non-Western Perspectives Research Articles

Informal Economy in Ecuador

This paper will analyse the effects of the economic changes that Correa’s government introduced on Ecuadorian policies, mainly focussing on the consequence that this policy had on the informal sector and unemployment. There aims of this work is to discuss how this modification to the economical policies have contributed to the development of the country and analyse the sustainability of the mentioned policies in order to contribute to the understanding about the informal economy from a non-western perspective, in this case using as an example the case of Ecuador.

What are the factors that contribute to postgraduate international students’ academic success? A Malaysian qualitative study

ABSTRACTAlthough there has been a large body of Western literature exploring adjustment experiences of international students, limited research has been conducted to understand the connections between factors and academic success particularly concerning postgraduate international students. This paper fills this gap in the literature from a non-Western perspective, investigating key factors of academic success. It thus seeks to contribute to scholarship on international student development. It adopts a qualitative approach and is based on 55 semi-structured interviews, analysed thematically. Good supervision mechanisms, provision of student adjustment programmes, workshops and financial services by the Postgraduate Student Office, library services and individual characteristics of postgraduate international students were revealed as factors that contribute to academic success.

Beyond postmodernism: a non-western perspective on identity

ABSTRACTThis article offers a critique of the Eurocentric nature of postmodernism and argues that it is necessary for non-Western peoples and cultures to go beyond postmodernism in their quest for their own identity in the globalization era. Non-Western ideas and ideals of personhood are important and valuable alternatives to the Western individualistic self-concept when it comes to reconsidering and reconceptualizing what it means to be fully human in the world. The article, therefore, aims to theorize the nature and dimensions of identity from a non-Western perspective. This article first contends that the conception of self in Eurocentric traditions of modernism and postmodernism are not apt to accurately and adequately capture selfhood in non-Western societies, which is predicated on radically different ontological and epistemological assumptions. By using a culture-as-living-tradition approach, then, the article delineates the Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) and Confucian modes of selfhood as an example of non-Western theorization of identity. More specifically, this article identifies five common dimensions of these African and Asian ways of being human: (1) collectivity, (2) morality, (3) sensitivity, (4) transformability and (5) inclusivity.

KOMUNIKASI DIPONEGORO DAN POST-TRUTH ERA PROPAGANDA KLASIK JAWA

This study is manifestation of a non-Western perspective communication research. The dominance of western perspective in communication studies encourages the development of contextual non-Western communication with the source from historical and socio-cultural as a grounded alternative perspective. This study is aims to read the era by examining the historical traces of Prince Diponegoro and post-truth practices that occurred during the Javanese classical propaganda era around the late 18th century and early 19th century. This study uses historiography method through literature review of historical texts related to Prince Diponegoro and social history at that time. The results of this study reveal the fields of production of reality that are influenced by the colonial culture and the practice of de-islamization that separates the local wisdom of the Palace and tradition of the Javanese society. The intersection of Prince Diponegoro’s resistance to the amoral values implies the creation of a negative construction of Prince Diponegoro as a rebel figure who only wants to gain power in the land of Java . The clarity of reading historical reality is important in order to avoid a factual twist as a whole of civilization. Keywords: Pangeran Diponegoro, Post-Truth , Colonial Communication, non-Western Perspective , Identity DOI : https://doi.org/10.26905/nomosleca.v4i1.1974

Pebbles and Peregrinatio: The Taskscape of Medieval Devotion on Inishark Island, Ireland

SINCE 2008, the island of Inishark, Co Galway, Ireland, has been the subject of archaeological research by the Cultural Landscapes of the Irish Coast (CLIC) project, directed by Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame. The CLIC project’s excavations have produced new evidence for the use of water-smoothed pebbles within monastic and pilgrimage practices on the island. Using a relational perspective centred on the concept of ‘taskscape’, this article traces the formation, acquisition, manipulation, and deposition of these pebbles by human and non-human agencies and suggests how the stones may have facilitated worshippers’ embodiment of penitential devotion — peregrinatio — by evoking the divine governance of hydrological forces. Relational theory, although inspired by non-Western indigenous perspectives, is shown to be effective in shedding light on the interplay of bodies, language, objects, and environmental phenomena in early medieval and medieval Irish Christian practice.

Beyond the criminalisation of migration: a non-western perspective

A number of non-western source countries have been involved in the control of migration and borders leading to the adoption of restrictive laws and policies aimed at 'fighting against irregular migration'. North African countries are a case in point. This article sets out to look beyond the oft-cited securitisation of migration policies and the consequential criminalisation of irregular border-crossing. North African countries' proactive involvement in the reinforced securitisation of migration policies is examined while making use of the various heuristic devices produced by the scholarship and focusing on policy transfers, socialisation, norm diffusion and localisation in international systems. By adopting a non-western perspective, this study demonstrates that, ultimately, there is no stable point from which to observe cooperative systems and analyse socialisation, for both socialisees and socialisers may play interchangeable roles, under specific conditions. These conditions are thoroughly examined.

