Theories of the South: Limits and perspectives of an emergent movement in social sciences

Introduction

There is nothing new about the fact that some social scientists have been disconcerted by the way in which our disciplines have constructed their master narratives, appropriating Euro-American sociological theories to give meaning to the idea of society in the rest of the world. In the 1950s and 1960s, authors such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon had already criticized the impact of these theories on the subjectivities of colonized subjects. The dependence theories were also a direct challenge to the developmental models of the times, establishing themselves, albeit topically, as an alternative for interpreting the question of global inequality.

Over the past two decades, new theoretical reactions and alternatives have emerged under labels as diverse as ‘postcolonial’ (Chakrabarty, 2000), ‘decolonial’ (Mignolo, 2009), ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt, 2000), ‘phases of modernity’ (Domingues, 2008) and ‘our modernity’ (Chatterjee, 1997). These movements recovered the pioneering reactions from the 1950s and 1960s vis-à-vis contemporary African, Asian and Amerindian experiences. Even the International Sociological Association recently edited two books in which a profound and current debate on this issue has resurfaced (Burawoy et al., 2010; Patel, 2010). However, it is necessary to clarify that the theoretical movements of the past – along with the new critical and analytical trends mentioned here – have but a minor influence on legitimate debates not only in the academic circles of Euro-American sociology but also those located in countries where these approaches were first produced, as noted by Go (2013) and Alatas (2006).

While there is already a main outline of this set of debates – to the point where it is acknowledged as part of the internal disputes within the social sciences – a new alternative has now been added under the label theories of the South. Even if we consider this new theoretical movement as a component of the larger set mentioned above, it is important for us to recognize that it has introduced a new tool (we can also think of it as a lens) that had not reached the core of the geopolitical dispute within our disciplines: the South.

If we examine works from only the past five years, we can find three major contributions that helped add this specific challenge to the existing conceptual corpus: the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos on Epistemologies of the South; the collection of articles by Raewyn Connell on the sociologies of Southern Theories; and, finally, the recent work by anthropologists Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff on Theories from the South.

Utilizing the strategy of the review essay, I will discuss the ways in which the South has been brought to the core of the theoretical debates within the social sciences in these works. By employing the notion of économie de la grandeur (how actors can legitimately justify their actions in contexts where multiple or contradictory logics exist), a term coined by Boltanski and Thévenot (1991) and by Boltanski (2000), I describe the grandeurs or virtues that are associated with the South in each work. In addition, I show how these authors employ particular grandeurs to sketch the universe of theoretical debates in their books and thus ensure the legitimacy of their contributions to contemporary sociological debate.

Instead of reviewing these works in their totality, I aim to explore the ways and moments in which each author invokes the South in these writings, giving it the heuristic potential to modify the agenda of the social sciences. From this particular focus, I will look into certain specific issues that I find problematic in these works in order to enrich the debate on the meanings and the appropriations of the South. First I examine the vision of Boaventura Santos, according to whom the main feature of the epistemologies of the South is associated with a disruption of the abysmal logic of scientific/capitalistic forms of knowledge. This is followed by a critique of the Comaroffs’ reification of the classic dualism of traditional social sciences between the ‘theoretical’ theories of the North and the ‘practical’ theories of the South. I then analyze Connell’s disregard of the internal processes of colonization of the social sciences by Euro-American narratives when the author defends the social theories produced in the South as potential alternatives to mainstream sociology.

The South as epistemology and hope

In his writings since the 1990s, Portuguese social scientist Boaventura Santos has questioned whether the epistemological project of Western sciences is in fact universal; he does so by combining the discoveries of the ‘social science’ with other forms of knowledge. As he has stated in his works, Santos seeks to challenge the way in which the North imposes its scientific knowledge as superior to other forms of knowledge that still survive in the South, building an impassable distance for a type of abysmal thinking.

His book Epistemologies of the South, originally published in 2009, is a compilation that brings together perspectives with the same theoretical aim: to break away from the colonial model of production of knowledge, presenting a range of texts that cover everything from postcolonial African literature to Indian subaltern studies and the Latin American decolonialist authors. In this essay, I will not compare the entire book with the texts by Connell and the Comaroffs but will instead focus on the introduction (co-written by Santos and Maria Paula Meneses) and Chapter 1, where the notion of the South is explicitly associated with alternative forms of knowledge for the social sciences.

