The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Sciences

Manuel Len Mndez

MASTER IN THE POLITICAL SCIENCES - AREA STUDY: POLITIC PROBLEMS OF THE MASHREK ERASMUS EXCHANGE PROGRAM - GHENT UNIVERSITEIT LECT.: CRISTOPHER PARKER

The object of this paper of Timothy Mitchell is to trace a brief genealogy of the Area Studies through and parallel the principal Social Sciences and discern its relationship, follow its transformation and evolution and its possible outcome in a not so distant future. It could be interesting because knowing that path is possible to have a different view of the social sciences and how this recently born paradigm affected the sight and the way of think about the history of Europe in the twentieth century and the America project of universal social science. The main object of the paper of Mitchell is to have a clearly idea about what are the exact field of knowledge that covers the Area Studies in general, and the Middle East in particular, how it has been possible of determine the Middle East as an clear and distinct field of study and the relation of these in the production of knowledge that affects in a direct way to the questions of power politics of the whole world, both the Occidental society as the Muslim one, with the added of a community firstly Occidental but stabilised and surrounded by the Muslim culture. By using a historical methodological review of the concerning issue, the author states that first of it all the genealogy of the area studies as an academic field must be understood in direct relation with the sedimentation of the other fields of social sciences and the scientific knowledge related to them and the use of that knowledge in the twentieth century political project. The interest for the area studies, started in the interwar period when borrowing ideas of the humanistic and classical knowledge started to compare the never falling interest of those for that specific zone and its knowledge and starting by Biblical and Semitic philology. Starting from that point the Egyptologist James Henry Breasted, founded the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (O.I.U.C), transforming a traditional philologic discipline into an historic one. After the II W.W, in 1947 and following the steps of O.U.I.C was institutionalised the first committee specialised in a specific world region, the Program in Near Eastern Studies. The main object of that program was to trace a social evolution of the zone and know how works the relationship with the political situation of the moment, namely modernization, by discerning the main variables that influenced the development of the Middle East countries such as i.e. the family, the industry, the commerce and even the slavery and the non-Muslim minorities, making a total of twelve of them through a lapse of time that comprehended from the pre-western influence period to the present day by passing through the western impact in the XVII century. But this modernisation process was only possible by the scientific interdisciplinarity achieved in the 60s. That project was abandoned in 1950 and in the same year the Royal Institute of International Affairs published a paper that was called to be the successor of the project, The Middle East: A Political and Economic Survey, much influenced by the work of the previous project made by H.A.R Gibb and H. Bowen, after that first paper a lot more knowledge was produced in an organic and synthetic way, both by occidental and Arab scholars, taking as object of study the main twelve indicators created in first instance to fill the existing knowledge void in the social sciences. The organic sight they take concluded in a vertical a horizontal division based in the main production groups and categories but there was not a specific approach to the state neither the economy, as the political science and the economic science does.

The II W.W changed the focus point of social sciences and the area studies suffered a slope due to the recruitment for the army of the American scholars and the lack of skill of the scholars from outside. In the other hand the major disciplines were so focussed in their main subjects, economists in the market and the economy, political scientists in public laws and rethinking the idea of the state and sociologists in the social problems brought by the industrialization from the sight of the Parsonian social system, just defining its own boundaries between them conforming in that process the well-known nationalization process of the social sciences, thinking each field in a very demarcated and self-holistic cultural geo-political territory. Due to that new re-organisation of the main concepts of the major disciplines it was possible to define in a better way the field of the area studies, making possible the retro-alimentation between the disciplines and the possibility of study the society as a total structure of scientific knowledge and at the same time it was possible to focus in an specific object of study giving legitimating in that way the whole social sciences itself. But with the crisis of social sciences in the twentieth century all of them leave apart that willing of nationalization due to the impossibility of holding a coherent theory that match all the theories in an interdisciplinary way and try to be more holistic in its sight, revising from the base its epistemological core, and slightly changing its paradigm. The repercussion of that crisis to the area studies were the loss of legitimacy because the national identity was no longer a valid indicator which can define in any way the course of the politics, the economy neither the society. The only discipline unable to do that was the politic science because its new point of view about its object of study was a strong confidence in the micro-economics as the best way to explain the world, thing that made possible refloating the relevance on area studies. From that moment, and in an attempt to reconcile the both existing approaching ways to the political science and the area studies, a new terminology was developed. Terms like institutional income or culture were recoined to express those aspects of the social sphere that was impossible to explain from the traditional self-interested individual action defended by the economists in an attempt to separate the holistic sphere from the individual one. With those premises democratic theory, the political economy of growth and identity, ethnicity and religion became the new points where focus to understand the development of the non-occidental zones. But despite of it all these evolution, nowadays the modernization theory has a big academic dominance in the area study discipline, just giving to it a Eurocentric point of view, namely, all that is considered in the western countries, as Israel, is compared and measured with the occidental world. As the author suggest, and I agree with him, is necessary to find out an approach to the area studies, that permits to match in the most scientific way of thinking, namely, leaving apart any kind of bias, and try to be the more neutral as possible, and find indicators to study that although not to be comparable on a global level at least extrapolate whit the local. If that goal is accomplished maybe we can find out a way to understand and even predict the social and political behaviour of one society by knowing the behaviour of the other and vice versa.