Knowledge Production, Area Studies and Global Cooperation

Claudia Derichs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317282068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Nachhaltige Entwicklung

Whereas Area Studies and cross-border cooperation research conventionally demarcates groups of people by geographical boundaries, individuals might in fact feel more connected by shared values and principles than by conventional spatial dimensions. Knowledge Production, Area Studies and Global Cooperation asks what norms and principles lead to the creation of knowledge about cross-border cooperation and connection. It studies why theories, methods, and concepts originate in one place rather than another, how they travel, and what position the scholar adopts while doing research, particularly 'in the field'.

Taking case studies from Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, the book links the production of alternative epistemologies to the notion of global cooperation and reassesses the ways in which the concept of connectedness can be applied at the translocal and individual rather than the formal international and collective level.

Knowledge Production, Area Studies and Global Cooperation provides an innovative and critical approach towards established means of producing knowledge about different areas of the world, demonstrating that an understanding of pluri-local connectivity should be integrated into the production of knowledge about different areas of the world and the behavioural dimension of global cooperation. By shifting the view from the collective to the individual and from the formal to often invisible patterns of connectedness, this book provides an important fresh perspective which will be of interest to scholars and students of Area Studies, Politics, International Relations and Development Studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND) 4.0 license.

1Introduction

Knowledge production, Area Studies, and global cooperation

This chapter discusses the three key terms of the book. It introduces the line of thought that is further expanded and empirically grounded in the subsequent chapter.

The key terms in the title of this volume are three compound words that seem to be commonly understood and in general use: knowledge production, Area Studies and global cooperation. While they are commonly known and elaborated upon, they are rarely studied in relation to each other or with a focus on their mutual relationship. Directing my gaze at what particular kinds of knowledge production lead to particular views of global cooperation, I argue that the area where knowledge is generated and spread has a role to play for our view of actors’ cooperation on a global scale. Theories ‘from the South’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012), for instance, have not become consumed as thoroughly and frequently among scholars around the world as theories from the Northern part of the globe have. But let us first attend to an exercise that usually precedes the study of mutual relationships between words and concepts: A solid treatise would require providing clear definitions, distinctions from similar terms and concepts, and maybe include a reflection on synonyms and conceptual fields. Clarifying what is meant by knowledge (and its production), areas (and their study) and (global) cooperation would thus form the first steps of the overall attempt to connect them to each other. In what follows, I am certainly not living up to the expectations going along with the provision of clear-cut definitions. Rather than offering something succinct and precise, I strive to raise awareness for the dependence of any definition not just on time and place, but on language as the very medium through which meaning is conveyed. Words and terms are patient carriers of the meanings they ought to transmit. But what exactly they transmit varies across space and time, across speakers and listeners.

The problem of defining

Synonyms in one language may not be considered as such in another tongue. And even if they were, it is not guaranteed that people associate the same thing with the very term they use. Scholarship, science and learning, for instance, are frequently associated with the term knowledge, even used synonymously, but they do not connote the same. One of the first tasks before immersing into the waters of reflection and interpretation is to raise awareness for the boundedness of words and terms we are so much ‘at ease’ with in everyday academic life. Definitions deserve their due merit, they help holding authors and presenters accountable towards readers and audiences and they provide orientation. But they are also a means to narrow down the semantic scope. The exercise of defining may become reconsidered through the attempt of translation, because translating a term or concept requires clarity about its meaning. However, translations may also become defying tasks. I take knowledge and its potential synonyms as a case in point. Translating the term from Japanese into English language (and vice versa) illustrates the difficulty of conveying an exact or ‘original’ meaning. The common Japanese translation of knowledge is 知識 (chishiki). It consists of two characters, each of them hosting a meaning of its own. The character 知 (chi) is commonly understood to signify the intellect (intellectual competence), whereas the character 識 (shiki) refers to discriminating, knowing, or writing. The composite chishiki is also translated as scholarship, but when scholarship bears the connotation of ‘bookishness’ and literary ability, the character combination for ‘scholarly vigor/power’ and achievement, 学力 (gakuryoku) would rather be the matching compound. The semantic difference of the characters used is obvious and immediately visible; translators are expected to carefully choose the most appropriate ones – a task which becomes imperative when English language texts use knowledge and scholarship interchangeably. It gets even more difficult (but also more interesting) when the conceptual basis of a term is different or even absent at all in the target language. This has been the case with words like society, nation, religion and others – words exported from one part of the world to another (cf. Nawa 2016). Citizens of the Japanese island prefecture Okinawa related to me that the local Ryukyu languages did not have a word for ‘peace’ in pre-modern times; peace had always been there, relations to neighbouring regions were fine and there was thus no need to coin a term for this ‘normal’ state of affairs.¹ Only when the Ryukyu islands became occupied by Japanese clans and formerly friendly relations to neighbouring regions turned sour, ‘peace’ became a notion to refer to. Adding to the complexity is the change of meaning of words and concepts over time. ‘Family’, for instance, came to replace the ‘household’ as the reference for a common unit of social organisation in modern societies. This change in language indicates the conceptual change that took place. House, household and kinship are nowadays notions associated with a societal organisation characterised as ‘traditional’ or pre-modern, whereas family signifies something more modern, something disentangled from kinship-based societies and hence representing the emergence of territorially based societies in which, eventually, the individual gained priority as a subject of rights. When we turn to the Japanese translation of family, this conceptual disentanglement is rather latent and not as obvious: the term 家族 (kazoku) which is the common translation today for family is composed of the character for house (家 ka) and tribe/people (族 zoku). The same character for house (家) read as ie was the dominant unit of social organisation in pre-modern Japan. Thinking of family as a social unit detached from the concept of house seems thus to be quite an alien idea in Japanese, although today’s Japan would not be considered a kinship- or household-based society. I come back to the example of kinship and family in the discussion of disciplines as an ordering principle of knowledge production.

