4

Global Sociology: Indigenous, Subversive, Autonomous?

The idea of ‘global sociology’ has recently been promoted as a way in which sociology can redress its previous neglect of those represented as ‘other’ in its construction of modernity. While there is little consensus on the meaning of ‘global’, either in its own terms or in the context of it as a qualifier of the way in which sociology as a discipline operates (or might come to operate), the standard understanding is as follows. The global, as descriptor, points to the contemporary world order, usually post the 1970s, in which the intensification of worldwide processes under neo-liberal policies has brought more of humanity into contact with each other. The global, as qualifier, points to the need for sociology to engage meaningfully with the world beyond the West. This engagement usually takes one of two forms. First, an argument that the distilled truths of sociology continue to remain valid, but it would be useful for them to be supplemented by additional data from other places. And, second, that what is needed is the inclusion of other voices and other knowledges and thus an expanded canon of sociology and sociological perspectives. Both approaches, in their different ways, are ‘additive’ and regard the global, and global sociology, as constituted by the steady accretion of new data, neglected theorists and alternative discourses. On this understanding, the global and global sociology are descriptors of the present and a call for sociology to be different in the future. This chapter, and the following one, address the different ways in which sociologists have envisaged the development of global sociology.

The International Sociological Association (ISA), both through its meetings and its journals, has provided an important space for the articulation and wider dissemination of ideas of ‘global sociology’ from scholars based in locations other than Europe and the US. A journal of the Association, the aptly named International Sociology, was described by Martin Albrow, one of its early editors, as a forum for the discussion of ‘a global sociological consciousness’ and a marker of the development of sociology as an international discipline (1990: 5). The 1980s, for example, saw extensive debate on the possibilities for the ‘indigenization’ of the social sciences, centred on the arguments of Akinsola Akiwowo (1986, 1988), and the relationship between indigenization and the internationalization of sociology. This was followed in subsequent decades with discussion around the development of autonomous social science traditions, as put forward by Syed Hussein Alatas (2002, 2006), and the need to recognize multiple, globally diverse, origins of sociology. This chapter will focus on these early debates that subsequently coalesced around a call for ‘global sociology’, both within the journal and more broadly, and discuss the significance of their interventions in this regard.

I

The publication of Akiwowo’s ‘Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry’ in the signal journal of the ISA in 1986 caused somewhat of a stir. It proclaimed the importance of indigenizing the sociological enterprise and sought to demonstrate how this could be achieved by extrapolating sociological propositions through an interpretation of the transcribed verses of a Yoruba oral poem (translated into English). The article followed an earlier symposium organized by Akiwowo at the 1982 ISA World Congress on ‘Universalism versus Indigenisation in Sociological Theory’ from which a number of articles were brought together by him and published in the June 1988 issue of International Sociology. In the editorial introduction, Akiwowo (1988) outlines the intellectual rationale framing his call for the indigenization of the sociological enterprise in terms of three key issues. The first concerns ‘the extent to which the conceptual schemes and propositions which constitute mainstream sociological theories, can be accepted as containing universal principles for the explanation of human societies everywhere’ (1988: 155). The second, focuses on whether sociological theories arising from empirical studies on Western societies can be valid and reliable when used to understand social life and social problems in other places. Third, and conversely, Akiwowo poses the question of the extent to which ‘generalisations from empirical studies from Third World societies [can] be accepted and extended to European and American societies’ (1988: 155).

The project of indigenization, for him, is not simply a project of recovering and highlighting the cultural resources of societies beyond those which regularly feature within mainstream sociology. It is also a call to address the adequacy of all theories by subjecting them to ‘tests and retests within different societal contexts’ in order to determine their empirical universal validity (1988: 155). While Akiwowo does not use the term empirical universal validity, it is clear that he is distinguishing his project of constructing universal claims on the basis of an assessment of their reliability and validity in ‘universal’ (global?) contexts and not just on the basis of a claim to be so, as, he argues, has been the case for the majority of universalist theories to date. Indigenization, as he articulates it, requires ‘the study, analysis and explanation’ of society which takes into account the multitude of factors contributing to its constitution and uses all available resources in the endeavour; this includes using the resources of Western ‘notions, ideas and thoughts’ (1988: 158). Akiwowo’s project of indigenization, then, is not an assertion of the radical particularity of specific cultures. Rather, it is a call for learning from the traditions of various cultures in order to develop, through a process of investigation and argumentation, universal propositions and frameworks that are adequate for the task in a variety of locations.

