Putting colonialism into the picture: Towards a reconstruction of modern social theory (original) (raw)
Colonial Sociology and the Historical Sociology of the Social Sciences
Social Science History
George Steinmetz's book on the colonial origins of modern social thought is an eye-opener and a game-changer. The book represents a learned, deeply researched, and admirably constructed study: broad in scope, spanning a considerable period of time and tackling a pressing problemcolonial social sciencein a sophisticated and challenging manner. Since the book has a meaning that is well beyond its specific object of study, it is worthwhile situating it in the broader context. I would say Colonial Origins has a fourfold significance. First, it changes our understanding of sociology and can inspire a shift in sociologists' self-understanding. Demonstrating that, in France, "colonial sociology" was a subfield of considerable intellectual and institutional importance represents a discovery, perhaps a rediscovery, which should have consequences, not just for specialists in the history of sociology, but for the discipline as a whole: for the authors who will be selected for anthologies and textbooks, and, more generally, for what should be included in the thematic and theoretical repertoire of the discipline. In addition to this forward-looking dimension, there is the retrospective questioning, examining the amnesia, the active and passive modes of ignorance of this colonial past. These are social processes as well, in need of sociological scrutiny, and they are an integral part of the analysis that Steinmetz presents. Second, and beyond the case of France, the book is a research program and a model for studying colonial sociology in other contexts, colonial and non-colonial, and an invitation to do so comparatively. Although Steinmetz announces further work himself, such an effort will hopefully be joined by others, so that the inquiries can become a collective and transnational research effort. There is every reason to examine comparable (sub-)fields in other countries, their structural dynamics as well as the intellectual production they have given rise to. To mention just one intriguing comparative question among others, have there been equivalents of figures like the Tunisian scholar Albert Memmi and the Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad, important social thinkers who were born and grew up as colonial subjects? Third, the book contributes to the trans-disciplinary intellectual debate about colonialism, post-colonialism, and decolonization. The conclusion of the book
"Deprovincializing" sociology: the post colonial contribution
Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais., 2007
This essay discusses the contributions of post-colonial studies for renewing the contemporary social theory. At first it considers the character of the critique addressed by post-colonial studies to social sciences. After that, it analyses the post-colonial epistemological alternatives, considering three interrelated concepts: entangled modernity, "hybrid" site of enunciation, and decentralized subject. The conclusion is that, in spite of its severity and suspicion among some authors that post-colonial theory can destroy epistemological foundations of social sciences, an important part of post-colonial critique is rather addressed to the theory of modernization. Here, post-colonial positions present affinities with objections, which have already been presented by "conventional" social scientists. Other aspects raised by post-colonial authors do not destabilize, necessarily, social sciences; they can even enrich them.
The New Sociology of Empire and Colonialism
Sociology Compass, 2009
This study reviews recent sociological scholarship on empire and colonialism. The new 'imperialcolonial studies' in sociology is not a fully fledged subfield but an emerging space of inquiry that examines social forms, processes, and relations associated with imperialism and colonialism. This study sketches the main features of the new scholarship. It also situates the new sociological studies within a larger history of sociological inquiry and interdisciplinary context. Finally, it suggests that the future of sociology's new imperial-colonial studies lies not in 'sociologizing' the study of empire and colonialism but in deploying analyses of empire and colonialism to help critically reorient some of traditional sociology's limiting lenses and assumptions.
"Coloniality, modernity, decoloniality A new introduction to the second edition of *Unbecoming Modern*, 2019
In this new introduction, we propose to undertake three tasks. Each of these moves imaginatively extends and critically supplements the discussion in the earlier introduction to the volume. These considerations crucially concerned the pressing requirements of: (1) historically grounding colonialisms; (2) adequately specifying the terms of modernity; and (3) prudently addressing the imperatives of power and difference in critical endeavor. Unsurprisingly, on offer ahead are deeper historical specifications of colonial cultures, succinct understandings of the contradictions of modernity as well as the contentions of its subjects, and prudent readings of de-colonial claims. These themes are reflected in the title of this introductory essay. After this prologue, they are presented as an act in three scenes, followed by an epilogue.
