Category Imperialism Encountered

In February 1957 Lloyd Rudolph and I set forth into the “heat and dust” villages of Thanjavur district, South India, with 10 Indian graduate students from Madras Christian College.¹

We were part of a wave of comparativist political scientists who had been motivated in the 1950s and 1960s by the proliferation of new nations following decolonization. Gabriel Almond, a senior participant in this move, wrote that political scientists moved into Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America “with all of the energy and commitment of pioneers who wanted to be the first to observe these new experiments in politics, or to observe primordial and traditional societies with the curiosity and fascination that we associate with anthropological field work.”³

We had tuned in early to the liberating part of survey research. Survey data freed political scientists from the formalist/legalist approaches that characterized the institutionalism of that time. Survey results told us what the citizens thought they were experiencing and doing. It gave us access to the electoral behavior and political attitudes that shaped the practical meaning of political institutions. We imagined we were plumbing the true underpinnings of the Indian experiment in democracy. What we had not counted on was that American ideology, America's hegemonic Lockean liberalism, would shape the very concepts and methods we used to acquire knowledge about an unfamiliar society and its politics.

When our bewildered interviewers returned from their first foray into the villages of Tamil Nadu, they complained of a radical disconnect between their training experience, modeled on best U.S. practice of that time, and their field experience. They had been led to expect that the mise-en-scène for the performance we call an interview placed the interviewer with his clipboard in the kitchen or living room of a suburban home, where he would record the personal opinions of the housewife within—a simple two-person interaction. This model highlights the assumptions of methodological individualism that characterize survey research as practiced in the United States. Respondents are singular. They respond one on one. Our interviewers did not expect the village woman, surrogate for the U.S. housewife, instead of compliantly revealing her preferences, to rearrange the staging and enlarge the cast: husband, father, and sons, and daughters appeared, sometimes joined by village notables. Responding to a survey question became a matter of collective deliberation, a veritable seminar. The experience instructed us that in village India the individual was not the unit of opinion. Indeed, the singular, private, and personal were alien to the life worlds of Indian towns and villages.

Survey research also operates with radically democratic assumptions: all opinions, like all votes, are assumed to have equal importance and equal weight. They evidently did not in 1957 India, although, in the succeeding decades, that difference has been dismantled. Our interviews were conducted at a time when caste hierarchy and patron/client relationships carried over into political relationships. The lower castes had not yet realized the leverage their numbers would give them in democratic elections. The lower castes soon learned to use their numerical advantage to trump the status and economic power of the middle and upper castes. So the local knowledge that we then encountered, that the opinion of the leading landlords and the caste and village headmen yielded an accurate reflection of village attitudes, was not misplaced.

Our 1957 Madras survey introduced us to the problem of exporting homegrown concepts and methodologies to alien places, where, as we would say today, the “other” lives. As social scientists entered new research arenas—and in the 1950s that meant nations newly liberated from colonial rule after World War II—they brought with them the concepts and methodologies that had been developed in connection with political research at home. “I had a sense of mission,” wrote Gabriel Almond, “in bringing to the study of foreign political systems the theoretical ferment and methodological innovation which had already gone far in transforming the field of American political studies.”⁴

Using Anglo-American concepts and methods in new research arenas was unavoidable. They were our tool kit, our means for entering complex and unfamiliar non-Western environments. Without concepts and methods we would not know where to look and what to look for. The question was, and still is, to what extent were those concepts and methods amenable to infiltration, adaptation, modification, and transformation by the forms of life and worldview of the alien other? To what extent were the tool kits we brought with us from the United States capable of bridging differences between civilizations, cultures, and worldviews between the Western observer and the non-Western observed?

Early in our research in India, Lloyd Rudolph and I coined the phrase “imperialism of categories.”⁵

The title of one of Ashis Nandy's essays, “The Intimate Enemy,” conveys the cultural violence associated with the imposition of alien categories. An alien culture is unwillingly ingested by the colonial, but can be neither fully absorbed nor regurgitated. It becomes part of his mentality, his way of thinking and judging.⁶

Categories are also modes of creating and controlling. Foucault showed us how categories embedded in discursive formations,⁷

Lockean Universalism and the Other

Louis Hartz did not precisely warn us that American social scientists were unfit to understand foreign societies, but he did observe that Americans bore a particularly heavy intellectual burden as they approached the alien other. That burden was a Lockean universalism that taught that the self and the other were the same because they shared a common human nature. The assumption that all persons share a common humanity is one of the normative glories of liberalism. It asserts the equal worth and common reason of all humans. But the presumption of sameness obliterates difference when it erases the markers that distinguish cultures and peoples and create identity and meaning. Survey research concepts and methods in 1957 took for granted that other cultures too were constituted by Lockean individuals.

