Before going over this module, the learner must answer the PRE-TEST in order for the teacher

to assess
Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) and pinpoint specific topics that need emphasis during the discussion.

PRE-TEST

Essential Questions for Consideration

 What are the historical factors that gave birth to the social sciences in the West?
 What is the relationship between modernity and social sciences?
 What are the basic goals of sociology, anthropology, and political science?
 How did the social scientists in the developing countries respond to the colonial character of the social
sciences?
 Why do we need to develop culturally sensitive social sciences for the nation and our people in the age of
globalization?

Pre-Lesson Assessment Activities

Get clippings from newspapers on the current social problems of the country or in your local community,
for example, overpopulation, HIV/AIDS, teenage smoking, climate change, deforestation, mining, human right
violations, etc. In your opinion, how can the social sciences contribute in solving these specific problems? Why do
you think it is necessary to employ the knowledge of the social sciences to solve these problems?

Building Vocabularies People to Remember

Anthropology Ruth Benedict
Colonialism Franz Boas
Decolonization Auguste Comte
Enlightenment René Descartes
Globalization Emile Durkheim
Indigenization Immanuel Kant
Modern Period Bronisław Malinowski
Political Science Harriet Martinea
Postcolonialism Karl Marx
Reflexivity/youky as a Sikolohiyang Pilipino Margaret Mead
Sociology R. Radcliffe Brown
Max Weber

MODULE #1

The Birth and Growth of the Social Sciences

Learning Objectives

At the end of this lesson, the students are expected to:

 Explain anthropological and sociological perspectives on culture, society, and politics:

 Acquire basic knowledge about origin, growth, and development of the social sciences during the modern
period;
 Explore the significant personalities that contributed to the development of the social sciences;
 Demonstrate curiosity and openness to explore the significance of the social sciences, namely, sociology,
anthropology, and political science to human life;
 Recognize the Western and colonial origins of third world social sciences and

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  Knowledge production;

 Debate the need to decolonize the local sciences from Western biases; and
 Demonstrate curiosity and openness to explore the influence of globalization on the development of the
social sciences.

The Historical Background of the Growth of Social Sciences

In the development and progress of human knowledge, the social sciences were
the last to develop after the natural sciences. And while the origin of the social sciences can be traced back to the
ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, their development as separate fields of knowledge only
begun in the modern period (Collins 1994, p. 7).

Before the birth of modern social sciences in the West, the study of society, culture, and politics were
based on social and political philosophy (Scott 2006, p. 9). In return, social and political philosophies were
informed by theological reasoning grounded in Revelation based on the Bible. This was largely due to the
dominance of religious worldview and authority during this time. While pre-modern social thinkers employed
experiences and personal observation, just like modern scientists, they fit them within the overall framework of
their philosophy and the overall religious scheme of the Church.

Philosophy is distinct from science. Science would have not developed if it remained under the wings of
philosophy and theology. Philosophy is based on analytic understanding of the nature of truth asserted about
specific topics of issues. It asks the questions: "What is the nature of truth?", "How do we know what we know?"
Unlike philosophy, the sciences are based on empirical data, tested theories, and carefully contrived observations.
It does not ask the question about the nature of truth. Science seeks to discover the truth about specific causes of
events and happenings in the natural world. It is inductive. It proceeds from observing particular cases and moves
toward generalizing the properties common to these cases to other similar cases under the same specified
condition.

This definition of science is a very modern description. Before the modern period, the growth of the
sciences was slowed down because of the dominance of religious authority and tradition. However, with the
breakdown of the Church and its religious power after the French revolution, the sciences grew steadily and rapidly
to become the most widely accepted way of explaining the world, nature, and human beings (Harrington 2006).

The development of the social sciences during the modern period was made possible by several large scale
social upheavals and pivotal events. They can be summarized below.

