Disaster Areas

            

Above Vietnam

            So area studies has been a disaster area in many ways. 

— Eqbal Ahmad, "Knowledge, Place, and Power: A Critique of Globalization,” in Ali Mirsepassi, Amrita Basu and Frederick Weaver eds. Localizing Knowledge Ìn a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003). 

"Bill Brown of Boston," West Africa, no. 1929, February 13, 1954, p. 125; no. 1930, February 20, 1954, p. 166. The anonymous "American Correspondent" of this biographical article notes that Dr. Brown lectured at Howard University. During the war he entered the State Department where he eventually succeeded Ralph Bunche as chief of the African Section of the Office of Strategic Affairs. He later headed the African Research Branch of the State Department. Brown left the Department of State in 1953 when the Ford Foundation offered him an appointment as consultant, involving a study trip to Europe and Africa. Upon his return from Africa, he accepted the post at Boston University. The Program at the start was entirely supported by Boston University, "but it is hoped that they will be supplemented by foundation grants." The Ford Foundation in November, 1954, made a substantial grant to the Program. One of the Program's faculty members is already engaged in a study of African students in the United States under the auspices of the Program and with partial financial support from the Twentieth Century Fund. American Sociological Review, XIX, 1954, p. 604. "The Anonymous Correspondent'' adds the following: "It is somewhat surprising to see in a sedate street in Boston, a pleasant New England (U. S. A.) town, an office housing an 'African Research and Studies Program'' Vaguely one feels that there can be little connection with far off Africa. But America is very conscious of her lack of knowledge of other continents. Her sudden emergence as the leading world power made her realize this and everywhere there are springing up groups concerned with areas very remote, both culturally and geographically, from America. So Boston University decided to establish an African Research and Study Program...." This "little connection with far off Africa" goes back, of course, a long way, to colonial times and the slave trade. This basis of New England colonial development has been amply documented. Less known, however, is the direct relationship of New England not only to the slave trade encompassing primarily West Africa, but also that of commercial relations with East Africa. To this day the dining room of the main hotel in Salem is called the "Zanzibar Room."

— Jerome S. Rauch, "Area Institute Programs and African Studies,” The Journal of Negro Education, 1955 p. 418-419, note 49. 

The late Jerome Rauch’s experiences during the 1950s illustrate the sort of troubles that befell anthropologists who critiqued disciplinary connections to the national security state. Rauch’s experiences are worth recounting, first, to acknowledge that there are many more victims of McCarthyism than could ever be established through a search of archives or record systems and, second, to stress how the fears of McCarthyism repressed the development of specific voices.

In the late 1940s Rauch began studying anthropology at Columbia University where he undertook fieldwork in the Mortlock Islands (aaanb 1947 1[2]:16). Rauch took graduate courses with Kardiner, Strong, Benedict,Wagley, Weltfish, and Steward. He was active in the Columbia chapter of the American Veterans Committee, the Henry Wallace campaign, and the campus Marxist Club (Julie Rauch to Price 7/7/01). Things went well for Rauch until 1955 when he published an essay in the Journal of Negro Education, titled ‘‘Area Institute Programs and African Studies.’’ This article developed a sophisticated, radical critique of the social sciences’ ties with governmental agencies. Rauch critically analyzed how increased funding for area study centers caused these centers to think in specific ways and to ask questions with applications to the military and diplomatic interests of the Cold War. With frankness and detail Rauch argued that relationships between funding patrons and client anthropologists ‘‘transformed academic research into applied science, and reconfigured social research into ideology’’ (Rauch to Price 2/22/01). Rauch observed that there was a ‘‘configuration of government and business interest[s]’’ that could be seen in the mixture of governmental policy agencies (e.g., State Department, Foreign Service Institute, etc.), intelligence agencies (e.g., Office of Intelligence Research, Office of Naval Intelligence, etc.), military (e.g., National War College, U.S. Air Force, etc.), private foundations (e.g.,Viking Fund, Rockefeller Foundation, etc.), and private industry (e.g., Standard Oil, etc.) directing research funding opportunities and research agendas for anthropology (Rauch 1955:415–16).

Rauch directly experienced negative consequences for his analysis of the ‘‘subordination of area research to government and business policy’’ (1955: 415). After publishing this critique, Rauch was given a Cold War cold shoulder by many in Columbia’s anthropology department. Decades later he recalled that after publishing his impolite study he was taken aside by ‘‘Julian Steward, [who] told me that I was unemployable, and trying to face reality, I enrolled in library school’’ (Rauch to Price 12/13/00). 

