The universities are in the midst of a profound struggle over the nature of knowledge and the shape of its transmission. There is no one struggle, nor is there a coherent vision of the future. Instead, there are overlapping trends, practices, debates, and decisions, which, when taken together, suggest that academics and teachers, students and professors, administrators and legislators are staking out positions in a public debate about the future of the university. These debates are going on everywhere: from departments revising their graduate and undergraduate curricula to university senates debating the shape of undergraduate requirements; from the panels of foundations deciding fellowship applications to the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education; from the floors of state legislatures to the tables in school cafeterias. These discussions and the policies that are adopted as a result of them will profoundly affect how we teach, what we teach, and what we aim for when we teach.

My concern here is not with the debate about the future of the university as a whole, but a small part of it: I see the debate about multiculturalism as a challenge to the categories of historical interpretation. Framed primarily in terms of American history, the challenge of multiculturalism also goes to the heart of the ways we teach about the non-West. In this essay, I will argue that multiculturalism’s challenge to Western culture for an inclusion of minority representation has been paralleled in the shift from Western civilization to world history in some widely used college textbooks. In both cases, the result has been a more inclusive unit of analysis: instead of one Western culture, we now have many Western cultures; instead of one Western civilization, we have many world civilizations. Although the units of analysis in both projects have been broadened, the historical and analytical ordering concepts remain largely the same. I will conclude that the challenge of multiculturalism for the teaching of non-Western history—as well as Western culture—is not resolved merely by including those who are not represented. The challenge must be to rethink the categories of analysis.

My specific reference point is the multiculturalism debate at Stanford University and the ways in which this debate has influenced the university-mandated undergraduate “liberal arts” curriculum. One of the recently adopted changes (1990) in the Stanford undergraduate curriculum is the requirement that all students take a world cultures course. The issues of the debate at Stanford will lead me to examine several popular world history textbooks in order to assess how well these texts satisfy the challenge of multiculturalism. In particular, I will examine the legacy of the concept of “civilization” that undergirds the textbooks—if not always the teaching—about both Western culture and world history. In the final section of this essay, I will describe the "World Outside the West" course sequence at Stanford. This course began in 1983–84 as a conscious effort to engage in a debate with Stanford’s Western Culture program about the categories of “civilization.” The issues raised here may also provide an agenda for a more thoroughgoing discussion of the teaching of world history and non-Western history.

Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is, like the critique of Western Culture, a large and loose category, filled with many claims and claimants. When Stanford students in January 1988 marched outside the meeting of the University Senate, which was debating the composition of the mandated freshman year-long Western Culture requirement, they chanted “Hey hey, ho ho. Western Culture’s got to go.”[1] These students were protesting the “canon” of the “great books” around which the freshman core courses were organized.

In their critique, these students drew inspiration from various forms of postmodernism and literary criticism, which maintain that the canon is a political statement made by self-styled white male academic guardians of an intellectual tradition over whose persistence they draw their own intellectual (and professorial) authority.[2] Protesters demanded that the canon be opened, allowing representation from those groups hitherto excluded: people of color, women, subaltern classes, gays, and so forth. The students were not attacking the notion of a canon per se, but the composition of the canon and control over election to it.

The 1988 demonstration at Stanford had its roots in at least two other trends. First, there had been a relatively quiet, but sustained, debate among African-American students at Stanford concerning the failure to recognize the important contribution of Eastern Mediterranean, and in particular “black” Egyptian, civilizations to Greece and, hence, to Western civilization. Many Western civilization textbooks now acknowledge the “Asian” roots of civilization, including Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, but they do not satisfy these students’ demands for an emphasis on the wide influence of Egyptian culture on Greek civilization.[3] 

Representatives of the Chicano and Asian-American student organizations argued that “Stanford can no longer freely silence the voices of minorities and women in the classroom. It is time for Stanford to recognize that people of color outside of Europe have made intellectual and artistic contributions to the world we live in.” Moreover, inclusion of minority voices in the Western culture canon would offer Stanford students a “better appreciation of our fellow students’ heritage and would promote tolerance and help dispel racism.”[4]

Second, the composition of the student body at Stanford was changing dramatically during the 1980s, yielding student populations that were far less white, middle class, and male. In 1988–89, for example, women composed 43.5 percent, African-Americans 8.4 percent, and Chicanos 8.6 percent of the total undergraduate student population. Asian-Americans accounted for 16 percent of the student body. Demographic changes at the University of California were greater still. With the shifting ethnic and gender composition of undergraduates, multiculturalism has become a shorthand term for demanding more attention to the histories of minorities and those not represented in the standard political and cultural narratives of Western civilization. These students also argued for a shift in the focus of Western culture courses from Western Europe toward the peculiar conditions of America, and in particular the ways in which race, class, and gender shaped American history.