Beyond the criminalisation of migration: a non-western perspective

Beyond the criminalisation of migration: a non-western perspective

Tensions and Symmetries in the Ethnographic Unconscious: Lacan, Rain of the Children, Cross-Cultural Trauma

This paper is situated at the intersection of a number of tensions: the registers of psyche and culture, psychoanalysis and anthropology, colonial and post-colonial, mediation and re-representation. Drawing on Vincent Ward’s Rain of the Children (2008), it proposes a move from a perspective inflected through western epistemes articulated by psychoanalysts such as Lacan to one situated within non-western perspectives. Such perspectives have recently been explored in a variety of fields such as ethnography and STS in a quest to investigate and rework existing, largely western distinctions. Yet such social science approaches are either ambivalent or silent on how psychoanalysis, the unconscious and the constitution of self are reconfigured within these shifting frames of cultural reference. This is the central question for the paper. These issues are further highlighted where difficult questions of suffering emerge, as displayed by the cross-cultural and postcolonial trauma in Ward’s film. Consequently, a key epistemic conundrum emerges in how to engage such diverse cultural perspective when dominant western paradigms are brought into question; the paper illuminates the theoretical and experiential tensions this bring into view.

Individual Autonomy: Self, Culture, and Bioethics

Abstract This paper problematizes the concept of individual autonomy in the on-going project of attempting to understand and construct global principles of bioethics. We argue that autonomy as it is commonly defined and interpreted, and the emphasis that is placed on it, presupposes an individualistic concept of the self, family, and community that arises out of a Euro- Western liberal tradition and that is often in tension with various non-Western perspectives. We conclude that a more globally dialogical approach to bioethics is required.

Gleaning the social contract theory from African communitarian philosophy

The social contract is one of the most influential political theories in Western philosophy. Although the social contract theory is mainly associated with a number of thinkers in the broad history of social and political philosophy, I am particularly focused on the social contract theory proffered by two British philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. While the social contract theory has mainly been influenced by these British philosophers, little has been done in terms of appraising its key normative ideas from non-Western philosophical traditions. In this article, I examine how the social contract theory might be understood differently from a non-Western perspective, if values salient in African communitarian philosophy are properly understood. As I attempt to establish how the African social contract theory can be gleaned from African communitarian philosophy, I make comparisons and contrasts between the social contract theory in the African tradition and the traditional social contract theory in Western philosophy. I intend to make a novel interpretation of the ideals of the former that are implicit in the African communitarian structure. I seek to provide reasons why the African communitarian structure could be taken as the normative basis for a plausible social contract theory in the African social and political context.

The Limits of Socio-Legal Radicalism

In this review to mark the 25th anniversary of Social and Legal Studies ( SLS), we offer an assessment of the evolution of socio-legal scholarship on the Third World. We seek to locate the journal in the broader history of socio-legal studies and legal education in the United Kingdom and to consider its engagement with the work of Third World scholars. In order to do this, we recall the founding commitment of the journal’s first editorial board to non-western perspectives on law and locate this commitment both historically and biographically. We explore a number of important interventions concerned with socio-legal studies in the Third World, but also point to significant gaps and omissions since 1992. To end, we argue for a reassertion of SLS’s founding commitments to anti-imperial scholarship and the challenges posed by critical, non-western perspectives.

On the Continuum of Exit: Understanding the Stages of Change Among Women in Commercial Sexual Exploitation

Examining the involvement of women in commercial sexual exploitation (CSE), and the process of exit, as stages of change, from a non-western perspective, is an attempt to expand and build knowledge base about the exit process. This study included 163 women in, exiting or already exited CSE from five places in India–Bangalore, Mumbai, Kolkata, Goa, and Delhi. Forty-two percent of these women had entered as minors, and poor economic condition was a major driving force, with the women having an average stay of 10 years in the sex industry. Transtheoretical or Stages of Change model was used to guide the understanding of exit process. An exploratory factor analysis identified four stages of change—denial, hopeful, actively working, and perseverance—as the best fitting model for this population. Most of the women who exited (70%) highlighted the role of social welfare agencies in facilitating change towards exit. This article promotes an inclusive approach of placing individuals at different stages along the continuum of exit, and providing more finessed stage-specific services that facilitate exit from CSE, rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all approach that treats all women in or exiting CSE as a homogenous group.

