Engaging with the Term Humanities

Engaging with the Term Humanities

Even though the field is central to their work, humanities councils rarely center the term humanities in their mission statements. Of the fifty-six councils, only fifteen use the word humanities in their mission statements at all. Instead, most focus on what can be achieved by participating in humanities activities, like forging connections between people of different backgrounds, exploring and understanding our shared human experience, and building civic engagement. For example, Arizona Humanities aims to build “a just and civil society by creating opportunities to explore our shared human experiences through discussion, learning and reflection.”3 The Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities also emphasizes connection between people and ideas “that enrich lives, broaden perspectives, and strengthen communities.”4 The Northern Marianas Humanities Council focuses its mission on the people of the Northern Mariana Islands—specifically naming the Indigenous people of the commonwealth—while also attending to “enriching their lives through research, dialogue, programs, and publications.”5 The choice not to lean on the term humanities is not a turn away from the concept but instead a focus on what the humanities can do for communities.

Chuck Holmes, executive director of the Alabama Humanities Alliance (AHA), echoes this sentiment, noting that, although the term humanities does not appear in the AHA mission statement, the council is not dispensing with the idea but rather connecting with a public that may not be familiar with the term. Once people are in the door, engaging with AHA programming, councils have a prime opportunity to show them all that the humanities can encompass.6 David Pettyjohn, executive director of the Idaho Humanities Council, feels similarly: “Instead of saying we promote the importance of the humanities, it’s more relatable to say we connect people with ideas. . . . The humanities are all about understanding the human experience and rather than technically listing all those fields, the council chooses to focus on the importance of connection.”7

The humanities councils are aligned with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which provides most of their funding and has its own definition of the scope of the field. When Congress established the NEH in 1965, the founding legislation presented an outline of what the humanities would include:

The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to, the study and interpretation of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts; those aspects of the social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.8

Among the states, twenty-one of the fifty-six councils use this definition to guide, at least in part, their own definition of the humanities, with some using this language word-for-word and others borrowing the list of disciplines named in the NEH’s legislation to contextualize their own description of humanities activities. Perhaps not even a majority of the councils rely on this definition because they are cognizant of the fact that the humanities as a concept is an ad hoc category rather than one based on a preexisting, well-established, and shared understanding.9 Ad hoc categories are context dependent and often constructed spontaneously in the service of a specific goal, so understanding them usually requires familiarity with that context. Listing academic disciplines and referring to them as the humanities is largely based in academic concepts and done for the purposes of grouping these disciplines under a functional umbrella. However, beyond the walls of academia, this context disappears, hindering an understanding of what engagement with the humanities means in public life.

When asked about the combined use of a list of humanities disciplines alongside a newly crafted definition of the humanities, Nashid Madyun, executive director of Florida Humanities, noted that the added focus on storytelling allows him and his staff to address multiple audiences and remove ambiguity around who they are and how they use the term humanities.10 Humanities Nebraska similarly combines the NEH definition with a much shorter “translation.” Chris Sommerich, executive director, remarks that Humanities Nebraska uses the NEH definition “for the more scholarly side of things, but beyond that people’s eyes just kind of glaze over.” They choose instead to focus on the idea that the humanities are all about exploring what makes us human. “That seems to resonate with the broader public, is easy for people to remember, and gets to the heart of it in a positive way.”11