Two years ago, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) released what it called a “comprehensive” report on the state of social research, in collaboration with the International Social Science Council — the second in a decade.
The editorial team of the World Social Science Report (WSSR-10) put together contributions on the state of research in specific geographies and on the problems afflicting social sciences in general.
“Knowledge”, intoned the Foreword, “should unite, bring together”. But “Knowledge Divides”, meaning that the scholars who put together the reports recognised differences in “research capacities” across the world, differences that “hamper the capacity of the social sciences to respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow.”
Knowledge divides
Like the world, so knowledge…The UNESCO report on social science research (SSR) discovered a co-relation between material inequality and that of knowledge.
The report in that sense is a look at the fragmentation of the social sciences across geographies and the way their tools are put to use or, not put to use, for a better future.
In that sense the report's subtitle, “Knowledge Divides” is wonderfully loaded with double meaning, depending on whether you use the second word as a verb or noun.
The report uses the phrase as a noun, for its examination shows conclusively the skewed nature of social science research, its systems of investigation, its conclusions and prescriptions for the world's problems: in a word, SSR mirrors hegemonic patterns evident in the real world.
SSR is a Western monopoly with its origins in the Enlightenment. But increasingly its mode of dissemination is English, with its production based, in large measure, out of the United States of America, followed by Western Europe, then East Asia and the Pacific.
South Asia figures low down on the ranking of nine geographies, above Arab states at the bottom and below Sub-Saharan Africa.
It's all in English
To a large extent however the WSSR is campy: it raises questions that would excite scholars from the developing world about the appropriation of intellectual resources, a process of exclusion in a field of knowledge that has often erred in its prescriptions for a better world. But the report, released in 2010, raises more questions than it answers, even though it does this inadvertently.
The first and most obvious problem is with its critique of English as the medium for the articulation of SSR. Statistics note that more than 80 per cent of the “academic and refereed journals” are edited in English and most of them originate in the US England, and the Netherlands.
As an established fact, this is true; but should it worry scholars from non-Western regions of the world?
From the narrow viewpoint of SSR publication, only those who have set their sights on such journals as career-advancing agencies should worry.
If the idea however is to use SSR as a tool for investigations into problems afflicting host regions, then the more important issue to address would be the extent to which any journal is both widely circulated and effective in positing solutions to a society's problems.
Second, the point cannot be laboured enough that had it not been for English, Edward Said would not have been as hugely read as he has been, and Carlo Ginzburg and Umberto Eco's enormous contributions to history and culture studies would have been confined to the Italian peninsula.
More than any other language, English is everyone's to use or misuse and communicate.
Thomas Babington Macaulay's “Imperial Despotism”, evident in the way English, was implanted has given way to delightful global bazaar of linguistic anarchy.
As Isaac Chotiner wrote in a review of Robert McCrum's “Globish” in The New Yorker, “English (in India) has been a language of occupiers and imperialists but also one of insurgents and democrats.” And he ends his piece, “the Indian story, like the American one, is not about Globish, it is about English.”
Who needs it?
A more provocative issue the WSSR-10 raises without confronting is the epistemological basis of SSR. It has been sired by the Enlightenment that articulated the organising principles of state power, religion, individual rights, reason and the rejection of inherited privileges — in a word, Modernity.
Those inequalities and hegemonic outcomes the report notes are the results of that Modernity and its own guiding principles; they have over the centuries bulldozed, or attempted to crush the world of its diversity, be it ways of seeing and expression, or livelihoods.
The WSSR-10 notes the failings of Grand Theories in social sciences (neo-classical market economics) but stops short of wondering if any are required at all: organising theories exclude the anarchic, the unruly, those elements that do not fit into the ordered world.
Social sciences today are by and large, the results of modernity's desire to incorporate the precision of pure sciences and mathematics into the study of the unruly, the waywardness of the human condition.
The dichotomies have simply followed: Them and Us, Natives and the Cultured, the Irrational and Reason, Secularism and Religion, Clash of Civilisations, End of Reason.
A new discourse
So, if the hegemony of the Western SSR has to be broken, it is not enough for a lot more citations to emanate from India or Mali.
A new epistemology has to develop that can retain diversity, unreason, religion, perhaps even witchcraft, as elements of any society's emotional and cognitive constitution.
A more authentic social science would have to delete the second word because the term, today more than ever before, appears a contradiction: the Arab Spring, Wall Street implosion, the imploding Eurozone, racial hatreds and the destruction of the earth call for a radically different set of principles from the ones that have steered social science research and its hegemonic discourse to such disastrous effect. > blfeedback@thehindu.co.in