Afterword: Doing global sociology: Issues,problems and challenges

Eurocentrism, colonial modernity and Indian sociology/anthropology

In a recent paper, Go (2013a) argues that Orientalism, Eurocentric universalism and imperial repression are part of what he calls metrocentrism. I would argue that Eurocentric analysis organizes sociological knowledge across the world either in the form of universal scientific knowledge ⁷ or in the form of Orientalist precepts. The first presents itself as sociology and the second as anthropology. Let me explain.

Eurocentrism was a theory of constructing a self-defined ethnocentric theory of history, that of ‘I’. Because this was not merely a theory of history but an episteme, a theory of power/knowledge, it also theorized the ‘other’, the ‘periphery’. This episteme, now termed ‘categorical imperative’, creates the knowledge of the ‘I’ (Europe, the moderns, the West) against the ‘other’ (as the peripheral, non-modern and the East). This perspective legitimizes a theory of the separate and divided nature of the knowledge of the West and the East. It divides the attributes of the West and the East by giving value to the two divisions; while one is universal, superior and ‘emancipatory’, the other is particular, non-emancipatory and thus inferior. This inferiority, a condition of its not becoming modern, in turn further legitimates the need to emulate the ‘moderns’ and to accept the colonizing process as a ‘civilizing’ process.

Eurocentric knowledge is based on the construction of multiple and repeated divisions or oppositions based on a racial classification of the world population (Quijano, 2000). This principle becomes the assumption to further divide the peoples of the world in geocultural terms, with which are attached further oppositions, such as reason and body, science and religion, subject and object, culture and nature, masculine and feminine, modern and traditional and sociology and anthropology.

Sociology became the study of modern (European – later to be extended to Western) society while anthropology was the study of (non-European and non-Western) traditional societies. While European modernity conceptualized its growth in terms of linear time, it sequestered the (various) East(s) divided between two cultural groups, the ‘primitives’/barbarians and the civilized as being enclosed in their (own) spaces. Thus sociologists studied how the new societies evolved from the deadwood of the old; a notion of time and history was embedded in its discourse. On the contrary, anthropologists studied how space/place organized ‘static’ culture that could not transcend its internal structures to be and become modern. Sociology found its birth in India as anthropology.

In an earlier paper, I have suggested (Patel, 2006) that the East was further divided into separate geospatial territories as these were colonized with each territory given an overarching cultural value. In the case of colonial India, it was religion: Hinduism. The discourse of coloniality collapsed India and Hinduism into each other. Later those living in the subcontinent were further classified geographically in spatial-cultural zones and ‘regionally’ subdivided. Those that were directly related to Hinduism, such as castes and tribes, were termed the ‘majority’ and organized in terms of distinct hierarchies (castes were considered more superior than tribes who were thought to be ‘primitive’), while those that were not were conceived as ‘minorities’, these being mainly groups who practised Islam and Christianity (Patel, 2006).

The discipline of anthropology since the late 19th century legitimized a colonial frame of reference for examining and evaluating ‘communities’ and became a powerful instrument and tool of understanding contemporary sociabilities. This form of categorization and classification, if it created ‘norms’ for rule, also benefited one indigenous group, the Brahmins, who were now given enhanced status, that of the ‘indigenous intellectuals’. Other political entities, which in premodern times had authority, such as that of region, village or neighbourhood communities, kinship groups, factional parties, chiefly authority, political affiliations, all got superseded, deleted from knowledge frameworks and silenced. Colonial conquest and knowledge both enabled ways to rule and to construct what colonialism was all about – its own self-knowledge. The British played a major role in identifying and producing an Indian ‘tradition’ in terms of Hindu religion, the caste and kinship and the joint and extended family systems.

Thus, in colonized countries like India, I have argued earlier (Patel, 2006, 2011) anthropological knowledge was part and parcel of the colonial politics of rule (see Sitas in this issue for an understanding of African trends). Not only was it expressed and organized in terms of values that were in opposition to modernity, but disciplinary scientific practices such as Indology and ethnography were used to legitimize these positions. This knowledge was classified and codified with the help of the native intelligentsia; especially the Brahmins, the highest caste, and it thus reflected the social order as represented by this group, eliding any discussion of the voices and conditions of those who were on the margins.

