Western Sociological Heritage, Modernist Paradigm, and the Crisis of Sociology in South Asian Countries

Abstract

South Asian sociologists argue that the sociology discipline and its practice in South Asia are facing a ‘crises’ and/or an ‘impasse’ due to a range of reasons including the dominance enjoyed by Western colonial-imperial heritage, i.e., theoretical and methodological, engrained within the scholarship, practice, institutions, and research. The rapid growth in the number of universities and colleges teaching sociology without achieving the required standards is also contributing to this crisis. The reproduction of the Western disciplinary heritage by contemporary sociologists who are not grounded in their own scholarly traditions is causing considerable damage to the discipline and to the intellectual growth of new cohorts of students who follow sociology courses in growing numbers in university-affiliated Colleges in India, Bangladesh and elsewhere. Against this trend in the sociology discipline, some sociologists even talk about the end of sociology (e.g., Nazrul Islam 2004). There are stronger pleas for an autonomous or indigenous sociology along with the need to pluralise and globalise the discipline. It is being argued that there is an unequal relation in the global division of labour relating to social science knowledge production and dissemination. Thus, the world social science powers in Europe and USA enjoy an advantage over these processes in other countries. This relationship has created dominant-subordinate epistemic 2 frameworks. Utilisation of such frameworks has compelled sociologists in South Asia to turn a blind eye to their own historical, cultural, philosophical, and intellectual traditions and knowledge. The teaching practices and resources influenced by Western sociological heritage also perpetuate this unequal relationship. Moreover, various binaries created by the modernist paradigm during the colonial era have been reconstructed under the conditions of globalisation to serve the interests of Western social science powers. If this is so, sociologists in Asia/ South Asia have an obligation to interrogate this unequal and dependent relationship and to explore socially relevant knowledge paradigms, theories, and concepts from their own societies with a view to formulating alternative sociological discourses, theories, and methods. However, this is not a call for wholesale rejection of Western sociological heritage in Asia/South Asia.