The Third World Revolt against First World Social Science

Abstract

The first of the two major goals of this paper is to give more form and content to the process whereby the third world indigenizes the social sciences-elements seriously lacking in the present literature. Indigenization is seen in this paper as a phenomenon, whereby third world social scientists reject paradigms from the first world and formulate their own authentic ones. The form and content referred to above, this model process, are constructed by drawing an analogy with Paula Freire's revolutionary pedagogy. In drawing this analogy, we achieve the second major goal of the paper, which is to warn first world social scientists and educators of the existence and the magnitude of the indigenization movement in the third world. There this movement is seen as part and parcel of the struggle for decolonization, from both colonial and neo-colonial structures. First world social scientists and educators are thus put on notice that their paradigms which they typically view as international reference models, valued for their intrinsic scientific worth, are typically pictured as part of the neo-colonialist postwar extention of the United States. And the struggle is to reject them and to formulate authentic, indigenous models, as Latin American did when it formulated dependency theory. The author concludes that the above development bodes ill for the naturalist's dream of an emerging consensual, mature social science parallelling natural science. This dream is likely to remain just that, a dream.