It is impossible to look at the debate about the future of one of the area studies without devoting a couple of paragraphs to this anomaly, because the specific terms in which the issue arises this time around and the reasons why solutions obviously did not "work" before, will affect us all. In the mid-1980s there was a concerted attempt to create a National Foundation for International Studies, on a par with the NSF and NEH. It did not succeed, for reasons I have not had time to explore. The argument in its favor, entitled Points of Leverage (Lambert 1986), offers a remarkable view of the strengths, overlaps and gaps in the U.S. engagement with the rest of the world. I read it in 1995, at a time when the U.S. is pulling resources out of the U.N., and in conjunction with an African colleague's commentary on his own impressions of a U.S. academy that recoils from sustained critique of "central terms of reference...and key animating debates."
The claim that Americans do not know or care about the rest of the world must be, in part, an official stance to allow selective engagement to look plausible. Claims of insularity have also allowed an evasion of engagement with the arguments of world systems theory which were so influential in the academy in the 1970s and 1980s. But the American population is surely not so much insular as intransigently bilateral and optative. Global knowledge and global theory are avoided because each constituency can withdraw from most of it most of the time, if they wish. On the other hand, groups within society intensely cultivate detailed local knowledges: places of origin, centers of economic partnership, beauty spots for vacation, political and religious networks for the pursuit of common agendas, and so on.
The institution of area studies in the 1950s was justified in a very interesting way: not as a corrective to a failure on the part of society at large, but to a failure of the academic disciplines to incorporate international knowledge. If there is a single theme throughout the ensuing debates it is the continuation of that failure. Lambert writes in 1986 that "Economics and sociology, two disciplines that one might have expected to be heavily represented in language and area studies, are opposed as a matter of faith" (1986:63). In African Studies we have a special program (the pre-dissertation field-study awards) to try to get around the disciplinary barriers, but a colleague wrote to me that the disciplinary lock on academic jobs, in a very competitive job market, makes the work to acquire area specialization an unattractive and expensive proposition. In his overview of the present state of play in international and area studies, the vice president of the Social Science Research Council implicitly sees the area studies institutions as being called on to adapt more fundamentally than the disciplines to the new situation of the post Cold War world; for example area studies scholars and centers will focus "more than in the past on training scholars and practitioners who specialize within disciplines to understand..." (Heginbotham 1994:37, my emphasis). Read as part of a history, this represents realism, rather than principled conviction, about disciplinary strength.
Why, however, have the disciplines been so successfully recalcitrant that Lambert could write: "After 30 years of federal support for campus-based international studies, we are still in the 'pilot project' stage" (1986:4)? The answer may not be possible to define, but it matters very deeply to pose the question, because otherwise the failure will be laid at the feet of area studies scholarship, in the context of another effort at internationalization and the inevitable competition for resources. First of all, not all disciplines are the same; history, anthropology, language and literature have context-sensitivity built into the disciplinary structures. Their own challenge-and one they have themselves seen for at least ten years-is to develop ways of studying multi-site phenomena with the same sensitivity as they have studied times and places. I can only imagine us all embracing the new opportunities for this kind of work that resources in International Studies would offer. Area studies has already fundamentally altered at least some of the scholarship in these core disciplines over the past thirty years: anthropology has become historically inflected, historians study narratives and diaries, and literature draws on the work of Clifford Geertz. Political Science has bordered on the interchange a little more cautiously; geography has engaged fully but in small numbers; a successful Rockefeller Foundation project brought area studies scholars and agricultural scientists together. In the core disciplines, then, area studies has already done some of what Heginbotham is suggesting, by dint of great effort and in the teeth of some inertia from within the disciplines. In a content-analysis of the African Studies Review, Sanders writes: "change and growth in the journal have been guided more by changes in disciplines than by efforts to re-direct or change African Studies. The only exception to this might be the synthesis articles solicited through the SSRC" (1993:124). The authors of those overview papers were carefully chosen to represent the most forward-looking work. So there is a leadership that should be enthusiastic about adding the new agendas.
