India/western Sociology

[acharya]

All about Indian sociology

http://www.cultuurwetenschap.be/DOWNLOADS/...%20Cease....doc

The Context

Unlike the earlier generations of Asian intelligentsia, we are not confronted by what they had to cope with viz., a dynamic western society. We know only too well today, what choices they had and what they made of them yesterday: either they retreated into obscurantist revivalism touting the indigenous culture as the only or the best form of life, or took to an aggressive hawking in the street bazaars of Asia those goods and products bought at bargain-basement prizes from giant warehouses elsewhere. The first went into bankruptcy in its country of origin while some entrepreneurial elements amongst them shifted their shops from the banks of the Ganges and the Kaveri to that of a Thames and a Hudson. The second has made fortunes by selling remainders at retail prices. Either way, the Asian culture stagnated: our intellectuals had lost a world they never had and grew up in one they never knew. And we, their heirs and legatees, have to struggle to make an alien world our own whilst our own becomes alien.

All of this was yesterday. Today? Today, Europe has turned in on itself. Its culture has developed agoraphobia. Its leaders are parochial and provincial, its intellectuals amnesic, its body-politic anaemic and its citizenry cynical. It is a world grown old beyond its age, its vision myopic and bi-dimensional, and its perspective short and shallow. This enables us to study some of its values and presuppositions without being overawed by its dynamism; the static nature of European society today throws these values up in sharp relief.




AN INTRODUCTION TO AN INVITATION


The Impulse

Despite the grandiose nature of the task, the impulse for this position paper is both normal and rea-sonable: it is one of assessing theories from the domain of social sciences. The intuition guiding this undertaking is the realization that whatever their explanatory power or problem-solving capacity, the existing social sciences are not adequate to the task of making our world intelligible to us. There is a feeling of dissatisfaction with the conceptual apparatus that obtains today, a disquiet that interesting and important issues are not even being formulated as questions for an inquiry. One of the tentative explanations often put across to account for this unsatisfactory state of affairs is that the social sciences of today are ‘Western’. That is, the social sciences embody assumptions (whether all of its assumptions or only some of them are ‘Western’ requires to be made out), which blind them to recognizing issues that are very important to an understanding of our world.

The Condition

However correct it might prove to be later, this intuition is not sufficient for the task of assessing theories from the field of social sciences. To reject the existing conceptual frameworks, simply be-cause we feel that they do not quite manage to do what theories are supposed to, would be a folly. There is no way of assessing theories, unless it be by comparing them with rival theories. We could sensibly begin with theory appraisal (assuming, of course, that the theories under consideration are not inconsistent) if, and only if, we have two or more theories which are competitors to each other with respect to the phenomenon they explain. I will not go deeper into this point, except to state it as a condition.

In one sense, it could be said that there are rival theories in the field of social sciences: structural as against cognitive anthropology; Austrian school of economics against Keynesian economics; Marxian economics against Micro and Macro economics; Parsonian as against Weberian sociology…etc. Therefore, it might appear that our problems are solved, even before we have formulated them. It becomes merely a question of ascertaining which of these competitor theories are best suited for the job we have in mind.

A Question…

But this is not what we have in mind when we speak of ‘decolonizing’ social sciences. So, what do we have in mind? Let us look at the issue this way. Without the least bit of exaggeration it could be held that the study of societies and cultures is a project initiated by the Western world. Over the centuries, Western intellectuals have studied both themselves and other cultures and, in the process of doing so, they have developed a set of theories and methodologies to understand the human world. What we call ‘social sciences’ are the result of the gigantic labour performed by brilliant and not-so-brilliant men and women from all over the world over a long period of time.

Let us formulate a hypothetical question in order to express our intuition: would the results have been the same or even approximately similar if, say, the Asians had undertaken such a task instead of the Europeans? Suppose that, in the imaginary world we are talking about, it was the effort of the Asian intellectuals reflecting about the European culture and that of their own, as they saw both, which eventuated in social sciences. Would it have looked like contemporary social sciences?

…and an Answer

I put to you that the most natural answer to the question is this: “We do not know”. It is worthwhile reflecting on this answer.

