Spatial Social Thought: Local Knowledge in Global Science Encounters E-Book

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 635

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Global, local, glocal – reflecting on the area of world social science seems to be above all a matter of space. In these spatial dichotomies the global has no location and locations seem beyond this world. Discourses about world social science thought not only distinguish social thought along spaces where they are created. Space has become an attribute of thinking when social scientists reflect on the world of social thought: Southern, Western and Northern knowledge, the location in which thoughts are created, is not only a hint about the address of a thinker, but about the theoretical perspective through which social science thinkers look at social reality. Social thoughts are imagined as imprisoned in the spatial context in which they are created, and social science thinkers are imagined as representatives of spaces, whether these are defined politically, culturally, or in any other context in which their thoughts must be rooted as if the product of human minds was nothing but a voicing of the nature of spaces. And should we imagine the world social science arena, the encounter of all these spatially bound thoughts, as the encounter of many parochial knowledges that never manage to arrive at shared thoughts unless they already share the same spatial context? Why should we then at all meet each other? This book discusses examples of spatially constructed knowledges and the struggles these knowledges encounter as they seek to meet one another and escape from the mind prison of their spatial contexts. Or does the world social science arena after all only prove that the ‘Western’ dogma of contextualizing social thought is a dead end road for social thought – everywhere?

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Foreword

Section I: Global Social Thought

Chapter 1 Concepts that Hinder the Progress of Sociological Research: Identity as an Epistemological Obstacle

First Cause:

Second Cause:

Third Cause:

Fourth Cause:

First Obstacle:

Second Obstacle:

Third Obstacle:

Fourth Obstacle:

References

Chapter 2 Isn't Anthropology Already a Multiversalist Discipline? Assessing the Status of Anthropology in Asia

Critique of Universalism in the Social Sciences

But What about Anthropology?

Anthropology of Asia

Variations in the Practice of Anthropology

The Threat of Universalism

Recent Changes in the Academic Landscape

References

Chapter 3 Indigenised while Internationalised? Tensions and Dilemmas in China's Modern Transformation of Social Sciences in an Age of Globalisation

Introduction

Background Factors

Scale of China's Social Sciences Research

China's International Visibility in Social Sciences

Research Perspective in China's Social Sciences

Indigenisation Movement and Its Criticism

Concluding Remarks

Chapter 4 ‘Academic Dependence’: The World Social Science Arena–a Battlefield among Parochial Thought?

I. What Is “Dependence on Ideas”?

II. The World Science Arena: A Battle among National Social Science Communities about the “Growth of Knowledge”?

International Science Encounters—A Competition about the “Growth of Knowledge”?

The World of Science—A Global Battle among Science Communities?

III. The World Science Arena—A Battlefield of the Scientific Powers—about Scientific Power?

Opposing Scientific Power by Shifting the Distribution of Scientific Power?

Academic Dependence Theory Finds Its Power Allies—Speculating on the Imperial Powers of Nations-States

References

Section II: Spatialized Thought and Local Knowledge Production

Chapter 5 Michel Foucault and the Postcolonial African Theory: A Critical Essay

Introduction

I. Foucault's Criticism of the Social Sciences

The death of Man: the analytic of finitude

Rule, Norm, System

Psychoanalysis, Ethnology and Linguistics

II. From Archeology of Science to Subjective Hermeneutics

How to Think about Discontinuity

The Discursive Formations Analysis

Taking Care of Oneself

III. The Postcolonial African Discourse: From Bayart to Mbembe

From the Proper Historicity toward the Revenge of the African Societies

The Postcolonial Situation: Plural Time, Dreams, and Witchcraft

The Postcolonial State: Violence and Accumulation

The Melody of Confessed Irrationalism

Conclusion

Bibliography

Chapter 6 Knowledge Production: A Perspective from the Periphery

Introduction

Knowledge Flows

Critical References

Knowledge Trajectories Globalization: An Anthropological Matter

Local Expressions of Globalization: Mexico and Spain

Global Spaces

Global Consumption: From Mexico to the World

Notes for Debate

Bibliography

Chapter 7 Civilizational Encounter, Cultural Translation, and Social Reflexivity: A Note on the History of Sociology in Japan

Introduction

I. Short History of Japan: Organizational Principle, Its Emulating Expansion, and the State

1. Japanese Civilization

2. Ie Principle

3. Emulating Expansion of Ie Principle

4. Japanese Modernity

5. The Second Modernity

6. Tentative Conclusion

II. Short History of Japanese Sociology

1. From Meiji to the Second World War

2. The Period after World War II

3. The Present State of Japanese Sociology

4. Conclusion: Toward a Reflexive Project on History of Sociology in Japan

Bibliography

Chapter 8 The community of sociologists in Morocco facing the internationalization of knowledge

The local community of sociologists in Morocco: an unfinished empowerment.

