How interdisciplinary is interdisciplinarity? As an editor, I find that question much on my mind as I read proposal after proposal trumpeting interdisciplinary methodology and claiming that a resulting book will be of interest to readers in every discipline within a mile of the topic. In recent decades, academe has echoed with the refrain of interdisciplinarity; perhaps we have now reached a time to pause and consider what interdisciplinary work is, and what it is not.
Is the literary critic who analyzes five novels and a film to understand the rise of consumer culture doing interdisciplinary work? Is the environmental scientist who borrows a model from game theory? We might ask about both: Is their work interdisciplinary, or are they simply expanding the tool kit of their own disciplines?
By now, we know a good deal about the intellectual and institutional histories of academic disciplines and even subdisciplines. But we’ve given far less thought to understanding the histories and sociologies of interdisciplinary work. What do we mean by interdisciplinarity, anyway? Is it an attribute of the author? The work? The audience? If an art historian employs theories from philosophy and psychology in a study of Impressionism, are the methods recognizable to readers in those disciplines? Must they be, for the work to be considered interdisciplinary? Is this “inter” a bridge connecting two ways of working? Or is it some third way, one that is beyond them?
We tend to talk about interdisciplinarity as if it always has the same meaning. From my vantage point as an editor, however, I see different fields taking recognizably different approaches. Interdisciplinary work by an art historian looks markedly different from that by a sociologist of art. Sometimes the differences are glaring, sometimes subtle. They are traces that reflect choices made along the way: how to frame a question, or what weight to give various forms of evidence.
Indeed, I believe it is nearly impossible to produce work that does not bear the marks of the discipline of its origin. The literary critic Donald E. Pease speaks of a “disciplinary unconscious” that frames our thinking. Far from being surprised, I consider that an anthropological insight, one that takes seriously the cultures, categories, and valuations of particular disciplines. Intention is no more the guarantor of “escaping” one’s discipline than it is of escaping one’s race or gender. While some causes of disciplinary power are structural and exterior to a scholar -- such as departmental pressures and expectations -- many others result from internalizing the standards and values of normal scholarly practices.
Let’s examine how interdisciplinary work is produced. When one writes for an interdisciplinary audience, one is trying to please readers both outside and inside one’s own discipline. Sometimes those outside are real readers, a group of colleagues from other departments who share an intellectual quest. A sociologist working on the civil-rights movement, for example, might be a member of a reading group composed of historians, political scientists, and literary critics studying the same topic.
Sometimes the outsiders are phantasmatic: what a sociologist anticipates a historian or critical-race theorist would expect to see. Our sociologist might imagine a reader over the shoulder asking, “Why did you choose that archive?” “Did the concept of race mean the same thing in the 1940’s as it does today?” Scholars balance such expectations from other fields with the familiar rules, needs, practices, and understandings of their own discipline. After all, they want their cohort, as well as outsiders, to appreciate their work.
That relates to the exterior pressures to which I alluded. Scholars have to worry about how their work will be seen in professional, career contexts. Will it help them obtain a job that carries with it the possibility of renewal, tenure, promotion to full professor? Will it bring an invitation to lecture at the prestigious School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell? To give the distinguished Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures in anthropology at the University of Rochester?
Interdisciplinary work, then, needs to be seen as a compromise, a hybrid between disciplinary forces and the desire to use concepts and methods from -- or to speak to -- other disciplines. Good individualists, scholars tend to think of their discipline as exterior to themselves: One joins the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, the American Anthropological Association, etc., and the discipline includes you, giving you part of your identity. In fact, disciplinarity is a form of capillary power (to cite Foucault’s notion of an internalized, dispersed form of discipline). Much of the power is split into small and internalized forms. Academics enforce the norms of their disciplines themselves, often consciously, intentionally, strategically, but just as often unconsciously.
It is not hard for scholars engaged in interdisciplinary projects to remember that their own work must balance disciplinary and interdisciplinary impulses, and they can usually recognize similar tradeoffs in work in their own field. They recognize when an author is pushing boundaries and when he or she is staying within disciplinary conventions. However, when scholars go to evaluate interdisciplinary work from another field, they often forget the forces that helped structure that work, and read it as if it were a direct representation of the author’s beliefs.
