A review of a review? The mise en abyme may be too
much for a blog post. But please indulge me for a bit, because I truly think
there are some important issues to tease out here.
One of the major tensions that academics face is the pull between specialization and interdisciplinarity. Not just the increase in knowledge of a specific field, but also the increase in secondary academic literature about that field, means that scholars need to specialize more and more. At the same time, scholars are constantly asked to include multiple disciplines in their outlook, to be able to evaluate and understand work in a variety of fields. Related to this is the tension between specialization and generalization. With this increasing specificity in scholarly work, it becomes harder and harder for academics to write general accounts of the state of their own field (let alone others); for scholars of the ancient world, this means what life was like in the past. And it becomes harder and harder for scholars to explain what it is they do, and why they do it, to the public.
A good example to explore these tensions is Eric Cline’s recent book, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press, 2014). This volume sums up the state of our knowledge about a major issue: the collapse of the international system in the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age. Why did political and social systems from Greece to Turkey to Egypt to the Levant change so drastically at this time? This is a problem that touches on data and analysis from classics, Near Eastern studies, anthropology, history, and environmental science, among other fields. Interestingly, Cline’s book has become something of a phenomenon – very unusual for a scholarly book, even one for a popular audience: it has led to a series of news articles, an op-ed by Cline in the New York Times, and is already set to be translated into at least 10 languages. Because of the parallels with our society today that it confronts us with, especially in the emphasis of the role of climate change in systems collapse, 1177 B.C. has clearly resonated with a wide audience.
What I want to focus on here is not Cline’s book itself, but
a review of that book by the prominent biblical scholar Niels Peter Lemche.
Lemche’s review appeared in The Bible and
Interpretation, an online journal aiming for both a public and a scholarly
audience. A review of a review is an odd thing, and not something I would
normally recommend doing. But in this case, I think we can see a fascinating
intersection of the tensions I mentioned above – specificity and
generalization, specialization and interdisciplinarity – along with the basic
tension of academic vs. public scholarship. What is it that scholars do, and
who do we do it for?
