xdiscip1 - university of leeds · web viewbut the more relaxed, more successful scholarly...

COMMUNICATING ACROSS DISCIPLINES

(with special reference to the Behavioral Sciences)

Harvey B. Sarles

Paper presented at the Higher Education Close Up Conference 2, Lancaster University, 16-18 July 2001.

Table of Contents

Introduction................................................1 What is the Problem.......................................4 What are Disciplines? How do they Work?...................6 The Interdisciplinary Scholar............................10 Interaction between Persons/Disciplines..................13 Successful Communication.................................15 Disciplinary Reception...................................17 Purification Ceremonies..................................17 Data Interpretation......................................22 Coalitions of the Third Party............................25 Relative Prestige among Disciplines......................30 Where do the Smart/Ambitious Kids Go?(Smart?)............36 Issues...................................................40 Students/Ex-students: Can they stay that way?............43 Education-Training Styles................................47 Interdisciplinary Observation............................50 Metaphors................................................55 Structure vs. Process....................................56 Frames and Frameworks....................................58 In spite of it all.......................................59

BIBLIOGRAPHY...............................................60

INTRODUCTION

This essay is written from my personal experience. It is "raw" rather than work in progress. I've lived through the wonderments of trying to talk with persons in other disciplines and have even had some amount of qualified success. I have taught -- now for many years -- a course based on this "text" -- introducing students to Cross Disciplinary Communication by the route of observation, discussion, and especially interview of experienced and successful practitioners of the various disciplines at the University of Minnesota (but also at the Universities of Pittsburgh, Cornell, and Sussex, England).

My experience has ranged over several academic fields and in different settings: as an undergraduate math/science student taking courses with electrical engineers; briefly (one year) as a Medical

1 Communicating Across Disciplines H. Sarles

Student in a Medical School and in a rehabilitation research and treatment center; a couple of years in an aeronautical research laboratory working as a programmer-systems analyst-mathematician in constant contact with other mathematicians, physicists, statisticians, and engineers; as a graduate student in anthropology and linguistics -- themselves a wavering marriage of disciplines which effectively disappeared from the intellectual scene after a "revolution" in linguistics in the 1960's; then a couple of years of fieldwork in Southern Mexico trying to figure out how I thought differently from how others think; as a new academic working in a high-powered psychiatry department as a researcher, coming into constant contact with and beholden to psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, social workers, and psychotics; as a teacher-researcher trying to figure out what I am doing here; as a long-term "member" of a discipline who found himself in a (personally) impossible bureaucratic and intellectual situation, and has at long last changed disciplinary homes to a place where I seem, occasionally, more "at home"; as a sometimes constant athlete noting how differently people must conceptualize and handle their bodies; as an amateur musician thrust into a violinist's subculture and restricted from some others; as a partially handicapped person (a person with a disability) who deeply believes that all persons see themselves that way...now engaged in interviewing, doing expert systems' research...thinking now of moving on.

By now (some years after the first writing), I have lived through a couple of academic "revolutions" (Kuhn, 1962), both as witness and participant. I have known winners and losers; some of their joys and tragedies. My own teachers "lost" to the "Chomskyan revolution" in linguistics (Chomsky, 1957), and my own work was until recently (still is...?) peripheralized or marginalized in its consequence and fallout. I have been close participant witness to a shift in Biology from a systematic comparative outlook to an incursion by "behavioral biologists" and by "socio-biologists" and to a current almost-revolutionary takeover by chemist/microbiologists under the banner of "genetic engineering." I became a teaching academic just as the psychoanalysts were "overthrown" in psychiatry, by a (very different) group of behaviorists. Now I seem to be re-entering several conversations from which I effectively disappeared some time ago: doing work in linguistics by training foreign graduate students to speak intelligible English, and doing work in a branch of artifical intelligence - expert systems research.

Seeking for rational discourse, the attempt to describe the world faithfully and well, I have run head-on into the boundaries and boundednesses of disciplinary lines: hard and firm as the Rock of Gibralter. The Sociology of Disciplines has emerged -- for me -- virtually as a subject matter concerning my attempts at objectivity. (Mannheim, 1936). Indeed, several influential writers have claimed that the problem of understanding across disciplines is essentially impenetrable (Geertz, 1983: Chap.1; Fish, 1989).1 I think, on the other

1Marcelo Dascal writes to me: "My own experience (admittedly limited) is that it is very hard to get from a 'specialist' any sense of what he is doing, why it is important, where it is leading, etc...my experience of trans-disciplinary discussions has been so far for the most part quite frustrating. People invariably resist criticism of their basic assumptions, and retreat into their prohibitive jargon when criticized.


hand, it is very difficult thus it needs much doing.In addition to my quest for any adequate description toward an

understanding of human behavior, I have been forced to study the discourses of the various disciplines, attempting to discern: what is accurate from what is habitual; what is acceptably problematic from what is not; what is problem and what is solution; what is method, what not...and why? When does "technique" overwhelm ideas? When does the history of a discipline overtake its present notion of its subject matter? How do form and content argue or pass each other by? What are similarities among disciplines, even and especially when they may take different forms and faces: e.g., reductionist versus holist? What is the nature of "cycles" in disciplines; what is a "generation," which disciplines "progress," and which fall under the spell of some particular powerful thinker-writer? Why, and how?

Emerging (?) many years later -- still kicking, if mellowed from the scars of head-bangings against disciplinary walls -- I attempt to translate, to mediate and broker understandings across these too-real lines of disciplinary orientation. Occasionally I can only point out how or why differences in thinking simply pass each other by. What I had once thought to be differences in subject matter -- to be synthesized into some coherent curricular pie of all of knowledge -- I now understand to be oft-splintered.

This essay, then, is both record and invitation. How to study the various disciplines; to attempt to understand them in their own terms; to transcend what is minor; to assimilate what is important into some sense of knowledge and coherence.

What is the Problem?!

In academic and scientific circles, there is often expressed a plea for an "interdisciplinary approach" to some problem or other. Experts from one area "should" get together with others to discuss common interests. Knowledge and perspective, joined with others, will -- it is claimed or proclaimed -- grant new insight. Students should receive an "integrated" education, a holistic knowledge based on the widest possible curriculum. This clarion call sounds loudly about once per generation, perhaps when the central or gathering issues of any discipline no longer attract new energies.

Many behavioral scientists seek for a unified approach to their subject matter [Grinker, 1967; Pike, 1967). It is an ultimate goal, even if it does not work out on any regular basis. Yet many of those scholars who have actually worked in interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary settings seem disenchanted; a fair number embittered by their experiences. This essay will explore some of the dimensions of the problems, frustration, and occasional successes of interdisciplinary work -- from the framework of communication across disciplines: a sub-topic of Inter-Cultural Communication.

'Understanding' thus remains at a surface of politeness and commonplace - which, I suspect, is what your 'knowledge of a subject in outline' can ultimately amount to...the walls [between disciplines] do not fall by blowing the disconstructionist horn at them. I think, rather, thaat specialization is there to stay, and in this sense that 'knowledge is not possible.'" (January 22, 1992).


Scholars are members: they become members of disciplines much as if they are tribal members of any (often exotic) culture -- with habits, thoughts, languages (jargons, argots), and metaphors of their own. Most of this remains inarticulate if nonetheless real and powerful. Similarly to how modern corporations are thought to be cultures, the members (must?) adhere to the rules, norms, and habits of each discipline.2

Such disciplines exist not only as a set of tenured slots at universities, but also as a body of literature, a history (and genealogy) of the subject matter, issues, concerns, and a partial way of being and operating in the world.

Members of a discipline share a fair number of such traits. To the extent that they are successful within the discipline, they must believe (or be considered to believe) that they embody some minimal number of such traits; and certain, perhaps defining features, in particular. They are, in a quite real sense, members of cultures; at least of sub-cultures. While these persons are "ordinary" in much of their comings-and-goings, their identity as vocational-persons is often extremely strong; passionater and pervasive in their lives. The deception (to the observer) is that quite ordinary-appearing persons (i.e., majority to their larger national cultures) are quite extra-ordinary, even exotic, in their orientation and experience.

Notions like success and discipline entail some exclusive boundaries to a group of persons who operate under the aegis of the field. These may be exclusive in a number of senses: in-group and out-group traits, rites-de-passage, and the mystique that success (in life) is actually available within the confines of the discipline. Disciplinary life, that is, is sufficient to grant meaning to one's life-work.

While disciplines involve areas of intellectual "interest," it is their "politics" which most often determine the disciplinary boundaries; most members of disciplines are heavily affected by the political-cultural aspects of the disciplines, irrespective of the depth of their intellectuality! There is good reason to claim that these disciplinary lines hardened during the early 1960's when the baby boom reached college age, when federal monies entered the academy and bureaucratization of universities was in its upswing. The disciplines became sufficiently large in membership that there came to be "centers" of many/most disciplines which became a kind of norm against which other interests were measured, and the boundaries became firm (Sarles, 1992ms: Chap. 3).

Disciplines may "lose" their subject matter occasionally, but they can re-invent "new" ones, given a prior framework of issues and subject matter. For example, the fact that most "primitives" are rapidly becoming urbanized will probably not force anthropologists to become sociologists...but we can note a dual development: (1) the anthropology of complex societies and urban anthropology; (2) a defensive move to "claim" exotic, rural socities which seem, still, to be "pure" and "uncivilized," as their exclusive "turf" or academic "territory."3

2For an insightful review into what this consists in, especially in the context of change of the internal operating cultures of several industries, see Zuboff (1988).3By 1992 this statement appears less true. The notion of "culture" - first taken over into description of corporate workings, now by women, minorities (persons of color in America), and "others" from around the world - is very fluid at this moment. It is


It is the existence and presence of these boundaries which causes the primary problems in interaction between and across disciplines. What are such boundaries...about? How do they develop; how are they maintained. When do they appear; how are they "invoked"? Are they akin to boundaries of human cultures or of other species, so that speaking of communicating across disciplines is a meaningful and useful notion?

Yes! Of course they exist; they are like cultures! The potential for in-depth understanding across the boundaries is as difficult as across other lines; perhaps even more difficult, as this essay will attempt to portray and set out lines toward understanding, perhaps solution.

Disciplines exist because of common "interests" or subject matters; sometimes they share techniques and a history. Often they are defined as a set of common issues or problems, and approaches to their solutions. Each discipline has a kind of internal patois or discourse, ways of talking or of discussing issues and problems. As we will see, these tend to remain obscured to non-members -- as they face the brunt of the often exclusionary practices which characterize any/every viable discipline. (The universe of disciplines is, to some extent, organic and changing!) The obscuring of issues does not decrease the importance of intellectual issues in any discipline, but it places any "outsider" at a disadvantage, and may act to exclude s/him.

In this essay, I will consider primarily some of the social-behavioral sciences and how they consistently tend to misunderstand one another. The widest, shared subject matter -- shared, that is, by all these disciplines -- is (human) behavior: its observation, description, understanding, etc. Differences tend to lie in notions of: what are "reasonable" questions; what is (acceptable) data; what to observe, how to interpret...Some of the disciplines (all of the disciplines!) believe that they alone have the correct, or most correct, approach to the subject. (As I will show, there are also a number of "prestige hierarchies," based often on approach or claim to proprietary "ownership" of the subject matter. These hierarchies criss-cross in peculiar manners.) As lines between the social sciences and the humanities are in some senses blurring at the present moment, this too will enter our critique.

What are Disciplines? How do they Work?

A discipline is embodied most actually in the personages of people who call themselves sociologists, or psychologists, or economists (are so called by their colleagues). Success is available to members of a discipline in a number of ways: both within a field and in the academic setting; in the wider community (scholarly or not). (If success is not/no longer available within a discipline, the discipline exists in

being appropriated by those who have felt/been oppressed by others as a rallying concept which grants them membership, cohesion, and boundedness; moving from Anthropology (where it has received an increasing critique) to Comparative Literature, American Studies, and - someplaces - the Humanities. Code terms include "multiculturalism," "cultural pluralism" and the ownership (from political conservatives) of wht definition of whatever is "politically correct."


name alone, or will become a sub-discipline of another field.)4

For the neophyte -- the student -- success is offered in the form of degrees. It is very similar to apprenticeships in any skill, the "study" terminating in a "union card" (M.A., Ph.D.) which permits and/or enables one to work at s/his trade. The degree equally certifies membership within the discipline: abilities, knowledge, etc. The credential is quite real in that others in academia, society, regard it as a kind of guarantee of qualification. In some disciplines and subject areas, there are licensure laws and regulations (e.g., medicine, law, teaching).

The graduate faculty are the certifiers of these master-masons. They guarantee, like any certifying board, that a candidate will be a worthy "practitioner." Different from the continuously demonstrable skills of most performing artists, tradesmen, typists, however, the skills of the academician tend to be played-out before an extremely small, often "captive" audience. Measures of "quality" are often more flexible because of the (potential) audience size, and the disciplines often evolve rapidly and more independently than they would if they were more "present" in the larger world. For an ultimate narrowing of the world see Hesse (1969).5

Members-to-be of a discipline are "socialized" through a course of study, usually supervised more and more closely as the candidate approaches maturity. After initial recruitment into the earliest stages of study, a trainee must begin to demonstrate both skills and a "proper frame-of-mind" in order to become more seriously attended to.6 Indeed, at large research universities, the faculty may well have a great deal of energy and time to spend with advanced students. They "pay off" their less serious teaching obligations -- to large numbers of students who simply want exposure to the subject matter -- by reaching very wide audiences in the lecture theater or over closed-circuit television. With respect to the integrity of the discipline, the ratio necessary to maintain this "service" may run in the range of several hundred to one. "Serious" productive (i.e., disciplinary, leading to success) work, is

4Occasionally, disciplines reach impasses; i.e., it appears to the members of the discipline that some "central" issue are incapable of being solved, or have been by-passed and disappeared effectively. In such times, many of the most promising members of the discipline leave the discipline, get tired,...old. Students effectively exhaust the subject matter in a few years: either aging prematurely themselves, or attracting person who "enjoy boredom" and the control of knowing. Sometimes new issues arise and excite interest, young persons. In other moments disciplines effectively "disappear" - e.g., linguistics -- in the early 1990's?5However faulty the analogy between artisans and scholars, it is taken fairly literally by people outside a given discipline who want to hire or consult a sociologist, linguist, etc., to "do a particular job" and who often feel confused or cheated later on, in hindsight, when their person turns out to be different from what they had supposed or imagined s/him to be!6In many/most cases, students are selected/ select themselves on the basis of their already thinking like members of the discipline. Possibly this is more the case than students being "interested" in the same problems or issues of members.


research/scholarship and the training of future research-scholars.7

As students become more skilled, or simply by surviving the rapid attrition of others, they are increasingly brought into the fold. Their individual experiences will begin to differ somewhat (though they continue to have much in common with fellow students and professors in their discipines), depending on a number of factors:

1. The "league" in which that graduate department plays.2. Does the student have a major professor, or interest group, or

is s/he a student-at-large?3. The nature and "age" of the discipline projected into a

foreseeable future.4. The actual (and projected) job market.5. "Style" variables (including sex/gender, marital status, etc.)6. Career development age of the staff and student.7. "Pay-offs," perceived success.8. Competing disciplines.9. Etc.Without expanding on these greatly, a few observations are

pertinent since any of these factors may entail a great deal in any individual case, and for the discipline as a whole...and help any interdisciplinary translator or "broker" to penetrate any situation.

