N E W S L E T T E R The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities November - December 1997 IN FROM THE MARGINS: CENTRAL ASIAN HUMANITIES STUDIES AT BERKELEY When I first mention Berkeley Central Asia/Silk Road Working Group to scholars whose own work is fully outside the ambit of Central Asian studies, their first response is often something like: Wonderful. Ah, by the way, what is it that defines Central Asia, exactly? And while this is, quite literally, one of the fundamental questions within the community of Central Asia scholars, it also reflects the twilight in which Central Asia in general, and Central Asia humanities scholarship in particular, has languished in American universities. In both public imagination and academic focus, Central Asia has long been marginalized as a vaguely defined region land-locked somewhere among the ancient Graeco-Roman, Near Eastern, Chinese and Indian civilizations, and buffeted by the modern powers of the Soviet Union, China, India and Iran. There has been little attention paid in our universities to the region’s art and archaeology, languages and literature, belief systems and other cultural productions. And what academic work has been done is often produced by scholars who are scattered through many different academic departments, working in isolation from, and often unaware of, each other. This conceptual marginalization of Central Asia is in large measure the result of the now widely discussed overall tilt toward Europe in humanities and social science studies in virtually all American universities. Such marginalization was reinforced by the long night of Cold War politics which for so long severely hindered Western research in and about Central Asia, discouraging succeeding generations of scholars from entry into fields of study which focused on the region. Another, less frequently discussed, phenomenon has also been working against the maturation of Central Asia humanities studies in the Western academy. This is the “great civilizations” pantheon, a reigning paradigm which in its delineation of those ancient and modern cultures worth studying, has over the past two centuries become a pedagogic ideology. That is, even the more limited academic space reserved for non-European humanities studies has been filled almost exclusively with work on those cultures 1 which have been deemed great by standards Central Asia in the 1990s, providing scholars to which not all contemporary scholars would with new avenues for direct contact and adhere: the ancient cultures of Egypt, research, has created an opportunity to view Mesopotamia, Persia, India and China, Central Asia cultures as specific and dynamic, anointed during the rise of European and as producers rather than merely as Orientalism, and the modern Asian cultures of recipients and conduits of external cultures. China, Japan and India. Through the support of the Townsend Center, The study of Asian art within the American the Central Asia/Silk Road Working Group at academy, for example, has tended to focus on Berkeley has for three years now been a forum the heartlands of India, China and Japan, with connecting scholars from various fields who scant attention given not only to the arts of wish to participate in research and dialogue on peripheral regions but to ways in which those Central Asia. Current projects include a series arts influenced work in core cultures. Silk Road of systemwide workshops planned to develop archaeology has likewise focused on the Central Asia curriculum at the various UC relations between China, and to a lesser extent campuses. In addition, the Group has planned India, and the Greek, Roman and early modern a workshop for early December that will bring Contents European West. Central Asia, when studied at Central Asia scholars from the Centre National all, is usually viewed merely as a transit zone de Recherche Scientifique, Paris, to discuss with In From the Margins: Central Asian Humanities Studies at between these civilizations, with little or no their Berkeley counterparts “Research Strategies Berkeley 1 focus on the rich cultures which influenced a for Joint Archaeological Excavation and Futures of the Humanities millennium of exchange between East and Development of a Central Asia Curriculum.” Disciplines: Whither Historical Studies? West. Similarly, Buddhist studies have This France-Berkeley workshop, supported in 3 concentrated on the spread of the religion east part by the France-Berkeley Fund, will be Islands and Systems 3 from India, with far less attention paid to the followed, on December 6-7, by a conference on Working Groups ways in which the belief system was altered as “The Silk Roads in Central Asia” presented by 5 it sought acceptance within different cultural the Working Group in conjunction with the Publication Activities 9 realities north and west, in Central Asia. Silkroad Foundation. The conference will Calendar include presentations by Central Asia scholars 10 But things are improving. At Berkeley, two new from around the world and has been planned Events 15 undergraduate courses are being offered by the to stimulate still greater interest in and exchange Announcements Department of Near Eastern Studies in 1997- on Central Asia cultural studies. 