[lg policy] Area Studies in a Global Context

Sat Dec 5 16:00:01 UTC 2009

Area Studies in a Global Context

 Christopher Vorlet for The Chronicle Review

By William G. Moseley

The study of global processes and a grounded understanding of world
regions constitute the yin and yang of a solid internationalist
curriculum. While the two sides of this cantankerous odd couple may
occasionally feud, they actually need each other—a lot. Unfortunately,
trends in the academic and grant-making realms have tended to
undermine the area-studies component of internationalist education.
Many disciplines used to train regional specialists. It was
commonplace, for example, in history, anthropology, and my own
discipline, geography. Had you visited a geography department 50 years
ago, you would have found a specialist for each major world region
(Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America). That ended in
the 1960s, when the old regional geography was subjected to a
tremendous amount of criticism for being overly focused on the
particulars of an area and blind to the impacts of transnational
forces.

Now geographers are identified by their thematic expertise (I am an
environment-and-development specialist), and only secondarily noted
for regional knowledge. Similar changes have occurred in other
disciplines. Cutting-edge dissertations in many fields now deal with
transnational phenomena, at multiple research sites, rather than a
deep understanding of one particular area. This pattern follows
broader trends in academe over the past 100 years wherein disciplines
are mostly organized around the study of phenomena across space rather
than the study of multiple intersecting phenomena in one area.

But the increasing paucity of area-studies training is a problem. A
lack of basic area-studies knowledge is evident among the general
American public. For example, a 2006 National Geographic-Roper Public
Affairs survey of 18- to 24-year-olds found that only 37 percent of
them could find Iraq on a map, and that six in 10 young Americans
don't speak a foreign language fluently. Worse yet are public
officials who have displayed an amazing ignorance of geographic
difference, such as President George W. Bush's comparison of
democracy-building efforts in the Middle East to prior achievements in
Germany and Japan.

Sadly, it largely has been the security concerns of the post-9/11 era
that have recatalyzed government interest in area studies,
particularly for strategically important regions such as the Middle
East. That is unfortunate, because tunnel vision on security issues,
without the perspective that area studies can offer, can lead to bad
policy and wasted resources. Looking at regions somewhat abstractly is
also problematic in discussions that aren't directly security-related.
That was made apparent to me when I worked at the World Bank for a
short time. There I met dozens of brilliant young Ph.D.'s. Their
understanding of theory and transnational processes was laudable.
Unfortunately, they couldn't begin to imagine how a policy would play
out in a particular place or region. The consequences of such
ignorance can be devastating. Those who have studied World
Bank-imposed economic or environmental programs in Africa, for
example, can attest to the problem of policy making uninformed by an
awareness of regional differences.

Of course the opposite is also true: that local policy or program
initiatives that do not account for external influences are similarly
doomed to failure. To take an example from my own research, we can
promote local food production in West Africa until we are blue in the
face, but those efforts will always be stymied if we do not account
for national policies and international trade relationships that
encourage the production of African cash crops for export markets. At
my own institution, we have a well-supported and thoughtfully
organized international-studies curriculum that emphasizes the study
of global processes. While we also have a strong suite of area-studies
programs, the difference between those and international studies in
terms of resources and planning is palpable. Those differences are not
simply related to the internal dynamics of my college, but to the
pipeline of new academics and the prerogatives of those holding the
purse strings who increasingly view area studies as old-fashioned.
Repeated conversations with colleagues and multiple exchange visits
with other institutions have led me to believe that the situation on
my campus is not uncommon.

Both global and area-studies advocates are guilty of blindly hunkering
down in their bunkers. Rather than seek common ground and obvious
synergies, we often fall back on simplistic caricatures of the other
side: the jet-setting global theorists versus the dusty old
area-studies scholars obsessed with language and local-level detail.
The reality is often quite different. A new approach to area studies
is increasingly in practice in most disciplines. We now teach about
regions in their global context. In my Africa class every spring, my
students and I not only examine the variation in physical environments
and cultures across the continent but also study the global processes
and historical patterns that bind Africa to other parts of the globe.
The problem is that the new approach is not widely understood across
academe or among those making college-budget decisions.

