Feature Article-1: Why Humanities?
Homi K. Bhabha
The humanities form part of a sweeping arc of human learning - literature,
philosophy, history, languages, music, art history, the classics, religious
studies. We must not assume, however, that these disciplines belong to a single
scholarly tradition or share similar methods of analysis. Each discipline
develops its distinctive account of an evolving history, based in part on
prevailing cultural and institutional circumstances, and in part on the
evolution of norms and genres that best express its vision and values.
What the humanities have in common is a peculiar relationship to the world:
They are in the world, but not entirely of it. And humanists often occupy a
similar liminal position, working across a shadow line that, at once, divides
and joins the "real" world with the imagination, one disciplinary
realm with another. Interdisciplinarity is not merely a scholarly method. It
represents an ethical commitment to promoting a diversity of perspectives - to
engaging in productive, if properly contentious, conversations between
disciplines.
Humanists are as concerned with reshaping the means with which we interpret
human realities as they are with reflecting these realities. Philosophers
provide us with concepts that may seem distant and abstract, but they enable us
to grasp underlying structures of thought that are not always apparent to the
naked eye: How do words and things relate to each other? How do we connect
immanent causes with singular cases? Poets illuminate the world with images and
metaphors that are distant from daily discourse, but nevertheless uncover the
imaginative and verbal intensity that lies concealed in everyday things -
perhaps a jar in Tennessee, or a rambling rose, or even blue suede shoes.
Scholarly knowledge is most often produced "at one remove" from
everyday experience. Through a process of conceptualization the empirical world
comes to be represented in linguistic signs, scientific formulae, resonant
symbols, or digital images. Humanists reflect as much on these processes of mediation
as on the outcomes of knowledge. They draw attention to the frames, maps, or
tables with which we construct our access to reality at one remove. They
reflect on ways in which social reality is translated into metaphor
(literature), image (art), abstract reasoning (philosophy), narrative and
memory (history). Literature is, in some profound sense, about the shape of
language and words, but it is also about character, action, social and
political consciousness, unconscious fantasy. Art is about light, color, paint,
stone, and figurative technique, but it is also about religious passion,
aesthetic interest, the intimation of pain, and the perception of beauty and
virtue.
Humanists may not primarily be seen as hunters of facts or gatherers of
data, but they have deep interests in the empirical world of archives,
documentary research, and the institutional histories and genealogies of their
disciplines. The humanist's skill or craftsmanship lies in endowing both the
archive and the experience of everyday life with a "fourth" dimension
that becomes visible in the art of narrative: the telling of a story, the
process of an argument, or the making of a picture. Humanists are embedded in
this world of poesies and mimesis Ñ in "making" and "representing"
- as forms of human communication through which a historical world comes to be,
and to belong, to those who inhabit its ambit of ideas, images, and values. The
communal (and communicative) world of the humanities encourages a diversity of
intellectual approaches in order to ensure that our scholarly culture preserves
traditions of democratic participation and protects freedom of interpretation.
This is why the humanities build communities rather than
"models," and this is why the public always feels that it has a stake
in humanistic debates. The humanities make a unique contribution to
establishing - through dialogue and interpretation - communities of interest
and climates of opinion.
Like the weather, humanistic knowledge can be changeable, turbulent, and
elusive. But does anybody seriously argue that we can do without air? We need
the humanities, as we do the atmosphere, for they allow us to draw the breath
of human life and art, and in that process to aspire to the best in ourselves
and others.
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