It is important to recognize that comparison is not a method or even an academic technique; rather, it is a discursive strategy. There are a few important points to bear in mind when one wants to make a comparison. First of all, one has to decide, in any given work, whether one is mainly after similarities or differences. It is very difficult, for example, to say, let alone prove, that Japan and China or Korea are basically similar or basically different. Either is possible depending on one’s angle of vision, one’s framework, and the conclusions towards which one intends to move. (In the jingoist years on the eve of the First World War, when Germans and Frenchmen were encouraged to hate each other, the great Austro-Marxist theoretician Otto Bauer enjoyed baiting both sides by saying that contemporary Parisians and Berliners had far more in common than either had with their respective medieval ancestors.) In the present chapter I have thus tried, as perhaps offering a useful example, to show how the comparative works I wrote between the early 1970s and the 2000s reflected, in their real difference, changing perspectives, framings and (political) intentions.
A second point is that, within limits of plausible argument, the most instructive comparisons (whether of difference or similarity) are those that surprise. No Japanese will be surprised by a comparison with China, since it has been made for centuries, the path is well trodden, and people usually have their minds made up beforehand. But a comparison of Japan with Austria or Mexico might catch the reader off her guard.
A third reflection is that longitudinal comparisons of the same country over a long stretch of time are at least as important as cross-national comparisons. One reason for this has to do with the power of a certain kind of textbook-style national history that does not disdain myths and has a vested interest in continuity and perpetuating an ancient ‘national identity’. Scots who want to believe and insist that they have long been oppressed by the English do not like to be reminded that London was ruled by a Scottish dynasty through most of the seventeenth century; likewise many Japanese do not take kindly to the suggestion that their country’s earliest ‘emperors’ may have been partly Korean in origin. Hence scholars can profit immensely by reading widely in ancient history.
A fourth point is that it is good to think about one’s own circumstances, class position, gender, level and type of education, age, mother language, etc., when doing comparisons. But these things can change. When you start to live in a country whose language you understand barely or not at all, you are obviously not in a good position to think comparatively, because you have little access to the local culture. You feel linguistically deprived, lonely and even isolated, and you hunt around for some fellow nationals to stick with. You cannot avoid making comparisons, but these are likely to be superficial and naive. But then, if you are lucky, you cross the language wall, and find yourself in another world. You are like an explorer, and try to notice and think about everything in a way you would never do at home, where so much is taken for granted. You can no longer take your class position, your education, even your gender, for granted. What you will start to notice, if your ears and eyes are open, are the things you can’t see or hear. That is, you will begin to notice what is not there as well as what is there, just as you will become aware of what is unwritten as well as what is written. And this works both for the country you are living in and the one from which you came.
Often it starts with words. Indonesian, for example, has a special word, gurih, for the taste of rice (‘deliciously pungent’ according to one dictionary). If you come from England, you are then startled to realize that the taste of rice can’t be described with a designated English word. On the other hand, Indonesian has no word like the English ‘sepia’ for the beautiful colour of old photographs. The same is true of concepts. Javanese has a word, longan, for the empty space under a chair or bed, which English does not.
Such a period of struggling with a new language is especially good for training oneself to be seriously comparative, because there is not yet any automatic lovely translation of foreign words into the language in your head. You gradually get to know enough to notice more, and yet you are still an outsider. If you then stay on long enough, things get taken for granted again, as they were back home, and you tend to be much less curious and observant than before. You start to say to yourself, for example, ‘I know Indonesia inside out.’ The point being that good comparisons often come from the experience of strangeness and absences.
Chapter 5
Interdisciplinary
Prior to the French Revolution, universities were neither numerous nor very important. Students played no significant role in European politics until the upheavals of 1848. That year was marked not only by the publication of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, but also by a wave of rebellions by radicals, liberals and especially young nationalists against the dominant conservative Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanov and Ottoman empires controlling Central and Eastern Europe. Generally speaking, the contours of intellectual life were shaped by a class structure dominated by clergy and to a lesser extent by the aristocracy. Clergy and especially aristocrats were usually rich and did not need to work to make a living. If they became interested in intellectual study, clergy could do so in a monastery and aristocrats with their own money. The infrastructural costs were not great. The major monasteries had well-stocked libraries, it did not cost a great deal for aristocrats to build a good personal library, and newspapers were fairly cheap. Bourgeois intellectuals, if they did not have adequate private incomes, depended on the patronage of aristocrats. In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson’s famous dictionary of the English language was written by hand, and entirely by Johnson himself – something inconceivable today. Universities were often sleepy places.