Writing in The Liberal Tradition in America,⁸

The experience of being “born free” means that Americans did not experience radically different ideologies and institutions. They did not have to struggle against feudal oppressions and feudal survivals or the absolutism envisioned by Thomas Hobbes or Robert Filmer. They did not experience the status order and class differences that were the sediment of European history. Being born free without having to become so produces, in Hartz's view, a complacent liberalism, a liberalism unlike Europe's, which imagines itself as both revolutionary and embattled. According to Hartz, American liberalism lacks the “philosophic spark,” the “sense of relativity,” the self-consciousness and reflexivity of European liberalism.¹¹

Having been born free, Americans assume that the whole world is eager for a similar condition. Hartz argues that the Lockean liberal consensus “elicits an impulse to impose Locke everywhere.”¹²

Or will challenges by the alien other merely evoke the liberal hysteria manifest in the “red scare” after World War I, McCarthyism after World War II, and the Patriot Act after 9/11?

The Empire and Liberalism Suspended

In his Liberalism and Empire, Uday Singh Mehta extends the critique of liberalism beyond a parochial American context.¹⁵

Nineteenth-century liberalism's understanding of the colonies, like much of twentieth-century modernization theory's understanding of new nations, depended on an historical anthropology of earlier and later that coincided with lower and higher, backward and advanced. A lower position on the historical timeline entails an absence of that reason which entitles to deliberation and self-government. As John Stuart Mill put it:

This theory of historical infantilization served nineteenth-century liberalism as the justification of empire.

Mehta's countervailing presence is Edmund Burke, who rejected liberal universalism—the doctrine that all humanity is the same. If the universalism and historical evolutionism of nineteenth-century liberals anticipates modernization theory, Burke speaks for the epistemological position of contemporary area scholarship that credits and values difference. He upbraids a featureless and abstract liberal universalism for its failure to grasp how territory is marked by particular and specific histories and cultures.

Unlike the liberals of his time, Burke saw the injustice of Protestant empire in Ireland and viewed the independence of America without regret. “[On Ireland], America and India, he [Burke] was at every point upon the side of the future,” Harold Laski tells us, and “he was the first English statesman to fully understand the moral import of the problem of subject races.”¹⁹

Burke parted company with his nineteenth-century liberal successors too “not because … he had a more ‘realist’ epistemology and prose that ‘correspond’ to or better describe the nature of Indians but rather because his thought … takes seriously the sentiments, feelings, and attachments through which peoples are, and aspire to be, ‘at home’…. This posture of thought acknowledges that the integrity of experience is tied to its locality and finitude….”²⁰

Burke finds a way between a liberal universalism that elides or denies all markings of place and attachment, on the one hand, and a cultural relativism that denies all human commonality and asserts the moral equivalence of all custom, on the other. Mehta has Burke envisioning a conversation or negotiation between two strangers, whose norms are mutually opaque, a conversation that “holds out the possibility … that through the conversation, which has as its purpose the understanding of sentiments that give meaning to people's lives, wider bonds of sympathy can be forged.”²²

Americans are not Burkeans. They are tone-deaf when it comes to the meaning systems of others. As a distinguished colleague said, advocating the elimination of a foreign language requirement in the graduate political science department at Chicago, “There is no need for it. Everything you need to know is in English.”

Universalist Theory Travels Abroad

Max Weber and Clifford Geertz have reminded us that there are two types of models: models of and models for. The former is a heuristic, an analytic abstraction designed to guide inquiry. The latter is an exemplar to be emulated. In practice, there is often slippage. Models-of become models-for. It is hard even to name a model without making it into a model-for. Consider, for example, the simple concepts of modernity and tradition. Would those two words be understood as neutral signs at a cocktail party full of readers of the New York Times?

We summarize the set of concepts that dominated the new comparative politics of the 1950s and 1960s as modernization theory. As a coherent set of concepts, modernization theory has suffered severe criticism and countermovements, such as dependency theory of the 1970s and postcolonial critiques of the 1990s. But modernization theory's central premise and promise, the reproduction of the West through the replication of its stages of growth, endures as a theme in American social science and public policy. Its return in new guises reminds us that modernization theory continues to function as a model-for among scholars and policy intellectuals. Hence it requires revisiting. You need to know history in order not to reinvent the wrong wheel.

