Transcript for: Faculty conversations: James Pritchett
Pritchett: One, our job, our primary job is to mobilize resources; resources which we give out in the form of graduate fellowships to entice more students to study culture. Two, we give out funding to entice professors to create more courses on the various cultures of the world. In a sense what we try and do is develop a sort of seamless engagement with the various cultures that we are focused on, so that students who come to Michigan State University can have the experience of studying culture in the classroom. They can engage with faculty members, they can engage with extracurricular activities on and around the campus, they can participate in study abroad programs that might have research, internships that bring them into contact with MSU professors who are doing cutting edge research on particular regional issues, African issues. So our job is to put together that seamless engagement with culture in all of its different forms.
During economic hard times, it is often necessary for institutions to make tough decisions, to look seriously at their operation. It is also a wonderful time to go back and look at one's roots, look at one's origins and find out, or to remember, to refresh one's memory about what were those fundamental things that led us to develop in the way that we did that were at the base of what we are. This was a land grant. Michigan State was a land-grant university designed to solve the practical problems of the people of the state of Michigan. We now, as our president has indicated, are moving to world grant. We are now entrusted with the responsibility for looking at the worlds big problems. And so, African Studies, and again our colleagues in Latin American Studies , the East Asian Studies, are now shifting and focus our attention not just on that seamless engagement with our culture, but how do we organize ourselves in ways that we can actually deal with some of these major problems?
I would argue that area studies is in fact the only paradigm by which we can really study globalization. Yes, we live in a world in which commodities, ideas are moving around the planet at the speed of light. But, in fact, commodities, ideas in motion don have any particular meaning, don have any particular value. Itonly when they land someplace that they reacquire value. A commodity can be worth one thing here. When it gets resituated somewhere else, then you have to discover what its value there. A set of ideas mean one thing here, but when they move to another place in the world, you have to figure out what is the cultural context here. What are the set of ideas that it becomes enveloped in, and therefore, how does its meaning change? My sense is that the only way we probably can study globalization is through acknowledging, developing area studies as a paradigm. So one of the things that is happening here at Michigan State right now is that is exactly what we are thinking about. We are looking at ourselves in a very serious way, seeing if in fact we can make the institutional changes so that area studies in fact becomes its own paradigm.
[Produced by Brian Vernellis. Media Communications. University Relations. Michigan State University.]