Responding to this evolving social and cultural context at Stanford, the University Senate in 1987 and 1988 debated changes in the orientation of its Western culture requirement. It would be wrong to suggest that it was student agitation that prompted the changes in the requirements of the freshman course in 1988. Faculty had taken the lead in criticizing the Western culture requirement and the form it took. By 1984–85, an interdisciplinary group of Stanford faculty were collaborating in an experimental course under the Western Culture program called Conflict and Change. Although this experimental course was still bound to the “list” of great books, it sought to provide alternatives to the Western European-centered narrative. Using the latitude already provided in the list of core books, which allowed instructors to tailor their courses by choosing some books in addition to the required ones, these instructors examined Islam, the Iberian peninsula, the conquest of the New World, and the underside of European culture. Instructors from this course eventually led the faculty’s own call for reforms, which focused on a formally mandated review of the Western culture requirement scheduled to begin in 1986–87. The debate on the Western culture requirement took place throughout the university over two academic years, 1986–87 and 1987–88. The debate in the University Senate was condensed into three months, from January through March 1988. Reading the arguments presented at the Senate and those published in both the student and administration newspapers, I am struck with how impassioned, yet thoughtful, the debate was. Those supporting the opening of the canon prevailed in an overwhelming vote on March 31.[5]

The critique of the canon has been an important step in rethinking the categories of teaching and scholarship. At Stanford, and at other universities, the canon has been widened to include minority voices.[6] This has been, however, only a partial victory. If the ordering concepts remain intact—a canon, regardless of its composition—then the cultural architecture of “great” (and perhaps not so great) books continues unchallenged. Moreover, these ordering concepts sustain (just as before) the authority of those who determine the now-more-open selection process.

As I shall argue, merely opening the canon to new voices and applying “civilization” as used in Western culture to world history textbooks permits the organizing concepts (and their cultural and political implications) to remain unchallenged. If we are to take the challenge of multiculturalism seriously, then we need to design courses that challenge the prevailing intellectual paradigms.

The Concept of Civilization in the Teaching of World History

In many textbooks dealing with Western culture—and more recently those dealing with world history—the development of what most authors unproblematically call “civilization” lies at the heart of the narrative that constitutes the meaning of the past. I will argue that the peculiar ways in which “civilization” has been used has impoverished the study of the past by narrowing the range of human experiences studied. Just as the concept of a canon has narrowed the range of literatures studied, so too has the concept of civilization narrowed the topics and the issues studied historically.

In the popular The Western Heritage to 1715, Kagan, Ozment, and Turner argue that “civilization, then, is a form of human culture in which many people live in urban centers, have mastered the art of smelting metals, and have developed a method of writing.”[7] This seems reasonable and is not ethnocentric. The authors recognize the historical importance of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, and, indeed, this concept of civilization could be applied with some modifications to the civilizations of Asia and Africa, although it would not fit those of pre-Columbian America. The concept of civilization employed by Kagan, Ozment, and Turner, however, entails a further narrowing:

The roots of Western Civilization may be found in the experience and the culture of the Greeks, but Greek civilization itself was richly nourished by the older, magnificent civilizations of the south and east, especially in Mesopotamia and Egypt. In the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (Mesopotamia) and soon in the valley of the Nile in Egypt, human beings moved from a life in agricultural villages, using tools of wood, bone, shell, and stone, into a much richer and more varied social organization that we call civilization. The need for organizing this new and varied activity and for keeping records led to the invention of writing. The wealth acquired through more effective agriculture, better tools, the specialization of function, commerce, and conquest permitted the development of unprecedented skills. Great advances took place in the arts and sciences, in literature, and in the development of complex religious ideas and organizations.

The new style of life required firm, efficient management and soon produced governments that were centralized and powerful. The kings’ power rested on their capacity to manage the economy and to collect taxes.[8]

Although the authors derive their concept of civilization from non-Western examples, the histories of these non-Western cases are subordinated to the narrative of classical Greece. The characteristics of civilization are thus no longer culturally neutral, but are chosen because they find their flowering in “Western” civilization, with the Greeks serving as the takeoff phase. This is, after all, the authors’ objective. I do not find fault with their objective as much as with the implications this narrowing has for the use of the concept “civilization” for a study of the past. In its use here and in the textbook by Lerner, Meacham, and Burns, we can begin to see not only a narrowing of the ordering concept, but also a kind of teleological bias, which presupposes the rise of the West out of the myriad roots of the “ancient” world.