Modernization theory arose out of a confluence of structural and functional systems theory of the kind pioneered by David Easton in political science and Talcott Parsons in sociology. Both were macro, totalizing projects, aspiring to explain all. As Parsons told the Faculty Committee on Behavioralism at Harvard in 1954: “A long-term program of scholarly activity which aims at no less than a unification of theory in all fields of the behavioral sciences is now envisaged.”²³

In this sense the West, and more particularly the United States, was seen to show the nations of the world their future. Modernization theory represented an extension of the liberal historicity I have already discussed—a scientized, objectivized version of the value-laden concepts of James and John Stuart Mill, with their view of world peoples as backward/advanced and uncivilized/civilized.

Parsons and Edward Shils's pattern variables proved a most seductive way to manage the bourgeoning project of modernization theory. They proposed a series of oppositional dyads to organize the social universe of the modern West and its traditional other: ascription/achievement, affectivity/affective neutrality, collectivity orientation/self-orientation, particularism/universalism, diffuseness/specificity.²⁴

The Parsons/Shils paradigm became hegemonic in the social sciences of the 1960s and 1970s. This model-for in the guise of a model-of promised closure. All possible permutations of action could be accounted for: “We maintain,” wrote Parsons and Shils, “that there are only five basic pattern variables, and that, in the sense that they are all of the pattern variables which derive, they constitute a system.”²⁵

Coherence had several implications. If the features of the “modern” system were interlocked and not detachable, “developing” polities or societies had no choice but to buy into the whole basket. There was to be no fashioning of a modernity inflected by particular histories, no picking and choosing. Not only were developing societies expected to transition to the predetermined ensemble of Western modernity, but they were also to discard the equally coherent contrasting features into the dustbin of history. Mixed states, hybrids and their occupants, were “transitional,” incomplete, and unstable—either on their way to modernity or failures incapable of completing the journey.

Dichotomies are logical structures that suppress the intermediary ground where most of the world exists. Yet it was from intermediary ground that the multiple modernities of Western Europe and East Asia were created. There was nothing uniform about the history of those modernities, no master narrative that explained them all. The factors that led to the modernizations of England, France, Germany, and the United States were contingently, not systemically, related.

Our quarrel with the dichotomies was that they misunderstood how social change occurred. Most change occurs by adaptation and incrementally. Particular features of tradition persist, though often modified, into modernity. Tradition is not an unbreakable package; nor is modernity. The components of each are capable of recombination. Individualism may not fully replace collective forms of sociability and action. And despite the depersonalization wrought by modernizing processes, in many societies group solidarities and other forms of institutionalized affect resist affective neutrality. Particular mixes of timing and circumstance continue to mark the differences among modern societies. Adaptation has enabled a plurality of modernities.

New Generations of Universalism

New generations of universalism have washed over modernization theory. Rational choice and globalization bring similar assumptions to analysis. In the social sciences the propensity to imagine that the world is the same always and everywhere is most prominent among economists. When George Stigler and Gary Becker argued in “De Gustibus non est Disputandum”²⁷

Rational choice's disdain for the collective and the particular does more violence than did modernization theory to scholarship that aims to distinguish and characterize cultures and societies. Modernization theory at least had a differentiated vocabulary to characterize the other—a vocabulary that recognized alternative social and ideal attributes. Rational choice inquiry and explanation replaces alternative formulations of motive and identity with a uniform, singular concept of utility maximization. According to Amartya Sen,

Theoretically most relevant to my earlier discussion of Lockean liberalism's universalism is the propensity for formal theory to attribute motives rather than investigate them. The assumption that actors' preferences and choices are determined solely by calculations of rational self-interest is problematic not only because it ignores the role of sentiment, passion, and commitment in behavior,²⁹

Area Studies as Countermovement

Modernization theory has encountered a number of countermovements, including dependency theory, globalization theory, and postcolonial criticism. The most articulate of these is dependency theory, which introduced the idea of exploitation into its understanding of development, or rather lack thereof.³¹

