminishing returns to local knowledge.
o Characteristically, they prize an increment of knowledge concerning their
particular region more highly than additional data extracted from other political
systems.
5. The Middle Ground: Local Level
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Area Studies have always displayed an ethnographic impulse.
o Animated by that impulse, students of politics have acquired languages,
resided in villages, and engaged in participant-observation,conducting what
amount to anthropological studies of politics.
Many such researchers have stressed the way in which people behave strategically,
anticipating the reactions of others, whether they are rivals in the struggle for power
in a village community,competitors for office in a trade union or party, or police and
public officials.
o The well-timed accusation of "tribalism" or of the violation of a norm: deference
to an elder, the timely performance of a burial service, or the full and prompt
payment of a bride price.
o The search for a value-laden social linkage--so as to create a sense of
obligation, whether because of common descent, residence,or place of origin.
The study of politics at the microlevel is actor-centred.
5. The Middle Ground: Local Level
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Elizabeth Colson's commentary upon the Plateau Tonga of Zambia
o Their lives resemble the Rousseauian myth, with people residing in peaceful
communities,sharing their belongings, and legislating wisely in village assemblies. But as
Colson became more intimate with the lives of these people, she came to learn of their fears: of
the greed and envy of their neighbors, of their wrath, and of their desire and capacity to harm.
o Although the lives of the Plateau Tonga may have resembled the accounts of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, their beliefs could have been drawn from the writings of Thomas Hobbes. Colson
resolves the paradoxical contrast between beliefs and behavior by conjecturing that the nature
of their beliefs supported their peaceful conduct.
People scrupulously chose to act in ways that would preserve the peace, she argues, for fear of the
violence they would unleash should they impinge upon the interests of others.
Colson's ethnographic account of political order among the Plateau Tonga thus parallels the
reasoning adopted by game theorists.
The illustration reminds us that the use of game theory requires a complete political anthropology:
knowledge of the actors, their choices, the constraints they face; and their beliefs about the behaviors
of others. It stands as a complement to, not as a substitute for, local knowledge.
6. Case Study: United States
Richard D. Lambert (American Behavioral Scientist)
University Affiliation:
A.B. 1946, M.A. 1947, Ph.D. 1951
Chairman of the South Asia Regional Studies Department
Director of the Office of International Programs
Biographical Summary:
President of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science
Author of works on South Asia
Definition of area specialist
“I define an area specialist as someone who devotes all or a
substantial portion of his or her professional career to the study of
another country or region of the world.”
“..I will be describing area studies as the field is currently organized
in the US, where laissez-faire model growth has produced almost a
pure market profile of this intellectual enterprise.”
- Richard D. Lambert
Academic debates about area studies in US
Relative value of an area vs. Disciplinary focus
Research technology vs. Content
Applied vs. Pure research
Comparison of US’s & Other Scholars
There are individuals within
government agencies who have
responsibility for providing policyrelevant information
Research is carried out in
universities by scholars, who set
their independent agendas, in some
cases see themselves not only
independent of government policy
but opposed to it
Topical & disciplinary focus is determined by
interests of public policy
Much of area studies is carried out within
government agencies or separate academic
that a responsible and responsive to
government needs
Recognizing the national need for specialists
Before WW II, only handful of American scholars dedicated their
professional lives to study countries outside of western Europe
Participation in WW II created a need for a larger cadre of area
specialists with a greater knowledge of the contemporary societies in the
world
After the War, military need for these programs disappeared
However, with help from private foundations, 14 organized campus-based
area studies programs remained
Elements within area studies
Degree of specialization
In American context, the degree of area specialization is a
continuum ranging from the person who conducts a single piece of
research on another country, to scholar whose entire professional
life is devoted to research and teaching on a particular area. Only
77% spent 25% of their professional time studying or teaching about
area (Lambert et al., 1984)
Benefits and Drawbacks
It allows for the continual infusion of fresh ideas
and perspective
It protests against the enclaving of area studies
