Western Social Science Research Articles

Cultural encounters in the social sciences and humanities: western émigré scholars in Turkey

Turkish modernization relied on the western social sciences and humanities not only as an abstract and distant model, but also in the form of close encounters and interactions with western refugee scholars. This article examines the activities of western intellectuals and experts who visited Turkey in the early republican era (1923-50), especially focusing on a group of èmigrè scholars who were employed in Turkey after the university reform of 1933. While European and North American social scientists were drawn to meticulous comparisons of "east" and "west" in this period, elites in the former component of this comparative dichotomy were seeking creative ways to turn this taxonomy to their advantage. In the Turkish case, the project of adopting modernity contained universalistic aspects intended to function for particular local needs. A body of racial, historical and linguistic theories attempted to create and sustain a nationally homogeneous society while, at the same time, emphasizing the contributions of Turkishness to western and modern history. Republican scholars tried to establish the Turkish origins of western civilization with the help of western social sciences in general and of western èmigrè scholars in particular. In the process of facilitating the local efforts to import western modernity into the specificity of Turkishness, refugee scholars encountered contradictory demands and employed different strategies to respond to these demands.

Big Money as an Obstacle to Democracy in Russia

Established Western social science theory equates democratization with rising levels of wealth and the associated establishment of a middle class that has an interest in the peaceful resolution of conflict through a political process. The case of Russia under Putin suggests that there is no necessary link between wealth as such and democratization. During his two terms as president, Putin benefited enormously from the rapid rise in world oil prices, but this economic security did not translate into liberal democratic political practices – quite the reverse. Indeed, the swift pace of economic growth and rising standard of living has not pushed Russia's rulers in the direction of democracy but rather, has encouraged a form of authoritarianism that in its use of rewards for favourites and supporters is reminiscent of aspects of feudal rule. The Russian middle class, secure in its wealth, is not a bulwark of democratic values, and those who have spoken out – and, more importantly, acted – in support of democratization have been silenced. It is Russia's poor, rather than the wealthy elite, who are critical of Putin's anti-democratic actions. The transfer of office from Putin to Medvedev in May 2008 is unlikely to change this tendency.

Turning point: the Arab world's marginalization and international security after 9/11

The danger raised by the terrorist threat is real, existential, and vital to the United States. But the attacks on 9/11 have been broadly misunderstood. In assessing the meaning and significance of the war on terror, Tschirgi raises many issues related to the Middle East and American policy toward that area. For example, he debunks the entire exceptionalist approach to the Arab world (the presumption that Arab societies fail to be fathomed by Western social science). While Tschirgi stresses the need for resolving the war on terrorism favorably, he also suggests two broad policy recommendations. First, he argues that while the United States should maintain its firm commitment to Israel's preservation as a Jewish state, it has no corresponding duty to support Israeli expansionism. U.S.-Israeli relations should proceed on this basis and should be informed by a greater American reliance on principles of international law. Second, Tschirgi concludes that an American withdrawal from Iraq must be effected as early as possible. Tschirgi's provocative thesis is that the attacks of 9/11 were not as unique an event as we commonly believe. Rather, they were understandable-though deplorable-human reactions to a combination of factors that fueled the Arab world's marginalization and led to a generalized feeling among the people of that region that the West (and particularly the United States) posed a mortal threat to their identity. Employing three case studies of marginalized violent conflict-Mexico's Zapatista conflict, Egypt's struggle against the Gama'a al-Islamiyya in Upper Egypt, and Nigeria's fight against the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta-Tschirgi demonstrates the dynamics through which traditional peoples have in modern times opted to wage hopeless struggle against objectively more powerful states. The parallels between the dynamics that informed each of these situations and those marking the international Muslim insurgency against the West are striking, as are the significant differences between the two phenomena. The parallels are found in the mechanics of marginalization and resistance. The differences lie, first, in the Muslim insurgency's identification of the West as a total enemy and the struggle with it as having a zero-sum nature and, second, in the modern terrorists' potential access to lethal means of mass destruction. Both the parallels and differences that mark the two phenomena help deepen a real understanding of the meaning of 9/11.

