Orientalism in war and peace: the politics of academic scholarship during the long twentieth century

Abstract

In this paper I explore the relationship between Orientalism, empire-building and the development of the social sciences in the US during the long twentieth century. I focus on the construction of a series of academic infrastructures that the sponsors of the social sciences have underwritten to produce knowledge about the Others of empire. I am especially concerned with the role of these academic infrastructures in concealing imperial domination and in Orientalising imperial subjects. I trace the historical development of the infrastructures and explore the dilemmas they create for scholars who seek to critique processes in which they are unavoidably involved.

Keywords:

• Orientalism
• knowledge production
• social sciences
• empire
• US military

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of Third World Quarterly for excellent feedback on an earlier draft of this paper. Related versions of this article were presented to audiences at meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the American Ethnological Society; the City University of New York; Arden House (New York); the University of Illinois, the Canadian Anthropological Association, and Shanghai University. I thank those who organised these conferences for inviting me to participate and those who attended the conferences for raising very interesting questions that forced me to refine and clarify my argument. Conversations with and/or written commentary from Peggy Barlett, Tom Biolsi, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, John Gledhill, Zhang Hong, Constantine Hriskos, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Tugrul Keskin, Bruce Knauft, William Roseberry, Parker Shipton, Gavin Smith, Ida Susser, Joan Vincent and Harry West also proved valuable in improving the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The present article focuses on the institutional structures through which Orientalism has been reproduced. In contrast, much previous scholarship, inspired by Edward Said’s pathbreaking work (1978), has approached Orientalism through the study of texts and representations. This latter literature in enormous, but useful reviews and influential works include Bhabha (1986), Gates (1986), Hoeveler and Cass (2006), Kennedy (2000), Lowe (1991), Macfie (2000), Spivak (1986) and Varisco (2017).

2 With the rise of the corporate foundations (the so-called ‘philanthropies’) in the United States after 1900, financial support because available for the first time for systematic field-based investigation and amelioration of social problems along the contested frontiers of imperial expansion. The leaders and innovators were the philanthropies associated with the Rockefeller fortune (see Nugent 2002). As noted in the pages that follow, the emergence of the social sciences at the time represented a shift in the form taken by Orientalism but not a break with it. This shift from traditional Orientalism (in the form of sinology, Indology, etc.) to more contemporary forms was one to which Said (1978) himself drew attention.

3 One might also distinguish a fifth period, which predates the four discussed in this paper. This earlier period, which begins in the 1870s and continued until the end of the nineteenth century, was concerned with questions of order and disorder among Native American societies, who were being progressively overrun as United States settlement spread westward across the North American land mass. This process concerned the expansion and consolidation of the United States as a polity, and knowledge about conditions along its contested frontier was underwritten by the United States government. The Bureau of American Ethnology was the institution that organised the collection and ordering of this information (see Vincent 1990). This period in the history of anthropology in the United States has been largely forgotten. Even so, it produced such classic works as The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, by James Mooney (1896).

4 Space does not permit a more fine-grained discussion of changes in neoliberalism from the 1980s onward and their impact on knowledge production in the social sciences.

5 It is commonly assumed that the area studies framework for organising knowledge was imposed upon the social sciences by the United States security apparatus after World War II, in the context of the Cold War. Rather than having been imposed upon social scientists, however, the area studies framework was proposed by the academic leaders of the Social Science Research Council to the United States military during World War II. This focus on bounded geographic areas represented a major departure from the period prior to World War II, when social science knowledge had focused on problems and issues rather than areas (see Nugent 2010a).

6 Even a cursory examination of the websites of organisations of this kind reveals the preoccupation of many with the problem of security.

7 In 2008 United States Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, who had previously been President of Texas A&M University (and prior to that the head of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)), announced the creation of the Minerva Research Initiative. In a speech made to the Association of American Universities (AAU) on 14 April 2008, Gates explained that Minerva was intended to support fundamental research in universities, increase the intellectual capital of the Department of Defense (DoD), and develop stronger ties between the DoD and the academic community – which Gates, as President of Texas A&M, had left to take up the post of Secretary of Defense (Nugent 2010c). In the process, Gates explained, expertise housed within the universities would be harnessed to national security projects while new forms of expertise would be cultivated within both the university and the military (Asher 2008). In his speech to the AAU, Gates situated this recent government initiative to shape the production of academic knowledge in a history of similar efforts that harkened back to the Cold War. He invoked in particular Arthur Schlessinger’s call for ‘a return to the acceptance of eggheads and ideas’ (Ascher 2008: 1). Schlessinger’s statement came in the aftermath of the launch of Sputnik, and referred to the need to develop the expertise of scientists in an effort to ‘meet the Russian challenge’ (Ascher 2008: 1).

