Area Studies and the Global at Wisconsin and Beyond

By way of background, I should say that I am a geographer and have been an area-studies partisan from the moment I entered college. Through my MA, I was interested mainly in how the Upper Midwest had taken shape culturally. In other words, I was an Americanist—which counts as area studies, too. The opening of my eyes to Africa came as an unexpected gift in 1979, after my MA. I was twenty-three and on a fast track to a PhD but profoundly ignorant of all things beyond the borders of the United States. Ignorance of the world is a problem for a geographer! My solution was the Peace Corps, which sent me to Niger, a country about which I knew nothing at all. I served two years and came back to the United States committed to working professionally on Africa and to spending as much time there as possible. My professional life has revolved around Africa ever since, first in my PhD studies, then in Wisconsin’s Department of Geography, then in Wisconsin’s African Studies Program, and now in Wisconsin’s Institute for Regional and International Studies (IRIS).

I bother outlining my personal history to establish that I have been committed to African studies over the course of a varied career—as an academic in a social-science department, as an administrator in an African-studies center, and now as the codirector of IRIS, one of these globalizing entities that could be seen as threatening the regionalist African studies enterprise.

The first point I wish to make draws from my experience in these three domains. The point is this: there is not an inevitable intellectual contradiction or tension among the ambitions embodied in these domains, no necessary tension pitting progress in the disciplines, progress in cross-disciplinary understanding of regions, and progress in understanding global systems against one another. The three domains are more than compatible: they are mutually dependent. In fact, first-rate disciplinary, regional, and global contributions can be made by one person, often in a single study.

This is not a new point. Many people have made it, including contributors to Africa and the Disciplines, a 1993 classic.² We have all read good work that contributes simultaneously to disciplinary progress, regional understanding, and tracing out one or another global strand. Studies in many fields—history, anthropology, sociology, political science, popular culture, and others do this. But while the intellectual tension among these domains is often exaggerated, budgetary pressures in universities are not. Budgetary pressures make us defensive about the piece that we care most about, or the piece that keeps us employed: our discipline, our region, or internationalism writ large. Budgetary pressure, or the threat of future contraction, causes us to posit, and sometimes even to build, phony intellectual walls to defend imaginary intellectual territories. We find ourselves under budgetary stress turning supple academic traditions into caricatures of themselves in order to seem to be fighting an intellectual battle instead of a crass one about money. Caricatures such as political science is a nomothetic discipline that only incidentally produces idiographic description of political realities in places. Nonsense! Or area studies are dominated by particularists, antiquarians, and emotional defenders of exotic locales who study their place mainly because of a personal identification or investment in it. Nonsense! Or globalization is obliterating local realities and processes such that the scale of all analyses should now be global. Nonsense!

There is nothing mutually exclusive about disciplines, regions, and global systems. There never has been.

The problem is money. The problem is that we can no longer fund everything the way we used to do. This situation will not change soon. The 1950s and 1960s, when deans created new departments and whole new fields willy-nilly because the money was there, are not going to return. Our challenge is to figure out what to protect in the face of economic contraction and how to do it.

Human instinct is to protect the bits that have meant the most to us personally, or that might keep us employed. But if we all...