The focus of Akiwowo’s scholarship on developing sociological propositions from the traditions of Yoruba oral poetry caused a certain degree of disquiet among both fellow sociologists in Nigeria and those further afield. Most prominently, perhaps, his call for indigenization was addressed by Margaret Archer (1991), in her Presidential Address to the World Congress, where she critiqued the move within sociology toward fragmentation and localization in the context of society itself moving in the direction of globalization and greater integration. With the title of her address, ‘Sociology for One World: Unity and Diversity’, Archer proceeded to map ‘the irony of an increasingly global society which is met by an increasingly localised sociology’ (1991: 132). In the face of the radical relativism of postmodernism and its mockery of the possibility of an international sociology, she argued for the ‘fundamental unicity of Humanity’ that, in turn, necessitates ‘a single discipline’ for ‘a single world’ (1991: 131; quoted in Adesina 2002: 94). While Akiwowo’s project could be seen to be at odds with such an understanding, Archer, however, incorporated his work into her vision. She suggested that the import of his ‘pioneering work’ is in its demonstration ‘that people do think much the same the world over’ and the evidence for this is his ability to teach and do ‘sociology in the vernacular’ by elaborating ‘oral Yoruba equivalents for Western sociological concepts’ (1991: 143). The importance of Akiwowo’s ‘pioneering work’ for Archer, then, is in its confirmation of what was already known and its translation of the dominant paradigm into a ‘vernacular’ sociology.

Archer’s ‘Sociology for One World’ is a global sociology based on Western sociological concepts where the only space given to other voices is in their translation of these concepts into local idioms. Never mind that these ‘local idioms’ and ‘vernaculars’ are to other people what ‘English’ is to Archer (see Adesina 2002: 110 fn 7). As Adesina argues, Archer’s evocation of a ‘single humanity’ is one that ‘assumes its “unicity” by denying a voice to the non-Western voices. (And the non-dominant voices in the West, as well)’ (2002: 94). There is little, as far as Archer is concerned, to be learned by the West from sociologists elsewhere; just an appreciation of their confirmation of the validity of what was being argued prior to engagement and thus an ability to continue as normal with minimal disruption after engagement. In this, Adesina implicates Akiwowo, as much as Archer, for failing to contest her (and others’) claims that all he was doing was ‘vernacularizing’ or ‘indigenizing’ Western sociology (2002: 95). By allowing his contribution to be labelled simply as a form of ‘indigenous’ sociology, compatible with Western traditions, Akiwowo denied the (epistemic) reach of his own arguments.

The embrace of ‘indigenous’ sociologies has been seen to be as problematic as the dismissal of them, as both responses placed the arguments being made into a ‘ghetto’ removed from critical engagement (see Adesina 2002: 95). In his discussion of the emergence of indigenous sociologies, Martin Albrow, for example, highlighted two key issues that needed to be addressed. The first was the limits to the potential universalism of knowledge produced in this way, which has been discussed above; and the second, the difficulties of its communicability within sociology and globally (1990: 102). In addressing the issue of communicability, Akiwowo (1999: 120) suggests that this is bi-directional: that is, there is the issue of communicability of ‘indigenous’ sociology from the ‘parent’ culture to the worldwide community of sociologists and its communicability among scholars of the ‘parent’ culture. I would argue, additionally, for a third issue to be considered in discussions of communicability and that is the importance of the worldwide community of scholars to engage meaningfully with the insights of ‘indigenous’ sociologies.

Akiwowo’s work, while much cited as an example of ‘African’ sociology, is less engaged with in terms of what is being argued. Indeed, the only sustained engagement with his actual arguments comes primarily from other Nigerian scholars; in the first instance, Moses A. Makinde (1988), and O. B. Lawuyi and Olufemi Taiwo (1990) and then Appiah (1992), and Adesina (2002), although, see also Connell (2007a). In part, this may be as a consequence of the unfamiliarity of sociologists outside Nigeria with Yoruba oral poetry, but it is nonetheless a significant issue. As Ari Sitas (2006: 365) argues, the ‘most frustrating’ aspect of the debates around Akiwowo’s work is that they were not taken anywhere. They remain located as ‘a snippet of performance’ and are contextualized as simply a staging post in the overall development and understanding of ‘the phenomenon of globalization’ (2006: 365). Albrow and King’s volume, Globalization, Knowledge and Society, for example, included Akiwowo’s original article and the critical engagements with it by Makinde, and Lawuyi and Taiwo, but presented the debate as ‘phase’ on the way to globalization (of sociology) as properly expressed by others (Albrow 1990: 7). There has not been, Sitas continues, ‘even a gesture in the West’s itinerary’ towards the arguments being put forward (2006: 365; Tageldin 2014). Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000: 29), in a different context, has similarly argued that while Third World scholars have to engage with theoretical paradigms produced in the West, scholars in the West can, by and large, make world-historical pronouncements without any regard to the histories, philosophies and traditions of those living beyond the West.1 This is a part of the asymmetry of engagement that requires address in the development of ‘global sociology’.

