A critique of Eurocentric social science

In calling for a change, Claude Alvares contends that 'much of present-day social science in non-European universities is nothing more than the mindless study and re-study of the dead corpus of sociological knowledge generated in response to ethnocentric or peculiarly European perceptions of situations often decades or centuries old.'

---

The social sciences and the real world

IN January 2010, the Department of Sociology (DoS) of Delhi University formally inaugurated a brand new European Study Centre at its premises funded by the European Union.  The Centre would help in the 're-design of the existing sociology syllabi of the M.A. and M. Phil programme at DoS' in consultation with European scholars. The Europeans were willing to pay 300,000 euros for the two-year programme of the Centre.1 

The question we may rather impolitely ask is: Where was the need for such a programme when we consider that the DoS, like every other university department elsewhere on the planet, has been teaching European sociology since the days it was first set up?

Earlier, intellectual dependence and servility came as a natural corollary of colonial rule. Today it is being welcomed because it comes buttered with hard cash. For cash-strapped universities mired in the now-almost-permanent age of structural adjustment, this appears to be the only option left for carrying on academic activity even if it means that one is forced to continue to make one's living by canvassing the products of other peoples' brains. There is not even a hint in the European Study Centre proposal that it desires a partnership between equals or that Indians will help Europeans deal with Europe's own social problems of which there is an abundance: for example, the integration of minorities, relationships between ethnic communities, alienation, problems of care of retired employees, domestic violence and alcoholism, etc. We are still very much moving along a one-way street - with all the movement from the 'superior' or 'advanced' culture at the core to the 'inferior' or 'deficient' culture at the periphery - because that is how knowledge continues to flow in the global university knowledge system.

No wonder the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)'s World Social Science Report 2010 concludes that for all practical purposes social science research outside the non-European world is so insignificant in quality it is rarely cited. The Report, for example, points out that North America cited zero research from both Asia and Africa.2

Political imperialism may find fierce resistance today (Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Egypt), but academic imperialism has not, probably because it is almost invisible. On the contrary, it appears to have increased in intensity and outreach.

Departments and faculties in almost all universities of the globe have - voluntarily or involuntarily - continued to pay obeisance to the objectives and methodologies of social science generation prevailing in Western academic circles (Farid Alatas refers to the latter appropriately as 'social science powers'3). Their output even today continues to reflect principally the concerns of Western scholars. Much of present-day social science in non-European universities is nothing more than the mindless study and re-study of the dead corpus of sociological knowledge generated in response to ethnocentric or peculiarly European perceptions of situations often decades or centuries old.

Even where academic work in Asia or Africa may nowadays sometimes reflect local issues due to the efforts of individual researchers who wish to do meaningful, independent work, the methodologies applied and theoretical frameworks still remain firmly Euro-American in character.  Independence from colonial rule has had little or no significant consequences except for providing opportunities to jockey and fight to occupy chairs left by earlier intellectual overlords. Naturally, there is very little evidence of creative thinking or work, considering all move and have their being in an intellectually sterile wasteland.

Since the social sciences as we know them today are little more than unquestioned European perspectives for European social problems using the peculiar research tools and methods associated with Europe's intellectual history, can they ever be useful tools for the study of other societies with a vastly different range of problems as well as human experience? And what is the 'emotional' or 'spiritual' connection between this body of knowledge and the lives of people living in societies outside Europe?

  One of the major consequences of this state of affairs is its effect on students who register at universities in various countries. They come to perceive the standard diets prescribed in courses as foreign, with little or no meaning or relevance to the world around them, especially to their inherited knowledge systems or to the meanings attached to important elements of their culture. They therefore see themselves compelled mostly to parrot the language of the discipline, to ingratiate themselves into its set phrases, vocabularies, slogans, categories and concepts (which change, like fashion, every few years) so that they can regurgitate it confidently when their time comes to address students as lecturers or professors. Competence and confidence are acquired only after years of subordination, uncritical and unquestioning acceptance and indoctrination. 

  Moreover, in form, the university everywhere has also lost its original character and purpose and become an upgraded version of the factory school in which knowledge is simply disseminated as a given and the student has little scope to create or contribute anything of her own. The European Study Centre at Delhi will ensure that young students can go for an all-expenses-paid six weeks' stay in Europe during which they will be given an opportunity to sniff the latest terminology in fashion during seminars and become au courant with the latest researches and concerns of the European academic community which still assumes that it is at the very top of the hierarchy of the social science imagination worldwide.