Cohabitation of three generations of sociologists in Morocco: an outline of analysis.

Some aspects of the scientific production of the three generations of Moroccan sociologists in time of internationalisation

Bibliography

Chapter 9 Internationalization of Research in Lebanon: The case of the American University of Beirut

Introduction

Some interrogations and hypotheses

Methodology

The University as a research institution[3]

Funding research at AUB

The very relative scarcity of funding and the real scarcity of time

AUB faculty members as researchers

Publication: research or promotion?

Publishing as a promotion tool

Science talks in English

Publication as a regulation instrument

Collaborations

Conclusion

Bibliography

Section IV: Globalizing Local Social Thought

Chapter 13 The Transformation Processes in Global Social Knowledge

Analytical Framework

Higher Education and Research in the non OECD World

The Reconfigured World of Higher Education and Qualified Jobs

Recent Changes in the Globalization of S&T

The Dilemma about Advanced Education: Local or International

Prometheus bound: What future can be envisaged for the social sciences?

Conclusion

References

Chapter 14 Can Peripheries Talk Back? Alternative Intellectual Trends in Tamil Nadu and their Possible Lessons for Knowledge-Making Practices outside Intellectual Power Centers

Introduction

The Great Divide

Little Magazines of Tamil Nadu

Art for art sake

Art for people sake

Postmodern Magazines

Little Magazine as Movement

Little Magazines as Antithesis

Academic Dependency as Perceived by Little Magazine Movement

Imitative Stage

Adaptive Stage

Synthesis Stage

Resistive stage

Inventive stage

Alternative Discourses and Practices in Little Magazines

Alternative Practices - Forms - Local Journals

Alternative Strategies – Form – Language

Alternative Strategies – Form - Groundedness in folk and literary traditions

Recruitment and Socialization

Alternative Strategies - Issues - Foregrounding the Forgotten

Conclusion

References

Tamil Books

Tamil Journals

Web sources

Chapter 15 How to Overcome “Oriental” Sociology?[1]

1. Sociology as an empirical science vs. “oriental” Sociology

2. The Iranian Case

3. Reflections on Conditions of overcoming the oriental sociology

References

Authors

Foreword

This book is a publication of the World SSH Net thinkshop series. The aim of these thinkshops is to engage scholars from around the world in non-disciplinary and non-national reflections about the challenges the social sciences are facing in the era of globalization.

Substantial changes in world conditions have dramatically challenged and altered the social sciences. These have affected the social sciences more than any paradigmatic shift of theories within a given approach to science ever could.

To mention only a few:

First, the transformation of the only real alternative society system, the project of socialism in the Soviet Union, later followed by China, into globally acting market economies, the very society model the Soviet Union, China, and their allies around the world had opposed for almost a century.

Second, together with the dissolution of this alternative society model, the abolishment of an alternative science system and of an alternative approach to social science thinking has transformed Historical Materialism, the set of theories fundamentally opposing the science model of capitalism and their representative democracies and its scientific interpretations of the world, into a mere variation of the multiplicity of relativized theories within the Western science system.

This, the transformation of the whole world into an arena for the competition for power between nation-states and using the growth of global capital to exploit this growth for their global political power, called “globalization,” has shifted the battle between antagonistic science approaches into a competition about theories within the Western model of science reflecting about a widely unified world - and into a “battle of cultures” with a newly emerging opposition. Overcoming the threat of a war between the two world society systems and the unification of the world under the regime of global capitalism has replaced the threat of a ‘hot’ war between the two world powerswitha world of wars.

Thirdly, probably based on the same Western model of science, the emergence of new science universes, haseroded the global scientific monopoly and theories, so far mainly created in Europe and the United States. It is evident that significant and powerful science arenas are emerging in countries like China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Korea, and Mexico. Namely, both the sciences in China and India are growing rapidly and have the potential to become global scientific superpowers.

