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Framing the Questions: New Visions from the Arts and Humanities at Berkeley |
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Researchers in the arts and humanities pose questions that go to the very core of our human condition: questions of belief and moral values, and questions that assess the past as a way of understanding our present and future. These questions serve as a frame on which knowledge is built. "The humanities help us to understand our history, the works of art and literature we create, the societies in which we live, the structures of the languages we speak, the ethical norms that govern our interactions, and the scope and limits of our cognitive capacities, including the capacity for understanding itself," writes Berkeley Philosophy Professor Hannah Ginsborg. The humanities "contribute to the goal of understanding ourselves and our place in the world around us." This volume provides a window into research in the arts and humanities at UC Berkeley. It focuses on particular examples, but in the aggregate gives us a "frame" or lens on trends that are reshaping, in significant ways, this crucial area of higher education. Global in reach, transformed by technology, reaching across field boundaries once thought inviolate, research in the humanities and the arts responds to the needs of an ever more complex world. In the following pages, faculty and graduate students from the arts and humanities ask questions on enormous range. Why have the Germans whitewashed Goethe? What is the purpose of "digital art"? What role should emotions play in medical practice? What is the origin of the "model minority" stereotype? How can theater arts teach literature or history? Why does an ancient Sanskrit poem sway the direction of India's politics? Why did the French dance with horses, and what can we learn by re-creating an "equestrian ballet"? Humanistic inquiry is indispensable, says Comparative Literature Professor Robert Alter; it "puts us in critical touch with our own human past... We need to remember Aristotle and Job, and also The Tale of Genji and the Sanskrit classics; we need to remember the High Modernist literature of the 1920s and the film noir masterpieces of the 1940s," says Alter. "The multivoiced humanistic body of knowledge of which I speak is, in its own less obvious way, profoundly pragmatic, serving the necessary purpose of human self-understanding, and rescuing us from our muteness by expressing all the facets, dark and bright, of the human condition." The arts and humanities departments at UC Berkeley, in concert with the campus libraries, museums, multitude of research centers, and special programs, constitute a milieu that promotes the "voicing" of important questions and the ongoing search for answers commensurate with the needs of our changing environment. Berkeley's history, size, diversity, and high standards all contribute to a unique spirit of intellectual and social engagement. Chief among the influential centers is the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, founded in 1988 to foster interdisciplinary activity on campus. "At the Townsend Center, large visions and large questions translate into people, projects, and programs coming together within and across the unparalleled range and richness of the humanities at Berkeley," says the center's director, History Professor Randolph Starn. The center sponsors more than 50 working groups that serve as the humanities' equivalent of laboratories, bringing together graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars from various fields to study particular areas of interest. The many lecture series, conferences, and seminars initiated or co-sponsored by the center are part on an ongoing public conversation in the humanities, while the center's publications and web site serve as the main humanities bulletin board on and beyond the campus. "These activities, and more, give real content to the center's standing mission to support, gather, and explore the wonderfully diverse energies and insights of the humanities," says Starn. A much more recent initiative, the Consortium for the Arts, complements the Townsend Center's mission by supporting interdisciplinary work in the arts and promoting the arts as a central, thriving force in campus life. A fundamental goal of the new consortium is to integrate into the campus research and educational missions its rich resources in the arts. The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, for example, is home to nearly 7,000 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, and a like number of cinema titles; the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology houses 3.8 million archaeological and ethnographic objects, while Cal Performances brings a staggering variety of music, dance, and theater arts to campus from around the world. A university is defined ultimately by people, resources, and the research and teaching that derive from the interactions among these parts. In the humanities at Berkeley, group discussions and individual research projects are devoted to the study and interpretation of texts and other cultural products, while the arts focus on the creation of new works. But the mission of both arts and humanities also is to examine the analytical framework itself, the perspectives through which we view our civilization: "From our vantage point today we can see that some of the 'interpretive lenses' used in the past involved gross distortions. Even as we attempt to compensate for those distortions, we cannot assume our current optic is perfect," says Berkeley's Dean of the Arts and Humanities Ralph Hexter. "The university is home to the pursuit of truth, and we cannot ever stop questioning received ideas." Next page: Chapter 1: Culture, Globalization, and the Political World |
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