Immutable: Decolonizing Knowledge, between the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Part 2 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
31
Access
Open
Title
Decolonizing Knowledge, between the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Part 2 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.
Author
Steinmetz, George
Editor
boasblogs
Other contributor
Dobler, Gregor
Publishing institution
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Date of publication
20 June 2024
Terms of use
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Namensnennung + nicht kommerziell + keine Bearbeitung
Abstract
This talk will examine different approaches to analyzing the relations between colonialism and social science. Within the humanities, postcolonial theory has been the most directly relevant to questions of “decolonizing” social knowledge. Within the social sciences, the first intellectual to call explicitly for “decolonizing sociology” and to propose a method and theory for carrying that out was Pierre Bourdieu. I will discuss postcolonial theory and Bourdieusian sociology as complementary approaches to the problem of understanding social science in colonial contexts.
I will then develop examples of several key issues raised by a combined Bourdieusian-postcolonial approach. One concerns the conditions under which intellectuals are able to push against and beyond the constraints of unjust political situations and to develop innovative and critical ideas. A second issue is the ability of thinkers to change their theoretical perspectives over the course of their lifetimes. A third problem relates to the relative autonomy of scientific fields and the effects of fields on thinking and on some specific features of texts. This illustrates the potential autonomy of cultural production under colonial conditions.
The talk’s conclusion returns to the idea of a careful, tolerant, and liberal approach to decolonizing knowledge that hews to the best ideas in the humanities and social sciences.
Keywords
Decolonizing Anthropology
Cultural Anthropology
Social Anthropology
Ethnologie
Decolonization
History of Ideas
Methodology
Epistemology
Social Sciences
Postcolonial Theory
GND Keywords
Ethnologie; http://d-nb.info/gnd/4078931-7
Sozialanthropologie
Kulturanthropologie
Ideengeschichte
Wissenschaftstheorie
Methodologie
Dekolonisierung
Postkolonialismus
Sozialwissenschaften
DDC
300 Sozialwissenschaften/301 Soziologie und Anthropologie
300 Sozialwissenschaften/306 Kultur und Institutionen
300 Sozialwissenschaften/370 Bildung und Erziehung/378 Hochschulbildung (Tertiärbereich)
RVK
LB 53000
LB 29000
Language
eng
Publication type
CourseMaterial
File format
MP4
Publisher DOI
Dauer / Länge
00:46:34