In their widely popular (now in its eleventh edition) Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture, Lerner, Meacham, and Burns begin with a brief overview of the paleolithic era, but—much like Kagan, Ozment, and Turner—see “civilizations” only as the outcome of urbanization:

Discussing the origins of cities is really the same as discussing the origins of civilization, which may be defined as the stage in human organization when governmental, social, and economic institutions developed sufficiently to manage (however imperfectly) the problems of order, security, and efficiency in a complex society. Around 3,200 B.C. Mesopotamia was “civilized.” That is, at least five cities existed, which all included among their inhabitants warrior-rulers, administrators, and priests, which all encompassed several monumental temples, and which all boasted in addition elaborate private residences, communal workshops, public storage facilities, and large marketplaces. Rudimentary forms of record-keeping were mastered, and writing was on its way. Herewith the story of civilization in the West begins.[9]

But the story of the West really begins, as the authors indicate eighty pages later, with the Greeks.

Among all the peoples of the ancient world, the one whose culture most clearly exemplified the spirit of Western society was the Greek or Hellenic. No one of these peoples had so strong a devotion to liberty or so firm a belief in the nobility of human achievement. The Greeks glorified humanity as the most important creation in the universe and refused to submit to the dictation of priests and despots. Their attitude was essentially secular and rationalistic; they exalted the spirit of free inquiry and made knowledge supreme over faith. Largely for these reasons their culture advanced to the highest stage that the ancient world was destined to reach.[10]

Civilization has narrowed here even further. It has become essentially a narrative history of Western cultural elites and their ideas, propelled through time by the vagaries of politics and the decline of empires. Simply stated, civilization is “high culture,” and this means written works of philosophy, politics, religion; written forms of literature and poetics; works of plastic and painted art, enduring architecture; and so on.

Although these two textbooks recognize the influence of non-Western ideas and institutions on Greece, to what extent has this concept of “civilization” become indelibly imprinted with the stamp of the “Western” culture? The cold war, the decolonization of Africa, the war in Vietnam all contributed to a growing awareness of the interdependence of the “West” and the rest of the world. This growing awareness ushered in a wave of new (and continuously revised) world history textbooks. Does a study of world history, however, demand a new categorization of the past, or can the concept of civilization be refurbished and reapplied?

In 1955, Edward McNall Burns launched what has become a widely used text for world history. In the preface to the original, he states:

The time has long since passed when modern man could think of the world as consisting of Europe and the United States. Western culture is, of course, primarily a product of European origins. But it has never been that exclusively. Its original foundations were in Southwestern Asia and North Africa. These were supplemented by influences seeping in from India and eventually from China. The exhaustion of Europe by two World Wars, the revolt of the colored races against Caucasian domination, and the struggle for the world between Communist powers and the United States have made every part of the earth of vital importance to every other. If peace is indivisible, so are prosperity, justice, and freedom; so, in fact, is civilization, itself.[11]

Burns, Ralph, Lerner, and Meacham’s World Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture attempts to survey “the struggle for civilization” throughout the world. “No major area or country has been omitted. The aim throughout has been to give the student an appreciation of the distinctive achievements and limitations of the principal human societies and cultures past and present, and an awareness of their relevance for contemporary problems.”[12] These laudatory objectives are somewhat clouded by the very organization of the book: “Each edition [of World Civilizations] has included the whole of Edward McNall Burns’s Western Civilizations, except for sections on the non-Western world, which are more fully covered in this work.”[13] World history is not a distinctive undertaking, but one that operates under the hegemony of the historical category of “civilization” as it was invented for courses in Western civilization. The world, then, is merely a larger field to play out the teleological tendencies in the historical development of Western “civilization.”

This same tendency to see world history through the narrow lens of the cultural and political categories of Western civilization is also evident in Palmer and Colton’s A History of the Modern World, first published in 1950 and revised most recently in 1992. In a section entitled “The Civilized World,” (which deals with the period 1871 to 1914), the authors narrowly define the “civilized world”:

With the extension of the nation-state system Europe was politically more divided than ever. Its unity lay in the sharing by all Europeans of a similar way of life and outlook, which existed also in such “European” countries as the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Europe and its offshoots constituted the “civilized world.” Other regions—Africa, China, India, the up-country of Peru—were said to be “backward.” (They are today referred to as “less developed.”) Europeans were extremely conscious and inordinately proud of their civilization in the half-century before 1914.

They believed it to be the well-deserved outcome of centuries of progress. Feeling themselves to be the most advanced branch of mankind in the important areas of human endeavor, they assumed that all peoples should respect the same social ideals—that so far as they were unwilling or unable to adopt them they were backward, and that so far as they did adopt them they became civilized in their turn….