The problem lies not in what has been done in area studies, but with what has not. Some disciplines have not participated to anything like the same degree, and most notably academic economics, as Heginbotham goes on to say, by way of an example: we need training "to understand how the culture, history, and language of a local context shape its interaction with, for example, the evolution of market institutions and engagement with international market forces" (1994:37). If the main problems for internationalization are economics and the professional schools perhaps it would be worth simply stating that, and proceeding from there. Again, this should be welcomed by those of us who labor in the disciplines and area studies, because we have very deficient technical training to trace out the implications of the economic forces that affect everything we study (see, for example, my edited collection on money; Guyer 1995). I am optimistic that an international studies infrastructure could, in fact, achieve this. The reality of vast populations not linked into the banking system at all, of exchange rates in what Collier terms "small open economies" (1994) that are extremely vulnerable to speculative forces, will surely attenuate the hold of an economics that is unnecessarily universalistic in its theoretical claims. The global political economy is one of several topics-along with migration, the communications media, and violence-that cannot be taken on by area studies alone. We need international studies, and certainly should not be pitted against it, as if we had failed in the mission to internationalize (all) the disciplines and now needed to be superseded. The disciplines themselves still need to embrace theoretical and susbtantive inspirations that come from the international world.
The very considerable advantage of being precise about a) the power of the disciplines to contain the influence of area studies and set the conditions of work, and b) the very particular power of economics to opt out altogether from the beginning, is that we do not now identify failures with the area studies establishment itself (the SSRC committee, the Title VI Centers, Africanists in general), as some seem to want to do. We stand to undermine invaluable resources, with no guarantee whatsoever that they would be replaced at all, let alone by something better.
Before moving on, I want to ruminate about the effect of computer technology in some disciplines versus others. Over the past fifteen years economics and political science have embraced modelling, and if they move into intellectual space afforded by international studies, we who specialize in "context sensitive" research (to use Pearl Robinson's term) need to envisage some form of collaboration. I have been convinced that this is potentially a good thing: by difficulties in my own research and by listening to natural scientists describe how modelling has allowed formerly unimaginable cross-disciplinary work on complex ecological systems. But it may need managing in order to be maximally fruitful and to avoid such eventualities as the total takeover of the agenda by the single discipline of economics, as happened, for example with the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change, which was started by anthropologists and is now entirely economics; or (as I understand it) with the near-complete scoop of new NSF money for environmental studies by economists. If this happened-as it could, without the link to a strong and continuing area studies tradition- international studies and area studies would simply become a new incarnation of the two sides of the old and dire opposition between quantitative and qualitative research, between universalizing and particularizing disciplines. The logic is a strong one. International Studies, as a forum for coming to grips with global forces, could well become a staging ground for the same universalizing economics that avoided engaging with area studies in the past.
Area studies might then become what it already is edging towards: the academic incarnation of our national bilateralism, where each area belongs to its own constituency and generates a form of local knowledge, by, for and about "the people." It almost goes without saying that I think this would represent another lost opportunity in the apparently endless quest for genuine internationalization of American scholarship. It can be that, and to some degree should and certainly will be that, as national life becomes more and more privatized. But both endeavors can be much more if they are not pitted against one another, or mutually accommodated through a simple but intellectually negative disciplinary division of labor between economics and political science on the one side and history and anthropology on the other.
What better possibilities are there? The increased possibilities for comparison and the study of global forces that an International Studies infrastructure offers are only one step forward. The real opportunity for both is a vigorous expansion of the interdisciplinary frontiers that became rather cemented in the "core disciplines" approach of the area studies tradition. Our most strategic resource is the small cadre of younger economists, political scientists and specialists in climate change, remote sensing and international migration, who know both some area studies and modelling techniques. They are our first cohort of scholars to be methodologically polyvalent, convinced of the importance of context-sensitivity and also ready to address some of the analytical and philosophical issues that my African colleague pointed out. To have made it through the disciplinary ranks under present conditions is a tribute to their talent rather than to any conviction about the value of contextual work on the part of the disciplines.
