4 - The Meaning of Alternative Discourses: Illustrations from Southeast Asia

Summary

The term ‘alternative discourses’ refers to works that attempt to both critically assess mainstream ideas in the social sciences that are generally regarded as unproblematic, as well as generate alternative concepts and theories. To the extent that mainstream social science is Eurocentric, the practioners of alternative discourses often see themselves as contributing to counter-Eurocentric social science. This chapter introduces the notion of alternative discourses by way of providing illustrations from Southeast Asia.

Introduction

That the social sciences in much of the Third World lack creativity and originality is something that has long been recognized by social scientists everywhere and has even become the topic of many research papers and books. To be sure, part of the problem has to do with the fact that the social sciences in much of Asia, Africa and Latin America were introduced by colonial powers and failed to be sufficiently indigenized, domesticated, or nationalized in order that they could be more relevant. This is due in part to the lack of continuity between the European tradition of knowledge and indigenous systems of ideas (Watanuki 1984, p. 283) and the non-existence of an organic relationship with the cultural history of the colony (Kyi 1984, p. 94).

While it is not true that there was nothing approximating social scientific theory in Asian and other non-Western societies prior to the introduction of the social sciences from Europe and America from the eighteenth century onwards, it is certainly worth noting that no indigenous schools or traditions in sociology or any other social science discipline ever came into being autochthonously in non-European societies. What I am referring to here is a general problem of knowledge even in countries like India, Egypt, Turkey, Korea and the Philippines where the social sciences are relatively more developed. In Korea in the 1970s, for example, scholars were ‘awakened’ to the need to establish a more creative Korean sociology (Shin 1994).