In Arabic, to raise another example, the translation of conceptual terms such as ‘gender’ is a contested task and a challenging endeavour (Kamal 2008: 262–64). While the pragmatic version of using the Anglicism and converting the letters (i.e. writing the Arabic consonant letters جندر (jndr) and omitting the vowels as commonly done when they are short) is a frequent one, it is not always preferred. J(e)nd(e)r has the smack of a Western concept and may, as such, be missing cultural ‘authenticity’. Knowledge, family, gender and other ‘commonly understood’ terms reveal their contextual embeddedness once they migrate into different contexts and are made comprehensible through translation. Definitions only help as long as the experiential commensurability of the underlying ideas and concepts is given.

I am raising these examples since they nurture my everyday business as a scholar of Asian and Middle Eastern societies and a social scientist who is expected to deliver findings (in fact knowledge) serving to understand ‘the world’ writ large. It is the daily encounter with ‘translations’ of presumably universally known terms and concepts that has caught my constant attention for fallacies coming along with the exercise of producing knowledge on areas and connections between people around the globe (i.e. cooperation). Most of my reflections on global cooperation draw from knowledge accumulated in world regions different from the one I grew up in; the natural question to ask is how can I be confident in having translated empirical reality ‘properly’ into research findings which are then shared by an ever-expanding scientific community? It is not necessary to mention that ‘proper’ findings in the social sciences are neither achievable nor can they be decreed because they are always constructed to a certain extent and based on subjective interpretations. As feminists, for example, have learned, gender equality means different things to different people. As obvious as this realisation is, it does not prevent me from reflecting thoroughly on the key terms of this volume. The only thing it does is to urge an understanding based on awareness of the subjectivity and, at times, the definitional hegemony in social science research. The exercise of translating necessitates due attention to the context wherein ideas and concepts are embedded, but it also has its limits as I have demonstrated. I have therefore opted to make as transparent as possible the mental avenue I walked when trying to comprehend the terms ‘knowledge production’, ‘Area Studies’ and ‘global cooperation’.

The subsequent sections of this chapter address the semantics of knowledge and its production; the comprehension of regions and areas in social science; and global cooperation with a focus on actors’ connectedness across localities, nations, and regions. The chapter discusses concrete aspects of international relations and cooperation and builds the bridge to the next chapter on alternative epistemologies. A question to be tackled throughout the book is what the study of global cooperation may gain from the inclusion of alternative epistemologies and, eventually, the behavioural dimensions of translocal, transnational and transregional connectedness that are nurtured in epistemic settings other than the dominant ‘Western’ or ‘Northern’. Depending on the literature consulted, the West, the (global) North, Northern-American or European are the preferred terms to refer to the part of the world where most of the hegemonic knowledge that pervades institutions of learning around the globe has been generated. I leave the different cardinal directions uncommented and use the West (and adjectives Western and non-Western) as my own term of choice. I do so in the most neutral way possible, i.e. neither implying a ‘West versus X’ relationship nor ignoring the fact that cardinal directions such as the West have emerged from a particular worldview. The West is a fuzzy but tenaciously utilised denominator, one which has become settled in academia.