It matters very much, then, which elements-disciplines, and scholars within disciplines-become the brokers under a new dispensation of international and area studies. At several universities African Studies specialists have taken on the job of managing international studies centers, precisely with a view to preempting the EDCC scenario. Most of the technical expertise, however, is still more junior that this. We also think that there are African counterparts, but they show up topic by topic rather than as a particular cohort, especially since the African academic context does not foster their affiliation with "Africanist" organizations. In my own view, these people need particular support to define an interdisciplinary agenda that would include both sophisticated model-building/quantification and the context-sensitive definition of variables and reading of findings without which the whole exercise can be meaningless. This is an "interdisciplinary" task that we have still not, after all these years, really taken on. For both area studies and international studies, there are new disciplines that need to be inter-related with one another in order to address the fundamental intellectual problems. It should be noted here that much of this work is "relevant" in the developmental sense. It relates to environmental change, agricultural development, public finance and the culture of democratization- all topics that lend themselves readily to international comparisons.
Are we addressing the issue of international studies within African
Studies? Yes, but piecemeal in particular works within specific networks,
by preempting the reprise of an IR or macro-economics control of leadership
positions, and through the work of individual scholars (notably several
of the African faculty who came here in the 1980s). The interest of major
universities in appointing Africanists to these positions reflects a vote
of confidence that they as individuals and our own traditions of thinking
about international issues represent a promising way forward; we are certainly
not holding these positions by virtue of the intrinsic importance of Africa
to U.S. foreign and economic policies. We are still in the first stages
of their directorships, so the intellectual thrust they may be able to
give is not yet bearing fruit. The future of an intellectual presence lies
with the ways in which junior faculty can make use of the space both area
studies and international studies opens up. Judging from past experience,
the real challenge will be to foster as solid an interdisciplinearity amongst
other disciplines as areas studies has created amongst its own core disciplines
over the past thirty years. As long as the framework of international studies
fosters this, both international and area studies can only gain from one
another.
All area studies in this country have potential self-selected constituencies, by ethnic origin. They may or may not be interested in scholarship, and they may have their own idiosyncratic interests within it (esthetics, for example, ancient history, or religious studies). Their ordinary lives predispose them to engage. Most area studies include scholarship by immigrants from the area and members of the ethnic constituency. The resulting inter-ethnic interface of non-national and national scholars must be one of the most productive assets of the area studies format: there's no escaping one another, in the day-to-day confrontations with ideas, students, administrators and the currents of political change. The study of one group by another, indefinitely, bypasses all kinds of important intellectual possibilities that constant engagement fosters. And if bilateralism is the dominant form of American internationalism, this kind of exclusiveness is also unsustainable over the long term.
I don't know of any reliable way of estimating the African-American presence in the African Studies professorate, but it must be higher than it was. As far as I know no white scholar in African Studies is explicitly opposed to increasing the proportion of Africans and African-Americans in the ranks beyond the level it has now reached. In my own experience the debates are about three issues that immediately arise once the composition of the community has been altered: authority (scholarly and institutional); access to resources; and the inclusiveness of networks, including most importantly the networks through which the field is reproduced. Such issues strew blood and feathers on the academic floor regardless of who the parties are. Undoubtedly the confrontations are further embittered when race enters in. But my own impressions have been so favorable about the possibilities for maintaining engagement, not least due to the generosity of our African-American colleagues, that I would certainly not see the field as polarized or engaged in unresolvable struggles.