When we confess to being unable to answer the question, it does not arise from an impossibility to answer questions about hypothetical situations: all our scientific laws describe hypothetical situations and we can say what would happen in such situations. (E.g., ‘what would happen if I drop a stone from the top of a building? It would fall downwards…etc.’) Our claim to ignorance has to do with the specific kind of hypothetical situation which the question picks out, and with the feeling that there is no way to check the veracity of the answers one may give. That is, because we have no model of such an attempt, we have no way of deciding how to go about answering such a question. Worse still, because we have no models where the answers can come out either true or false, we feel that all answers to this question are meaningless and, therefore, that the question itself is meaningless. The question has not violated any syntactic or semantic rule; it has not committed any category mistake and yet we do not know how to make sense of this question.

There is a peculiar air about this state of affairs. We are not able to make sense of a question which asks us, literally, how we appear to ourselves and how the West appears to us. And yet, we have been studying both ourselves and the West for quite sometime now!

We know the West as the West looks at itself. We study the East the way West studies the East. We look at the world the way West looks at it. We do not even know whether the world would look different, if we looked at it our way. Today, we are not in a position even to make sense of the above statement. When Asian anthropologists or sociologists or culturologists do their anthropology, sociology or culturology – the West is really talking to itself.

The task

As a result, if you will allow me a mild hyperbole, I would assert that neither the problem of ‘incom-mensurability of cultures’ nor that of ‘indeterminacy of translation’ arises. They might become prob-lems when the background assumptions and theories which underlie a study are different. The back-ground assumptions and theories which guide a Western anthropologist studying Asian culture are the same as those of an Asian anthropologist studying his own. Should one of them face problems, so should the other. Both study the same phenomenon (the ‘inscrutability of reference’ notwithstanding), with the same tools embodying the same assumptions. The nature of some problem and its relative importance are not different for the two, and these are so organized by their background assumptions.

Western culture, with background assumptions peculiar to it, ‘problematized’ some phenomenon which has taken the status of a fact to us: we prattle on endlessly about the problem of ‘the Indian caste system’, the amorphous nature of ‘Hinduism’, the problem of ‘underdevelopment’, the ‘question of human rights in Asia’ …etc. Idem for our perspectives on the West.

Surely, but surely, there is a problem here? If our culture differs from that of the West and if, per-force, our background theories and assumptions are other than those of the West, we could not pos-sibly either formulate questions or assign weights to them, both about us and the West, in exactly the same way the West does. Yet, we do – invariably and as a matter of fact. How can we make sense out of questions routinely copied from western social research, and then go on to answer them by means of empirical studies? But we do – we act as though these questions do make sense to us.

Be it as that may, this situation prevents us from either defending or attacking the Western social sciences: we cannot say that they are ‘true’ because we do not know any other. We cannot say they are ‘false’ because there are not any theories to compare them with. And that is why you will not find criticisms of Western social sciences in this paper.

Consequently, our task at this stage cannot be one of assessing Western social sciences. Therefore, we cannot ‘decolonize’ them either. But, what we can do is to try and say how the world appears to us. What are the things we take to exist in this world? What are the experiences important to us? If we try to do this by constantly contrasting our answers to the ones formulated by Western social sciences, then perhaps a stage will come when we could begin to talk about assessing Western social sciences. In this process, we shall have begun to construct an alternative (where possible) to Western social sciences.

What does it mean though to say or suggest that we try and describe the world as it looks to us? How can this be both rewarding and serious? It is the aim of this paper to answer these questions. For the moment, all we ought to remember from the foregoing is the following: even though we have been looking at the world, the social world that is, for centuries, we do not know how it appears to us!

The Structure

This paper has six sections. In the first, I introduce the notion of world models which I will use dur-ing the course of the next five. The second section explicates the model of “self’ as it obtains in the Western and Asian cultures. The third section looks at one dimension of the relation between human selves and ethical phenomenon. The fourth discusses one aspect of the moral domain viz. the moral nature of human rights. It asks the question whether the differing notions of the ethical, as they ob-tain between these two cultures, throw doubt on the idea of universal rights. The fifth section carries us into the debates about Nations and ethnicity as they are isomorphic with the differing models of self. The sixth looks into the way human selves learn in these two cultures and at the relation between the nature of selves and learning. It also formulates some hypotheses as a consequence. The paper concludes by reflecting about what has been achieved and proposes some guidelines for assessing it.