From the very first pages of the introduction, the authors define their objective to be a critique of the colonial perspective of scientific knowledge, understood as a representation of the West that combines processes of secularization and global capitalist expansion. The South, in the words of Santos and Meneses (2009: 12), ‘is conceived of here metaphorically as a field of epistemological challenges that attempts to repair the damage and impact historically caused by capitalism in its colonial relationship to the world’ (author’s emphasis).

For both of these writers, ‘the epistemologies of the South are a set of epistemological interventions that denounce this suppression’ (of the knowledges of peoples and colonized nations). They place value on the knowledges that ‘successfully resisted and they explore the conditions of a horizontal dialogue among different knowledges’ (Santos and Meneses, 2009: 13). In this regard, the South corresponds not to a geographic unit but to a specific epistemological form that could be defined by its negative and repairing relationship to colonial capitalism.

According to Santos, Western modernity and its scientific perspective of the world turn out to be a weapon for domination by forcefully refusing any possibility of coexistence with other forms of knowledge. The main problem, according to Santos and Meneses, would not necessarily be the inexorable existence of colonization and of its master narrative, that is, scientific thought. The central issue would reside in the fact that these processes do not allow for that which Johannes Fabian (1983) and later Walter Mignolo (2000) refer to as coevalness of other social forms and their knowledges. For the colonial-global-capitalist order, social forms and formulas scattered across the globe have been left on the fringes or simply disregarded as significant experiences. Like the title of Walter Mignolo’s latest work (2011), this would be the ‘dark side of modernity’.

According to the authors, although it was impossible for them to simply exclude colonization and the consequences of modernity from their colonized daily lives, the peoples of the South managed to adapt and come up with alternative modernities, which were not sufficiently explored in their text. Another solution unique to the peoples of the South, as noted by the authors, is the creation of a ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’ ‘meaning tolerance, patriotism, global citizenship, a global community of human beings, global cultures, etc.’ (Santos, 2009: 41). ¹ The base of this cosmopolitanism would be the different temporalities in which ‘the subaltern experiences of the global South have been forced to respond to both the short duration of their immediate needs of survival and to the lengthy duration of capitalism and colonialism’ (Santos, 2009: 50).

As with other theorists on decoloniality already quoted, Boaventura’s empirical wager is on the indigenous peoples. By having historically positioned themselves in opposition to colonialism and to abysmal scientific thought, indigenous peoples would constitute living proof that understanding of the world goes beyond Western modes of knowledge.

The recently acknowledged emergence of indigenous representatives and their own forms of organization in international leftist forums (the fundamental stage analyzed by the author is the World Social Forum) shows, according to Santos, the possibilities of a hybridism between West and non-West, in which classic leftist movements ally themselves with black, indigenous, feminist and landless worker communities.

For the author, in spite of the fact that these forums created new political relations, ‘this diversity continues to lack an adequate epistemology’ (Santos, 2009: 45) that would allow for the free movement of ideas among such different groups. Its academic project thus consists in constructing an epistemology that takes this diversity into account while allowing asymmetrical realities to be joined together.

Here I believe that Boaventura Santos is left in a quandary since in spite of praising the plurality of forms of knowledge and their incompleteness, the Portuguese thinker seems hard-pressed to come up with a single formula that encompasses them all: ‘In order to move forward, we require a residual or negative general epistemology: a general epistemology of the general impossibility’ (Santos, 2009: 46).

It would thus appear that in order to deconstruct a hegemonic form, it is necessary to construct another hegemonic form, one populated with the imagination of the colonized as well. In my opinion, this type of elliptical solution does not help us to overcome epistemological colonialism. We continue to face the same dilemma of either imposing an epistemology (a general one that takes diversity into account) or accepting several epistemologies (which do not necessarily communicate or wish to communicate with one another) supported by the colonized world in such different conditions, durations and consequences. His proposal, as we have seen, is to use the dialogue of differences, which he refers to as an ecology of knowledges, in order to argue in favor of a non-hierarchical point in common between scientific knowledge (of the North) and tradition knowledge (of the South).

However, once again, wouldn’t the search for this convergence be precisely the driver of the ‘liberal-democratic-Western’ project? Wouldn’t that rhetoric be more of a way of conceding the diversities of the South to the North’s need to simplify them? Like placing within a single scope feminist and postcolonial epistemologies, the landless movement, quilombolas and indigenous people (examples used by the author) without relapsing into what traditional social science (of the North) has always done? In my view, this ecumenical perspective represents a sort of Northern Other, not a configuration based on own specificities that would go beyond the vague notion of traditional used throughout the work.

