Johnson's Russia List
#9290
9 November 2005
Russia Profile: Slavic Studies Face an Uncertain Future. Interview by
Andrei Zolotov Jr. with Katherine Verdery
Russia Profile
www.russiaprofile.org
November 8, 2005
Slavic Studies Face an Uncertain Future
Interview by Andrei Zolotov Jr.
When about 1300 scholars from all over the United States and many other
countries descended upon Salt Lake City on Nov. 3 for the 37th annual
convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic
Studies (AAASS), this organization of area specialists was facing serious
challenges.
Apart from the hundreds of sections and panels on subjects as diverse as
"Bodily Function, Dysfunction and Repair: Russian Literature and
Physiology," "Russia's Big Business Under Putin" and "Slavic Diachronic
Morphosynthax," there was a plenary session entitled "What's In a Name?"
where the future of the association itself - and the declining role of
former Soviet regional studies in American academia - were debated.
On the sidelines of the convention, Russia Profile Editor Andrei Zolotov
Jr. interviewed Katherine Verdery, the outgoing president of AAASS and a
Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York, about the trends in Russia and neighboring area
studies in the United States.
RP: The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, or
AAASS, appears to be at the crossroads. When was the AAASS started and what
is its purpose?
Katherine Verdery: The organization was started in 1938 by a group of
people who were trying to promote a deeper understanding of the Soviet
world and the satellite countries that had come under the Soviet
domination. But these were all scholars, not CIA people. A lot of them were
?migr?s from what was then the Soviet Union, and they wanted an
organization in which they could talk about the things they were writing
about.
It then grew and, at its height, included around 5000 members. But since
1991 numbers have been gradually going down, because it is no longer an
area that attracts a lot of new scholars. Today students are going into a
study of China or the Middle East - you know, whatever is hot, attracts
more people. So, we are trying to develop some new panels and new kinds of
events at this convention, which may increase the membership and attract
some younger scholars.
One of the things that I was trying to promote was a change of the
organization's name, because "Slavic studies" describes only a small part
of what the membership does. Their work encompasses countries like Romania,
Hungary, the Baltic republics and Central Asia, where the term "Slavic" is
completely irrelevant. And now we don't really have the same kind of
coherence to the whole East European, Soviet, Russian area that we did
before. So I started the panel discussion on whether the name should stay
the same or be changed. And the people present at the panel, which is of
course a small subset of the organization as a whole, voted to change the
name. But we didn't decide what to change it to. Maybe Association for the
Slavic and Eurasian Studies or something like that.
But it has always been a scholarly organization and it has always had a mix
of people who came to the United States from the Soviet Union and East
European countries and native-born American scholars like myself - I have
absolutely no connection with Romania, I just got interested in it.
RP And what is exactly your field of study?
KV I am an anthropologist. I have worked for the past 15 years on property
transformation and wrote a book about de-collectivization of agriculture in
Transylvania. And before that I worked on national identity, ethnic
relations and so on.
RP Apart from the decline in numbers, what are the trends in the
development of this area studies in America?
KV The fields that have always been most heavily represented in the
organization were history and literature. Social sciences were less
dominant, although political science was the one with the greatest presence
from social sciences, especially in the days when Kremlinology was an
important part of our understanding of what was happening in the Soviet
government.
One of the important differences is that in the last ten years or so
political scientists have really been dropping out of the organization and
we haven't got many new ones in. Part of the reason is that political
science as a discipline seems to be captured by certain kinds of theories,
like rational choice theory, which doesn't believe that politics happens in
particular places. They think they can develop general theoretical models
and apply them anywhere. Also, within political science, the sexy thing to
do is to develop theoretical models, and you don't get any professional
recognition for being an area specialist.
At the same time more anthropologists are joining it, because anthropology
is a field that depends on being able to do research on-site. During the
Soviet period, very few people could do field research inside the Soviet
Union. Now we have opportunities to go to all the Central Asian republics,
the Baltics, many parts of Russia and Eastern Europe. So anthropology is
growing while political science is declining. I think literature people and
historians continue to be more important in terms of sheer numbers, but
even in those subject areas fewer people are signing up now to take courses
in Russian, Czech, Slovak, Serbian or Hungarian, and fewer people are
coming to study the history of Russia or the Soviet Union. So, overall,
there has been a tendency in American academia toward a diminished interest
in this area, which I think is terribly unfortunate. Because it is a very,
very important part of the world. It will continue to be an important part
of the world, and it's a fascinating part of the world.
