Reflections on the Indigenous Research of China's Educational Sociology

Abstract

In 1953, at the Second Conference of Latin American Sociologists, the Brazilian sociologist Ramos first proposed a campaign for the indigenization of the social sciences. He urged his colleagues to discard the "canned sociology" imported from the developed nations and to set up a school of sociology suitable for the resolution of indigenous Latin American problems. This raised the curtain, on a world scale, on the indigenization of research in the social sciences. Indigenization represents a trend in research; it is not a strictly defined scientific term, and it is difficult to give it a strict definition. In general, the indigenization of social sciences may be understood in this way: The world is multicultural, and the issues studied by the social sciences are all profoundly influenced by culture. Meanwhile, social science researchers always live within a specific cultural setting and take as their objects of research social issues and social phenomena in the cultural setting to which they belong. Hence we have the indigenization of social science research. Sociology of knowledge also maintains that scientific knowledge or theory (especially social science knowledge or theory) is not generated in a vacuum, but is conditioned by given social, cultural, and historical factors. Actually, this theory of sociology of knowledge shares the same view of indigenized research.