Knowledge

Knowledge is a household term, yet it is rarely digested in the myriads of contexts in which it is used. Searching for a handy explanation of what knowledge is about, I came across a textbook by Kristof van Asshe and Anna-Katharina Hornidge on rural development. According to these authors (2015: 22), knowledge is:

[a]‌nything that helps us to understand the world and ourselves in it, anything that gives insight and the insight itself. […] All other distinctions between sorts of knowledge, between expertise and local knowledge, between disciplines, between experts and laymen, are contingent, can be drawn in different ways, and the way you do that has implications for your perspective on development.

I subscribe to both writers’ simply held explanation which links knowledge to understanding and insight. In an attempt to structure the conceptual field of knowledge – contingent as it were on my own subjective perspective – I find it useful to distinguish between three ways of approaching knowledge as a topic of social scientific as well as Area Studies research. These approaches also relate to the three key terms of the title. The first is to apply an historical perspective and get an idea of the epistemic concepts that knowledge in general and science – ‘as a collection of different forms of expert knowledge’ (van Asshe and Hornidge 2015: 19) – in particular were based on in different world regions. I examine this with reference to East Asia. The second is a critical appraisal of how acquisition and dissemination of knowledge of our times have become organised in institutions of learning and research. Disciplines and areas as globally utilised ordering principles are discussed as cases in point. In the third, I attend to the dependence of knowledge production on political environments and politically informed world views. This issue harks back to the critical discussion of knowledge organisation in the preceding section, but it also inverts the perspective from local to global and looks at politically motivated constraints of knowledge production in different regions and nation-states (or areas, as it were).

Recent endeavours to compile a global history of knowledge appear to aim at decentring the diffusion of knowledge (cf. Goh 2011). The perceived uni-directional flow from a Western centre to non-Western peripheries is seen as problematic and means to confront the hegemonic power, style of knowing and epistemological imperatives of knowledge deriving from one part of the world surface in articulations of distinctive regional epistemologies.² The hitherto uncommon aspect of bringing in regional epistemologies is the impetus to counter a perceived hegemony. Why the Western style of knowledge assumed a hegemonic or even imperative role becomes apparent through a glance at the study of knowledge and science during the preceding decades. In the past, regional knowledge systems have well been part of scholarly attention, as for example in comparative studies such as the ‘comparative history of science’ (Pyenson 2002: 1–33). On the one hand, comparing the genesis and development of science historically has been a scarce and relatively young activity. Lewis Pyenson (2002: 7) has attributed the beginnings of a ‘[s]‌ophisticated, comparative history of science’ in the 1950s to the work of merely four scholars: Edward Shils, Ludwig Fritz Haber, Joseph Ben-David, and Derek J. de Solla Price’. On the other hand, Western scholars did not rid themselves of normative predispositions – despite the honest appreciation of non-Western science systems. A case in point is the work of Joseph Needham, a scholar whose name shows up, apart from the four mentioned, in almost any treatise of comparative historiographies of knowledge. Needham’s studies of science and medicine in East and West from the 1950s into the 1970s are frequently cited.³ He compared China to Europe, but also the Arabic world to China and Europe – especially in the realm of medicine. He praised what China was able to achieve in the Middle Ages – much more than Europe – and points to the entanglements, interplays, and ‘marriages’ of ideas in Chinese, Greek and Arabic alchemy (cf. Pyenson 2002: 11). Needham’s appreciation of Asian and Arabic science notwithstanding, he and most of his contemporaries were still convinced that a ‘scientific revolution’ had not taken place in the non-European world, whereas it had taken place in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Europe. Hence, in retrospect, the ‘Why Not’ question came up, as Yung Sik Kim (2014b) calls it, i.e. the frequent question why China and others did not experience a scientific revolution. Underlying this question, Kim reasons, was ‘the assumption that there is a universal development pattern of the growth of scientific knowledge’ (Kim 2014a: 107). To cure this misleading assumption, Kim (2014a: 116) suggests a de-narrowing of perspectives:

Of course, the modern perspective cannot be eliminated from our attempt to understand traditional Chinese science. A minimal amount of basic modern vocabulary and concepts are needed to expound to others what we have understood. What is to be avoided in the choice of subjects for our investigation into Chinese science, however, is the preponderant, if not exclusive, emphasis, on those concepts and aspects that were significant in the development of modern science in the West.

His criticism targets the apparently unquestioned setting of norms and priorities in comparative history without pondering about the particularity and context-depe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes on the text
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• 1 Introduction: Knowledge production, Area Studies, and global cooperation
• Part I Alternative epistemologies
• Part II Areas and pluri-locality
• Index