SCIENCE HUMANITIES
Pure Science Visual Arts

Applied Science Performing Arts

Social Science Religion

Law

Linguistics

History

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 The Unprecedented Growth of Science

The Scientific Revolution, which begun with Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), refers to historical changes
in thought and belief, to changes in social and institutional organization, that unfolded in Europe roughly between
1550 and 1700. It culminated in the works of Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727), which proposed universal laws of
motion and a mechanical model of the Universe. The 17th century saw the rapid development in the sciences.
Along with Sir Francis Bacon, who established the supremacy of reason over imagination, René Descartes and Sir
Isaac Newton laid the foundation that allowed science and technology to change the world. The discovery of
gravity by Sir Isaac Newton, the mathematization of physics and medicine paved the way for the dominance of
science and mathematics in describing and explaining the world and its nature. With the coming of the Scientific
Revolution and the Age of Reason, in the 16th and 17th centuries, nature was to be controlled, "bound into service
and made a slave" (Capra 1982, p. 56). From the Medieval cosmology or model of the universe that defines it as
divinely ordained, people shifted to the model of the universe as a big machine. The triumph of this model of the
universe was facilitated by Newton's Physics. Descartes' separation of the physical from the spiritual, the body from
the mind, also led to the triumph of valuing the physical over the spiritual. Once the physical universe is considered
as a machine, it soon became apparent that human beings can explore it according to science in order to reveal its
secrets (Merchant 1986).

The Secularization of Learning and Education

The modern period marked the growing triumph of scientific method over religious dogma and theological
thinking. The triumph of Reason (specifically Western Reason) and science over dogma and religious authority
began with the Reformation. The Protestant movement led by Martin Luther eroded the power of the Roman
Catholic Church. It challenged the infallibility of the Pope and democratized the interpretation of the Bible. Then,
there was the Enlightenment. This was largely a cultural movement, emphasizing rationalism as well as political
and economic theories, and was clearly built on the Scientific Revolution (Stearns 2003, p. 70). In the Age of
Enlightenment, philosophers led by Immanuel Kant challenged the use of metaphysics or absolute truth derived
mainly from unjustified tradition and authority such as the existence of God. Kant advocated the use of reason in
order to know the nature of the world and human beings. In 1784, Immanuel Kant wrote his famous essay, "What
Is Enlightenment?" Kant heralded the beginning of the Modern Period when he defined Enlightenment as the
courage to know.

Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make
use of his understanding without direction from another. Self incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies
not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another.
Sapereaude! "Have courage to use your own reason!"-that is the motto of enlightenment.
(http://www.allmendeberlin.de/What-is-Enlightenment.pdf, retrieved August 7, 2014)

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 Whereas in the Medieval Period, universities relied mainly on religious tradition and the Bible to explain the
nature of the universe and the place of human being in the grand scheme of things, the modern universities
started to rely on science and its method to interpret the world. Max Weber, one of the leading figures in modern
sociology, described this process as rationalization. Rationalization means that social life is more and more
subjected to calculation and prediction. Calculation and prediction can only be achieved if human beings and
society rely on regularities established by modern science. Earlier people explained diseases through divine
intervention. With the discoveries of germ theory and the development of vaccination by Louis Pasteur, people
relied more and more on medical knowledge to deal with diseases. As French sociologist Francois Lyotard (1984)
points out, Science triumphed because it provided reliable results.

Another element of rationalization is the separation between different social spheres, especially between
the Church and the universities. The collapse of religious authority and the gradual erosion of religious domination
over social life of the people led to the use of classical humanistic resources such as ancient philosophy and
humanities to advance human knowledge independent of Revelation (Zeitlin 1968, pp. 3ff).

The Rise of Universities

Education is the single most important factor in the rise of social sciences. The growth of universities also
contributed to the triumph of science. Secular subjects or subjects dealing with natural world proliferated in the
universities. Merchants and capitalists supported universities and institutions of secular learning because they
became the hub of training future scientists, technocrats, and technological innovators. Durkheim, one of the
founding "fathers" of sociology, for instance, lectured on the need to secularize education and base the curriculum
on the need of nation-state-to develop citizens necessary for the modern world (Collins 1994, p. 11).

