Rodolfo Stavenhagen, “Decolonializing Applied Social Sciences,” Human Organization 30, no. 4 (Winter 1971), 333-344.
Summary and description of two camps of social scientists operating in Mexico with regard to agricultural development. Transition between two sets of social scientists.
Notes
- 333 – “Rodolfo Stavenhagen, a Mexican social scientist, is currently Senior Staff Associate at the International Institute for labour Studies, Geneva. This paper is a slightly revised version of the author’s guest lecture at the thirtieth Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, held in Miami, April 1971.”
- Clearly a radical anthropologist with revolutionary leanings, never specified by political persuasion (marxist, socialist, etc.)
- “A second imperative refers to the problem of communications: how can research findings best be made available to those most in need of social knowledge yet usually least capable of acquiring it; who also happen to be precisely those groups most commonly studied by social scientists.”
- “A critical and committed social science must also turn from the traditional study of the underdog to that of the dominant elites and the system of domination itself. Ideological commitment by the social scientist to the anti-status quo might also lead to his emerging role as activist, and not merely as participant, observer. The applied social scientist cannot, by definition, be neutral to the larger political and ideological issues which determine the framework of his professional practices, whether he is engaged in international organizations or works on development problems within his own national context.”
- 334 – “It lies perhaps in the destiny of the social sciences that they should not only reflect the dominant forms of social organization of their times, but also — as they have done ever since they grew out of the social and political thought of the Enlightenment — that they should become major vehicles for the expression of the radical countercurrents and critical conscience that these very forms of organization have brought forth. This dialectical relationship between the social sciences and society finds its way into the ambiguous and frequently conflictive roles that social scientists and individuals are called upon to play in modern society.”
- “It has lately been found necessary in some quarters to decry anthropology in general, and its applied variety in particular, for its links to colonialism and imperialism. I believe this to be a healthy development, for the historical relation between colonialism and imperialism as world-wide systems of domination and exploitation on the one hand, and the use of social science in the management of empire, on the other, has up to recently been overlooked or ignored. It can no longer be neglected, and it has become clear to many of us that the methods, the theories, the various ‘schools of thought,’ the very objects of study and observation in anthropology and other social disciplines have been deeply colored by this historical relationship.”
- “Thus it seems to me that it is equally mistaken to deny the evident historical relationship between colonialism and anthropology (or between imperialism and the so-called sociology of development) — a question that lies in the domain of the sociology of knowledge — as it is to simply treat these disciplines as handmaidens of colonialist or imperialist domination.”
- “For it is precisely out of the science of society that the most powerful critiques of colonial systems, imperialist domination, totalitarian political structures and bourgeois class society have spriung. New generations of radical social scientists have arise — mainly in the Third World — who question some of the basic assumptions upon which social science in the industrial countries seems to stan. Yet it must be recognized that these social scientists themselves are a product of the way social science in general has developed.”
- 336 – “I am always touched by the prefaces to published monographs on Latin America, in which the grateful author expresses his acknowledgment to Don Simpatico, Dona Gracias and the other helpful inhabitants of San Pedro or San Miguel (or whatever the name of the barrio or the village might be), but for whose collaboration and hospitality the study might never have been written. Yet how frequently do those communities and these helpful informants whose live are so carefully laid bare by proficient researchers actually get to know the results of the research? Is any effort made to channel the scientific conclusions and research findings to them; to translate our professional jargon into everyday concepts which the people themselves can understand and from which they can learn something? And, most importantly, to which they can contribute precisely through such a dialogue?
- 337 – “In French-speaking Black Africa intellectuals and students tend to grade visiting foreign social scientists (particularly Frenchmen) according to their degree of mental decolonization before they begin to judge their professional capacities. In these countries the identification between colonialism and ethnology is such that the very name and nature of the discipline is in disrepute and rejected by many Africans.”
- 337 – “Yet precisely one of the more criticable and increasingly criticised aspects of social science — at least as far as the Third World is concerned — is that it is mainly concerned with studying the oppressed — from the outside. It should have become abundantly clear in recent years that the causes of oppression, or exploitation, or deprivation (relative or absolute), or simply backwardness and traditionalism, are to be found in the functioning of total systems, in the nature of the relationships binding the oppressed and their oppressors . . .. We must thus try to channel to the former not only scientific knowledge about themselves, but also about how the system works. And this requires giving attention to the other pole of the relationship, and perhaps the most important pole: that of the dominant groups.”
- “One would think that because of his social origins, his university education and his general place within the social structure, the social scientist should be well placed to carry out such studies; yet up to now his scientific and mental equipment does not seem to have carried him into this direction. By concentrating his attention upon the ‘underdogs’ in society, the social scientist has revealed precisely those tendencies which are most subject to the radical critique: the paternalistic or ‘colonial’ approach to the study of society. More than any of the other social disciplines, anthropology has been bound by these limitations.”
- 338 – “he can simply continue producing information — like an assembly line worker produces spare parts — without regard to its ultimate use. But surely such scientific alienation stands in direct contradiction to the role of the intellectual in society as a humanist and a social critic.”
