This Way to Paradise: On Creole Researchers, Hybrid Disciplines, and Pidgin Writing
作者回顾1970年代跨学科研究的失败，指出其隐含的本质主义和语言完美翻译假设，并分析1980年代后社会科学向文学艺术转向带来的学科边界模糊。
When I was beginning my research career in the 1970s, the first wave of ‘interdisciplinary studies’ came in. A group of researchers from different disciplines would receive common funding to study the same phenomenon. The desired result was a complete description of the ‘object’ from all possible ‘sides’, contributing to a ‘holistic image’. The actual result was a bunch of separate reports, unintelligible to anyone from another discipline, sour faces, and a strengthened conviction that ‘they’ were doing ‘weird things’. I thought that ‘cross-disciplinary studies’ was a better description of the exercise, as everybody was cross at the end, including the sponsors. From the perspective of three decades, it is easy to see what was wrong. The whole idea was grounded in two implicit assumptions: of the essence of things (to be ‘discovered’ and ‘documented’) and of perfect language (where words stand unwaveringly for things and are therefore perfectly translatable). By the end of the 1970s, however, things started to take a different turn, as Clifford Geertz (1980) observed. ‘The turn’ was first labeled as interpretative, then as linguistic, and then as narrative, but the direction was unmistakable. After decades of modeling itself upon the natural sciences, the social sciences had redirected their genre towards literature and art, and genres began to blur. Twenty-three years later, lots of bizarre effects are visible. Volume 10(3): 430–434 Copyright © 2003 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)