Who would have known that something as simple as a set of definitions at the beginning of the novel, Meridian, would bring us back to the ideology behind Moran’s Interdisciplinarity. Alice Walker’s insightful and strategic placement of these definitions in regards to the title and main character of her book, serves as a starting point for readers to have some sort of prerequisite knowledge when it comes to understanding her book. Among the many definitions of the word “Meridian,” there are also specifically stated interpretations per discipline. This word, like so many others, has different meanings for the different disciplines it may inhabit at the time. Each discipline has claimed its own interpretation of the word and regardless of how absurd it may seem to have so many different definitions at the beginning of this novel, they are all connected.
Ah, that is interdisciplinarity in and of itself. All of these different definitions of this one mere word can come together and all orchestrate their own role in the novel without ever having one dominate the other. Well isn’t that the essence of interdisciplinarity right there? Conversation between disciplines, all taking up space, and coexisting in relation to each other all at the same time is interdisciplinarity. This text is used as the functional means of space and conversation for these different disciplines to come together in forming a narrative that is coexisting intertextually among other works – but I digress, that is for another blog post on another day.
So as a means of perspective, a dictionary would be on of the most interdisciplinarity-filled texts at our disposal. It would serve as an anthology of the disciplines, free of dominating arguments, just a mere presentation of the different interpretations of each word coexisting in a text that we use as a reference endlessly. That would be the ultimate form of interdisciplinarity, but everywhere we turn (as we turn pages), we find more and more instances of interdisciplinarity.