The following will run in the winter political economy of the
world-system newsletter. I put in on the net to generate some
discussion of who we are and where we are going.
THE STAGES OF PEWS
Albert Bergesen
PEWS is becoming irrelevant. Our numbers are down. We lost
a session this year, and our flagship presentation at the 1995 ASAs
focuses upon a minor utopian novel about a "world party" in the
21st century. To put it bluntly: in a world-system of pressing
problems from environmental degradation to growing violence between
races/ethnicities, the use of a session on fantasy politics and
indulgent futurology is a grossly irresponsible use of half of the
sessions we are allocated.
How have we gotten to this situation where utopian speculation
about forming a 21st century "world party" is considered putting
our best foot forward as research scientists? I don't know, but on
reflection I can see three stages in our decline as a research
section. In Stage One we started with our feet rooted in the
reality of underdevelopment, poverty, oppression, and the human
suffering of the 3rd world. We began studying, researching, and
theorizing underdevelopment. It brought us our greatest success,
the overthrow of modernization theory as the story of development.
But this concern for the South waned in the 1980s, and in response
to our evaporating subject matter we entered Stage Two--outreach--
where we nominated scholars from other areas to be PEWS Chair with
the hope that they would bring in new people and subject matter.
We began to drift from the world as it existed today, and took up
more esoteric subjects from pre-history to hunter-gatherer "world-
systems" and even art history. Our subject matter became ever more
arcane and, as a consequence, of interest to ever fewer and fewer
people. On their own these are important issues, yes, but clearly
we are adrift, and we have lost our moral compass of concern for
the problems of our world. At this point we now enter Stage Three,
our fantasy stage of non-reality concerns and utopian political
fantasies. This is the 1995 ASA session organized around Wagar's
fantasy novel presented to the larger ASA as one of our now only
two sessions.
I do not know the answer, but I strongly feel we must return
to the real world of existing problems and pains of the world as we
know it. Our irrelevance is unnecessary: the organizations
section deal with the global environment, the culture section is
thriving, and culture is global, and from job loss leading to
underclasses as global restructuring to the immigrant backlash of
prop 187, today's biting issues are clearly world-system issues.
This is not to say we should ignore our new arcane topics, nor
should we abandon studying the underdeveloped South either, but it
is clear that we have lost the way that was once lit by the plight
of the South. New lights need to be lit; new areas of research
for which the world-system is a good explanation need to be
identified. Otherwise the drift into fantasy topics and indulgent
utopian visions of political power will only increase. Let's return
to our original vision. Let's make next year's sessions about the
real world.