Universally Comprehensible Arrogantly Local
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Universally Comprehensible, Arrogantly Local
Author: Wiebke Keim
language: en
Publisher: Archives contemporaines
Release Date: 2017-04-01
From the perspective of the international scholarly community under North Atlantic domination, South Africa might look like a peripheral place of knowledge production. In recent years, a plethora of voices calling for provincializing Europe, for deconstructing Eurocentrism and for adopting post- and decolonial perspectives have challenged such views. They have partly transformed the academic landscape, but have had limited success in challenging the fundamental global divides in production, circulation and recognition of social scientific knowledge. This book chooses a different take on the question of how North Atlantic domination could be challenged, by conceptualizing counter-hegemonic currents in international sociology. Instead of providing theoretical and deconstructive critiques, counter-hegemonic currents are effective through collective social scientific practice: the production of data, knowledge and texts, of new generations of scholars, the interaction with extra-university actors, leading to the gradual emergence of integrated and productive scientific communities. Their orientation towards local arenas of discussion and production of socially relevant research effectively reduces the belief in the hegemony of the North. The historical development of South African labour studies is a case in point. This study provides a systematic, in-depth analysis of research and teaching activities, networks with extra-academic actors and international cooperation over time in the three major Labour Studies centres: Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. It draws on a rich variety of material, including annual reports of research centres and labour service organizations, teaching contents and exam questions, the 1974-2003 volumes of the “South African Labour Bulletin” and newsletters of ISA Research Committee 44 on Labour Movements. Qualitative analysis of four seminal books is used to assess their contribution to original, general theory-building. In-depth interviews with Labour Studies representatives complement the analysis of documents and literature by reconstructing the oral history of this scholarly community, an indispensable source given that many debates could not appear in written form or had to be watered during the Apartheid years. The study concludes that over time, South African social scientists have generated knowledge on labour, industry and trade unions that is universally comprehensible, but arrogantly local.
Urban Politics After Apartheid
Urban Politics After Apartheid presents an understanding of gendered urban politics in South Africa as an interactive process. Based on long-term fieldwork in the former townships 20 years after the end of apartheid, it provides an in-depth analysis of how activists and local politicians engage with each other. Sandrine Gukelberger contributes to the ongoing debate on urban governance by adding a new historicising perspective as an entry point into the urban governance arena, based upon the political trajectories of ward councillors and activists. Integrating urban governance studies with new perspectives on policy and social movements provides insight on the everyday events in which people engender, negotiate, and contest concepts, policies, and institutions that have been introduced under the catch-all banner of democracy. By conceptualising these events as encounters at different knowledge interfaces, the book develops a locus for an anthropology of policy, highlighting everyday negotiations in urban politics. Urban Politics After Apartheid dissects the social life of policies such as Desmond Tutu’s rainbow nation metaphor beyond national symbolism, and academic and public discourse that largely portray participation in South Africa to be weak, local politicians to be absent, and social movements to be toothless tigers. Proving the inaccuracy of these portrayals, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of South African politics, urban studies, political anthropology and political sociology.
An Invitation to Non-Hegemonic World Sociology
Although sociology is present as a discipline or as a social practice in most countries in the world, its future as a not-only Western social science has hardly been addressed before. In this book, a team of interdisciplinary scholars have been working together not so much to offer one single response to the question than to raise important issues at stake for the future of sociology. Is it universal? Can it be indigenous? How is it possible – and is it even desirable – to write its history differently so as to know better about its early world diffusion and gradual Westernization? Do we need to expand or change its canon? This collection brings together essays that are all engaged in international discussions concerning the universality of sociology, or more precisely the epistemological and theoretical conditions of this universality. The postcolonial and decolonial critiques of the Eurocentrism of sociology are the basis for a reflection on how to continue to do sociology in a non-hegemonic way. That is, sociological ways of describing reality - including the history of sociology and its canon - that are not limited by Western-centrism or other nationalist or religious hegemonies.