To demonstrate the virtues and the differences of the societies of the South, the author himself explains what the sites of this new epistemology would be: ‘Peripheral societies of the modern world system, where the belief in modern science is most tenuous, where the connection of modern science to the purposes of colonial and imperial domination is most visible, and where other non-scientific and non-Western knowledges prevail over the daily practices of the population’ (Santos, 2009: 47).

Although readers of Santos may not find it difficult to perceive the perverse effects of colonial epistemologies, it is nearly impossible to figure out from the text which of these knowledges would fall on the ‘other side of the line’. If we say as Santos does that these knowledges are ‘popular, secular, proletarian, peasant and indigenous’ (Santos, 2009: 25), exemplary terms coined by the epistemology of the North, aren’t we in fact grouping them in the categories that the colonizer-capitalist-globalizer subject created to fit them into a hierarchical order for forms of knowledge?

The impression that Boaventura Santos gives is that in spite of the fact that little is known about the specific content of these other knowledges, there is a metaphysical belief regarding its difference in relation to those of Europe. A belief that at certain points could be confused (from my own perspective) with what is also a metaphysical idea of the noble savage free from conflict, without bodies and contradictions. In this point, there is a serious risk of limiting the debate to the same rhetorical dimension that has in the past (and in the traditional vision of the social sciences) posited the superiority of the colonizer as a generic and civilized being. By placing his hopes in the societal forms that he recognizes in the South, the author leaves aside local forms of knowledge and places excessive emphasis on the problems violently created by colonizing societies.

The South as hell’s avant-garde

The book by Jean and John Comaroff, follows the same editorial trend of the other texts analyzed here. The work begins with a lengthy introduction entitled ‘Theories from the South’, which attempts to bring together a series of articles the public is already familiar with (besides the introduction to the book, only a single chapter had not already been published). This introduction will serve as the basis for my analysis as it is the only part of the book to formulate the question of the South in a satisfactory way.

The Comaroffs begin their essay by embracing the idea that for decades Southern societies have been regarded ‘primarily as a place of parochial wisdom, of antiquarian traditions, of exotic ways and means’ (2011: 1). Another familiar topic addressed in the text is the fact that the South has traditionally been a supplier of ‘raw materials’ for the social theories drafted in the North. In their vision, however, this scenario could be on the verge of being altered as certain social processes of the South begin to spread across the globe.

These authors are working to subvert what they refer to as epistemological structures of this hierarchy. This is based on the hypothesis that in this historic moment, the global South is the one that should be providing the insights for understanding the rest of the world.

These insights are connected to terms like inventions, accommodations and hybrids, which appear over and over again in the text (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2011: 6). In the different colonial contexts of the South specific forms of ‘proletarianization of the peasantry and of displaced cosmopolitanisms forged in the spaces between promises and privation, between exclusion and erasure’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2011: 6) have emerged. In spite of their insistence on describing the social processes of the South – and the creativity with which the South deals with the most pressing questions of life in the North – the authors state that they do not wish to merely revert the process, which ultimately would preserve the topography of traditional critical analyses. For the authors, new geographies of center and peripheries have emerged along with alternative forms of production and value creation. In current geopolitics, in which companies and governments from the South participate in markets on fairer conditions, the old structural approaches in which the ownership of the means of production was limited exclusively to the North have also been undermined in the view of the authors.

According to the authors, the modernity of the South is not merely a derivative or a counterfeit of that experienced in Europe. This modernity needs to be apprehended in its relationship to the North but also to the South, with its own experiences and dilemmas. As we will see further on, it is these dilemmas and their solutions that give the South a competitive edge in a situation of crisis in Euro-America.

One of the longest and most obscure points in the text is precisely the difference between modernity and modernization. In a clear effort to safeguard modernity, modernization and its theoretical/normative telos are presented as factors that would tend to build hierarchies within societies and establish discriminatory, unilinear notions of time and space. As a concept and as a practice, modernity – which the authors describe at one point, using David Harvey’s words, as ‘an orientation to being-in-the-world’ and ‘to a vision of history as progressive, man-made construction, to an ideology of improvement through the accumulation of knowledge and technological skill’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2011: 9) – would already seem less noxious, because it is inscribed and modified according to specific contexts (an argument that also brings to mind the debates on alternative modernities).

In the modernity of the South, the ‘capitalism-and-modernity’ dialectic would thus have generated new ‘radical’ standards for the relationship between capital and work. In the book, these do appear from time to time, though mainly associated with the flexibilization of labor, a phenomenon which the authors claim originated in the South and is now spreading to the Old World.