Three illustrations must suffice: the institutional dispersal of African and African-American studies after the mid-1960s; the competition for academic jobs, resulting in a perception by some of a "ghettoization" of African history, which is the discipline that is hardest hit by the job crunch; and the problem of scholarly authority and the published
"canon." i) During the 1960s, the changed racial profile of the student body and the raised social consciousness on campuses gave rise to a struggle to address African-American intellectual concerns. The main concern, of course, was that the canon was implicitly or explicitly racist. Those of us who were students then can certainly attest, for example, to the pervasiveness of reference to "primitive societies," in the very presence of students from those societies. Evolutionary paradigms were only just beginning to shift. And only in certain contexts was scholarship beginning to address social movements as making positive contributions to justice and equality. Area Studies had arisen in a critical stance vis-a-vis the disciplines, which were seen as being quite intransigently authoritative in their own western style, so some area studies scholars were not necessarily as quick as they might have been to recognize that they, in turn, appeared almost as intransigent from yet a third standpoint. The pace at which new vistas were envisaged was too slow and clumsy for many active participants, who eventually preferred a context of their own rather than spend precious energy at a time of great ferment of ideas trying to budge the established organizations. As mentioned already, a constituency of Black scholars left the ASA in 1969 over the the representation of Africans and African-Americans in key capacities, and after raising "suspicions about the compromise settlement" (Challenor 1969: 6) that was eventually suggested. The African Heritage Studies Association was formed to promote study and debate along lines that was thought more fruitful. Comparable processes on campuses across the nation led to the institutionalization of Black, Africana and African-American Studies departments and programs.
It is likely that some Black scholars who might otherwise have been in African Studies found these other contexts more stimulating and congenial during the 1970s and that there were corresponding institutional tensions. Some universities combined African and African-American Studies under the rubric of Africana Studies. On the whole, though, our institutions-including funding institutions-maintain a quite rigorous division between the two fields of study, with separate programs, degree requirements, funding criteria and so on. In theory this should not create problems because collaborative work can certainly be envisaged and organized when faculty and students share common interests. But when resources are at stake it almost certainly does create frictions. At some universities there appears to be some effort at intellectual convergence, either through particular leadership (such as Gates and Appiah at Harvard), through programmatic commitment (see the special number of ISSUE), or through an intellectual focus on the connections between Africa and its diaspora. In other places, scholars maintain a regional or thematic rather than diasporic definitional basis to the field; a person is a West Africanist, or a Caribbeanist, or a labor historian, rather than a specialist in Black cultural and social history.
This is a moving frontier, for intellectual, social and organizational reasons, which may find different resolutions in different universities. In an era of cost containment, some faculties may be put under pressure to merge. This is a dilemma for which there is probably no single "right answer" because the ways of doing top quality work depend on resources and commitments that will vary from place to place. But the stage is certainly set for a series of new discussions about collaboration and separate integrity across the spectrum of disciplines, programs and organizations. Given the likelihood of new external contexts for our work, it would seem useful to start thinking about these issues.
ii) Universities are under pressure to diversify the faculty, and the effort to put minority scholarships in place is just beginning to bear fruit in African Studies. Many universities can only afford one African historian. The logic is inexorable that they would prefer that one to act as an encouragement to the minority student body, as well as boost their own diversity factor, but they cannot usually declare so openly. Philip Curtin (1995) has put forward one perspective, that this constitutes ghettoization. A critique of this terminology, and its assumptions of segregation and creeping inferiority, was expressed at the Urbana conference, and is presented in the special issue of ISSUE (1995). One fundamental constituent of the problem is the competition for academic jobs in African history that set in about twenty years ago, and has sent at least one very well-known scholar abroad to pursue a career. No solution can be found without addressing the content of training for a job market that is so excruciatingly competitive. Most people must surely see this without us all having to "take sides," except in a single phalanx to request that the terminology be altered, and that all the implications of closure and inferiority that come with it be eliminated. The substance must be open to examination and discussion from all angles.
iii) Scholarly authority was raised in articles by Tiyambe Zeleza and Thandika Mkandawire, and is addressed intermittently in many gatherings. Zeleza tabulated the authorship of articles in five major journals from 1982-92 and found that only 17% were written by Africans (Johnson 1994:124). He urged that African scholars should simply confine their publications to Africa-based journals. Mkandawire has devoted large parts of his career to developing such publication outlets, but argues equally forcefully for the maintenance of high levels of competence in intellectual work, which he sees as having sometimes been eroded in African contexts.
