Ver el código de «2004 - A Manifesto for the Humanities in a Technological Age - Cathy N. Davidson & David Theo Goldberg»

== <small>'''Texto'''</small> ==

In a 2002 interview, the so-called global economic adviser Jeffrey D. Sachs insisted that
interdisciplinarity was the only way to solve world problems. The need, he said, was "to focus not on the
disciplines but on the problems and to bring together five main areas in an intensive dialogue: the earth
sciences, ecological science, engineering, public health, and the social sciences with a heavy dose of
economics." What was missing, of course, were the humanities and the historical, comparative, and
critical analyses the humanities provide.

Sachs is not alone in his disregard. Few observers of higher education would deny that support for the
humanities is declining in an environment in which universities are increasingly ordered according to the
material interests, conditions, and designs of the sciences, technology, and the professions. We contend,
however, that if ever there were a time when society was in need of humanistic modes of inquiry, it is
today. More than ever, we require the deep historical perspective and specialized knowledge of other
cultures, regions, religions, and traditions provided by the humanities. And precisely because of the
rapid developments in science and technology, we must think carefully about the nature of the human,
the ethics of scientific investigation, and the global effects of technological change. Those questions --
the province of the humanities -- are vital and need to be recognized as such by universities, by society
at large, and, we admonish, by humanists themselves.

To this end, we pose three fundamental questions: Is there a place for the humanities in the
contemporary university? If so, what place? And what kind of humanities?
As scholars with experience as directors of two interdisciplinary humanities institutes -- one on the West
Coast and one on the East Coast, one at a public-university system and one at a private university -- we
offer the following manifesto for the humanities. We note that we define the humanities as our institutes
have, in a way resonant with Sachs's prescription: as problem- or issue-based rather than disciplinary,
and collaborative rather than individualistic in their model for research and thinking.
Further, our manifesto is both normative and descriptive. It is normative in the sense that we see it as a
prescription for the kind of humanities best suited to the contemporary university and its global
arrangements. It is descriptive in that we believe that the humanities have already gone through some of
the intellectual transformations we describe, but that universities and humanists themselves have not yet
fully appreciated the magnitude or the implications of the change.

Although humanists, for example, often engage in multiauthor, multidisciplinary projects (such as
collaborative histories, anthologies, and encyclopedias) with the potential to change fields, universities
and their faculties have been slow to conceive of new institutional structures and reward systems
(tenure, promotion, etc.) for those who favor interdisciplinary or collaborative work. We believe that a
new configuration in the humanities must be championed to ensure their centrality to all intellectual
enterprises in the university and, more generally, to understanding the human condition and thereby
improving it; and that those intellectual changes must be supported by new institutional structures and values.

Over the last two decades, the humanities have been reconfigured both across departmental divides and
within those entities called "traditional humanities departments." The work being done in those
departments -- the syllabi in undergraduate courses, the reading lists doctoral students prepare, the books
their professors write -- are already marked by a disciplinary heterogeneity that would have been almost
unrecognizable as pertinent to any specific disciplinary thinking a generation ago. Humanities
departments have been transformed in many different directions, with many different emphases, but all
show the marks of such crosscutting interdisciplinary areas as ethnic studies, gender studies, cultural
studies, and new kinds of area studies or global studies; critical theory has broadened the base of reading
into philosophy, sociology, ethnography, anthropology, and political and social theory. Concomitantly,
those areas of social science often called "narrative" or "interpretive" ("soft science," in a phrase we
deplore) have adopted literary theory and methods of narrative and subjective, memoiristic writing.
Performance theory has (at long last) broken down the barrier between humanistic writing about the arts
and actual artistic production (creative writing, dance, music, visual arts, performance art, multimedia
art). Science studies, critical legal theory, and science-and-information studies are all within the
province of humanistic study. Service-learning models have further extended the reach of the humanities
and the arts into the larger community, through speaker series, book clubs, outreach programs, as well as
"in reach" programs where community leaders educate academics about their ideas and practices.