Graduate Schools seem to operate roughly a national (in some disciplines an increasingly international) "pyramid" within strata, much like social strata; i.e., they trade students, faculties, ideas, within certain lines. Across strata, they may look "up" to note what and where prestige lies (lines of research, "hot" issues), what it may mean to "make it" and become successful; where "bandwagons" are rolling not yet filled.

But interest groups of particular special interests or techniques may occur within any stratum, carry their own notions of success. From "above," within the "higher" strata, persons tend to valuate others (and themselves) quite highly...often deservedly so.8

The highest stratum -- in many fields -- usually includes Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley or UCLA, Chicago. In some fields this would be large research universities (Ivy) such as Columbia, Yale, or one or the large Big Ten state land-grant universities. Partly, the coasts tend to attract people because of reputation and life-styles, as well as access to other scholars, to the news media, etc. There are also strata among colleges which may "feed" students to the higher graduate schools: these

7The issue of any discipline turning out research and "new knowledge" is somewhat moot here. In fact, most disciplines actually define what "knowledge" and "new" mean. They can enforce the meanings through control of journals, jobs, opportunities to get grants, to get to the "right" meetings, people, places.8Inversely, some places (entire universities, fields, disciplines, etc.) tend to devalue themselves and to value others more greatly. In some cases, universities have themselves declined (within the memory of various persons) and are regarded/regard themselves as lesser just because they are there (e.g., Minnesota was a "great" university in the 1940's and '50's and is continually being judged by many not in its current terms but with respect to what is "no longer is" - by alumni, but also by many of the older faculty who remember the glory days, and have themselves overseen the decline. In other cases (e.g., Harvard), faculty often tend to rate themselves highly just because they are there ("overrate" themselves?).


include Reed and Swarthmore on the coasts, Macalester and Carlton in the mid-west...as kind of advanced prep schools.9

In any case, pedigree counts; and it counts differently within and across disciplines. Within a discipline a Harvard degree may be very good, but one needs sponsors, a reasonable presence, some track-record of productive work, in addition. People are often willing (and often capable) of judging their own membership (depending on the "age" of the field, somewhat). And even a few Harvard departments are not very good in any era. However, across disciplinary boundaries a Harvard degree is usually "worth" quite a bit more than otherwise -- and in about the same way as a British dialect is often desirable in America, whether or not it was a "good" dialect in Great Britain -- it grants a kind of instant credibility.

Except for a field which is "in flux" even at the very top, success is usually highest when obtained within that field. There is, in other words, plenty of good work (research/scholarship) to be done: if done well, it will get one to a professorship at (say) Harvard with the usual business-governmental connections and consultancies. Whether one is "called" (called back if one was a student there) to Harvard depends, in turn, on a number of other variables: age, sponsorship, writing an essay or having an idea which "catches on," being "attractive," etc.

In general, socialization works towards defining the prestige-success groups in terms of which one measures oneself...within a given field. Since about 1960 the disciplines have been sufficiently large to provide "place-ness" for many persons, and most workers in any field are much more oriented toward success within their fields, than they are, say, toward other persons of similar interests at their own institutions. Most professors are thus oriented towards their fields nationally (or internationally), and not oriented towards their colleagues, locally. Many scholars are thus very "alone" (lonely?), isolated, and do their work in concert with others they see infrequently; perhaps only by reading each other's work. The amount of discussion and cross-talk at most universities is, in this era, very low...and not much encouraged. Disciplinary membership has been substituted for any "community of scholars" at a given university as envisioned by Newman (1953).

The Interdisciplinary Scholar

Who, then, would be (is) found in interdisciplinary settings? One obvious answer: persons who are or will be less successful in their own fields than they are aiming towards. Thus, one of the biggest problems in inter-disciplinary work is that some of the persons involved are likely to be cast-offs from their own disciplines; and not necessarily very competent as seen by their own disciplinary fellows. This type of interdisciplinary person is, in my experience, the most usual (often the

9These "formerly" liberal arts colleges have become more and more oriented to research/scholarship over the past decade, as their faculties have increasingly come from the highest research universities and direct their students toward graduate study and/or research careers.


most troublesome) kind of person in such endeavors, seeking success/prestige among those who are not very capable of "quality" judgments..."undisciplined" departmentally but also intellectually.10

But there are others: the mature, successful person (in s/his own field) who is looking for new ventures, new fields in which to sow seeds, or who is sought out by reputation. Unless very "special," the person who has actually achieved success within s/his own field, is likely to be a "pain in the neck" in interdisciplinary settings. If s/he is willing, or feels it necessary to expand interests, s/he is likely to enter into new works with the tag of expert written across s/his tee-shirt. Since s/he has been successfully busy doing s/his own work, s/he is very unlikely to understand that the rules in terms of which others operate may be quite different from those by which s/he gained some degree of reputation. In a few cases, this type of "old pro" may have become successful by using bureaucratic or managerial acumen, and may still have the good sense or grace to sense how others are operating. But if s/he has this much sense, s/he will probably stay out of interdisciplinary situations except in the role of the consultant...on very short-term, low responsibility bases.

More recently, as the professoriate has become "filled" in various disciplines (principally the Humanities and Social Sciences), a number of ambitious persons find themselves essentially without portfolio. Many of these have entered administration, and form a new cadre of still-young managers who, as a group, are "tougher" and more competent than their predecessors, most of whom drifted into (university) administration from academic careers: usually, not the most successful in their own fields.

Others have gone to "allied" fields where there is work: Medicine, particularly, has hired Social Scientists and, very recently, Philosophers (ethicists) and some others. In my experience, most of these persons become Physicians' assistants in one form or another, tending to find a more limited success within these applied fields. Occasionally, some of them find a niche or return to their "home" disciplines after some success within their "places of work." Generally, such persons are not "full partners" in the interdisciplinary settings in Medicine, because of disparities in pay and in advancement opportunities. They are not, therefore interdisciplinary (full) partners in their enterprises, but operate more as multi-disciplinary team members, where they are underlings to a Physician, offering help and perspective, but not in determining the nature of issues or problems, or in setting agendas or sharing responsibilities.

The last type to be considered here is the gadfly -- less interested in being successful within s/his own discipline, more interested in some sense of the intellectual problematics, or of some problems common to several disciplines (e.g., what is behavior, what is one/many, change/continuity, reductionism, etc.). If managed "well" s/he can be a most productive worker in inter-disciplinary settings. As gadflies are difficult, almost by definition (questions of loyalty to issues rather than to disciplinary persons/colleagues), s/he will balk

10The word "discipline" has several, somewhat competing meanings: disciple to the field; a disciplined person with respect to outlook, habits, etc; someone who is anchored or grounded in some particular field of knowledge which provides s/him with a surety of being, etc.


at bureaucratic considerations and place s/his interest in the problem above different disciplinary interests (turf, history, etc.). Unfortunately, this type is rarely well managed since s/he is perceived as a threat by the more or less experts who come as representatives of their respective disciplines. ("Straight" members of s/his discipline -- i.e., those not engaged in inter-disciplinary practice -- are likely to see s/him as "unsound," not "solid," "crazy," "untrustworthy," since s/he is not practicing the trade as they define it, in the "mainstream." (The source for the gadfly, in s/his moment of explanatory exposition is Socrates in Plato's "Apology", condemned to death for corrupting the youth of Athens to his view, rather than to their parents' = home discipline?)

The role (perhaps anti-role is more accurate) of the gadfly is worth exploring since s/he represents a sort of "ideal" inter-disciplinary agent. S/he is, if competent and not overly paranoid or given to create sabotage, what interdisciplinary study and pursuit is all about. Following Socrates as a model, s/he is interested in "everything," in working on common problems, without worrying about s/his own success in a narrower discipline. Alas, s/his mortality rate is high and usually quick. S/he is badly managed and is likely to end up being blamed for the failure of the group - or, like Socrates in the "Apology," for being a "corrupting" influence (an intellectual "terrorist" in the sense of disrupting the definitions of turf, control, history, and genealogy which prevail at any time -- beyond "maverick" status). Having no other locus or audience, s/his strategies will likely be to attempt to use interdisciplinary groups for prestige, while the others will be referring and deferring to their home disciplines, and this takes a group of like-minded gadflies: oxymoronic; a pathos.

The issue of dilettantism is of great import here because the disciplines become centered, then de-centered in various cycles, as the issues of any discipline become "hot" then are solved, resolved, and finally reach some form of impasse. At times of impasse, there occurs a sense that it is "time" to cross disciplinary lines, to work on "larger pictures." At such times, some "larger-picture" people, oriented to seeking an arena for success, will become "inter-disciplinary" essentially in the mode(l) of any discipline, but in an anti-disciplinary way. Within the various definitions of discipline, this seems undisciplined and often "ungrounded" intellectually. It has been my experience that it is difficult to distinguish a brilliant and articulate dilettante from a serious gadfly. One has to "run through" a complicated interview-discussion to distinguish a person of substance from a "B.S. artist." The latter are often smart, learning and memorizing what they are told are the great issues/great menwomen, but with little sense of the embedding and surrounding issues, their contexts, importance, etc. (It "takes one to know one!?")

Although we thinkers about interdisciplinary research can also assign blame, it is useful to look at this in more problematic and interested terms, as an arena for study: a problem in "inter-cultural communication." That is, disciplines can be regarded and understood in large measure, as having members who are as different as members of different cultures. The problems of communication (and of mutual understanding) are concerned with exploring both the similarities and differences among cultures: a problem in comparative thought (Sarles, 1991).


Here, the locus of the reader-thinker becomes important: I suggest that we begin to think of ourselves both as disinterested observers who can suspend belief and/or disbelief, and as members of such an interdisciplinary team looking at the issues involved in some interdisciplinary enterprise. Then we group members must find some ways of translating (or brokering) differences into some common language, noting that words or activities, even success, often mean different things to various participants.

A major problem is how to know all about this and continue to appreciate it in spite of the apparent interpersonal difficulties which it sets up: i.e., disciplinary (cultural) differences will be acted-out between individuals in any situation -- but the (real) difficulties will have more to do with the "disciplinary self" than with the social selves of the participants. Team members will/may be fighting over misunderstandings generated by their home disciplines (cultures) while they seem to disagree at a very personal level.

Interaction between Persons and between Disciplines

Begin, now, with the context of interaction: over some common area of interest! Members of different disciplines are simply unlikely to interact unless they (we) have a shared interest. Rather, their interactions are between persons -- not as discipline members -- temporary, and involve no longer term commitments: Clark Kerr (1963) said that the modern university is a large community with a common parking problem -- or they are on college or university committees, or they play racquetball, or...

In the context of a problem area, even the interest shown by the various participants likely means different things to each. One might like to see some work done, but would "not participate s/himself" -- a very common type of personality in academic settings and bureaucracies, perhaps less so in business. Another may simply have no good future prospects unless this project is actualized: mixed feelings about some issue. These motivations seem (feel?) much more familiar to us than different disciplinary motivations, since they can occur within any given discipline. We are less likely to read these accurately for members of other disciplines than our own due to limited access to information, gossip, different styles in various areas.

One simple (?) example is clothing: male professional school faculty and administratively-oriented academics are highly likely to dress in suits, certainly shirt-tie, jacket. Women's dress is similarly (some women claim even more tightly) circumscribed. This is also true of most young academics and academic bureaucratic academics. But the more relaxed, more successful scholarly academics find themselves dressing more informally as they mature (as distinct from successful administrative academics). In common settings, these different types are, in my experience, very likely to misread each other's appearance until they get to know each other very well. This situation is very much like the use of terms of address in medicine (Doctor) and in academia (Mr. is more appropriate within a group of successful Ph.D.'s). Most "good" academics would react to a dark-suited visitor as unserious (e.g., as an administrative type).

Another example is relative age: maturity varies in different


fields. In medicine, middle-thirties is a relatively young age -- in hard sciences, it is much older, and full professorships fall to younger persons than this. The social-behavioral sciences vary, but careers do not "peak" in anthropology until the middle 40's or beyond. Similarly, in the humanities, the apprenticeship of graduate school usually endures for many years.

Picture a situation in a medical school where I once worked as an assistant professor: I was about 30, yet two to ten years younger than all of my M.D. peers. This situation made for very peculiar interactions, not ameliorated by the fact that one's own students (for the later-maturing fields) are likely to overlap in age with one's cross-disciplinary peers. Unfortunately, many people attempt to overcome the age disparity by getting into complex consultative or social relationships with other age-equal cross-disciplinary fellows -- there is no question that there are generation gap problems involved in the scene across disciplines.

Once members of different disciplines have gotten beyond these simple problems and have given their apparent assent to a course of action, the fun begins in earnest. Things come up -- such as the setting, who's going to be the boss (or administrator), where will funds be sought, what kinds of people and advice will be hired!?

Only the very naive (?) will simply try to set up a group and hire people, without a great deal of preliminary cross-talk and experience. In some areas, particularly paramedical, it is possible and traditional to do just this: medical schools hire psychologists, social workers, bio-chemists. Usually an M.D. is the boss, and this enterprise can often work because everyone is, in effect, committed to training and/or curing. The mission of the groups is really quite clear; problems are relatively few, all things considered. Strains show up quickly, however, when non-curing oriented scholars are simply hired to work on research problems, without (often, even with) prior exploratory experience.

Given the medical-paramedical tradition, for example, the physician is the ultimate boss since s/he is the ultimate curer, responsible by law and tradition for the patient. (No one I know of is opposed to there being doctors!) The physician is accustomed to this and usually transfers s/his experience to new settings with a bit less caution than other academics would use in unfamiliar territory. Most physicians not only seek personal success (as does everyone else we're likely to hear of), but they tend to perceive their mission as part of the ultimate responsibility theme which we all hope they have as curers. (And the disparities in salary and in other money-consulting opportunities often create huge gaps in lifestyle, in credibility, reference groups, etc. These seem to have worsened in the past generation as the university has joined the market economy.)