As the author stated in a recent interview about the book for a Brazilian journal: ‘And given the state of cities everywhere, these communities (and I have noted that they are not all the same; their living conditions and possibilities vary) suddenly appear to be very avant-garde. Just like corruption, temporary aberrations or third-world scandals, these communities can no longer be seen merely as deviations from a more rational plan’ (Comaroff, 2011).

This passage serves as an introduction and leads directly to another controversial topic within the book, which is the evolution of Euro-America toward Africa. The authors make it clear that this is a provocative phrase and not a statement on the fact of there being an involution of the North’s history. By accepting (albeit partially) the notions of multiple modernities, the authors conceive of life in the South as parallel and in relation to the North. While for decades we believed that the South would evolve toward the North, it now seems that it is the North that will take on airs of the South in various ways. The question that is not sufficiently clarified in the text is whether the authors believe that this will occur because there is a dialogue and a learning of the North with the South or whether the path taken by the North (the crisis) is the inexorable route already taken by the South.

The authors’ discussion then turns briefly to the question of coevalness (a term also appropriated by Boaventura Santos, as we saw earlier) or, to put it a better way, to the North’s refusal to acknowledge the temporalities specific to the South. According to the authors, the North is progressively giving in to the time of the South. In this regard, we find another relationship that the authors would not hesitate to call ‘dialectic’ between (1) multiple modernities with parallel temporalities, and (2) a modernity sui generis that encompasses the South and the North: the neoliberal modernity.

According to the authors, the events of the South would be the epitome of capitalism in its current neoliberal phase, which is why the North would be increasingly more and more similar to the South. In this point the authors adopt a pessimistic tone like that in their other writings when discussing Africa and modernity. With a dangerous simplification that appeals to the Euro-American imagination, they are insistent when affirming that governance in Africa is based on ‘kleptocratic patronage … because market forces in Africa have never been fully cushioned by the existence of a liberal democratic state and its forms of regulation’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2011: 16). They even go so far as to say that these are settings in which ‘the rule of Law, of the labor contract, and of the ethics of civil society are, at best, uneven’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2011: 19).

To the surprise of certain critics who believe that they had already understood the positions defended in the text, a few pages later we find a definitive phrase: ‘And not all is darkness’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2011: 18). For the Comaroffs, Africa is also ‘a source of inventive responses to the contingencies of our time, responses driven by a volatile mix of necessity, possibility, deregulation, space-time compression,’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2011: 18). These are imaginative forms of survival. While the North lives/acts, the South survives/reacts, and even without very much awareness, it could have invented its own ways out of the crisis. To borrow an argument by Ortner (2001) in his review of another book by the Comaroffs, it seems to me that there is no room in their analysis for an agency other than that of capital and capitalists.

This type of rhetoric could have an effect on the perspective of the social sciences and the Euro-American leftist press, both of which continue to see the South as a place of absence, as the heart of darkness. Yet the argument of these anthropologists is devastating for those who have sought to construct the agencies and the convivial coexistence of forms of knowledge in the South (Borges, 2009; Nyamnjoh, 2012).

The authors then lead us into the universe of what they consider to be the production of theory in the South. It is from among the Tswana, and their notion of a multifaceted, cultured personhood, that we are provided with a sketch of the future paths of the South. For the Comaroffs, the notion of personhood that emerged from their research would not be too different from the contemporary neoliberal forms of constructing the self. In a rereading of their own previous texts (which make up a great part of the book) on the politics of mercantilization of ethnicity, of the changes in the nature of the nation-state and citizenship, and of the disenchantment with procedural democracy (as opposed to a civil society democracy), we find many examples of how the dilemmas of the South could have anticipated those which the North is currently experiencing.

In my opinion, the authors’ statements on the specular or mimetic nature of the processes experienced in the South and in the North pose a dilemma: how do these new processes constitute a Theory from the South? For the Comaroffs, ‘theories’ does not refer to the grand theories of the modernist tradition. It would not be an appeal to abstraction or to a philosophical anthropology. The authors clamor for a ‘grounded theory’ that is historically contextualized (although they seem to easily accept a single idea of capitalist history). A middle ground between the concrete and the concept, between the epic and the daily, between the significant and the material. In short, a theory that seeks to ‘explain’ phenomena through the relationship between the grand determinations and the contingent and close conditions.

The notion of theory is modified in an interesting way to welcome the practical solutions found (under scarcity) in these countries as also theoretical. Due to the method and manner in which the social situations described by the authors are presented, it is difficult to wager on their theoretical-epistemological potential. In this regard, a ‘grounded’ narrative in this book is constructed through findings from the authors’ research in relation to major Euro-American theories repeating the classic model that they criticize. In the end, the book emphasizes the idea that grand theories are constructed in the North and that in the South, we should be constructing grounded theories that enter into dialogue with those built in the North. Nevertheless, we could ask ourselves the following: isn’t this ‘grounding’ precisely a new version of what the authors refer to at the beginning of the book when speaking of the South as the producer of data for the theories of the North?