We are not proposing such changes. Look around! While some were busy fighting the culture wars, a
different battle across disciplinary lines was being fought -- and it was won. The humanities in 2004 are
a many-splendored thing.

Take, for example, the remarkable excitement in areas such as classics. The melding of traditional
linguistic and historical areas (such as epigraphy or papyrology) with new techniques of 3-D digital
imaging and visualization, coupled with an expansive political geography that acknowledges that the
ancient world extended across Asia and Africa as well as over what is now known as Europe, has
changed the map of antiquity. "Postcolonial classics" may seem like an oxymoron, but some of the most
exciting work in classical studies has been carried out by archaeologists who have read contemporary
theories about the economic, political, and psychic impact of colonization and of war or revolution
against a former colonizer. Critical race theory and gender studies have added new contours to our
understanding of the past as well. Humanists delving into the contentious issue of paying reparations to
descendants of African-American slaves, for example, have been talking to classicists to sketch out a
deep and complex portrait of slavery and the impact of racism in societies that stretch from centuries
past to the United States today. Each field is richer and deeper because of the others.

The important point here (and it can be extended to medieval and Renaissance studies, too) is that the
influence is multidirectional. We are not talking about making older fields "relevant" (the rallying cry of
humanists in the late 1960s). We are saying that new interdisciplinary paradigms help us uncover whole
new areas and objects of study that, in turn, complicate the paradigms. Rather than denounce some of
this work as "present-ist," humanists need to embrace the complications of interdisciplinarity. Those
outside the humanities should draw on the humanities as they do the same.

In some core sense, however, humanists do not receive credit for the contributions they make in the
same way that, for example, scientists receive credit for discovering a way to prevent or treat a formerly
incurable disease or social scientists are quoted as authorities on current events. While a relatively minor
scientific discovery (sometimes even one based on a study not yet replicated) can become a headline in
the media at large as well as on our university Web sites, the form of knowledge offered by humanists is
less frequently viewed in terms of "discovery." Insight, analysis, logic, speculation, historical
knowledge, linguistic mastery, geographical precision, aesthetic production, or complex religious understanding are somehow not "new" -- even when they are.

Yet when university administrators make the case for the importance of higher education to legislators
or potential donors, they often summon up a humanities-based concept of general education -- even
when they do not acknowledge it as such. They typically argue that a four-year degree, with a liberal-
arts foundation, provides a better launching pad to responsible citizenship in an uncertain world than, for
example, specialized acquisition of skills in a trade school.

We need to bring to the surface for our administrators, and our university public-relations officers, how
much the distinctive underpinning of the modern research university (as well as of the liberal-arts
college) is the humanities. If all we want is expertise, industry is a far better place to learn science and
technology than a university. But, in fact, industry, more than anyplace else, wants not only highly
trained scientists; it wants scientists who can also understand applications, intellectual property, issues
of equity, human awareness, perspective, and other forms of critical analysis and logical thinking that
are specifically the contribution of humanistic inquiry. The university that loses its foundation in the
humanities loses, in effect, its most important asset in making the argument that "education" and not
"vocational training" is worth the support of taxpayers, foundations, and private donors.

The humanities engage three broad sets of questions: those of meaning, value, and significance.
Meaning concerns interpretation of data, evidence, and texts. Value ranges over the entire field of
cultural, aesthetic, social, and scientific investments. Significance, implicating both the former two,
raises questions of representation, in the sense of accounting for (explanation) and of capturing, in the
sense both of offering a faithful rendition (description) and of making broad claims (generalization).