However, most other academics are oriented differently. While most anyone wants to help physicians do their job better, the non-paramedical scholar has a different sort of pragmatism underlying s/his motivation. I have rarely seen (or heard of) these differences bridged in inter-disciplinary settings over any period of time even between pairs of research workers. The exceptions seem to be very rare.

Successful Communication


In order to communicate effectively a number of issues must be considered:

1. mutual respect for the differences and for the quality of the people.

2 mutual knowledge of the fields by the participants -- this includes notions of data, success models, history, etc.

3. awareness of problems and techniques for bridging these gaps consulting inter-disciplinary "brokers," etc.

4. willingness to do 1-3.

Gathering data and knowledge about other people's fields can be done in several ways. Most professional scholars will have had some formal education, at least at introductory levels, to a large variety of subjects. They also are likely to read popular or semi-scholarly reviews of any interesting subject matter. Lastly, they deal with the subject matter through a very small number of people they "know" personally. The routes by which they gained such knowledge often has a strong effect on the communication potential. (One important marker -- relative prestige of the disciplines -- will be considered later.)

The points contributing to or stopping successful communication potentials seem to have an order or rank, though all are necessary:

1. If the persons (the actual individual interactants) do not rate each other as highly as they do themselves, there will most likely be some distortion, if not a complete blockage of information flow (similarly, if they downgrade themselves, they are very likely to underestimate their co-workers and interfere with their self-images).

2. If the people do not see the fields involved as having legitimate, but different perspectives or approaches to the same or similar subject matter, then one discipline will be considered less important than the other (by one or more interactants).

3. The interactants must have a good sense or "feeling" for the knowledge, the intellectual frameworks, and success notions of their alter egos -- or they will get caught up in all kinds of miscues, particularly as they engage students and others whom the interactants mutually address.

4. The interdisciplinary interactors must be sensitive managers; they not only have to know about differences and similarities among people, they must have techniques for talking to other people in the others' terms; i.e., they must have cross-disciplinary antennae which are sensitized to how others view the world; and they have to be able to implement this knowledge in some synergistic fashion - beyond, but including, compassion and empathy.

Last, they must all be willing to work at the task of communicationg on a fairly constant basis. It's not very different from the kind of loyalty and faith required of a long term marriage. Interestingly, the outside world seems ambivalent-to-negative in being willing to help sustain an interdisciplinary venture: divorce is more the norm. (There is some demand or use of an inter-disciplinary counselor or "broker," yet there seem to be precious few of those who can travel across boundaries, fewer who can foresee and correct problems.)


Within these larger points, the actual problems can take many forms ranging from lack of mutual or self-respect to having to heed a call from one's own home discipline, thus abandoning a mutual venture in terms of a notion of success in one's genealogical discipline.

Disciplinary Reception

One of the more subtle reasons for interdisciplinary communication problems involves the receiving of information from one discipline into another. The problem often doesn't arise between interdisciplinary co-workers, and they may actually get along well for a considerable time. A difficulty may then arise between them, apparently from nowhere: there is a fight, a parting of the ways, the usual recriminations, etc. The fight takes place in reference to the audiences of the various members even though it is actualized between the co-workers. (Divorces over how to raise children seem quite similar.)

It seems that information and data flow from one discipline to another does not occur in a smooth, strictly rational way. The critical, evaluative techniques which we supposed to be common to all educated people, appear to differ remarkably in the inter-disciplinary setting. Data and/or information must often undergo a rite of purification before it can be acceptable into one discipline from another. In the converse situation, data is often accepted quite uncritically and outside of the traditions and contexts in which it may have gained significance, if it has a "proper" pedigree.

Purification Ceremonies

A major problem in cross-disciplinary communication is presenting ideas or information in a way that members of a particular discipline are willing to accept as the message -- as intended. A message may be couched in unaccustomed ways, or in manners which are not considered legitimate; or they may be presented by a person who is uncertified (not credible) in their eyes. In order for any message across disciplines to be effective, it must be ritually purified.

Consider as paradigm the case of the "outside" speaker to a mixed audience of students and their teachers. The students are very likely to be deeply involved within their own discipline. Typically, the outside speaker is sponsored (introduced) by a disciplinary inside fellow who conjures s/himself up in the guise of a prophet bringing the "good news" of s/his new insights and interests to landed gentry and their disciples. Here the qualities (mostly "stylistic") of the inside prophet are extremely important, especially those which are perceived by s/his audience. It is within s/his powers to decant and/or cleanse the message.

The prophet may s/himself be among the landed gentry. S/he will already know that s/his confreres have been wondering why s/he's on this particular kick -- s/he has enough old ("serious" = disciplinary) interests to keep s/him busy "at home." Too many times, s/he will bring in a cross-disciplinary colleague to present the new ideas, hoping that s/his own presence will suffice to cleanse them. If s/he is really foolish, s/he will not even be present. S/his non-disciplinary


colleagues will get a polite (often) hearing, after which their non-relevance will be made explicit. If the sponsor is too powerful, it will remain implicit, but nonetheless as real. In other words, it will be dismissed out-of-hand; not merely a case of non-communication, but a potential reaction, a turning-away.

The "old (wo)man" would be much better off if s/he had brought s/his own buddies, or a very few of their disciples into the inter-disciplinary business early and rather privately; promising them pay-offs within their own discipline, rather than becoming public all at once with no one already in s/his "debt." (This presumes that others, particularly young persons, will find this work interesting and promising; but this is usually no problem, because the young and ambitious are always interested in seeing the future possibilities of success in any venture, particularly one certified by a person who is powerful in any discipline.) Having a group of one's own apparently success-oriented persons in on the presentation will set it up to be purified. That process is not properly "set," but needs to be actualized and performed, as it were in the context of some ritual.

If the cross-disciplinary proponent is a minor (and/or young) figure in s/his discipline, s/he is usually in deep trouble at home. In the first instance, s/he'll find it very hard to find an audience of erstwhile peers. S/his work will be compassionately (if lucky) pronounced to be interesting, but not ----. (Fill in your own field!) If s/he is unusually attractive in some other sense, s/he may have found older patronage, and the situation might be like that described earlier. But this case is unusual since very attractive young persons are ordinarily pushed into the current center of their own disciplines by their patrons well before they are certified professionals, so they will rarely be found in interdisciplinary work.

Thus the young or unsuccessful (in s/his own field) finds audiences to be very scarce. (Recently there are developing groupings of scholars in Interdisciplinary and Integrated Studies. So far, they appear not be to "leading" figures in developing ideas; rather they seem to be more oriented to [undergraduate] curricular development. It remains unclear whether they possess any "subject matter" of their own.) Most of the time s/he talks to mixed groups, or non-prestigeful ones in terms of s/his home discipline. S/he will, incidentally, find it very difficult to become successful, to receive good appointments in s/his own field. S/he may, indeed, become successful, but that success will have to be measured in terms of other audiences than the discipline to which s/he purportedly "belongs." (A pity, if s/he cares -- In a tight job market, most of these persons will "convert" to some interest which has a market!)

Now, granted that the setting is amenable, if not exactly correct, the ritual may begin. Each field has its own customary mode of presentation; its own public arena. In addition, each field has its own certification or stamp-of-approval activities: often a particular setting, procedure, costumes, times of day or week.

Picture the scene: a performer comes before an audience and spouts a set of words. S/he may show slides, charts, videos. In the Humanities they actually read long papers/essays. S/he may entertain questions during and/or after the performance. (In some disciplinary settings there are only questions after read papers; the style varies considerably, and one should know where s/he is!) S/he may be


"entertaining," provoking apparent amusement. Ho, ho...! But do they believe, do they hear, do they remember what was said,or even talked about? What do they think of s/him - and the ideas -- in retrospect?

The main problem is that each field has its own canons for presenting and judging such performances. Well-socialized members of each field learn the appropriate ways to phrase things, about how much information to present, when laughter is entertaining but still serious. Some fields enjoy language, puns, jokes. Others seem to deprecate what would be "fun" in particular settings.

But it's very difficult for an outsider to appreciate these subtleties, much less take them on as part of s/his repertoire. Only the very "exceptional" (well-coached?) can learn all the tricks of the trade, and even fewer people (super-serious?) are convincing to audiences outside their own fields. (We might consider the case of eminent outsiders -- but again they're unlikely to be in the inter-disciplinary arena except during times when intellectual shift or impasses are felt to be occurring.)

The first apparent moment of a presentation takes place during the introduction. Even introduction styles vary widely -- often from field to field, but also idiosyncratically. A skilled interdisciplinary speaker is very sensitive to this moment since it sets up the situation and may affect the audience's evaluation to come. The audience is likely to be familiar with the introductory speaker and know s/his style; long or short, complimentary or "no-comment," rambling-historical. Any deviation from the usual will be noted and "counted," but the outside speaker can only guess what the "usual" is, and how the introduction is being reacted to. A skilled speaker will watch the audience reaction very carefully.

S/he may then turn to the audience, which may have remained pretty neutral -- or s/he may have to undo. For example, I was once introduced by a physician to a general audience, simply as a non-physician. His tone was disparaging -- at least I heard it that way. So I simply certified my relationship to physicians by stating that "some of my best friends were...", that I had worked as an "anthropoltergeist" in a medical school, and that a physician "friend" had once tried to explain to me about different fields and their discontinuties and belongings: he said that "blood is thicker than water, and that a drop of water in a bucket of blood looks like a bucket of blood." Thus I certified myself (as understanding the physician's view of the M.D. vs. PhD world) and at least opened up the audience to the possibility that what I was about to say was both interesting and potentially knowledgeable -- in their terms. (My measure of success was derived from later feedback.)

The non-introduction is equally tricky, since one has to quickly state: 1) who s/he is; 2) try to certify that s/he is who s/he says s/he is; 3) state why the audience should care. This is done most easily by taking a fairly well-known person or position in the audience's field and showing how one relates to or against s/his position. It is usually safer to identify against some position, because the audience is aware that the speaker is an outsider, and too strong an in-group identity sets them on edge. In any case, one must discuss s/his relevance, if it was not mentioned or derogatively dismissed in the introduction.

At risk of making too much of this, I should point out that merely identifying oneself by s/his home discipline is a dangerous thing to do. Occasionally a few listeners will have very positive knowledgeable


associations to one's field. But even in these cases, these associations may have derived from coursework taken many years earlier, a youthful ambition. Their memories are also likely to have become colored by subsequent experiences, especially in a large university where much of one's reputation is carried by rumor. This leaves the speaker in a set of positions not necessarily of s/his own choosing. S/his stongest, usually wisest, ploy is to identify s/himself positively while leaving these other more diffuse associations to "float" ambiguously for the time being...but to keep them in mind.

The presentation itself takes place within different settings in each field -- even if they look familiar. Most cross-disciplinary speakers know that their style will vary in terms of the room, audience size, seminar or lecture form; whether they will use slides, transparencies, notes, read, or simply talk. But they don't know a number of things: where the audience is, educationally -- i.e., how much does it know about the substance, the topic of the speaker. Pitching the talk too high is dangerous, but often tolerated; too low, is a direct insult -- both speaker and topic will be losers that day, and possibly for many to come. Are the members of the audience in a positively receptive mood (rare, but possible) for some reason (reputation, a recent important work, etc.)? Have they had a recent, bad experience with someone from another field; from this speaker's field?

But even more important is the style. Some behavioral science fields require a listing of the context of the talk by reference to a series of "empirical" studies. Experimental psychology talks usually consist of a talk, interpersed with a number of slides, which presents quick detailed data on a carefully delimited problem area. Some fields, notably anthropology, balk at this form of data presentation, preferring a sort of wide-ranging anecdotal, case-study, "it-happened-to me-in-Borneo" presentation. Physicians prefer case studies, behavioral biologists colored slides. But, in any case, using a style outside of the usual (preferred!?) one, seems to jar the audience, usually to underrate or to marginalize the speaker and the talk. Certainly an audience is likely to receive the speech differently than the speaker intended and thinks it is being received.

Within the style-difference context, the choice of presentation style is problematic. One can pretty easily cast s/his talk at a bland->serious level, but this always leaves one open to the criticism that s/he is not an adequate insider. Clearly one cannot exactly win in interdisciplinary settings.

If one has a home disciplinary audience, and feels that s/his success is at least partly within that discipline, then there is little point of becoming a member of another discipline. In my experience no committed disciplinary member tries to become a member of another discipline -- that's a contradiction inherent in the notion of commitment. So "selling-out" is simply a form of changing disciplinary audiences and redefining one's success arena. Most of the people who switch seem to be more interested in organization and administration (or fame) than in research and/or scholarship. (Spoken from the experience of a person who has painfully dissociated himself from a discipline which has "lost" interest in his subject interests and taken up a position which is not particularly interested in "language and human nature" - Sarles, 1985.) The most "useful" interdisciplinary position -- if it's to remain truly interdisciplinary -- is to remain the (hopefully


interesting) outsider.

Data Interpretation

The problem of data is particularly intriguing. Even though almost all the behavioral sciences consider themselves to be empirical, they differ on their commitments to where the significant/real data lie (the "locus" of the subject matter). Only a few of them really observe the behavior of their subjects. Medicine, ethology, and anthropology (i.e., many practitioners of these disciplines) actually observe what their subjects do. Experimental psychology more often observes the results of what its S's do; e.g., how often a bar is pressed. Sociologists tend to be more concerned with that people say they do or believe; political science and economics tend to look at certain population "behaviors" - rarely at people behaving (how they voted; how much money they save or spend). Linguistics has been working (now changing?) in terms of a kind of idealized, regularized scheme of how subjects say they talk -- or ought to talk. But even those who observe actual behavior observe quite different aspects/patterns of behavior, often for differing reasons. No wonder cross-talk is difficult!

A second fact of the data problem is that interpretations of data are constructed within wildly different frameworks, often for quite different reasons. Medical-paramedical concerns are primarily with curing: if understanding of, say, a basic behavioral syndrome helps in the curing, fine. But understanding is a goal in medicine only insofar it it does shed light on a set of symptoms, and directs the physician toward a cure. Just as in engineering, the basic sciences are tolerated; but research and development is where the real money goes. Medicine thus has a very useful axe to grind -- but nevertheless an axe. Surprisingly, other disciplines also act as if they have axes to grind.

In my experience, most behavioral sciences have a sense of distrust about their own data! -- data, in the sense of direct observations. The shift toward using statistical models only confirms this view to me. I've tried to understand this in such terms as their axes-to-grind; or that the business of behavioral sciences have a kind of secret mission, much like medicine's curing, which both justifies their existence and urges them to act like demi-physicians; i.e., to cure rather than to understand. Similarly with surveys and opinion polls -- a bend to a market economy notion, rather than to an examination and inquiry of questions asking "how" and "why?" Perhaps their cure is control, and they have deep-seated political ambitions. Perhaps they have all become bureaucratized, and are concerned primarily with turf, publications, jobs, grants, fame and the possibility of appearing on McNeil-Lehrer; less with issues, problems, etc.

