Rethinking postcolonial sociology

Gregor McLennan sees my book as inaugurating a new phase of “multiplex” postcolonial sociology. This approach moves away from sweeping generalizations about Eurocentrism, Manicheaism, complicity, and pervasive coloniality in “Western” sociology. It pays closer attention to sociology’s internal heterogeneity and is less distrustful of scientific norms such as validity, objectivity, evidence, autonomy, scientific neutrality, and explanation. More specifically, my approach relies (1) on the idea of “context” from the classic sociology of knowledge and intellectual history; (2) on the concept of “field” from Bourdieu; (3) on methods of “close reading” and textual interpretation from literary criticism; and (4) on the “historians’ craft” (Bloch) of using the most extensive available archive of published and unpublished sources. I argue that we can evaluate historical thinkers in their contexts, assessing the constraints and spaces of possibility they faced, and then examine their intellectual choices, the moves they make in the social scientific game. This approach aligns more closely with the ideas of the founders of postcolonial theory, who were more interested in texts that “brush up unstintingly against historical constraints” rather than those that are “inertly of their time” (Edward Said). McLennan agrees that postcolonial sociology is indebted to European Enlightenment traditions; I focus on its roots in the sociology of knowledge and sociological historicism. The article then responds to McLennan’s main “probes.” The first concerns the methodological problem of “labeling investigations as ʽsociologyʼ and specific people as ʽsociologistsʼ”, and the limits of field theory. The second concerns my “outline of a theory of colonial sociological practice,” which tries to understand the dilemmas facing sociologists in colonial situations and the historians who study them. The third probe addresses the question of the scientific exploitation of empire. The sociologists I emphasize did not approach the colonized as a pool of resources to be extracted and exploited but worked across the colonial boundary line to generate knowledge. Although the book focuses on the mid-20th century, I return in my comments to Durkheim, upon whose shoulders so much of the later work was standing. The key is that Durkheim was also a theorist of empire and colonialism and politically an anticolonialist. He described colonies as anomic spaces and rejected biological concepts and hierarchical notions of civilization. He rejected universalistic values while advocating a system of states governed by historically specific morality and law rather than violence. Finally, Durkheim reversed the “imperial gaze,” directing it back at Europe.