Rethinking Postcolonial Sociology
Journal of Classical Sociology., 2024
Gregor McLennan sees my book, The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire, as inaugurating a new phase of “multiplex” postcolonial sociology. This approach moves away from sweeping generalizations about Eurocentrism, Manicheaism, complicity, and pervasive coloniality in “Western” sociology. It pays closer attention to sociology’s internal heterogeneity and is less distrustful of scientific norms such as validity, objectivity, evidence, autonomy, scientific neutrality, and explanation. More specifically, my approach relies (1) on the idea of “context” from the classic sociology of knowledge and intellectual history; (2) on the concept of “field” from Bourdieu; (3) on methods of “close reading” and textual interpretation from literary criticism; and (4) on the “historians’ craft” (Bloch) of using the most extensive available archive of published and unpublished sources. I argue that we can evaluate historical thinkers in their contexts, assessing the constraints and spaces of possibility they faced, and then examine their intellectual choices, the moves they make in the social scientific game. This approach aligns more closely with the ideas of the founders of postcolonial theory, who were more interested in classical texts that “brush up unstintingly against historical constraints” than in texts that remain “inertly of their time (Edward Said). McLennan agrees that postcolonial sociology is indebted to European Enlightenment traditions; I focus on its roots in the sociology of knowledge and sociological historicism. The article then responds to McLennan’s main “probes.” The first concerns the methodological problem of “labelling investigations as ʽsociologyʼ and specific people as ʽsociologistsʼ,” and the limits of field theory. The second concerns my “outline of a theory of colonial sociological practice,” which tries to understand the dilemmas facing sociologists in colonial situations and the historians who study them. The third probe addresses the question of the scientific exploitation of empire. The sociologists I emphasize did not approach the colonized as a pool of resources to be extracted and exploited but worked across the colonial boundary line in generating knowledge. Although the book focuses on the mid-20th century decades, I return in my comments to Durkheim, upon whose shoulders much of the later work was erected. The key is that Durkheim theorized colonialism and empires and politically an anticolonialist. He described colonies as anomic spaces and rejected the biological race concepts and hierarchical notions of civilization. He rejected universalistic values, while advocating an international system of states governed by historically specific morality and law rather than violence. Finally, Durkheim reversed the “imperial gaze,” directing it back at Europe.
The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire, Ch. 1, 2023
Shadows of empire are draped across the lands of erstwhile conquistadors and their erstwhile victims. More precisely, there is an imperial penumbra that allows only part of the light source to be seen. This hidden source of energy is the imperial past. The Roman Empire, one of the deepest sources of imperial energy, is both omnipresent and absent. Words like colonia, imperium, emperor, dictator, proconsul, and praetorianism are still used to describe the imperial textures of our po liti cal realities. From Augustus to Hitler, through to the pre sent, western rulers have been haunted by scenarios of decline and ruination, and by the appearance of former "barbarians" at the heart of the metropole.2 The world in which we live is also engraved with the markers of modern colonial empires. From 1492 through the mid-twentieth century, populations in Africa, Amer i ca, Oceania, and Asia were annexed by a global system dominated by empire-states. Most of the existing states in Africa, Oceania, Ameri ca, and the Middle East were created as colonies, or emerged from the breakup of former colonies and the collapse of the Soviet Union.3 The bound aries between and within states, the internal lines of ethnic rivalry, the unequal
Modernity and colonialism: on the historical-sociological blindness of the theories of modernity
2017
This paper criticizes the historical-sociological blindness found in contemporary theories of modernity (as in those of Weber and Habermas) in order both to construct a sociological model for the process of Western modernization and to formulate a normative notion of cultural modernity which can favor the development of a critical social theory which is correlatively sociological and philosophical. The historical-sociological blindness regarding the theoretical-political reconstruction of the process of Western modernization is basically characterized by the separation between European cultural modernity and European social-economic modernization, which leads to the notion that European culture is not directly linked to social and economic modernization. Likewise, Western modernization is fundamentally an autonomous and endogenous constitutive process, bearing no correlation with other cultures-societies, as seen in the lack of references to the fact of colonialism. Such a separatio...