Most of us have well-developed views about human nature and really quite a bit of observational experience about our subject matter. Physicists have to be smart, ingenious, careful; the behavioral scientist has to try and transcend s/his own experience -- most of which s/he'll actually continue to use as a social being. It has seemed to me that the behavioral science models which are available tend to self-select their students. People who believe that men (sic!) are truly rational (e.g., to maximize profit) go into economics. Rare is the behavioral scientist who is broad enough to look at some total range of


behavior and be careful and patient enought to interpret behavior "in its own terms." (This would entail, minimally, traveling to all the different disciplines, and "-isms" to see what they are up to, think, "see" and record...this essay as one attempt?)

It is instructive, for example, to be in joint seminars or teach classes jointly with persons from other disciplines. It becomes intriguing when three disciplines are present, to see which two form coalitions -- usually against the third -- and over which issues.

I have taught (with a psychiatrist colleague) a class on human movement in social contexts. We had engaged in a couple of years of conjoint experience in research study in this area, so we agreed pretty much on subject matter. But teaching -- the use of students' questions, feedback, conceptualization of the "course" -- was quite different. Luckily, we both respected each other (as individuals and thinkers) enough to discuss our teaching strategies -- but he was, in my experience, a very rare and special person. (By now, I've had several such sustained experiences: a few disasters, some memorable successes, from my personal perspective. Still, this is complicated turf!)

We worked it out in about the following way: we both wanted to get through the course material outline in the allotted time. There was a formal, distributed outline-syllabus with readings -- and the style (with about a dozen students) quasi-formal. I did most of the lecturing (the setting was in Anthropology, where I had an appointment, not in Psychiatry - so the course was officially mine). We differed in two major areas, as far as we could tell, in trying to analyze our reactions.

First, we had both tried to bring every student in on the classroom discussion -- in one way or another. Apparently, however, we tended to interpret student reactions somewhat differently. I tended to focus away from "weak" or "silly" questions -- since (I thought) they detracted from the course. I tried never to put-down the student, but I either answered the question I thought s/he should have asked or somehow maneuvered the situation so it moved quickly on to something else (Sarles, 1992). My psychiatrist friend invariably wanted to know why the student had asked this question or why s/he had phrased it in a particular way. My colleague seemed to want to use the classroom as a kind of therapeutic milieu in which the less capable (in my view) or more "needy" (his view) got disproportionate attention. It was only because we (he and I) had a pretty deep trust in one another that we ever found out that we were, in fact, observing approximately the "same" behavior but simply interpreting it from differing frameworks. (Most physicians, in my experience, do not believe others, non-trained, can or do observe what they claim to; they're probably correct in many cases.)

The second difference was in our differing sense of time dimension as it applies to learning. Learning, good teaching, implies conceptual changes. The psychiatric experience my colleague brought with him said that such conceptual changes occur very, very slowly. He (also in psychoanalytic training during that period) was patient to the point of unbelievability (my view!). I demanded (as subtly as I could) pretty immediate response -- the proverbial bulb lighting up -- fairly constantly, or I redid and re-explained. (He said something like: "You're probably training them to show positive responses in order to get you throught the lecture!" Fair enough.). But my belief, still harbored, is that I can get people to change their conceptions, to teach


in such an effective way that this is possible, or I must change teaching techniques, approaches, thinking. He, in his patient, gentle way, suggested that this was certainly less possible than I (still) believe, than I experience.

From an interdisciplinary point of view, this could have caused us enormous problems, unless we were willing to discuss what was happening. This, in my mind, was only possible because we had known each other for quite a while, had shared lots of ideas, and had a great deal of respect for one another -- an ongoing sincere interest in what the other was thinking and would say or do at any point in the course: he was a very "gentle" human being.

But assume for a moment that we simply were hired to teach a class, without this previous common experience. We would -- even if both well-motivated -- have talked past one another, not have understood the actual situation. Likely, we would have imputed the misunderstandings to one another rather than to ourselves as fairly representative of our respective disciplines. And we would never have tried it again -- a real tragedy, since one has to learn how to observe (in my opinion) by watching trained people observe, interpret, ask questions. As noted earlier, most interdisciplinary coalitions have, indeed, been abortive and often filled with bitterness.

Coalitions of the Third Party

Another interdisciplinary experience is the "coalition of the third party." Usually, when members of three disciplines are present in a situation, two pair off; the third interprets this as a coalition against s/him -- and it often (usually?) is.

For various reasons, there seem to be certain natural-appearing alliances across disciplines. These have, in my experience, very little to do with particular individuals involved -- although the feelings generated in these settings are usually directed toward or aginst the individuals. Some examples (from some 20 years ago -- and the times have changed, though the point has not): where psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and anthropologists are present, the psychiatrists and anthropologists find themselves to be "allies." Linguists, experimental psychologists and anthropologists -->psychology-anthropology are allies; linguists-anthropologists-sociologists-->linguist-anthropologists; behavioral biologists-psychologist-anthropologist-->biologist-psychologist (except in the few instances of the social-behavioral biologist who relates to the anthropologist.

The point of the coalition of the third party seems still to hold, but there have been various changes during the past two decades (1970-90), which have somewhat altered the relationships. Some of these changes have been "driven" by internal changes within the disciplines (I think). Psychiatry essentially severed its relationships with anthropology in the early 1970's as it became more "behaviorally" oriented, preferring drug treatment to talking therapies. Psychiatry thus tends to coalesce with behaviorist psychologists and biologists, and to discount anthropologists -- if indeed, there is any communication. (I have had none for the past several years after a futile miscommunication.)

After a hiatus of some 20 years, as the apparent leading edge of


psychology (pushed by advances and impasses in Artificial Intelligence and Expert-Systems Research) has moved "back" toward cognition, I am now more in the company of psychologists and linguists who are casting about for some "new" ideas and/or directions. I have one good (truly intellectual) colleague in biology (we talk every few days), but feel locked-out of biology at least for the time being -- and have left anthropology for Literature (Comparative) where my ideas seem to resonate a bit more easily. (At least they love puns!) This is very organic turf, at least in this moment -- but, I think, the move to coalition remains fairly constant.

It appears, in general, that there are closer feelings about one's disciplinary colleagues than about members of other disciplines. Without attempting to probe these in any deep sense, they do seem to be akin to the feelings that one has about s/his own family. They raised s/him; s/he operates in terms of their logics and morality (for or against); when the chips are down, home is always there, and one is always more or less welcome.

The presence of the third party often seems to enhance some similarities or in-commonnesses, as well as to call attention to in-common hostilities. This seems much like the eternal intra-family war, the internecine sniping that occasionally becomes public: woe to the outsider who messes into the situation! The familial coalition, in such situations, is tighter than that proverbial drum. This is surely understandable for a single discipline (relating us back to the speaker in the foreign land); but why and how does this work in third-party coalitions? And what effects can it have on interdisciplinary communication?

Why does this threesome break-up and break-down into coalitions of two plus one; why do they operate this way? Well, children in threesomes tend to operate similarly. Perhaps it is related to some need to make up "fictive kin" in cases where none actually exist; one "needs" to find someone who is related in some deeper way than...? Again, no one is surprised (in interdisciplinary situations) that persons form coalitions on personal grounds, but it seems to be less widely recognized that these seem to form more easily on disciplinary grounds (but why do people find particular others attractive, anyway?). Perhaps we tend to read such situations as operating only between persons, and to discount or read-out situational variables.

One possible interpretation follows the social psychologists who seem to see each group formation as existing primarily as a totally new entity. Members of groups are seen to behave essentially as group members -- not as persons with previous experience, history, skills, etc. But in tri-disciplinary situations, it is clear that only certain aspects of the individuals' histories go into the coalition formations. Since they are usually disciplinary, they do not depend very much on individual differences.

(Discount the fact, for example, that most paramedical people are extremely ambivalent about coalitions with and against a physician -- some disciplines rank higher or lower than others, and this will affect the coalition. It also varies in different settings; e.g., at my university, anthropology has always been remote from the other social sciences and often assumed to be a second-rate discipline. Locally trained psychologists -- high prestige here -- are likely to down-grade all anthropologists. In this section, however, we'll assume that the


disciplines are essentially equivalent.)In such settings it soon becomes apparent that different

disciplinary members attend to slightly different aspects of data, ask somewhat different questions. My experience has been that after a short period of "feeling-out" one's colleagues, a kind of consistency of issues takes on a rather central focus. Then those present line-up along this focus -- two on one side, one on the other. (What gets "lost" in any situation: a little; a lot?)

The dynamics of this is fascinating. In thinking about it, it is worth noting that any number of themes could be discussed, attended to, which remain fairly neutral. But that does not happen in the tri-discipline setting. Many issues may be discussed in such settings, but they are approached through a two-to-one bias along the lines of quickly central foci.

The notion of a central focus is not as obvious or explicit as I've been suggesting. My experience is derived from analysis and hindsight. Having been in quite a few interdisciplinary settings, I've noted the coalitions forming with a great deal of consistency.

My claim to insight rests on predicting which disciplines will "coalesce" or not, and in trying to explain (to others/myself) the issues over which the split will/has occur(red). In other words, I have found myself acting as a kind of mediator (not always unbiased) in trying to account for the non-communication which ordinarily takes place in such settings. (More complicated, and more difficult for me personally, is trying to explain to the participants that they often do not understand one another, particularly in settings where interpersonal confrontation of this sort is regarded as a personal affront. The "rationalist myth" is that differences in such situations are almost always personal, not cultural/disciplinary, so that pointing out a miscommunication is taken by many persons to be a direct commment on their personal attributes; i.e., a direct, personal, clear insult! Obtaining sufficient authority/credibility in others' terms, to explain themselves to themselves, in a very tricky endeavor.)

But people really do seem to act consistently in terms of their professional, disciplinary selves; this is enhanced in the tri-communication setting. How do they -- or do they -- get to communicate, to actually understand or intuit what the others are trying to say?

Clearly, there is only a partial chance of communication occurring as part of the human (social) condition of occupying partially different experiential worlds. Our problem as cross-disciplinary brokers or mediators is, more reasonably, how to diffuse (de-fuse) the central foci of assumption and argument, and to enhance the adherence to working on the problems significantly (?) at issue.

In attempting to work out the interdisciplinary communication problems, I have found it useful, first of all, to help enable the participants to become aware:

1. that there may be non-personal (i.e., disciplinary) issues involved; 2. that there may well be actual contradictions in positions, assumptions, interests which can only create futile dissent, and may well prove insoluble;

3. that the interdisciplinary approach may be a non-useful thing to do in some cases;

4. that all participants may be equally "well motivated," but operate in terms of different models of motivation, success, prestige,


etc. (...remembering that to adhere to a professional-academic discipline carries with it a strong imprimatur of being "right" and "correct" and "truthful"! - There are also a fair number of persons who may not be so noble or well-motivated, but they will remain undiscussed here.)

What I try to do is to talk with the participants individually (divide and conquer?) and identify with them in the sense of demonstrating my understanding of: (1) how they see themselves in their home disciplines; (2) how they attack/approach a number of issues; (3) how they do or do not get along on various issues.

Then I suggest that their interdisciplinary colleagues see themselves from somewhat different perspectives. This is often denied -- I guess on the "liberal" grounds that we're all basically alike (or should be!). I try to point out differences by recreating a set of issues on which the participants have disagreed -- over issues or ideas which any member of that (counter-) discipline would share. Then I ask my "client" to test other members of that counter-discipline to see if I was close to correct -- all in all, a pretty reasonable approach in which I ask a person to do s/his own testing, and work at doing s/his own reinterpreting.11

If a person who is in interdisciplinary work cannot transcend s/his previous interpretations sufficiently to be willing to do as I ask, I suggest that this is not s/his proper metier! Such a person can (possibly) do useful work as a hiree, a worker. But I doubt s/his long term ability to work as an effective, non-destructive inter-disciplinary colleague. S/he may simply have no awareness of and respect for interdisciplinary diferences; will tend to interpret all differences of opinion and approach on an interpersonal level -- if not today, then tomorrow.

Relative Prestige Among Disciplines

How members of each discipline view other disciplines, and their pictures of how others view them, will affect their communicational behavior. Here there are three main issues: (1) where the field finds itself, prestige-wise, at any given time and place; (2) the gaining

11This is all considerably more complicated in the early 1990's as "politics" in the broadest sense have entered into various disciplines and, in some cases, seem to pervade or even take over all other issues and considerations. The movement of the notion of "culture" from anthropology to various of the Humanities, Women's Studies, American Studies, etc., is often informed by a kind of politics of the "oppressed" against whatever is seen as controlling, hegemonious, etc. The culturalists (multi-culturalism, politically correct,...) seem to use culture to suggest that politics are everywhere and the dominant (only?) academic motivation. In the Humanities, where texts and literature are (the apparent) subject matter, the argument is cast as being about the nature of "the" curriculum: what to read - the canon of Great Men/Ideas vs. the books and literature by the down-and-outs, the recently rising, current writers, post-Colonialists, emerging literatures, etc. These arguments tend to cross certain disciplinary lines in ways which are generally different from the sorts of interdisciplinary efforts to which this essay refers - in which subject matters are related less to thei occurrences and characterizations in literature and more to being and happenings in the ("real") world.


(loss) of relative prestige; (3) the effects.If a field is down -- if its members regard some other field(s) as

higher -- they are likely to be uncritical about the high prestige field, and overly critical of their own disciplinary fellows.12 Most of the behavioral sciences are perennially in this bind, since they accept the foundations of scientific reasoning -- a la physics -- as their working paradigm; or as located in literary theory (as do aspects of anthropology and political science at this moment). And they do this uncritically for the most part; i.e., in terms of self-consciousnessness and self-criticism -- tending to "buy" the concepts as baggage with the prestige. (Similarly, the "hardened" behavioral sciences tend to put-down attempts within science-oriented disciplines which are descriptive/non-empirical or non-statistical as of lesser or no importance, often principally on grounds of "methodology.")