These are serious and long-term issues about how and where agendas are set. In my own opinion the problems derive at least as much from the iron control of the disciplines on creditation in the American university system, and from the very competitive phase we are in, as they do from any personal or collective articulated position about the issues in question. To get a job, gain promotion and get tenure in a U.S. university, now more than ever you have to leap the disciplinary hurdles. Disciplines may be flexible about various aspects of a scholar's work if it obviously meets or surpasses the standards of artisanship (coverage, logic, empirical richness and so on). But without publication in certain key peer-review journals or reputed presses the gates are quite simply barred. It's non-negotiable and it's not resolvable through any known tactics of confrontation.
We need very urgently to think through the implications of this situation in our own contexts of work, because many of them are not unique and we need to be able to separate those that we might influence from those we cannot. First of all, no-one in the academy will change the artisanal standards except from within. But we can a) recognize the issue and take a lead in shifting criteria where they no longer make any sense, b) make spaces for work done in other ways, and c) address the contingent problems that make the situation that Zeleza identified possible in the first place. It is interesting to see that some of the concerns and dilemmas are almost identical to those raised in South-east Asian studies (Raphael 1994), including the pervasive sense that the problem actually deepened during "my" second era, when area studies participated in the disciplinary debates about theory.
Since we do now have African and African-American intellectual leadership, the lines are no longer racial. I have heard African-American colleagues argue forcefully for a position that most of us can readily share: both the extension of opportunity to minority categories and the critical importance of implementing standards in every particular case. In a situation that is as competitive as ours, they are not mutually exclusive; minority resources add both quantitatively and qualitatively to the total pool.
Beyond that, all questions of authority are bound to be a struggle.
They should be, because there are real issues of the quality and the meaning
of the work at stake in a time of rapid and unpredictable change. The terms
of the African Heritage Studies Association's statement of purpose-"to
reconstruct and present African history and cultural studies in a manner
that is relevant to African peoples"- remains a challenge to be grappled
with. We are well served by those who are trying to do so, as long as discussions
can lead to alliances. Presenting a public image of chronic and unresolvable
confrontation will only convince our administrators, to everyone's detriment,
that the intellectual agendas of "reconstruction" and the constituency
agendas of "relevance" can be simply distinguished and dealt with separately.
If there is a single point of complete agreement within the African Studies community it is the value of extended field research in Africa. Vansina's generation was able to afford as much as every other year in the field for ten years or more (see Vansina 1994). By the time Tony Waters did his dissertation research he could write: "The academic career...has a rhythm which is...incompatible with research in rural Africa. The PhD takes 9 years.... This then leads to a 7 year-long fight for tenure.... The net result is that in the first 12-15 years of a promising academic career, no more than 1-2 years will be spent in Africa" (1995). Even those 1-2 years are now achieved by a select few, while everyone trained in what were accepted as "classic" field methods knows that the really valuable innovative work is done on the basis of longer and more intense research in Africa than 10% or less of one's time can possibly sustain. Our European colleagues and some of our own most productive scholars may spend up to four years on a single project. And class-time for the remaining 10-13 years is not necessarily spent in ways that enhance confidence and productivity in the field. It is a major tribute to the quality of the students in African Studies that they achieve such good work under such limiting conditions.
The situation is bad in and of itself, but also contributes in obvious ways to all the others: the anger of African colleagues about the bases for scholarly authority, the difficulty of budging the disciplines, the high rate of attrition in graduate school, the long years it takes to finish a dissertation and slow publication. To cope with relatively short stays in Africa we should be helping students to be as effective as possible during the time they do have by wedging field research into the curriculum for students from freshmen on, and teaching it as a whole toolbox of interdisciplinary skills. By the time a graduate student goes to Africa to do dissertation research they should already have done a variety of projects, both here and abroad. Even if there is money, it will take time, compromise and diplomacy in dealing with departments to come anywhere close to meeting this goal.
