Ó American Sociological Association 2018 DOI: 10.1177/0094306118779811 http://cs.sagepub.com Decolonizing Sociology RAEWYN CONNELL University of Sydney [email protected] The idea of decolonizing the curriculum is missionaries, explorers, surveyors, doctors, now under discussion in universities in translators, and more. In time this became pro- many parts of the world. Behind this lies fessionalized, with specific data-collecting expe- the question of decolonizing the knowledge ditions, some of them including great names in economy as a whole, and the disciplines the history of science: Joseph Banks, Alexander and domains within it. von Humboldt, Charles Darwin. The great bot- In this paper I outline what is involved in anistLinnaeusdidn’tgohimselfbutsentouthis decolonizing the discipline of sociology. apostles: one of them was aboard Lieutenant This is not actually a new issue: there is Cook’s Endeavour, sent to make astronomical a whole back-story of social critiques of observations from Tahiti, when the ship empire. We need to access this history as arrived at ‘‘Botany Bay.’’ well as understand how contemporary soci- Information from the colonized world ology is shaped by the global economy of was crucial for the growth of—among other knowledge. fields—botany, linguistics, geography, geolo- Dealing with those matters raises concep- gy, evolutionary biology, astronomy, atmo- tual problems about power and agency, spheric science, oceanography, and of course the agenda of change, and epistemological sociology (Connell 1997; Steinmetz 2013). structure. But this work also leads to practi- The hegemonic modern knowledge system cal questions: how to redesign curricula, is not so much western science as imperial reshape sociology’s workforce, and redistrib- science. ute resources. There is no single blueprint for Empire was challenged from the start by change; but there is enormous scope for the physical resistance of the colonized. invention and experiment, on the small scale Soon intellectual contestation was added. and the large. One of the most remarkable documents in the history of empire is the Nueva Coro´nica of Guama´n Poma, a descendant of the The Question of Empire Andean nobility. It is an illustrated descrip- It is now five hundred years since the over- tion of the social and political order under seas connections of Europe with other parts the Incas, a narrative of conquest, and an of the world took the shape of armed con- extended critique of the violence and quest, permanent colonies, and colonial inequality of colonial society under states—in other words, the structures of Spanish rule—and it was written about empire. Perhaps the decisive moment was 1615. The author was a contemporary of not 1492 but 1505, when the Portuguese Shakespeare.1 sent their seventh armed fleet (armada) into Critique from the perspective of the colo- the Indian Ocean and appointed Francisco nized continued throughout the history of de Almeida the first Viceroy of the Indies. empire. Striking examples include the He was given the job of setting up perma- Islamic anti-imperialism of Sayyid Jamal nent bases, grabbing control of the intercon- ad-Din al-Afghani in the nineteenth century tinental spice trade, and fighting off local (translations in al-Afghani 1968); Chinese rulers. All this he did. The Indians didn’t get rid of the Portuguese until 1961. 1 The dividends of empire were not only spices It was not published in Guama´n Poma’s life- time but survived in manuscript and can be and gold. They also included knowledge, on an seen in an excellent online edition today: increasing scale. Reportsflowedbacktoimperi- http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/ al centers from sailors, soldiers, governors, titlepage/en/text/?open=idp23904 399 Contemporary Sociology 47, 4 400 Featured Essay perspectives on western empire in the early in a postcolonial direction has gained trac- twentieth century, such as the nationalism tion and has begun to look like a collective of Sun Zhongshan (Yat-sen) (1927) and the undertaking. socialist feminism of He-Yin Zhen (transla- I see this as the significance—beyond their tions in Liu et al. 2013); and the powerful specific arguments—of four collections that analysis of settler colonialism in southern appeared almost simultaneously in 2010: Africa by Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, Julia Reuter and Paula-Irene Villa’s Postkolo- published as Native Life in South Africa in niale Soziologie; Encarnacio´n Gutie´rrez 1916. Rodrı´guez, Manuela Boatca˘, and Se´rgio We are today more familiar with the post- Costa’s Decolonizing European Sociology; 1950 texts known as ‘‘postcolonial’’ theory Sujata Patel’s ISA Handbook of Diverse Socio- or critique in the humanities. One of its logical Traditions; and Michael Burawoy, best-known documents, Frantz Fanon’s The Mau-kuei Chang, and Michelle Fei-yu Wretched of the Earth, grew immediately out Hsieh’s Facing an Unequal World: Challenges of the military struggle for independence in for a Global Sociology. Algeria. Edward Said’s cultural critique in They are reinforced by individually writ- Orientalism was less directly based on anti- ten but wide-ranging texts such as Syed colonial struggle, but Said had grown up Farid Alatas’s Alternative Discourses in Asian under British colonial rule in Palestine and Social Science (2006), Gurminder Bhambra’s Egypt and knew the story. Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the There was a continuing social critique of Sociological Imagination (2007), Wiebke Keim’s empire, colonial life, and postcolonial Vermessene Disziplin (2008), Julian Go’s Post- dependence. In the 1930s the young Jomo colonial Thought and Social Theory (2016), Kenyatta managed the amazing feat of and my Southern Theory (Connell 2007). turning Malinowskian ethnography into a cri- This movement has already moved tique of colonization, in Facing Mount Kenya; beyond initial statements. It has led to cri- Gilberto Freyre published the first version of tique and reformulation at a conceptual level his famous account of slave society in colo- (e.g., Rosa 2014; Bhambra 2014) and detailed nial Brazil, Casa-Grande e Senzala; and C. L. reexamination of the history of sociology’s R. James published his dramatic history of entanglements with empire (Steinmetz slave revolution in colonial Haiti, The Black 2013). It has also led to new perspectives in Jacobins. specific fields of sociology and allied disci- In the 1950s, the young Samir Amin plines, including criminology (Carrington, launched the rethinking of political economy Hogg, and Sozzo 2016), the sociology of edu- that eventually was published as Accumula- cation (Epstein and Morrell 2012), the sociol- tion on a World Scale; and the not-so-young ogy of disability (Meekosha 2011), the sociol- Rau´ l Prebisch launched the CEPAL analysis ogy of gender (Connell 2015), urban studies of Latin American economies that trans- (Robinson 2006; Watson 2009), and more. formed development studies and develop- ing state strategies. In the 1960s, Ali Shariati launched his synthesis of Shiite theology Reasons for Action and critical sociology in scathing critiques Sociology is part of the global economy of of neocolonial society, and Syed Hussein knowledge that grew out of the imperial traf- Alatas launched his sociological critique of fic in knowledge. In a process most clearly colonialist culture, postcolonial stagnation, formulated by the philosopher Paulin Houn- and intellectual dependence. These are just tondji (1997), empire generated a structural some high points. division of intellectual labor between periph- There is, then, a big back-story to the ery and metropole. This division is still deep- renewal of interest in postcolonial perspec- ly embedded in modern knowledge forma- tives among social scientists; we have a lega- tion. The colonized world was, first and fore- cy. It is only recently, however, that an agen- most, a source of data. Here raw material of da of transforming the discipline of sociology very diverse kinds was collected, often Contemporary Sociology 47, 4 Featured Essay 401 with the aid of indigenous knowledge main institutional base is a set of elite univer- workers, for shipment to the metropole. sities in the United States with PhD The metropole, or imperial center, aggre- programs and equivalent elite universities gated data from different parts of the colo- and institutes in western and northern nized world in libraries, scientific societies, Europe. All the top-rated journals are edited universities, museums, botanic gardens, here, most of the research funding is concen- and research institutes—a process now auto- trated here, the hegemonic curriculum is mated in databanks. This milieu in the formed and practiced here, overseas scholars metropole became the site of the theoretical travel to study or visit here, and the PhD moment in knowledge production. Research graduates from these institutions are strate- methods were formalized and routinized; gically placed to shape sociology in the next and specialized workforces were created generation. for producing and circulating knowledge, In mainstream theory (including method- forming the modern collective intellectual ology), there is little sense of being the prod- worker. In northern institutions, research uct of such a specific milieu. Read a modern- was further transformed into applied classic text like Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethno- sciences such as engineering, agronomy, methodology, Coleman’s Foundations of Social and medicine. In this applied form,