Colonialism and Its Knowledges
The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences, 2021
This chapter offers a comparative historical analysis of three trends – the indigenous, the postcolonial, and decolonial – which have confronted the nineteenth century Western disciplinary field of sociology as a hegemonic field organized through the colonial grid. It maps the ontological-epistemic stances that these positions articulate to legitimize non-Western pathways to political modernity. It argues that distinct political contexts have organized the scholarship and research queries of these subaltern/non-hegemonic perspectives and analyzes these in terms of the two forms of colonialism: settler vs. non-settler colonialism. While highlighting some internal critiques that have informed these positions, it argues that these circuits of knowledge-making have created cognitive geographies which need to be taken into account to ensure non-hegemonic global social theory.
Coloniality: the darker side of Western modernity
An article written for the Catalog of the exhibit, Modernologies, MACBA (Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Barcelona). It became the title of one of my books. And it is also an earlier expression of my interests in museums, arts and decolonial aesthesis.
Sociology and Colonialism in the British and French Empires, 1945-1965
Journal of Modern History, 2017
This article develops a revisionist history of postwar European sociology through the mid-1960s, arguing that colonial research represented a crucial part of the renascent academic discipline after 1945, especially in Britain, France, and Belgium. Colonies became a privileged object and terrain of investigation and a key employment site for sociologists, engaging 33-55% of the British and French sociology professions between 1945 and 1960. Colonial developmentalism contributed to the rising demand for new forms of social scientific expertise, including sociology. The article begins by showing that sociologists became favored scientific partners of colonial governments, and that this fueled new forms of applied sociology focused on urbanization, detribalization, labor migration, industrialization, poverty, and resettlement of subject populations. The article then establishes the existence of networks of colonial sociologists, charts their size and composition, and reconstructs their relations to neighboring academic disciplines, especially anthropology, and to the metrocentric majorities in their own national disciplinary fields. While some colonial sociologists served colonial powerholders, others pursued more autonomous intellectual agendas, even when they were located in heteronomous conditions and marginal institutions. Colonial sociologists made theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that shaped the subsequent discipline, though usually in unacknowledged ways, foreshadowing transnational and global history, historical anthropology, and postcolonial studies.
The End of Colonialism? The Colonial Modern in the Making of Global Modernity
Over the last decade, discourses of globalization and postcoloniality have diminished the value of the concept of colonialism not only for the present but for our understanding of the past. The history of the last five hundred years has been reworked as a march toward globality, and the power relations that shaped global history have disappeared into localized contin-I am grateful to a number of friends and colleagues for taking the time to read and comment on this article. Their advice and encouragement were much appreciated, even when
In the Guise of Civilisation: Deconstructing the Colonial Discourse
This paper tracks the antecedents of the colonial theory in the minds of the post colonial masses. Europeans, in the process of giving way to a higher level of consumption, resulted in developing imperialism (particularly the peak of intensified European scramble for colonies in the 19th century). Under the veil of civilization mission of the Europeans, the impersonal invisible hand of a capitalist expansion tempered the colonization overseas. Before J.M. Keynes drove home the importance of consumption and demand for economic growth and institutionalized the ‘Paradox of Thrift’, the dominant idea of economics since the times of Smith have emphasized the ideal of savings in an economy. The book, ‘The Worldly Philosophers’ by Robert L. Heilbroner speaks about John Hobson as one of the intuitive underground economists who attributed imperialism as a product of an economy distorted by its over emphasis on savings. The extreme inequality of wealth in England then (and by the virtue of the Marginal Propensity to Consume being lower for the wealthy) spurred the ruthless accumulation in Capitalism seeking for markets in other countries. And over a period of time, this very inevitable hypothesis for imperialism was countered with the theories of Orientals and Occidents, civilizing missions, Kipling’s satire ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and so on. In the later period, a lot of colonial expansion was not profitable (except in West Africa and India) yet ideological interests of a superior race kept them there until a point of saturation. The claims of ‘development of the underdeveloped’ and the post colonial deconstructions remain ambiguous. In presenting this political and economic relation, India has much to speak, mostly in the context of its post-colonial discourse. Keywords: 1. Colonialism 2. Marginal Propensity to consume 3. Paradox of thrift
