Sujata Patel - The history of sociology in India through the lens of the peripheral gaze скачать в хорошем качестве

Sujata Patel - The history of sociology in India through the lens of the peripheral gaze

This presentation contends that the assumptions governing the social sciences in India were enmeshed in anti-colonial social thought that emerged in India and other parts of Asia and Africa as anti-colonial nationalism. I have argued earlier that anti-colonial social thought which has a 200-year or more history has promoted the peripheral gaze-a set of ontological-epistemological assumptions around which new scholarship developed within post-colonial nation-states. Today it has matured to contain the following attributes: 1) a rejection of late 19th century Eurocentric scientific claim to produce timeless perspectives enmeshed in Orientalist-Eurocentric positions; 2) a commitment to investigate the complex histories and current relations of power in which they are themselves situated; 3) a recognition that knowledge has to produced not for its own sake but in the name of local/regional and national emancipatory ideas and utopias; 4) a need to be reflexive, subjecting its own viewpoint to scrutiny; and 5) the promotion of interdisciplinarity. In this presentation, I ask how sociology in India confronted colonial Orientalist-Eurocentric perspectives in order to articulate an alternative perspective based on an assessment of current relations of power. This is a historical question and my analysis draws from the methodological interventions made within historical sociology and sociology of knowledge. Sociology is at crossroads in India. Can the peripheral gaze sustain itself in this context? Bio: Sujata Patel has been the 2021 Kerstin Hesselgren Visiting Professor, Umea University, Sweden; Distinguished Professor, Savitribai Phule Pune University; National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla and a teacher of sociology at the Universities of Hyderabad, Pune and SNDT Women’s University. She works on modernity and global social theory, anti-colonial social theory and its history; urbanization and city-formation, gender construction and class and caste formation.