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Professors receive NEH fellowships

Published February 23, 2004; Category: ARTS & SCIENCES

Awards cover up to a year in research expenses

Julia Driver

Dartmouth professors Julia Driver and John Watanabe have been selected as two out of 180 scholars nationwide to each receive a $40,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The stipends, announced on Feb. 9, will allow the scholars to spend up to a year working on individual research projects.

Julia Driver, Professor of Philosophy, will use the fellowship to complete her book The Greatest Happiness Principle. The title refers to John Stuart Mill's principle of utility, a theory that defines the "right" action as the one that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Utilitarianism, as the theory is known, has fallen into disfavor among many contemporary philosophers, but Driver believes the theory can be a useful tool, particularly for policy makers.

"Even people who are critical of utilitarianism as a comprehensive theory agree that it is useful for forming public policy," said Driver. "It helps us ask, 'What kind of policies will promote human good?'"

Driver's book will address some criticisms leveled against utilitarianism, many of which derive from outdated interpretations. For example, if an individual had to choose between saving the lives of hundreds of people or saving his or her own child, a simplistic understanding of utilitarianism would suggest that the right action would be to save the group. However, Driver offered a more sophisticated utilitarian interpretation.

"If we explain the situation in terms of the certain special bonds we have with people in our society, like our children, then we can say that recognizing those bonds is systematically good for society," she said.

John Watanabe

John Watanabe, Associate Professor of Anthropology, will use the fellowship to complete a book about the relationship between the Maya Indians of western Guatemala and the modernizing Guatemalan state in the late 1800s. The labor demands of the coffee economy were beginning to pick up at the time, putting the Mayas and government officials in an increasingly antagonistic relationship that set the stage for conflict throughout the 20th century, Watanabe said.

"The government required the Mayas to send forced labor to help harvest the coffee," Watanabe said. "Although they complied, the Mayas also clearly had their own reasons for doing so. It's not so much that the Indians were blatantly resistant, but that they got better at not doing what the state wanted," without crossing a line that could lead to violent reprisal.

 Watanabe's study suggests that, contrary to some contemporary interpretations of history, the Mayas were not passive victims of the state, but sophisticated political actors.

"The passive victim image doesn't give credit to the Indian peoples," Watanabe said. "Their communities and cultures were not frozen in time. They might have been victimized by the process, but they weren't passive, and they learned how to work the system. The story that we tell now is that the Indians resisted and that the government overpowered them. But it's much more complex than that. There was much more collusion, more horse trading."

He believes his research could have implications for understanding the cultural and political climate of Guatemala today, as well as for studying other societies in which indigenous peoples and the state are in conflict.

The NEH received 1,289 fellowship applications for this year's fellowships, awarding a total of $3.3 million to scholars in 38 states and the District of Columbia.

By Tamara Steinert

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