The big changes really came about with the onset of industrial capitalism and the economic and political rise of the bourgeoisie in Western Europe in the nineteenth century. The rapid progress of industrialization, based on constant scientific and technological innovation, demanded a much more systematic and subdivided study of the hard sciences, which led to the setting up of specialized journals for the exchange of information and ideas. An increasing number of vocabularies had to be developed for physics, chemistry, biology and so forth, and these ‘languages’ quickly became too opaque for everyday intellectuals to keep up with and comprehend. One could say that this was all a result of the general, and increasingly rapid, division of labour in industrial societies. It applied less, however, in the case of what today we call, wishfully, the ‘social sciences’ and the humanities. Well into the twentieth century an educated person could still read important books on economics, sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, politics and even philosophy without too much difficulty.
In the wake of industrialization came the vast expansion of the functions of the modernizing and rationalizing state: ministries of health, education, agriculture, labour, science, culture, information and so on, as well as countless specialized boards for trade, immigration, urban planning and the like. Aristocrats were far too few in number to be able to staff these proliferating bureaucracies, even had they wished to do so. The required influx of bureaucrats therefore had to come from the bourgeoisie or middle class, who needed access to a better and more modern education. Education thus took on a new importance and required serious reformation, for which the state, for the first time in history, assumed a central responsibility. In this process the various German states were in the vanguard, and became a model for much of Europe and eventually the United States. The change took a special form in the latter, since the country had never had a real aristocracy.
The imposition of a ‘rationally ordered’ array of disciplines did not, however, come easily or quickly, especially in the humanities and social sciences. In the UK, for example, the prestige of classical studies remained high until after the Second World War. ‘Gentlemen’ were supposed to know their classics as part of a proper civilized upbringing. But classical studies was a jumble of history, archae
ology, literary studies, philosophy, philology and art history. Oriental studies, less prestigious but still important, had the same jumbled content. Literature was divided up unscientifically between English, French, German, Italian and Russian. Anthropology – born out of colonial and folklore studies and eventually supported by Malinowskian fieldwork – arrived late, essentially after the First World War. Sociology, though stronger in Germany and France, did not become fully accepted in UK universities till after 1945. In many places anthropology and sociology were regarded as aspects of a single discipline. Thanks to the prestige of David Hume and Adam Smith, politics and economics were also intertwined. History was divided up by era and by country, categories about which there was nothing scientific, while philosophy was a mix of bits of mathematics, linguistics, intellectual history and politics.
It is significant that in the UK, until quite recently, a PhD was not thought at all necessary for securing a university teaching position or for doing first-class research. When at Cambridge in the mid-1950s, I would quite often hear older teachers ridiculing the American ‘mania’ for PhDs as simply a mindless imitation of German practice. Before the unification of the German states in the latter half of the nineteenth century, they each had their own universities to train future bureaucrats and professors. Those who wanted to teach at these universities needed to obtain doctorates, and thus there were many doctors in Germany. British universities, on the other hand, were usually built on the chair system, where there was only one full professor in a department. Once a new professor was appointed, there was not much need for other members of the department to write dissertations. This was one reason why British scholars tended to look down on German and especially American scholars who considered a PhD as a professional requirement and a means of social mobility. Another reason was that not many scholars really believed that even economics or sociology could be said to be truly ‘scientific’ in a hard sense; they were considered more like practical fields, not too different from, say, Oriental studies. Some people, perhaps nostalgically, claim that scholarship in those days was basically interdisciplinary. But this is arguably anachronistic: for study to be interdisciplinary there have to be disciplines in the first place. Disciplines did not become crucial to scholarship until they were embedded in the institutions and social structures of universities. Three important developments can be identified as operative in this process.
One was the setting up of professional associations and journals which claimed by their very names to ‘represent’ the national plenitude of disciplines: for example, the American Historical Association (1884) had its American Historical Review (1895), the American Economic Association (1885) its American Economic Review (1911), the American Anthropological Association (1902) its American Anthropologist (1888, initially published by the Anthropological Society of Washington), and the American Political Science Association (1903) its American Political Science Review (1906). (Interestingly, my great friend Kato Tsuyoshi tells me that this development and its timing were virtually the same in Japan as in America.) Inevitably, since the distinguished scholars who dominated the editorial boards of these journals had their own prejudices and formed their own cliques, scholars who were excluded or marginalized quickly founded professional journals of their own, in the same discipline but with different prejudices and followers. Since publishing articles in refereed journals was important in deciding whether young professors got tenure and promotion, the number of journals proliferated massively, most with disciplinary claims. A senior colleague and close friend of mine once laughingly calculated that the average readership of an article in a refereed journal was between two and three people.
The second important development was the restructuring of power within universities. The most obvious sign of this was the financial system that gave discipline-based departments far the largest budgetary allocations. Appointments and tenure decisions were almost exclusively in departmental hands. This power turned out in many cases to have rather conservative, and sometimes amusing, consequences. Within departments power was typically in the hands of elderly professors who had sometimes passed their prime and, when they realized as much, were mistrustful of the work of young scholars with new skills and interests.
