Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States
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Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States
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Overview
Field Notes reconstructs the origins and trajectory of area studies in the United States, focusing on Middle East studies from the 1920s to the 1980s. Drawing on extensive archival research, Zachary Lockman shows how the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations played key roles in conceiving, funding, and launching postwar area studies, expecting them to yield a new kind of interdisciplinary knowledge that would advance the social sciences while benefiting government agencies and the American people. Lockman argues, however, that these new academic fields were not simply a product of the Cold War or an instrument of the American national security state, but had roots in shifts in the humanities and the social sciences over the interwar years, as well as in World War II sites and practices.
This book explores the decision-making processes and visions of knowledge production at the foundations, the Social Science Research Council, and others charged with guiding the intellectual and institutional development of Middle East studies. Ultimately, Field Notes uncovers how area studies as an academic field was actually built—a process replete with contention, anxiety, dead ends, and consequences both unanticipated and unintended.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804799584 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/30/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Field Notes
The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States
By Zachary Lockman
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9906-5
CHAPTER 1
"We Shall Have to Understand It"
... at the minute the Arabic world is not drawn to our alarmed attention as is the Far East, but everything indicates that within the next couple of decades we shall have to understand it. We should not wait until the need is too obvious, for by that time it will be too late to do anything.
— Mortimer Graves, 1936 or 1937
THE SECOND WORLD WAR has been described as the metaphorical "midwife" or "mother" of area studies, the historical conjuncture which brought it into being as a distinct mode of organizing the production and dissemination of scholarly knowledge. There is clearly some truth in this depiction, but postwar area studies in the United States also had significant prewar antecedents that provided important visions of, models for and experience with regionally focused academic research, training, networks, programs and institutions which would later contribute to the formation of area studies. Moreover, as with area studies in the decades that followed the war, these initiatives were supported, indeed made possible, by funding from several of the country's richest foundations, often working through a new kind of academic organization that connected them with the objects of their beneficence.
The Rise of the Great Foundations
The enormous, indeed unprecedented, accumulations of wealth which led to the creation of the Carnegie and Rockefeller "families" of philanthropic institutions were the product of the rapid industrialization which the United States experienced after the Civil War, accompanied by the rise of powerful corporations which came to dominate entire sectors of the American economy as virtual monopolies and generated vast wealth for those who controlled them. Around the turn of the century Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), who had built a business empire that at its height encompassed much of the country's steel industry, began establishing a number of philanthropies with distinct missions. For our purposes the most important of these was the Carnegie Corporation of New York, founded in 1910 with an endowment of $135 million (the equivalent of over $3 billion in 2015) as the main vehicle through which Andrew Carnegie's vast fortune would be disbursed for philanthropic purposes. John D. Rockefeller Sr. (1839–1937), who had built the Standard Oil empire and at the beginning of the twentieth century was reckoned the richest person on earth, followed Carnegie's example by donating large sums to educational institutions and to medical research. He went on to establish the Rockefeller Foundation, formally chartered in 1913 "to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world," with an endowment totaling $100 million. As of 1934 the Carnegie Corporation had an endowment of $157 million (equivalent to about $2.8 billion in 2015) and was distributing about $4.7 million ($83 million) in income each year. The Rockefeller Foundation, close behind with an endowment of $154 million ($2.7 billion), was distributing almost $12 million ($213 million) in income annually.
Carnegie and Rockefeller no doubt regarded themselves as altruists. But much of the American public saw them as "malefactors of great wealth," as President Theodore Roosevelt put it in 1907, and their new philanthropic enterprises were established in part to ameliorate their founders' negative public image as well as to avoid the looming threat that their vast fortunes, widely perceived as ill-gotten, might be subjected to heavy taxation. More broadly, this wave of philanthropy can be seen as part of an effort to mitigate the deleterious consequences of the economic and social transformations that the United States was experiencing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to combat the rising tide of resistance to the enormous economic and political power now concentrated in the hands of the owners and managers of the giant corporations and banks. As Edward H. Berman has put it, those who created and led these foundations hoped to achieve
the stabilization of the rapidly evolving corporate and political order and its legitimation and acceptance by the majority of the American population; the institutionalization of certain reforms, which would serve to preclude the call for more radical structural change; and the creation through educational institutions of a worldwide network of elites whose approach to governance and change would be efficient, professional, moderate, incremental, and nonthreatening to the class interests of those who, like Messrs. Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller, had established the foundations.
