Decolonization and Social Science Research: The Case of Tunisia

Extract

The historic appearance of the social sciences as an intellectual activity seeking to be scientific is directly tied to the birth and development of industrialization in Europe and in other areas taken over by Europeans, notably North America. If one opens a treatise on sociology, for example, one sees that all the founding fathers of the discipline are men of European culture. It is true that in the last few years Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) had often been cited as one of the forerunners of scientific thought, but he is a forerunner, and not a founding father like Conte, Durkheim, Marx, etc. The principal preoccupations of these figures were obviously those of their society, which at that time was going through a phase of upheavels connected with industrialization. But with the colonial expansion, which is one of the principle concequences of that industrialization, the curiousity of European scholars in social sciences overflowed the limits of their own society; thus was born ethnography, ethnology, and later, anthropology.