The entire paper is organized around one theme viz. the model of “self”. The first section, conse-quently, does not exhaust the theme. It is taken up and elaborated in different ways in the different sections: hopefully, what is said in one will get clarified by what will be said subsequently. Because not only do later sections clarify the earlier ones but also presuppose them, the paper hangs together as a whole: each section illumines the other, each leans upon the other. Therefore, I would suggest that you read through to the end, even when you feel that some thoughts expressed in any one section are not perspicuous enough. If I have succeeded in what I want to, by the end of this paper you should get a glimpse of the pattern I am trying to point out.

In this sense, I would like to believe that this paper is not only governed by a thematic continuity but also by the methodology used. Cultural practices, I believe, should not get “explained” in the first instance as something that arose out of a rational or irrational belief or decision.( M. Harris’ ‘explanation’ of the “origin of sacred cow” in India and Frazer’s ‘explanation’ of the “magical practices” of peoples represent such attempts.) Because a culture is “a way of life of a people”, to render a culture perspicuous is to show how one practice leans upon the other, how the other illumines the first and how they, in their interconnections, hang together and constitute a “form of life”. Such a ‘methodology’ is the most appropriate one for this domain because it is best able to point out the “patterns” in cultural practices.

The test of this paper, in a sense other than those I propose in the concluding section, would be this then: does this paper succeed in suggesting or hinting at an interconnection? Does it signal in the direction of a pattern which it does not seek either to capture or explain? I will raise this as a question here, leaving it to you to give the answer as you read through the sections.


SECTION I
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ON THE WORLD OF THE WORLD MODELS



On the Existence of World Models

When human beings go about in the world, they are helped in this venture by their representations of the world, the explicit and implicit beliefs they have built up, etc. I am using ‘representations’ as a collective name for everything that is scored in our memories without, however, implying anything about the format of such a storage. As such, it includes such things as images, facts, skills, language, events and episodes, concepts…To say that we are helped by our memories when we go about in the world is as non-controversial as the next claim: our memories are structured. In other words, we are helped in our goings about in the world by ordered and structured representations we have built up.

For the most part, philosophers and anthropologists and, of late, psychologists have reflected about these representations: metaphysical beliefs, ideologies, world views, world models etc., are some of the better known names for these – depending upon the subset of representations that any thinker chose to concentrate upon. What I will be talking about in the rest of this paper will be one such subset comprising of such representations as: the naive or intuitive physics and biology we work with; our intuitive notions and experiences of time, cause and space; our intuitions about the world, whether social or natural; and the social skills for building human relations etc. I will not be talking about all of these, but what I do talk about belongs to this subset.

Henceforth, I will use the word ‘intuitive or metaphysical world models’ to refer to this subset of representations. The choice for such a label is related to the difficulty of giving the intension for the subset: the ‘intuitive’ stands in contrast with the explicit theories we have about the world; the ‘metaphysical’ picks out the salient, experience-structuring property of these world models. Which representation belongs to this subset and which is excluded? I am unable to provide a criterion, except to say that the skill of riding a bicycle, the fact that Columbus discovered America and the theory of natural selection do not belong to the subset I have in mind, whereas the notions and experiences we have of ourselves do so. I know this is vague; but elimination of vagueness from this is a long term or life-term project, a moment in whose execution is the paper you have in your hand.

Having said so much, let me now state the belief that guides this paper: the intuitive or metaphysical world models are well-structured and ordered entities. Such models are the root, or primary models for all other models we have about the world be they physical or mathematical theories. To elaborate upon this is to say a word or two about the role of intuitive or metaphysical world models.

On the Role of the World Models

To begin with, these intuitive or metaphysical world models play a cognitive role. They guide our theorizing about the world: from a meta-perspective, they help in the structuring of object-level problems; they pick problems out as interesting or uninteresting to solve i.e. they distribute epistemic weights, and order problems by according cognitive importance to them; they put constraints on acceptable theories and explanations, and, finally, generate expectations and localize anomalies. It has been the dream of every philosopher of science to come up with a theory capable of doing all these things that world models can. They underlie all human efforts at theorizing about the world be it the natural or social world. Simply put, they guide theorizing.