Whereas physics and mathematics have internal theoretical, high-prestige areas, most behavioral scientists consider theorizing as a fairly empty process, unless accompanied by experimentation and whatever (at any time) passes for hard data. The physicists and mathematicians I have known are far more relaxed and abstruse thinkers than most behavioral scientists, presumably because they have no external prestige worries: i.e., they tend to regard their own fields as being a "bottom-line." Many behavioral scientists, on the other hand, get into arguments about the use of statistics, computers, and other methods and instrumentation, and the tools in their hands remarkably tend to limit the questions in the disciplines, rather than the reverse. (At this moment in some fields, the reverse actually seems more the case: the term "theory" is being used to make claims for the high prestige, "smart" areas of the fields -- locating itself particularly in "literary theory" which is attempting to rewrite Western thought, if not the entire human condition. Here, I too plead guilty. The point is that the inter-disciplinary broker cannot blithely assume that s/he already knows what determines prestige in any time or place, based on prior and always limited experience. Prestige is at least in part fluid and/organic.)

Communication from low to high seems difficult more because the low has constructed its own visions of the higher disciplines, than anything which necessarily emanates from the high prestige disciplines themselves (though some disciplines like philosophy tend to claim knowledge or all the texts, and assert that they deserve...or own...or. Arrogance and arrogation of knowledge is not unusual in the academy). Within the behavioral sciences, a further complication exists because the highest of them are fairly low in their own estimation compared, say, to physics or "even" to biology.

Among the behavioral sciences, I have seem more defensive (offensive?) threatened moves by the slightly highers against the slightly lowers than I find reasonable to think about. I find it very much like the starving dogs who are thrown a few scraps of food, fighting among one another for some left-overs that no one cared about. (Grr-r-r!) But it remains most interesting because it is largely self-imposed and does affect all levels of interdisciplinary communication.

12This applies to Universities as well, finding themselves at some point in a ranked pyramid. Most Universities -- not having much vision of what they "should" be, look to a set of "similar" Universities, both to define themselves and to judge how they are, how to improve, not decline, etc.


Perhaps this is a primary area of explanation for why interdisciplinary behavioral science reasearch has been and remains so abortive; why and how the issues at hand tend to get buried within battles over methods, turf, proprietary claims...

As a (former) member of a discipline (anthropology) which varies in prestige depending on "which outside" is the reference group, the most amazing thing I witness is how these factors affect the evaluation of the data and techniques of another field. I "do" very well (get along, appear reasonable, for example, to many biologists.)13 I have cross-cutting interests with oral biologists (i.e., tongue articulation behavior, and variation with dialects -- how it affects mouth-teeth shape) and with behavioral biologists (inter-species communication, social behavior of animals). Psychologists, who tend to regard these very biologists as high-prestige, (have) tend(ed) to regard anthropology as a non-biological science, rather than as a weak social science. And they tend not to listen, to me, at any rate. But if my "data" were presented as biology (by a biologist) to the same psychologists, it would/might well be accepted. And, I'm afraid, accepted uncritically. Ceteris paribus, prestige seems to be more important than rational argument, experiences, or observation in the construction of truth for most behavioral scientists. (Woe is us!) (Not to mention "politics" in a general sense.)14

The relative prestige of subjects or disciplines varies according to:

1) place of employment (2) training location of interactants (3) time of (1) and (2) 4) "age" of disciplines5) "success" of the disciplines in some larger sphere 6) "great wo/men";7) perceived relation of a discipline to other disciplines 8) success in obtaining good students; 9) external funding opportunities -- push of technologies, jobs,

etc.

In a given university, it may be that a few famous (wo)men -- or good bureaucrats -- were able to establish a very strong department. Since good young people tend to want to go (and hear about) to such

13This situation changed rather abruptly with the emergence of Sociobiology and E.O. Wilson in the middle 1970's -- but my most constant intellectual companion, P. Regal, has felt somewhat outside of his field of Evolutionary Biology/Ecology since that time as well, pushed also by the rise of chemists-microbiologists-genetic engineers since that era. 14Biology, which (claims to) represents nature, is most interesting because it has two virtually opposite views depending on whether it is matched oppositionally with anthropology or religion. With respect to religion (fundamentalist/creationist), biology represents the notion of change as evolution: either the deity created us or we have evolved. With respect to anthropology, biology tends to see itself in the nature-nurture opposition, where biology represents nature as fixity, and anthropology (mostly) claims that nurture/culture is change, and where the important features of the human condition are truly located. Interestingly, psychology has both factions within it, split somewhat evenly.


places, the department is likely to retain a strong reputation over many years; often this halo still works long after there is any substantive reason for it: e.g., the greats have left or retired intellectually. (Nowadays, many universities "buy" important faculty-thinkers, creating instant fame/quality.)

At such a place, the other departments are likely to recognize excellence both by lip service and by sending their students to take courses from the great (wo)men. In effect, the students are told that the "great" persons are indeed great -- thus their subject and importance legitimated, made credible and more memorable than they might otherwise be.

Most students, not having the critical acumen to make this judgment themselves, are left with this residual perception of other disciplines as legitimated during their training period and tied to particular personality images. In my experience, these ex-students are very likely to react in terms of these images -- even if they gain a critical sense later in their personal developments. (This is one reason why I suspect that many scholars do not believe or trust their own critical facilities, or often their own data!) The model of relative prestige derived from the period of a person's training is very likely to persist throughout s/his career. (This is so because most scholars do not get much "beyond" their graduate training during their subsequent careers. In an era of tight job market, especially, the necessity to publish quickly tends to "technologize" young scholars who have to operate out of knowledge garnered when they were graduate students, rather than having any leisure to rethink their own development critically in the first several years after their doctorates.)

Now in any given place, the oldest usually get the mostest -- merely because academic bureaucracies are self-serving: well-connected to others, especially administrators. The prestige of disciplines may thus vary considerably from place to place. An ex-student bearing a halo from s/his training may well carry this over to s/his new employment setting. S/he may try to establish relationships with people in the other high prestige disciplines (to s/him) and send s/his students to study in the other areas. The outside may, in effect raise the level of a discipline's prestige by treating it as if it were prestigeful. It is not unlikely that a "charismatized" person will even attempt to hire strong persons in s/his prestige areas as necessary to the good training of s/his own students. In this way a generation-old model of prestige can be used to actually build up a discipline today.15

The age of the disciplines is often a prestige-determining factor. This is true not only because of bureaucratic considerations, but because a long history seems to imbue a sense of importance and slight extra-reality even to an otherwise undistinguished history. Many scholars, most institutions are "historical thinkers" in the sense that they tend to look backward for the definitions of and solutions to current issues, rather than (for example) to the "present age" and they

15This is somewhat complicated in the present moment (early 1990's), because the notion of multi-culturalism, etc., has brought "new" populations into the university, especially women. In some areas (e.g., "cultural studies"), the "new" thinkers have established disciplines (some would say pseudo-disciplines) of women's studies, ethnic studies; but also parts of the humanities, comparative literature and American studies.


interpret history rather literally more than phenomenally; witin some processual sense of the ongoing present.

A long history also serves as a backdrop to proprietary claims of certain subject matters. Most social science students are likely to have a sense for history, economics, and psychology at the graduate level -- in a sense, regardless of the fact that other subjects might be more meaningful to them. The application of fictive history to modern reality is indeed a fascinating subject! Similarly, the "hard" sciences continue to regard the "soft" sciences as having no real claim to being/doing science -- especially, in my experience, this is true between biology and anthropology in the current era.16

At any given point in a discipline's history (the putative present) any given discipline may be deeply affected by its own or related disciplines' apparent success in the intellectual or scientific communities. The effect is more marked if the discipline has, itself, run out of new or currently useful theories or ideas. In casting around for new things to do, it is likely to relate itself to the external success of another discipline, to ride on its coattails. This may or may not work out well, internally to the borrowing discipline -- depending in turn on a variety of factors.

The case of experimental psychology -- particularly of learning psychology -- is a case-in-point. Behaviorism-association theory was seen by prospective learning psychologists as a relatively unpromising discipline during the late 1950's. Most of the developed methodologies were being applied, but no new, exciting issues were seen to be on the horizon. With Chomsky's "Review of Skinner" (1957), a new era seemed to be dawning. Linguistics seemed to have all kinds of new theories and ideas, applications, implications, and promises for psychologists. Linguistics was, at this time, in the midst of an internal revolution -- an extremely successful one -- for a while. Philosophy was also hunting for new ways around the perceived cul de sac of its affair with Linguistic Philosophy. All of the principals in this were funded extremely handsomely as they came together in a number of (mostly abortive) attempts at machine translation.

All in all, this seemed to constitute a new wave for learning psychology, and it bought-in to modern linguistics. About a decade later, the beginning of chinks in the theories began to show: Chomsky's ambitious promises of new sorts of insights into the human mind via language were given several years to materialize; but they did not, at least with respect to a certain order of semantic statements. The job market for linguists did not continue to enlarge; a new set of battles for control of the field continued between older linguists and those trained in the Chomskyan era. And now (two-plus decades later) the field seems to be at some sort of impasse -- with some few promising areas (computational linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, etc.).

Psychology, which had ridden this crest of linguistic success, was beginning to sense some of the difficulties with the linguistic ideas they had borrowed, and itself seems to be switching from any mere

16The two-culture issue (Snow, 1959) is particularly alive from the perspective of literary theory, which denies that any "objective" view (of anything!?) is possible, thus negating all of positive science - and from some perspectives - denying the possibility of the/any "truth," issues of reality, etc: a philosophical relativism opposing various senses of absolutism.


analysis of language "back" to the study of cognition -- both fields (and others) now being driven principally by the money and excitement of AI (artificial intelligence), especially "expert systems."17

Whereas Chomsky had been considered by many to be the leading intellectual of the 20th century, his linguistic theories seemed to poop out, and we entered a "post-Chomsky period." Perhaps these fields will look within -- as I think psychology is now doing with its move back to cognition -- rather than deriving its ideas and theories from other fields which promise to...and not get caught having to play with someone else's broken toys and wearing hand-me-downs.18

The notion of great men(women) affects most of us to an incredible degree. Much of the picture of ultimate success within a discipline is cast with such (wo)men in its collective mind. One reads the history of s/his field as a collectivity of the thought of those adjudged to be great by those who preach the current doctrine. Most of us use such character portraits to define our own potential, where we are on the rungs to success, and -- most interesting -- often as case studies to justify to ourselves how far we must fall short of so-and-so's greatness. To the extent that others continue to read and to revere the great wo/men of a given discipline, that discipline must maintain relatively high prestige (potential) even if the present actuality of its membership is considerably weakened. (Actually, if great men are the total model, the present always appears weak -- that this present weakness often does not affect the prestige of a particular field is fascinating!)19

If a given discipline is perceived as somehow fundamental to another, it "must" be prestigious; at least maintained. That is, if tools of a given discipline are considered basic to another, the tool discipline must be maintained -- well, if possible. For example, mathematics -- especially computer sciences -- is it for all the behavioral sciences, although most mathematicians are very skeptical about its applicability to behavioral science problems, at least as currently stated. The situation of anatomy is, perhaps, more complicated. Anatomy (of the cadaver, dissection) became exhaustively known some decades ago; but it needs to be taught to each generation of curers (doctors, dentists, etc.). So it requires persons to "volunteer"

17Expert systems is an example of an "engineering" approach to a problem overtaking an "intellectual" approach to the same problem. In expert systems, there is no particular attempt to lay out a "language" and to specifiy how particular areas or experts would partake of that general language. Instead, the effort is to take each area of expertise and to devise a method/mode of describing just how that person "thinks" as an expert, bypassing the general problem of the "language of thinking," a pursuit which has informed philosophy and linguistics for a long time.18At moments of impasse, particularly of a formerly prestigious/arrogant field, other fields who now emerge and rise in importance, have been known to wreak orders of revenge on the formerly important field which now seems vulnerable.19Disciplines/fields which are particularly related to various texts, are most vulnerable to going back to textual sources whenever a problem of nervousness about identity arises in any era. In the present age, for example, there is an increasing call from (neo-)conservative political thinkers to "return" to the "foundations" of Western civilization - particularly to Plato and Aristotle (Bloom, 1987), and by religious literalist/fundamentalists to the New (Old) Testament or the Koran.


to teach anatomy, even though almost no one, anymore, is an anatomist. (There is an "emerging" field of dynamic or functional anatomy which relates particularly to sports medicine and to orthodontia.)

Where do the Smart/Ambitious Kids Go? (Who is "Smart"?)

Most of us have some sense that the high I.Q. students we grew up with were selected early to go into the hard sciences (plus math and engineering), arts (including some literary interests), and a very few into the curing arts. Most recently (the Reagan era), many of them drifted into business and law = money = greed. Most of the really smart (i.e., high I.Q. early in school careers) never get into the social sciences, except "by mistake" or as fall-out from their earlier choices. The highly analytic minds that most scientific endeavors feed on do not get into the soft sciences -- pressures put on the school and community work very hard to ensure this. (But with the current unpopularity of math and science, the shift from business to Liberal Arts[?], the impending retirement of the bulk of professors...??)

There is a residue of such students who, for one reason or another, look to new areas of interest and slide into behavioral science (accompanied by a larger number of untalented scientific-arts drop-outs). Reasons? -- really good mathematicians appear to be unbelievably talented in their early or mid-teens; while many of us were worrying about football, boys/girls, and music during this period... and it's already too late to discover math in college; so it appears to be, anyway.

Not only do the soft sciences have trouble in attracting the best students, they also have trouble in keeping them. Not only do the best leave, but the implications of power in the hands of the less-than-best tends to drive them away, leaving a residue which is not highly creative, imaginative, or even flexible.

These issues are also caught up in the forever cycling battles between reductive and holistic thinking. It's much easier to be a fairly good reductionist, but extremely difficult to be a good holist. In holist-type-eras -- right now, apparently -- internal battles within the entire curricular structure, and in any particular university, become even more complex.20

20The past era (1960-1990 approximately) has been primarily a reductionist era, with analysis and reduction to the smallest atoms, particles,...of any and every subject matter tending to characterize what has dominated during this era. This tendency probably characterizes the entire curriculum, with the synthetic/syncretic thinkers marginalized during this era, and splintering/Balkanization of knowledge the rule to the level of what is obvious--> the curricular "solution" to all questions of knowledge.Complicating this reductionist tendency, is the observation that each discipline seems to have its own meanings and senses of what is small (reductionist) and large (holistic or synthetic): what is small to the biologist is absolutely miniscule to the anthropologist, but what is large or whole to the biologist jumps suddenly (!) to nature and to human nature with few stops in between. So communicating between those who seek "the bigger picture" may not merely be anti-reductionistic without knowing how the next person's discipline considers large and small: e.g. perception (small) and cognition (large) in psychology seem both very small to me.


This seems to happen to some disciplines more than to others, and it happens in different ways, places, and times. The important point, however, is that the perception of relative prestige, including talent of its practitioners, will affect communication across disciplinary lines.

