Diaspora 10:1 2001 ping the World After the n Area Studies Peter Rutland Wesleyan University Beyond the Area Studies Wars: Toward a New International Studies. Ed. Neil Waters. Hanover, VT: Middlebury College Press, 2000. This volume consists of ten papers that analyze the crisis in area studies and its implications for the various social science discip- lines. It is a welcome contribution to a debate—on the implications of the end of the Cold War for American academia—that should be happening but, curiously, is not. With authors from around the country, the book is published as part of the Middlebury College Bicentennial Series in International Studies. Middlebury is recog- nized for providing area studies at its best. It is arguably the leading institution in the country for the teaching of foreign languages, especially with respect to training students in social science alongside their language immersion. The Cold War exerted a powerful and lasting influence on the structure and character of America’s universities. It unleashed a flood of federal cash, funding a massive expansion of research labs in the sciences and spreading its largesse across the curriculum through expanded student loan programs. But perhaps the most direct impact of the Cold War on the humanities curriculum was in the funding and encouragement of “area studies.” The notion of area studies arose during World War II and metastasized in the fol- lowing years as the United States shouldered the mantle of waging a war, albeit Cold, against the Communist adversary. As contain- ment expanded from Europe to Asia and beyond, it suddenly be- came imperative, on grounds of national security, that the United States develop expertise in understanding those foreign societies: not only expert knowledge for policy advice, but also a cadre of teachers who could train diplomats, spies, and soldiers to operate in those cultures. Needless to say, academics happily signed on to this Faustian pact. The federal cash came with fewer strings attached than would, for example, sponsorship from business interests. Under the iDiaspora 10:1 2001 area studies paradigm, the world was divided up into blocs. The im- plicit assumption was that each area formed some kind of cultural- historical whole, that could and should be studied as an integral entity. The foundation of this unity was, primarily, culture, and usually high culture at that (culture with a capital “K”). In order to understand Russia or China, it was assumed that one needed to be steeped in the history and literary traditions of those countries. Fast forward forty years, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and its East European empire pulled the rug from under area studies. Although Communism soldiered on in China and a few other places, it no longer represented anything like the military threat posed by the USSR. (Today, Russia still has 7,000 interconti- nental nuclear missiles; China has about 20.) Curiously, although radical Islam was widely perceived as a threat, few universities saw any urgency in studying the Islamic world. The end of the Cold War left international studies in crisis. Ironically, just as America was seen as assuming an unchallenged role as the sole superpower, it showed all the signs of a headlong retreat from the outside world: but this retreat seemed to be led by universities, as opposed to business or the military. Diane Schemo wrote in the New York Times that, “according to government fi- gures, American colleges and universities graduated only nine students who majored in Arabic last year. Only about 140 students graduated with degrees in Chinese. These days, only 8.2 percent of American college and university students enroll in foreign language courses—nearly all in Spanish, French and German.” In contrast, last year the Defense Foreign Language Institute in Monterrey graduated 409 students in Arabic and 120 in Farsi. The collection under review is a handy introduction to the chal- lenges confronting area studies, although it falls short of providing a systematic account of the state of the disciplinary crisis. It notes that the problems inherent in the area studies approach were there from the beginning, the shift of national priorities since 1991 merely serving to bring these contradictions into the open. The first half of the book is devoted to two disciplinary challenges to area studies that surfaced before the end of the Cold War—postmodern- ism on one side and rational choice on the other. The second half consists of chapters on individual disciplines—anthropology, geog- raphy, political science, history, economics, and language teaching. David Gibbs’s essay blasts postmodernism as an insidious, knowledge-destroying practice that targeted many traditional fields of study, of which area studies was one. Richard Perry similarly makes postmodernism the main focus of his essay on anthropology. But the nihilism and obscurantism of postmodernism are easy and somewhat redundant targets. One would have liked to see a more grounded discussion of what has been happening in teaching andAfter the Crisis in Area Studies research. Have some area studies programs (such as Chinese and Russian, perhaps) been more impervious to postmodernism than others (Romance languages)? Can individual scholars or individual departments usefully combine traditional and postmodern ap- proaches, or are they