Expanding the ‘Third Space’ between Western and non-Western knowledge: Nakane Chie’s Japanese Society as anti-Eurocentric theory

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Decolonial theorists have frequently employed dichotomies such as North–South, East–West, White–Black and Metropole–Periphery to characterise the exclusion of knowledge produced by marginalised populations around the world. This article argues that such dichotomies overlook a body of knowledge that lies in the liminal space between these polarities: the Third Space of ideas. It proposes that a more diverse history of sociological thought requires an acknowledgement of thinkers who developed putatively ‘Western’ ideas towards anti-Eurocentrism. Through a case study of the Japanese anthropologist Nakane Chie and her 1970 book Japanese Society, this article shows how concepts of ‘hybridity’ and ‘contamination’ are essential for reconstructing how so-called ‘non-Western’ scholars innovated Western theories in anti-Eurocentric directions. This article shows how the sociological canon could be expanded through an attention to how different schools of thought have evolved transnationally.