Sociology and methodological nationalism ⁸

Early 20th-century nationalism of colonial countries have tended to evoke a golden past and highlight its indigenous and traditional knowledge and its civilizational heritage to legitimize itself as a community not recognizing that this knowledge has been paradoxically framed within Orientalist positions. Partha Chatterjee explains it well when he states that unlike the Europeans for whom ‘the present was the site of one’s escape from the past’, for the indigenous Indian intellectuals ‘it is precisely the present [given the colonial experience] from which we feel we must escape’ (Chatterjee, 1997: 20). Thus, the Indian indigenous intellectuals transposed the desire for a new modernity to the past of India, a past ironically constructed by colonial knowledges of modernity. As a result, Chatterjee argues ‘we construct a picture of ‘those days’ when there was beauty, prosperity and healthy sociability. This makes the very modality of our coping with modernity radically different from the historically evolved modes of Western modernity’ (Chatterjee, 1997: 20).

Thus, when the nation-state was formed Indian intellectuals actively participated to create institutions that promoted national institutions such as universities and research institutions arguing that thereby they were eroding the colonial exploitation. Social scientists saw their role as being analysts of their own society outside the influences of academic dependencies (Patel, 2010). But unlike economists and political scientists, the sociologists in India saw their project as that which analyses one’s own society (India) in one’s (indigenous) ‘own terms’, without colonial and now neocolonial tutelage. This project allowed for the institutionalization (ironically) of the Orientalist-nationalist particularistic problematique – an assessment of the changes occurring within India’s characteristic institutions – caste, kinship, family and religion through an elitist lens. The reduction of sociology to the nation, in the form of methodological nationalism, helped to build sociology in India as an anti-colonial sociology and opened up a possibility of creating intellectual knowledge for an alternative platform for discussing sociology. (See Connell in this issue on the ways in which innovative perspectives on gender studies have emerged and Sitas and Reddock for the African and the Caribbean experience respectively.)

Many newly independent countries have used this strategy, such as Nigeria, India or countries in the Latin American region; Raewyn Connell’s book Southern Theory (2007) documents the many positive outcomes that can be realized by going down this path. Across the world, this project has promoted varied but uneven intellectual traditions within different nation-states as scholars discuss, debate and represent social changes occurring in their countries. It has also allowed nationally oriented intellectual infrastructural resources to be created, which include not only universities, research institutes and laboratories, but also journals, publishing houses together with professional norms and ethics.

However it has become clear that this strategy has its own limitations. If methodological nationalism in social sciences of the Atlantic region promoted Eurocentrism then that of the newly independent countries valorized the nation and the state; the visions of its elite became the frames of doing social science silencing the recognition of marginalities of all kinds and advocating its disappearance from its frame of reference (see the paradoxes that this position has expressed in Banerjee-Dube’s article in this issue). As a consequence contemporary social science language remained mute on the political moorings of this project and did not examine its close linkages with the metropolitan (advanced capitalist) hegemonic orientation and consequently the dynamics of capital accumulation on a world scale.

Instead of creating what Farid Alatas (2003) calls ‘autonomous intellectual traditions’, in some countries these trends have led to the reframing of a new dualism in social science. For nationalist social sciences have become closely associated with the official discourses and methods of understanding the relationship between nation, nation-state and modernity; while other contending perspectives have become marginal. No wonder Hountondji (1997) has argued that such culturist projects, that of creating indigenous knowledges from Orientalist constructed discourses, which he calls ‘ethnoscience’, remain part of the colonial and neocolonial binaries of the universal/particular and the global/national. Thus his argument for organizing endogenous knowledges which appropriate, assimilate through a critical mind all the international heritage available including the very process of scientific and technological innovation and then interfacing it with a critical assessment and reappropriation of one’s heritage and recognizing its adaptability and creativity. ‘This is not traditionalism, but the exact opposite’ (Hountondji, 1995: 9).

