A Life Beyond Boundaries (15 page)

The idea of ‘interdisciplinary studies' started to be talked about at around the same time. In its origins I suspect that this new interest reflected frustrations about the evident misfits between fields of scholarship and the conservative institutional power of departments claiming to represent
disciplines. Discipline-based departments tend to have a vested interest in the maintenance of the status quo, yet fields of scholarship may not fit within the existing departmental boundaries because they are likely to change their contours in response to developing historical situations, societal needs or researchers' academic interests. This is especially so in our age, when rapid social, economic, political and technological changes are everywhere apparent. Hence the misfits arise, and moreover expand. However, there were other signs of increased interdisciplinarity, as bits of different disciplines combined with each other. Interesting fields such as cultural studies and postcolonial studies blossomed. There was also the optimistic idea that interdisciplinary studies would help create bridges between disciplines and area studies. ‘Fashion' also played an important if short-lived role.

If the general idea of interdisciplinary studies was attractive, it was also vague and open to very different interpretations. The two most basic views could be crudely described as follows. The first took off from the Latin prefix
inter
-, which was read as meaning ‘in between'; in other words, researchers lodged themselves in the big empty spaces ‘between' disciplines. If, for example, you wanted to study the elaborate, often poetic slang of Filipino transvestites in its political, social, historical and economic contexts, would there be adequate space in these disciplines for this kind of work to be carried out? Is there a discipline of gender studies that could help you? Why not? People working along these lines produced a lot of interesting and valuable material, borrowing from several
disciplines in an ad hoc manner, but the studies themselves were often rambling, anecdotal and intellectually incoherent. For such people ‘cultural studies' was a useful, prestigious rubric, but some did not fully realize that really good cultural studies are very hard to do.

The second view implied the difficult task of systematically combining the basic frameworks and tools of two or more disciplines. But such an approach required both a mastery of each discipline and a carefully considered supra-framework in which they could be handled. Only really exceptional minds could do this work well. David Laitin's superior comparative work on the politics of language-policy and everyday language use is a good of example of how political science and social linguistics can be elegantly combined. Needless to say, the two ‘basic views' sketched above represent the two ends of a spectrum, and many scholars have worked somewhere in between.

One has also to look at the intellectual culture in which a lot of youthful research is planned and financed. The US is again a good, if extreme, example. The funds to support dissertation research usually come from private foundations and/or governmental bodies. Success in securing funding typically depends on a good proposal, ‘logical, tidy and tightly framed', since the referees for these institutions are usually prominent ‘disciplinary' professors. The student grapevine fairly quickly spreads the word about ‘what will work', which is why, if you sit on such panels of referees, you find that the proposals often look very much like each other.

In political science, students are supposed to come up with a hypothesis to be confirmed or disconfirmed within the coming year. This time limit is a bad idea, since it is too short to attempt anything rather difficult. The demand for a hypothesis is often a bad idea too, because it implies from the start that only two general answers are possible: yes or no. Scale is always a problem. If a student says he wants to study sexual ideology and practice in the Meiji period, he will usually be told something like this: ‘Stick to sexual ideology, find an interesting decade, and confine yourself to Tokyo. Otherwise you will never finish and get a job.' This kind of advice is not unreasonable, given the real financial and market constraints, but it is not likely to encourage bold or ambitious work.

The ideal way to start interesting research, at least in my view, is to depart from a problem or question to which you do
not
know the answer. Then you have to decide on the kind of intellectual tools (discourse analysis, theory of nationalism, surveys, etc.) that may or may not be a help to you. But you have also to seek the help of friends who do not necessarily work in your discipline or program, in order to try to have as broad an intellectual culture as possible. Often you also need luck. Finally, you need time for your ideas to cohere and develop. As an illustration, the research that resulted in
Imagined Communities
began when I asked myself questions to which I had no answers. When and where did nationalism begin? Why does it have such emotional power? What ‘mechanisms' explain its rapid and planetary spread? Why is nationalist historiography so often mythical, even ridiculous? Why are existing
books on the subject so unsatisfactory? What should I be reading instead?

I started out with only two certainties. Firstly, that part of the answer must lie with world-transforming capitalism. But Marx did not pay much attention to print-capitalism, while fine scholars like Elisabeth Eisenstein paid a lot of attention to print but not a lot to capitalism. So? Secondly, that another part of the answer had to involve the rejection of the standard European idea that nationalism developed out of old ethnic groupings, since this idea could not explain either the early nationalisms of the Americas, or the late nationalisms of the Third World anti-colonial movements. Rory advised me to read Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's masterpiece
L'apparition du livre
, which described brilliantly and in enormous detail the early marriage of capitalism and print, and Jim Siegel kindly gave me a copy. The inspiring work of Victor Turner, particularly his unsettling semi-psychological concept of the ‘pilgrimage', gave me the clue I was looking for as a key to the mystery of Creole and anti-colonial nationalism.

I had long been in love with Walter Benjamin's enigmatic ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History', especially his difficult idea of ‘homogeneous, empty time'. But I wasn't thinking of using it at all until Jim (again) gave me a copy of Erich Auerbach's
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
. The most fascinating sections were those on antiquity and the Middle Ages, which revealed a conception of time utterly alien to the modern world. This book then led me to the master French historian of
the Middle Ages, Marc Bloch, and later to David Landes' then recent book on time and clocks.

Finally, a complete accident. I was talking casually with an Americanist friend of mine when the conversation turned to the topic of Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, which was a huge international success. He told me something very instructive about its domestic reception. Pro-slavery critics had mercilessly attacked the book as sheer fiction, if not pure lies. Mrs Stowe was so stung by these criticisms that she published a huge book containing all the documents on which she had relied for writing the novel. But very few people had any interest in buying it. This in turn made me think of Emile Zola's
Germinal
, Ivan Turgenev's
Fathers and Sons
, Eduard Douwes Dekker's
Max Havelaar
and a few other novels which had an enormous political impact when they were first published. They are still read today, and yet no one other than a professional historian is eager to read about the ‘facts' on which these grand fictions were based.

