Area and regional studies in the United States

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Area and regional studies in the United States

Political Science & Politics v. 34 no4 (Dec. 2001) p. 789-91
Area studies in the United States is under siege. Government and foundations are turning their attention and funds elsewhere. Although they operate from very different quarters, critics are taking area studies harshly to task for both alleged errors of commission and omission. Yet mine is an optimistic message. These difficulties must be seen within the context of a change in the demographic composition of graduate studies in the U.S. An infusion of intellectual energy from foreign graduate students and post-docs is leading to a reinvention of traditional area studies as global networks of scholarly engagement. Over the longer term these networks, and the scholarship they will create and sustain, bode well for the continued intellectual vitality of this field of scholarship.

Area studies in the United States was created within the context of the Cold War. Now that the Cold War is over, area studies is reinventing itself in new conditions. It is affected by two adversarial intellectual currents; disciplinary-based, "scientific" critics who value nomothetic approaches more than contextualization; and cultural critiques developed from the perspective of the humanities and, at times, postmodernism. In response, area studies exhibits a growing emphasis on cross-regional studies that seek to blend and incorporate elements from both scientific and humanistic perspectives. In so doing, it has an opportunity to open itself to new forms of international collaboration that promise to enrich the insights generated by U.S. social scientists.

The impetus for area studies came in the early years of the Cold War. As part of a team of well-known political scientists specializing in modern Japanese studies, Robert Hall (1948; Rafael 1994, 92-98), drafted a report for the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). It was an extended plea for the institutionalization of area studies as the most effective way for achieving three objectives; to extend the relevance of the humanities, including the study of foreign languages, in a rapidly changing world; to link the humanities to the social sciences across a broad range of interdisciplinary endeavors; and to safeguard the American national interest in what was rapidly becoming a global confrontation with communism.

Of particular interest in the current debate is the link between the humanities and the social sciences. The 1948 report acknowledged that advances in the methods and theories of the social sciences were extremely useful for an understanding of global affairs that was not cut off from the humanistic tradition. The disciplinary concerns in traditional departments were too partial and encapsulated to make the necessary connections between different and emerging fields of knowledge. A new generation of scholars would be literate in two worlds; a specific region or country and a specific discipline. It was the potent mixture of interdisciplinary studies that promised to fuse the humanities and the social sciences and thus generate the necessary depth of understanding and wisdom for policy advice.

Insistence on the complementarities between the humanities and the social sciences created its own fissures. The 1960s, for example, witnessed the growing attraction of behaviorism. This helped generate a deep divide between proponents of "traditional" area studies on the one hand and "modern" social science approaches on the other. In the midst of the discussions of the behavioral revolution the difference was typically cast as one between "quantity" and "quality." Area studies, then, referred to the detailed description of events in a particular country or region that did not aim to generalize beyond the specific case at hand.

A generation later, in the 1990s, the term "area studies" has acquired a very different meaning (Hall and Tarrow 1998). Proponents of area studies do not exclude the usefulness of description. However, they aim typically at generalizations that, going beyond a specific country or region, rely on a sophisticated use of the comparative method and build on a relatively deep level of contextual and historical knowledge.

In line with the 1948 report, the term area studies continues to connote an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and research that brings together in major research centers scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds. Most of the area studies centers at U.S. universities focus on particular world regions. The tension between the pull of disciplinary and the push of interdisciplinary work affects all of the social sciences. It is particularly evident in the field of economics. As an applied social science, economic development provided a connection between the discipline of economics and area studies between the 1950s and the 1970s. Applied work faded once economics moved into an almost exclusive preoccupation with mathematical and statistical models. It is now virtually impossible on many university campuses to find economists who are interested in participating in interdisciplinary area studies. Major foundations like the MacArthur Foundation or the German Marshall Fund as well as the SSRC have found it increasingly difficult to entice young economists to apply for their fellowship competitions.

The role of area studies depends greatly on the objectives it seeks. Generally speaking, it is probably fair to say that in political science, area studies refers to work oriented toward producing general propositions that are properly contextualized. This tradition of scholarship has yielded some of the most important, substantive generalizations of contemporary social science. They transcend the description of unique cases without seeking to establish universally valid laws--for example, in the analysis of the transition from authoritarian to democratic forms of government, in the structures and strategies of a variety of capitalist states, and in the content and form of regional integration.

For a variety of reasons, area studies is now on the defensive. Globalization as the dominant concept of the 1990s suggests powerful processes of homogenization and convergence that make increasingly irrelevant the detailed knowledge of the internal affairs of different countries and regions. Even though this claim is deeply contestable and contested, it offers to policymakers and academic leaders a rationale for trimming budgets in the wake of sharp cutbacks in federal funding. Having won the Cold War, the government is no longer interested in training specialists with in-depth knowledge of all parts of the world where the global competition with the other superpower might unfold.

For example, with the end of the Cold War and in a more plural world the strategic imperative for supporting language instruction and area studies is eroding. In an era in which English is increasingly becoming a lingua franca, the issue of foreign language training remains vexing to university administrators. The changing spending priorities of governments and foundations prompt cutbacks in language instruction.

On the lookout for new and exciting programs, foundations have shifted their priorities and thus have added to the pressure put on area studies. For example, the Ford and MacArthur foundations initiated a joint program on globalization in 1993, against the background of declining budgets for area studies and the proliferation of "new" countries at the end of the Cold War.