Another oft-heard concern about area studies is that it is organized
around world regions that are arbitrary human constructions. Indeed,
area-studies experts do rely on an artificial categorization of the
world into regions. However, the organization of knowledge into
disciplines is also subjective. If we retain disciplines because they
are useful for fostering scholarly debate on certain phenomena, is it
not also useful to encourage transdisciplinary conversations among
scholars working in particular areas of the world?
While there is an array of processes that transcend regional
boundaries, there are also commonalities that bind a region together,
such as similar colonial experiences, shared traits in climate and
ecology, related languages, or shared public-health challenges.
Academe and society benefit from an interdisciplinary conversation
about those places, even though we recognize that the boundaries
between regions are porous.

A further critique of area studies is that it is a relic of the cold
war. To be more precise, detractors point to Title VI of the National
Defense Education Act, which, beginning in the late 1950s, supported
the creation of area-studies centers at major research universities.
The act also provided financing for Fulbright-Hays scholarships to
support doctoral students and faculty research abroad. Did research
centers and scholarship programs supported by that program produce
scholarship that was useful to the State or Defense Departments?
Maybe, but much of the research supported in that manner was of no
direct use to U.S. geopolitical interests or was deeply critical of
American and European imperialism. For example, a quick review of
recent Fulbright-Hays grantees reveals projects with titles such as
"Effects on Rural Households and Livelihoods of Increasing Rates of
Illness and Death Related to HIV/AIDS in Malawi" and "The Making of
Colonialism in Equatorial Africa."

I'd make two further points about the government support. First, many
disciplines outside area studies have a long history of entanglement
in government projects, too. While that has led to some problematic
theories and research (for example, physicists' support for the
development of the atomic bomb), most disciplines have moved on in
spite of it. Area studies existed before Title VI support. The
approach was never wholly financed by that source, and much of the
work supported by Title VI appears to be of no use to the defense
establishment.

Second, U.S. foreign policy toward other parts of the world would
arguably be much worse in the absence of area studies. Area studies
contributes to a general understanding of other regions by our
students, an understanding that American citizens need in order to
hold their government accountable for its actions abroad. If some of
those students go on to be policy makers whose decisions may influence
people in other regions, all the better if they have a less
America-centric view.

On the other side of the curricular coin, global-studies programs
would be stronger if they insisted that their students gain an
intimate familiarity with at least one region of the world. It is
important that these students have a place in which they can envision
how abstract policies and concepts play out. I would further argue
that those with a grounded understanding of particular places often
are better equipped to study transnational linkages.

Some of the best transnational work has actually been done by scholars
who have a deep comprehension of, and a history of fieldwork in, a
particular region. For example, Judith A. Carney, a geographer at the
University of California at Los Angeles, is the author of Black Rice:
The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Harvard
University Press, 2001), which won the 2002 Herskovits Prize of the
African Studies Association. This seminal work is part of a growing
literature on the Atlantic World, a global region centered on the
Atlantic basin. Carney effectively demonstrates how African knowledge
of tidal-mangrove rice cultivation in West Africa was vital for the
establishment of highly productive rice plantations in the Carolinas
in the 17th and 18th centuries—an insight that has changed our
understanding of African-American history.

What is interesting about Carney's career is that she was an
Africanist first, and only later became interested in America's
Southeast. It was, I would argue, her detailed understanding of rice
cultivation in West Africa that allowed her to recognize the role of
Africans in the historical development of rice farming in the
Carolinas. Without a previous background in African agriculture,
Carney's exploration of the African connections to the historical
development of rice-farming systems in the Carolinas could never have
been made as forcefully and as convincingly.

The reality is that both perspectives, area and global studies, are
needed for a solid internationalist education. As educators we need to
be concerned about how we are training the leaders of tomorrow. They
will certainly need to understand broad, transnational phenomena, yet
they must also know how those phenomena play out, day to day, in
specific locales.

William G. Moseley is an associate professor of geography and director
of the African-studies program at Macalester College. He is author of
Taking Sides: Clashing Views on African Issues (McGraw-Hill, 2004).

http://chronicle.com/article/Area-Studies-in-a-Global/49284/

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