4. Facing the Global Future

The Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences as Both Global and Local

For the arts, humanities, and social sciences, the way forward toward engaging globalization more fully is, ironically, at least suggested by the paradox that fields with responsibility for understanding and expressing social and cultural interaction are often less international than those that pay little attention to such interaction. Certainly the arts, humanities, and social sciences will continue to develop international networks and collaborations. Those contacts will, moreover, be especially helpful in contributing over time to mutual understanding and appreciation across traditional divisions. But along with this crucial role, the arts, humanities, and social sciences must also provide a counterbalance to the corrosive impact of globalization on local traditions.

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At a time when economic, political, and cultural patterns that have originated in the West are celebrated, often uncritically, as universally applicable, the arts, humanities, and social sciences can provide detailed data and informed interpretations of particular traditions that continue to shape the attitudes and behavior of billions of people the world over. At a time when the individualistic and secularistic orientation of the modern West dominates global communications, awareness of premodern and non-Western mores becomes a substantial resource for resisting overspecialization and homogenization. Thus the arts, humanities, and social sciences in effect contribute to preserving the cultural equivalent of biodiversity even as they observe, describe, and in the end also participate in the development of the hybrid cultural forms that result from the interaction of globalizing processes with local traditions.

This double role of the arts, humanities, and social sciences is evident in the reconceiving and restructuring of so-called area studies. That process will continue as students and scholars seek to balance the need for in-depth knowledge of the languages, histories, and sociocultural traditions of particular geographical areas with the opportunity for the cross-cultural comparisons that globalization invites. Because of our full array of area institutes, Columbia is in a strong position to contribute to this reconceiving and restructuring, and we fully intend to continue to do so.