Area studies was originally a bureaucratic construction, an artifact of the cold war. In 1958 the National Defense Education Act funded area studies because Congress thought the country needed language and area knowledge to carry on the struggle against Communism. Area studies provided a vehicle for “stockpiling area experts”—a metaphor whose military ring was not accidental. The NDEA was to provide the sort of knowledge that was spectacularly lacking in the run-up to 9/11, when command of Arabic and knowledge of Islamic culture and politics might have connected the famous dots. That the NDEA did not achieve its goal, to override America's allergy to foreign languages and its disinterest in foreign societies, is apparent from the fact that the United States can scarcely field a Pushtu speaker to ask local tribesmen whether they have seen Mr. bin Laden lately. That the allergy remains robust is apparent from the fact that the Democrat-sponsored National Security Language Act and the Homeland Security Education Act languish in committee without Republican backing.³³

Area studies legislation suffers from a contradiction. The narrative used to get the National Defense Education Act passed was bellicose; language and area knowledge were needed to defend against enemies or to preempt Soviet initiatives in contested nations. But the scholars who entered area studies, with the possible exception of scholars of the Soviet Union, largely brought to the task a benign curiosity and eagerness to understand the other. Academic entrepreneurs were happy to ride the bellicose wave into bigger departmental budgets for esoteric specialties that would not ordinarily be federally funded. Clever deans, collaborating with professors of Sanskrit and Arabic and Chinese, built programs of study and provided for academic appointments and fellowships for enthusiastic scholars eager to spend time among the other. The contradiction between bellicose and peaceable goals persisted relatively undisturbed until the war in Iraq ripped the cover off one section of area scholars, those studying the Arab Middle East. They were revealed as having an unsuitably positive view of the peoples and cultures of an area increasingly suspect among media-watching, soldier-sending Americans. It turned out that students of areas brought to their task sentiments and passions as well as cool observation and interpretation. And that understanding often lead to sympathy.

Area scholars were perceived as a kind of shadow embassy for the countries they studied. National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger advocated the transfer of area specialist foreign service officers out of countries they knew best because, he said, they went native. He was right about that, but wrong about their ability to serve the nation. Their long-term engagement with countries and regions provided an essential corrective to a grand strategy driven by presidential concern for the four-year election cycle, and to the detachment of the executive branch from time, space, and circumstance.³⁴

Many area scholars are educated in ways that help them to overcome their Lockean universalism, their axiomatic adherence to the liberal consensus, and their American unanimity. They are trained Burkeans, sensitive to the “ancient constitutions” of the other, and suspicious of projects that claim to improve the condition of the other on the American pattern. Think of the storybook figure of Graham Greene's expatriate Englishman in some palm-fringed land—faintly alienated from his native land, speaking Fiji, knowledgeable that the local grocer is a supplier of heroin and the local butcher's son a woodland guerrilla—and you have an exaggerated version of the area scholar defected to the land of the observed.

But area scholars remain a thin exceptional voice in America. Niall Ferguson has proposed that America accept its destiny as a global hegemon, but learn how to be an imperial power from the history of the British Empire.³⁵

I want to return to my argument that area studies was in some respects a countermovement against the prevailing mentality in the social sciences as well as among the American public. Some area scholars explicitly distanced themselves from comparative projects because they considered “comparison” a disciplinary practice contaminated by cultural hubris, a way to put down the other. Whether in political science, economics, or sociology, comparison was about what third-world countries did not have and the first-world did. Comparison in the guise of a scientific practice became a way to shame the other.

What many area studies scholars had in common with Burke was their respect for the dignity, worth, and meaning of the other. That respect could not be enacted except via recognition of the specificity of the other. Area scholars learned to enter into the life of the other, under certain circumstances to “become” the other. They resisted the practice of subsuming the particular sub specie aeternitatis, or treating local thought and practice as instances of some abstract universal.

This characterization of the area scholar would hardly have proved credible to the most notable of the power-shapes-knowledge proponents, the late Edward Said. At the time he published his best-known book, Orientalism, he believed, in Aijaz Ahmed's effective summary, that “[a]nyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient … is an Orientalist … Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the ‘Orient.’”³⁸

Postcolonial theory bears a complex relationship to area studies. Postcolonial theorists often combine the critical edge of Marxist vocabulary with a respect for cultural determinants that Marx would have disdained. They are as likely to be found in English or comparative literature departments as in the social sciences. Postcolonial scholars disrespect and transgress boundaries. They are “post” colonial in that they attack the justifying prose of imperial and para-imperial authors—and often of all authors not of the colony. Heirs of Foucault and Said, they lament the corruption of power and the fatal intermeshing of power and knowledge. Some see area scholars, especially American area scholars, as the running dogs of corporate exploitation or the oppressive state. Some, however, see them as the perspicacious eyes of a postcolonial generation, willing to pay cultural reparations for the offenses of the old Europe and to counter the cultural imperviousness of a new United States.⁴⁰

