There are many possible ways to discuss Field Notes, Zachary Lockman's latest book. It certainly calls for a roundtable forum, a critical reflection by a younger member of the profession, or a review essay along with recent publications about the structure, purpose, and political culture of the field. Since it begs for a longer conversation, a standard book review is not the optimal framework for discussing the meaning of this exploration of the institutional foundations of our profession. Clearly, this is not another scholarly contribution to some “strangely neglected” corner of the field. Rather, it is a book that seeks to rearrange the DNA of our professional community as a form of foundation repair. “Think of it as a service to the profession,” advised one colleague. Indeed, the book is most certainly something of that nature.
The writer, Zachary Lockman, hardly needs an introduction in these pages. It is enough to say that, along with a few select others, Lockman inherited something akin to “founder's stock” in the profession. Lockman brings with him decades of dedicated, balanced, and impartial service, and Field Notes was anticipated for quite some time and was rumored to be a significant intervention in the politics of the field: complementary in purpose and character to his largely successful book Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). However, while Contending Visions courageously defended our craft against a neoconservative attack by outsiders, in this book the author deals with our own demons: a far more challenging and politically fraught task. In Field Notes, there are no outsiders to rally against. Thus, instead of a return to the methods and purpose of his previous book, Lockman here offers a deep, archive-based excavation of our field, the goal of which is to establish a consensual institutional memory that can clarify the origins of our institutions and their forms of organization, and by doing so, elucidate our general mode of being. Unlike previous genealogies of the field, including a brief article by Timothy Mitchell published in 2004 (“The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David L. Szanton [Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2004], 74–118), Lockman does not follow the history of ideas. Instead, he follows the money and the institutions to which it gave birth, a choice that leads him to the 1920s thus undermining Mitchell's emphasis on the exclusive influence of the Cold War. Emphasizing (impersonal) institutions rather than (very personal) ideas and ideologies determines the overall measured tone of the book and steers it as far away as possible from current readings of “the political.” Though there was a certain wisdom in this choice, this absence also calls attention to itself: a point to which I will return later.
Lockman writes about long-forgotten times in which one could squeeze the entire field into a corner of a small café and hold an impromptu fateful business meeting. These were times in which it took Philip Hitti of Princeton University five minutes of casual small talk to secure a major grant from the Carnegie Corporation. But beyond the anecdotal, Lockman is seriously interested in figuring out key questions: What does it mean to build a field? Which infrastructure is required? Where will the money come from? Which norms should govern the field? Which disciplines should comprise it and within what sort of hierarchy? What should its attitude be toward the needs of the state and other interested parties? These are timely questions. The correspondence he unearthed reveals a very American story of how the private money of the Rockefellers, Fords, and Carnegies was systematically put to work for the sake of “field building.” Money alone, however, is not the whole story, as these private foundations provided a form of leadership with very specific demands and requests. Time and again they wanted to see concrete results to match imagined goals, goals that in hindsight were quite amorphous and oftentimes far-fetched. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that intellectuals in the field were not at all its builders, a reality that inscribed a certain split between the institutional and the intellectual. Meanwhile, for the first three decades of this formative era, the US government showed no significant interest in this enterprise.
The book is arranged chronologically, beginning in the 1920s and ending in the 1980s. We learn that US President Woodrow Wilson's failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and join the League of Nations pushed the internationalist officers of the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations to invest in area studies. Even more surprising is how unattractive the field appeared to students in both the humanities and social sciences, who flocked instead to African Studies. It is revealing, for instance, to discover the history behind the chronic complaint that the knowledge in the field is of inferior quality. Members and donors were complaining about this problem from the very beginning. Given limitations of funding and academic interest, unreachable ideals permeate this story. Such, for instance, was the aspiration to establish a “genuine scholarly association” that is entirely free of politics or the hope that the field would develop “some unique or distinctive intellectual paradigm” (xviii).
Other issues are more well-known: the Cold War demand for actionable knowledge, collaboration with governmental agencies, transparency and accountability in foreign funding, the persistent issue of the Arab–Israeli conflict, and the many scandals and unsavory affairs that characterized the early years. Overall, in page after page, we learn of the many difficulties and insurmountable barriers that the founders needed to surpass in order to establish the field as an intellectually viable and organizationally sound and self-sustained community. This is not a linear story of a success. There is much back and forth, endemic pessimism, unbridled optimism, unwarranted caution, and maybe some recklessness as well.
Undoubtedly, Lockman tells an important story. But what does it actually mean? Assuming that facts don't wear their interpretations on their sleeves, the question is what can young members of the profession do with this fine-grained account? Though Lockman studiously avoids imposing any politically tinged interpretive framework—treating his subject matter as though it were the history of astrophysics—it is perhaps possible to speculate about the real message of his work. In more than one way, the book's main argument is not necessarily the one about institution building. This and other subtle points only form the exterior framing for a much more important, albeit passive, argument about the deep rhythms of the field. In a way, and without saying so explicitly, Lockman seems to argue that a field which survived the violent upheavals and vicissitudes of the last century should stick to its current structures and culture. It is therefore an argument on behalf of steady institutional continuity and the need to abstain from “rocking the boat” as the best guarantor for the collective well-being of the community. By definition, “continuity arguments” of this nature are conservative. I use that term in the most positive sense possible, as a perspective that calls for moderation and a measured, fine-tuned alteration of established practices and norms. As the antithesis of radical action, Field Notes could be read as a call for perspective and moderation by a hugely respected veteran who, in the best of Arab intellectual tradition, is performing the task of the shāhid ʿala al-ʿaṣr (a wise elder) for the benefit of al-jīl al-jadīd (the young generation).
If that is indeed the intention, I am not sure that the young generation is listening. It has no patience for detailed arguments about institutional histories and their assumed fragility. Instead, it wishes to see radical, decisive, and immediate intervention on behalf of a host of causes and issues, the most prominent of which is that of Palestine and the prospect of a full academic boycott. Lockman does not hint at any of this, and ends his book in the safe territory of the mid-1980s. No doubt it is a very nice ending. But it does raise questions about the complete absence of women among the founders and the possible implications of this gender makeup. Of equal importance, as the reader turns the last page and closes the book, he or she will find themselves sitting next to the elephant in the room, and will have to decide what to do with it. It is a very big elephant indeed; perhaps it is even a mammoth. Only time will tell what the field should do with Palestine and whether Lockman's strategy of dispassionately laying the facts bare will yield more of the moderate action that is organically in line with his story or, instead, yield action that will divert from this pattern in new and unexpected ways. Whichever choice is made, it will be yet another twist in the long history of an unquiet profession, but certainly not its end.
