Do the social sciences and humanities open up whole new imaginary worlds or run the risk of ¡°autoerotic¡± self-indulgence?

A range of views were expressed in a debate on ¡°Promoting Humanities and Social Sciences in Today¡¯s Society¡±, held at the Norwegian Ambassador¡¯s residence in London last week.

It formed part of the presentation ahead of this year¡¯s Holberg Prize, which the chair of the board, Sigmund Gr?nmo (University of Bergen), explained was established by the Norwegian Parliament in 2003 and given annually to scholars who have ¡°made outstanding contributions to research in the arts and humanities, social science, law or theology, either within one discipline or through interdisciplinary work¡±. This year¡¯s prize is due to be announced on 12 March.

Because it is now worth ?388,000, continued Professor Gr?nmo, the prize ranked as ¡°one of the most prestigious academic prizes in the world¡± and was designed to ¡°increase society¡¯s awareness of the importance of research in [its] fields¡±.?

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Taking up these themes, Sir Jonathan Bate, provost of Worcester College, Oxford, cited a comment of playwright Anton Chekhov to argue that ¡°scholarship, like creative work, is about asking questions in the right way, not providing answers¡±.

In the tradition of much utopian writing, he went on, Shakespeare set The Tempest on an imaginary island. In the same way, ¡°all art and humanist scholarship create a separate world which illuminates ours, partly by showing the differences. Imaginary alternative worlds help us criticise our own and imagine others¡±.

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Sarah Churchwell, professor of American literature and public understanding of the humanities at the University of East Anglia, noted that there has been ¡°a general elision in Anglo-European societies between market values and social values¡±. What the humanities provided were ¡°spaces that exceed the marketplace¡­not soft arts, but the foundations of a civil society¡±. Since many of the most important developments come from collaboration between the humanities, hard and social sciences, ¡°English educational culture has to get beyond its view that a general education [eg on the American liberal arts model] is dilettantism¡±.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Centre for Policy Research in India, suggested that we ¡°need to ask slightly harder questions¡±.

In India, he pointed out, demand for the arts and humanities had never been greater: ¡°Lahore recently had a huge literary festival in the midst of a terrorist attack.¡± Yet many defences of them do not make a general case for their value but ¡°end up defending a particular organisational model, self-referring disciplines and particular institutional forms of practising them¡±.?

The humanities and social sciences, Professor Mehta suggested, were ¡°valued when they were seen to be embedded in structures of common life¡±. Universities were ¡°originally sectarian and pathways to God¡±. Later, culture and then nationalism took over from religion, but universities were ¡°still enlisted in creating a common language. They have always been embedded in a much larger story of common purpose ¨C and that has given them their power.¡±

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Today, however, Professor Mehta continued, ¡°humanities claim to reveal much about the nature of humanity while also deconstructing the whole idea of ¡®the human¡¯¡­Can they move beyond their deconstructive impulses and reach redemption too?¡± If not, there was a danger they ended up being ¡°done for their own sake¡± in a way he described as ¡°autoerotic¡±.

matthew.reisz@tesglobal.com