The Dissolution of Feudal Social Relations

With the intensification of commerce and trade in the 17th century, many medieval guilds or workers'
cooperatives were dissolved and absorbed into the emerging factory system. The factory system and the
unprecedented growth in the urban centers due to trade and commerce, attracted a lot of agricultural workers and
mass of rural population to migrate to urban centers. This created the modern cities. This development forced
many social scientists during this time to study the effects of the dissolution of feudal relations on the social life of
the people. Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936), a German sociologist, and contemporary of Max Weber, lamented the
passing away of gemeinschaft or community because of urbanization. Tönnies' classic book Community and
Society (1957) showed how the modern way of life had drastically changed the way people relate to one another.
Whereas in traditional communities people had warm relationships with the members of the community, in modern
cities or gessellschaft, individualism gave way to cold and calculated social relationships. As capitalism replaced
agricultural economy, people began to see their relationships with other people as mere economic transactions
rather than as a form of personal relationships.

Trade and Commerce

Livres des merveilles du monde recorded the travels of Marco Polo, an Italian merchant from Venice. This
book introduced the Europeans to Asia and China, and inspired Columbus' five journeys to America (1492-1506).
From Marco Polo's travels (1276-1291) to Magellan's circumnavigation of the world (1519-1522), the travels of this
period fed the imaginations of the Europeans with vivid descriptions of places whose very existence they had so far
been unaware of. These travelogues had not only inspired European merchants and governments to explore the

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 non-Western world but also provided the social scientists the raw data to create a universal model of social
development.

Later in the 18th century, trade and commerce greatly accelerated. Charles Tilly, a historian, believed that
this was one of the major factors in the large-scale change in European history that also determined largely the
direction of the social sciences. Both domestically and around the world, European merchants played a growing
role in trade and commerce. Anthropologists also began to compare the differences between rural life and city life,
between the civilized life and the supposed "savage" life of non-Western people. As many travel accounts reached
the Western world, especially in the accounts of Harriet Martineau, a British political economist and sociologist,
social scientists shifted their attention to non-Western world as a model of the early stage of Western civilization.

The Rise of Individualism

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 The intensification of commerce and trade gradually replaced barter with theintroduction of money and
banking system. Soon banking system provided merchants and capitalists the leverage to extend credit and
transactions. The introduction of money enabled people to deal with people in an impersonal manner. Money made
possible the reduction of human interaction to mere business-like transactions devoid of any warmth and personal
touch. This led George Simmel(1858-1918), a German sociologist in the early 20th century, to decry the growing
depersonalization of life due to the introduction of money. Money economy transformed individuals to autonomous
consumers who were released from attachment to local contexts and traditions. Hence, the dominance of money in
social life paved the way for individualization of lifestyle and the birth of plural relationships. This condition became
an important focus of social scientists.

It compelled them to explain how the “new economy,” which was industrial capitalism, that replaced the
traditional feudal relations, had drastically shaped human character and traits. The transition from feudal economy
to industrial capitalism heralded the creation of people who no longer relied on traditional norms and prevailing
culture. Modern individuals asserted their freedom to choose. Through education and the spread of scientific
worldview, people saw their lives as no longer at the mercy of fate or destiny. Individualism is simply the
recognition of the power of the individual to assert ones freedom against the given norms and structures of
society.

The vast intensive and extensive growth of our technology which is much more than just material
technology entangles us in a web of means, and means towards means, more and more intermediate
stages, causing us to lose sight of our real ultimate ends. This is the extreme inner danger which threatens
all highly developed cultures, that is to say, all eras in which the whole of life is overlaid with a maximum
of multi-stratified means. To treat some means as ends may make this. Situation psychologically tolerable,
but it actually makes life increasingly futile. (Source: Frisby, David and Mike Featherstone, eds. 1997.
Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, p. 97. London: Sage.)

