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Southern Theory presents the case for a radical re-thinking of social science and its relationships to knowledge, power and democracy on a world scale. Mainstream social science pictures the world as understood by the educated and affluent in Europe and North America. From Weber and Keynes to Friedman and Foucault, theorists from the global North dominate the imagination of social scientists, and the reading lists of students, all over the world. For most of modern history, the majority world has served social science only as a data mine. Yet the global South does produce knowledge and understanding of society. Through vivid accounts of critics and theorists, Raewyn Connell shows how social theory from the world periphery has power and relevance for understanding our changing world from al-Afghani at the dawn of modern social science, to Raul Prebisch in industrialising Latin America, Ali Shariati in revolutionary Iran, Paulin Hountondji in post-colonial Benin, Veena Das and Ashis Nandy in contemporary India, and many others. With clarity and verve, Southern Theory introduces readers to texts, ideas and debates that have emerged from Australia's Indigenous people, from Africa, Latin America, south and south-west Asia. It deals with modernisation, gender, race, class, cultural domination, neoliberalism, violence, trade, religion, identity, land, and the structure of knowledge itself. Southern Theory shows how this tremendous resource has been disregarded by mainstream social science. It explores the challenges of doing theory in the periphery, and considers the role Southern perspectives should have in a globally connected system of knowledge. Southern Theory draws on sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, economics, philosophy and cultural studies, with wide-ranging implications for social science in the 21st century.
This book critically explores Global South perspectives, examining marginalised voices and issues whilst challenging the supremacy of Global North perspectives in literature. The unique value of this book lies in its extensive coverage of various Southern challenges, including disaster management, climate change, communication, resilience, gender, education, and disability. It also underscores the relevance of indigenous philosophies such as animism, Buen Vivir, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Neozapatism, Qi vitality, Taoism, and Ubuntu. Stemming from regions as diverse as Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America, these philosophies are brought into public discourse. By demonstrating their practicality in designing intervention programs and influencing policy-making, the book fills a critical gap in global Southern literature while promoting context-specific knowledge for improving well-being in the Global South contexts. This book’s content resonates with a diverse audience, encompassing students, academics, researchers, NGOs, and policymakers from postcolonial states in the Global South and those from Global North countries. Furthermore, it is highly relevant to communities within the Global North that mirror the Global South – those grappling with equity issues for indigenous populations. It has a versatile appeal that transcends disciplinary boundaries, encompassing cultural studies, sociology, international development, philosophy, and postcolonial studies, thus making it accessible to all educational levels. It holds particular interest for those in development studies, indigenous studies, government departments globally, international organisations, and universities worldwide.
As nation-states in the Northern Hemisphere experience economic crisis, political corruption and racial tension, it seems as though they might be 'evolving' into the kind of societies normally associated with the 'Global South'. Anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff draw on their long experience of living in Africa to address a range of familiar themes - democracy, national borders, labour and capital and multiculturalism. They consider how we might understand these issues by using theory developed in the Global South. Challenging our ideas about 'developed' and 'developing' nations, Theory from the South provides new insights into key problems of our time.
Shows how social theory about modern world from peripheral societies is equal in intellectual rigour and is often of greater political relevance to our changing world. This title draws on anthropology, history, psychology, philosophy, economics and cultural studies, with wide-ranging implications for the social sciences in 21st century.
This book, which combines scholarly articles with interviews, seeks to imagine a decolonized sociolinguistics. All the chapters are firmly grounded in southern approaches to knowledge production, focusing not only on epistemology but also on the complex relationship between epistemology and ontology. The chapters address issues ranging from author positionality to the central theorists of a southern sociolinguistics, and roam from the language classroom to the church, in ways which invite us to begin to decolonize ourselves and rethink normative assumptions about everything from academic writing to research methods and language teaching. The book provides scholars and teachers with inspiration for how to teach linguistics in ways that challenge colonial hegemonies and that allow one to ‘do’ sociolinguistics otherwise. It also makes a powerful argument that debates about decolonization, southern theory and social justice are not just academic pursuits: what is at stake is our future and how we imagine it.
Though his work was little known outside Italian intellectual circles for most of the twentieth century, anthropologist and historian of religions Ernesto de Martino is now recognized as one of the most original thinkers in the field. This book is testament to de Martino's innovation and engagement with Hegelian historicism and phenomenology--a work of ethnographic theory way ahead of its time. This new translation of Sud e Magia, his 1959 study of ceremonial magic and witchcraft in southern Italy, shows how De Martino is not interested in the question of whether magic is rational or irrational but rather in why it came to be perceived as a problem of knowledge in the first place. Setting his exploration within his wider, pathbreaking theorization of ritual, as well as in the context of his politically sensitive analysis of the global south's historical encounters with Western science, he presents the development of magic and ritual in Enlightenment Naples as a paradigmatic example of the complex dynamics between dominant and subaltern cultures. Far ahead of its time, Magic is still relevant as anthropologists continue to wrestle with modernity's relationship with magical thinking.
This book facilitates more careful engagement with the production, politics and geography of knowledge as scholars create space for the inclusion of southern cities in urban theory. Making Urban Theory addresses debates of the past fifty years regarding whether and why scholars should conceptualize southern cities as different and argues for the continued importance of unlearning existing theory. With examples from the urban question to environmental justice, urban infrastructure to basic income, this volume highlights the limitations of existing explanations as well as how thinking from the south entails more than collecting data in new places. Throughout the book, instances of juxtapositions, unease, unlearning and learning anew emphasize how theory-making from southern cases can open avenues to more creative possibilities. The book pulls theories apart, examining distinct components to better understand the universality and provinciality of empirical phenomena, causality and norms, including questions of what a city is and ought to be. This book delivers a clearer articulation of ongoing debates and future possibilities for southern urban scholarship, and it will thus be relevant for both scholars and students of Urban Studies, Urban Theory, Urban Geography, Research Methods in Geography, Postcolonial/Southern Cities and Global Cities at graduate and post-graduate levels.
Time is at the forefront of contemporary scholarly inquiry across the natural sciences and the humanities. Yet the social sciences have remained substantially isolated from time-related concerns. This book argues that time should be a key part of social theory and focuses concern upon issues which have emerged as central to an understanding of today's social world. Through her analysis of time Barbara Adam shows that our contemporary social theories are firmly embedded in Newtonian science and classical dualistic philosophy. She exposes these classical frameworks of thought as inadequate to the task of conceptualizing our contemporary world of standardized time, computers, nuclear power and global telecommunications.
Since its initial publication, this highly respected text has provided students with a critical review of the major research paradigms in the social sciences and the logics or strategies of enquiry associated with them. This second edition has been revised and updated.
This book describes how those individuals who are often most marginalised in postcolonial societies draw on age-old, non-western knowledge systems to adapt to the hardships characteristic of unequal societies in transformation. It highlights robust indigenous pathways and resilience responses used by elders and young people in urban and rural settings in challenging Southern African settings (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland) to explain an Indigenous Psychology theory. Flocking (rather than fighting, fleeing, freezing or fainting) is explained as a default collectivist, collaborative and pragmatic social innovation to provide communal care and support when resources are constrained, and needs are par for the course. Flocking is used to address, amongst others, climate change (drought and energy use in particular), lack of household income and securing livelihoods, food and nutrition, chronic disease (specifically HIV / AIDS and tuberculosis), barriers to access services (education, healthcare, social welfare support), as well as leisure and wellbeing. The book further deliberates whether the continued use of such an entrenched socio-cultural response mollifies citizens and decision-makers into accepting inequality, or whether it could also be used to spark citizen agency and disrupt longstanding structural disparities.