What sorts of effects may be seen? They vary, as in attempts to cross-talk over any sub-cultural lines, from simple blockage, through the variety of talkings-past-each-other, to the sense of severe marginalization and isolation which often results from being treated as a non-person.

Clearly, persons who don't understand one another will have difficulty in communication -- by definition, essentially. But if they know this, and want to transcend their differences, they will search for their mutual features and build on this basis: e.g., people-we-both-know, experiences we've both had, a book, an interest, a joined opposition to some external cause or person. If there appear to be none of these, it will be very difficult to (want to) communicate. But this is hardly ever true among scholars since they share the educational experience, life in bureaucracies, etc., if not a clear common subject matter interest. Among such persons, relative prestige among disciplines can become a major force in ther interactions.

Remember that the interaction takes place between two (or more) individuals who, in this case, represent different disciplines. If they are essentially equivalents (age-mates, common quality of education, degree, "productivity," fame), they may well begin to bargain over who somehow represents the better discipline, who holds more trump cards. This does not, by the way, seem to happen between disciplines who have very little in commmon -- or historically have been in competitive history with one another. In this situation, one is likely to be treated much more like a person-colleague; i.e., disciplinary lines are called to attention later rather than earlier in the interactions.

Among the behavioral sciences, however, no one happens not to come in disciplinary wrappings. Given the equivalence scene, there usually occurs an exchange of talk about common interests; e.g., why they are bothering to talk together in the first place. But I have rarely seen this proceed in any simple, straightforward way. If one discipilne is down (in prestige), both individuals are likely to be defensive and move toward the establishment and equal division of proprietary rights over the subject matter.

When this is in the wind, the long-term potential of interdisciplinary communication is already being undermined. They are simply going to operate as two separate enterprises, much as a bricklayer and plumber or a string and oboe. They'll need a manager/conductor and a score (blueprint) in order to do anything together -- really, separately and independently -- and come together only with respect to some larger plan.

Since this seems to happen so commonly in the equivalence situation, it is worth examining its dynamics in a bit more depth. We would hope, first of all, that shared interest in a common problem area would help them to supercede their differences -- and in a few cases this does work on a long term basis. But why is it so unusual?

Let's again consider a situation I know quite well: cross-talk between psychologists (P) and anthropologists(A)-linguists concerning language-related research. A current prestige group of psychologists are


"modern" linguists, part of whose accession to the ownership of linguistics included the effective disposal of said anthropological-linguists (for good or bad reasons doesn't concern us here).

But the concerns, problems and empirical orientation, training of psychologists and anthropological-types has a lot in common, depending of course, on which school of training, etc.

So what happens in the face-to-face? On first meeting, things go fairly well. Lots of common interests are made explicit. They may begin to plan a common project, to share a seminar. The principals have little or no trouble communicating -- have common interests, care about each other's backgrounds, and they discuss ideas and ambitions easily. The sources of trouble begin to emerge gradually, even mysteriously, as they discuss certain reference people, and erupts most often when in the context and company of students.

The ostensive difficulties appear to be about data even though the subject matter had seemed, till then, to be identical. The psychologist wants quickly to move to taking movies/videos of a certain sort of subject; the anthropologist wants to wait until s/he has been with ("hung-out" with) the subjects for a while. The first split, in fact, is over the nature of subjects, but in peculiar ways: P- wants to restrict the field of data-gathering and quickly look for a few common features among s/his subjects -- s/his ideas of subject being the few seconds which occur on the film.

A- always seems to want to know more; s/he objects to taking a short film which is supposed to fully characterize a subject, unless and until s/he knows a lot more. P- appears to always want to reduce variables and to "simplify" the situation. A- appears to want to complicate things so much that s/he never gets down to business and "never gets any data!"

This sketch (our data!) is instructive in that it portrays the frustration of both P- and A- vis-a-vis one another. In our omniscience we can see that P- and A- are probably both partially correct in approach and could certainly complement one another. Yet in most cases I know of, either P- or A- adopts the other's methods (i.e., P- becomes A-, or vice-versa) or they go their separate ways to meet in the diffuse future.

Why? I don't think it has much to do with either P- or A-, granted that they do share a lot of common interests. Most of the trouble seems to be located at bureaucratic levels, where they each will continue to live. My observation is that they each have in mind somewhat different audiences. I really haven't found many persons whose intellectuality and interest in scholarly problems is strong enough to push them to transcend their prestige-audience for very long! (Would money help?)

Similarly, the politics of the interactors may strongly determine how they approach any problem: some of the psychologists and behavioral biologists I have known well, have strongly in mind a kind of "Darwinian-competitive" model of our being, and seem to be searching to confirm the innateness or the givenness of our being, while most/many anthropologists have more a sense of cooperation and a Jeffersonian-liberal or "liberationist-neo-Marxist" model of human justice in mind when they approach any problem. In this context, the conflation of knowledge and politics tends both to splinter interactants and to obfuscate the nature of the problematics.

My general approach to resolving such issues is to attempt to


explicate and deal with the political issues quickly ["up-front"], and to attempt to explain to both parties how they are thinking "past" one another. Then we might be able to deal with intellectual problems.

Issues

Most of those disciplines which call themselves social and/or behavioral sciences have some distinct subject matter, theory, history, methods, and concern with intellectual issues. They all share their concern with behavior -- most include the study of humans, and a few restrict their study to humans.

A few of these fields have a (distinct?) subject matter but tend to borrow other disciplines' methods and, implicitly, their underlying theories -- but usually not their history or concern with issues. These latter are not usually considered to be on a par with the other fields, even in potential -- we'll call them sub-academic. Here, I'm thinking particularly of social work, educational psychology, speech-communication, speech pathology (communication disorders), and journalism. These all tend to borrow psychological, sociological, or anthropological methods (and, recently, theory from comparative literature) and apply them to their particular subject matters, often without benefit of any of the intellectual history which gave rise to these theories and without the dispositions or reasons for their development.21

In the academic fields, not only is there a difference in subject matter -- homo politicus, social or pathological or individual or economic or cultural (hu)man -- but there seem to be strong differences in their conceptual views of humans, and of human nature. The student who samples these different views by taking a course in each can, indeed, imagine s/he knows these fields, but it is mostly an illusion. I know of no one person who can be said to understand all the social-behavioral sciences in their own terms.

Why is this? Where have all the synthesizers gone? Better, why have they not emerged?

Mainly, I think this has to do with the notion that everyone seem to think s/his view of human nature is essentially the same as everyone else's. Ha!22

The various behavioral sciences are no closer in this respect than the antagonists in the abortion battles who (the anti-abortionists representing Roman Catholic and Protestant Fundamentalist views, essentially), cannot understand one another at all and merely talk past one another.23

21Sometimes this seems ot lead to reinventing ideas which have passed from existence and memory for pretty good reasons. In other cases, the understanding and interpretation of events and data and subject matter is radically transformed, or leaves a great deal of subject matter out, while narrowing the field radically; e.g., speech-communication's concern with "values" in considering cross-cultural understanding, omits much of each nation's own understanding (and principles) of itself -- the roots of nationalism, for example.22For an extensive review of human nature arguments see my aphoristic study of human nature.23I've tried to explore the abortion misunderstanding as one which pits a religiously


To attempt to communicate across these disciplines -- not merely to elevate one view at the expense of others -- one must beat s/his brains, reconceptualize, explore ("feel") how others see human nature, suspend belief and disbelief, yet hold firm to s/his own view.

In order to do this, one must believe-assume that s/his cross-disciplinary colleagues are as honest and well-motivated as oneself (to suspend one's moral judgements, as other sorts of critical judgements); but that they "really" operate in terms of different belief systems and in the different prestige arenas each of which can constantly reify its own view.

Consider two fields which seem (at least) to share a descriptive term: rational (hu)man -- economics and developmental psychology. Very broadly, economics views each person as most rational when s/he works to maximize s/his profits; developmental psychology sees growing up as becoming more and more rational. But here, rational usually is defined by the ability to solve a set of problems, mostly logical-mathematical in type; ones which older children can do, but younger ones cannot. I know of no attempt to study developmental economics (i.e., growing up rationally -- as learning how to maximize profits better and better). I guess that economic psychology is a more likely candidate. In any case, note that rationality is shared as a term, but it takes on quite different meanings in the different fields. (Doesn't anyone notice -- why?)24

Compare either of these views with that of anthropology, say, and other views shared by these two become apparent. It is "obvious" to the anthropologist (and not at all to the economist or developmental psychologist) that these two assume their unit of behavior to be the individual. This must seem overly narrow to the anthropologist because s/he assumes that the shared views of individuals often override their individual differences. A child's view of rationality (economic or psychological) is shaped (informed) largely by s/his family and/or peers (and their families) - just as the "reason" why one is Catholic or Moslem or Jewish in belief and identification has principally to do with being brought up in one's family which is...this is no small thing!

And success is judged differently in different places. Instead of attending to these different "cultural" definitions of rationality, the economist is overly likely to regard a person who wants, say, to maximize s/his chance of a good life in the hereafter, as being anti-rational, and throwing good resources away -- e.g., vows of poverty are anti- or irrational. (The same economist will likely not take any religious revival seriously.) The developmental psychologist is likely to believe that s/his (Western) logic is the (only) logic/reality in the world and measure people in terms of s/his own standards. Witness the use of the standardized I.Q. test as being definitive of a person's capabilities -- to succeed within our school system. (Again, this

(textual-interpretive) notion of being as different-opposed to an experiential notion.24And one also notes at least two other notions of rational which exist in the academy, and inside each of our heads simultaneously, if walled-off intellectually: rational means logical in philosophy-psychology, but its oppositional term in psychiatry - irrational - means clinically "crazy" - not exactly anti-logical, but in various ways outside of reality. And in the field of law, rational refers particularly to that part of society which is taken to be representative of community mores and morals: the upper-middle, usually white and male community.


critique has been somewhat successful since this essay was first drafted some years ago - but varies with the rise and fall of racism/Social Darwinism.)

Each of these differences can be extended to the other behavioral sciences. They don't all split on these issues, but as there are fields and sub-fields, there are different views. Some of these are different but possibly complementary, but some of them are different and opposed. In the latter cases, there may well be no communication possible: one can only try to elicit the various views, show how they differ, and in what kinds of cases they become opposed (trying to find a grounded position -- and sufficient authority -- to be able to provide an analysis and critique of both sides, by explaining to one another how they are, and why they do not/will not/cannot agree -- or why they pass each other by).

The economic notion of rationality may, indeed, be the cultural view in some places (upwardly mobile America) -- and complement or be the same as the anthropological view in that particular context. The views may become opposed, however, in extrapolating to other contexts. Scholars representing these two fields could "honestly" believe they agreed on many things -- until this extrapolation takes place -- and the inevitable parting might be bitter ("they were deceiving each other") unless they had some insight into their underlying assumptive differences...and some sense for their various entailments as they play-out in different situtations and times.

Unfortunately most of those who enter the interdisciplinary arena come with a good deal of goodwill, a naive belief that two disciplines are usually better than one, and a not very deep critical education within a single discipline. Unless these cross-disciplinary fellows are extremely good (in various possible senses: e.g., high quality, self assured persons), and quite willing to probe their own belief systems, their future in interdisciplinary work seems quite limited in time and very likely to end in the kind of disaster which would discourage truly good people to enter the fray in order to work on real problems of mutual interest.

Students, Ex-Students: Who's who, and can they stay that way?

The question of obtaining and keeping a professional-disciplinary identity in the context of interdisciplinary settings is problematic for everyone. Persons actually trained in such settings get a peculiar view of their own and other disciplines. Ex-students cum professionals are liable to very different pressures in such settings than those they were exposed to during their own disciplinary training. In all cases the studentship and memories of student days will affect one's identity and, in turn, one's proclivities and abilities to communicate across disciplines.

The role of student in such settings is most peculiar -- perhaps akin to that of the children of mixed or immigrant marriages. Sometimes it works out happily; sometimes not. Much depends on the relationship of the principals (the professors) in these settings -- as much, perhaps, on the nature of the scholarly communities into which the student will move. Ceteris paribus, a student who is trained to be a gadfly, and not strongly committed to an ongoing discipline, must be very strong and


self-contained. S/he must enjoy what s/he does, often irrespective of what others say or do. (A problem: if they are all that self-contained, why wander seeking companionship in other's disciplines?)

The dynamics of such a situation are quite complex -- certainly as it presents itself to the student. The present identity of each of the principals derived from a situation which was quite different from that in which they now find themselves. In other words, their reason for being who they are is not at all apparent to their students; similarly to the children of immigrants.

In addition, it is very hard for the student to extrapolate to the particular disciplines from observing the interdisciplinary scene. A physician, say, who gets s/his major "kicks" out of communing with social scientists makes little sense to most medical students. If s/he is the only medic who s/his psychologist-colleague's students see, they'll have a very bizarre view of medical practitioners. The extent to which they are successful in working with such a physician gives them essentially no predictive value that they'll be at all successful in working with any other physician. Most students, having gone through this experience, become leery of entering into any ties, tend to run to their home disciplines to see if they can still be loved, and/or they get very scared and retire to the undergraduate college teaching scene where they will be greatly appreciated by young students for their apparent breadth and erudition.

Actually, I've never known any students who survived an inter-disciplinary setting. I presume there are some, but I don't bet strongly on it. My experience has been limited to working with my (disciplinary) students when I was working in someone else's setting (psychiatry-medicine), and working in my former setting (anthropology) with students from other disciplines, and in my sub-specialty (linguistics-kinesics).25

In the psychiatric setting I did research primarily, but taught an occasional course over in anthropology. I got some money to hire research assistants from a relatively benevolent boss who thought he appreciated anthropology and only later discovered that he appreciated a (very) few anthropologists for a very few years. The students were considered as interesting appendages by my medical colleagues; cute but not "serious," in their terms.

We (students and I) formed an enclave, a kind of ethnic or exiled group in the midst of "real" (dominant?) society, defined by the majority physicians. A couple of the students did get into the medical world in one or two settings (group therapy), but I never was able to

25Actually this situation is just now (1992) in some flux. I have moved to Comparative Literature -- the concept of "culture" has been largely abandoned by anthropology, and taken over largely by literature. The very notion of communication -- a buzz-word of the 1970's and '80's -- has been submerged or diminished with respect to culture, which seems overwhelming as a conceptual tool and is being used to explain almost every aspect of the human condition: from subjective being to mutual understanding to how to get along in a large corporation. It is not yet clear to me what it now means to be a student of ----, and where the lines which have demarcated disciplines will yet come to any resting place, or even if they will.


determine whether they were co-opted to be paramedical persons in such settings, or simply treated as another sort of patient; a little of both, I would guess. In the end all of them abandoned any medical interests they might have had, for a more "reasonable" and rewarding future within "core" anthropology.