II

While calls for the indigenization of sociology had opened up ‘spaces for alternative voices’, they were seen to have had little discernible impact on the hierarchies of the discipline more generally; whether in terms of the politics of knowledge production or in more material terms such as access to publishing in high-ranking journals or encyclopaedias (Keim 2011: 128; see also Gareau 1988; Keim 2008). The critiques were easily dismissed as political, or politically correct, and there was little engagement with the epistemological issues being raised (notwithstanding that they raised issues similar to feminist critiques of sociology). With these endeavours having seemingly reached an impasse by the early years of the twenty-first century, the debates around the possibilities for global sociology shifted both geographical location and terminology: from Africa to South-East Asia and from indigenization to autonomy. These debates, for the most part, centred on the arguments and perspectives of Syed Hussein Alatas (1974, 1979, 2002, 2006) and were newly presented in international fora by his son, Syed Farid Alatas (2001, 2006). This is not to suggest that there had not also been long-standing critiques by scholars located in other parts of the world of what were regarded as Western imperialist approaches within the social sciences. However, there was a new coalescence of these debates structured around a specific engagement with the possibility of creating a global sociology. This focused on two complementary strands: one, ‘the lack of autonomy’ of Third World social science and two, ‘the lack of a multicultural approach in sociology’ (Alatas, S. F. 2006: 5). Before addressing these developments in more detail, I shall address some of the preceding arguments around dependency and the need for establishing autonomous social sciences being made in other parts of the world.

In the early-to-mid twentieth century, debates on the need to differentiate ‘indigenous’ knowledge production from colonial hegemonic discourses were unsurprisingly linked to wider movements for decolonization and liberation (see Patel 2006, 2010d). The Lucknow School of Economics and Sociology, for example, founded in the 1920s under the leadership of Radhakamal Mukerjee and D. P. Mukerji, sought to engender ‘a spirit of self-reliance’ and creativity through the medium of social science that would dovetail with what others such as Tagore were doing in the realm of culture, or Gandhi in the realm of politics, as part of the overarching project for national liberation (Joshi 1986: 1456). They critiqued the use of colonial approaches and concepts to understand social and political issues in India and, instead, argued for the development of ‘an alternative approach or model which corresponds to Asian conditions as well as traditions’ (Joshi 1986: 1460). They believed that attempts to understand India through ‘Eurocentric concepts derived from the pre-industrial stage of European socio-economic evolution’ were not only inadequate to the task at hand, but had also had disastrous consequences in the operationalization of policy based on such understandings (Joshi 1986: 1464). What was needed, as Mukerjee argued in 1922, was to recover alternative values from the history of Indian civilization that would enable the reconstruction of conceptual frameworks adequate to the reality of Indian society (Joshi 1986; see also Patel 2010c, Modi 2010).2 This call for intellectual independence and the development of alternatives found echoes through the decades and across national boundaries.