8 Asher (2008), citing Program Solicitation NSF 08-594 Social and Behavioral Dimensions of National Security, Conflict and Cooperation. As part of its plan to restructure national security strategy, the US military is drawing upon interdisciplinary research from a wide range of fields (which includes the hard sciences, the social sciences, business management, climate studies, etc.).

9 The United States government almost eliminated funding for area studies-related research in the early 1970s. Only a last-minute plea from Henry Kissinger saved it (temporarily) from the block.

10 For example, Minerva offered to sponsor field-based studies of so-called ‘terrorist’ networks and counterinsurgency operations (Nugent 2010c). There were also distinctive racialised and gendered imaginaries implicit in the academic work that Minerva proposed to sponsor. This important topic is beyond the scope of the present paper.

11 See also Fenton (1946, 1947), Herge (1948), Holborn (1947), Keefer (1988, 1995) and Nugent (2010a, 2010c).

12 See also Coles and Weinberg (1964), Donnison (1961), Friedrich (1948), Herge (1948) and Hyneman (1945).

13 For a more in-depth discussion of this process see Nugent (2002, 2006, 2010a, 2010b).

14 For discussion of the ‘Foreign Area and Language Program’ see Fenton (1946, 1947), Herge (1948), Holborn (1947), Keefer (1988, 1995), and Nugent (2006, 2010a).

15 The OSS was created during World War II to oversee intelligence matters and ended up being the forerunner of the CIA.

16 This figure includes a scattering of professionals in non-academic fields.

17 See in particular Fenton (1947), Hall (1947), Matthew (1947), Nugent (2006), SSRC (1943), and SSRC (1944).

18 In addition to the slate of academic advisors to the OSS mentioned in the text, the SSRC, the ACLS and the NRC (all the creations of the great philanthropies) established area committees during the war, ‘when detailed knowledge and experts on virtually every area of the world were in heavy demand’ (Hall 1947, iii). These committees joined with the Smithsonian Institution to form the Ethnogeographic Board, which helped coordinate the activities of academics so that they could contribute as effectively as possible to the war effort (see Farish 2005; Fenton 1946).

19 See also Robinson (2004) and Wallerstein (1997).

20 The radical social sciences literature of the 1960s is vast, but important works include Moore (1966), Mintz (1960), Wolf (1969) and Worsley (1964).

21 The increasing involvement of US military forces in seemingly non-military activities has taken place in the context of a broad transformation in the organisation of the armed forces – one that Lutz (2004) refers to as a shift from mass industrial to post-industrial warfare.

22 See Britschgi (2004) for a review of military operations other than war during and after the Cold War.

23 The policies of the Trump administration deepened these tendencies. Trump’s hostility to science, and his suspicion of expertise more generally, is well known, and is reflected in his government’s attack on higher education and research. Trump’s embrace of ‘business’ (ie the maintenance of corporate and elite privilege) is reflected in his administration’s use of violence, surveillance and repression to control dissent. In what amounts to an invasion of government by business, there seems to be no sense that expert knowledge has any role to play whatsoever in enabling domination. This is an anti-epistemology of a very distinct kind – one that assumes that folk knowledge (about race, nation, gender, inequality, civilisation, etc.) is all that is needed to understand and control the world.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Nugent

David Nugent is a professor of anthropology at Emory University. His works include Modernity at the Edge of Empire (Stanford University Press, 1997), State Theory and Andean Politics (co-edited with Christopher Krupa; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), The Encrypted State: Delusion and Displacement in Northern Peru (Stanford University Press, 2019) and State Formation in the Liberal Era: Capitalisms and Claims of Citizenship in Mexico and Peru (co-edited with Ben Fallaw; University of Arizona Press, 2020). His interests focus on the anthropology of political and economic life. Much of his fieldwork has been conducted in the Andean region of South America, but he has also done research in East Africa and among indigenous groups in North America.