Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 22:43:48 -0500
From: rlilly-AT-scott.skidmore.edu (Reg Lilly)
Subject: Re: PLC: Cultural Studies


>I think that Stirling's parody and Metin's comments on
>antthropology/sociology/cultural studies may rest on a misconception
>about how academic fields usually form.  Sure, there's a lot of
>overlap in the subject matter of the humanities and the human
>sciences--but then, there's a lot of overlap in the subject matters
>of biology, chemistry, and physics.  It seems to be that new fields
>emerge because they have new methods and paradigms, not new subject
>matters--though I'm sure there are exceptions.

        The emergence of academic disciplines is rather interesting, and
not very uniform (or so it seems to me).  Skidmore College faculty recently
approved a major in Women's Studies, and though the ground swell was behind
approving the major, there were some acerbic, and admittedly interesting,
arguments against it.  To smmarize, there were several people who felt that
the Women's Studies was not a discipline, but an "orientation," and that
the work being claimed by women's studies was just a hodge-podge of people
in various fields that 'talk about women's experience.'  The arguement went
that if there could be a women's studies major, we could have an Upperclass
White Male major -- one can define one's 'field' by defining a phenomenon.
Others pointed to women's studies as marked by 'poor scholarship.' In
effect, all the arguments I heard could be applied mutatis mutandis to any
new discipline.  They seemed unconvincing to me for their 'a priori'
reasoning.

Ciao,
Reg




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