They had been exposed to the establishment, rather than to one or two medical people with cross-cutting interests. For them, it was well nigh impossible to see any individual physicians except as representing the medical world; because, in that setting, it is abundantly clear to any outsider that the medics are physicians first and scholars or intellectuals second, a long way removed. No physician was willing (able?) to interact with these students, except through me. Doing that, the physician never could become a person (professor) to the students. So working/being in other people's settings, unless perhaps they are constructed especially outside of the main setting, seem not to be good places to train students and push them into interdisciplinary settings. On the contrary, I strongly suspect it will usually tend to push them to react against any cross-disciplinary inclinations they might have had. (In this particular setting, the psychiatrists-Freudians had a generally negative clinical notion of the personality who would seek to go into "primitive" fieldwork situations, seeking -- as it were -- their own infantile personae!? -- a kind of anti-Jungian reaction.)

The dynamics of this seem to be similar to the establishment and coalescence of any in-group feelings. By exposing the members or neophytes of any group to another group, they seem to react by the setting-up of a kind of counter-culture. That is, by exposing students of any discipline to some other discipline -- to the disciplinary selves of members of other fields -- students tend to react by searching for their own disciplinary selves; to look for "home." (For example, my own interest in the study of America really got its impetus when I was residing in Mexico for two years.) Students of a given field who travel outside are like to have a firmer inside identity than their fellow students who have remained at home, not straying, not being exposed to outsides which mostly tend to firm-up boundaries.

In my (former anthropology) setting, there have been other sorts of experiences. First, in general academia, the disciplinary self is much less evident to students than, say, in medical settings. Everybody has a Ph.D., anyway -- the field is assumed by students to be one of high concentration and interest, rather than one whch requires special skills, licenses, or identities. No mission is apparent, and disciplinary differences or arguments appear to be truly academic.

Inside a field there are members, and there are members; which kind depending on one's pedigree, age, productivity, success, interests, and sub-field. Whereas the membership of an entire field appears essentially identical from the outside, it's a different story at home; inside.

Inside, the field is divided into many parts or particles. Often it is difficult to find many common features which characterize members of a particular field. Good students, both in the discipline and visiting, find this out more or less rapidly. But their perceptions are always slanted by their own career desires and the limitations on which parts and how much of their own field they see and are exposed to. (At various moments of great academic "isolation" --1992, right now -- the portrayal of many fields is quite disparate, done in courses and


discussions between students and particular professors with whom they speak: there is very little discussion within most fields at the present moment, thus the portrayal of any field is likely to be toward particular publications, articles or books, and at particular meetings of people who want to meet and/or impress one another.)

The central ("visible") figures in any discipline at a given time are the people (great men [above age 50 or so] and women) whom everyone is reading or listening to (but some "hot" younger people as well). At the centers of any field -- the places where most of the great wo/men have been brought to -- a student can ask a great one to unpack; how s/he thinks, what s/he is about, how s/he got there, etc. Being exposed to the best (intellectually, stylistically,...) one has a chance of realistically evaluating s/himself and of being evaluated. But for most students, the acquisition of one's disciplinary culture is through interpretation of the great wo/men, as well as with their teachers' embodiment of the discipline, and s/his place within it. In some cases of talented youngish teachers, s/his students deal with their and s/his belief in s/his future success -- and, by implication, theirs. Thus, everyone is to some extent or other in the interdisciplinary enterprise if only because disciplinary issues and styles change, and students have to project their career lines into the (their) future.26

Education-Training Styles

Inside any given discipline -- at the graduate level -- there are two dominant training-educational styles: apprentice and

at-large. Apprentice-type students are tied to the career line and/or enterprise of one or a couple of individuals or their academic genealogies. At-large students belong to the department, but are "free" to be eclectic and choose their career lines for themselves -- within some limits.

Students from other disciplines are usually treated like at-large students unless they actively portray themselves as non-disciplinary members by arguing or publicly restating that they are not students of the discipline.

Outside students who run into an apprentice-type enterprise find themselves handled quite differently: they may be labeled as outsiders and a polemic set up which reflects the issues of disagreement between s/his teachers at home and abroad as interpreted by the outside teacher. If they are very good students the attempt will be made to co-opt them, or to influence them to go home and educate their co-students and teachers there; or they will find themselves as complete outsiders and leave very rapidly. The latter is, in my experience, the most usual.

But -- it is important to note -- most students who are making it within their home discipline never travel outside, except to experience the occasional great person who is visiting on a one-night stand. (Here,

26This issue of the isolation of many scholars at their home institutions needs more developing. Suffice, for now, to say that there tended to be a "bureaucratization of knowledge" in the 1960-1990 period. This tended to set up a central aspect of many fields and placed others on the "margins." Each university wanted to have one of the central types of person, many/most of whom found little comradeship at their universities, but wrote and read the work of persons only at other instututions.


the rules change greatly when any field or area is perceived to be at some impasse -- then there is much more traveling.) These majority students never have to deal with an in-group interpretation of the great persons, but can handle and interpret s/him within their ongoing disciplinary imagistic structures. (Heaven help us when these types try to enter inter-disciplinary work later in life!)

At home, apprentice students are treated quite differently from the at-largers -- this varies with the style of the discipline. Most of the hard sciences only have apprentice students. The behavioral sciences tend to favor at-large students and one can find both styles within a single department. Given the desire of the behavioral sciences to be scientific, it is interesting that they emulate some methods of doing science, but seem to reject many of the training/educational procedures. (The internal politics, jealousies, privileges, access to faculty, etc., that this mix engenders can get complicated beyond belief, especially with persons who have a penchant for gossip, and the relatively poor [academic] management which has characterized many departments in my university.)

Apprentice students follow the career line of the enterprise as embodied in their professor(s): for or against, but usually within the implied limits of s/his interest. At-large students reflect more or less loosely what a few or several of the professorial staff do for a living. The at-large students seem to reflect the ideas of the great persons in the entire discipline and not in their departments. (If there were great persons there, they would have apprenticed themselves to s/him -- or tried to...).

The at-larger become professor and the apprentice-trained student emerge often as very different types of academics. And when they happen to be found in interdisciplinary settings, they often act out in terms of their training.

Most critical in the cross-disciplinary setting is the question of their primary professional identities: career lines, degree of problem orientation, critical thought abilities, loyalties, originality vs. derived, etc. I think that the two student types tend to "move" differently when confronted with people of other disciplines. The apprentices can imagine how their professor would adopt a position on such and such an issue -- in much the same way as one understands, say, the moral position of one's parents. While s/he may not have a solution to any essentially new problem, s/he does have a strong reference perspective from which to view s/his current position: a form of "grounding." S/he is likely, in other words, to be able to conjure up a professional identity which at least differs from that of s/his cross-disciplinary colleagues.

The at-large student, finding s/himself in an interdisciplinary situation, is in a more difficult position. S/he is fairly vulnerable to the persuasions and seductions of other disciplines. Since s/he has no strong person-professional models, s/he is vulnerable to reacting to pressures by interpreting them in some purely existential manner (i.e., where's the money and/or jobs!?). S/he is very liable to react to other persons in a personal manner, in other words. Since s/his primary professional identity is couched in the writings of the great wo/men in s/his field, s/he has trouble conjuring them up outside of the usually narrow ranges of their concerns. S/he is liable either to be co-opted into the view of s/his colleagues' disciplines, or to beat a hasty


retreat into s/his own home departmental grounds -- feeling "homesick" perhaps.

Clearly, the understanding of isues, motives, ideas, methods is affected by one's training and s/his professional identity, how s/he came to it and maintains it -- and grows within and beyond it. Communication across disciplines is thus further complicated, but realistically so.

Interdisciplinary Observation: How do they ask the next question?

One of the great problems in inter-disciplinary communication is in the dynamics of the interaction. Why do conversations move the way they do? Do topics or questions arise in particular orders, perhaps differently in each discipline? Are there different styles of presenting topics, reacting to statements, asking questions? -- differences in what becomes public? In my experience, yes!

It is very difficult to separate idiosyncratic from disciplinary styles without a good deal of experience with members of some other disciplines -- over time and in different settings. Among successful people in every discipline there are the brash, the quiet, the angry, the controlled -- or so they appear. How can we distinguish what is particularly individual from what are themes and patterns which are shared thus characteristic of members of a particular discipline?

One must become "literate" in other disciplines: one must go traveling to hear speeches in other disciplines -- join their seminars, talk with them and their students, interact over time, and gradually learn what others do, their concerns, and how they do their respective tasks. Gradually, one must learn how to not be too obnoxious and how to ask questions in such a way that s/he can begin to probe into borderline areas (for them). S/he must expect (and be willing) to be put down each time s/he discovers an area of question that is considered too "far-out" for that discipline, and be willing to be put down again when s/he predicts from this experience that s/he has found some kind of "boundary" of acceptable questions. For this is how one gets at underlying presumptions, assumptions, beliefs shared by members of other disciplines. The greatest personal difficulty with playing at this position is that one is likely to be put down, but also often treated as if stupid!27

Granted that one can remain a visitor in other disciplines' settings, s/he should soon note contrastive differences in styles of presentation, of subject matter, in who asks questons, and of what form. How are the questions handled?

Here a basic education in the other discipline and a basic commitment to one's own are critical. One must have a very good sense for what's going on and be mentally very active in formulating one's own

27If one does not have a pretty good sense of who one is, s/he ought to stay out of the inter-disciplinary endeavor. S/he'll find s/his personal sense of reality is more tenuous that s/he thought and be very vulnerable to accepting some other discipline's definitions of success. S/he is very likely to be co-opted, to return to s/his home discipline as the prophet bearing good news for the gang at home -- a kind of missionary status.


kinds of questions while attending to the others' interactions, or one cannot spot such contrasts. In my experience, very few people can strike any useful balance here: either they accept, or they reject the other discipline's approach to discussion, but they usually do it uncritically because the achievement of critical faculties across disciplines seems, to me, to be quite rare.

An example: most modern physical anthropologists (human biologists) accept modern (synthetic) evolutionary theory, and their work consists in interpreting their human data within the context of this theory. Very few (if any) of them are willing (able?) to push the actual boundaries of the theory. They are practitioners of biology under the rubric of anthropology, but they have less and less to do with the rest of anthropology. In an increasingly literal sense, they are biologists as opposed to anthropologists; instead of being those anthropologists concerned primarily with, say, body movement in sociocultural contexts. In my terms, they have been co-opted by biology.

In the other discipline's seminars a contrastive- comparative style will soon emerge! The first place it shows up obviously is in the questions directed to a speaker or an issue. (Discount the cute graduate student -- male or female -- who asks a very substantive, literal question; every field has to have a few to fill that specific role! Discount questions about methods, at least at first, because an outsider has no way to evaluate them.)

Granted that a speaker is considered to be respectable in s/his own discipline (and the outsider must already have asked several insiders about this), are the questions: (1) straightforward; (2) hostile; (3) why-type questions; (4) apparently directed to the speech/subject at hand; (5) apparently answerable?

If all the questions are straightforward -- e.g., if they can be answered with reference to a method, to a literature reference, do not apparently require the speaker to make a strong or controversial personal opinion -- there's not much to be learned about that discipline from this session. All disciplines with some substantial subject matter spend a fair amount of time presenting it. This is not very different from getting information about how to fill-in a job application. One might possibly note some unusual style variables such as how different speakers (in different disciplines) present substantial matters, but otherwise one should choose another day. (After a while, however, a more knowledgeable visitor can press a speaker to move into shady areas; and see if s/he will, what s/he does, and how s/he proceeds. In order to do this, however, one must already have established some amount of credibility -- knowledge, style, etc. -- to be taken at all seriously.)

If the questions appear to be hostile, there might be a great deal happening of interest to the inquiring visitor. Here the cross-disciplinarian may find some fertile ground. What is the hostility about? It may represent a speaker's own personal style -- or the style of that field. (Philosophers of science, for example, appear to be more hostile to each other that most disciplines -- it is their style. If the irascible style occurs in other settings it may be less benign.)

If the hostility is directed to the ideas being presented, some insight can be gathered by watching who does the questioning. It's most likely to emanate from someone's student -- old pros rarely expose themselves personally. So one has to find out whose student it is. (A noteworthy point about hostility is that it usually emanates from


persons who feel threated in some way or other -- confident people often put down or dismiss others, but they usually feel no need to do it in a hostile manner. The astute interdisciplinarian will search hard to find out the grounds on which the hostility-threat behavior is based.

Watch how the questions are directed! If they are all substantive, they tell a fair amount about how the audience regards the expertness of the speaker. This is more impressive if substantive questions emerge from the pros than from students and from the non-note-takers rather than from those who are busily playing human dictaphone.

Non-substantive questions are much more interesting for the outsider. Do they ask about interpretation of data? In my experience, only well-respected persons in fields who regard themselves as fairly prestigeful ask these kinds of questions out loud. It always seems to connote respect, even if it's done to elicit an argument. (Only worthy persons are worth arguing with!)

Will the speaker interpret the data? -- how does s/he set up a framework for doing so? S/he could move to put it in some historical perspective, trying to legitimate s/his problem area, or simply say what she feels it means. One has to consider a range of possibilities, most of which do not actually occur in a given situation, in order to see what is actually happening. (Actually, that turns out never to be really simple!) Or, s/he can claim s/he doesn't know enough to be willing to make an interpretive move; at least not now.

Each one of these different responses to a call for interpretation will affect the picture s/he presents and the one that s/his audience will retain! It's worth remembering that audiences deal with selective images of people and ideas -- perhaps metaphors is a more useful descriptive term. Offhand, a speaker is never sure which examples or responses will work, in terms of getting s/his intended message across; s/his job is to leave them with the right one, as s/he sees it. Or the speaker may be willing to leave the audience thinking as they were, rather than trying to tell them anything "new." (As well, the constant message -- which may be the major one -- is that the speaker possesses the authority to deliver this message!) Successful image manipulation can do a great deal of long term education in the post-speech question and answer session by how they frame their interpretations.

This is most clear in responses to why-questions! Because of this, these are the best observational frameworks for the outsider. There are a number of options in the handling of such questions (not to neglect the noting of who asked the question, in what contexts!).

There are, for example, several different forms of "I--don't-knows!" (1) I-don't-know..period, full stop, next question! (2) I-don't-know...this is what I do for a living...period. (3) I-don't-know...well, what I think is...(4) I-don't-know...and nobody really knows...,etc.