The Birth of Social Sciences as a Response to the Social Turmoil of the Modern Period

Sociology is a branch of the social sciences that deals with the scientific study of human interactions, social
groups and institutions, whole societies, and the human world as
Such. Of course, sociology also addresses the problem of the constitution of the self and the
individual, but it only does so in relation to larger social structures and processes. Sociology.
Therefore, is a science that studies the relationship between the individual and the society as
they develop and change in history. Sociology does not only study the existing social forms
of interactions but also pursues the investigation of the emergence of stable structures that sustain such
interactions.

Auguste Comte (1798-1857), a French philosopher and mathematician, is the founding father of
sociology. He coined the term "sociology" but he originally used "social physics as a term for sociology. Its aim was
to discover the social laws that govern the development of societies. Comte suggested that there were three
stages in the development of societies, namely, the theological stage, the metaphysical stage, and the positive
stage. Comte's sociology has always been associated with positivism or the school of thought that says that
science and its method is the only valid way of knowing things.

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 Unknown to many students of sociology, however, there were also women scholars who were responsible
for the development of sociology. The "founding mother" of sociology is Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), an
English writer and reformist. With physical disabilities, Martineau traveled a lot, especially in the United States, and
wrote her travelogues. In her accounts expressed in How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), the deep
sociological insights that we now call as ethnographic narratives are fully expressed. She also wrote on political
economy and was influenced by J. S. Mill, David Ricardo, and Adam Smith.

After Auguste Comte, the German philosopher and revolutionary Karl Marx (1818- 1883) further
contributed to the development of sociology. Marx introduced the materialist analysis of history which discounts
religious and metaphysical (spiritual) explanation for historical development. Before Marx, scholars explained social
change through divine intervention and the theory of “great men.” However, Marx advocated the use of scientific
methods to uncover the deep structural tendencies that underlie great social transitions, for instance, from
agricultural to modern industrial capitalist society. Marx belonged to the realist tradition of social sciences that
believed in the power of scientific reason to know the nature of society and human beings. Unlike any other
sociologists, Marx stands out as the sociologist who combined revolutionary activity with scholarly passion.

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 Another French sociologist, Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), made possible the professionalization of
sociology by teaching it in the University of Bordeaux. Durkheim was responsible for defending sociology as an
independent discipline from psychology. As a social realist, Durkheim argued that society possesses a reality sui
generis (that is, its own kind, or a class by itself, unique) independent of individuals and institutions that compose
it. Durkheim famously argued that society pre- existed the individuals and will continue to exist long after the
individual is dead. His main contributions are in the field of sociology of religion, education, and deviance.

Another founding father of sociology is Max Weber (1864-1920). Weber stressed the role of
rationalization in the development of society. For Weber, rationalization refers essentially to the disenchantment of
the world. As science began to replace religion, people also adopted a scientific or rational attitude to the world.
People refused to believe in myths and superstitious beliefs. In this way, modern individuals became dependent on
science to order

their lives. And the greatest application of scientific way of life is in bureaucracy, which Weber saw as a
mammoth machine that will eventually curtail human freedom. Because in bureaucracy efficiency is considered as
the supreme value, other values such as personal relationships and human intimacies are gradually discarded.

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 Anthropology

Anthropology as a scientific discipline originated from social philosophy and travelogues of Western
travelers. It grew out of the encounters of social scientists with the non-Western world. According to Allan Barnard
(2004), "anthropology emerged as a distinct branch of scholarship around the middle of the nineteenth century,
when public interest in human evolution took hold. Anthropology as an academic discipline began a bit later, with
the first appointments of professional anthropologists in universities, museums, and government offices" (p. 15).
Many pioneers in anthropology built a universal model of cultural development patterned according to Darwin's
evolutionary theory that locates all societies in the linear evolutionary process. Like sociology, anthropology
developed during the years of two World Wars (Barnard 2004, p. 37). Four great anthropologists helped to
formalize and advance anthropology as a discipline, namely, Franz Boas (1858-1942), Bronisław Kasper Malinowski
(1884-1942), Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955), and Marcel Mauss (1872-1950).

Franz Boas is often considered as the father of modern American anthropology. He was the first
anthropologist to have rejected the biological basis of racism or racial discrimination. He also rejected the popular
Western idea of social evolution or the development of societies from lower to higher forms. This kind of theory
influenced by Darwin was rejected by Boas in favor of historical particularism.

