Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States - Softcover

Lockman, Zachary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804799067 ISBN 13: 9780804799065

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2016

Synopsis

Field Notes reconstructs the origins and trajectory of area studies in the United States, focusing on Middle East studies from the 1920s to the 1980s. Drawing on extensive archival research, Zachary Lockman shows how the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations played key roles in conceiving, funding, and launching postwar area studies, expecting them to yield a new kind of interdisciplinary knowledge that would advance the social sciences while benefiting government agencies and the American people. Lockman argues, however, that these new academic fields were not simply a product of the Cold War or an instrument of the American national security state, but had roots in shifts in the humanities and the social sciences over the interwar years, as well as in World War II sites and practices.

This book explores the decision-making processes and visions of knowledge production at the foundations, the Social Science Research Council, and others charged with guiding the intellectual and institutional development of Middle East studies. Ultimately, Field Notes uncovers how area studies as an academic field was actually built―a process replete with contention, anxiety, dead ends, and consequences both unanticipated and unintended.

About this title

About the Author

Zachary Lockman is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and of History at New York University. He is the author of Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (2004, 2010).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Field Notes

The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States

By Zachary Lockman

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9906-5

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Preface, 
1. "We Shall Have to Understand It", 
2. "The Regional Knowledge Now Required", 
3. Launching a New Field, 
4. Princeton, the ACLS and Postwar Near Eastern Studies, 
5. A Committee for the Near and Middle East, 
6. Field-Building in Boom Times, 
7. "A Need for More Regular Contact", 
8. "The Lower Parts of Max Weber", 
Epilogue, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

"We Shall Have to Understand It"

... at the minute the Arabic world is not drawn to our alarmed attention as is the Far East, but everything indicates that within the next couple of decades we shall have to understand it. We should not wait until the need is too obvious, for by that time it will be too late to do anything.

— Mortimer Graves, 1936 or 1937

THE SECOND WORLD WAR has been described as the metaphorical "midwife" or "mother" of area studies, the historical conjuncture which brought it into being as a distinct mode of organizing the production and dissemination of scholarly knowledge. There is clearly some truth in this depiction, but postwar area studies in the United States also had significant prewar antecedents that provided important visions of, models for and experience with regionally focused academic research, training, networks, programs and institutions which would later contribute to the formation of area studies. Moreover, as with area studies in the decades that followed the war, these initiatives were supported, indeed made possible, by funding from several of the country's richest foundations, often working through a new kind of academic organization that connected them with the objects of their beneficence.

The Rise of the Great Foundations

The enormous, indeed unprecedented, accumulations of wealth which led to the creation of the Carnegie and Rockefeller "families" of philanthropic institutions were the product of the rapid industrialization which the United States experienced after the Civil War, accompanied by the rise of powerful corporations which came to dominate entire sectors of the American economy as virtual monopolies and generated vast wealth for those who controlled them. Around the turn of the century Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), who had built a business empire that at its height encompassed much of the country's steel industry, began establishing a number of philanthropies with distinct missions. For our purposes the most important of these was the Carnegie Corporation of New York, founded in 1910 with an endowment of $135 million (the equivalent of over $3 billion in 2015) as the main vehicle through which Andrew Carnegie's vast fortune would be disbursed for philanthropic purposes. John D. Rockefeller Sr. (1839–1937), who had built the Standard Oil empire and at the beginning of the twentieth century was reckoned the richest person on earth, followed Carnegie's example by donating large sums to educational institutions and to medical research. He went on to establish the Rockefeller Foundation, formally chartered in 1913 "to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world," with an endowment totaling $100 million. As of 1934 the Carnegie Corporation had an endowment of $157 million (equivalent to about $2.8 billion in 2015) and was distributing about $4.7 million ($83 million) in income each yea

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804799067
• ISBN 13: 9780804799065
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 376