Fourthly, and less visible than the changing scientific world power architecture, but certainly more significant in effect, are changes related to scientific concepts and paradigms that guide social thoughts. While Euro-American sciences have, to a great extent, set the global scientific standards for social and human science knowledge production during the last century, the era of globalization created space for developing new approaches to social science thinking, which question the monopoly of European paradigms and concepts. Academics in the former colonies of Europe, as well as in other newly created states, have started expressing their grievances about their work being a victim of “Western” scientific colonization that still colonizes their forms of thoughts and reflections. Social scientists that have had little or no colonial experience, likewise, complain about imposed knowledge concepts and agendas, and claim a new role in the globalizing scientific practices and discourses. Some scholars entirely refuse to accept the Western knowledge concepts any longer, and propose “Islamic” or “Hindu” social sciences based on their indigenous religious-cultural backgrounds, incorporating an explicit opposition to Western knowledge paradigms. Academics in Africa experience a similar shift, divided between those who defend a catching-up strategy aiming at a deeper inclusion inside the existing science world and those who reject collaborations with Western-dominated sciences and defend a refuge into indigenous and nativist alternatives. Latin American scholars, who have had a longer history of defending genuine “Latin-American” thinking, combine local knowledge with radical rereadings of Western scholarship to challenge the Western intellectual knowledge monopoly.

Aspiringtoa nonhegemonic science world, the group of scholars gathered in the World SSH Net jointly reflects together with other scholars coming from around the world and from all disciplines on the effects these changes have on the world's social science arena and on its ways of theorizing. To do this a series of thinkshops is being carried out, focusing on the epistemological, educational and institutionaleffects these changes have for social thoughts.

The first thinkshop took place in Buenos Aires in October 2010, focusing on “Cultural elements in social sciences and in academic labour - Epistemological and educational challenges constructing a scientific multi-versalism”.

The following second event was carried out in Beirut in July 2011 reflecting on “Social sciences in Arab countries facing a scientific multi-versalism: pathways, challenges and constraints”.The third thinkshop took place in Tokyo in May 2012 under the title “Theories about and Strategies against Hegemonic Sciences.” Its outcomes are published in a book under the same title. Thinkshop four has been meanwhile performed in Mexico City reflecting on “Multiple Epistemologies: Science and Time, Science and Space, Science and Culture, Science and Society”.

The outcomes of our reflections of all thinkshops are published in series of books.[1]

This book presents the outcomes of the conference in Beirut, which focused on the discourses between scholars from Islam majority countries and other social scientists not only from different disciplines but all from other rather peripheral sciences from Africa, Asia and East Asia, India and Latin America and on their views on a newly emerging science universe. It invites a global audience to controversial discourses about its findings presented in this book in four thematic sections under the title “Spatial Social Thought - Local Knowledge in Global Knowledge Encounters”.

The book title points on a set of paradoxes in the current discourses usually discussed under the notions of global versus local, North versus South, and alike, in short under notions making variations ofspacea distinctive attribute of science while discussing the current phase of internationalising social thought.

While one could raise the question, if social thoughts distinguished in the different location contexts where they are produced in an era where the locations of knowledge productions seem rather a declining aspect, the concepts of “global” and/ or versus “local” show some odd features in these debates, or more precisely of an approach to social sciences on which this debate of distinctive spaces of social thought is based.

Firstly, global knowledge seems to be spaceless knowledge, knowledge that is thinking about a nowhere, while the “local” knowledge is bound to a space outside of which it cannot be understood. There are, thus, two versions of a nowhere knowledge, constituting the current discourses about what was once discussed under the notion of universal knowledge: The global knowledge is nowhere and the local knowledges are only here, and, thus, as a whole also nowhere. Just as if this paradox intends to apply Chakrabarty's critique of the Soviet Union's interpretation of Marxism, the Historical Materialism, to the whole current science world, we are facing a world of theories, which, despite of their battles between spaces of knowledge productions, epistemologically share the very same approach to social science thinking, the idea of contextualizing knowledge along spaces. It is this approach to social science thinking in which the substance of thinking appears as the “context” to which hypothetic thoughts, constructed through theoretical models is ex post applied, just as if the social reality was not the contents of social thought but an annex of its modelled theories. Only an approach to social science thinking, in which thinking about social phenomena means to apply hypothetical models of thoughts to the social reality and to then prove or disprove these modelled thoughts with theoretical constructs created through these very models, called an empirical reality, not only appears as a most tautological and most affirmative relation of the thinker to what they are supposed to unveil, it is only in this approach to social science thinking in which the nature of the phenomena is not the substance of social science thinking but the context for the modelled thoughts. The most constitutive elements of social phenomena, time and space, in this approach to social science thinking become an odd distinctive attribute, an annex of thoughts, as if any knowledge about the same thing could be knowledge here and no knowledge there. This, and only this approach to science feels then need to make the distinction of knowledge along the context, the circumstances under which it is created, the wheres of knowledge, and it does this, the more in the production of social knowledge, oddly enough, the more the where vanishes in a globalised social reality.

This book documents the many paradoxes and ambiguities of a debate distinguishing the world of social theories along such spatial dimensions of knowledge.