Planetary Urbanisation and the Built Heritage from a Non-Western Perspective: The Question of \u2018How\u2019 We Should Protect the Past

The process of planetary urbanisation, which is currently affecting a large part of the world, impacts on the existing built environment in an unprecedented way. Its dramatic rapidity often implies the sudden disappearance of traditional urban and rural structures and the rapid transformation of local cultures. Contextually, as never before, attempts to protect culture in its tangible and intangible expressions are increasingly central to international agendas on sustainable urbanisation. However, this is by no means an easy task to achieve. The main reason for the controversy is that the consensus around the need to protect heritage and its tools, as formulated primarily in the Western world in the past, has changed. It has been challenged by alternative, non-Western, primarily non-materialistic views, or it has been delegitimised by the (often) exploitative practice of heritagisation, as a result of the process of protection itself. The main aim of this paper is to reflect on the implications of contemporary planetary urbanisation on the built heritage and its protection, considering that most of this process is taking place in fast-developing countries of Asia, Africa and South America and, at the same time, there is a redistribution of economic (and therefore cultural) power from the West to the East, and from the North to the South of the planet.

German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar by Austin Harrington (review)

304 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2017. teacher’s, and journalist’s activity, an enabling exchange between those who act and those who are acted on.3 Kemple covers the issues implicit in this formulation but takes us much further than Simmel. The presentation of Weber in this work, flawed and misleading as it occasionally is, exemplifies a more general account of scholarship as performance. This is a perspective infrequently engaged but informative of an element of intellectual work illuminating of its process where the focus is typically on its product. This is an important consideration and it is what makes Kemple’s Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism an important book. Jack Barbalet Australian Catholic University, Melbourne Austin Harrington, German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), x + 439 pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-1-107-11091-5. £84.99. It might seem as if everything about the Weimar Republic and its intellectual friends and enemies had already been written. But in the run-up to the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the first German democracy, the deck has been reshuffled. The new study by Austin Harrington, a sociologist and philosopher at the University of Leeds, is among those offering new perspectives. There are nine ‘voices from Weimar’ which form a political choir in Harrington’s book. In the chronological order of the year of their death, which lie between the Kaiserreich and the Federal Republic, the voices are: Georg Simmel (1858–1918), Max Weber (1864–1920), Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), Max Scheler (1874–1928), Ferdinand Tönnies (1855– 1936), Karl Mannheim (1893–1947), Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956), Alfred Weber (1868–1958), and Karl Jaspers (1883–1969). It is a choir of bourgeois and liberal social scientists and cultural philosophers. Harrington aggregates them as a specific intellectual milieu. What fascinates him are the texts produced by this milieu between 1914/18 and 1933, which he reads as a shared musical score. The basic idea of the book is original. Following the lead of postcolonial studies, which has now encouraged us to think about ‘provincializing Europe’ (Dipesh Chakrabarty) from a non-Western perspective, we might read German-speaking social thinkers as voices 3. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 86. Book Reviews 305© Max Weber Studies 2017. of intra-European criticism of the notion of a linear and evolutionary ‘long road West’. They stand for provincializing the West in the service of a cosmopolitan goal: ‘German cosmopolitan social thought of the Weimar years decentres, relativizes or “provincializes” European consciousness from a location immanent to European intellectual history’ (5). This thesis, applied to the ‘Western’ ordering ideas of democratic institutions, capitalist economy, and cultural individualism , has several implications for Harrington. First, there are diverse liberal traditions in Europa for thinking about capitalism as ‘the most fateful force of modern life’ (Max Weber). Working in the tradition of historicism and with the sociology of knowledge, German-speaking social scientists have developed a high capacity for reflecting on these matters. Their polemical writings during the First World War should not be read as an aggressive defense of an anti-Western Sonderweg; rather, their ‘protest at the West’ should be understood more as a plea for ‘cultural and civilizational plurality’, for distinct historical paths into European and ‘Western’ modernity. Second, these selected social scientists and intellectuals have engaged critically but constructively with narratives of ‘the West’ from a universal-historical perspective. They always defended ‘Western traditions’ with cosmopolitan intentions. Their traditions, which are shared in many interlocking ways, cannot be reduced to mere Eurocentrism. Their historical thinking directs our attention to the problems of the present, and to traditions that ‘essentially survive problems of “Eurocentrism” and continue to suggest ways in which these problems can be tackled directly in the present day’ (2). The nine protagonists fight on multiple fronts to provide Germans with new perspectives for their future. Their cosmopolitan worldview moves them to self-critically question the claims of Eurocentric hegemony. Their sensitivity to differences enables them to critically deconstruct evolutionary Whig histories of Western civilization, such as H. G. Wells’s bestseller The Outline...