For example, many junior people in literature departments are trying to make sure that their projects look literary enough to assure long-term success in academe. Even though they may be writing about constructions of race at the end of Reconstruction, or wedding ceremonies, or the gendered nature of Indian nationalism, they still want to include a sufficient number of close readings of texts (at least some of which are canonical) and enough literary history to have something that will be seen as the proper object of study for a person in a literature department.
But when literary critics criticize the piling on of archival material in a historian’s work as positivist and underinterpreted, it rarely occurs to them to ask why the historian put the material there, or to think that the reasons might be similar to the ones that motivate all those close readings.
The carefully contrived balance, which is understood from within the discipline, may be read from outside as failure. “So-and-so unfortunately ends up replicating the colonial relation of anthropologist and other that he seemed determined to avoid.” Or, “Sadly, despite the challenging ideas, too much of the interpretation rests on the reading of a few texts.”
I have come to see how such a failure of understanding operates to distinguish scholars as interdisciplinary writers from scholars as interdisciplinary readers, especially when they read something that crosses into their own disciplinary practice or subject area.
As writers, many scholars inclined to interdisciplinary work are happy bricoleurs, trawling other disciplines for useful theories, methods, and information. They are pleased to enrich their own work by using those practices in their own bricolage, picking up bits and pieces as needed. Generally, they have a reasonable degree of trust in their own ability to use tools and practices for good purposes. Far from being sloppy, that is seen as doing the extra work that creative scholarship requires. It would, after all, be much easier to stick to well-worn disciplinary procedures.
However, a whole different set of responses comes into play when the same scholars read work from another discipline that uses theory or practice from their own discipline badly (and isn’t it always bad?). Thus, for instance, one might hear anthropologists say things like, “Hasn’t she ever heard of the critiques of Mary Douglas -- which are, after all, 25 years old?” Or, “You call this ethnography? All he did was read Web sites.” Similarly, a literary critic might say, “Fine ethnography, but this work doesn’t seem to have a theory of representation.” Or they might bewail a dated reliance on Bakhtin or the use of a theory about separate spheres that has by now been shown to be distorted, at best.
In other words, the work is often seen as careless, using tools from the discipline without understanding their attendant histories, contexts, and shortcomings. Usually, scholars, whether historians, anthropologists, or literary critics, do not employ their excellent skills at putting themselves in the place of someone from another discipline. Do they wonder why people in their own discipline are so much better at creating hybrid methods? Why they always make better choices than people in other disciplines? Scholars turn out to have great affective attachments to the methods of their own fields, even if they spend much of their academic lives grumbling about them or picking them apart.
There is something about academic training that makes people insistent that one disciplinary approach must be right and others wrong, or, at best, misguided. How rarely one hears statements like: “Isn’t it great for Indonesian studies that the Dutch philologists are so picky, while the anthropologists are so analytically creative?” “Isn’t it wonderful for American studies that historians push on being careful about the archives, while the literary scholars have produced such interesting interpretations?” “Wow, without the film scholars’ text-based interpretation, my communications research would be much impoverished!”
Scholars treat interlopers from other disciplines as if they were engaged in a war for territory, as if interdisciplinarity were a zero-sum game. There are certainly some institutional contexts in which that is realistic -- for example, when one has to convince administrators that an available line is needed more in one’s own field than elsewhere. However, the attitude surfaces on far too many occasions -- in, for instance, grandstanding questions at public lectures.
Such a territorial attitude belies the intellectual values that academics always trumpet: a dedication to producing new knowledge and the free exploration of ever more creative and complex ideas. Scholars who could be learning from each other spend their time knocking each other down.
Territoriality is often redoubled when interdisciplinary spaces are at stake. Perhaps that is because such spaces are new, with boundaries less clear and less ritualized than in traditional disciplines. Take the case of cultural studies. Like many other such areas, it was set up as a place for interdisciplinary work, but it is often attacked by people in a variety of other fields as if it were a marauding discipline. I realize that cultural studies is a very particular example, but hope that an analysis of how such a relatively visible area has been embraced and attacked will be helpful in the consideration of interdisciplinary projects in general.