The four book sections document a reflexive round trip of spatilised social thinking:

Starting in section 1 with reflections on the challenges of“Global Social Thought”and their struggles within a preferably – politically – contextualized approach to social thought , section 2 discusses the frictions and ambiguities of“Spatialized Thought and Local Knowledge Production”created for globalising social sciences; section 3 about“Culture in Global Knowledge Encounters”specifies the tensions of locally contextualized knowledge for global thought along culture as a major feature of contextualized knowledge and brings us back to where section 1 started, the question, how to transform contextualized, local knowledge, towards global knowledge, that is“Globalizing Social Thought”.

On behalf of the World SSH Net and all other conference participants we want to express our gratitude to the American University of Beirut and the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Beirut for more than supporting us to carry out the encounter of academics from all over the world and to publish their thoughts and thus to carry on with their discourses. Especially without the engaged support we got from the Layla al Zubaidi, the former director of the Böll Foundation in Beirut, neither the conference in Beirut could have been held nor this book could have been published. We also want to thank Helen Jardine and Jack Rummel for editing the chapters, with some exceptions all written in English, all by nonnative English speakers, into proper American English, and, last but not least,Abdel-Rahman Ayas, who made enormous efforts to carry out what the above chapters theoretically discuss, that is, to translate some chapters from Arab into the Anglo Saxon categories of “Western” thoughts.

Michael Kuhn and Kazumi Okamoto (World SSH Net)

[1]The overall ouctomes of the series of thinkshops will be published in a book with the working title „Social Sciences in the Era of Globalization“.

Section I:Global Social Thought

Chapter 1Concepts that Hinder the Progressof Sociological Research:Identity as an Epistemological Obstacle

Youssef Salameh

Before discussing identity as an epistemological obstacle, first of all we have got to differentiate between identity and the identity concept. Evidently, human thinking would not be possible if we take away the identity concept from our heads, and if we consider this concept unnecessary in the entirety of mental operations that the mind cannot carry out without the identity concept being in its logical conception a basis for all these operations.

What should be deduced from that is not the existence of a stable, rooted and final identity for things and phenomena; rather, it is that the identity concept is a conceptual mold whose content is fully connected with the will of knowledge on one hand and with the will of truth on the other. Thus, there is no room for a discussion of the identity concept as a mental conception without which the mind cannot think; this makes doubting identity as a concept impossible because such doubting equals stopping the mind from carrying out its mental operations. My doubting here and my discussion deal with historical conceptions or diverse definitions of identities of things, phenomena and even humans themselves, as identities acquired through the conflict among people in the human history. Behind this conflict there is a conflict over knowledge and a conflict over truth, which makes historical conceptions of identity, as mentioned above, something related to the will of knowledge and the will of truth from the perspective of the conflict among humans over defining right and wrong, or true and fake, in the framework of the conflict among human wills over defining knowledge and truth.

Thus, what is meant here by identity as an epistemological obstacle is not related to a critique of the principle of identity; it is primarily related to a critique of the products that are defined as identity or identities, while in fact they are products of the will of knowledge and the will or truth. Despite this, there are those who promote such identity, identities or products by considering them a stable and final essential or quintessential constituent of human things, phenomena and societies.

This is the field targeted by my criticism; I call it the “identity illusion.” These assignments are nothing more than illusions that lead to epistemological obstacles once one shifts from considering them historical assignments to considering them permanent, unchangeable truths that lie behind any process and change.

I refer by epistemological obstacle to something completely different than the knowledge question; by epistemological obstacle, I am not concerned with questioning whether the human mind can know or not; this is outside my interests and outside researching the epistemological obstacle concept.

In the context of this research, the epistemological obstacle means something unrelated to the issue of knowledge but related to knowledge as a mental composition, an intellectual construction and a structural assembly that posits knowledge. This substitutes the traditional consideration of knowledge as a direct reception of data in the reversal or negative sense, or as simple interaction between the knowing self and the known subject. I said “simple interaction” because I believe that knowledge is the result of the human structural and compositional ability; this makes the interaction between the self and the subject an aspect of knowledge, not knowledge itself.

In light of this conception of the epistemological obstacle, a phenomenon under study or a subject of knowledge ceases to be looked upon in a traditional consideration, which believes a studied phenomenon or a subject of knowledge is completely independent of the knowing self, or is independent of the positing or composing self's efficiency.

What we study, we compose, and what we research, we posit. Only this way, knowledge gains value that allows for its discussion.

It may be said here that the mentioned value makes knowledge a mere subjective stance or some sort of subjectivity that is very far from objectivity. In response to that I say knowledge is not objective except within the limits of justifying the energy that is active or composing and positing the human self. Objectivity in the traditional sense, which allows for objective verification by any person who wants to verify knowledge's validity, has no relation with o