These models do not just play a cognitive role. They are indispensable for our practical interactions with the world as well. They structure experience and do so in a fundamental way: the experiences of success and failure in our ventures and, indeed, the very construal of some experience as being a success or a failure; our perception of others around us and our responses to them etc.

If these world models are both cognitively and practically so fundamental, how do we acquire them and how do they undergo change? After all, these models function as the source for generating ex-pectations and, at some level, as the arbiter for accepting proposed explanations. Given furthermore that they structure our experience of the world, it might appear that they are not susceptible to change at all.

On the Nature of the World Models

The question raised above is crucial and important. Despite its centrality, I will not try to answer it in this paper; come to that, I do not have an answer to give. But, a reflection or two about the acquisition and change of these intuitive or metaphysical world models is nevertheless in order.

One thing is that we do acquire these world models (at least, those that I am talking about) and they are not innate. The folk psychology we use to understand peoples’ actions and behaviours, i.e. the model on the basis of which we ascribe hopes, intentions, beliefs, desires, etc., to people and thus make sense of their actions cannot be said to be innate in any sense of the term. We come to acquire them and acquisition of world models is a learning process. Furthermore, as the history of thought unambiguously demonstrates, they have changed over time – clearly and visibly. Question about acquisition or change of these world models is one for empirical enquiry and is of fundamental importance.

Even without performing such an empirical enquiry, it is safe to assert that the intuitive or meta-physical world model is something which an individual builds up. But that is not to say that the model is just an explicit set of beliefs or that its construction is deliberate. Its coming into being is certainly not purposive in the sense that a human being decides to have one and then executes such a decision.

It is like “Culture” in that the latter is not the result of purposive action of any one actor or even several of them. In fact, as I have already said before, the goal of our explicit theorizing is to model what we have built up without aiming to do so i.e. to design consciously and explicitly, what is built up sub-intentionally.

To be sure, the content of our explicit theories (in the Natural sciences) cannot be compared to the content of our intuitive world models. Where such comparison is possible (say, in psychological theorizing), our intuitive models win hands down! In any case, this is a side issue for the moment.

That orders, structures etc., exist without conscious design is neither new nor surprising. The order that biological life exhibits on our planet, if we accept the claim of evolutionary theory, or the order that different societies exhibit are well known to all of us.

What about its applicability to learning? That we learn, acquire and build world models without in-tending to do so may tell us something about learning process or, at least, about some interesting fragment of it: learning is sub-intentional. Is there such a learning process? Is it possible to point such an activity out? My answer is a qualified yes, but I am anticipating.

World Models and “Decolonizing the Social Sciences”

Now, we have a foot-hold to begin making sense of the project viz. to decolonize the social sciences. One possible way of doing it is this:

(a) The core meaning of the concept of culture (in its natural-linguistic usage) is best expli-cated by an appeal to the world models: the content of and the interdependence between the elements of these world models would furnish us with the required explication. What makes some action, some belief, some experience, a part of a cultural repertoire is not only the content of such an action, belief or experience, but also the interdependence between these and other actions and experiences, which make them cohere and give us a whole (‘Zusammenhang’ as the Germans can say it so beautifully).

(b) Acquisition and change of these world models have the properties that cultural acquisition and change exhibit: they are learned, include both behaviour and beliefs, and change slowly. Though some elements of an intuitive world model can change during the life-time of one individual or one generation, it does not mean that any one individual is able to change or transform one’s world model entirely on one’s own. Even though it is the world representation of an individual and is built up individually, its implicit nature and the experience-structuring role, nevertheless, attest to the practical impossibility of changing such a model in a solipsist fashion.

Because these world models are built up sub-intentionally, and because of the kind of learning process involved in such an endeavour, to anticipate a bit, these world models cannot be built up except in society. In other words, one is able to explain (partially) why it is that acquiring culture requires interaction with significant others.

These world models exhibit the curious properties shared by all cultural systems viz. conservatism and dynamism. Cultural systems are conservative: they endure over time and through generations. They are also dynamic: each individual builds the requisite world representation in his/her ‘own’ way.