Such discussions also constituted an aspect of the debates on dependency theory that were addressed in an earlier chapter. As Gareau argues, from the standpoint of the recently decolonized countries, the social sciences were ‘not so much foreign “products” as … instances of socio-cultural dependence’ (1988: 171). They were seen to be created with minimal input from other parts of the world and simply offered as generally applicable in all contexts regardless of geographical, social or political particularity. The inequalities were seen to exist both at the epistemological level and the level of international membership of research groups. On examining the International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1968), for example, Gareau (1988) discovered that, while claiming geographic representation in the selection of contributors, only 0.9 per cent came from the Third World, 0.3 per cent from Communist Eastern Europe, whereas American affiliated authors constituted 78.1 per cent of the total. The International Encyclopaedia, he suggests, ‘thus emerges as a mute witness to the provincialism of the disciplines whose name it bears’ (1988: 174). The only option for Third World scholars, in this context, he believed, was to attempt ‘to make what is foreign more relevant to local conditions and needs’, that is, to domesticate and then, over time, change the disciplines (1988: 177). Although, even as he himself acknowledged, this recommendation preserved the relationship of intellectual dependency that was otherwise under critique. Dependency theory did, however, provoke a more profound challenge to the intellectual formation of the social sciences in the Latin American debates. As Mignolo suggests, the early work of the Colombian sociologist, Orlando Fals Borda, used dependency theory to argue not just for a ‘project in the social sciences for the liberation of the Third World; rather, it concerned also a project of intellectual liberation from the social sciences’ (Mignolo 2002: 65). Fals Borda’s argument was that dependency was not only economic and political, but also intellectual and that this ‘epistemic dependence’ had to be recognized and addressed as part of any broader address of relations of dominance. This would involve not simply using ‘Western’ knowledge until such a time as an ‘indigenous’ critique could be developed, as suggested by Gareau above. But, rather, recognizing that knowledge is produced in particular historical and cultural conditions and is not straightforwardly transferrable to other contexts. As such, as Fals Borda writes, it is important and necessary to develop local ‘theoretical models to interpret correctly and coherently the problems of our society’ (1980: 163). In this, he was followed by scholars such as Enrique Dussel arguing also for a philosophy of liberation from the south, where the south was not simply a geographic location, but an epistemological position (see Mignolo 2002). In Dussel’s own words, the philosophy of liberation was ‘a critical philosophy self-critically localised in the periphery, within subaltern groups’ (2008: 340). This did not mean that other philosophical traditions were not engaged with, but that this engagement was oriented to taking what was useful in terms of contributing ‘to a justification of the praxis of liberation’ (Dussel 2008: 342).

The presumed necessity of holding onto the philosophical and humanist traditions of ‘European’ social science at the same time as being sensitive to local conditions was also posited by Roberto Briceño-León and Heinz R. Sonntag (1997b) in their Introduction to the ISA’s regional volume on Latin American Sociology. Within this volume, Quijano (1997) argues for a form of cultural subversion and ‘re-originalization’ in the patterns and production of social-scientific knowledge. In the absence of subversion, he suggests, ‘there is no way to produce any alternative’, but if that subversion is not successful then ‘its products, statements and virtualities are most likely to be co-opted and assimilated by the dominant pattern’ (1997: 33). Any meaningful decolonization of knowledge, he argues, has to occur in the broader context of the social, political and economic decolonization and democratization of society. In this way, Quijano directly links the material and epistemic challenges facing ‘decolonial’ thinking. This is elaborated further in his development of the coloniality-modernity paradigm together with Walter Mignolo and María Lugones. This is the subject of a subsequent chapter and will be discussed at greater length there. For now, these themes of dependence and subversion are precisely what scholars such as Syed Hussein Alatas had also been arguing for and this chapter will go on to discuss the development of ‘alternative’ or ‘autonomous’ approaches to global sociology in East Asia.

III

Syed Hussein Alatas, a prominent Malaysian sociologist, independently arrived at similar themes and developed them in the 1960s and 1970s with his critique of ‘the captive mind’. He argued against the unthinking assimilation of Western concepts and categories by Third World scholars and urged them to free themselves from the twin perils of intellectual domination by, and subservience to, Western social science. He developed this idea initially in the context of development studies, but then broadened his argument to call for ‘intellectual emancipation’ more generally (Alatas, S. H. 1979, 2000). Alongside outlining ‘the problem of the captive mind’, S. H. Alatas (1979) advocated the establishment of autonomous sociological traditions. His key proposal was that scholars in other parts of the world needed to draw on their pre-colonial civilizational heritage in order to develop autochthonous concepts and traditions which could then be brought into dialogue with Western ones, thereby beginning the process of a proper universalization, or globalization, of social science, created through dialogue as an alternative to the simple adoption of Western traditions, masquerading as sociology as such. As should be clear, the development of autonomous traditions was not to be based on a rejection of Western paradigms or concepts but, rather, is seen to involve a process of selectivity based on an assessment of the usefulness of the paradigms or concepts in question. An autonomous tradition, for S. H. Alatas, is based on ‘genuine creative assimilation from abroad’ of ‘whatever is necessary for progress’ together with drawing as much as possible from one’s own traditions (2000: 27).

