Immutable: Decolonising the Social Sciences, Decolonising Universities: What it Might Mean and how it Could Work. Session 9 of the digital lecture series „Decolonizing Anthropology: A Self-Critical Appraisal of the Current State of Research and Teaching"; German speaking departments of social and cultural anthropology.
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Resource ID
17
Access
Open
Title
Decolonising the Social Sciences, Decolonising Universities: What it Might Mean and how it Could Work. Session 9 of the digital lecture series „Decolonizing Anthropology: A Self-Critical Appraisal of the Current State of Research and Teaching"; German speaking departments of social and cultural anthropology.
Editor
boasblogs
Other contributor
Knecht, Michi
Publishing institution
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Date of publication
18 January 2024
Terms of use
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Namensnennung + nicht kommerziell + keine Bearbeitung
Abstract
This session brings a social anthropologist, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, and a sociological theorist, Tobias Werron, into dialogue on the question of what decolonisation means for them in teaching and practicing social theories and in the production of knowledge within anthropology and the university.
According to Tobias Werron, the Western tradition of sociological theories revolves around two main abstract questions. First, how is social order possible? And, second, what are the main characteristics and historical forces shaping modern society? Given these abstract and seemingly universal questions, he wishes to reflect on the critique of the tradition as being “colonial” through what Julian Go terms “imperial episteme” and what Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to as “false universalism.” A common theme of such critique is to describe the sociological tradition as “eurocentric”, given that sociology was first institutionalised in European and North American universities at the time of “high imperialism” between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. In his contribution to the conversation, Werron highlights two major issues. First, recent findings in the history of the social sciences which show how perspectives of major sociological theories (as well as sociology’s ways of remembering or forgetting its own history) reflect sociology’s entanglement with colonial and imperial history. Second, he discusses what could be done to account for these insights in our own practice and teaching of social theory, arguing that this implies two major tasks: (1) expanding the Western canon and discovering new – particularly non-Western or non-Northern – authors and theories; (2) readjusting the focus on topics – such as imperialism, colonialism, racism, violence, nationalism – which have played only minor roles in Western/Northern theories’ conceptualisations of social order and modernity.
Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka discusses similar issues from the perspective of knowledge production as a global hierarchy dominated by the Western canon that shapes our universities and the differentiated sense of academic belonging within them. Pointing out the alienation of those operating from within what she calls “academic provinces” and from undervalued positions within the hierarchy, she emphasises the need to decentre academia, to recognise the co-construction of knowledge between academics and ‘informants’, and to take notice of how academic hierarchies are reinforced in the materiality of the university and its social rules. According to her, processes of de-colonising need to be traced in three different dimensions: a) the socio-political constellations of knowledge production; b) pluralising knowledge; and c) the modalities of transmitting and exchanging knowledge.
The conversation is moderated by Minh Nguyen, another social anthropologist in Bielefeld.
Keywords
Decolonizing Anthropology
Cultural Anthropology
Social Anthropology
Ethnologie
Decolonization
History of Ideas
Methodology
Epistemology
GND Keywords
Entkolonialisierung; http://d-nb.info/gnd/4070860-3
Ethnologie; http://d-nb.info/gnd/4078931-7
Sozialanthropologie
Kulturanthropologie
Universität
Soziologie
Ideengeschichte
Wissenschaftstheorie
Methodologie
DDC
300 Sozialwissenschaften/301 Soziologie und Anthropologie
300 Sozialwissenschaften/306 Kultur und Institutionen
300 Sozialwissenschaften/370 Bildung und Erziehung/378 Hochschulbildung (Tertiärbereich)
900 Geschichte, Geografie und Hilfswissenschaften/960 Geschichte Afrikas
RVK
LB 53015
LB 31000
Language
eng
Publication type
CourseMaterial
File format
mp4
Publisher DOI
aleph-id
BV050170099
Alma System ID
MMS 9949958232502882
Dauer / Länge
00:59:58