The Postcolonial Reconstruction of the Chicago School in the Philippines

Abstract In the Philippines, a group of scholars associated with the Institute of Philippine Culture took up and reworked the Chicago School tradition of social science research. “IPC sociology” has been depicted as an American transplant and, worse, a neocolonial project. Critics took issue with what they saw as its intellectual and material dependency on the United States, deeming it not just inappropriate but “irrelevant” to Philippine society. I will contest this reading and argue that IPC scholars didn’t just import the Chicago School tradition wholesale but had to reconstruct it in the face of challenges, pressures, and demands particular to Philippine society. In the process, they transformed it, producing a distinctly Filipino research tradition. I will tell the story of these reconstructions through the figure of Mary Racelis Hollnsteiner, whose academic career spans almost 70 years, virtually the entire history of social science research in the Philippines. The aims of the paper are twofold: first, to contribute to a global history of the Chicago School by highlighting the way it was taken up and transformed in the Philippines. Second, I use the case study to provide purchase on the question of what an authentic postcolonial sociology looks like in practice. In the case of IPC sociology, it came to be articulated not in opposition to Eurocentric legacies but through their use and adaptation.