In spite of this legitimate desire, it seems that the Comaroffs’ problem lies in their dependence on the essential concepts and narrative forms of leftist colonial thought. They embrace, without questioning them, the typical dualisms of sociology and anthropology (i.e. micros and macros). By doing so, they do not manage to follow through on their good intentions; in the end, all the grounded theories of the South would be nothing more than reactions to the theories of the North. These grounded theories would be passive, only capable of being understood in the extent to which they evoke an existing theory of the North, that is, in the extent to which they prove palatable to Euro-American epistemocentricism. In other words, it is a grounded theory that serves as a subsidiary to a Theory with a capital T.

The point the South African anthropologists are trying to make becomes explicit here. The South itself does not seem to have enough content to characterize something empirically and in my reading of the book, the South would also be the result of the universal ‘global movement’. In this regard, there is no need to revise the historical or sociological narratives as proposed by the subaltern, postcolonial or decolonial writings.

Since the North continues to be the North Star (the pun is intentional) of the narratives and social processes even in its negativity, the authors are quick to ironically classify contemporary events as ‘counter-evolution’ (2011: 47). We could be sparing and keep to the authors’ preferred perspective, according to which this is an ironic approach to the evolutionist way in which terms like ‘Third World’ were coined in the past. Nevertheless, if we bear in mind the relational conception according to which South and North would in fact be two facets of the same process, which now moves toward that which Norbert Elias would refer to as decivilization, the only alternative, in my opinion, is to consider that for the Comaroffs, we are in fact regressing. Given this scenario, those who are accustomed to living in the savage world of poverty, kleptocracy, HIV, magic and slums would already be adapted to adverse situations and would thus be more prepared to survive the destructive consequences of neoliberalism.

Like in the articles that comprise the rest of the book, the Comaroffs’ recent incursion into the challenges of the South never questions the traditional reading of the social processes which take place in the South. Incidentally, it is the acceptance of the worst facets of these societies which allows the anthropologists to structure their theories. The fact that we are in the South, which the traditional social sciences have described as the home to defective societies, is what allows us to survive in today’s context of globalized neoliberalism. What has changed due the crisis is that these defects, though never desirable, have now become useful.

The South and its social thought

In the three books analyzed here, the work of Raewyn Connell can be considered the only one which systematically presents ‘endogenous theories’ (Mafeje, 2000; Nyamnjoh, 2012), that is, theoretical alternatives produced outside Euro-America that equate North and South in terms of their epistemological limits. In every chapter of Connell’s 2007 book, we can discern an attempt to engage with the social thought produced in countries of the South. The South here has well-defined locations: Latin America, Africa, India or Iran and, surprisingly for some, Australia. Yes, for this author Australia (as a reminder, the name literally means ‘land of the south’) is a country of the South which could be compared to the other locations mentioned above in sociological terms. Australia would thus share both the effects of colonialism as well as the relegation to the periphery of its sociological production – mainly in the realm of theory. In other words, unlike the Comaroffs, Connell believes that the South can be defined not by its political and economic situation but instead by its intellectual position (which cannot be reduced to the terms mentioned above).

Unlike the other texts analyzed, this book establishes an intrinsically sociological discussion and its subjects are social theories produced by social scientists living in colonial situations. In contrast to the work of Santos and Meneses, the book seeks to establish a dialogue not with other epistemologies (non-scientific or popular/practical) but instead with sociology itself outside of Euro-America. The argument, a sensitive one for many of us who live in the South, is that the sociologies produced outside Europe and North America in Connell’s perspective are as marginalized as other non-Western forms of knowledge.

The use of the term Southern means ‘[to] emphasize relations – authority, exclusion and inclusion, hegemony, partnership, sponsorship, appropriation – between intellectuals and institutions in the metropole and those in the world periphery’ (Connell, 2007: ix). More explicitly than the other authors, Connell defines the South by an intellectual relationship, not necessarily a cultural (like Santos) or economic (like the Comaroffs) one.

Four years before the Comaroffs, Connell had presented the same problem established by the South African authors. Borrowing an argument from the philosopher Paulin Hountondji (1997) (who also has a chapter in the Santos and Meneses book), she argues that while the collection and application of data take place in the colonies, theorizing about them remains the privilege of the metropolises. The author then asks when the social theories made in the South – and as the book shows, there are many – will be incorporated by the social scientists of the core and, although the question may seem paradoxical, by scholars from the periphery as well.

