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

neoclassical economics, were then exported to the rest of the world with all
the authority of the most advanced knowledge, and all the weight of First

World wealth and power (Connell, 2007: x).

Though there are attempts made to correct this, metropolitan sciences continuously
update at home and are exported. Furthermore, ‘Metropolitan theory is distributed

through a global network of institutions including universities, scientific
organizations, journals and-as Arturo Escobar (1995) has eloquently shown-

development institutions from the World Bank down’ (Connell 2007: xi). A point

Connell makes is that ‘(t)o the degree that the making of modernity has been a
world-historical process, it can as well be narrated from its undersides as it can from

its self-proclaimed centres—like those maps that, as a cosmic joke, invert planet
earth to place the south on top, the north below’ (Connell 2007:117).

Comaroff & Comaroff (2012) also question ‘the universal premises of Euro-
American social theory founded on modernity and enlightenment’ (2012: 116). They

believe that ‘(a)s an ideology, it has never been dissociable from capitalism’
(Comaroff & Comaroff 2012: 116). Moreover, ‘Other modernity’s are treated as

transplants of the Euro-original’ (2012:114). The meaning of modernity however ‘is
dependent on context, serving to put people in particular times and places on the

near-or-far side of the great divide between self and other, the present and

prehistory, the general and particular—oppositions that are mobilized in a range of
registers from theologies to party platforms’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 2012: 119). The

positivist social sciences, modernist sociological theory ascendant from the 1950s,
deployed this grammar of oppositions such as foundational contrasts as mechanical

versus organic solidarity, status vs. contract, pre capitalist vs. capitalist (Comaroff &
Comaroff 2012:119). Though ‘Colonial/postcolonial studies … has taken pains to

transcend the assumptions and methods of modernization theory’ (2012: 119), the

question remains as to whether Sociologists in the global south, in this case South
Asia have done so sufficiently?

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