Geopolitics of travelling theory

How does one move forward in this matter given the inequalities that organize the global production of knowledge?

Some social scientists have argued that the best way out of this epistemic and methodological difficulty is to particularize the universals of European thought (see Bhambra and Magubane in this issue). For example, Immanuel Wallerstein has argued that:

Europe in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries did transform the world, but in a direction whose negative consequences are upon us today. We must cease trying to deprive Europe of its specificity on the deluded premise that we are thereby depriving it of an illegitimate credit. Quite the contrary. We must fully acknowledge the particularity of Europe’s reconstruction of the world because only then will it be possible to transcend it, and to arrive hopefully at a more inclusively universalist vision of human possibility, one that avoids none of the difficult and imbricated problems of pursuing the true and the good in tandem. (Wallerstein, 2006: 106–107)

Dipesh Chakrabarty, the historian of subaltern studies, has made a similar argument. He coined a new methodology called ‘provincialization’, and suggested that its quest was the following:

To ‘provincialize’ Europe was precisely to find out how and in what sense European ideas that were universal were also, at one and the same time, drawn from the very particular intellectual and historical traditions that could not claim universal validity. (Chakarabarty, 2008: xiii)

I would argue that we have to evolve a twofold strategy. On one hand there is a need to deconstruct the provincialism of European universalisms and locate them in their own cultural and national contexts (Bhambra and Magubane in this issue). This is primarily a project for the Atlantic region, its universities and research institutes, publishing houses and journals, its scholarship and professional norms. It involves a change in syllabi and curricula, research questions and methodologies of doing research and self-conscious efforts to decolonize its academic moorings.

On the other hand, there is also a need for the global social science community (within and outside the Atlantic regions) to go beyond the ‘content’ of the social sciences, that is the explanations they offer and the narratives they construct shaped as they are by a genealogy that is both European and colonial. Rather, we need to analyse their very ‘form’, that is, the concepts through which explanations become possible, including the very idea of what counts as an explanation (see Connell, Lan and Reddock in this issue). Obviously, it is not possible to suggest that the social sciences are purely and simply European and are, therefore, ‘wrong’. Such an argument has little relevance given the fact that we are and remain within one world capitalist system. We cannot dispense with many of these categories, but it is important to recognize that they often provide only partial and often times flawed understandings. We need not reinvent the wheel; however there is a necessity to generate explanations that are relevant for different contexts. ⁹ (By asserting the necessity of indigenous social science, Mignolo in this issue offers a contrary argument.)

How is this possible? On the one hand we need to move out of truth claims that are universalistic and assert those that are historical and contextual (see Banerjee-Dube, Lan and Reddock in this issue). On the other hand, it is imperative to make the social science market competitive rather than monopolistic as it is now. One tactic is to ‘open’ up the market of production, distribution and consumption of knowledge to new audiences, institutions and processes. Social sciences need to articulate themselves in many expressions at different sites (other than academic) and engage with the ways these define their distinctive culturist oeuvres, epistemologies, theoretical frames, cultures of science and languages of reflection, and sites of knowledge production and their transmission. In addition to classrooms and departments, together with syllabi formulations and protocol of professional codes, this can also include campaigns, movements and advocacies. Thus, their production involves a creative dialectics within and between activists, scholars and communities in assessing, reflecting and elucidating immediate events and issues which intervene to define the research process together with organizing and systematizing knowledge of the discipline in a long-term institutionalized process for the teaching and learning process.

The second tactic is to build intellectual networks across institutions and scholarships among and between the scholars of the non-Atlantic and Atlantic regions. This is being done through professional associations, in various initiatives for research collaboration through the IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa) and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) networks and through professional organizations such as the ISA. This article suggests that there is a need to substitute existing vertical hierarchical linkages between imperialist and ex-colonial countries or between that of core and periphery in production, distribution and consumption of knowledge with horizontal linkages between localities, regions and nation-states of the non-Atlantic and Atlantic regions. This will help to reflect collectively on common and relevant themes that structure the experience of being part of the globe.