One benefit of a more aggressive approach to getting students to collect and work with original data from early on would be that dissertation projects could become more multidisciplinary in method, across disciplines different than the classics of anthropology and history, without over-diluting the student's level of professional competence in field research. In brief, for certain topics a student could reduce the time spent in the field, and use it in strategic combination with other methods. Africa is no longer as limited as it was in basic documentation. Remote sensing data are collected on a regular basis; there are published daily reports on the broadcast news (Foreign Broadcast Information Service, the VOA daily publication); there are various sources on the Internet; archives and libraries have collected invaluable sources in print, film and recorded media, including fieldnotes and the raw data from village agricultural studies; there are massive surveys, such as the Demographic and Health Surveys, that contain more information than the original researchers ever use. With electronic communication, totally new resources are within most scholars' reach.
An advantage of a strategic approach to fieldwork would be the new disciplinary combinations made possible. Another would be the gains in geographical coverage. At present, it's hard to imagine anyone spending the long periods of time needed for classic field research in some of the situations we read about in Africa. And yet if we do not, the entire literature on those areas and subjects will be provided by journalists. The possibility of combining careful analyses of already collected original data with a focused field component of, say, two or three months makes staying in Zaire or on the Sudan border, less completely daunting that it would otherwise be.
It is not often recognized in African Studies that the long intensive
field trip has become controversial within anthropology on the grounds
that it makes the linking of local and global forces quite difficult. In
the mid-1980s there were some more or less powerful critiques made of the
Malinowskian tradition: Llobera on its inapplicability to addressing larger
political cultural dynamics in Europe, Marcus and Fischer on the need for
multi-site ethnography in the era of global processes. As far as I know,
anthropology has not done anything very systematic about changing training
with these critiques in mind, along with the vastly changed data availability
and the difficulty of the African situation. The topic bears reopening,
not to abandon the unwavering commitment to field research but to adapt
it to changed conditions within both academia and Africa, and to offer
alternatives within courses of training.
Political responsiveness has perhaps never been a great forte of scholars, but it was one of the guiding hopes of the area studies vision, that scholars would be a public resource in times of need for informed opinion. Junior faculty cannot possibly afford to take the time to be active in public life because the standards for professional advancement at the university-in teaching, publications and service-have become so demanding. One could see this as a recipe for quietism, especially by comparison with the past. But some people are still putting forth the effort, across the spectrum of philosophical conviction, to fulfil the civic duty of being an area studies specialist, trained and supported at the public expense (even if the amounts of money are so comparatively small). Particularly difficult personal situations are created for our African-American colleagues, for whom community involvement is an expectation. During a recent Harvard forum on "The Responsibility of the Intellectual in the Age of Crack," only Gates of all the African-American academics on the panel was able to say-and even then, only when pressed at question time-that he saw his scholarship and university service as a contribution to the community. How can anyone, and in particular junior faculty, be a scholar, maintain a personal and family life and also meet the expectations of public leadership at the same time under present conditions?
I leave this unresolved problem until last. There is no clear
solution. More efficient linkage into organizations would help. Designation
of points of mobilization so that we can actually fulfil one of the expectations
of the area studies vision seems necessary. Junior faculty, and particularly
African-Americans, probably need a sabbatical around their third or (at
the latest) fourth year of service, to make sure that the necessary publications
for tenure are out before the sixth year, and to thereby make it possible
for them to even dream of public engagement. I hear from several quarters
of the American public life that we scholars of Africa are not outspoken
enough, on enough important topics. There are many ingredients to the explanation
for this perception, but facing the issue is critically important over
the next few years when Africa, U.S. foreign and domestic policy, and academia
are all in flux at once.
Jane I. Guyer, Copyright 1996