In putting forward this alternative argument for the establishment of an autonomous social science tradition, S. H. Alatas (2002, 2006) was keen to distinguish it from the earlier arguments for indigenization. He argued that the two approaches should not be confused and that reflecting on the differences between them was no ‘mere wrangling on terminology’ but rather highlighted serious deficiencies with the indigenization paradigm (Alatas, S. H. 2002: 155). The domain of the latter was understood to be that of ‘customs, usages, plants, animals, climate and food habits’, that is, the domain of the ‘relative and particular’, rather than the ‘general and universal’, which was instead associated with Western social science and the autonomous traditions approach (Alatas, S. H. 2002: 155). As such, according to S. H. Alatas, indigenization could not facilitate the development of the social sciences, as its focus was on ‘fitting the entity [Western social science] into a pre-existing mould’ rather than breaking away ‘from the existing scheme of things’ to create something new (2002: 155, 156). The implicit criticism here is twofold. First, that the project of indigenization accepted Western social science wholesale and simply adapted it to fit with local conditions. There was deemed to be no break with the dominant Western paradigm or any attempt to create a new tradition distinct from that paradigm. Instead, indigenization was seen as part of the process of ‘imitative’ thinking that indicated a failure to decolonize knowledge and was presented as a mere variation of Western social science. Second, that indigenization remained locked within a particularistic, ethnographic frame that did not seek to create ‘universal’ knowledge. Instead, it is presented as a ‘distortion’, or even ‘mutilation’, of the social-scientific endeavour (Alatas, S. H. 2006: 11). While these criticisms are asserted, they are not demonstrated, and the differences as they are presented appear to rest more on a division between tropes of indigeneity or nativism, on the one hand, and civilization on the other (see also Alatas, S. F. 2001).

The focus on a civilizational context, for the development of autonomous traditions of sociology, aligns this approach with that espoused by theorists of multiple modernities. In both approaches, the Western social-scientific tradition, linked to modernity, is given centrality and is regarded, as S. H. Alatas states, as ‘the definitive reference point for departure and progress in the development of sociology’ in other places (2006: 10). This is primarily a consequence, in his view, of the Western tradition being the first to formalize the collective response of a group of scholars into the discipline of sociology. It is not to suggest, however, that sociological thought could not have emerged independently elsewhere – and, indeed, S. H. Alatas (2006) and S. F. Alatas (2010) point to the earlier sociological insights of scholars such as Ibn Khaldun and Jose Rizal – but that, given the contemporary hegemony of the Western tradition, sociological endeavours in other places have to now take this tradition into account in their own development. Alongside this, as S. F. Alatas argues, autonomous traditions need to be ‘informed by local/ regional historical experiences and cultural practices’ as well as by alternative ‘philosophies, epistemologies, histories, and the arts’ (2010: 37); the ‘autonomy’ of the different traditions, then, rests on studies of historical phenomena believed to be unique to particular areas or societies. In this way, Western social science becomes a reference point for divergence (creativity, as expressed through the appropriation of Western traditions read through local contexts), as opposed to convergence (imitation, as expressed through the application of Western traditions to local contexts).

While much is made of the need for creativity and autonomy, and imitation is roundly denounced, there is little discussion of what the purchase of these autonomous traditions would be for a global sociology. The most that is suggested is that the development of autonomous traditions would require new attention to be ‘given to subjects hitherto outside our radius of thinking’ and that this ‘would entail the repositioning of our sociological perspective’ (Alatas, S. H. 2006: 21). Collaboration, cooperation or learning does not seem to go much beyond discovering new objects of investigation or then recognizing ‘multiple and alternative centres, spaces and identities … as repositories of social science thinking and theorizing’ (Sinha 2003: 10). The focus on identity is underlined with S. F. Alatas’s argument that the development of autonomous traditions contributes ‘to the universalization of the social sciences to the extent that alternative civilizational voices are added to the ensemble of ideas and works’ (2001: 59). There is little discussion, however, of why these subjects might have previously been outside our radius of thinking or what the process of bringing them inside consists of; the exclusions are naturalized and made issues of identity, not methodology or disciplinary construction. The limitations of existing approaches are seen to reside in their failure to engage with scholars and thinkers from outside the West and the main problem is taken to be one of marginalization and exclusion. The solution, then, is a putative equality, through recognition of difference, and redressing the ‘absence of non-European thinkers’ in histories of social and sociological thought that would enable the creation of a (more) multicultural sociology (Alatas, S. F. 2010: 29).