This way of thinking links the humanities, old and new, engaging the best of both, yoking traditional
humanities interests -- interpretation and questions of value (ethics, aesthetics) -- to newer ones such as a
critical and reflexive focus on representation, on the latter's conditions of expression, signification, and
power. It prompts the following characterizations of the humanities:

*History matters. The humanities at once reflect and depend upon historical scholarship. This point is
deeply tied to the antifoundationalist disposition in today's humanities, with its skepticism of grand
universals. The focus must be on the specific context. That is true as much in the histories of the
formation of knowledge, of disciplines and their limits, as it is in particular subject matters -- the objects
of analysis -- with which we now concern ourselves. We cannot fully comprehend any object of
analysis, like the AIDS catastrophe in Africa, without understanding the historical conditions of its
emergence, modes of being, and representation.

*Relationality reveals. The relational view -- socially, conceptually, historically -- that the humanities
bring to the table provides insights and perspectives not otherwise available. For example, a catchphrase
like "American women have more freedom than any other women in the world" cries out for a greater
understanding of different conceptions of being a woman. Why are rape rates in some countries
significantly lower than in the United States? Why do numerous countries where women seem to have
few rights still have female leaders? The point is not to dismiss the idea that American women enjoy
freedom, but to comprehend what it means. To do that requires an understanding of particulars -- and of
global connections and comparisons.

*Conscience and critical memory trouble. The humanities serve as the conscience and memory of
intellectual and social life, and of the academy itself. Did the universities in Germany heroically oppose
the rise of fascism, weakly collaborate, or some of both? When have scientists acted, and not acted, in
the best interests of society? We learn the lessons of history, but we do not always enjoy them. The
humanities both reflect the world and its representations, and serve to reflect critically upon them. What a burden to bear! No wonder we're not always welcome at the dinner table in this day and age. No
longer are we only (if we ever were) the entertainers of the court.

*Creativity counts. The humanities and the arts are vital to one another, coterminous and codependent.
They support, shape, and inspire each other. After all, both are concerned with representation, with
signification and interpretation, with value and evaluation, as well as with the conditions that make those
things possible. Both are based on assumptions that there are multiple forms of intelligence. The
relationship of the humanities to the arts, however, cannot be simply subject and object (the aesthetic
production as an object of study by humanists). Artists have traditions of expression, voice, and
performativity from which those of us in the humanities have much to learn. The very highest standard
of collaboration, for example, is what dance troupes, actors, and musicians do as a matter of course:
combine an array of individual talents into a whole. Although artists and humanists often compete for
the same restricted funds, by insisting on the interconnections among our endeavors -- and by
acknowledging that those trained in expressive cultural forms may be better communicators of certain
messages than humanists -- we can shape intellectual projects that widen the scope, audience, and
importance of our intertwined endeavors.

*Social policy contains social assumptions and values. The humanities, social in character even if all
too readily hermetic in practice, can help delineate the assumptions and values in social arrangements.
Global health policy, for instance, must take into account the social hierarchies, cultural practices, belief
systems, histories and relations among subgroups (ethnic, religious, racial, sexual, etc.) to be effective.
Without deep knowledge of culture, language, and history, public policy is doomed to fail. No social
policy ought to be conceived, let alone enacted, without humanities infusion.

*Communication clarifies. If we in the humanities are to insist upon the privilege of informing critical
policy making, we must promote dialogue in clear and concise ways. We bring -- or surely can bring --
to the table interpretive and critical skills: an ability to analyze formal structures; to reveal hermeneutic
content; to highlight critical values. But, in renewing the public contributions of the humanities, we need
to find the language to generalize from our specialized training without compromising the critical and
interpretative values for which we stand.

*Diversity is important. The humanities have been the principal (and for the most part the principled)
site of diversity and diversification in the academy, both demographically and intellectually.
Engineering, the sciences, the social sciences, and, to a lesser extent, the business schools now may be
playing catch-up, recruiting increasingly diverse student and faculty populations; but the humanities are
still way ahead in facing up to the challenge of understanding diversity in complex and paradigm-
changing ways (just consider the contributions of ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and other
identity-based programs).