However, as the author herself warns, the social sciences of the periphery do not all share the same basic principles, which contributes to making these own forms of creating theory different as well. In this regard, as I have already stated, the theories in question are more ‘social thought’ than they are sociology sensu stricto, they are not limited to a specific epistemological scope.

Instead of accepting sociology as an established science (like the Comaroffs do), Connell offers a profound critique of the canons of the discipline. For the author, who interestingly classifies Economy and Society and the Division of Labor in Society as grand ethnographies (in the sense of being large-scale ethnographies on European social life), the classic works with their tendency toward the comparative have never admitted the effects of colonialism as a variable in their analyses. In the author’s view, the suppression of colonialism is what allowed classic social scientists to establish the role of the South in a grand civilizational/rational narrative without discerning the effect of their own theoretical actions. According to this perspective, the universalism that the founders of sociology sought can only exist through the ignorance and through a lack of dialogue with the intellectual realm of the colonized countries.

As I had already emphasized earlier, Connell’s objective is also to discover how modern has been thought of in the South. Up to this point, there is nothing to distinguish this from that which is referred to as academic social thought almost everywhere in the world. According to Connell, however, the dilemma of the theories of the North is that they have never been willing to think together with their colleagues in the South, as shown in her sharp critique of the works of Bourdieu, Giddens and Ulrich Beck. And even when they are open to dialogue, they demand that this dialogue take place in their language and in its traditional, i.e. colonial, form.

Some questions emerge from this dilemma: ‘Can we have social theory that does not claim universality for a metropolitan point of view, does not read from only one direction, does not exclude the experience and social thought of most of humanity, and is not constructed on terra nullius?’ (Connell, 2007: 47).

For those accustomed to doing sociology in the South, the answer is obviously yes. For that reason, it is interesting to note that Connell only asks this question because she spends most of the book on an extensive review of certain theories on how to think about the modern world – theories made outside the Euro-American axis. In my opinion, this is the book’s greatest merit and it denotes a rare effort among English-speaking authors to conceive of a more democratic social thought.

In the section ‘Looking from the South’, Connell offers accurate readings of specific debates produced at locations with which the author seems to have established academic ties over the course of her life. This is another important point: Connell respects the theories of the South because she has maintained academic relationships with several countries outside Euro-America. Her interpretation of the sociologies she became familiar with during her academic visits around the world goes beyond the scope of this article; her criteria for selection are pretty clear and consciously limited.

This concern and perspective are reflected in a different notion of the grounded theory proposed for social theory. This would mean a ‘linking theory to the ground on which the theorist’s boots are planted. To think in this way is to reject the deeply entrenched habit of mind … by which theory in the social sciences is admired exactly in the degree to which it shapes specific settings and speaks in abstract universals’ (Connell, 2007: 206)

Challenges and limits

As we have seen, all three of these books point to the need to advance a principally non-colonial perspective of the South in the sphere of the social sciences with their own methods. For Santos and Meneses, advancing the South means bringing in other types of typical or genuine forms of knowledge from this region. This knowledge would build the scope of a negative, temporary and general epistemology which would be capable of helping to resolve the daily dilemmas of contemporary life. Their text calls for a convergence between the science of the North and other typical forms of knowledge of the South. In the attempt to consolidate his notion of abysmal thinking (typical of colonialism), Boaventura Santos prefers to maintain dualism as the starting point that allows him to construct his proposal for the ecology of knowledges. If we compare the text of these authors to that of Connell, it becomes clear that the Portuguese pay little attention to the fact that (social) science is also produced in the South. Therefore, although their book includes certain important authors of Latin American and African social thought, they do not take full advantage of these authors (in their text there is only a brief digression on the dilemmas of creating an African philosophy). As we saw earlier with regard to the chapters written by other authors in the Santos book, the goal of the work is to pay more attention to the subaltern, the intellectually non-hegemonic knowledges and ways of thinking than to scientific or sociological outputs.

As we also saw earlier, the Comaroffs’ appeal for a grounded theory comes up against the lack of any criticism by the authors of the knowledge, the narratives and the vocabularies typical of the social sciences. ² The authors’ interesting conclusion that the countries of the South are creatively dealing with the imperfections of neoliberalism and that these alternatives should be explored as a theory from the South is limited by the imperial curtailing of the South. Here the South is merely the subject of action and reaction to the social processes that originated in colonization; the South is a place of chaos. The book offers no frank dialogue with the anthropologies or sociologies made in this part of the world, as the authors take for granted that the form and content of these sciences are no different from those of the North. In the name of (an evidently colonial) unity of the social sciences, their complexity is negligent while they eradicate the theoretical questions that have already been addressed by local anthropologies and sociologies – questions which could eventually lead to something originally created in the South.

