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Anxiety of Interdisciplinary Engagement 205 6 Political Science, the Anxiety of Interdisciplinary Engagement, and Southeast Asian Studies CARLO BONURA Social scientists do not seek to master the literature on a region but rather to master the literature of a discipline. Robert Bates, “Area Studies and the Discipline” P erhaps in no other discipline is the legitimacy of area studies more openly contested than in political science. The recent debates in the United States, reaching their climax in the late 1990s, present the latest round in a conflict over the role of area studies that has its origins in the social science transformations of the early post–World War II period. In their analysis of “the Area Studies Controversy,” Mark Tessler, Jodi Nachtwey, and Anne Banda identify the “heart” of the controversy in political science as an “important disagreement about social science epistemology, about what constitutes, or should constitute, the paradigm by which scholars construct knowledge about politics, economics, and international relations in major world regions.”1 This disagreement, played out most visibly in the subfield of comparative politics, has fundamental implications for political science as a discipline within social science. In fact, much of the discussion surrounding area studies has revolved around questions of the influence of the humanities in area studies and the development of social science methods within political science to study topics such 205 206 Carlo Bonura as culture and history, previously considered the responsibility of area specialists, cultural studies, and anthropology. The aim of this chapter is to view political science in the United States as a site of contestation over area studies and inquire into the status of Southeast Asian studies in recent debates over area studies in the discipline. In doing so, I hope to make this well-trodden dispute— namely, the rational choice–area studies debate—more familiar to members of other disciplines in Southeast Asian studies. This debate often questions the validity of area studies scholarship in the production of social science knowledge. Therefore, I would like to reconsider Benedict Anderson’s suggestion that the discipline of “political science is now much more promising” in its relationship to Southeast Asian studies.2 In the context of the current debates, such a promising relationship would entail a general environment of acceptance toward area studies, resulting in communication across disciplines over epistemological and methodological issues important to Southeast Asian studies. I consider this kind of communication as a form of interdisciplinary engagement that area studies are well situated to facilitate. Such engagements allow for theorizing within a discipline to be reflexive and enable a comparison of approaches to similar topics shared by various disciplines. In my analysis, however, I argue that the relationship between political science and Southeast Asian studies is often unidirectional (from discipline to area studies). I will outline some general obstacles facing area studies in political science and examine the current status of Southeast Asian studies in the subfield of comparative politics. A more promising approach toward a renewed engagement with area studies within political science may lie in the traditionally abstract, rather than empirical, field of political theory. In the final section of this chapter I will look at the potential of the relatively new subfield of comparative political theory regarding this important task of interdisciplinary engagement by focusing on its possible contributions to the current discussion of Islam and civil society in Southeast Asia. By way of introduction, the arguments of Robert Bates in his criticism and calls for reform of the practice of area studies in the United States have broadly framed the current wave of discussion surrounding area studies and the utility of rational-choice analysis in the study of comparative politics. As is illustrated in the epigraph supplied by Bates above, the regional “approaches” fostered by area Anxiety of Interdisciplinary Engagement 207 studies appear out of place in the grander social scientific project of political science. His aim in kindling these debates, to rephrase Theda Skocpol, is to “bring the discipline back in” in the study and “mastery” of comparative politics. The New Old Debate over Area Studies in Political Science and the Anxieties of a Discipline The opening paragraph of Robert Bates’s highly controversial letter on area studies to the Newsletter of the APSA Organized Section in Comparative Politics declares a “consensus” in the academy that has over the last five years worked to revolutionize the enterprise of area studies, in the wake of a decline of foundation-based funding: “area studies has failed...

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