They thus shared substantial common ground with the Progressive movement of the period, which sought to address widespread social distress and discontent through moderate social and political reform led by an enlightened elite, to be achieved by the deployment of scientific (including social-scientific) and technical expertise to address social problems and by the provision of enhanced educational opportunities.
During and after the First World War, key leaders at the great foundations, and at the organizations and institutions they funded (and had often created), also embraced an increasingly internationalist perspective. They were particularly concerned about the leading role which they believed the United States, as a rising global power, could and should — indeed, must — play on the world stage, and so they sought to instill in Americans a greater awareness of what they regarded as the country's global responsibilities. Hence the creation, with Rockefeller and/or Carnegie funding, of such entities as the Foreign Policy Association (1921), the Council on Foreign Relations (1921), the Institute of Pacific Relations (1925), which would play a key role in promoting the study of modern and contemporary Asia, and the Yale Institute of International Studies (1935).
The Foundations and American Academic Life
The elaboration of this new network of foundation-funded organizations and institutions focused on international affairs and foreign policy was accompanied in the interwar period by efforts to enhance teaching and research about other parts of the world at America's colleges and universities. In this endeavor a key role was played by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), founded in 1919 to represent American academic organizations in the humanities in the Union Académique Internationale. The ACLS brought together representatives of the American Historical Association, the American Oriental Society, the Modern Language Association, the American Economic Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Antiquarian Society, the American Academy of Arts and Science, and the American Sociological Society (which in 1959 renamed itself the American Sociological Association, thereby escaping an unfortunate acronym), among others. Many of these professional associations were the product of the reorganization along disciplinary lines of teaching, research and professional life in American higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a process which also yielded distinct disciplinary departments at colleges and universities.
The founders and early leaders of the ACLS shared the intellectual and political vision of the Progressive movement: as such they were part of what Alfred De calls "an emerging network of modernizing and forward-looking academics that connected humanists to the goal of improving society through rational knowledge and democratic action." Beyond serving the ACLS' constituent learned societies, they hoped not merely to promote but also to reshape the humanities in the United States, by supporting the upgrading of professional standards and the adoption of scientific research methods. While it was still getting itself up and running, the ACLS was joined on the American academic scene by another organization with which it would often collaborate but was sometimes in competition. This was the Social Science Research Council, established in 1924 to do for the social sciences more or less what the ACLS hoped to do for the humanities: protect and extend the interests of the social science disciplines and promote social science research, especially on contemporary social problems — again, very much in keeping with the Progressive vision of developing and deploying scientific expertise to address social problems. The SSRC brought together a set of academic organizations that included the American Anthropological Association, the American Historical Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Statistical Association, the American Economic Association and the American Sociological Society; some of its members belonged to the ACLS as well.
It was only in 1926 that the ACLS secured a reliable source of support, from the General Education Board, established in 1902 as one of several philanthropies created by John D. Rockefeller Sr. and his family and associates. The ACLS would thereafter receive the great bulk of its funding, for its programs as well as for its operating expenses, from Rockefeller philanthropies; indeed, for much of its life it was widely regarded as more or less an arm of the Rockefeller Foundation. From its inception through the 1930s the SSRC also received most of its funding from Rockefeller philanthropies, especially the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (founded in 1919) which, before it was merged into the Rockefeller Foundation in 1929, disbursed tens of millions of dollars for social science research, mainly on education, public health and welfare, race relations and child study in the United States but on a smaller scale on international affairs as well. Both the ACLS and the SSRC thus served as intermediary organizations linking the foundation world with scholars, universities and academic institutions and organizations, and as conduits for foundation funding.
The Rockefeller philanthropies made substantial grants to individual scholars, academic institutions and programs in the humanities through the 1920s: for example, they gave $780,000 to the University of Chicago's new Oriental Institute to train archaeologists, and $500,000 to Harvard University's Fogg Museum to train curators and art historians. The ACLS, especially its leading figure in this period, the historian-archivist Waldo T. Leland (1879–1966) who served as the organization's executive secretary and then director until his retirement in 1946, hoped to make the allocation of grants funded by Rockefeller (and on a smaller scale by the Carnegie Corporation as well) less haphazard and more strategic, and also to encourage the humanities disciplines to produce more — and more practically useful — knowledge of the non-Western world. In this mission Leland was joined by a younger colleague, Mortimer Graves (1893–1987), who would succeed Leland as the ACLS' preeminent figure and dominate the organization until the late 1950s. As De puts it, Graves "criticized the traditional focus of the humanities on the preservation and transmission of western culture. In the 1930s, he complained that humanities scholars too often isolated themselves from current events, despite the education and training that uniquely equipped them to analyze broad international changes." Scholars in the humanities should, Graves believed, "educate the public and create a class of knowledgeable policy elites capable of navigating complicated international waters, especially those of East Asia." To achieve this Graves advocated, among other things, the reform of the undergraduate curriculum so that it much more effectively exposed students to the histories and cultures of the non-Western world.