A similar dilemma can be found in Connell’s book. In this case, it is important to note that Santos and Meneses indirectly point out one of the gaps in Connell’s book. We cannot believe that just because certain social theories are produced in the South, this automatically means they are not colonial. The Australian author does not address the question (or only addresses it in relation to her own country) that many contributions to the social sciences are produced by colonial elites or by local groups more interested in aligning themselves with the proposals of Giddens, Bourdieu and Beck than in taking on the theoretical challenges developed endogenously. ³ In other words, they are more interested in bringing the inevitable Euro-American and Southern provincialism to rest on the same platform.

To be a bit more accurate, the book should have taken into account the internal colonialism within the social sciences in which local theorists and researchers generally impose foreign agendas in their own countries (the use and abuse of the so-called barometers that measure democracy are a good example). We cannot forget that the majority of the social scientists in the South have little or no contact with local or endogenous forms of social knowledge. We also cannot ignore the fact that, due to the colonizing nature of the field, many of the theorists who are based in the South position themselves not on the ground upon which they are writing but instead on abstract global narratives. As Nyamnjoh (2012) warns, at times our theorists appear to be ‘potted plants in greenhouses’ whose atmosphere is as pure and ideal as the narratives on modernity that we receive and teach in our courses at the universities of the South. Not all theories made in the South are thus grounded theory. ⁴

Only Boaventura Santos considers (albeit superficially) that the social sciences and their narratives can be produced locally by intellectual elites – chiefly the political and economic elites. It is important to acknowledge that in Africa, Latin America, Australia, Iran and India, those who produce theory about the modern world are the colonizers. These theorists consider themselves modern and they feel little connection or admiration for the other epistemologies discussed by Santos and Meneses. In the end, they hail from social strata that never enter into a profound dialogue with the majority of the populations of their respective countries, sometimes because they merely consider these populations to be part of an objectified class. We must keep in mind that certain Southern scholars can simply choose to overlook the discontinuities with the North (Connell, 2007: 24) and, in order to ensure they are legible for international and local audiences, they strive to insert their texts into the grand and simplistic narratives of pre-modern/modern or pre-capitalist/capitalist.

On notions of the South and theory: Grandeurs in development

Based on this literature review, my main hypothesis is that the notion of South and its extreme variations in different texts are connected to the diverse meanings and values that are attributed to the term theory in each of the cases. From my point of view, for those who analyze these works from the South, the initial enthusiasm expressed in the titles does not actually translate into elements that configure an alternative per se. There are at least two central points revealing that the South is still a less homogeneous label than ‘postcolonial’ or ‘decolonial’. In addition, to quote Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), the South has yet to establish a convention of grandeurs and principles of equivalence that would allow for mutual recognition among the diverse initiatives presented (unlike that which has been established for theories of modernity, for example).

The first proof of this is that the very idea of what theory is differs significantly in each case. For Santos, theory is epistemology; for the Comaroffs, theory is practice; and for Connell, theory is academic social thought. Thus, the unity expressed in the titles succumbs to highly diverse analytical universes, whose grandeurs (in the sense attributed to the word by Boltanski, 2000) correspond to disputes over different things. Although we can optimistically confirm that as a set, the texts could represent an innovative movement in the social sciences, the evidence and subjects incorporated into the debate are not at all equivalent. In the forms of knowledge that would be typical of the South, we see the value attributed to certain competencies (non-scientific knowledges, practical knowledges or local sociologies). As these competencies are highly disparate, they lead sociology itself down paths that are not always reconcilable in methodological terms. These competencies are also attributed to different subjects like indigenous people, informal workers or social scientists.