In this doctrine, each society is considered as having a unique form of culture that cannot be subsumed
under an overall definition of general culture. Kwakiutl dancing, for example, in Boas’ analysis can only be
understood according to the meanings ascribed to it by the participants rather than seeing it as part of a general
social function.

Consistent with his anti-evolutionary theory, Boas advocated cultural relativism or the complexity of all
culture whether primitive or not.

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 Another anthropologist who contributed to the development of modern anthropology is Bronisław
Kasper Malinowski. He was a Polish immigrant who did a comprehensive study of Trobriand Island. Based on his
field study, he developed what social scientists now call as participant observation.

It is a method of social science research that requires the anthropologists to have the ability to participate
and blend with the way of life of a given group of people. He is also considered as one of the most influential
ethnographers in the 20th century. Ethnography is literally the practice of writing about people. Often, it is taken to
mean the anthropologist’s way of making sense of other people’s modes of thought, since anthropologists usually
study cultures other than their own.

Another influential anthropologist is Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown. He did fieldwork in 1906-1908. on the
Andaman Islands east of India, and published his reports in the diffusionist style, but later shifted his theoretical
orientation. In 1937, he became the Chair in Social Anthropology in Oxford. Unlike Malinowski, but similar to
Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown advocated the study of abstract principles that govern social change. He saw individuals
as mere products of social structures. This view led to the establishment of structural-functionalist paradigm in
anthropology. According to this view, the basic unit of analysis for anthropology and social sciences are the social
structures and the functions they perform to maintain the equilibrium of society.

Political Science

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 Political Science is part of the social sciences that deals with the study of politics, power, and government.
In turn, politics refers to "the process of making collective decisions in a community, society, or group through the
application of influence and power" (Ethridge and Handelman 2010, p. 8). Political Science studies how even the
most private and personal decisions of individuals are influenced by collective decisions of a community. Divorce,
for instance, may be a very personal matter among couples, but the decision and the rules on divorce are shaped
by collective decisions arrived at through conflict and antagonism on different interest groups within society,
especially religious groups. As women's rights advocates often claim, "The personal is political.

Whereas other social sciences have a quite clear history, political science has a complex history. Its earlier
form can be traced backed to the ancient Greek political philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Later it
developed into a religious-oriented tradition beginning with Augustine, and later secularized by Machiavelli,
Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. The preoccupation of these modern political philosophers is to explain the transition
of Western
societies from savagery toward democratic commonwealth. Their works, highlighting thesocial contract theory,
became the foundation of modern democratic theory.

Some scholars argue that political science is a unique American invention. Hence, its focus has always
been the narrative of democracy. The science of the political during the 19th century was organized around the
concept of the state as elaborated by German émigré Francis Lieber, who taught at Columbia University. In the
20th century, the discipline of social science shifted from state-centered to pluralism as evidenced in the works of
Lawrence Lowell (Public Opinion and Popular Government, 1913) and, later, Walter Lippmann (The Phantom
Public, 1925). Pluralism led to the emphasis on analyzing group interests rather than the state. In this view, society
is viewed as being composed of several competing groups with different interests that generate conflicts.

Later, political science will be dominated by behavioral orientation that defines the discipline as an
empirical science. This shift was advanced by David Easton in his work The Political System: An Inquiry into the
State of Political Science (1953). This was also the beginning of liberal tradition in political science. Liberal tradition
champions individual freedom as best embodied in democracy. Like in sociology, critical tradition in political science
was not marginal to the discipline. The works of Herbert Marcuse and the members of the Frankfurt School
became a loud critique within political science itself.

In the 20th century, political science has moved from behavioral approach that emphasizes scientific
method towards doing research on more pressing social problems. Today, political science is composed of diverse
paradigms and interpretations.