Interrupting the mindset of educational neocolonialism: Critical deliberations from East and West international adult educators

Applying international and comparative education and cultural perspectives, through critical comparative reflection, this paper examines issues and challenges of adult learning, teaching, and research endeavors between the East and the West. First, a brief literature review illuminating the obstacles and barriers for a two-way exchange between East and West is presented to argue and call for an interchange through which the West might endeavor to listen to and learn from intelligent life beyond its own borders (Merriam and Associates. Non-western perspectives on learning and knowing. Krieger: Malabar. 2007; Milligan, Stanfill, Widyanto, & Zhang. Educational Studies, 47(1):50–70, 2011). Second, via critical personal narratives, two international adult educators’ lived issues, experiences, and reflections demonstrate the pressing necessity that invites us to recollect critically what has been “dismissed or at very least delegitimatized” (Reagan. Non-Western educational traditions: Indigenous approaches to educational thought and practice 3. New York: Routledge. 2010), in the discourse of conceptualizing educational thoughts and practice, and argue for consciousness to challenge our own ethnocentrism and the ethnocentrism of others that could help make the learning from each other more authentic and equally value from both sides. Finally, it concludes with recommendations that may facilitate further deliberations—philosophically, theoretically, and practically. The paper calls for a different mindset that helps interrupt educational neocolonialism in the globalized world. It also aims to help create a “third space” for bridging educational understandings and learning between East and West accurately, and more effectively.

Exploring Western and non-Western epistemological influences in South Africa: theorising a critical democratic citizenship education

My decade-long research on democracy and schooling in a Xhosa township has led to an examination of epistemological influences on democratic citizenship from Western and non-Western (i.e. African) perspectives. While Max Weber advanced the notion of an autonomous citizen within Western democratic states, different philosophical and cultural assumptions operate in South Africa, where the individual is viewed as not separate from, but rather embedded in, the community into which one is born. This theoretical position – a person is a person through other people (isiXhosa proverb) – serves as a thoughtful starting point for theorising a critical democratic citizenship education. This article explores Western and non-Western influences through scholarly literature and practitioner perspectives. The goal is to consider the convergences and divergences between Western and indigenous knowledge with ubuntu (humanness), an African moral ethic, as its key construct.

The ‘secrets’ of Chinese students’ academic success: academic resilience among students from highly competitive academic environments

Given Chinese students often perform well academically despite the challenges of their competitive academic environments, it is important to explore what enables the academic resilience of these students. Moreover, because the extant resilience literature is biased towards Western accounts of resilience, it is crucial that non-Western perspectives be added to this literature. In this study, three factors from family and school settings were examined: namely, parental supervision, school involvement and recognition, and school expectation of behaviour. We did so among 693 11th grade Chinese students from two of the largest provinces participating in the competitive college entrance examination in China. Participants completed a questionnaire comprising a series of individual, family, and school variables that were complemented by academic achievement data drawn from school records. Results showed that Chinese parents’ supervision and school involvement and recognition are significantly and negatively associated with low school commitment and individual conflict attitude, which are important protective factors in reducing adolescents’ risk of problem behaviours and promoting academic resilience. This study highlights the importance of taking a multidimensional approach to building academic resilience among those from highly competitive settings in China.

Welcome from the Editors

Welcome from the Editors

The global permutations of the Western publication regime

This article introduces the concept of the ‘publication regime’ into the current discourse on academia. This allows for a much deeper understanding of how publishing conglomerates and appointment and promotion procedures in Western universities are increasingly interlocked. It then turns to the global permutations of that regime as it is currently disseminated to other parts of the world. Using empirical examples drawn primarily from the field of tourism studies, we examine the problems engendered by the introduction of the regime’s appointment and promotion procedures of early career academic staff in universities in the emerging world regions. We specify the auxiliary mechanisms intended to ameliorate these problems, and draw attention to the neo-colonial implications of the disciplining process which these mechanisms are introducing into the academic life of the universities in the emerging regions. We argue that, as the Western publication regime is becoming increasingly globalized, local intellectual voices tend to be silenced by the regime’s growing hegemony, and call for the integration of non-Western perspectives into the framework of the publication regime.

Food practices, gendered intimacy and family life in contemporary Guangzhou

This article is concerned with the intimate spousal relations through the analysis of their management of daily meals and domestic food work. It extends beyond research focused on the relations between gendered power, identity and the space of home, through a focus on food practices. Based on three case studies, this empirical research analyses how the gendered nature of domestic food work makes, remakes and unmakes the intimate relations between women and men. In particular, the narrated food stories explore how gendered domestic food work is undertaken in families with different forms and geographies of homemaking, creating intimacies even when families have to live apart. Moreover, the construction and reconstruction of the geographical terms of distance and proximity under the discourse of intimacy in the mobilised urban Guangzhou are discussed. The main argument suggests that both genders play important roles in the process of practising intimacy in the family sphere. This work contributes to the wider critical and cultural geographies of family through engaging men’s agencies into the domestic sphere from a non-Western perspective.