mutually exclusive? Critics of postmodernism often fall into the postmodernist trap—they focus on the style of discourse of academics and not on the content of their work. Margaret Mckean’s chapter discusses the impact of rational choice theory—the use of formal, quasi-mathematical reasoning based on the calculation of individual self-interest. Rational choice originated in economics, but it has captured a commanding position in the leading research departments and publications of political science. However, its influence has already peaked, and it never really established the dominance of the discipline that its adherents claimed and aspired to. The vast majority of political scientists do not exclusively use the rational choice framework in their research or their teaching. Mckean believes in the utility of rational choice, so she avoids the trap of treating it as an insidious force that has undermined area studies. However, her essay devotes twenty-one pages to explaining what rational choice is and only eight pages to discussing its relevance to'area studies. This brief review of work done under the influence of rational choice is far from comprehensive. Ravi Palat’s energetic piece, entitled “Fragmented Visions,” is the most provocative and engaging in the collection. (It is also the only one that was previously published, appearing in the Braudel Center's Review in 1996). He explains how area studies was born in 1943, in the form of programs to train military administrators for Europe and Asia. In place of the colonial-era mental map of the world, fleshed out with scholarship by bureaucrats and mission- aries, there appeared a new Cold War globe, based on the United States’ need to secure raw materials and to contain the USSR. This led to the segmentation of the globe, the preservation of the dichoto- my between the West and the Rest, and a radical rejection of uni- versal discourses and analysis. Palat, a sociologist at SUNY Binghampton, blasts what he calls “areaists” for tunnel vision, for “reductionism of cultures and civilizations to a few simplistic axioms... Thus Confucianism is said to represent the ‘essence’ of Chinese culture; the caste system, of Indian culture; tribalism, of African culture, and so on” (78). Cultural legacies are “reified, essentialized and exoticized” (87). Other areas were held up against the US/West European model and found deficient. But Asia was too populous to be exterminated or transformed, and thus had to be taken on its own terms, in a way that other regions were not. Given the artificiality of the areas, Palat argues that the real impact of area studies was, in fact, the fragmentation of each region into individual countries and cultures.Diaspora 10:1 2001 When combined with the fragmentation of the university into discip- lines, this led to the production of hyper-narrow studies of little use to anyone outside academia—but presumably preventing the univer- sities (and the society they serve) from achieving a true understand- ing of the pernicious agenda of the national security paymasters, With the end of the Cold War, the state no longer needs this apparatus, and Palat suggests that professorships in area studies will go the way of chairs in imperial history (83). Areaists “eddying in self-referential ghettoes seek to constitute new programs of study on Central Asia or Asia-Pacific” (87), but Palat predicts that these efforts will fail. The collapse of area studies “has been partly camouflaged by the rhetorical triumph of laissez-faire economics” (87). In the place of area studies, Palat has only some vague recommendations for scholars looking for new ways to organize and structure academic inquiry: he advocates the spread of “antidiscip- lines” and “world-context data sets.” Palat’s thesis is thought-provoking and on target, but something of an overstatement. In most undergraduate schools, 90% of stu- dents are majoring in specific disciplines and not area studies programs. This is also true at the MA and PhD levels. Palat con- demns the area studies partitioning of the world as artificial, but here, too, he seems to be overstating his case. For this reader, at least, it makes sense to partition the world into blocs, such as Latin America or East Asia, for pedagogic purposes. The only area that seems truly artificial is Southeast Asia, since the cultural differ- ences within the region are so vast and the cultural ties to other regions (East and South Asia) so strong. (This point is explored in arecent book by Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons.) The second half of the book, on the individual disciplines, opens with Richard Perry's essay bemoaning the state of anthropology, which, according to his account, has been heavily and possibly fatally infected with the virus of postmodernism. While earlier gen- erations of anthropologists went out to do fieldwork with a view to understanding how other societies work, the present generation, skeptical of narratives that claim to represent the Other, are con- tent to deconstruct the texts of earlier scholars from their arm- chairs. Perry concedes that this development was facilitated by a failing in the old anthropology, which excelled at portraying the particulars of life in small, isolated communities but was less suc- cessful in building general theories about the character of human society as a whole. John Agnew relates how