Even if we apply quantitative or sociological indices alone, we can say that after 1870 there was in fact, and not merely in the opinion of Europeans, a civilized world of which Europe was the center.[14]

Perhaps more blatantly than others, Palmer and Colton began with a Western civilization core and merely appended bits and pieces of the non-West to provide a “world history.”[15]

Not all textbooks on world history are so narrowly construed. William McNeill’s A World History is organized around the notion of precarious balances among “civilizations,” where a series of shocks or disturbances to those balances constitute the “major historical benchmarks of world history.” For McNeill, although civilization remains purposely vague, it is still a fairly familiar concept:

Civilizations are unusually massive societies, weaving the lives of millions of persons into a loose yet coherent life style across hundreds or even thousands of miles and for periods of time that are very long when measured by the spans of an individual human life. Being both massive and long-lived, civilizations must perforce also be few. Indeed, from the time when human societies first attained civilized complexity and size, no more than four different major civilized traditions ever co-existed in the Old World; and in the New, where Amerindian development remained always weak and retarded, no more than three distinct civilizations ever emerged.[16]

McNeill’s “civilization” is somewhat broader, but it too imposes an ordering on human societies, deeming some worthy of study and others not.[17]

Two other world history textbooks are cut from a different cloth. Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History and L. S. Stavrianos’s The World Since 1500: A Global History differ from other world history texts in that they are concerned above all with explaining the patterns of European dominance over the world in the period after 1500.[18] Wolf’s book is theoretically rich, but it is idiosyncratic, petulant in tone, and uneven in coverage. It is the kind of book area experts love to hate, precisely because the theoretical sophistication is greater than the author’s knowledge of the component regional histories. It is also a difficult book and one that assumes a certain facility with Marxist theory. Undergraduates, and quite often instructors, have a hard time understanding it.

Stavrianos’s The World Since 1500 is perhaps the most successful of the world history texts available because it begins with the assumption that a world history perspective requires “a fresh start”:

Too often, the Modern World History course retains these traditional topics [of the modern European history course] and adds others concerning developments in non-European regions. The net result is an overburdened course that is neither European nor world history. It is essential, therefore, to start fresh and to organize the course on a new and genuinely global basis.[19]

Indeed, Stavrianos takes his global perspective to an otherworldly direction when he begins his study with how the world would have looked to a Martian observer in 1500. From that perspective, Europe was only one of “four Eurasian centers of civilization, and by no means the most prominent.” By the end of the eighteenth century, however, Europe had gained control over the oceans, conquered vast areas in the Americas and in Siberia, and had organized a system of global commerce.

Stavrianos’s reference to “civilization” is merely descriptive; it plays no analytical or organizing role in his history. Stavrianos does not see Western culture as a bundle of traits ever more refined: “During most of the pre-1500 period, Western Europe would be termed an underdeveloped area. Its peoples were on the periphery—on the outside looking in. They were quite conscious of being isolated and vulnerable.”[20] The text is organized around explaining why Europe emerged from regional isolation, why and how it exerted its dominance over the world, and what led to decline of the Western world’s hegemony.

Global history is not, however, the only way to teach about the non-Western world. Indeed, one of the liabilities of Wolf’s and Stavrianos’s texts is that the global perspective gets in the way of explaining the historical dynamics of regional cultures and societies. Instead of learning about different cultures in their own terms and thus trying to see how their societies changed in response to regional influences, they are presented as part of a whole tapestry. As I will argue, the "World Outside the West" course sequence at Stanford purposely departed from both the high-culture framework of Western civilization courses and from the totalizing approach of world history.

The "World Outside the West" Course Sequence

Since 1980, when Stanford undergraduates were again required to take a year-long course in Western culture, they have also been required to take one course on some aspect of non-Western culture, society, or politics.[21] In 1988, the Western culture requirement was modified in response to the protests and reforms I outlined earlier to be more inclusive of the varied cultural traditions that make up the West and America in particular. A series of structural changes in the canon were made and the Western Culture sequence became CIV (Cultures, Ideas, and Values). In 1990, the University Senate changed its undergraduate liberal arts requirements yet again: in addition to the three-quarter CIV sequence, Stanford undergraduates are required to take a one-quarter self-standing course on non-Western culture,[22] one course on American societies (which was a compromise wording for a required course on race and class), and an “asterisked” course on gender.