*Linguistic diversity is essential to real heterogeneity. More than other areas, the humanities have
remained committed to promoting the speaking and reading of languages other than English. Indeed, the
language requirement, where it remains for the humanities, is part of the reason we have lost students to
the social sciences, where they are happy to speak in a single tongue -- and where students in area
studies are happily sent to the humanities to learn the foreign language of an area of specialization. But
the elevation of English as the global lingua franca of commerce has placed enormous pressure on the
continuing viability of language programs.

We conclude with three points, two institutional and one social. The first concerns the humanities and
new technologies. The humanities have a central place in exploring the possibilities, the reach and
implications, of digital technologies and cultures: how technology shapes what we think about the
human and the humane. But there are myriad questions. What do we in the humanities want from those technologies? What do we want them to contribute to our collective needs and interests, scholarship and
pedagogical practices, so that we are not merely passive consumers or after-the-fact commentators?

How can we count (for tenure or promotion) work that scholars do in a new digital environment and that
will quickly outstrip the work they publish on paper? How do we best employ new technologies (which
our students often find less intrusive than we seem to) for pedagogical purposes? Most important, how
can humanistic training (taxonomical, philosophical, indexical) be used to solve one of the biggest
problems of the information age: How do we make sense of too much information? Humanistic thinking
is ideally suited to creating next-generation, multimedia search engines that also order, sort, and
minimize information flow. Doing so is not a matter of hardware or software but of collective thinking
and analysis

The second institutional point is that new humanities require new structures. As we think through the
revolution in electronic communication, we need to create new models for researchers to work across
disciplinary boundaries, making use of databases and resources that no one scholar, or department, can
maintain. That requires planning at an institutional level. We need, too, to stop talking around the issue
of the single-author monograph as the benchmark for excellence, and to confront what new kinds of
collaboration mean for tenure review, accreditation, and more.

That brings us to our third point. We live in challenging times, and if we don't mind our manor (not to
mention our manners), we will find our intellectual and pedagogical environments drastically changed
without our more or less consciously shaping them. We have much to offer, and we need to be assertive
in defining our contribution, labeling it, and getting our message heard.

The humanities provide the social and cultural contexts of the creation and application of knowledge, the
critical reflections upon how knowledge is created and what its effects and implications are. The
humanities promote a broad range of social and cultural literacies. They offer critical civic
competencies, ways of comprehending cultural and technological values, and the worlds such values
conjure; in short, ways of world making. A world without the humanities would be one in which science
and technology knew no point of social reference, had lost their cultural compass and moral scope. It
would be a world narrowly limited and limitlessly narrow.

It is true that being "above the radar screen" has a certain social risk but far less of a risk than being
peripheralized, marginalized, underfinanced, and out of the collective decision making at our
universities or in the society beyond. The university remains one of the only places in our public sphere
for informed, sustained, critical analysis. The humanities represent that practice and that form. We must
face the challenge and assume the social responsibility of translating our specialized knowledge in ways
that might inform the public, contribute to policy discussions, and, in the process, show students, faculty
members, university administrators, and state legislators the importance of the humanities

Cathy N. Davidson is vice provost for interdisciplinary studies and a professor of English at Duke
University. David Theo Goldberg is director of the University of California Humanities Research
Institute and a professor of African-American studies and of criminology, law, and society at the
University of California at Irvine


== <small>'''Contexto'''</small> ==}

Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

== <small>'''Autoras'''</small> ==

== <small>'''Fuentes'''</small> ==

== <small>'''Enlaces'''</small> ==

'''URL:''' 

'''Wayback Machine:''' http://web.archive.org/web/20120129022820/https://uchri.org/media/pdfs/Manifesto_Humanities.pdf

[[Categoría:Manifiestos]]
[[Categoría:Inglés]]
[[Categoría:2004]]
[[Categoría:Cathy N. Davidson]]
[[Categoría:David Theo Goldberg]]