political geography is heavily polarized into rival camps of “realists” and “constructivists.” The former are still out there gathering facts and running regressions, demon- strating that despite the complexity and interconnectedness of the modern world, spatial location still matters. For example, otherAfter the Crisis in Area Studies things being equal, states that are adjacent to other states prone to engage in war are more likely themselves to be involved in war (144). (A finding that strikes this non-geographer as rather ob- vious.) Constructivists, in contrast, attack the assumptions behind geopolitical analysis, which serves to legitimate the idea of state power and the existing system of rule. Maps are not “mirrors of nature” but tools of oppression. Leading development economist Paul Streeten contributes an elo- quent chapter on the poverty of economic theory and the need for a broader, interdisciplinary training and research agenda. However, he makes almost no mention of how all this specifically relates to area studies within the field of economics. During the Cold War, despite the growing emphasis on mathematical theory, area studies had maintained a foothold in economics departments, with special- ists teaching courses on comparative economic systems (mainly the centrally planned economies) and development economies. Over the past decade, these posts have been expunged from many university departments on the grounds that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread of globalization, the laws of supply and demand are the only game’in town. The reluctance of university departments to hire and tenure eco- nomists with area expertise has to some extent been balanced by a surge of interest among non-area-trained economists in studying the transition economies (i.c., ex-socialist economies). The globaliza- tion of capital markets, too, together with the worldwide spread of deregulation and privatization, has stimulated a lot of research interest in emerging market economies. It remains unclear to what extent this work is grounded in a real understanding of the coun- tries involved and whether any of this specific country research finds its way into the undergraduate economics curriculum, (One suspects that it does not.) Streeten unfortunately does not discuss to what extent contemporary university economists actually under- stand and teach about the economics of specific places outside America, such as Argentina or Japan. James Rosenau’s short piece, a mere nine pages, does not try to provide the reader with even an outline of how area studies is treated in political science ‘as a whole. Rosenau focuses upon the sub-field of international relations, but even here he discusses the rival schools without offering an explanation of their content for the reader unfamiliar with Realists, Liberals, and Constructivists. But Rosenau makes some very'pertinent observations about the way Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of paradigms has sunk deep and pernicious roots into American intellectual life. Academics don’t feel the need to engage in dialogue with people they identify as belonging to a rival and outdated paradigm, he argues; they just label and hence dismiss them (187).Diaspora 10:1 2001 Ian Barrow notes that area studies is deeply entrenched in the discipline of history, This traditional framework seems to be under attack by the rising field of world history, but Barrow argues that world history and area studies share a tendency to resort to a Feliance on abstract, reified categories such as “civilization.” Barrow wants to inject agency into these over-systemic approaches. But what sort of agency? Barrow most definitely does not want to install the individual (as in rational choice theory) as the focus of analysis. Rather, he seeks a “complex agent” that is simultaneously object and subject, discursively linked to her fellow agents. Barrow’s argu- ment strikes the present author as just another artificial abstrac- tion. He tries to illustrate his point with the example of Britain, arguing that British national identity emerged in the context of imperial expansion (207). But surely no account of British national identity, even one written within a structural framework like world history, would fail to include this point. In posing world history as a threat to area studies, Barrow is presenting us with a false polarity. In reality, world history and area studies feed off each other, with the great world historians drawing upon the research of their area-trained colleagues. By its very nature, world history is reductionist. In order to offer a general theory, it has to leave out a great deal. One can have world histo- ries based on economic surplus (Marx) or military power (McNeill) or latitude and longitude (Diamond). Thus the Icarus-like project of world history will never be a substitute for the study of specific regions or countries. The concluding essay by Jon Strolle surveys the past century of language teaching. He notes that the study of modern languages picked up, in the nineteenth century, where the study of classical languages left off—with the crucial assumption that language was important only because it enabled one to study literary culture. This literary culture was assumed to be a unified whole, the re- pository of important truths of history and philosophy. Hence the disdain for the