The "World Outside the West" course was a faculty response to the 1980 Western Culture requirement. A small group of area studies faculty shared a common grievance: compared with the three-quarter Western Culture requirement, an unspecified one quarter, non-Western culture course would not adequately portray the tremendous cultural and social diversity in the non-Western world. Moreover, this group was dissatisfied with the “high” cultural emphasis implicit in the teaching of the Western Culture requirement. We proposed, instead, a comparative study of three non-Western cultures over a two-quarter sequence, focusing on a broader definition of “culture.” In this course, “culture” was conceived as lived experience,[23] thus emphasizing social history. Since there were no ready-made models for such a course, we spent considerable time exploring alternative ways of conceptualizing and organizing the material we hoped to include in the course and in developing a model of culture that could be used as part of a debate with the proponents of Western “culture” as commonly conceived. We found Fernand Braudel’s division of time into natural, social, and eventful time, as developed in his The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World of Philip II, provocative and helpful in organizing course materials. Our agenda was to find alternative categories for the study of culture and civilization that would allow us to apply to teaching the conceptual advances in social history that had transformed the practice of historical scholarship.

As our thinking evolved, the course came to concentrate on aspects of selected cultures in Asia (China), Africa (Nigeria), and the Americas (Mexico), and was to have a threefold objective: to introduce students to a select number of non-Western cultures before and after extensive contact with the West; to help students better understand the values, attitudes, and institutions of non-Western peoples in the modern world; and to furnish students with a framework for comparing and contrasting all cultures, including that of the West, thereby heightening their sensitivity to and appreciation of the varieties of human experience.

Students would not be the only beneficiaries. The process of course development would present opportunities for enhanced dialogue among faculty who specialize in the study of non-Western societies. We expected this dialogue to encourage greater sensitivity to the comparative dimension in courses taught in our own fields of specialization and to generate insights into further innovation in the curriculum in regard to introductory courses in specific non-Western areas.

Teaching "The World Outside the West" began in the autumn of 1984–85.[24] From the outset, the faculty team, comprising two anthropologists, three historians, and a political scientist, had to confront and resolve two critical intellectual problems. One was to see how the various parts of each of the cultures with which they dealt could be presented in such a fashion as to make them into an interrelated, coherent, and apprehensible whole. The second problem was to shape the elements of the course—the peoples, societies, and cultures of China, Nigeria, and Mexico—into a common and shared discourse. Tackling the first problem required development of intracultural understanding; handling the second necessitated transcultural comparison.

The faculty involved were convinced that the best way to confront the basic epistemological difficulties was to present an overall and unifying analytic framework that stressed how men and women in different cultural areas responded to common problems relating to human efforts to control both nature and cosmic forces, and how these efforts shaped the society, economy, and polity. Particularly in the first quarter, when we study these three cultures prior to their sustained contact with the “West,” we wanted to portray the cultures as dynamic and changing in order to avoid the stereotype of the “changeless” non-Western world. We paid special attention to the social, economic, political, and intellectual feedback between natural time and social time. Although we began with detailed discussions of physical and human geography, we spent considerable time examining the indigenous worldview—the bodies of philosophical, social, and religious thought—in each of the three cultures. The course came to be structured around an examination of what, explicitly, these indigenous bodies of thought express and how they are linked to social, economic, and political organization and change.

The professors’ pedagogic goals were to analyze, mediate, and compare these bodies of thought; and to specify how peoples use these bodies of thought to inform, shape, and construct their various cultures. Central to our comparative approach was the idea that these very different cultures were alternative responses to problems all human societies seek to resolve.

This comparative concept—different responses to common problems—helped organize the syllabus, lectures, and reading assignments. The goal here was to get students to appreciate that the great diversity of human cultures reflects the enormous creativity of human beings in their responses to problems and opportunities. We expected that students would come to see that the Western tradition is just one possibility among many. As a result, students would come to adopt a more detached perspective on their own culture.

While none of the faculty agreed on a common definition of culture, there was general concurrence that it should include the schemes of perception, conception, and social action shared by members of a society in their quest to relate to each other and to make sense out of the universe in which they live. The concept of culture emphasized in the course would include the “great traditions” of art, literature, religion, and philosophy, dealing with them not as eternal and immutable verities, but as part of the everyday structures of life—including birth, rites of passage, marriage, and death. The course depicted culture as a fluid phenomenon and solidly rejected the usual assumption that non-Western cultures, once established, remain essentially unchanged.

Teachers presented both exogenous and endogenous views of the Chinese, Nigerian, and Mexican societies. Ethnographies, travelers’ accounts, and similar documents imparted a sense of how these societies were viewed by outsiders, while the cultures’ own written and oral traditions imparted a sense of how members of the societies perceived themselves. Faculty considered this emphasis on a dual perspective one of the main tasks of the course, for it would encourage students in the idea that any society can be regarded from a number of viewpoints and that truth is relative to the social and cultural position of the actor and the observer.

The faculty believed it imperative to stress in their teaching the immense variety of non-Western societies and cultural traditions. They wanted to sensitize students to the distortions of complex social realities that arise with the use of terms like “non-Western world” and “Third World,” which are residual categories indicating not what various cultures are, but what they are not. Such terms not only incorrectly suggest that the world outside the West is homogeneous, they have also come to imply backwardness, poverty, and inscrutability. Emphasizing the heterogeneity of the non-Western world would indicate the falsification involved in indiscriminate use of all-encompassing terms such as “Third World” and would suggest further why the responses of non-Western peoples to Western intrusion have varied enormously from place to place.

