America: Lost in translation

[Harold F. Schiffman]

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i08/08b00601.htm
>>From the issue dated October 14, 2005

America: Lost in Translation
By RICHARD PELLS

How successful has the United States been in making its policies and
values better understood among Muslims in the Middle East and Southeast
Asia? Based on my experience last summer as a Fulbright senior specialist
in Indonesia, the answer is: hardly at all. During May and June, I spent
three weeks giving a series of lectures on American history and the global
impact of American culture to students and faculty members at several
universities in central Java. I was based in Yogyakarta, which the
guidebooks describe as the "intellectual" capital of Indonesia. Leaving
aside the characteristic hyperbole of guidebooks, I anticipated that I
would meet a number of people who had some familiarity with the United
States. Moreover, since Indonesia is a country with the largest and (along
with Turkey) the most moderate Muslim population on the planet, I assumed
that it would be a focal point for the Bush administration's efforts to
win "hearts and minds" in the Islamic world.

The disparity between my expectations and my experiences could not have
been greater. Since 1978 I have been a visiting professor abroad on many
occasions not just in relatively tranquil places like Western Europe,
Scandinavia, or Australia, but also in Eastern Europe during the Communist
era, Turkey, Thailand, Malaysia, and Brazil. But never have I had as
difficult a time communicating with audiences, or deciphering what they
were saying to me, as I did in Indonesia. Ironically, the original intent
of the Fulbright program, when it was launched in 1946, was to promote
"mutual understanding" between Americans and other people around the
world. What I encountered in Indonesia was mutual incomprehension.

Indeed, I often felt like the Bill Murray character in Lost in
Translation: jet-lagged, surrounded by people eager to please, bemused by
my inability to fathom their version of English, trying to remember to nod
and smile even when I was clueless about what was going on around me. As
my frustration and sense of isolation grew, I recalled the advertising
slogan in the movie: "For relaxing times, make it Suntory time." In my
case, it was Smirnoff time I sometimes suspected that the only personal
relationship I established in Indonesia was with a liquor salesman who
kept saying to me as I left his emporium: "I see you again, Mister." More
seriously, Lost in Translation is one of the most discerning films ever
made about culture shock. And that, in fact, was what I felt in Indonesia
almost every day.

The breakdown in communication, however, did not result simply from the
struggle many Asians have in pronouncing certain English words. In the
"discussions" that followed my lectures (which frequently took the form of
someone delivering a 10-minute speech before arriving at a question), and
in the conversations I had with individual students and faculty members, I
found myself repeatedly saying, "I don't understand what you mean." That
was true even when their comments or queries were translated into
recognizable English. The problem was not one of language, but of context.
What I didn't grasp, at least not for a while, were the political and
cultural assumptions behind the questions Indonesians were posing.

My dialogue with Indonesians often became surreal. "Is there grass in
Texas?" I was regularly asked of my home state. Obviously Indonesians
having seen far too many old Westerns supposed that Texas, with some of
the most heavily populated urban areas in America, was a veritable
wasteland of sagebrush and dust. Indonesians also seemed obsessed with the
prevalence of what they called "free sex" in America. Someone finally
explained to me that they meant the tendency of Americans to engage in sex
before marriage or after divorce whereas in Indonesia such activity is
forbidden, in theory if not in practice. And since many Indonesians in my
audiences had seen Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, they were
convinced that students in American high schools were heavily armed, just
waiting for the opportunity to open fire.

But it was their questions about Moore himself that left me truly
befuddled. I was asked continually if the Bush administration had
subsidized Moore's movies, including Fahrenheit 9/11. Eventually I
realized that such a question revealed an entirely different set of ideas
about the relationship between government and culture. Since Indonesians
believed that movies, plays, and novels could scarcely exist without the
political and financial support of the state, it was hard for them to
imagine the existence of a "private" sector in the arts, or the absence of
an American ministry of culture.

Indonesians are by no means the only people, in Asia or elsewhere, who
cherish their stereotypes about America. One can find similar
misconceptions all over the world, notably among Europeans currently
hostile to American foreign policy as well as to what they regard as
America's economic and religious "values." Yet in Indonesia I did not
confront the usual anti-Americanism. Nor did I come across students, even
at privately financed Muslim universities, whose knowledge consisted
exclusively of what they'd memorized from the Koran. Although I was
certainly asked whether the Bush administration was genuinely committed to
the promotion of democracy in the Middle East, or only to fulfilling
America's imperial ambitions, no one shrieked at me about the war in Iraq
or Washington's support for Israel.

On the contrary, there is at the moment a great deal of affection for the
United States. That fondness is the result, in part, of America's
financial and military assistance to Indonesia after the tsunami
devastated most of Aceh Province in Sumatra. The favorable attitude was
reinforced by the highly visible presence of American journalists covering
the tsunami's wreckage, and by the well-publicized trips of the former
presidents Bush and Clinton to devastated areas.