© This raises formidable problems: if each individual builds up his/her ‘own’ world repre-sentation, how is it at all possible to classify any one group of people as belonging to one culture? How can one speak of such entities as the ‘Western Culture’? What explains the cultural continuities as well as discontinuities between and within generations? All of these are unsolved problems and I have no solutions to them. Nevertheless, I will indulge in some flag-waving and table-thumping to show, if nothing else, just how important they are to any project which intends to ‘decolonize’ the social sciences.
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It is possible to construct an abstract model which, in some unspecified sense, stands mid-way between an individual’s intuitive world model and the objectivations that circulate in the group to which the individual belongs at the level of daily life. (Like stories, rituals, customs, festivals, etc.) Such an intermediate world model is what, anthropologists attempt to construct when they do their field work or so I hypothesize. The intuitive world models of the individuals belonging to a group would be similar to such an abstract, intermediate world model. ‘Culture’ (like, say, the Asian or the Western Culture) names such an intermediate world model. The conventional element involved in circumscribing the culture of a people is captured by the fact that one has to construct such an intermediate model. But the arbitrariness involved in such a conventional construction is reduced by being subject to two constraints: firstly, such an intermediate model must model the objectivations and, secondly, it must be possible to draw a similarity relationship between the relevant aspects of the intermediate model and intuitive models.

(d) There is, with respect to my task, an additional constraint. Such an intermediate model should lend intelligibility to what otherwise appear as unintelligible object-level claims in individual social theories. A very brief explication is required here.

Social theories have been evolving over a period of at least three-four hundred years. In-dividual practitioners of these domains who created such theories have used indifferently many intuitive world models. Therefore, in order to speak of Western social sciences one will have to build an intermediate world model that underlies various social sciences and show how it can illumine the “self-evident” but otherwise obscure claims of various theories. At this stage, it is important to emphasize that which makes object-level claims intelligible need not be, and in most cases is not, justification provided for accepting them. The task of an intermediate model is rather to shed light on why a group of thinkers from a culture consider this intuition worthy of justification at all; why this vague notion appears intuitively correct to them, and not that one. The contrast I have in mind can best be captured by means of the different questions that these types of enquiries, viz, the intelligibility, the explanatory and the justificatory types of enquiries ask. For example, when one asks, why some group of thinkers defend or criticize the claim that human beings have a right to free speech, one is asking questions about the nature of justifications prevalent in the group with respect to this issue. This is what I call a justificatory type of enquiry. One would get an explanatory type of enquiry, if one explained this phenomenon, say, by appealing to the emergence of bourgeois social order or whatever. But, instead of asking either of the two questions, if one asks why the group considers this project as a sensible one at all and how on earth could they feel that it requires justification or criticism at all, one is hypothesizing about intelligibility.

Let me put it this way. There are some ideas current in the social sciences which I do not understand. Even though you and I can proficiently use them, we face some or all of the following problems with respect to them: we cannot explicate their meaning; we cannot identify the phenomena they refer to or even whether they refer at all; we cannot recognize the descriptions they provide; we feel that they are plain nonsensical; we are vaguely disturbed …etc. So, we try to find out why the Western social scientists do not face similar problems. If we are successful in our project, we will come up with an intelligibility hypothesis. Such a hypothesis does not take away any of our problems with respect to these ideas; it is merely a way for us to understand why the Western thinkers are not as baffled about them as we are.

(e) Given what I have said about the world models, two further remarks are in order. Firstly, what makes some project intelligible-to-us need not do the same for those who have been pursuing it. They might find our intelligibility hypothesis perverse, false or even unintelligible. It is probable that they find our partial descriptions of their culture as shallow and superficial as we find their partial descriptions of our cultures to be! Such a response from them stands to reason, because the manner of structuring a problem and going about answering it, the way of distributing cognitive weight etc., are all, as I said before, due to one’s world model. Indulging in such an enquiry has the consequence, and this is the second point, of enabling one to draw inferences about the nature of one’s own world model.

(f) All I am saying is this then: this paper is how I can make sense of some of the projects of the Western social sciences. I want to believe that you are confronted with similar problems and what makes something intelligible to me would do the same for you as well.

But for this belief to assume cognitive significance, some further effort is required: if it can be shown that alternative, abstract world models can inspire different object-level theories; these are able to address themselves to the issues currently tackled by the existing social sciences and can do so differently; it could be legitimately said that the task of “decolonizing the social sciences” is truly and properly begun.


I leave it to you to judge on the basis of the foregoing and the following pages, whether or not this paper belongs to such a process.