The "World Outside the West" is a two-quarter sequence. The initial segment of the course originally dealt with the societies of China, Mexico, and Nigeria before their enduring contact with an aggressive and interventionist West. The instructors’ main objective during the opening quarter of the course is to challenge stereotypical notions of presumably dormant and stagnant non-Western societies that became dynamic only after being energized through contact with the West. The lessons here are that many non-Western societies have traditions as complex as, and in some cases with a longer history than, those of the West, that there are no societies without their own sense of time, and that all societies have traditions of challenge and change that persist in their dealings with the West.

For the instructors involved in the presentation of Chinese society and culture before extensive contact with the West, teaching focuses on some of the major elements that characterized the Chinese outlook, illustrating the ways in which a widely shared, specifically Chinese worldview was manifested in social, economic, and political arenas. Elements that are stressed include the absence of a creation myth (while the emergence of civilized, humane society may need explaining, the world itself simply is and cosmogony is not a serious issue); the view that the cosmos, the human/social realm, and the ordinary world around the Chinese are part of one holistic entity; the closely related idea that this differentiated and hierarchical whole functions organically, so that conditions in one realm affect the others; the emphasis in Chinese thought upon eclecticism, complementarity, and harmony rather than exclusivity, contradiction, and struggle; the predilection among Chinese people not to divide what one thinks or knows from what one does (knowledge and action are but two sides of the same coin); and the absence of a self-conscious science, which did not prevent the Chinese from developing a rich tradition of scientific and technological discovery.

Religion is stressed in the examination of the central Mexican Aztec civilization. Teaching centers on the ways in which all aspects of what have been traditionally considered the religious aspects of culture—cosmology, pantheon, priesthood, ritualism, sacrifice, symbolism, sacred sites, architecture, pilgrimages, mythology, divination, magic, and theological and philosophical speculation—were elaborately developed and closely integrated with social and political organization, ethics, art aesthetics, literacy, and daily life. Partly through original documents, students are introduced to the central Mexican worldview: they read Aztec philosophical poetry and confront the rudiments of the complicated and sophisticated Aztec calendar. The intimate interweaving of religion with daily life is important for understanding the Spanish conquest of Mexico, for the Aztecs regarded Cortés as the fulfillment of a prophecy that foretold the end of a political-cosmological cycle. Thus the Aztec defeat cannot be comprehended without reference to Aztec religion and the interaction between Aztec and Spanish worldviews.

In Nigeria, with the exception of the Islamic tradition of the north, the relatively small scale of most societies hindered the development of a professional “intellectual” class. Lacking literacy, precolonial Nigerians did not bequeath to posterity a written corpus of philosophical traditions. The smallness of scale of many of the societies of Nigeria contributed to an intimacy of belief, analysis, and practice. Thus, it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to separate religious thought from ethical behavior, philosophical traditions from political ideas. The Nigerians’ complex cosmology, for example, demonstrates their understanding of causality and consequence. Problems of human survival demand a careful and continuous accounting to the spiritual world and the maintenance of balance within it. Examination of the Nigerian life cycle explores the closeness of the past, present, and future in the consciousness of Nigerians and in their religious thought. Throughout the Nigerian segment of the opening quarter, instruction hinges upon this critical sense of intimacy between thought and lived experience.

The first quarter ends and the second quarter begins with the interaction of the three non-Western cultures/societies with the aggressive, curious, expansionist, and interventionist West. As the first quarter ends, we have introduced Europeans onto the scene, exploring how, in the case of China and Nigeria, they were obliged to conform to local patterns of commerce and culture. In keeping with the religious, philosophical, and cosmological themes of the opening quarter, attention is directed toward the response of Christian Europeans (especially missionaries) to the religious ideas and values of the three societies and the responses of the peoples in these societies to the cosmology and ethical norms of the Christians in their midst. The course also addresses questions of how a society like China, with varying degrees of success, maintained its political independence in the face of Western pressure while at the same time it attempted to create new cultural syntheses between Western civilization and its own heritage. In its examination of the range of non-Western reactions to the West, the course reiterates its emphasis on the vast heterogeneity of the world outside the West. Discussion of the reactions of non-Western peoples to the West also reveals their deep ambivalence toward the West, an ambivalence that is an important, inescapable fact about the contemporary world. The ambivalence can be seen in the alacrity with which some social groups gravitated toward Christianity, Western literacy and numeracy, and Western technologies combined with their unwillingness to take Western culture in its prefabricated totality. The proliferation of syncretic or breakaway Christian churches provides an excellent example of these ambivalences.