Moreover Indonesians are as sensitive as Americans to the menace of
terrorism. In 2002 two nightclubs in Bali were bombed, killing 202 people,
including 88 Australian tourists. In 2003 the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta
was severely damaged. Soon after I landed in Indonesia, the U.S. Embassy
and its consulates closed down for several days because of a terrorist
threat. Meanwhile the English-language Jakarta Post persistently warned
Western tourists to beware of congregating at shopping malls. Those
threats and warnings have turned out to be all too realistic in view of
the most recent suicide bombings on Bali that killed 22 people and wounded
more than 90.

Perhaps as a result of both their gratitude toward and shared
vulnerability with Americans, many Indonesian students told me after my
lectures that they were eager to learn more about American culture, and
that they wanted to find out how to obtain grants to study in the United
States. They also pointed out to me that I was the first visiting
professor from America they had ever encountered who had talked to them
however impenetrably  about the history of America's politics and its
culture.

The trouble, therefore, is not so much with the cliches that Indonesians
have in their minds about America, just as it is not with our mutual
failure to comprehend one another's language. The central problem is that
Indonesians know almost nothing about the United States, beyond what
they've seen in Hollywood's blockbuster movies. What they really need is
some in-depth instruction about the complexities of American life about
America's history, its political system, its economic and social
structures, its foreign policy, and its cultural institutions.

In short, Indonesians and people in other Muslim countries could benefit
enormously, as would Americans, from the sorts of overseas cultural
activities to which the United States committed itself during the cold
war. From the late 1940s through the end of the 1980s, the American
government along with the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations sponsored
lectures and conferences abroad on American history and literature; art
exhibitions featuring America's Abstract Expressionists and postmodern
painters and sculptors; international tours of jazz musicians, symphony
orchestras, and ballet companies, as well as of Broadway musicals and
dramas; visiting professorships where American academics taught in foreign
universities; fellowships for foreign graduate students to study in the
United States; and cultural centers like the America Houses in West
Germany and Austria that showed American movies, displayed works of
American photographers, and offered symposia on American social and
cultural life.

In addition the State Department, the U.S. Information Agency, and the
foundations helped build up library collections of American materials
especially books, magazines, and newspapers  in foreign universities. For
example, in the 1950s and 1960s, at the John F. Kennedy Institute for
North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin, the Ford
Foundation helped subsidize the creation of what became the largest
research library for American topics on the European continent.

Even the Congress for Cultural Freedom, though secretly bankrolled by the
CIA, was instrumental during the 1950s in publishing magazines and holding
symposia that provided outlets for debates between American and foreign
intellectuals. More important, the congress arranged for manuscripts
written by Eastern European dissidents to be published in the West.

After the end of the cold war, many of those global cultural efforts and
institutions either were eliminated or suffered dramatic cutbacks in
financing. The stipends for Fulbright lectureships, including the
better-endowed Fulbright Chairs in Europe, failed to keep pace with rising
faculty salaries, making it tougher for the program to persuade American
professors to teach abroad. The Clinton administration, presuming that the
United States no longer had to contend with an external enemy like the
Soviet Union, reduced the financing of American-studies conferences and
lecture tours abroad, discontinued the practice of underwriting concerts
and art exhibits, closed all the America Houses and other cultural centers
overseas, and shut down the American libraries housed in U.S. embassies.

Furthermore the infrastructure that supported America's public and
cultural diplomacy was severely weakened. The U.S. Information Agency,
which had supervised most of our international cultural and educational
programs since 1953, was absorbed by the State Department in 1999, thereby
losing its independence and becoming more subservient to the department's
political and foreign-policy priorities. Meanwhile, according to
statistics from the Defense Science Board and the Government
Accountability Office, the staff and funds for public diplomacy (i.e.,
cultural programming and public relations) have been eroded by more than
25 percent, adjusted for inflation, since 1989. That means that there are
fewer U.S. consulates overseas that organize conferences and fewer
cultural-affairs officers in American embassies. Those officers who remain
are stretched too thin, having to serve too many masters, and they are
increasingly aware that the road to promotion and influence in the Foreign
Service lies not through culture but through press and public relations.

It was only after the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack
on the Pentagon in 2001 that many outside observers (among them,
journalists and academics) and some government officials recognized that
the United States needed once again to communicate, culturally, with the
rest of the world, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia.
Nevertheless, that communication has been awkward at best, much of it
marred by an emphasis on advertising techniques and an excessive reliance
on the Internet rather than on direct, face-to-face interactions between
Americans and foreigners. Nor have the ventures been inspired by the
long-range vision that characterized America's cultural efforts during the
cold war.

There are, of course, many differences between the cold war and the war on
terrorism. The cold war was primarily a contest between two nation-states,
the United States and the Soviet Union, both with a lot to lose in the
case of a possible nuclear conflagration. Consequently each country
understood that there were limits beyond which neither could go,
particularly when it came to threatening the spheres of influence or
national-security interests of its adversary. Terrorists, on the other
hand, are stateless and fanatical, with nothing to lose and no conception
of what is and is not permissible.

