I always enjoy looking around me and trying to get a sense of what is happening in my profession. I’m an historian of Southeast Asian history, but I also have a background in Chinese history and world history, and I guess you could say Asian Studies as well.
That professional world feels very different to me now than it did ten, or certainly twenty, years ago. A few years ago, I wrote a couple of related articles about my experiences in academia to date (here and here). I continue to think about it, and decided to update those ideas here.
What I feel now is a sense that everything has become “dispersed.” Yes, there are still people who research and publish about topics in say Southeast Asian history, but I no longer see a logic to what people are doing. You see someone promote a new publication on social media here, and then a few weeks later you see another publication mentioned there. . . and then that’s it.
Or you go to one of the mega-conferences where there are twenty-five panels at the same time. . . and find that it is difficult to find ones that stand out.
That said, I can never be sure if the things I sense are actually happening, or if I am just in a bubble. So, I thought I’d try to express here what I sense or feel, and maybe others will agree or disagree, but hopefully that can help me get a better sense of what is going on.
My perspective is mainly American-centric, as that is where I have spent most of my career to date, but at the end I’ll try to talk a bit about other places.
Superstars and Big Ideas
This morning I asked my wife, who works in a range of fields dealing with topics in education, the internationalization of higher education, the sociology of globalization, etc., “Who are the superstars in your field these days?”
She said, “There really aren’t any. It’s all kind of equal now.”
We both agreed that this was not good.
When I was a graduate student in the 1990s, there were clear “superstars” in all of the fields I was involved in: Chinese history, Southeast Asian history, and world history. Then there were also what we might call “big idea superstars,” that is, people who came up with some kind of theoretical approach that scholars in multiple fields all engaged with.
While I didn’t necessarily agree with all of these superstars, they played an important role because they facilitated discussion. When many people were talking about the same idea or approach, you were forced to also learn and think about that idea or approach, and that would 1) help you improve your own ideas, and 2) enable you to contribute to a wider discussion by either building on or challenging the ideas of superstars.
As such, superstars and big ideas helped move scholarship forward. However, by the early 2000s, the age of superstars and big ideas had largely come to an end. I feel like Arjun Appadurai’s 1996 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization was perhaps the last “big idea” book that had a wide influence across many fields.
So, what happened to the superstars and big ideas? I don’t really know. This is where I start to have to “feel” things.
Human Factors
The first thing to note is that most of the superstars and big ideas from the 1970s-1990s belonged to a single generation, the generation born after World War II and known as the Baby Boomer generation. By the 1990s, most of these scholars were in their fifties, and that’s right about the time when people can start to run out of new ideas, or get repetitive, or get bored/tired. Therefore, perhaps the end of the age of superstars and big ideas was because they were linked to a generation which followed the normal course of human life.
However, it would make sense that this would have led to the rise of a subsequent generation with its own superstars and big ideas, but that’s not what has happened. So, why is that?
One possibility is that it could be that theories and methodologies had done all they could do, that is, that they had reached a point where they were not able to offer significant new insights or explanations. In other words, maybe there are no superstars or big ideas now because there is nothing left to say.
While that’s possible, I think people can always find new ways to look at the world. However, to do that, they have to be able to see it in a different way from their predecessors. Again, just basing off my own experience, I spent about twenty-five years in the same history department, first as a graduate student and then as a professor, and the department that I left after twenty-five years was much more homogenous in its worldview than the one had I entered.
What follows with that homogeneity, I would argue, is a tendency to perpetuate certain established ideas (the ones upheld by the homogenous group). As such, perhaps one reason why we no longer have superstars and big ideas is because the profession has become more homogenous.
Another phenomenon that I can sense (and again, this is an American-centric view) is that there hasn’t been a natural generational change in academia. Instead, the Baby Boomer generation has continued to work into their seventies or even eighties and that has also made it difficult for new ideas and approaches to take hold.
Economic and Technological Factors
Adding to these human factors have been economic (1998 and 2008 crises, etc.) and technological (the rise of the Internet) ones.
When I first started working in the early 2000s, there was a lot of job mobility. It was very common for a new PhD to first get a job at a small college, and to then move in two or three years to a state university, and then if the person was particularly productive, to an “elite” university in say five to seven years. Meanwhile, superstars were able to switch from one elite university to another.
