This link is a little old, but ever-so-up-to-date. A year and a half ago, some of the top profs at NYU were asked what the big new trend in humanities were. A few said “neuroscience,” some said “globalism,” but by far the winner-- which wins partly because it encapsulates the former two and much else besides-- was “interdisciplinarity.” Don't just trust me. See for yourself, here.
Oh yes, everybody has a good word for interdisciplinarity. But try to run a search on an interdisciplinary basis, and you find out that every person doing interdisciplinary work is considered “not quite good enough” in one or another of his or her fields. The literature people really liked so-and-so's neuroscience, whereas the neuroscientists thought it was a joke. And so on.
Fine example of a good intention: we love interdisciplinarity, everybody does, but the rewards for attempting it are small.
When you got me on interdisciplinarity, it opened a new world of what humanities was. I mean, in its original conception, humanities was interdisciplinary. Language, philosophy, these were all different ways to combine our concrete, techie knowledge of the world in a way that affected the human experience.
Naturally, over time and academic progress, the domain of our mixable knowledge has changed, but “humanities” hasn't updated. But as long as interdisciplinarity is the exception rather than the rule, aren't we collectively missing something vital about humanities?
In this regard, it seems like the reward system could just be diffuse for lacking a concrete target to point at. If someone asked you, “What is interdisciplinary excellence?” what would you say?
You end with a good question, J. I would probably answer, “Stuff that makes me think in new ways and doesn't just address people with the same specialization,” which is at least truthful, but assumes that my sensibility is normative.
So I point to examples. Gerald Edelman, who is, they tell me, completely up to speed in an esoteric discipline (neurology), but also asks good questions about art and music. Leibniz, whose mind worked in such an original yet consistent way that you could put him to work on any problem and something good would emerge. Neither had to be hired by a committee, though: Edelman already had his Nobel for immunology before he went into brain science, and Leibniz was a minor official in the service of a patron who mostly had him writing up reports on heraldry and genealogy. Committees are often interdisciplinary in make-up, of course, but they tend to converge on a minimum consensus rather than following out their own risky, that is, non-agreed-upon, possibilities. And despite all the complaining about committees (I'm doing it now), they are how we go about making decisions that are both informed and democratic.
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