Political Economy of the Crisis in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe

Conventional western social science scholars hold the view that the current crisis in Zimbabwe is but the consequence of misgovernance by President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF led government. This paper debunks this viewpoint and considers it a short-circuit analysis of the complex nature of Zimbabwe’s crisis. Instead, the political economy approach is adopted which is considered more far-reaching, holistic, historic, dialectic, and more empirically-scientific-based. The critical analysis of the crisis reveals that the key to the current socio-economic and political impasse in Zimbabwe lies in the nature of the social organization of production and the class character of both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe’s social system which are strongly tied to the land issue. To this end, the paper confirms that Zimbabwe’s economy, polity and social relations are organized in a manner that many Zimbabweans are at the fringe of the social structure. The main argument of this paper is that social organization of production in Zimbabwe is such that does not guarantee ordinary Zimbabweans access to land to produce their basic material needs, and to participate in making decision about how this major means of production is organized for production, distribution and consumption. This paper concludes by noting that the way out of the current crisis in Zimbabwe lies in a radical overhauling of the feeble social organization of production while not undermining the importance of a congenial political milieu in Zimbabwe

The 2007 Western Social Science Association Presidential Address: Globalizing the right stuff

Focusing on the potential of globalization is appropriate given that the theme of the Western Social Science Association's 49th Annual Conference is “Crossing Borders.” As many commentators have po...

What really matters

What really matters fundamentally in survival? That question—the one on which I focus—is not about what should matter or about metaphysics. Rather, it is a factual question the answer to which can be determined, if at all, only empirically. I argue that the answer to it is that in the case of many people it is not one’s own persistence, but continuing in ways that may involve one’s own cessation that really matters fundamentally in survival. Call this the surprising result. What are we to make of it? According to several philosophers, not much. I argue that these philosophers are wrong. What best explains the surprising result is that in the case of many people one’s special concern for oneself in the future is not fundamental, but derived. I explain what this means. Finally I explain why the task of explaining empirically what matters fundamentally in survival is in some ways more like a meditative quest than a traditional inquiry in western philosophy or social science and, as such, is best answered not by psychologists, but by philosophers.

Exploring the Microfoundations of Group Consciousness

This article will explore the microfoundations of group consciousness. In order to do that it re-examines two well-established theoretical traditions within Western social science, the social cohesion paradigm within social psychology and the various mind-body theories within anthropology and sociology, hoping that this re-examination will have intellectual bearing on the issue of group consciousness and group action. As a result of this analysis it is suggested that the different ways a group enacts its ideology can help shed new light on many features of group life. A relatively new theory is therefore presented which can account for this relationship and also helps to organize and integrate many of the earlier findings that pertain to the issue of group consciousness and group action. This theoretical framework, originally developed by Harvey Whitehouse, postulates that divergent modes of encoding have differential social effects. More specifically, there are two distinct modes of encoding, two distinct psychological ways of relating and acting within the framework of a group’s ideology that are worth particular attention: the doctrinal mode of encoding and the imagistic mode of encoding. Their differences, manifested in the formal and informal behavior of groups, are many. Some of them, like organizational structure, change patterns, leadership style, centralization-decentralization aspects and institutional practice, are explored in depth. Whitehouse’s cognitive theory is finally coupled with findings from sociology in order to furnish a fuller account of the social underpinnings of group-related phenomena. In particular we use Mark Granovetter’s network theory in order to show how interactional patterns can have an influence on issues of group consciousness. The two theoretical strands are fused into a dual model which shows great promise and merits further attention. In the final part of the article examples are given in order to illustrate the real-life relevance of the stipulated model.