The historical evolution of social science studies

The question few people ask is: Why do Indians or Iranians or Chinese for that matter allow themselves to continue to be fed a diet of what Europeans or Americans decide is social science? Is it possible that they could survive for thousands of years without intensive know-how about social, political, scientific or military organisation? Why are we unable to resist the notion that European sociology or anthropology or American political science or psychology is some kind of absolute which cannot be questioned? Or are we simply too lazy to surrender this colonial inheritance and rethink anew?

It may be useful here to inquire (briefly) into how this situation arose in the first place.

The intellectual history of societies falling as colonies under the political domination of Europe and, later, the US shows two major phases. In the first phase, there is a determined assault on their intellectual and spiritual traditions which is often internalised and often uncritically accepted by the leading and influential sections of the subjugated population. In any event, they really do not have any choice.

Thereafter, in the second phase, there is an overt attempt to completely replace the indigenous systems with ideas associated with the experience of the coloniser - a routine feature of the exercise of power.

The methodology adopted for such cultural assaults was elaborated very powerfully in 1612 by Sir John Davies, British Attorney for Ireland, in his book titled A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never  Entirely Subdued and Brought Under Obedience of the Crown of England Until the Beginning of His Majesty's Happy Reign. Though he was writing in respect of Ireland, Davies could have been writing about any other country that came under the political subjugation of colonial powers:

'The defects which hindered the perfection of the conquest of Ireland were of two kinds and consisted: first, in the faint prosecution of the war and next in the looseness of the civil government. For the husbandman must first break the land before it be made capable of good seed; and when it is thoroughly broken and manured if he do not forthwith cast good seed into it, it will grow wild again and bear nothing but weeds. So a barbarous country must first be broken by a war before it will be capable of good government; and when it is fully subdued and conquered, if it be not well planted and governed after the conquest it will soon return to the former barbarism.'4

The simple truth is that there has never been a change in this principal approach of imperialism and its ways thereafter.

The assault on India's traditions, for instance, was first officially announced by William Wilberforce in his 1813 speech to the English Parliament in which he argued that the English must ensure the conversion of the country to Christianity as the most effective way of bringing it to 'civilisation'. The effort to Christianise the Hindu population fell flat on its face and proved to be one of the most abject failures of imperial governance.

In 1835, however, a profoundly new approach was crystallised in the form of a 'Minute' by Governor General Lord Babington Macaulay which became the foundation of the modern academic enterprise and proved to be successful beyond the expectations of both colonial and post-colonial rulers. In that influential Minute, Macaulay summarily knocked down the entire intellectual output of India and Arabia in well-known words:

'I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.

'It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.'5

  Macaulay insisted on installing a new system of education with a very specific set of goals:

  'I feel with them that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern - a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.'6

This well-known formulation of the objectives of the colonial education project coupled simultaneously with the display of civilisational arrogance was repeated ad nauseam in countries as diverse as Turkey, Indonesia, the Philippines, Aotearoa (New Zealand), etc. These became overnight 'victim' societies or 'defeated' civilisations and their leading lights readily applied this collective feeling of inferiority to the products of their minds as well. In the context of Africa, Ngugi wa Thiong'o wrote:

'The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance [was] the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples' languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their own springs of life.'7

It is truly amazing to discover that so many educated segments in practically every colonised society could be so convinced eventually of their own - and their civilisation's - worthlessness, that they would allow themselves to be robbed of everything that their civilisations had to offer and then meekly submit to remould themselves in the manners and thinking of those who came from far outside their borders.

The scale of this civilisational failure of nerve was ultimately restricted in its reach for a rare reason: the difficulty the imperial power faced - as Macaulay himself admitted - in 'educating' the entire population! In other words, we survived with our identity simply because most of us did not speak English, we continued to speak in our own mother-tongues, and the majority of our populations had little interest in certifying themselves in Western knowledge systems. They simply remained aloof, disinterested, unincorporated.

Two different societies

The result everywhere has been the generation of two wholly different societies owing allegiance to separate systems of knowledge and belief, even when they occupy the same single geographical space. In his remarkable work of anthropology Mexico Profundo, Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla made a critical reference to the 'imaginary Mexico' imposed on that society by Western scholars and academics.8 He called it 'imaginary' not because it did not exist, but because it denied the cultural reality lived daily by most Mexicans.

