Much of the scholarly literature on the history of U.S. area studies in general, and of U.S. Middle East studies in particular, depicts them as in essence a byproduct of the Cold War, launched primarily to produce knowledge and trained personnel of use to the new American national security state. However, research in the archives of the Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford foundations and of foundation-funded organizations like the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, among other sites, demonstrates that while the Cold War context (or more broadly and more usefully, visions and exigencies of the United States as a global power in the age of decolonization) played their parts in establishing area studies as a component of the American research university, so too did a range of developments in philanthropy, higher education, the humanities and the social sciences that began long before the Cold War. So instead of treating area studies as little more than a Cold War form of knowledge, this paper explores how, beginning in the 1920s, foundation-backed efforts to foster interdisciplinary approaches and to induce the humanities to engage more effectively with the world beyond Europe and North America (including the development of innovative language-teaching methods) conduced to the creation of new academic networks, projects and institutions focused on specific geographic regions. During the Second World War, a new set of sites, projects, practices and networks (which drew on prewar developments) helped delineate the intellectual and institutional contours of what came to be called area studies, ultimately yielding both an apparently coherent and efficacious vision of how useful knowledge about the world might be produced and disseminated, and (beginning immediately after the war) an assemblage of new academic programs, institutions and funding flows. Using Middle East studies as its prime example, the paper shows how until 1958 it was the big foundations rather than the federal government which launched and sustained area studies in the United States, not simply to produce policy-relevant knowledge for the state but in pursuit of a broader (if never fully realized) vision of advancing the social sciences, the humanities and public knowledge about the world. By “following the money” and focusing on institutional developments, this paper offers a more complex understanding of the origins and trajectory of Middle East studies in the United States and of how this new academic field was actually built.

The Politics of Middle East Studies from the Viewpoint of Anthropology This paper analyzes the politics of Middle East studies in anthropology via analysis of discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the institution of the American Anthropological Association. It examines resolutions brought forward by AAA members at the Annual Business Meeting in relation to other resolutions and statements passed by the AAA membership and/or Executive Board since the early 1970s. It draws on the resolution texts, archived minutes of the Association Executive Board and Business meetings, commentary in Anthropology News, and ethnographic interviews with over one hundred anthropologists of the Middle East/North Africa. The paper compares the early 1980s language used to support and oppose these resolutions, and others related to Middle East conflicts, with that of the 21st century. With this diachronic view, we identify both patterns and inconsistencies in these arguments and in the criteria used to evaluate what issues are appropriate for AAA commentary. We argue that there is a trend towards greater administrative control over procedures related to political statements, which involves reliance on increasingly de-politicized technocratic mechanisms and particular administrative connections for expertise. We also argue that far from a planned conspiracy against members’ Palestine activism, this history also reveals bureaucratic amnesia. Nonetheless, we call attention to a major difference in how this conflict, and issues involving the Middle East in general, are treated as compared to issues linked to other geographic contexts. This difference has, at times, resulted in anthropologists’ disillusionment with their professional association. In sum, the fate of these resolutions and statements suggests that within the AAA, the Middle East – particularly Israel/Palestine – is treated as, and is seen by many members to be, an exception.

This paper examines the relationship between U.S. foreign policy interests and Middle East expertise. Drawing on three distinct but related case studies, it discusses how the U.S. government sought to cultivate knowledge on foreign areas during times of real or perceived crisis. From the attack on Pearl Harbor to Sputnik to the U.S.’s Global War on Terror, national emergencies have shaped the U.S. government’s interactions with academia. During the early Cold War period, Washington sought a consistent supply of candidates for government service to support its growing international commitments. To achieve this goal, U.S. government agencies found willing allies among universities, academic societies, and philanthropic foundations. The mutually beneficial relationship between governmental and non-governmental institutions, I argue, was essential to the development and formalization of area studies in the United States. Yet as this paper demonstrates, these efforts were not always successful or had unintended consequences. As relations with academia soured in the 1960s, American policymakers increasingly relied on expertise which reinforced Washington’s foreign policy goals. The paper concludes that think tanks benefited from this shift in the perception of area knowledge and greater American involvement in the Middle East.

This paper reinterprets the historical development of policy-oriented American expertise about the Middle East. It does so by analyzing the fundamental dilemma posed by the late emergence of the U.S. as a regional power in the 20th century. On the one hand, reconciling U.S. power to anti-colonial nationalism required official and non-state actors to advance exceptionalist claims about the benevolence of American power based on the absence of an imperial past. On the other hand, such claims highlighted a poverty of local knowledge and institutional expertise necessary for carrying out the self-described American missions of developing and democratizing the Middle East. According to the existing historical literature on America's Middle East foreign policy, the U.S. government attempted to address this dilemma by drawing upon the experience of Christian missionaries, knowledge produced by the oil industry, and support for Zionism-as-modernization. On the basis of new research in government archives, private manuscripts, and published sources, however, this paper will show how U.S. experts translated and “Americanized” regional knowledge drawn from other sources, including those derived from Ottoman and British imperial precedents. Such translations occurred with the assistance of European and Middle Eastern interlocutors who portrayed the region’s societies as open fields for U.S.-administered change. The argument focuses on three areas: shifting uses of the Ottoman past by U.S.-based scholars and officials to imagine and map regional development; American-sponsored land reform strategies that drew upon the inheritance of Ottoman- and mandate-era agricultural policies; and adaptation of post-Ottoman, Arab nationalist historiography to justify cold-war strategies of authoritarian modernization. This research offers new perspectives on the relationship between knowledge and power in the U.S. encounter with the Middle East. It not only analyzes the role of the Middle East in producing American exceptionalism but also helps to clarify the nature of the relationship between European Orientalism and post-1945 American social science.