Intellectual Dependency: Late Ottoman Intellectuals between Fiqh and Social Science

AbstractModernization led to the intellectual dependency of the Muslim world on the West for social theories. Human action ('amal) is the subject matter of both Islamic fiqh and Western social science (i.e. of all those sciences which attempt to apply empirical methods drawn from the natural sciences to the sphere of human society, including education and law). Though different in many aspects, both have a claim on widely overlapping intellectual territories. Social science in its different forms conquered the space traditionally occupied by fiqh, and its professional representatives (such as academicians, jurists, educationists, and writers) replaced the fuqahā'. This article thus points to a dialectic tension between fiqh and Western social science which shaped Muslim intellectual history since the 19th century. This article unearths this latent tension by using the example of late Ottoman intellectuals as Ziya Gökalp, Said Halim Pasha and İzmirli İsmail Hakkı. In the Ottoman case it brought about a new cleavage in the Muslim intellectual community between advocates of social science and advocates of fiqh. Yet many intellectuals and even some fuqahā' attempted a synthesis between both fields. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the modern Turkish Republic adopted the policy of wholesale westernization, an element of which was the adoption of Western social science to replace fiqh in explaining and ordering human action. This intervention in the intellectual life increased the dependence of modern Turkish intellectuals on the state; which is another aspect of their intellectual dependency explored in this article.

Leon Petrażycki's Socio-legal Ideas and their Contemporary Continuation

This article outlines the main socio-legal ideas formulated by Leon Petrażycki at the beginning of the 20th century, and their historical reception up to the present. Although Petrażycki's ‘sociological manuscripts’ did not survive World War II, his major works on law and morality do contain many sociological leitmotifs. The latter are drawn out and presented, and include his proposals relating to methodology and the proper formation of sociological theories and propositions, along with his reflections, for example, on the psycho-social nature of law, the social functions of law, progress, property, and the social infection of emotions. The reception of Petryżycki's ideas in Western social science is seen to be still incomplete owing to the language barrier. In drawing out the difference between the Western and Polish reception contexts, a distinction is uncovered between a ‘formal’ and ‘living classic’.

Immanuel Wallerstein's Theory of the Capitalist World-System

One of the most significant tendencies in the development of Western historiography and social sciences in the last three decades has been the consolidation of a new multidisciplinary field of inquiry, comparative historical sociology (CHS). Reinhard Bendix, Charles Tilly, and Immanuel Wallerstein can be considered parents/creators of CHS in the U.S.A. The theory of the Capitalist World System (CWS), initiated by the American sociologist and historian I. Wallerstein (b. 1930), who started his career researching the contemporary history of Africa, is one branch of the CHS. This theory was formulated in opposition to Eurocentrism, which is characterized by a belief in the endless (linear) progress of European civilization and which discounts other (non-European) cultures. Wallerstein's popularity and influence in Western social sciences reached its zenith in the 1970s and 1980s, so that while perhaps coming late in the game, nonetheless knowledge and acquaintance with the ideas of this author can be useful for the conceptual renewal of modern Lithuanian historiography and for the investigation of problems in the socio-economic history of Central and Eastern Europe. The main strength of the CWS's approach is the possibility to expand historical thinking to regional and global perspectives in reply to the challenges facing social, political, and geopolitical reality and to interpret the history of every region in the historical context of local and world (meta) civilization. The main objectives of this article are: 1) to clarify the methodological traits and sources of the CWS's theory; 2) to reconstruct retrospectively the development of the CWS's theory in the works of Wallerstein (from the 16th to the second half of the 19th c.); 3) to discuss the critique and reception of CWS's theory. The subject of Wallerstein's study of CWS's theory is the origin and development of the capitalist world-system itself. CWS arose on the basis of the European world-economy during the "long" 16th century (1450-1640) and has been in existence ever since. CWS is an economic world based on capitalist production and division of labor, politically organized in the form of a union between sovereign and competing states. An especially important distinguishing feature of CWS is the differentiation into three economic zones: the core, the periphery, and the semi-periphery (according to their role in the world division of labor). The most important theoretical sources of CWS are dependency theory, F. Braudel's theory of history, K. Marx's theory of capitalism, and the Marxist theory of imperialism. Because of the dominant significance of Marxist sources, CWS can be considered a neo-Marxist theory. The development of the CWS's theory (from the 16th to the second half of the 19th c.) has three stages: 1) agrarian capitalism - the beginning of the CWS's theory; 2) mercantile capitalism - the outcome of the consolidation of the CWS's theory; 3) globalization period of the CWS. The critics of Wallerstein's theory of the CWS could be relatively differentiated into two groups - historians/sociologists based on Marxism and sociologists/ economists. The first group emphasizes that the theory of CWS is deficient in empirical adequacy, ignores the relationship between class structure and economic development, exaggerates the importance of the market on the internal socio-economic development of countries, and orients toward economism. Sociologists and economists notice that the theory does not analyze explicitly the influence of institutions on the emergence of capitalism and institutional development of the hierarchy of geo-economic zones. Synthesis of global and regional contexts investigating socioeconomic reality of the past could give higher empirical adequacy to the CWS's theory. On the other hand, the influence of the CWS's theory is confirmed by the further development of international political economy and radical renewal of cultural anthropology (not mentioning historical sociology).

