Lost in the Translation

Michael Dutton’s “Lead Us Not into Translation” is a penetrating and informed account of how area studies grew out of (perhaps I should say genealogically descended from) philology, Oriental studies, and the privilege accorded to translation, a painful reminder of the arguments that have attended area studies since its inception, and a passionate plea to restore to it theoretical purpose that was lost in the translation. In the current situation, the status of area studies in the academic procession has been put into question from several quarters and its “discipline” has either been shown to be insubstantial (a sign of irrelevance) or is dismissed as an exhausted echo of the ColdWar. Despite the assault on what might be described as a Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs continue to enjoy an untroubled existence in the university precincts in the United States and abroad. Not too many years ago the Ford Foundation, perhaps the largest benefactor of this “theme park,” announced another round of institutional grants, cash that would give these aging relics unperturbed grazing space and a stay of extinction. This current situation doesn’t appear to beDutton’s uppermost concern; he focuses instead on providing a genealogy of, or Foucauldian “history of the present” to, area studies. But it is difficult to dissociate these more contemporary considerations from either the preoccupation with explaining why area studies has eschewed theory for applied science, or from the connection with prior forms of philological “scienticization” and the service Oriental studies has provided the colonial and colonizing project. Dutton is correct to hold up contemporary social scientific disdain for area studies because of its “unrigorous” approach (we might pause to wonder about the claims of rigor in rational choice theory and its enabling conception of human nature driven by calculation and maximalization!) and his narrative often recalls a long-standing controversy in U.S. academic