Arts & Sciences

The current buzzword "globalization" has a natural allure for academic policy-makers, foundation executives, and researchers. It promises new mysteries to be unraveled and innovative ways of packaging or organizing research in the social sciences. In 1993, the Ford and MacArthur Foundations inaugurated a joint "globalization" project and, in the same year, the Mellon Foundation initiated a new seminar program on cross-regional issues. The concern for globalization has been taken up by the Social Science Research Council.

There is much to be gained from this development. As the spread of the economic crisis in Southeast Asia to other parts of the globe recently showed, the world has been growing more interdependent; the globalization metaphor offers opportunities to examine that interdependence more closely. However, there are dangers: even as it draws attention to the importance of developments elsewhere in the world, it threatens to undermine America's knowledge base about particular nations and regions.

The end of the Cold War precipitated cutbacks in government funding for many programs devoted to the study of what was once the communist bloc and those parts of the Third World seen as the terrain for that war. At the same time, new paradigms theorizing about other nations without use of country- or region-specific knowledge devalue culturally specific knowledge in such disciplines as political science and sociology—once bastions for area studies. To many university administrators, globalization offers a rubric under which to cut back support for area studies without seeming to give up a commitment to international studies altogether.

As in most such debates, rhetorical devices abound, and a determined effort has been made to turn the very phrase "area studies" into a pejorative one. One result is considerable confusion about what area studies is like; another is a corresponding uncertainty about what the alternatives might be. The concept has three distinctive connotations:

First, it is sometimes used to refer to scholars who provide detailed description of a national or regional case but remain uninterested in generalizing beyond it. Second, it refers to the acquisition of a relatively deep and context-rich knowledge of a specific society or region that is then used as the basis for developing propositions of more general applicability. It is in this second sense that area studies predominates in most social science fields today. Third, the term is used to refer to the organization of teaching or research via interdisciplinary clusters of scholars who represent both the first and the second meanings of the term in a program oriented toward a particular region of the world.

The value of area studies defined in this third sense speaks to the fruitfulness of alternate ways of organizing teaching, research, and intellectual exchange. The issue here is whether—since discipline-based departments already exist—it is useful to have area studies in addition. This is open to debate because area centers are not costless in either financial or intellectual terms. Their central purpose is to enhance interdisciplinary exchange among scholars interested in a specific region of the world, and, to the degree they succeed, the intensity of interchange within individual disciplines may be diminished.

Even in the face of the current fascination with non-area-based knowledge, a number of considerations have persuaded Cornell's leadership of the continuing value of area centers.

First, much of the most influential work in the social sciences has long been generated by scholars informed by precisely the kind of interdisciplinary exchange that area centers facilitate—of which SEAP is a glowing example (consider the broad influence of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities.)

Second, given the hold that disciplinary boundaries exercise over virtually all other modes of scholarly organization, the presence of area centers would seem a small incursion and in some cases a precious resource.

Third, the multinational exchanges that area centers produce not only provide students and faculty with direct insights about other parts of the world; they have much to say about how their own disciplines are practiced elsewhere.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Cornell was in the vanguard in resisting Cold War_led incursions into area studies; in the post_Cold War era, Cornell will hopefully find both the resources and the wisdom to maintain the teaching of less commonly taught languages, opportunities for foreign students and scholars to come to Cornell, and faculty lines—in short to hold out against the less-lethal, but intellectually weakening, fad of globalization.

Sidney G. Tarrow, Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Government, works on transnational social movements. He focuses on modern Europe.