The Colonial Origin of the Social Sciences

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 The Clamor for Decolonization of Social Sciences

As discussed above, the images created by the social scientists around the 18th century carried a
very European view of non-Western world. Social sciences spread from the center to the peripheries of
the world. Most of their observations, mainly from anthropology, were clothed in the cultural beliefs and
attitudes of the fair European. It cannot be denied that social sciences as they developed in the West
were employed by colonizers in order to further subjugate the inhabitants of the non-Western world. As
Simale and Kincheloe (1999) observed, "The denigration of indigenous knowledge cannot be separated
from the oppression of indigenous peoples. Indeed, modernist science, anthropology in particular, has
been deployed as a weapon against indigenous peoples" (p. 29).

Social Darwinism, which proclaimed the survival of the fittest, was used to justify the domination
of native people as well as the exploitation of the underclass in industrial societies. In fact, most
travelogues and descriptions of the European travelers were full of factual errors and had belittling
descriptions of natives. When European explorers, just like social scientists, encountered the natives,
they found themselves different from the natives. Most Westerners looked at the natives as savage,
illiterate, and incapable of rational thinking. And these colonial biases were also echoed in the social
sciences during that time. For instance, in the development of societies, European social scientists
placed the non- Western world in the lowest point in the evolutionary process. This kind of attitude also
led to colonialism and the destruction of indigenous cultures, language, and traditions. E. San Juan, Jr.
(2006) provides a classic example for American colonialism in the Philippines:

Complicit with the invading military, US academics were appointed to implement the systematic
“tutelage” of the Filipino subject. One example is Dean Worcester, professor of anthropology at the
University of Michigan, who wrote one of the first sourcebooks of knowledge about the Philippines and
its people. He participated in the first Philippine Commission in 1899 on the basis of his expertise on
zoological specimens collected in the archipelago. As Secretary of the Interior for 13 years, Worcester
became notorious for denouncing the “barbaric” practices of slavery and peonage of the Muslims, thus
judging Filipinos unfit for being recognized as a people or a nation (p. 51).

Because social sciences were imported from the rich Western countries, many scholars in former
colonies and developing countries are now clamoring for decolonization of the social sciences. As two
scholars rightly observed, "The story of the Scientific Revolution in Europe itself is framed in the
ethnocentric West-is-best discourse of colonialism." Social scientists advocating decolonization or de-
Westernization of science believed that the methods and concepts, the epistemology, and the
philosophical worldview that inform Western social sciences are not as universal as Western scholars
claim. Western medicine, for instance, is a unique product of Western civilization. Outside the Western
civilization, there are other existing alternative medical systems that are even much older than Western
medicine.

Indigenization of Social Sciences in the Philippines

In the Philippines, social sciences after World War II simply perpetuated colonial knowledge
production from American social sciences. Many Filipino social scientists such as Virgilio Enriquez, a
psychologist; Zeus Salazar, a historian; and Prospero Covar, an anthropologist advocated for the
indigenization of social sciences.

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 Moreover Prospero Covar, a former professor at UP Diliman, recalled that the clamor for
indigenization was done through Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino Psychology) that manifested its
beginnings in the 1960s when the UP Community Development Research Council challenged the
applicability of Western concepts, theories, and research tools, and subsequently embarked upon
researches on Filipino concepts and indigenous cultural forms.
Sikolohiyang Pilipino (SP) is borne out of this move to indigenize social sciences in the
Philippines. Two leading exponents of SP, Narcisa Paredes-Canilao and Maria Ana Babaran-Diaz, wrote:
"Sikolohiyang Pilipino refers to the psychology borne out of the experience, thought and orientation of
Filipinos, based on the full use of the Filipino culture and language" (p. 49). According to these authors,
"The idea is that the social sciences, such as Western academic psychology, are very much a product of
the common sense concepts and lived daily realities of the white male fathers of psychology, their
respective communities, and local histories. Thus, Carolyn Sobritchea (2002) argued that the strategies
for collecting information as suggested by SP are very useful for doing feminist ethnography in the
Philippine context such as pagmamasid (observation), pakikiramdam(feeling your way through),
pakikilahok (participation), pagtatanong-tanong (informal interview), pakikipagkuwentuhan (informal
conversation), and sama-samangtalakayan (focus group discussion). The current direction of SP can also
be applied to decolonization of Filipino social sciences. It was a movement that systematically critiqued
the theories and methodologies of Western psychology, and on a more constructive plane, it aimed to
create a psychology relevant to and based on Filipino indigenous ways of knowing, living, and valuing,
"in short, a psychology that is appropriate and significant to Filipinos" (Pe-Pua 2006, p. 111).
Indigenization comes after decolonization. Reconstructing Filipino psychology tailored-fit to Filipino local
experience can proceed in two levels: from within and from without (Enriquez 1995).