Coloniality: Key Dimensions and Critical Implications
Emerging from sociological and philosophical inquiry into the history of the colonial encounter in Latin America, the notion of coloniality (and the larger field of decolonial theory with which it is now associated) has become a crucial theoretical resource for scholars across a range of disciplines. Investigations of the structure and processes of coloniality challenge received ideas about power, knowledge, and identity in modernity, and these investigations have significant implications for educational philosophy. Nevertheless, decolonial scholarship remains less known among educational theorists than postcolonial theory, with which it shares many concerns but from which it also sharply differs in crucial respects. In our presentation of the notion of coloniality, we first describe the history and key dimensions of this idea. The second part of the article develops several of the most crucial implications of the notion of coloniality for scholars and educators, with particular attention to how this tradition offers a rethinking of familiar categories in critical theory and pedagogy.
Sociology and Settler-Colonialism
2021
IV ISA Forum of Sociology Paper 676.3: Sociology and Settler-Colonialism Research Committees Session: Multiple Modernities and Colonialism(s) Tuesday, 23 February 2021: 16:00 - 17:30 Brasília Time (BRT)
Historical Sociology, Modernity, and Postcolonial Critique
The American Historical Review, 2011
Standard historical-sociological accounts of modernity are predicated on notions of rupture and difference: a temporal rupture between an agrarian, pre-modern past and an industrial, modern present, and a cultural difference between the ‘West’ and the ‘Rest’. While sociology’s long-standing linear accounts of modernization, based on notions of societal convergence, have been tempered by a recent emphasis on ‘multiple modernities’, the wider postcolonial critique has not been sufficiently answered. One of the most significant charges of this critique has been that the universality ascribed to sociological concepts such as modernity has been based on a parochial reading of the histories of Europe and the US as internally homogenous and qualitatively distinct from histories elsewhere. In other words, the world historical character of such concepts rests on a partial understanding of what happened in the West with little consideration of events in other places – more specifically, of the necessarily global conditions of these events. In this article, I assess the contributions of four developments in sociology and history which seek to take into account the world beyond the West in our understandings of modernity: namely, third wave cultural historical sociology, multiple modernities, micro-histories and global history. These different endeavours provide promising avenues of redress to earlier Eurocentred narratives, but to be effective they must not only provide us with ‘new data’ but also participate in the dialogue of how these new considerations may prompt us to think differently about the concepts in question.
2016
This article develops a series of arguments about social fields, subfields, and social spaces that can help us understand empires and colonies. First, we have to assume that the scale of fields is not always coextensive with the boundaries of the national state but is often much larger, or smaller. Imperial fields are among the most spatially extensive ones, though they may not be as territorially extensive as truly global fields. Second, we need to make a distinction between imperial fields and imperial social spaces (based on Bourdieu’s distinction betweem social fields and social spaces). The third argument is that colonies in modern empires were characterized by two different kinds of fields: fields that were simply extended into the overseas territories, versus completely separate fields unique to one or more of the colonies. The colonial state is an example of a field that is specific to the colony. By contrast, scientific fields were often simply extended from the metropole into the colonies, encompassing both. The fourth argument concerns subfields. Transported into imperial realms, this distinction suggests that some colonial offshoots of fielded metropolitan practices do not constitute separate fields but are nonetheless differentiated from their main overarching field. These four points are illustrated with examples from British, French, and German imperial policy, colonial statecraft, and colonial sociology.