Rauch was not bitter about this unwanted career change. He lived a productive life outside of anthropology working with W. E. B. Du Bois on the Council on African American Affairs, researching the history of the Caribbean slave trade, assisting the Maryland Legislative Black Caucus, and working as an applications programmer at the Oncology Institute of Johns Hopkins Hospital (Rauch to Price 12/13/00). But the culling of Rauch from anthropology not only curtailed the development of his line of critical research, it limited the audience who would encounter his critique and it sent a message to other anthropologists that such frank analyses could detrimentally affect one’s career.

David H. Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham: Duke, 2004), 346-347.

… the Ford Foundation, in close consultation with the CIA, helped to shape postwar area studies and important collaborative research in modernization studies and comparative politics that were later mediated through well known Social Science Research Council projects (ones that were required reading when I was a graduate student in the late 1960s).  According to Christopher Simpson's study of declassified materials, however, this interweaving of foundations, universities, and state agencies (mainly in intelligence and the military) extended to the social sciences as a whole: "For years, government money .. . not always publicly acknowledged as such—made up more than 75 per cent of the annual budgets of institutions such as Paul Lazarsfeld's Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, Hadley Cantril's Institute for International Social Programs at Princeton, Ithiel de Sola Pool's CENIS [the Center for International Studies, earlier known as CIS] program at MIT, and others." Official sources in 1952 reported that "fully 96 per cent of all reported [government] funding for social sciences at that time was drawn from the U.S. military." My own work in postwar U.S. archives over the past two decades has taught me how many books central to the political science profession in the 1950s and 1960s emerged first as internal classified government studies. 

Bruce Cumings, “Boundary Displacement: Area studies and International Studies During and After the Cold War,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29 (1997), 15.

Above Iraq

Such a shifting in the focus of history can only be regarded as a long process. It would require an intensive effort for making available to the historian the type of historical information needed for these studies: literary sources, manuscripts and documents (many of them still buried in remote libraries), the study of folk traditions, physical objects, field studies, etc. It would also require the development of the necessary academic infrastructure in the countries concerned, for experience has shown that where the study of societies with living cultural traditions is concerned, the perception of its ethos and inter-connections requires a very long period of training for persons not born and reared within it. Even the development of “area studies” in many of the Western countries can play only a limited role in this process. For one, many of the area studies programmes in these countries have a heavy presentist bias, being dependent for their finances upon government and/or private foundations, and geared to fulfill certain political or business purposes. Secondly, within these countries, area studies are often considered peripheral to the study of history by the university departments. In consequence, they sometimes fail to attract the right type of student or researcher, thereby further strengthening the ethnocentric bias in history. To an extent area studies programmes have tended to perpetuate the notion that Afro-Asian countries are “patients” in the field of history, and that the history written by the historians of the area are somehow inferior, being tainted by the “nationalist” bias, whereas it is presumed that the writings of historians from metropolitan countries, i.e. the former colonising powers would be free from the “Imperialist” bias. This tendency to attempt to continue the colonial situation in the field of history in the name of the centre and the periphery is bound to have harmful repercussions.

Satish Chandra, "A Note On the Decentring of History and Apprehension By All People of Their History," Diogenes 20:77 (1972), 103.

The career entry barrier is first and foremost, language. If philologists no longer dominate area programs (then called ‘Oriental studies’, something also pioneered in the United States at the University of Chicago) as they once did, few Japanologists will pay attention to the work of someone who cannot read Japanese. If people in a large region of the world speak the same language—for example, Spanish in most of Latin America—then a Latin American studies programme will include everything south of the Rio Grande. If it is a region like Northeast or Southeast Asia, however, where there is no common language in the past century, ‘area’ will usually mean country. The field of Korean studies makes this generalization clearest: in spite of Korea’s two-millennium-long history of interaction with Japan and China, to be in ‘Korean studies’ is to study Korea and not China or Japan. (When I applied to a Northeast Asia committee for research funding to study the regional political economy, one Japanologist on the committee asked if I were ‘changing my field’.) To study China or Japan is to assume that one need know little or nothing about Korea: my experiences in this regard could easily fill a book, but we need only look at one book, Peter Duus’s Abacus and the Sword, to see the prefatory assumption that because he cannot read Korean, he must limit his study of Japanese imperialism in Korea to Japanese materials. The implicit assumption appears also to be that lack of Korean-language facility maims one in understanding the scholarship of Koreanists done in English, which is the only explanation I can come up with, of why Duus made so little use of the seminal studies of late-nineteenth century Korea by James B. Palais, Key-Hiuk Kim, Martina Deuchler, and others. That is, without climbing over the language barrier one ought not to venture into alien territory—however close (in every sense) it might be. 

Bruce Cumings, “Seeing Like an Area Specialist,” in John D. Kelly, Kurt Jacobsen, Marston H. Morgan, eds., Reconsidering American Power: Pax Americana and the Social Sciences (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020), 92-93.