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Research Journal of the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka- Rohana 12, 2020

The idea of the dominant social science powers such as UK, France, and USA -
metropolitan ‘core’- structuring systems of thought in the colonial peripheries and

its critique is known in the critical Social Science and Humanities circles. Such
criticisms started with the onset of imperialism, colonisation, orientalism, and

Western modernism. While such critique is gaining ground in social science circles
in South Asia, sociologists elsewhere have formulated arguments on how modernist

knowledge exercised dominance through social science disciplines, and through

English language and modernist education, over knowledge production and
dissemination processes and institutions in the colonial peripheries in the last 200

years. They further show how this was further extended after countries of the
colonial periphery obtained independence and developed sociological teaching and

1
research with a nationalist-developmentalist orientation .

According to Alatas, the social sciences were implanted in the colonies and other
th
peripheralized regions by the colonial powers in the 19 century onwards, ‘without
due recognition given to the different historical backgrounds and social

circumstances of these societies. (Alatas 2006: 24-25). Those who introduced social
science disciplines failed to sufficiently indigenize, domesticate, or nationalize so

that they could be more relevant. Despite political emancipation, the intellectual

dependence of the former colonies on Western models continued. Leading
theoretical perspectives originating from Europe and America are still present in

University syllabi and journal article bibliographies. Due to the wholesale adoption
of Western educational systems and philosophies formally, lack of creativity and

originality emerged in the knowledge production, utilization in research and
dissemination. This intellectual dependency is in both structures and relevance of

ideas derived from alien settings (Alatas 2006: 25). Though ruptures have occurred

in the relationship between Asian sociology and the Western sociology, academic

1 For information on the concepts operational during the colonial period in India, see
Imagining Sociology of South Asia: 1840-1870, Wiles lecture Series, UK.

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