RP What can actually be done to rejuvenate these studies and the
association?
KV One thing is that a lot of the younger scholars, who are now coming up
in political science or history, are not particularly enthusiastic about
this organization, because they see it as remains of the old cold warrior
types who were very strongly anti-Soviet, anti-Communist. This stereotype
is not true, although there certainly were many people who had that kind of
orientation. One of the reasons I was thinking of changing the name is to
give a signal that this is actually a different organization now. A lot of
the old cold warriors have retired and died. Their contribution was
valuable at the time, but they no longer call the shots of the intellectual
direction for the organization.
We are going to have new kinds of panels, different types of ways for
people to present their work. We'll have workshops for students on how to
write a dissertation. We'll have ongoing themes; for instance, every year
we'll have a panel on U.S. foreign policy towards Russia and Eastern
Europe. And we'll try to make the newsletter more of a forum for discussion
of contemporary issues instead of just telling ourselves that this
convention is happening. Our journal, Slavic Review, needs to represent
social science and not just literature and history.
RP Is there enough interaction with Russian scholars? I have seen some
Russians here, I saw more at your previous convention in Boston last year.
But is this enough for American scholars to meet with scholars from the
region?
KV We would definitely like it to be that way. Many of the earlier members
were people who had come from that region, so they had immediate personal
ties there. But now it is more possible for us to have scholars who still
live in Russia or Estonia or whatever come to our meetings. In the early
1990s we had set up a special fund to which members could contribute by
adding a donation to their dues. It would be used to pay for airfare for
people to come from East European countries and the former Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, that fund never got really big. But we are glad to have
people here who can come with their own steam, and it is very valuable to
us. We have here, for example, Andrei Kortunov, the executive director of
the Mega-Project Development of Education in Russia, who is an absolutely
wonderful sort of academic entrepreneur in Russia. There is a number of
graduate students from Russia who are on panels - they are in the U.S.
getting their degrees, but they don't necessarily intend to stay here, so
they occupy a kind of intermediate category: people from the area who don't
come over just for the convention, and they add wonderful knowledge to the
discussions.
RP How many members are there today?
KV About 2700. At the convention we have about half that number. If we hold
a convention in Boston or Washington, it is usually about 1800 people.
RP What do you think Russia could do to help Russian studies in American
universities? Because one would assume that it would be in Russia's
interests to promote an understanding of the country.
KV You can't have scholars do things if there is no money to pay for their
research. In the United States the sources are drying up and foundations
like the Ford Foundation or Rockefeller Foundations, which used to give
money to social sciences for research, don't give that funding anymore. So
we need funding for research activities.
Secondly, there is a problem of maintaining faculty positions in Russian
studies in American universities, which also requires specialized funding.
And thirdly, participation of scholars from Russia and other countries in
the area would also rejuvenate the organization.
RP Does it make sense to keep treating this region as a single entity? Are
the Czech Republic and Turkmenistan still part of the same region to you?
KV That's another question I put to the audience at this panel [on the
strategic development of the organization]. People have a very divided
opinion on this. Personally, I don't think it makes sense to keep Central
Asia as part of this regional study. Although throughout the former Soviet
space there are things that connect the parts together, Hungary is today a
member of the European Union, while Kazakhstan has very little reason to be
included into the same scholarly organization. So, I think over the next 10
to 15 years people studying Central Asian republics might gradually start
attending Middle Eastern studies associations or set up their own Central
and South Asian studies association.
RP But are you saying that Central Europe, South Eastern Europe and Russia
are still part of one region?
KV Well, I think so. Although Central European countries are already
spinning off into the European Union, it is really hard to say where the
boundaries are going to be. It is a very interesting time now to see how a
whole collection of countries that was tied together by a similar political
and economic system is taking many different trajectories out of it. How
that will affect the way different countries are grouped ten years from now
will be a very interesting thing to follow.
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