quest for “proficiency” in language use among many professors of literature. ‘This lofty vision—an extremely partial, if not downright false, image of how cultures and society actually function—continues to bedevil the study of language to this day. Area studies programs were built around the assumption that the core of a culture is its high literary texts; that in order to understand Germany you must begin with Goethe; Spain, Cervantes; and so on. (This is what jaded Russianists call reading “Tolstoevski.”) During World War II and the subsequent Cold War, the area studies lobby even managed to hitch its wagon to the national security interests of the United States, gladly accepting government money to boost enrollment in languages of strategic interest, most notably Russian.After the Crisis in Area Studies Strole provides a useful summary of government programs to promote language study over recent decades, and some snippets of data—for example, that the 8,000 students of Mandarin in college courses are dwarfed by 80,000 students in part-time schools run by the Chinese immigrant community. A more systematic analysis of precisely how many students are studying which languages, to what level, would have been useful. Also, some further reflection on American exceptionalism is in order. Why are Americans—even educated Americans—so reluctant to learn foreign languages? In much of the rest of the world, from Scandinavia to India to South Africa, bi- or trilingualism is the norm. There must be powerful objective reasons for this situation—which leads one to question just how realistic it is to expect a few government grant programs to reverse the tide of monolingualism in the United States. An interesting innovation addressing this problem within a university context was adopted at the University of York in the United Kingdom, which was newly founded in 1963 (and from which the present author graduated with a PhD in Sociology). Rather than have separate language and literature departments, all language teaching was concentrated in a Language Proficiency Center. However, all students in the departments of History and “English and Related Literature” were required to gain fluency in a foreign language and to take a course using sources in that language. The experiment worked well, and those departments receive high national rankings for both teaching and research. The point is, of course, that such a radical step could be taken only in a university that was being started from scratch and had no vested interests to block such a move. It is supremely ironic that as America ascends to global hegemo- ny, it jettisons even the illusion of trying to understand the complex cultures with which we co-inhabit the planet. One’s initial reaction is that it is time to give aréa studies a decent burial. On the other hand, what will come in its place? Area studies programs do at least provide a framework within which students can systematically learn about a chunk of the outside world. Too often, on American campuses, “multiculturalism” translates into students studying themselves. Perhaps more troubling than the Balkanization of area studies programs is the disciplinary Tower of Babel that has been erected on American campuses. The expansion and maturation of American universities during the fat years of the Cold War led to an increas- ing fragmentation of the academic disciplines. How often do schol- ars of the various disciplines actually talk to each other? With dozens and dozens of journals in each field, the odds that, say, a political scientist will happen across a particular article by a psychologist that casts light on his own research have become aDiaspora 10:1 2001 increasingly remote—not because such articles are not out there, but simply because the political scientist will never be aware of them. The relentless encroachment of jargon and specialized tech- niques makes it increasingly difficult to communicate across disciplinary boundaries. Undergraduate students are the only people who actually know what the different disciplines are saying about the world—a scary thought. Universities are innately conservative institutions. Their organi- zational structure has been remarkably static since their founding— for the most part, in the nineteenth century—as training grounds for the elite of the rising industrial societies. Faculty are typically hired for a lifetime of employment at a single institution. Mean- while, the rest of the world is changing at an ever-accelerating pace. Universities have tried to adapt by raising more money and invest- ing it in buildings and technology. (But one suspects that those who believe that the “wired” classroom will restore knowledge to its commanding role have never had to grade papers based on Web “re- search.”) The threat to traditional area studies programs is clear. Some small language and literature departments have been closed or merged, and professors are being forced to retool and offer more courses in translation. A rethinking of the way area studies courses are organized is long overdue. But the current crisis is so severe, and so many core interests of tenured professors are threatened, that probably no such review will take place. Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World. London: Verso, 1998, Schemo, Diane. “Use of English as World Tongue Is Booming.” New York Times 16 Apr, 2001: AL,