Social Sciences in the Era of Globalization

While science may be considered as a universalizing form of knowing, it has to be

sensitive to the local cultures of the people that adopt it. Social sciences, in particular,
because they study cultural meanings and social change, must be able to address the
concerns and problems of the local communities rather than being merely a tool to continue
the control of Western worldview on local cultures. In the era of globalization, the strongest
weapon against being swallowed in the vortex of homogenization of culture is to rely on its
traditions and collective memories of its people. Such collective memories empower them
against being swallowed by the torrent of Western values.
In the era of globalization, social sciences face the problem of plurality of paradigms and
methods. According to Gerald Delanty (2006), a British sociologist, "The current situation," of the social
sciences, "is characterized by post-disciplinary developments and a related plurality of theoretical and
methodological approaches" (p. xviii). "These tendencies tend to undermine the venture of grand theory
that was part of the classical social theory." Gone are the days when social scientists dreamt of creating
an all-encompassing theory to explain large-scale historical upheavals and social change.

With globalization, social sciences welcomed the proliferation of different social theories and
ideological orientations. The critique of Eurocentrism of traditional social sciences allows indigenous
cultures and other non-Western "subjugated knowledges" to reclaim their voices. Other than
decolonizing Western social sciences, the social sciences are also being transformed by feminism and
postmodern currents. Henrietta L. Moore (2010) defines the feminist reorientation in anthropology:

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 Feminist anthropology is concerned with critically examining relations between women
and men, and investigating how gender, embodiment and sexuality are produced through
complex relays of power involving ideologies and social institutions. Its focus of analysis has
shifted over time, moving from an initial emphasis on women to a concern with gender relations,
issues of difference and identity, and sexuality and heteronormativity [strict distinction between
male and female sexes) (p. 284).

Feminist approaches in social sciences question the gender biases inherent in traditional social
sciences. They do not only challenged the exclusion of women from the "male-stream" (as mainstream)
disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and political science, but also more radically, they questioned the
unacknowledged male-bias (or androcentric orientation) of many theories and measurements. In
particular, classical women sociologists approached the task of analyzing society from their distinctive
knowledge and experiences as women, and that this standpoint gave them particular advantages as
students of society. One of the most significant contributions of women in social sciences is the rejection
of the theoretical stance in which the theorist locates herself or himself outside and apart from what she
or he analyzes, speaking as a disinterested and omniscient observer (Lengermann and Niebrugge-
Brantley 2001, p. 131). This is reflexivity or the awareness of the social scientists of the ideological,
political, and social biases of their standpoints when doing research and publishing their works for the
wider public. Feminists argue that many male social scientists, including women, in most instances, are
never aware of the gender biases of their studies and research. When social scientists, for instance,
study IQ or intelligence, they usually make generalizations that do not discriminate between the
experience of women and men.

POST-TEST

Summative Assessment

 There are very few women included in the history of the development of the social sciences-
sociology, anthropology, and political science. Do a research on the contributions of women to the
development of the social sciences in the early 18th century. Make sketches or gather pictures of
these women and write about their contributions below the pictures or sketches.
 From your history classes, how did the Spaniards and American colonizers describe and view the
native Filipinos? How will you assess these images and representations of native Filipinos and their
way of life?

Subject Description: Prepared by: Clindon C. Andaya, LPT Page 14 of 14

Understanding Culture Society and Teacher
Politics