18 98: Introduction to Central Asia (Fall; co- Sanjyot Mehendale sponsored by the Department of Geography) Department of Near Eastern Studies, and Silk Road Art and Archaeology (Spring). Co-director, More generally, the political opening up of Central Asia/Silk Road Working Group 2 Futures of the Berkeley colleague, now at the University This was not always the case. Some twenty Humanities Disciplines: Whither of Pennsylvania) and Margaret Jacob (also years ago, planning the scholary Historical Studies? of the University of Pennsylvania) recently conference deserved serious treatment, co-authored, with Joyce Appleby, Telling apparently commensurate with a more With the Center’s interest this year in the Truth about History which ends with a general concern with the customs and visions and versions of the future comes a resounding defense of the vital role of institutions—a social ordering—through series of conversations on the future of the historical studies for a pluralistic which knowledge was to be produced. The humanities disciplines. It’s not an democratic future. Frederic Wakeman purposes of the 1976 volume entitled academic joke that a series on the future (University of California, Berkeley; past Conference Planning (a multi-authored book begins with history early in December. We president of the Social Science Research of how-to essays) seem mixed. One senses live in the future rightly or (for the most Council and of the American Historical in some of these essays nostalgia for a more part) wrongly imagined by the past. Association) is a leading, perhaps the ordered world that could be achieved, Historians need to be ahead of what they leading, historian today of modern China. albeit temporarily, in the span of a write about, more than scientists whose Randolph Starn conference. Questions of authority, and discoveries depend on processes of nature how to deal with its absence, are rife. The that were there all along. Recent authors of one essay liken a conference celebrations or lamentations over “the end participant to one who “emigrates” from of history” have turned out to be the “familiar continent of his [sic] work” premature, to the surprise of practically no Islands and Systems and “immigrates into an island culture one but the pundits. If anything, history deliberately set up with certain aims and objectives in mind.” ( p. 12). has become, as usual, an arena where Although one has only to consult the pages agendas for the future are fought out. To of this Newsletter to see that conferences Among the contributors to the 1976 reflect on the future of historical studies at are hardly an anachronism, what seems to volume is anthropologist Margaret Mead, the turn of the millennium I will be joined have disappeared, at least in the whose own book, The Small Conference, had in conversation on Tuesday, December 2 humanities and human sciences, is a appeared in 1968. Mead too places high at 4, in the Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler, discourse about conferences and the stakes upon the conference: “The by a panel with some of the most organizational structures that enable the conference situation is designed as one to thoughtful and influential scholar-teachers production and exchange of knowledge at permit the participants to act as whole at work in the field today. James Clifford the “real” person-to-person level. The individuals using all their senses as they (History of Consciousness, UCSC) has just conference has seemingly dropped out of seldom do in the narrower, more published Routes: Travel and Translation in our conception of “scholarly specialized contexts of other forms of the Late Twentieth Century, a fascinating communication,” pushed aside by the hard professional and academic life,” she writes collage of essays and meditations “on the issues deriving from the effects of (p. 45). To this end, in a kind of den mother history of an entangled modernity…as an information technologies upon the mode, she concerns herself with practical unfinished series of paths and infrastructure within which scholalry work matters, issues which, in the human scene, negotiations.” Lynn Hunt (our former is produced and organized. 3 can cause problems: never ask for In a paper entitled “Digital Documents and suggestions about procedures which have the Future of the Academic Community”— already been decided upon (this is an essay deserving far more attention than “pseudo-consultation”), she says; she can be given here—Lyman makes clear that advises that participants have a clear modes of participation and the creation of picture of the arrangements, the type of a civil society or community are still high living conditions, how much free time they on his agenda (indeed the Library is itself will have, how many formal sessions, how a “shared intellectual resource and site for many informal, and so on.