By the end of the 2000s, job mobility was basically dead. If you had a job by that point, it would be the last job you would ever have, so you had to hold onto it. For those who did not yet have jobs, it would probably take years to obtain one, but if you did succeed in getting a job, again, it would most likely be the only job you would ever have.
The possibility of (upward) mobility encourages people to excel to be able to be good enough to deserve a better position. Also, job mobility forces one to address key issues in a field, or academia at large, to show that one is engaging with, or leading, that field.
When job mobility doesn’t exist, then excelling in one’s field becomes more of a personal choice. This could be another contributing factor to the disappearance of superstars and big ideas.
Then there is the Internet. Whenever I see people talking about the state of academia, I rarely see people talking about the Internet, but for me, I think the internet has been enormously disruptive (but I still love the Internet).
Before the Internet, knowledge production took place in controlled spaces (in universities, in journals and presses recognized by scholars in a field) and was only available in controlled spaces (university libraries). The Internet blew the walls of those controlled spaces away. When that happened, I think that the meaning of what was going on in those spaces was blown away as well.
When the world was something far away from the controlled space where scholars were working, it was easier to imagine that what you were doing was somehow important. However, when those walls were blown away and you could see all the amazing things that other people in the world were doing, it became harder to figure out how exactly the topics academics spent their time researching and talking about mattered (and to whom).
I have my theory that this loss of meaning has seriously affected people. They may not consciously think about it, but I do think that it is affecting people at a subconscious level, and I think it lessens the drive to research and publish, to mobilize people to organize workshops or conferences, etc.
As a result, everything now seems very “dispersed” to me. Someone might publish an article, but then you don’t hear anything again from that person for years. You don’t see workshops or conferences that focus on some “big idea,” because, again, there aren’t any big ideas (other than to decolonize everything, but that’s a different story).
The Rise of Asia
In the late 1990s and early 2000s there was a lot of talk/hype about the coming “rise of Asia” and how the center of knowledge production for fields like Southeast Asian Studies was going to move from North America to the Southeast Asian Region.
Yes, there is a lot of dynamism in academia in Asia (some of which is tied to the push for rankings). However, I don’t see anything congealing together to create any sense of the place as a center of anything. Again, everything is “dispersed.”
Vietnam, for instance, is extremely dynamic, and we can see this in the pressures to publish internationally. What this has led to is a wave of international publications that are dispersed in all manner of journals around the world. However, in the absence of big ideas or superstars to engage with, these works end up addressing a wide range of unrelated topics.
So, there are a lot of new publications, but many don’t work effectively together to move scholarship forward (or they might only move forward small topics in sub-fields).
Meanwhile, there is also a lot of mobility. People in Vietnam who can publish a lot can easily move from one university to another, like the superstars used to be able to do in the US in the 1990s. However, that can also lead to the problem of people not being at an institution long enough to build a solid program (my department had that problem in the early 2000s in the final years of academic mobility).
Again, all of this leads to a “dispersal” of people and scholarship.
So, that’s what I feel now. There has been a “great dispersal” that has played out in different ways in different places, but the result is more or less the same.
And that makes me wonder: Is this what the world of academic knowledge production will look like from now on?
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Biologists sometimes talk of charismatic mega-fauna like whales and dolphins and elephants and lions that seize the attention of the public, while my prosaic animals tends to be forgotten. And yet the latter dominate most ecosystems. I was lucky enought to work with “superstars” who were brilliant in many ways. But what they were not good at was community building. We need not at all work on the same thing or in the same way, but a sense of what is important, what questions need answering, and what skills might be necessary to answer those questions. One of the great tragedies, at least in the US, this seems less true in Paris and Leiden, is the collapse of real language proficiency. I have only accepted graduate students working on VIetnam who already have classical and modern Chinese. Inscriptions on stele, câu đôi on temples, thành ngữ and tục ngữ make no sense otherwise. Nor does the great repository of Hán-Nôm literature or inscriotions everywhere. Or how are to understand the shift fronm the veneration of the Amithaba Buddha to the Maitreya Buddha? My feeling is that ther eis not just a tyranny of dispersion, but also a loss of the sense that one is part is a of long conversation to which sometimes one can add a useful (intelligent and accurate) sentence or two.