According to Bonfil, the lives of the 'de-Indianised' rural mestizo communities and also of the vast number of migrants living in the cities comprised what he called the Mexico profundo. This life was rooted in Mesoamerican civilisation based on its own food supply. Work in this society even today is understood primarily as a way of maintaining a harmonious relationship with the natural world. Health is related to human conduct and community service is often part of each individual's life obligation. Time is cyclical and humans fulfil their own cycle in relation to other cycles of the universe. You could say that for the Mexico profundo, Europe as a system of ideas to live by or as an ideal simply does not exist. Though Bonfil's perception appears to be radical, his description of a society that functions distinct from the perceptions of overseas scholars and their local coloured cohorts could be applicable in every society of the non-Western world. In our country, we call it the 'other India' - larger than India and in the deepest sense, concerned solely with itself and wholly unconcerned about Europe.

Eventually only two classes of people came to the conclusion that European science was the only successful foundation for the advancement of knowledge (and human welfare) in future: first, the Europeans (naturally); thereafter, the educated among the colonised, especially the academic community. Both for the wrong reasons.

Absence of objectivity

It is an elementary principle of assessments and evaluations that they must always be carried out - in the interests of objectivity and credibility - by persons unconnected with them. A person cannot be a judge in her own cause. But what do we find here? The assessments and evaluations of the West, of Western science, of the alleged dynamism and achievements associated with Western history are made by intellectuals, historians and writers from the West. They unabashedly glory in their own achievements, they become their own historians, they propose their own greatness, they themselves certify and celebrate the unique quality of their own way of life. The final act of hubris was a claim made fairly recently that American society symbolised 'the end of history', the end of evolution; that there was no further stage of human progress necessary or conceivable except endless refinements in technology.

The absence of objectivity has been taken to such absurd lengths that often entire histories of various human activities (ethics, science and technology, the arts, etc.) are compiled by Western writers which do not take into consideration even the existence of people from other parts of the globe. This ignorance of the role and intellectual contributions of people living outside the boundaries of Europe is on occasion admittedly due to a narrow or parochial education. But more often than not it is also because admitting the intellectual contributions of others would downplay the West's own claim to self-directed development up the ladder of human progress due to its innate cultural superiority over the rest of humankind.

  Western academic social science is not irrevocable, divine, infallible or bestowed with greater epistemological significance than other intellectual traditions or ethnosciences. It only appears so.

The success of Orientalist discourse has been in precisely this: the peoples of India, Arabia and other lands are today convinced that the best interpreters of their history, their societies, their traditions are scholars and commentators from the West rather than people in their own midst.

Distressed by this wholesale mental capitulation and surrender of an entire generation of intellectuals, Syed Hussein Alatas wrote - several decades ago - a stinging evaluation of what he called 'the captive mind' in which he pilloried Third World intellectuals for their continuing obsession with imported and handed-down theories of knowledge which had little to do with their societies, their experience and their own intellectual traditions.9

'It is the final triumph of a system of domination,' writes Ngugi wa Thiong'o in Decolonising the Mind, 'when the dominated start singing its virtues.'10

  Significant resistance to intellectual colonisation eventually came not from this captive and enslaved class of university-based academics but from the most marginalised groups, including the American Indians, the Maoris in Aotearoa (New Zealand), the Aboriginals in Australia and Canada and a significant group of scholars from the African countries.

It also came from Islam, though in mixed ways, as most Islamic societies were eventually unable to resolve the issue of the compatibility of their religious traditions and Western (secular, positivist, materialistically oriented) knowledge. Muslims in fact got themselves certified in Western knowledge systems in droves. Even today Muslim countries remain profoundly schizophrenic about their approaches to Western knowledge, including philosophy, unable to restore the productive harmony between science and Islam that flourished during the West's Dark Ages. Materialist Western knowledge - which denies the very existence of Allah - is taught side-by-side with Islamic theology, often within the same university.

In India, Western science including Western social science is accepted without question by its academic czars, signalling the complete intellectual defeat of its so-called thinking or academic classes. The country's (so-called) 'finest' minds - those who qualify for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) - are harvested in a handful of imported institutions that serve as unabashed recruiting grounds for production systems and economies abroad.

  After the US became the dominant force in the world economy, educational curriculum dominance shifted to American universities and their academic formulae became the new testament for the rest of the world, including now England.  As the US naturally assumed control over what would constitute higher education, this implied that university content would now be sourced to patterns of thinking from a country which encapsulated little more than the worldview and concerns of a predominantly white male population which had established its dominance there through sheer uninhibited violence and which would tolerate the growth of only those other sections that were in grand sympathy with its views.