Subjects of benevolence: Concepts of society and civilisation in early colonial indigenous administration

The concept of society was understood to be an artefact of a process of civilisation and hence was used as a key criterion to differentiate the civilised European from the uncivilised Indigenous inhabitants. It is argued that understanding the history of this central concept in Western social science and political theory required an acknowledgement of its development within the colonial and imperial context.

Economic systems and the Buddhist world view: the 21st century nexus

The possibility of a fruitful dialogue between Buddhism and economics has generally been repudiated in Western social science discourse. This situation is now changing in recognition of the key role of both social norms and beliefs, and economic matters, in current global political and military tensions, environmental problems, and efforts to change institutions and economies to bring higher levels of welfare. Even within mainstream economics, there are increasing efforts to incorporate socio-cultural influences into the assumptions and analysis of economic behaviour and activities. These developments provide a new basis for mutually beneficial exchange between studies of the economic dimensions of society, and the offerings of the Buddhist world view, logic and potential problem-solving approach. This paper describes some key features of “Buddhist economics” and builds upon Schumacher's original ideas and other more recent work concerned with the close correspondence between economic (or “livelihood”) aspects of human life and the philosophy, world view, and practice of Buddhism. A systematic comparison of the relevant dimensions of Buddhism and neoclassical economics demonstrates that Buddhist philosophy has intrinsic economic implications and highlights the potential relevance and value of integrated socio-economic analyses for application in the contemporary global context.

Ernst Troeltsch’s Concept of Europe

Recent writing in social theory has seen a renewed preoccupation with questions of religion, secularization and civilizational difference. This article reappraises the work of one early twentieth-century thinker in relation to these issues: the German historical theologian and close colleague of Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923). The article concentrates particularly on Troeltsch’s late writings on Europe and ‘Europeanism’. The thesis is defended that Troeltsch offers an important gloss on Weber’s famous assertion of the ‘universal significance and validity’ of occidental rationalism. Troeltsch offers a thicker, more concretized reading of Weber’s statement that serves as a precursor to contemporary thinking about ‘multiple modernities’ and also as a fund of trenchant counter-responses to the claims of recent post-colonial critics about Eurocentrism in western social science. Troeltsch’s writings give us one example among many of a current of cosmopolitan reflexivity in European social thought between the wars that avoided both nationalism and chauvinism, on the one hand, and nihilism and obscurantism, on the other.