Was there then a sense in which one could think of fictions as being more real than reality? If so, then how could they seem so super-real? Was it only because of their content, or did it have something to do with the novel's inner form? Out of these odd influences I finally saw how Benjamin's notion of homogeneous, empty time might help me. The paradox of super-real fiction made it possible to think about nationalism along the same lines. So, a German political economist (Marx), three French historians (Bloch, Febvre and Martin), a British anthropologist (Turner), a German philologist (Auerbach), an American
novelist (Stowe) and a German philosopher and literary critic (Benjamin) – all were crucial to the formation of
Imagined Communities
, yet none of them was particularly interested in nationalism. But in them collectively I found the tools I needed to solve (so I thought) the problem I had originally been incapable of grasping.

Can it properly be said that my book is interdisciplinary? Marx, Benjamin and Stowe, all long dead, were not professors, and I am not sure how far the three Frenchmen and Auerbach, all professors, thought of themselves as representing disciplines, even if Turner, in all probability, did. But
Imagined Communities
makes no systematic attempt at building a supra-disciplinary perspective (though Marxism is always there). Does the book then belong within one discipline? It certainly doesn't belong to history, since it is not based on archival or other primary sources. Political science? Only one or two political science books are mentioned in the bibliography. Nonetheless, it is all about a single political force, and the underlying framework comes directly out of my training in comparative politics.

There is still another way of thinking about interdisciplinary studies, which has been hinted at already. All disciplines, simply to be disciplines, have to think of themselves as having boundaries and certain kinds of internal rules, even if these change over time. In doing so, they follow the much larger logic of the ever-expanding division of labour in industrial and post-industrial societies. In principle there is nothing wrong with boundary formation and the creation of internal rules and standards, so long
as they are consciously seen as practices pragmatically devised to further the whole field of scholarly endeavour.

The analogy with sports is clear: If you play tennis, you use a round ball and a net, and there are rules about the size of the former and the height of the latter, as well as demarcated spaces in which you can gain points. You are not allowed to hit the ball with your arms, legs or head. If you play football, the ball has to be much bigger, and you need to have goalposts of a specific, arbitrarily decided height; you may use your head and legs, but not your hands. The space in which you play is much larger than in tennis, is differently demarcated, and the rules governing ‘scoring' are quite detailed. But these rules have also changed over time. If you like playing both tennis and soccer you have to know the different formats and rules. No one thinks of playing ‘intersports', and everyone knows when he or she is no longer playing the game.

This kind of consciousness is much less common in academia, because academic life is supposed to be about seeking truth rather than having fun (the boundaries and rules are set up for this purpose). When I first suggested to my colleagues that we should offer a course on the history of political science, and found that no one thought it a good idea, I interpreted the resistance in practical terms. Perhaps they thought we had no one who could devise and teach such a course? It turned out that this was not necessarily the case. The problem was how to interpret the relationship between ‘political' and ‘science'. If one emphasized
political
and bracketed ‘science', then the course would have to start with Plato and continue through
to, say, Fukuyama. But if one did the reverse, the history would not go back much more than a hundred years, when the term was invented in the context of a very American merger between public administration and constitutional law. The department would have found it difficult to come to an agreement on this. In spite of the complete failure of my proposal, I think all disciplines should offer at least one really good course on their histories, however conceived, to make students thoroughly aware of the origins and zigzag development of the intellectual walls that largely define them.

Of course there are alternative methods for breaking down disciplinary fences. One is to introduce into the graduate curriculum, forcibly if necessary, fine works in other disciplines or even outside all standard disciplines, especially if these are written by foreigners. The students will then not only pick up some different technical vocabulary and learn new concepts, but will have chance to look at their own (nationally inflected) disciplines from the outside and in a comparative manner. Another method is to try to develop courses that will attract students from different disciplines and, if possible, nationalities. In my experience, students often learn as much from discussions and arguments among themselves as they do from listening to professors. Nothing is more likely to get students to stop thinking creatively than a combination of national egotism and disciplinary myopia.

And what of audience, style and creativity? It is obvious that graduate students start their training by writing papers for their teachers. Prior to that, their writing may be clear
and even elegant, or clumsy and muddled, depending partly on talent but mostly on what they have learned in high school and as undergraduates. They are not yet inside the discipline, and they usually write, however naively, as persons. Anyone can read what they compose. But graduate students in the disciplines, especially if professionalism is well advanced, change their writing style fundamentally. As they proceed in their studies, they discover some key things about their future readerships. They are typically told that they are supposed to write primarily for other members of their disciplines, colleagues, editors of disciplinary journals, potential employers and eventually their own students. Their prose should reveal immediately the guild to which they belong.

The influence of this environment can be very strong, and is most visible in the use of (current) disciplinary jargon, excessive citations of previous works in the discipline which do not enlighten the reader but simply perform the rites of membership, and conformity to a kind of impoverished standardized language. Writing for a large, generally educated public, so they are often told, inevitably entails simplification, ‘popularization' and lack of technical sophistication (that is, it is too easily comprehensible). They also learn that whenever possible the books they eventually write should be published by university rather than commercial presses, since this will ensure that their pre-publication reviewers will be people like themselves, not unpredictable outsiders. Hence, consciously or unconsciously, they are encouraged to employ a prose style which is often much worse than the one they used in
high school or as undergraduates. Many continue to write in this way until they retire.