Still, America's cultural activities during the cold war were not designed
to convert Communists, nor today can such programs expect to persuade
terrorists to alter their tactics of intimidation and mass murder.
Instead, the libraries, symposia, magazines, and concerts were aimed
during the cold war at people in Western Europe, Latin America, and Asia
who were agnostic about the virtues of American culture or reluctant to
choose sides between the United States and the Soviet Union. Similarly a
resurrection of America's cultural diplomacy in the 21st century has to
focus on those in the Islamic world who remain ambivalent about the United
States and what it stands for  and who are uncertain about how America's
policies and values will affect their own cultures, social institutions,
and religious beliefs.


The best way to begin is by launching a sustained effort to make America
more intelligible to Muslims. Indonesia could be an ideal test case for
how effectively the United States can inform people in other countries
(and diminish their stereotypes) about life in America.

And the place to start is with libraries. Indonesia, like many countries
around the world, desperately needs books about the United States,
subscriptions to American newspapers and periodicals (both
mass-circulation magazines and professional journals), and DVD's of
classic American films. But such collections should be located within
Indonesian universities rather than at separate cultural centers, as in
the past, since Asian versions of Europe's America Houses could be
tempting targets for terrorist bombings.

After the demise in the 1990s of American libraries overseas, the Bush
administration placed its faith in what were called "American Corners"
mini-libraries that, at least in Indonesia, contain a few out-of-date
magazines and books about American history. But American Corners are
pathetic simulations of authentic libraries like the kind that exist at
the JFK Institute or in British universities. So if Americans truly care
what the Muslim world thinks, then university collections of American
materials must be substantially enlarged and improved.

Second, the State Department should consider financing semester-long
visiting professorships to Indonesia, and perhaps elsewhere in the region,
instead of relying on the small and underfinanced Fulbright program or on
ad hoc faculty exchanges between American and foreign universities. Those
professorships ought to match the salaries of American academics, to be
more financially appealing than the paltry stipends for Fulbright grants.
Such a program would also require that the State Department actively
identify and recruit scholars in American history, literature, sociology,
economics, political science, and law, rather than depending on whoever
happens to apply for the positions.

The purpose of the visiting professorships, however, would not be simply
to send American academics to Indonesia or to other Muslim countries to
teach courses and advise local faculty members on curricula. Instead, just
as the American government after World War II dispatched scholars to
Europe to help establish university departments and institutes of American
studies, so the State Department should define the role of the new
professorships as training one or two generations of Indonesian and other
Muslim Americanists, who could then transmit what they know about the
United States to their own students.

That training should not be devoted merely to developing a cadre of
indigenous academic specialists in American subjects. As in the case of
postwar Europe, the ultimate objective would be to provide students who
will some day enter business, law, politics, or the media with a greater
knowledge of and sophistication about America's political and economic
system and its cultural traditions.

Third, the State Department and the Fulbright Program, along with private
foundations, could increase the number of fellowships for Indonesian and
other foreign graduate students to study American history, literature,
law, or politics in the United States  not just for a year or two, but
with a view toward earning a Ph.D. and returning to teach their fields to
their own undergraduates. Again, fellowships like those were indispensable
during the cold war in helping to produce several generations of
Americanists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan.

Finally, the Foreign Service itself could require more people who are
interested in American culture and willing to devote their careers to
making our culture more comprehensible to foreign audiences. If a broader
set of cultural initiatives is to materialize, U.S. embassies abroad, not
only in Indonesia, urgently need more personnel and more support from
Washington.

All these efforts will cost a great deal more money than the Bush
administration has allocated for public diplomacy. But, despite their
intermittent disdain for the use of "soft power," important members of the
administration are aware of how precarious America's image is in Muslim
countries, if not also among America's wary allies in Europe. Condoleezza
Rice, after all, was in her earlier life an expert on American-Soviet
relations, and she knows how crucial culture was as a component of the
cold war. Karen P. Hughes, the new under secretary of state for public
diplomacy and public affairs, is a confidante of President Bush and may be
able to encourage the administration to pay more attention and devote more
resources to the role of American culture overseas.

Yet no matter what happens during the next three years, the significance
of and opportunities for cultural diplomacy extend well beyond the life
span of the Bush administration. Right now Indonesia could be a place for
pilot programs that, if successful, might eventually be expanded to
Malaysia and (if circumstances permit) Jordan and Egypt. But such programs
require imagination, energy, adequate funds, and above all time to work.

Thus, unless people in the State Department begin to think of the distant
future, rather than of immediate propaganda payoffs, America will never
duplicate the cultural accomplishments that characterized the cold-war
years. Instead, we will continue to find our views and our values
distrusted, misinterpreted, and lost in translation.

Richard Pells is a professor of history at the University of Texas at
Austin. His books include Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated,
and Transformed American Culture Since World War II (Basic Books, 1997).

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 52, Issue 8, Page B6


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Copyright  2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education