The second conclusion is that when these works are placed side by side, they do not allow for a clear definition of what the South would be as a matrix of knowledge for the social sciences. In this regard, there would be no significant difference between the sociologies of the South and the postcolonial sociologies, as both defend the effects of colonialism as an analytical unit more than a concrete homology between the forms of living in these diverse places. The sociologies of the South (in Iran, in Nigeria, in Australia, in India, in Latin America) cited by Connell, for example, do not enter into dialogue with one another. In the majority of these cases, they are national constructions and in many cases, nationalist ⁵ (a critique that could also obviously be applied to a significant part of Euro-American social theory, like in the book by Chakrabarty, 2000). The best example of this is Africa as presented by the Comaroffs: a generalizing summary of second-hand information which appears in a forced and imprecise way alongside specific questions like the Brazilian welfare program Bolsa Família (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2011: 44). In keeping with this tendency to generalize (which evokes the traditional theory criticized by Connell), the non-scientific knowledges of Santos encompass everything from rice cultivating practices in Asia to the landless, the indigenous and the quilombolas in Brazil (Santos, 2009: 50), groups which, in spite of what the author suggests, reveal abysmal and often antagonistic epistemological differences in their daily struggles, as I noted in Rosa (2012a, 2012b).

From the point of view of the disputes and the grandeurs brought to bear, the way in which South and theory are present in all of the texts analyzed makes it impossible to bring them together in a stable, permanent way. In terms of the theoretical-methodological option of this analysis (in which the main question is the dispute), the South could be considered a grandeur that remains an outsider to the sociological universe, that still does not have a set of stabilized elements that would situate it in a specific place to be validated. The estrangement of theory in its hegemonic form does not allow for the South to be simply situated within a field, nor does it permit one of the classic roles of critical thought (like that of the periphery) to be attributed to the South. What I perceive in these texts is a call for the need to transform not only the settings but also the possible roles of sociology.

Returning to another important features of Boltanski and his partners’ économies de la grandeur models, the challenges and the grandeurs proposed by the three works could be interpreted as critiques, in the sense established in The New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005: 73). By emphatically exposing some of the weaknesses and fallacies of the hegemonic social theory, the authors demand that established knowledge justify itself – for some of the injustices it has committed and continues to commit. Adequate responses to some of these challenges are essential for the discipline (and for capitalism, in the case of Boltanski and Chiapello) to continue existing in an increasingly critical context.

Conclusions: The South as a critical project

The aim of reviewing these three works was to understand the conditions in which the concept of South has been utilized to foster the debate about sociological production outside of Euro-America in recent literature. In the past and in other circumstances, authors such as Alatas (2006), Sosa (2006) and Sitas (2006) have utilized South as an adjective to generically describe academic production outside of Euro-America. However, these and other authors appropriated the term in a broader sense without bothering to seek a more precise definition, one capable of making the term more instrumental in sociological disputes. I believe that it is this search for a more accurate use of the term in today’s geopolitical context that differentiates the texts analyzed here.

Given that this is a dispute for legitimacy (both political and theoretical), we cannot leave aside considerations about whether these new lenses would be approved for their use in the debate. In dependence theories, multiple modernities, post- and decolonialism, the constructions start from facts that tend to appear self-evident to any traditional social scientist. Few would be brave enough to doubt the existence of modernity or its colonial facet, since we have found (and we are trained to find) their traces and effects in many places across the globe. Many doubts, however, would still surround the South, as we do not know exactly what its effects are, nor can we identify its trails, its edges and its borders.

In a general way, I believe it would be possible to summarize the efforts of the works presented here as an attempt to enact (Law, 2004) the South from different contexts. Enacting intrinsically depends on the production of characteristics and methods of detection that are already in use and in a process of legitimization as well. If we take them as a whole, as we have in this text, it becomes evident that there is nothing uniform in these works which would allow us to use them without hesitation as a tool, as has occurred in other traditions mentioned over the course of this essay. The traces of the South are dispersed in practice theories, in non-scientific practices and in local sociologies. Both in a traditional reading and when returning to the notion of the économies de la grandeur, the arguments employed here do not yet reveal a higher principle capable of reorganizing the hegemonic theoretical disputes (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991: 54–56); who knows whether they even strive toward this goal.

Within the scheme proposed by Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), the question that readers are left with is how to consider literature about the South in a legitimate way. To a certain extent, we could posit that the South, in the sense described here, is a project, like those described by Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) which forms part of a ‘new spirit’ in which contemporary social science develops. When considering the three works presented here, one of the features of this new spirit would be ‘encounters and temporary, but reactivatable connections with various groups, operated at potentially considerable social, professional, geographical and cultural distance. The project is the occasion and reason for the connection. It temporarily assembles a very disparate group of people, and presents itself as a highly activated section of network for a period of time that is relatively short, but allows for the construction of more enduring links that will be put on hold while remaining available’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005: 104).

The highly activated section, in this case, is the need to bring the social processes taking place outside of Euro-America to the core of social theory; this must be done in a competent, symmetrical way, not merely as counterexamples or derivations on the great march toward the West.