The Rise of Religious Nationalism and Conflict: Ethnic Conflict and Revolutionary Wars, 1945-2001

This study examines the role of religion in ethnic nationalism and revolutionary wars between 1945 and 2001 using the Minorities at Risk (MAR) and State Failure (SF) datasets. It asks whether religion is an important factor in conflict and whether the level of this importance has changed over time. Few previous quantitative studies on religion and conflict analyze data from earlier than 1980. The analysis of the MAR dataset shows that until 1980 religious and non-religious ethnic nationalism caused a near-identical amount of conflict, but from 1980 onward, religious nationalist ethnic groups were responsible for increasingly more violent conflicts in comparison to non-religious nationalist groups. The analysis of the SF dataset shows a rise in religious violence beginning around 1965. The earlier date in the analysis from the SF dataset is attributed to the higher sensitivity of that dataset to changes in the level of violence. These results have several implications. First, they show that religion can influence conflict, but it is not the only influence. Second, the influence of religion on conflict can change over time. Third, religion’s influence on conflict has been increasing. This contradicts modernization theory and secularization theory, which were the dominant paradigms in the Western social sciences for most of the 20th century and predicted the demise of religion as a relevant political and social force in the modern era.

Editor’s Reflections: Academic Indigenization

The movement for academic indigenization has been growing swiftly in the social science fields over recent decades. From a historical, sociological perspective, for example, Lee (2000) recognizes that Western social sciences were implanted in East Asian countries like many other developing societies where there were abundant cultural traditions and indigenous frameworks of understanding human interrelations. As early as the 19th Century, several Chinese intellectuals had called for “Eastern Way and Western Technology” or “Chinese Body and Western Utility” in their search for solutions to “saving the nation” from feudal corruptions and imperialist invaders. These thinkers and reformers were trying to better the fit between Western theory and China reality.

WSSA in terms of itself: associations within the association

Presidential address to the membership of the Western Social Science Association (WSSA), at the annual conference of the Association in Las Vegas, Nevada on April 11, 2003.Thank you for attending t...

The Thai Village Economy in the Past. By Chattip Nartsupha. English Translation by Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999. Pp. viii, 131.

This charmingly old-fashioned little book was first published in Thai in 1984, and now appears in an elegant English translation. The two major intellectual influences that gave it birth are rather older, dating from the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. The first developed from the intersection of the academic pre-eminence of varieties of Marxist thinking about the “Third World” and the struggles of anticolonial peasant-based revolutionaries and produced a high age of romanticism about the Southeast Asian village and the unfortunate victims who inhabited them. The origins of the second are more uncertain, but probably represent, paradoxically, a Thai appropriation of those Western social-science constructions of Thai cultural uniqueness which were especially popular in the 1950s and 1960s.

`The Transition to the Human World of Democracy'

Whether to a `liberal' or a `people's' democracy, the evolution of modern political systems has been consistently theorized as a `transition'. Elaborated within Marxism as the `transition to communism' and later recycled by modernization theory and comparative politics, this concept has been tightly connected to the development of macro-societal analysis. This paper argues that any attempt at writing its history should be sensitive to the deep-seated ambivalence of this concept, which has alternatively lent itself to either teleological or non-teleological interpretations. But far from matching the ready-made division between Marxist and non-Marxist political sociology, this ambivalence has always been internal to these different social scientific traditions. As a result, the same conceptual issues and tensions can be identified within the Marxist and, later, Soviet doctrine on the one hand, and Western social sciences on the other hand, from the sociology of development of the 1950s to comparative democratization in the 1980s.