In addition, area studies has also been the target of critiques from two very different types of scholars: rationalist-scientific and cultural-humanistic. From a rationalist-scientific perspective, Robert Bates (1997; Bates et al. 1998), for example, stirred much debate with his attacks. Bates, however, offers an analysis of the interaction between area studies and social science that points to the inescapability of many complementarities. He thus restates in contemporary terms a key argument of the 1948 report. To be sure, Bates was writing, and self-consciously so, within the context of intense professional turf battles in many political science departments, and more generally, in the professional community of international studies--and these battles are likely to stay with us for some time to come. But in an era of growing professional fissures, the intellectual case for a deeper fusion of both approaches remains as compelling now as it was in 1948.

Area studies is criticized also from opposite quarters that reflect a cultural-humanistic and at times postmodern bent (Rafael 1994). Since area studies privileges the contemporary nation-state as the unit of analysis, like realism in international relations, it tends to naturalize and reify the identity of actors that have been far from stable and unchanging units in the modern world. From this vantage point, area studies is criticized for assuming without further questioning the existence of stable territorial units. Whatever the analytical and political convenience of the traditional conceptual map of area studies, focusing on "nation-states" rather than other units of analysis conceals fundamental and often important issues. Trying to correct for this bias may lead scholarship in a historical-institutional direction that is committed to the gathering of empirical evidence (Scott 1992), or it may lead to postmodern styles of analysis that question the hidden assumptions of all styles of empirical analysis (Rafael 1994, 100-103).

These budgetary and intellectual challenges are strong, but so is a countercurrent that is likely to be more important in the long term. U.S. universities have been very successful and are a powerful magnet for outstanding young scholars the world over. As U.S. graduate programs in the social sciences continue to attract outstanding foreign students in large numbers, area studies is drawing on a very large and growing reservoir of interested and highly qualified scholars committed to the practice of a historically and culturally contextualized social science. In my department at Cornell, for example, typically one-third or more of the incoming class is made up of foreign students. The proportion in the comparative politics subfield tends to be higher.

Area studies thus feeds on the intellectual advances in and the geographic spread of U.S. social science. In his far-reaching reorganization of the SSRC, Kenneth Prewitt argued that changes in the real world require a reorganization of international scholarship along new lines (Prewitt 1996a, 1996b). In particular Prewitt pointed to the shift away from American-centric scholarship.

This globalization of scholarship and the attendant recalibration in the balance between area studies and social science, as Benedict Anderson (1992) points out, must itself be seen as a historical process in which knowledge is produced under different political circumstances. Before 1945, area specialists were typically colonial scholars appointed to the bureaucracy of Western states and residing in the area. After 1945 area specialists typically worked in U.S. universities and visited "the field" only intermittently. Since the 1980s, and in particular in the field of Southeast Asia studies with which Anderson is most familiar, U.S.-educated area specialists with a measure of social science training have returned to their countries of origin. This development is leading to a shift in the intellectual balance of power away from the U.S., and it opens new and potentially promising avenues for future collaboration between area studies specialists working in the U.S. and abroad.

The rise of national and regional centers of academic excellence and the articulation of indigenous scholarly traditions around the world points to the emergence of new global networks of scholarly engagement. Knowledgeable of, but not beholden to intellectual currents in the U.S., scholars operating in these networks will provide new energy and insights that will have powerful effects on U.S. area studies. These networks facilitate the creation of cross-regional perspectives on a range of dialectical processes confronting the social sciences everywhere: global versus local, basic versus applied, area versus disciplinary. Area studies is likely to be greatly enriched by this development. Like other realms of the social sciences, it is in the process of reinventing itself. It possesses a reservoir of intellectual strength that is very deep and very broad, precisely because it extends well beyond the United States.

Added material.

Peter J. Katzenstein, Cornell University.

NOTE

* This article draws on a paper originally delivered in January 1999 at a conference on "International Relations and Area Studies: Curricula and Syllabi," University of Tokyo, Institute for Oriental Studies.

REFERENCES

Anderson, Benedict. 1992. "The Changing Ecology of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States, 1950-1990." In Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America, ed. Charles Hirschman, Charles Keyes, and Karl Hutterer. Ann Arbor, MI: Association of Asian Studies.

Bates, Robert H. 1997. "Area Studies and the Discipline: A Useful Controversy?" PS: Political Science and Politics 30:166-69.

Bates, Robert H., et al. 1998. Analytic Narratives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hall, Peter A., and Sidney Tarrow. 1998. "Globalization and Area Studies: When Is Too Broad Too Narrow?" Chronicle of Higher Education 44:B4-B5.

Hall, Robert. 1948. Area Studies: With Special Reference to Their Implications for Research in the Social Sciences. New York: Committee on World Area Research Program. Social Science Research Council.

Prewitt, Kenneth. 1996a. "Presidential Items." Items (March): 15-18.

Prewitt, Kenneth. 1996b. "Presidential Items." Items (June/September): 31-40.

Rafael, Vicente L. 1994. "The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States." Social Text 41:91-111.

Scott, James. 1992. "Foreword." In Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America, ed. Charles Hirschman, Charles Keyes, and Karl Hutterer. Ann Arbor, MI: Association of Asian Studies.

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