“Or he can produce knowledge suited to prevailing and established interpretations of society, accepting and using in his work the premises upon which are predicated the continuity and stability of existing social systems. I would include under this heading the majority of studies on, say, acculturation, social class mobility, modernization, socioeconomic correlates of individual attitudes and behaviour, community monographs, etc. within the framework of functionalism and behavioralism. While such research has contributed considerably to an accumulation of knowledge in general, it has had little influence on changing prevailing patterns of the uses to which such knowledge is put and on the distribution of productive knowledge among different social groups. I am here consciously drawing an analogy between the accumulation of capital and the accumulation of knowledge in a capitalist society, insofar as both processes are an expression of the prevailing mode of social and economic organization.”
TRANSITION SENTENCE BETWEEN MY TWO GROUPS OF SOCIAL SCIENTISTS — a perfect description, from the perspective of the radical anthropologists, of the development-oriented econometricians and sociologists
“Thirdly, he can attempt to offer alternative explanations; explore new theoretical avenues; and exercise his intellectual critique of established or accepted ‘truths,’ and at the same time promote the redistribution of knowledge is a fashion suggested earlier. At this point, the accumulation of knowledge may become dangerous in the eyes of those who control the academic or political establishment . . ..”
And a summary of the other group of my thesis subjects — the critiquers of the Green Revolution development regime
- 340 – “In the second half of the twentieth century international technical aid has become something akin to what Christian missionary activity among heathens used to be earlier. The same apostolic zeal, the same moral justification, the same naivete about economic and political realities, the same basic subservience to and lack of critical appraisal of the international system of domination itself. Social scientists who work on various kinds of development programs within the international framework (either bilateral aid projects or those connected with international organizations), have not, until recently, challenged the basic assumptions upon which such aid has been based, many of which constitute theoretical misconceptions still widely held in social scientific circles concerning the nature of underdevelopment, the characteristics of the development process, and the interrelationships between the developed part and the underdeveloped part of the world.”
- “Nevertheless, this very experience over the last twenty or so years has demonstrated (to those who wish to see) the hollowness of many of these assumptions and the fruitlessness of many of these programs. . . . The social scientists involved in these programs have been the first to recognize their limitations. This has been one of their positive results: they have contributed to the development of the radical critique that I have proposed earlier.”
- “Though there has not been much publicity about this, the professional staffs of experts and technicians in a number of international agencies have lately expressed grave doubts and serious criticism about the operations they are involved in, and about the basic orientations that seem to guide the actions of these organizations. While some of this criticism simply proposes greater efficiency in existing programs, much of it is addressed to the implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumptions regarding the development process.”
- 342 – “Thus, while Mexican agrarian reform was revolutionary at first (up to 1940), the same reform (based on the same premises, the same mechanisms and the same ideology) has become conservative within Mexico’s contemporary social and economic structure. The role of reforms in society is but an expression of the relations between the various social and political forces at play, and it is the dynamic of these relations that will determine whether reforms are reformist or become revolutionary.”
- “Under these conditions, the applied social sciences must constantly redefine their role, or they will become meaningless technocratic appendages to the implementation of policies over which they exercise no influence whatsoever. I have encountered few applied social scientists who see the situation in this way; they usually accept a given set of policy guidelines from above, and if they tend to redefine problems at all it is more in operational than in political terms.”
- 343 – “It should be clear, for example, that the role of a sociologist or an anthropologist who participates in programs of diffusion of technical innovations in agriculture will vary radically according to whether these programs are carried out within a far-reaching agrarian reform and are addressed to the peasant beneficiaries of this reform, or whether they take place within a traditional setting of large estates, with rigid stratification systems, where a handful of modernizing entrepreneurs are the only ones who are able to take advantage of these innovations.”
- “A particularly relevant issue in Latin America at the present time is indigenismo, a term which denotes the various governnment programs directed at the incorporation of backward Indian populations into the mainstream of national life. Recently such programs have come under heavy attack by radical social scientists, particularly in Mexico and Peru. . . . The guiding hypothesis for indigenista has been that an acceleration process of directed acculturation or culture change will help break down this caste system, raise the Indian communities to the level of the surrounding environment and integrate Indians as fully fledged members of the national society. The nature of the national society itself was rarely analyzed. The mechanisms whereby the dominant classes of this national society (and before it, the colonial society) had in fact already integrated the Indians in a system of oppression and exploitation ever since the Conquest, but particularly since the expansion of capitalist production in agriculture was referred to as historical background but was not considered relevant to the present situation. By refusing to recognize the essential characteristics of the national society to which they belonged . . . the indigenistas squarely placed the onus of backwardness on the Indian communities themselves; on their culture, on their values systems and, ironically, on their supposed isolation.”
- “Of course these processes are occurring by themselves, and official indigenistas will hold that they are in fact combating them through enlightened paternalism, technical assistance, educational programs and the like. Critics, however, are doubtful, and would like to see a new kind of indigenismo as a powerful dynamic force which will serve not only bureaucratic palliatives to agonizing cultures and downtrodden peasants, but which will conter ethnocide as it is currently being practiced in Latin America (see the recent ‘Declaration of Barbados’ signed by eleven anthropologists concerned over this process, 1971) . . ..”
- “And as the case of the indigenismo shows, it is not a question of science versus politics, but of one kind of science-in-politics versus another.”