The China portion of the second quarter addresses the issue of how Chinese social and religious thinking did or did not change in response to the intrusion of new modes and models of thought from the West. Lectures and readings cover the missionary movement in China and Chinese reaction to it, the confrontation of traditional ethical systems with rationalistic Western social theories, and the transformation of Marxism into a Maoist synthesis. In general, although the Chinese intelligentsia were exposed to Christianity, they found its message inadequate. They were more accepting of a wide variety of Western secular philosophies, materialist or positivist in character, ranging from Social Darwinism to Marxism–Leninism. Why there was a general embracing of Western secular thought is one of the principal questions of the second-quarter Chinese section. In seeking answers to this question, efforts are made to sensitize students to what is universal and what is parochial in Western thought.

The beginning of the second-quarter Mexico segment discusses the conquest and colonization of Mexico in terms of the philosophical debates about human nature that the New World inspired in Spanish conquistadores and missionaries. The main subject of debate was whether, and if so to what degree, the indigenous peoples of the New World were fully human, having intellectual capabilities of a level sufficient enough for them to become completely Christian. The enslavers and exploiters argued that Indians, although descendants of Adam and Eve, had devolved to such an extent that they were in essence beasts. Protectors of the Indians argued that they were just like Adam and Eve immediately after expulsion from paradise and that therefore Indians were ready for full-scale evangelization. From discussions of debates and policies in regard to the Indians, the segment concludes with an examination of the politics, policies, and challenges facing the various Mexican governments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Second-quarter lectures and readings on the peoples of Nigeria concentrate on the quite different responses to Christianity among followers of Islam and those adhering to “animist” beliefs. The argument presented in the segment is that the many similarities between Islam and Christianity, coupled with the long history of conflict between the two world religions, enabled Muslims to successfully resist the proselytizing efforts of Christian missionaries. The intense linkage of localized animist beliefs with the maintenance of a local small-scale political order, however, created special opportunities for Christian missionary efforts, particularly on the heels of European military conquest. The effects on small-scale Nigerian societies of the confrontation between Christianity and animism are graphically portrayed in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.[25] Although rejection and acceptance of Christianity were the most potent alternatives available to Nigerians in their encounter with this aspect of Western intrusion, they were not the only ones. The segment examines instances of syncretic responses to Christianity, such as the Cherubim and Seraphim movement and the efforts of Nigerians to establish an independent Nigerian Christian Church. Studying these syncretic movements accentuates the creativity and dynamism of Nigerian societies in their reactions to the West.

The "World Outside the West" sequence was much neater and tidier on paper than it actually was in the classroom. China, Mexico, and Nigeria are very different cultures whose historiographical traditions differ considerably. Moreover, neither Mexico nor Nigeria was a recognized precolonial entity. This required that we redefine the units of study: for the first quarter, Mexico was essentially the valley of Mexico; for Nigeria, we had to balance two quite different narratives, one for the northern Muslim Hausa and the other for the acephalous Igbo of the southeast. While those who taught about China and Mexico presented more unitary views of their respective cultures and societies, those who taught about Nigeria tried to present the range of diversity in what was to become Nigeria. The Hausa and the Igbo were chosen because they were the principal players in the Nigerian civil war of the late 1960s.

Part of the problem for both teachers and students was the differences in the presentations of these regions and the unevenness in the quality of the literature available. Much more and much better introductory material was available for China and Mexico than for Nigeria, but the novels and other readings (including Things Fall Apart and the wonderful autobiography of a Hausa woman, Baba of Karo) more than favored the Nigeria side.[26] The course therefore avoided the problems of “equivalences” by acknowledging to students the very different historiographical traditions in the three regions.

Other forms of “equivalences”—including chronology—continued to plague the course. Events occurred at very different times in each of these areas, as did the beginning of sustained contact with the West, which was to serve as the transition from the first to the second quarter. Although it is somewhat awkward for students, we agreed to use what we call “conceptual” time. Thus, the establishment of the Aztec state could be compared to the Ming/Ch’ing transition in China, which was parallel to the consolidation of power by Muslim rulers in Hausaland. Similarly, the transition from the first to the second quarter also followed conceptual time, wherein the Spanish conquest of Mexico could be compared to the treaty port system in China and to the British abolition of the slave trade and the beginning of colonial conquest in Nigeria.

The "World Outside the West" is not designed to be a “world history” course. It is meant to expose students to ranges of diversity in three deeply studied parts of the world, to challenge them to think critically about these areas in relationship to one another and in relationship to the West, and to propose an alternative way of presenting and integrating crucial parts of the history of the making of the modern world. The course has a reputation among students for being extremely demanding, but also quite rewarding.