Cultural studies is not a discipline; it has no organization, no annual meeting, and very few departments. Most of the departments that do exist are renamed versions of other disciplines. Most of the practitioners -- those who would say “I do cultural studies” -- are in some other discipline: communications, literature, film studies, anthropology. For the most part, cultural studies is not an institutional or professional space; it is an interdisciplinary one, an intellectual one.
Cultural studies is organized around some common themes, questions, and politics -- what the connections are among cultural forms, and between culture and politics, or how culture is produced, circulated, consumed. It boasts e-mail lists, book series, and journals. However, even as early as 1980, when maybe 40 or 50 people would have called their work cultural studies, it would have been hard to identify a common method. It’s even harder today, when the intellectual space occupied by cultural studies is larger than ever.
Cultural studies started by mixing theories and methods from different disciplines in varying measures, with the implicit assumption that what seemed most useful would change as the work in the disciplines changed. What cultural studies has become is a space for work between disciplines.
Yet most anthropologists see cultural studies as replacing ethnographic studies with textual readings, replacing studies of actual others with theories about the “other” -- in short, they fault it for becoming less anthropological and more like literary criticism. Many literary critics, on the other hand, see cultural studies as replacing text-based studies with historically or culturally based ones, and replacing aesthetic judgments with political ones. In other words, they see cultural studies as replacing literary criticism with anthropology (and/or history and sociology).
To borrow the jargon of each discipline, we might ask whether the cultural studies “othered” by anthropologists is the same as the cultural studies “othered” by literary critics. The answer, clearly, is no. But so few scholars realize that. My point here is that, rather than seeing cultural studies as an intellectual project composed of scholars from their own and other disciplines, many people see it only from their own perspective: as a competing discipline trying to take over their academic space.
That defensiveness serves a function. It’s something we all know about, but rarely talk about: the politics within each discipline.
Let’s return to the example of anthropology. Within anthropology, many scholars wish to hold on to concepts now being criticized within their field -- that cultures are bounded, that class is the primary analytic tool, that positivist, social-science methodology is the only right one, that fieldwork should be carried out in the traditional manner, and more. Those scholars who feel disgruntled often attack work that they don’t like by labeling it cultural studies (or maybe, if they are generous, the result of the bad influence of cultural studies). They dismiss it by saying it’s not anthropology. In some ways, cultural studies has come to be used interchangeably with postmodernism (which, by now, is almost an epithet; seemingly, it has no adherents) or some other sign of the looming apocalypse.
Those whose work is so attacked, or who fear such condemnation, often feel called upon to demonstrate their loyalty to their own discipline, and they do so by joining in the attack on cultural studies. They criticize the ethnography in a work of cultural studies, or they call it too textual. In essence, they show their disciplinary solidarity. They are still anthropologists, even if their fieldwork is based in the United States, or if they employ Foucault, or if they are interested in political questions about race, gender, and sexuality. “Don’t look at us. The bad guy is over there.”
Of course, not all work in cultural studies is smart or interesting or useful. The same could be said of any area of study, be it reflexive anthropology, the New Criticism, or feminist sociology. Looking at a set of concepts through mediocre examples always seems like a waste of time to me, but that’s what many critics of cultural studies do.
I’ve dealt with cultural studies at some length here, because I think the responses to the field -- which are sometimes both positive and negative from the same people -- have much to teach us about the prospects of interdisciplinary spaces in general. If scholars are unable or unwilling to learn how to read work that draws on other disciplines -- to become aware of their own disciplinary biases, and to hold them in check -- all the talk of interdisciplinarity will be just that.
We must acknowledge that interdisciplinary spaces are hard to construct and hard to maintain. It is relatively easy to produce disciplinary versions of purportedly interdisciplinary spaces: literary cultural studies, sociological cultural studies, etc. Those do nothing but reshape the boundaries and methods of the existing disciplines. The real challenge is to find a way to hold the interdisciplinary and the disciplinary in view, not only as authors, but as readers, listeners, and participants in academic institutions. Only then will truly interdisciplinary work flourish.
Ken Wissoker is editor in chief of Duke University Press.
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