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232 STANFORD M. LYMAN & LESTER EMBREE

that the disciplines can be easily merged and lose their distinctive characters.
This also has not worked, often because one discipline proceeded to try to
assimilate the rest, which makes me think that integration is again the
ideological mask for disciplinary hegemony on the part of, say, history in
past attempts to build Women's Studies programs or biology in attempts to
build Environmental Studies programs. In contrast, a multi-discipline would
respect the uniqueness and distinctness of the constituent disciplines, strive
for equality of all disciplines within it, and not gloss over the difficulties of
maintaining mutual respect and cooperation.
Whether called a multi-discipline or an inter-discipline, Ethnic Studies
will project itself according to the problems posed. Many Ethnic Studies
departments are staffed by historians, sociologists, anthropologists,
psychologists, and experts on literature. Within the framework of the
curriculum, each approaches the topic from his or her disciplinary
outlook. Ethnic Studies is, at present, organized along lines similar to
the old "area studies'* programs, e.g., "Japan Studies,'' "Middle-Eastern
Studies," etc. No intellectually distinctive Ethnic Studies/7^r$p^crfv^ as such
has yet emerged. I discount those chauvinistic claims that are empty of
everything but rhetoric about a "Black," "Hispanic," "Asian American,"
or other outlooks.
While we have focussed on a development of the last four decades in
the leading universities in the United States and the centuries of interna-
tional (especially European) cultural events and over a century of cultural
scientific debate (especially in sociology) that are behind them, could you
sketch what you know about similar intellectual responses elsewhere in the
world to what I guess we might call diversities of ethnic groups? I suspect
that Great Britain, for example, has been moving in the direction, especially
since World War II, adding substantial new racial and ethnic groups from
outside to the internal set it has had for centuries. Are there academic-
institutional as well as theoretical developments that relate to this? I cannot
speak about multidisciplinary developments in most of the world.
However, it is worth noting that in countries that were once part of the
English seaborne empire, and are now part of the British Commonwealth,
the term "British subject" modifies jural and civic identities of ethnona-
tionals. In Africa, a few Anglophone and Francophone scholars are
struggling to define a continent-wide civilizational culture that preceded
imperiaUsm and that has survived both colonialism and separate na-
tion-statehood.