NO DISCIPLINE

1.

Abd-al Hakimu Ibn Alkalimat, "Common Problems, Common Solutions: Toward a Pan-African Ideology," Journal of Black Poetry 1:14 (1970-71)

My first reaction is to have our tribal governments establish research protocols and to ban people like this from writing about our tribes. 

— Delphine Red Shirt, “A Review of our ‘New History’: Part III,” Lakota Times (December 19, 2019). 

One of the members had explained to the natives (the report naturally refers them “sauvages”) that the high mortality rate was caused by the wines and liquors, which they did not know how to consume in moderation. “Why don’t you write to your great King,” one of the natives asked, “to prohibit the transporting of these beverages which are killing us?” “The French,” the Jesuit answered, need them to help them stand the sea voyages and the freezing temperatures of these places.” “Well then,” the other said, “arrange that they be the only ones to drink them.” At this point, a second native stood up: “No, it is not these beverages which kill us, it is your writings. As soon as you started to describe our country, our rivers, our lands, our forests, we all began to die, in a way that was not happening before you came.” 

— Carlo Ginzburg, “The Europeans Discover (or Rediscover) the Shamans,” in Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 87.

In contrast to tortuous attempts throughout the Arab world to reconcile nascent academic social sciences with Western Orientalist anthropology, at least on the official level, Algerian authorities said no. Ethnology was banned outright at the twenty-fourth International Conference of Sociology in Algiers in March 1974. 

— Susan Slyomovics, “‘The Ethnologist-Spy Was Hanged, at That Time We Were a Little Savage’: Anthropology in Algeria with Habib Tengour,” b2o: an online journal (December 10, 2018) 

2. 

The Asiatic Society of Bengal, center. William Wood, A Series of Twenty-Eight Panoramic Views of Calcutta (1833).

Anyone who still thinks of interdisciplinarity as the key to a new world should consider that it has been a working principle for World Bank teams on the ground in Africa since the Bank’s inception. The same goes for the concept of area studies – interdisciplinary scholarship focused on different regions of the world – which emerged in the US after 1945, with support from the Ford Foundation, and eventually spread across the Atlantic. 

— Mahmood Mamdani, “The African University,” London Review of Books 40:14 (July 19, 2018) 

The institutionalization of the nominal divisions of the social sciences is extremely strong today, despite all the genuflection before the rosy glow of “interdisciplinarity.” Indeed, I would argue that interdisciplinarity is itself a lure, representing the greatest support possible to the current list of disciplines, by implying that each has some special knowledge that it might be useful to combine with some other special knowledges in order to solve some practical problem. 

— Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Heritage of Sociology, the Promise of Social Science,” in The End of the World as We Know it: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 246. Originally delivered at Fourteenth World Congress of Sociology, Montreal, July 26, 1998. 

I have always been slightly bemused by the constant celebration or dismissal of interdisciplinarity within queer studies, particularly when it comes to the diversified holdings of queer archives. To return to a point I made earlier about periodization and geopolitics, such questions of interdisciplinarity often seem beside the point within histories of colonialism and sexuality. If one were to take the case of colonial India, for example, interdisciplinarity emerges more as a ruse of the colonial state, rather than a disruptive reading practice. What we need, now more than ever, is a genealogy of interdisciplinarity as concept and practice within and without Euro-American archival forms. For me, queer archival forms demand reading practices that are meandering, ragged, and unfamiliar; no blueprints here for a studied interdisciplinarity! 

— Anjali Arondekar, “Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion,” Radical History Review 122 (2015), 228-229.

Further reading: Joyce A. Lander, ed., The Death of White Sociology (New York: Vintage, 1973), especially Dennis Forsythe’s chapter, “Radical Sociology and Blacks,” 213-233; Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1969); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Irene Gendzier, Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985); Partha Chatterjee, ed., Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock, “On the Problem of Over-Researched Communities: The Case of the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon,” Sociology 47:3 (2013): 494-508; Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).