The ACLS and the Humanities in the Long 1930s
This international orientation helped the ACLS carve out for itself a distinctive role in American academia. In 1928, as the Rockefeller Foundation was beginning to fund projects in China, the ACLS began to convene meetings on Chinese studies in the United States which attracted some of the leading figures in the field and out of which emerged an ACLS-sponsored standing committee on Chinese studies along with ambitious proposals to promote and develop this field. Progress was halting, but over time there were signs of change in Asian studies, including the establishment of a new Program in Oriental Civilizations at the University of Michigan in the late 1920s. This field's development, and later that of other fields, gained new impetus after 1932, when David H. Stevens (1884–1980), previously involved in other Rockefeller-related projects, became director of the foundation's Humanities Division and increased support for culture and the arts but also for research and training in the humanities focused on specific regions of the non-Western world.
Foundation funding enabled the ACLS to provide postdoctoral research fellowships (if on a modest scale) for what was at the time usually referred to as Far Eastern studies. Working with the separate committees for Chinese and Japanese studies that it appointed and supported, and with the Carnegie Corporation providing funding for fellowships, beginning in 1932 the ACLS also helped organize a series of summer institutes that brought together scholars and students for intensive training on East Asia, generally including accelerated language training and courses on the history and culture of the region. The summer institute (or summer seminar) quickly became a model that was emulated in other regional fields and served as an important instrument of field-building; it also provided a context within which to develop new and more effective methods of language training, such the use of native speakers as drill instructors. The ACLS also supported the development of bibliographical resources, including (with grants in 1933 from the Rockefeller Foundation) the creation of a center for Far Eastern studies at the Library of Congress to enable students in the field to receive advanced training and make better use of that institution's rich collections. Plans were also made for the Library to catalogue Chinese and Japanese books in American collections.
The ACLS Committees on Far Eastern Studies, encompassing separate committees for Chinese and Japanese studies, began publishing a newsletter in 1937 and later a journal, Far Eastern Quarterly, and sponsored conferences that brought together scholars in the field. As Robert A. McCaughey notes, during the Depression years the committees also "acted as an academic placement bureau, anticipating openings wherever they might occur and trying to keep unemployed PhDs in the field through stopgap fellowship support." Though growth was slow, over time the field expanded and courses in East Asian languages gradually became more common; for example, in the fall of 1936 Robert K. Reischauer, a young political scientist then teaching in Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs, began offering courses in Japanese through the university's Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures.
Along roughly similar lines, Latin American studies also slowly began to coalesce as a distinct and increasingly institutionalized field in the 1930s, owing in large measure to foundation support. As Helen Delpar shows, the Rockefeller Foundation had long funded research on Latin America, a region of special interest to the Rockefeller family which had large oil investments there. It now began to encourage Latin American studies in a more sustained way, and as early as 1932 the ACLS formed an advisory committee to help develop the field. The committee initially focused on literature, but a group of social scientists soon began to collaborate with it and in 1935 the Social Science Research Council funded a small conference of Latin America scholars. The conference participants decided to continue to work together and to pursue annual publication of a select and critical bibliography of scholarly research on Latin America, encompassing a broad range of disciplines. The Handbook of Latin American Studies began to appear in 1936, with modest support from a Carnegie philanthropy (channeled through the ACLS) and, a few years later, with much more substantial support from Rockefeller; it continues to be published today, though its format has changed considerably over time. In 1939 the ACLS sponsored the creation of a formal Committee on Latin American Studies, which the following year received a three-year grant of $52,000 (the equivalent of almost $900,000 in 2015) from the Rockefeller Foundation. As with Far Eastern studies, Rockefeller in this period also funded summer institutes on Latin America sponsored by the committee, as well as projects by several American university libraries to acquire Latin American materials and the work of the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress and its Archive of Hispanic Culture.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Field Notes by Zachary Lockman. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Preface1. "We Shall Have to Understand It"
2. "The Regional Knowledge Now Required"
3. Launching a New Field
4. Princeton, the ACLS and Postwar Near Eastern Studies
5. A Committee for the Near and Middle East
6. Field-Building in Boom Times
7. "A Need for More Regular Contact"
8. "The Lower Parts of Max Weber"
Epilogue