The language I used above (dignity, respect) suggests that what is at stake is not just an abstract methodological question, but rather a worldview and commitment. This is terrain on which area scholars and epistemological universalists meet and quarrel. Epistemological disputes in contemporary social sciences remind us that scholars invest their chosen modes of inquiry with a moral aura. At its extreme, area scholars regard any methodology that does not recognize specificity and context as immoral; they condemn as the gas pump strategy of research scholarship that takes a purely utilitarian stance toward area knowledge, exploiting it as the “raw material” of hypothesis testing. ⁴¹

Yet area scholarship has itself been under attack for inattention to comparative approaches that can generate general theories, especially theories of causality. Hypothesis testers castigate area scholarship for being lost in pointless exchanges about incommensurability, truths of my village versus the truths of yours, exchanges that yield anecdotal specificity but do not produce explanations. The standard area studies defense—that the researcher is exposing the unique qualities of the subject area—is countered by the assertion that even uniqueness depends on comparison.

Louis Hartz considers this issue in relation to his own, American, version of area studies. He damns American historians for hiding their insularity behind the claim of exceptionalism. Comparisons with Europe are not “to deny our national uniqueness, one of the reasons curiously given for studying America alone, but actually to affirm it. How can we know the uniqueness of anything except by contrasting it with something that is not unique.”⁴²

Area studies is under attack too from another generation of universalists—the globalists, many of whom see regional worlds converging on a single pattern. Some see area approaches as freezing existing regional and national identities when what matters is that those identities are now being transformed by global processes. Area studies, they say, emphasizes “relatively immobile aggregates of traits, with more or less durable historical boundaries and with a unity composed of more or less enduring properties.” Such static aggregates must yield to the new mobility, which destabilizes the old national and regional objects of research, and focus on the new markers of fluidity: “trade, travel, pilgrimage, warfare, proselytization, colonization, exile and the like.”⁴³

Situated Knowledge

If modernization theory and other universalist schemes, such as rational choice and globalization studies, use concepts and categories fashioned out of the Anglo-American experience and deny difference by not recognizing the autonomy, authenticity, and agency of the other, what epistemology is likely to do so? The alternative to universal knowledge is situated knowledge. Situated knowledge recognizes time, place, and circumstance, and assumes that individuals and their capacities are marked by them. It proceeds from specificities and works upward to comparative generalizations, rather than downward from a priori assumptions. Theory construction for situated knowledge takes into account local knowledge and practice—how denizens perceive and interpret their world. Theory constructed from below produces different futures than theory constructed from above.

We may characterize situated knowledge by the way it makes projections about the future. Universalistic theories project a single history common to mankind, a common developmental path along which all humans will tread. Situated knowledge, by contrast, projects futures by reference to where a culture/society/polity is coming from. Its specificities dictate the next step. When Marx noted that men make their own history, but not any history they choose, he signaled the limits on historical agency. Those limits had for the most part to do with material determinants. The limits on agency that apply to situated knowledge are of a Burkean sort; they are limits posed by a country's “ancient constitution,” that is, the sociopolitical patterns that become conventional. Marx shares modernization theory's projection of a single history for mankind. The way in which Burke thought of historical agency, positing that futures grow out of pasts, is compatible with multiple histories via multiple paths.

We can also characterize situated knowledge by the modes of inquiry it favors. Causality and meaning are at the center of two important contrasting modes of inquiry. Causality, or at least regularity—what causes what or what goes with what—calls for empirical knowledge. Meaning—how humans perceive and understand the world—calls for interpretation. If I wink, do I intend to let you in on a conspiracy? Am I trying to seduce you? Have I got sand in my eye? Do I have a tic? Meaning structures are important; simple facts do not speak for themselves.

Conceding that both empirical and interpretativist approaches are necessary for any inquiry, situated knowledge—knowledge marked by place, time, and circumstance—relies on the excavation of meaning. It is in the interest of a conversionary project—and much modernization theory, as well as its generational successors, was a conversionary project—not to attend sympathetically to alternative worldviews. Situated knowledge, less animated by a conversionary project, is committed to the validity and significance of local knowledge—to the way peoples understand their histories, social processes, and worldviews. Much of the work of area studies consists of interpreting these understandings. Situated knowledge thus makes visible and credible a variety of forms of life.