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6 Humanities and Social Sciences
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6 HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES For Soviet scholars, communication meant liberation. — Another important but less well known element of U.S.-Soviet exchanges was the work of the U.S.-USSR Commissions of ACLS. Established in the mid-s, the commissions facilitated direct contact in the humanities and social sciences between scholars of the two countries through joint conferences and cooperative research.1 Prior to establishment of the commissions, there was virtually no cooperation between the two countries in the humanities and social sciences. Individual scholars were exchanged through IUCTG and IREX to pursue their own research, but the centralized and hierarchical nature of Soviet research made it difficult for American scholars to collaborate with their Soviet colleagues, either individually or in groups, without the permission of the responsible Soviet authorities. And those authorities were unlikely to give permission without the authorization of a formal agreement. In the early s, however, the détente years when the political climate was right and the United States and the Soviet Union had signed eleven cooperative agreements in various fields of science and technology, there was a precedent for similar cooperation in other disciplines. IREX, with the assistance of the ACLS, established with the Soviet Academy of Sciences a committee to create an agenda for cooperative projects that would be most useful to scholars of the two countries . That committee evolved into an ACLS–Soviet Academy Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, which had its first meeting in . Subsequent meetings were held every two years through the early s, and subcommissions were established for various scholarly disciplines, including, among others, international relations, economics, sociology, psychology, political science, geography, and philosophy. The commission was chaired originally on the U.S. side by ACLS President Frederick Burkhardt, and on the Soviet side by Academician Nikolai Inozemtsev, and after his death, by Georgi Arbatov. Participants on the U.S. side included such luminaries as sinologist John Fairbank, sociologist Talcott Parsons, and economist Wasily Leontief. . This section is based on the author’s own recollections and his interview with Wesley A. Fisher, Washington, D.C., February , . Fisher, a sociologist, served as secretary to the commission. The original ACLS intent was only to establish an agenda for cooperation in the humanities and social sciences. The Soviet Academy, however, with its penchant for centralization and control, sought to conduct the actual cooperative projects together with the ACLS. That created a problem for the Americans, who were not accustomed to conducting cooperative research on a national basis, but they went along with the Soviet proposal to establish an agenda, and then fund and run the projects with help from IREX. The first collaborative efforts took the form of conferences and symposia, with papers contributed by the two sides.Over time,however,the commission’s work was broadened to include joint field work, training for younger scholars, exhibitions, survey research, exchanges of data and archival materials, and joint publications. Funding on the U.S. side came from grants to IREX from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ford Foundation, W. Alton Jones Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Rockefeller Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, U.S. Department of State, and USIA. Because the ACLS partner was the Soviet Academy, that necessarily defined the disciplines for which collaborative projects were initially possible. Excluded were disciplines under the Soviet Ministry of Culture, such as art history, musicology, and theater, as well as disciplines under other ministries. Eventually, however, other commissions were established with other Soviet agencies in archival administration , art, cinematography, education, libraries, music, and theater and dance. The commission’s most visible work was the first jointly researched and curated U.S.-Soviet scholarly exhibition,“Crossroads of Continents: The Cultures of Siberia and Alaska,” which opened at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington , D.C., on September , , and was subsequently shown in other cities of the United States, Canada, and the Soviet Union. Ten years in the making and the result of collaboration between Soviet and American anthropologists, the exhibition brought together the great early Siberian and Alaskan collections of the two countries in a panorama of remote regions and peoples unknown to the outside world until the eighteenth century. Other activities of the commissions included exchanges of sociological data, the first joint archeological digs, and the first applications of Soviet students directly to U.S. universities. The first e-mail connection between U.S. and Soviet scholars, described earlier in these pages, was also...