The main issue of concern here is the ahistorical, or perhaps even wrongly historical, nature of the argument being made. For example, S. H. Alatas begins his 2006 article by stating that during the four centuries of ‘colonial expansion by the West throughout the non-western world … there was practically no interaction between the West and the non-western world’ (2006: 7). A line later, he suggests that the ‘great outburst of culture [sic] contact and intellectual interaction’ only occurred in the post-Second World War period ‘following the independence of the countries previously colonized by the West’ (2006: 7). This is a serious misreading of history and calls into question the subsequent theoretical work that is premised on this understanding. As Said Arjomand argues in a different context, a proper grasp of history enables us to ‘arrive at an understanding of cultural diversity adequate for the sociological reconstruction of locality, or rather regionality, in the cosmopolitan context of the new era’ (2000: 9). An arbitrary presentation of history that is manifestly incorrect does not enable an adequate sociological reconstruction of the same nor does it contribute positively to the development of a global sociology adequate for our global times.

The autonomous traditions approach reifies thinking and thought as endogenous aspects of defined and separate civilizations where nothing is necessarily to be learned from others. The implication is rather that the autonomous traditions would simply coexist, with each tradition generating knowledge within and for its own domain. While S. H. Alatas believes that other regions could not ‘be isolated from interest in the West’ (2006: 20), there is no recognition of, or concern for, dialogue among regions. The model of global sociology being posited here is of creative, autonomous, regional satellites orbiting the West where all the satellites need to refer to the West but it has no requirement to refer to them, or they to each other. The only injunction for the creation of a global sociology is an additive one, where the knowledge produced by the autonomous traditions would cumulatively contribute to the ‘growth of a genuine autonomous tradition throughout the world’ (Alatas, S. H. 2006: 21). Global sociology, in this understanding, would be the consequence of the interaction between regional traditions and the West, defined in civilizational terms, without due recognition of the extensive, and long-standing, entanglements between them. Put in other words, the basic premise of this argument appears to be as follows: there are regional cultures with their own specificities (civilizations); one of these cultures (Europe) established a tradition of scholarship around its particular epistemologies that became globally dominant; other regional cultures need to mine their deep heritage in order to locate local, yet autonomous-origin, equivalents (for example, Ibn Khaldun) and then develop regional traditions around these foci; once established, these regional traditions can become entangled with the European tradition (which remains both local and global) and thereby create a multicultural global sociology.

Theorists advocating a multicultural global sociology seek to address issues of sociological epistemology in the context of a world view mirroring that of theorists of multiple modernities. As I argued earlier, the idea of multiple modernities represents a kind of global multiculturalism, where a common (Eurocentred) modernity is inflected by different (other) cultures. However, by maintaining the idea of a general framework (identified with the experience of Europe) within which particularities (the experiences of ‘others’) are located, theorists of multiple modernities, in effect, neutralize any challenge that a consideration of other experiences and histories might pose to the epistemological adequacy of the general framework. Theorists of multiple modernities seek to disarm criticism by allowing for multiplicity at the same time as maintaining the fundamental structure of the original argument; that is, they offer a diversity of disaggregated histories in which Eurocentric history is avowedly de-centred. However, this leaves the standard Eurocentric (macro) narrative intact in its own ‘particular’ domain and fails to make the interconnections among those histories a specific focus of attention (see also Adams et al. 2005). This, I would argue, is an endeavour in which many scholars arguing for a global multicultural sociology are also complicit, whether knowingly or not.

As we shall see in the following chapter, even a scholar such as Raewyn Connell, who argues against forms of explanation that reify ‘as distinct “cultures” what are actually much more fluid, interconnected, messy social processes’, is nonetheless sympathetic to the ‘mosaic’ model of global sociology characteristic of global multicultural sociology (2010: 43). In her ‘mosaic’ view, the equal value of all cultures is affirmed and ‘the existence of multiple paths to knowledge is acknowledged’ (2010: 44). Although she suggests that this ought to be supplemented by a process of linking different forms and processes of knowledge (2010: 44, 45), the linking is primarily understood as a contemporary phenomenon and is not argued for historically. As I will go on to suggest, we need to reconstruct ‘backwards’ as much as forwards by taking seriously the interconnections between the alternative histories identified in arguing for a global sociology adequate to the conditions of the global within which it operates.

Notes

1For related arguments, see Depelchin (2005), Silva (2007) and, in the field of International Relations, Shilliam (2011).

2Satya Mohanty (2011) has further drawn attention to the literary endeavours of nineteenth-century Indian writers such as Senapati, Barua and Apparao, who in contesting colonialism also elaborated an ‘indigenous’ modernity as distinct from the colonial variety more usually discussed. In this way, he points to the role of literature in enabling a rethinking of modernity in the light of experiences other than those of Western subjects.