away from main currents within academic
disciplines
It lessens the danger of dependence on a very
few people for information on other societies
It reduces the likelihood of a descent into very
narrowly defined, country-specific esoterica
It may swamp serious scholarly work on other
countries in a sea of uninformed dilettantism
It squanders scholarly resources that might be
better spent on in depth studies
It intrudes issues of the advancement of the
discipline per se or of the technology of
research analysis into the selection of topic
and the conduct of research; the importance of
the research to the understanding of a country
or region becomes a secondary consideration
It dilutes the training of specialists so that
attaining genuine expertise on a country or
region is displaced by non-area-related
disciplinary training
Broad factual knowledge
Serious area specialist has:
Mastered a substantial amount of factual information on the area
Extensive and recent experience of direct contact with the area
High level of competency in a language of an area
Language competency
In 1982, the organized area studies programs on American campuses taught
76 different languages. The purpose of learning most of these languages is for
use by area specialists in active research within a country
Ologyzing area studies: country or region
“The combination of a high degree of specialization and the need for
substantial amounts of factual knowledge about a country or region, repeated
visits to that country or region, and high levels of language competency results
in what I would call “ologizing” area studies.”
Area studies tribes
Distinct tribes of scholars focusing on each of the particular world areas interact within the tribe and
not with people outside the tribe. The region represented in area studies reflect the broad cultural
subdivisions of the world such as East Europe follows the cold war, Burma goes with Southeast Asia.
The implication of the tribalization of area studies are twofold. First, each world-area studies group has
its own tradition, definition of scholarship, and set of relationships with the countries being studies and
the scholars in that country. Second, the territory lying between the tribes tends to be plowed by
others.
Discipline
The basic reference point for most area specialists is the discipline in which he or she resides, and the
long-term tendency is for more and more disciplinary specialization. Area-studies students have to
learn a variety of disciplines as they relate to their area of specialization. Area studies is not as an
interdisciplinary tradition of scholarship but as a set of sub disciplines, each of which lies inside the
larger tradition of the discipline. The distribution of scholars by degree of specialization, world area,
and discipline is the result of a laissez-faire system of recruitment and growth in the American
universities setting.
Area studies as a transdisciplinary enterprise - Area studies are viewed as transdisciplinary and
subdisciplinary. The area studies programs in American universities gather together scholars from
different disciplines who share the same area focus. The area studies program will offer courses in
many disciplines to train specialists.
Area studies as an interdisciplinary enterprise
The true blending of disciplinary perspectives in area studies is most frequent in two types of activity.
The first of these is in conferences, symposia, and thematic sessions at professional association
meetings.
The second type of blurring of disciplinary boundaries occurs in the research of individual area
specialists.
Area specialists will often start to choose topics that naturally belong in a variety of disciplines.
Area studies as a non-disciplinary enterprise
The term non-disciplinary refer to the topics often fall in domains where the conceptual and
methodological apparatus of particular disciplines is least relevant.
The core of area studies in the social science lies in the non-technical, frequently non-disciplinary end
of the discipline.
There are four core disciplines in area studies: anthropology, history, literature, and political science.
Area specialists have a great deal more intellectual interaction with humanists than do most of their
non area-oriented disciplinary colleagues.
The social science research in area studies leans toward the humanities, it is likewise considered nondisciplinary.
Area studies as a sub-disciplinary endeavor
There are particular sub-disciplinary domains within each discipline.
Area studies serve national objectives; in America it serves the need of the government and business.
It is impossible to narrow and direct the focus of research under the American laissez-faire system.
7. Conclusion
Changes in the world brought the need for area specialization, but
there has been frictions with this new relatively new study and the old
grounded social science disciplines.
Area Studies and Social science discipline are not incompatible or even
competing, but political science and other disciplines will be best
served by encouraging research that draws in a meaningful way on
both scholarly perspectives.