Transcript Deterritorialization and the crisis of social science by

Virginia de la Fuente
 He
is a British political
scientist and student of the
Arab world.
 Professor of Middle Eastern
Studies at Columbia
University.
 He is a supporter of the
academic boycott against
Israel.
The author found the origins of Area Studies at
the beginning of 1930s, instead of being a
response to WWII and Cold War.
 Delayed of Area Studies creation due to some
crisis in US:
1. Sputnik crisis
2. Brown v. Board of Education.
 In the interwar period, scholars turned to study
Oriental civilizations.
 In US, the Egyptologist Henry Breasted founded
in 1919 the Oriental Institute of U. of Chicago.
 In Princeton, there were connections with the
Arab world.
 In 1927, Princeton established the country’s first
department devoted to Oriental studies.
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In London, the Royal Institute of International
Affairs in the 1930s commissioned a survey of
Western impact on the Arab world since 1800.
The authors, Gibb and Bowen, wanted to study
Moslem societies, and hoped to produce a
“synthetic study of problems… as a whole”.
Gibb and Bowen’s program shaped the
development of Middle Eastern studies in the
US.
By the end of WWII appeared in Britain many
scholars with Arab background.
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Two factors set back the development of Middle Eastern
area studies, besides the US growing interest then in
Soviet Union:
1. No funds until Sputnik crisis.
2. US universities were already divided into separate
social science department.
Nationalization of social knowledge.
The social science disciplines were reorganized around
objects which assumed the structure of nation-state as
their universal social template.
US did not seem appropriate for the study of non-West
regions, so this revealed the importance of Area studies.
The development of area specialists would provide the
detailed knowledge of regions required to universalize
the science of politics.
 The
new structure of expertise in the US
university represented a particular
relationship between global and local.
 What today we call “global” was represented
as US claim to universalism (the belief that
social sciences could not cover the rules and
categories of human society).
 While Social Science occupied the place of
the global, Area Studies occupied the realm
of the local.
The crisis of Area Studies is the problem of how
area fields are related to the academic
disciplines.
 The disciplines can claim to be more universal,
but Area Studies needs to refuse it.
 The inability of culture, the state, the economy,
or society to survive as distinct territories of
social scientific investigation, called
“deterritorialization” of the disciplines, reflects
another deterritorialization in the contemporary
global history.
 Social scientists’ response to this
deterritorialization was to rely on another means
of defining their distinctiveness.
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The current problems of area studies are related
to the crisis in social science.
 The course of every discipline can affect what
happens to area studies.
 The consequence between discipline and world
region’s relationship is that the object of study
remains defined only in the West.
 This has caused difficulties to Area Studies, for
instance in the case of Middle Eastern Studies.
 When comparing Europe and Middle East, the
comparison is normally focus on Europe.
 Due to the scarcity information about Middle
East, their studies have been explained from the
Western view.
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For Chaudhry, it is necessary to insert Middle East
Studies into the general field of political economy,
because it is the piece of the puzzle that is missed.
 She exposes that the diversity of languages in which
communities articulate their political demands and
identities are to be translated into the universal
language of political economy.
 Because the market is understood as a universal
form, it cannot be something “cultural”. The
cultural refers to the particular, the province of
area studies.
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There have been many attempts to rethink the
relationship between the local and the global.
 The author’s advice is to stop talking about
global and local. Because their distinction always
awards the universal essence, but forget the
“cultural”.
 That is why he trusts to find a new approach
where a global reach has been achieved through
interaction with groups and relations. Such view
of the phenomena of global would help to
abandon local and global terms.
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