Lost in the Translation

Michael Dutton's “Lead Us Not into Translation” is a penetrating and informed account of how area studies grew out of (perhaps I should say genealogically descended from) philology, Oriental studies, and the privilege accorded to translation, a painful reminder of the arguments that have attended area studies since its inception, and a passionate plea to restore to it theoretical purpose that was lost in the translation. In the current situation, the status of area studies in the academic procession has been put into question from several quarters and its “discipline” has either been shown to be insubstantial (a sign of irrelevance) or is dismissed as an exhausted echo of the Cold War. Despite the assault on what might be described as a Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs continue to enjoy an untroubled existence in the university precincts in the United States and abroad. Not too many years ago the Ford Foundation, perhaps the largest benefactor of this “theme park,” announced another round of institutional grants, cash that would give these aging relics unperturbed grazing space and a stay of extinction. This current situation doesn't appear to be Dutton's uppermost concern; he focuses instead on providing a genealogy of, or Foucauldian “history of the present” to, area studies. But it is difficult to dissociate these more contemporary considerations from either the preoccupation with explaining why area studies has eschewed theory for applied science, or from the connection with prior forms of philological “scienticization” and the service Oriental studies has provided the colonial and colonizing project. Dutton is correct to hold up contemporary social scientific disdain for area studies because of its “unrigorous” approach (we might pause to wonder about the claims of rigor in rational choice theory and its enabling conception of human nature driven by calculation and maximalization!) and his narrative often recalls a long-standing controversy in U.S. academic circles over the failure of area studies to keep pace with social scientific standards of inquiry as practiced by economists, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and even, occasionally, anthropologists. Anthropology, perhaps the “softest” of these miscreant “sciences,” often, in many inflections, sounded the same conceit that assigned to area studies and historical studies the task of supplying raw materials for more sophisticated scientific processing of data. (My guess is that if disciplines like political science and sociology were abolished nobody would remember their contributions to knowledge the day after, excepting government agencies, which might be a good thing.) Even Claude Lévi-Strauss, himself no scientific slouch, offered to history, in his argument with Jean-Paul Sartre, the ennobling duty of providing chronologies and raw material for anthropological theory. The trouble with all of these social-scientific appeals is that their conception of science belongs to history—particularly nineteenth-century theories and practices in the “natural sciences”—not to the present with its diversely complex scientific procedures that often defy unitary representation.

Dutton's purpose is to show how the fatality that doomed later area studies to an “applied” and atheoretic fate must be found in the genealogy in which science and philology collaborated—perhaps unintentionally—to produce Oriental studies. While he has made a persuasive case for this trajectory, it is still only one possible narrative among others that might conceivably explain the dead end. This observation is especially true if we take into consideration conjunctural and historically contingent conditions in the configuration of area studies in a certain place and time. Dutton rejects this approach but it's hard to recognize his genealogy in the figure of area studies as they were implemented and practiced in the United States after World War II. What I am suggesting is that while I believe he is correct in making the claim that any consideration of the problem must begin with the present in order to trace the tangled and knotted genealogy, it is important to add that there are many different presents that are, in fact, conditioned by specific spatiotemporal determinations that will...