Conclusion

Teaching non-Western history through the "World Outside the West" course sequence has allowed faculty and students to explore different categories of historical analysis. The course was organized as a challenge to the concepts of “high culture” that undergird the study of Western culture, and it was designed to explode the concepts of “civilization” to permit students to appreciate the great diversity of human responses to common problems. If we are to take the challenge of multiculturalism seriously, then incorporating underrepresented minorities in a set of analytical categories that remain unchanged is to leave intact the cultural and political architecture of the study of the past, which privileges certain forms of cultural and intellectual expression over others and certain forms of history over others. As Stavrianos notes in regard to building a world history on the traditional topics of European history, the “net result is an overburdened course that is neither European nor world history.” Our challenge is to rethink how we teach about the past and to use fresh ideas about how to make the past speak to today’s students.

Notes

[1] This chant originated in January 1987 during an earlier Senate debate on this topic. Jesse Jackson, then a presidential candidate, participated in the march outside the Senate. In January 1988, the students also chanted “Vote now, we want change." See the Stanford Daily, January 20, 1988.

[2] For two recent discussions of these issues, see John & Searle, "The Storm over the University," New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990, a view from the liberal center, and Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York, 1991), a view from the right.

[3] See, for example, the much-debated Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (London, 1987) and the quite different but equally controversial Molefi Kete Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge; (Trenton, N.J., 1990).

[4] "Minorities and ASSU [Association of Students at Stanford University] Laud Task Force Report," Stanford Daily, April 28, 1987.

[5] An excellent compilation of documents relating to the Western Culture debate has been assembled by the office of the Cultures, Ideas, and Values program at Stanford University.

[6] For a discussion of the new Cultures, Ideas, and Values program at Stanford and the new insights that can be derived from juxtaposing canonical and noncanonical texts, see Daniel Gordon's essay in this book.

[7] Donald Kagan, Steven Ozment, and Frank M. Turner, The Western Heritage to 1715, 3^rd ed. (New York, 1987), p. 7.

[8] Ibid., p. 1.

[9] Robert E. Lerner, Standish Meacham, Edward McNall Burns, Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture, 11th ed. (New York, 1988), p. 26.

[10] Ibid., p. 105.

[11] Cited in Edward McNall Burns, Philip Lee Ralph, Robert E. Lerner, Standish Meacham, World Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture(New York, 1986), vol. 1, p. xii.

[12] Ibid., p. xiii.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Robert R. Palmer and Joel Colton, A History of the Modern World, 6th ed. (New York, 1984), pp. 551, 554.

[15] See their preface: "Since its first edition, the book has been designed to set forth the modern history of Europe and European civilization as a unit, and in its later chapters it attempts to tell the story of an integrated, or at least interconnected, world. Emphasis falls on situations and movements of international scope, or on what Europeans and their descendants have done and faced in common. National histories are therefore somewhat subordinated, and in each national history the points of contact with a larger civilization are treated most fully. Historic regional differences within Europe, as between eastern and western Europe, are brought out, and the history of the Americas is woven into the story at various points, as are developments of the last century in Asia and Africa" (Palmer and Colton, History of the Modern World, p. vii).

[16] William H. McNeil!, A World History, 2nd ed. (New York, 1971), p. v.

[17] Jacques Maquet, a leading French anthropologist, wrote a fascinating little book that implicitly challenged the linkage between civilization and "high" culture. In this book, The Civilizations of Black Africa (New York, 1972), Maquet establishes a broadened typology of civilization by applying the concept to hunters and gatherers and to nomadic herders as well as to farmers and urban dwellers.

[18] Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), and L. S. Stavrianos, The World Since 1500: A Global History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966). See also L. S. Stavrianos, The World to 1500 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974).

[19] Stavrianos, World Since 1500, p. xiv.

[20] Ibid., pp. 6-7.

[21] An earlier version of this section, written with James Lance, appeared in the American Historical Association Perspectives 29, no. 3 (March 1991). In Stanford jargon, this requirement was an asterisk requirement, which meant that students could satisfy it by taking a course that also satisfied one of the other ten distribution requirements. It was, according to this system, a second-tier requirement.

[22] The 1990 change, which took effect in the 1991-92 academic year, thus raised the non-Western culture requirement from a second-tier to a first-tier requirement.

[23] The term is originally taken from James Henretta, "Social History as Lived and Written," American Historical Review 84 (1979): 1293-1333.

[24] The National Endowment for the Humanities provided funds for the initial course development and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided subsequent and ongoing support.

[25] Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York, 1988).

[26] Mary Felice Smith, Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa (New Haven, Conn., 1981).