Thirdly, the departments were based on the pleasant notion that disciplines were scientific divisions within the broad field of scholarly knowledge, and that what marked each division was a basic common discourse. In fact, this idea is a fiction, since scholarly knowledge changes all the time and in many different directions. For example, when anthropology departments started to be created in the US they included archaeology and evolutionary biology. As archaeology became a highly technical field in which chemistry was an important element, and as ‘the rise of man’ took scholars ever further back in time towards ‘hominid’ and required a strong grasp of biology, anthropology lost contact with those other disciplines.
Cultural anthropologists had the same problems with evolutionary biology as did archaeologists, and evolutionary biologists with advanced kinship studies and comparative religious systems. They did not usually read each other’s articles, which in any case were published in quite different journals. In effect, where they survived, such departments hung on as mainly administrative and budgetary shells.
An anecdote from my own experience at Cornell may be enlightening here. One day the dean of Arts and Sciences summoned me, along with a nice mathematician whom I did not know, and assigned us to look into a serious problem in the department of psychology. The immediate occasion was the department’s rejection of tenure for a popular and productive young professor, who had appealed against the decision. The dean also informed us that for ten years the department had not granted tenure to anyone. When the two of us investigated, we found a fascinating situation. The tenured faculty was evenly divided between three groups that had almost nothing in common, other than mutual dislike and lack of understanding. The behaviourist psychologists studied mice and rats, and had close ties with the biological sciences. Another group was firmly attached to the theories of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and to the legacy of Sigmund Freud. The third group, who called themselves social psychologists, studied such things as why people who witness the same automobile accident have such different stories to tell.
It quickly became clear why no one had been tenured in ten years: any candidate would be vetoed by the two blocs who were not interested in, or despised, the remaining bloc to which the candidate was seen to be attached. Even in my own department it was increasingly clear that those who worked with complex mathematical models and equations and those who studied Plato or Nietzsche simply did not understand what each other wrote and were often not keen to try.
I no longer remember what the dean decided to do. But I have a strong hunch that he promised that if the young social psychologist under review was given tenure, he would give the department two new positions (one for rats, one for Lacan, so to speak). At the same time, the dean understood there would be enormous resistance to splitting the department or moving some faculty members to a different discipline. Institutional inertia, fears of budget cuts, anticipated loss of ‘positions’ in the short and long term, all played a role in the internal struggles.
These problems were magnified by two large social transformations surrounding universities, one quantitative, the other qualitative. In 1900, just under 30,000 bachelor degrees were awarded in the US, representing less than 2 per cent of Americans of graduating age. By 2005, the number of awarded BAs had risen to just under one and a half million, and 36 per cent of young Americans had such degrees. But the climb did not take place evenly, decade by decade. Up to the end of the Second World War, a college education was still something enjoyed largely by the children of the rich and the well connected. In the two prosperous decades that followed, however, there was a vast expansion of universities and enrolments (today there are over 1,400 four-year colleges and universities in the country), and a much wider
aspiration to the benefits of a college degree. The social force behind this change was the huge number of Americans mobilized during the war, which included for the first time large groups of Blacks and women who had earlier suffered discrimination. The veterans formed a powerful political lobby demanding that their sacrifices for the country be recognized by the provision of massive funding for their college education. The lobbying resulted in the passage of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, informally known as the G.I. Bill.
The immediate consequence of the increasing student enrolment was a rapid expansion of the professoriat. I have described earlier how tiny the Cornell department of government was when I arrived in 1958 – only eight professors, all men. Over the next fifteen years it almost quadrupled in size, and was no longer entirely male.* Still, it was a small department for a top-level university. Equivalent departments in places like Harvard and Berkeley had seventy professors or more. Departmental meetings were thus difficult to manage, and close ties between professors harder to institute and maintain.
Qualitatively, one major response to these quantitative changes was a new ideology of ‘professionalism’, which began to replace the older scholarly traditions derived from Europe. At one level, the shift was marked by big changes in requirements for graduate students. When I first came to America, my fellow students and I had to pass reading-proficiency examinations in French and German (the other traditional world-languages of scholarship) to get our PhDs. By the early 1970s, an alternative option was made available: choosing either French or German or a year-long course in statistics. Eventually no foreign languages were required, except for those students planning fieldwork overseas.
Before leaving for Indonesia in 1961 I had to pass five examinations (in comparative politics, political theory, American politics, American political sociology and Asian politics), set by individual professors, over five consecutive days. Fifteen years later, students took only two examinations in politics, standardized by a committee of professors, and these could be taken months apart. These younger students worked just as hard as we had done, but they were being trained ‘professionally’, i.e. in standardized courses close to those offered in other good universities, with the much same reading lists, and with a strong emphasis on ‘current theory’ (which would soon be replaced by others). I say ‘professionally’ because they were being trained, rather than educated in a general sense, the idea being to make them competitive in what began to be called ‘the academic job market’ after finishing their dissertations. Passing such examinations and gaining a PhD were coming to be regarded as professional qualifications, in the same way that aspiring doctors and lawyers had to pass professional examinations to be licensed to practise medicine and law.
A Life Beyond Boundaries Page 12