Uniform educational diet

The problem faced by the white American education system in the 19th century was the lack of uniformity of what was being taught at different schools and colleges within the country. The diversity was finally settled by the report of the 'Committee of Ten' set up in 1892 under the chairmanship of Charles W Eliot, President of Harvard University. The subjects seen as necessary for a proper university education for people growing up in the United States were decided by this committee and they would thereafter rule the world of academia everywhere even up to our own times with minor modifications. The subjects and also the duration of time to be allotted for the teaching of these subjects were determined by the committee. [The nine subjects were: 1. Latin; 2. Greek; 3. English; 4. Other Modern (European) Languages; 5.  Mathematics; 6. Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry; 7. Natural History; 8. History, Civil Government and Political Economy; 9. Physical Geography, Geology and Meteorology.]11

  What is important to note is that this attempt to create and enforce a uniform diet for all students of education in all countries - with diverse environments, intellectual histories and cultural traditions - was never questioned. The new curriculum was adopted everywhere because the modern university culture has retained a profoundly imitative or mimic character.  Ngugi wa Thiong'o, for example, relegated most academic scholarship in Africa to exercises in 'apemanship and parrotry'. (Rabindranath Tagore, India's distinguished man of letters, in fact, wrote a telling story about a parrot more than a hundred years ago in which he thoroughly parodied the educational system.)

  In the new culture, the printed textbook as an essential tool for learning naturally reigned supreme because these academicians were more comfortable with books than with the real world from which the text could safely isolate them. This facilitated further 'universalisation' claims since local experience was not considered necessary for theory and the theory in any case came always from Western academia.

  At no stage was there any critical questioning in our own societies of the directions in which the acquisition of knowledge had begun to proceed. Only the very prescient saw the terrible consequences for their own kind. A generally peaceful individual, Mahatma Gandhi was so outraged by the idea of turning his people into second-class Westerners that he declared in Hind Swaraj that 'deportation for life to the [penal colony of the] Andamans is not enough expiation for the sin of encouraging European civilisation.'12 As Vinay Lal notes, it is not at all surprising that the misery of human beings has increased in almost direct proportion to the spread of Western social sciences - from anthropology to geography and economics - in the rest of the world.13

Imperialism has thus remained an intrinsic feature of the world knowledge system. As Ward Churchill maintains in White Studies: 'The system of Eurosupremacist domination depends for its continued maintenance and expansion, even its survival, upon the reproduction of its own intellectual paradigm - its approved way of thinking, seeing, understanding, and being - to the ultimate exclusion of all others.'14

Even today the power to maintain this dominance continues to be exercised in the form of controls over the textbook trade, the authentification of social science literature, the selective use or promotion of scholars, the suppression and discrediting of ideas from other intellectual traditions, unscrupulous misappropriation of such ideas when possible, and control of circulation of ideas through the peer group system which links both the publishing and journal industries.

  This is the reason why Mahatma Gandhi, Tolstoy, Aurobindo, Mao Zedong and other eminent persons all worked on revamping the educational systems they inherited as an important element of their political work. Gandhi introduced the system of Nai Talim, in which students would work with their hands and learn and earn while doing so.            

Claude Alvares is the coordinator of the Multiversity Project. He is the author of Decolonizing History, which severely knocked down Western interpretations of societies like India and China. The above is extracted from his presentation at the International Conference on 'Decolonising Our Universities' held in Penang, Malaysia, in June 2011.

Endnotes

1.         See: http://www.iescp.org/index.php/events.

2.         The complete text of the UNESCO World Social Science Report can be downloaded from: www.unesco.org/shs/wssr

3.         Farid Alatas, Alternative Discourses in Asian Social Science, 2006, p.13.

4.         Sir John Davies, A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued Nor Brought Under Obedience of the Crown of England Until the Beginning of His Majesty's Happy Reign (1612), in Henry Morley, ed., Ireland Under Elizabeth and James the First (London: George Routledge and Sons, Limited, 1890), p. 291.

5.         See: http://www.vvv03.com/Minutes.pdf

6.         See: http://www.vvv03.com/Minutes.pdf

7.         Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind, 1981, p.3.

8.         Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Mexico Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization, 1996.

9.         Syed Hussein Alatas, The Captive Mind, 1969; The Captive Mind Revisited, Multiversity, 2006.

10.       Ngugi wa Thiong'o, work cited, 1981, p.20.

11.       See: www.mathcurriculumcenter.org/PDFS/.../comm_of_10_summary.pdf

12.       MK Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 2008 edition, p.89.

13.       Vinay Lal, 'The Disciplines in Ruins: History, the Social Sciences, and Their Categories in the "New Millennium"', Emergences, Vol.12, No.1, 2002, p.143.

14.       Ward Churchill, White Studies: The Intellectual Imperialism of Higher Education, Citizens International, 2002, p.25.

*Third World Resurgence No. 266/267, October/November 2012, pp 20-24