In general, if the why-question was asked at all, it meant that the speaker had already established a good deal of credence (unless the question was of the form: "Why in hell didya do that?") Somebody may really want more understanding. Issues, lack of understanding, asumptions are likely to get played out here as fully as they ever might. Knowing this, the outsider is always tempted to ask why-questions at the first possible moment. But, unless s/he has established s/his legitimacy and credibility, s/he (in particular) will be turned away with answers (1) or (2) above and may lose the kindness of s/his


erstwhile hosts.The last bit of question-gaming of interest has to do with the

nature of some questions; namely, are they apparently answerable? In the psychiatric setting where I worked for several years, the first three or four "questions" opening up each post-speech discussion had all the appearance of non-questions, but of a special sort. They all came from senior faculty -- it happened every time over the four years I was there. I began to realize that their questions -- comments really -- had to do with: (1) establishing who they were vis-a-vis the speaker; (2) who the speaker was vis-a-vis the "in-house" interpretation. They were identifying their views with a counter to the speaker, and acting as very real censor-shapers to the roomful of apprentices (mostly young psychiatrists-in-training for whose souls they were responsible. The speaker had very little room in which to move in these situations. So, little was to be learned (except stylistics) from my point-of-view as an inter-disciplinary communication student.

Another oft-occurring un-question is the put-down. For some reason, many academics tend to become cultists at the earliest possible moment in their careers (forming a "clericy"). And these types tend to respond to others not as persons, but as object representatives of some opposing cult; true or not. This seems to give them license to treat speakers in uncomplimentary ways and to try to reduce them -- (and their positions, peripherally) to non-persons.28

In this context, the outsider may find s/himself a great deal of food for thought. S/he should be able to get some quick perspective on where the lines of cult membership are drawn (to be held on "back burner" for future reference as to what the lines are about). And s/he should watch the ways in which the put-down are phrased: how responded to, the apparent "success" of responses, etc.

In my experience as a speaker, it is extremely "useful" (in getting my points and presence to resonate) to be attacked on doctrinaire grounds. If I had been unsuccessful in making myself credible earlier, this will help ensure credibility, because it means that I (and my position) were worthy of attack. Among the many faces of silence is the silent flatness of damnation in which attack can only be a relief. It does mean that the speaker should be able to dissociate s/himself from the attack on s/his position and be able to turn it back on the protagonist. (This doesn't mean that any attack is easier to take, if one can use it for some purpose; attacks hurt, and probably should hurt.)

The outsider should watch this carefully, to note where the attack came from, how it was phrased, in what tone-of-voice; how the speaker reacted, did s/he get flushed, stay calm, make a joke, how much control, how gentle or shrill?

If there is a reception after the speech, much can be learned from watching how the speaker is entertained or hosted: if s/he is left pretty much alone, one can be fairly certain that the speaker and/or subject is not taken seriously by the in-house group. If the pros or students crowd up to s/him, then the range of excitement may be gauged:

28This is an important aspect of the current (1992) politicization of intellectual occurring principally over the "curriculum debate" in the Humanities. Students often join sides rather than grapple with issues, knowledge, critical thinking. One strives to be (politically) "correct" rather than a person of knowledge.


remembering that there may be any number of reasons for the excitement -- fame, job possibilities,...Most revealing are the negatives.

Metaphors

There are some caveats, warnings, parameters -- habits of thought and of argument -- some lines of thinking and reasoning which characterize various disciplines, to which an outsider is not privy. I use the term metaphor as a cover term to account for a variety of forms and modes of argument, some underlying themes and issues which characterize members of any particular field, and some sorts of examples or metaphors which seem to be obvious to members, but totally obscure (or non-believable) to outsiders (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980)

Some examples include the speechless statue metaphor derived from Condillac in the early 18th century. This occurred within the history of the study of language -- which is itself a powerful "motivating" force within many disciplines used principally to invoke their authority or to split their approach from others. The speechless statue was Condillac's way of approaching the language "origin" issue (itself often a "way" of going back to Adam of Genesis -- the "originary" naming and language of humans): take "man" as a speechless statue and then think of all (minimally!?) we have to grant him in order for him to be truly human --> and this turns out to be a modern form of argument used by psychology and biology to talk of "basic needs" in granting "agency" to an inert but convincing copy of the human form. At any rate, the argument is very powerful and seductive for many persons who have little awareness that this metaphor is lurking beneath what they think of as "reasonableness."

Similarly, the organic analogy stated by Aristotle in his "Politics" leads(!) us to think-as-obvious, the notion that the relation between mind and body (mind directs body) can be applied to social relations (king over people, husband over wife, parents over children and slaves). If we are uncritical about the mind-body split, and tend to understand it hierarchically, then we are susceptible to interpreting much/most of social "reality" in terms of this organic metaphor.

Different fields tend to favor different metaphors and "raise" them to the level of methodological (even, reality) principles, often uncritically.29

In linguistics, there was in the 1950's until Chomsky, the notion that everyone with "knowledge" would take linguistic examples from any of the world's languages, and be able to "walk" their way through them by attempting to articulate them phonetically. With Chomsky the use of syntactically equivalent but ambiguous sentences with two differing meanings began to be used as the underlying "method" for argument in the attempt to derive some notion of un underlying ("deep") structure which accounted for the ambiguity: the phonetic method effectively got lost, so that many people who analyze language these days have little sense for the "fact" that language "consists" of sound. The methodology as metaphor has led linguists to "background" the physical facticity of language as somehow enabling language, but not being its true actuality.

29The "power" of particular ancient metaphors to inform present thinking and being, continues to astonish me, even and especially at the level of framing how we think about reality.


Other disciplines are primarily "historical" -- including evolutionary biology, geology, and astronomy, but probably not history, itself, which explicates history but generally does not think "historically." Biology, as example, is impressed extraordinarily with the problematics of how we got here: all our predecessors had to get born, stay alive, mate, produce young, survive,...in order for us to get here. This fact is understandably powerful. However, this notion of an "ultimate" biology tends to overwhelm the facts of our presence here and now, and to urge biologists to disattend to present ("proximate" = paradoximatic?) biology, and to be more impressed by "predeterminate" explanations than by present structural or processual ones.

Structure vs. Process

Beyond the reductionist-holist arguments which are found within almost every discipline (the danger for the observer being that what seems reductionist or holist to s/him, may be smaller or more analytic -- broader or much more encompassing -- to those in some other disciplines), some disciplines tend to seek for "structure" and others tend to be "processual" inherently, or at least from time to time. It is not overly strong to claim that the structuralists have applied their ideas to the socio-political world in our time, in the context of bureaucratic thought and being, and have "taken over" much of our lives. They often/ultimately fail (as recently in the Eastern bloc) because much of our lives are lived processually, and people have difficulty relating to structure determining their activities except in certain moments: e.g., when they are young, when a movement is "young," when there is much exciting prospect for the future.

This is an aspect of various problematics which derive from form-content disputes and orientations. Whether the world (and humans) are by their nature dual, whether behavioral scientists are dualists, the world of human sciences varies often in terms of form and content. Here it is important for the observer to ask (frequently!): what is the "task" of the inquiry? Platonically-derived thinking is formal in its outlook, often disregarding or downplaying (as in Chomskyan linguistics) issues which are "substantive" in other contexts. Why this might be, I have addressed in other contexts: but it seems to have to do with the "fact" that our experience is (often) paradoxical -- but that our theories of being have wanted to "resolve" such paradoxes in one or another direction in its attempt to "simplify" existence to some handleable proportion (Sarles, 1991).

In these arenas of supposition and assumption, the going is particularly rough for the cross-cultural observer/broker, and needs great strength and maturity -- or an era when the earlier disciplinary centers and work seems at impasse.

Frames and Frameworks

The outside observer-interactor-explainer-broker-understander in the scene between and across disciplines needs to enter into the thinking (and being?) of the other in some depth. This entails various degrees of suspension of belief and disbelief as one attempts to think


like, to think as, the other (to develop a "cognitive map").30 Then one must stand away, attempt to find some grounded position without being caught in some middle position which is without conviction, and say what is going on.

In some cases I find it possible and perhaps reasonable merely to attempt to explain to either side how the other thinks, how they move, what they understand and expect. In other situations, the issue is less how different "sides" think, than how their thinking "passes-by" the other. How to develop ways of considering others' positions, with the respect due to any serious thinkers, without ending up in a totally polarized argument with no ears open to hear? How, then, to find some ground for discussion, where the various understandings may enter into each others' frameworks of thought?

For here we discuss varieties of architecture of thought: assumptions, worries, ambitions, directions for solution, senses of problematics; issues of truth, reality, and authority; wonders of success and failure and the confirmation of one's virtues; modes of ascertaining if one's knowledge is "reasonable," including issues of prediction and of prophecy; the very "locus" of being and its confirmation.

At the outmost, we are considering the differences among theo-philosophical and political orientations; and, within the disciplines, differences in the nature of the "task" of knowing. If, for example, the task is therapeutic, the quest for knowledge may be vastly different than the issue of describing what is the range of normalcy. If the questions range over what is usual practice, then the wonderment of the human condition may be so limited or narrow as to effectively not-appear.

What are frames and frameworks of thought has to do with the architectonic of thought processes possessed by the members of any discipline. The mode of inquiry, of interview, of wonderment of the interdisciplinary scholar, has to take into account the possibility that various disciplines come to (often similar) issues with vastly different ways of framing statement, questions, and the very notion of a solution.

As an exercise, it is useful to (re)read the final pages of Plato's "Republic" in which he effectively alters our very notions of reality by placing our being in a position of "partaking" in the reality of formal structures, rather than in constructing reality in and of ourselves: here, life is in various senses always "outside" of itself. Once into this exercise, the question of frames and framings takes on much more solid possibilities, and we are off and running...

In spite of it all...

It's worth the hassle and trouble if only because no one person or

30The notion of "cognitive map" refers especially to the attempt of field linguistics to map the concepts in whose terms a native speaker of some language constructs how s/he hears and says the sounds of that language. The cognitive map is at the level of "out-of-awareness," akin to the unconscious, but available to be understood and recorded if the field worker is able to interview s/his informant "properly." This is done by a "phonemic analysis" including notions like "minimal pairs" of sound contrasts, distribution of sounds within words, etc.


discipline can control the data and techniques which ought to be brought to bear on the interesting issues in behavioral science and in the remainder of the curriculum: e.g., what is human nature, language, how do we think, learn, the nature of our sociality, our nature as social creatures, etc?

I don't think, as many did in the 1950's, that an overarching synthetic view is either reachable or necessarily desirable. I will (I think) remain convinced that the partial views of different disciplines are merely partial -- but that doesn't necessarily imply that the partials will form a single whole.

The holist, the cross-disciplinary broker, the interdisciplinary trouble-shooter are all visionaries. But I hope that they can remain relaxed and constant, in spite of the pressures to buy every/any single discipline's picture of human nature. I guess they need to form their own prestige group -- to be recognized by the various disciplines as a legitimate, if unusual, meta-disciplinary profession, rather than to fall into the kind of para-disciplinary niches relegated to the soft-minded and/or the curricularly despondent and splintered.

I think it's possible to become that broker, but it does take the kind of broad knowledge and overview which disciplinary members are not encouraged to have or to get. And it is not simple to wander across disciplines playing the role of gadfly and emerge unscathed.

I don't think it will (can?) come from a discipline like philosophy, because philosophy already has its own independent framework for measuring and evaluating, and doesn't seem overly open to inspecting the different disciplines in their own terms. My experience (as opposed to wishful thinking) is that some philosophers would like to do this job. It appears, however, that philosophers will continue to use other disciplinary examples and to interpret them within some overarching and preset philosophical framework (exceptions: Cohen and Dascal, 1989).

At this point in the history of the behavioral sciences it is overly easy to be (merely) critical. Understanding the different thought processes of the various disciplines is quite a different thing. It's easy, for example, to criticize each discipline for being overly narrow, or scientistic: a hundred years of psychology has produced little data, a lot of rhetoric and many faddisms. A philosopher might feel inclined to take the position that either there are many truths, or that there are none -- if s/he is to take the behavioral sciences seriously. What happened -- is happening -- to (the notion of) truth? In this era of increasing skepticism and cynicism-->nihilism, do the behavioral sciences do more than undermine the possibility of authority within science; about nature (Sarles 1991a)?

The cross-disciplinary broker must, I think, have a pretty firm belief that s/he is on the trail of the truth of Protagoras: that we humans are the measure of all things; that this must be the broker-translator's task and overarching principle and commitment. But it will not further enhance s/his understanding and conceptualization abilities to be merely critical: to argue within narrow theories.

S/he should be in business to see why and how other disciplines think like they do; s/he must assume that practitioners of other disciplines are as well-motivated as s/he -- but in different sorts of terms. And s/he'll have to learn about those terms, see where and why they move. Otherwise s/he'll be vulnerable: to keep re-inventing other disciplines' theories, implicitly using their assumptions; discount


their insights because they came in the wrong clothing and stylistics; to over-believe or to over-reject s/himself because s/he hasn't worked hard enought to gain some control over the limitations of s/his own perspective.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bloom, A. 1987. The closing of the American mind.Chomsky, N. 1957. Review of Skinner's "Language Behavior". In Language.Cohen, A. and M. Dascal, Eds.1989. The institution of philosophy: a

discipline in crisis? La Salle, IL: Open Court Press. Condillac.Fish, S. 1989. Being interdisciplinary is so very hard to do," in

Profession 89, a journal of the MLA. pp.15-22.Geertz, C. 1983. Blurred genres: the refiguration of social thought. In

Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, Chapter I. Basic Books, New York.1983

Grinker, R. 1967. Toward a unified theory of human behavior. New York: Basic Books.

Hesse, H. 1969. The Glass-Bead Game (Magister Ludi). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Kerr, Clark. 1963. The uses of the university.Kuhn, T. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: U. of

Chicago Press.Mannheim, K. 1936. Ideology and utopia: an introduction to the sociology

of knowledge. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.Newman, J.H. 1953. University sketches. Dublin: Browne and Nolan.Pike, K. L. 1967. Language in relation to a unified theory of the

structure of human behavior. 2nd Ed., Rev. The Hague: Mouton.Sarles, H.B. ----. 1991. Critical naturalism and cultural relativism. In Cultural

Relativism and philosophy: North and Latin American Perspective. Ed., M. Dascal. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

----. 1991a. Aspects of the Crisis in Meaning. In Humanism Today.----. 1992. Teaching as dialogue: a Teacher's study. Lanham, MD:

University Press of America.----.1992ms. The bureaucratization of the mind and the bureaucratization

of knowledge. In, The Idea of a University in The Present Age. Chapter III.

Zuboff, S. 1988. In the age of the smart machine: the future of work and power. New York: Basic Books.


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