POST-COLONIALISM COMPARED: POTENTIALS AND LIMITATIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA

The term “post-colonial” is a relative newcomer to the jargon of Western social science. Although discussions about the effects of colonial and imperialist domination are by no means new, the various meanings attached to the prefix “post-” and different understandings of what characterizes the post-colonial continue to make this term a controversial one. Among the criticisms leveled against it, reviewed comprehensively by Hall (1996), are the dangers of careless homogenizing of experiences as disparate as those of white settler colonies, such as Australia and Canada; of the Latin American continent, whose independence battles were fought in the 19th century; and countries such as India, Nigeria, or Algeria that emerged from very different colonial encounters in the post-World War II era. He suggests, nevertheless, that “What the concept may help us to do is to describe or characterise the shift in global relations which marks the (necessarily uneven) transition from the age of Empires to the post-independence and post-decolonisation moment” (Hall 1996, 246). Rattansi (1997) proposes a distinction between “post-coloniality” to designate a set of historical epochs and “post-colonialism” or “post-colonialist studies” to refer to a particular form of intellectual inquiry that has as its central defining theme the mutually constitutive role played by colonizer and colonized in shaping the identities of both the dominant power and those at the receiving end of imperial and colonial projects. Within the field of post-colonial studies itself, Moore-Gilbert (1997) points to the divide between “post-colonial criticism,” which has much earlier antecedents in the writings of those involved in anti-colonial struggles, and “post-colonial theory,” which distinguishes itself from the former by the incoporation of methodological paradigms derived from contemporary European cultural theories into discussions of colonial systems of representation and cultural production. Whatever the various interpretations of the term or the various temporalities associated with it might be, Hall claims that the post-colonial “marks a critical interruption into that grand whole historiographical narrative which, in liberal historiography and Weberian historical sociology, as much as in the dominant traditions of Western Marxism, gave this global dimension a subordinate presence in a story that could essentially be told from its European parameters” (Hall 1996, 250). In what follows, I will attempt a brief discussion of some of the circumstances leading to the emergence of this concept and interrogate the extent to which it lends itself to a meaningful comparison of the modern trajectories of societies in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Revitalizing Anthropology in East Africa: The Birth of EAAA

East Africa is known the world over for its extensive contribution to the history of humankind especially through the work of paleontologists and other archaeologists. Yet if one asked an average East African what anthropology is one is likely to be told that it is something to do with looking at old bones or one will have no clue all together. Such responses are instructive of the way anthropology and anthropologists have operated in East Africa specifically and Africa generally. First, anthropology as a discipline is another of the Western social science disciplines that entered the region through the main channel of colonialism. It indeed, reflects a kind of duality that is most likely to have schizophrenic adherents given both the British and American influences. The former which was a major player in the development of East African social sciences as colonizer adheres to a brand of anthropology that clearly separates the discipline into archaeology (which is often seen as a unit of history) while the latter which has become a major player in world scholarship because of its increased economic and political power favors a discipline that combines anthropology into the four fields of linguistic, cultural, physical, and archaeological anthropology. Thus one is able to find an American trained anthropologist in the University of Dar es Salaam unable to use his full anthropological training because he is in an archaeology unit that was structured to augment the work of historians. Second, anthropology has had its share of bad press in Africa for many years because of its association with colonialism although the same critiques have not been extended to other disciplines that are equally guilty of promoting Western superiority over Africa. This led to many anthropologists being unable to assert themselves in their own institutions where no specific departments of anthropology were present and also because of fear of being ridiculed as products of a colonial discipline. But things have changed in the recent past and anthropology has started becoming a respected discipline in the region. Indeed, many government offices, tertiary institutions, and NGO's have realized the critical role that anthropology can play in the social, political, and economic understanding and development of our communities. Inarguably anthropology is the only discipline that can boast of a structure and history of studying and understanding the entirety of human existence which is incredibly critical in Africa today—a continent that continues to be seen as a gone case in matters of global concern. It is the realization of this critical role that anthropology can and will continue to play in Africa that a professional association that would bring together anthropologists in East Africa was deemed necessary. Having returned in the late 90's from the US armed with a doctoral degree in cultural anthropology I was keen on making a major contribution to the discipline in East Africa but was not sure if there were many other anthropologists who had the same passion for the discipline as I had. I guess much of it had to do with the freshness of my training as well as the relevance I saw for the discipline in explaining and understanding some the socio-cultural issues that were current in Kenya at that time. This passion translated into the birth of the East African Anthropological Association (EAAA) in Nairobi mid 2001. (African Anthropologist: 2002 9(1): 60-65)