Understanding Culture

Society
and Politics
What we'll discuss
What is Social Science and Social
Studies?
Difference between Social Science
and Social Studies
Sociology, Anthropology and Political
Science
Founding Father of Sociology,
Anthropology and Political Science
 is a branch of the social science that deals with the
scientific study of human interactions, social groups and
institutions, whole societies, and the human world as
such. It is a science that studies the relationship between
the individual and the society as they develop and change
in history. It comes from Latin word "socious" meaning
'companion' or 'fellowship' and Greek word "Logos"
means 'knowledge or study'

Sociology
Auguste Comte (1798-1857)
Isidore Auguste Marie Francois Xavier Comte is
a French Philosopher and Mathematiian and
considered as the "father of sociology". He
coined the term "sociology" but originally used
"social physics" as term for it.
It aimed to discover the social laws that govern
the development of societies.
Three stages in the development of societies by
Comte: (1) theological stage (2) metaphysical
stage and (3) positive stage.
Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)
she is an English writer and reformist,
ethnographer, political economist, and
sociologists. She is considered as the "Mother
of Sociology".
Despite her physical disabilities, Martineau
traveled a lot, especially in the United States,
and wrote her travelogues.
In her accounts in "How to Observed Morals
and Manners(1838), the deep sociological
insights that we now call as ethnographic
narratives are fully.
She wrote on political economy and was
influenced by J.S. Mill, David Ricardo, and
Adam Smith.
K arl Marx (1818-1883)
He is a revolutionary and further contributed
to the development of sociology.
Marx introduced the materialist analysis of
history, which discounts religious and
metaphysical (spiritual) explanation for
historical development.
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 stood out as the sociologists who
compined revolutionary activity with scholarly
passion.
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)
French Sociologists, made
professionalization of sociology possible by
teaching it in the University of Bordeaux.
He was responsible for defending sociology
as an independent discipline from
psychology.
He argued that society possesses a reality
'sui generis' (that is, its own kind, or a class
by itself, unique)
His main contributioms are in the field of
sociology of religion, education and
deviance.
Max Weber (1864-1920)
He is another founding father of sociology, he
stressed the role odlf rationalization in the
development of society.
For him rationalization refers essentially to the
disenchantment of the world.
Science began to replace religion, people also adopted
a scientific or rational attitude.
People started to doubt myths and superstitious
beliefs.
Modern individual became independent on science to
order their lives.
In bureaucracy, efficiency is considered as the
supreme value, other values such as personal
relationships and human intimacies are gradually
discarded.
 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. It comes form Greek word
"Antropos" meaning 'human' and "Logos"
means 'study'.
Anthropology
Franz Boas (1858-1942)
is considered as the "father of American
anthropology".
He was the first anthropology to have rejected
the biological basis of racism or racial
discrimination.
He also rejected the popular Western idea of
social revolution or the development of societies
from lower to higher forms.
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.
Boas advocated cultural relativism or the
complexity of all culture whether primitive or
not.
Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski (1884-1942)
An anthropologist who contributed to the
development of modern anthropology.
A polish imigrant who did a comprehensive
study of Trobriand Island.
He developed what social scientists now call
as participant observation. It is a method pf
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 considered as one of the most influential
ethnographers in the 20th Century.
Ethnography is the practice of writing about
people.
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955)
He did fieldwork in 1906 to 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 Sociap
Anthropology in Oxford.
He has similarity with Durkheim in which advocated
the study of abstract principles that govern social
change.
He viewed individuals are mere products of social
structures.
According to his paradigm, 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.
The term `politics‟, is derived from the
Greek word `Polis‟, which means the
city state. It is a part of the social
sciencea that deals with the study of
politics, power and government.

Political Science
 Aristotle
is known as the Father of Political Science.
He is famous for his statement “Man is a
political animal”.
The antecedents of Western politics can trace
their roots back to Greek thinkers Socrates.
The antecedents of Western politics can trace
their roots back to Greek thinkers Socrates,
Plato (427–347 BC) and Aristotle (384–322
BC). The studies were philosophy oriented.
Plato wrote The Republic and Aristotle wrote
the Politics
 Saint Augustine of Hippo
was the Catholic bishop of Hippo in northern Africa.
He was a skilled Roman-trained rhetorician, a
prolific writer (who produced more than 110 works
over a 30-year period), and by wide acclamation, the
first Christian philosopher.
Augustine’s views on political and social philosophy
constitute an important intellectual bridge between
late antiquity and the emerging medieval world.
Although Augustine certainly would not have thought
of himself as a political or social philosopher per se,
the record of his thoughts on such themes as the
nature of human society, justice, the nature and role
of the state, the relationship between church and
state, just and unjust war, and peace all have played
their part in the shaping of Western civilization.
Niccolò Machiavelli
established the emphasis of modern
political science on direct empirical
observation of political institutions
and actors.
His famous book, ‘The Prince’ is a
guide to modern realist politics.
 Thomas Hobbes
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679) is best known for his political
thought, and deservedly so.
His vision of the world is strikingly original
and still relevant to contemporary politics.
His main concern is the problem of social and
political order: how human beings can live
together in peace and avoid the danger and
fear of civil conflict.
He poses stark alternatives: we should give
our obedience to an unaccountable sovereign
(a person or group empowered to decide every
social and political issue).
 John Locke
is among the most influential political
philosophers of the modern period.
In the Two Treatises of Government, he
defended the claim that men are by nature
free and equal against claims that God had
made all people naturally subject to a
monarch.
He argued that people have rights, such as the
right to life, liberty, and property, that have a
foundation independent of the laws of any
particular society.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
he remains an important figure in the history of
philosophy, both because of his contributions to
political philosophy and moral psychology and on
account of his influence on later thinkers.
The concern that dominates Rousseau’s work is to
find a way of preserving human freedom in a world
where people are increasingly dependent on one
another to satisfy their needs.
In his mature work, he principally explores two
routes to achieving and protecting freedom: the first
is a political one aimed at constructing institutions
that permit and foster the co-existence of free and
equal citizens in a community where they themselves
are sovereign; the second is a project for child
development and education that nurtures autonomy
and avoids the genesis of the most destructive forms
of self-interest.
Walter Lippmann (1889-1974)
was a newspaper commentator and respected world
news columnist.
His work (The Phantom. Public 1925) in the 20th
Century their works of the discipline of social
science shfted from state-centered to pluralism as
evidenced.
Pluralism led to the emphasis on analyzing group
interests rather than the state.
In this perspective, society is viewed as being
composed of several competing grous with different
interests that generate conflict.
David Easton - his work, "The Political System: An
Inquiry into the Stae of Political Science (1953)".
Liberal Tradition champions individual freedom as
best embodied in democracy.
The Clamor for
Decolonization
of Social
Sciences
Social sciences spread from the center (west) to the
peripheries (non-Western) of the world.
Most of their observations, mainly from
anthropology, were clothed in the cultural beliefs
and attitudes of the European colonizer.
It cannot denied that social sciences, as they
developed in the West, were employed by colonizer
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. oppression of indigenous peoples.
Indeed, modernist science, anthropology in
particular, has been deployed as a weapon against
indigenous peoples".
Social Darwinism, which proclaimed the survival of
the fittest, was used to justify the domination of
native people as well. as exploitation of the
underclass in industrial societies.
Most Westerners looked at the native as savage,
ilitirate, and incapabale of rational thinking.
For instance, in the development of societies,
European social scientists placed the non-Western
world in the lowest point in the revolutionary
process.
This kind of attitude also led to colonialism and the
destruction of indigenous cultures, language and
traditions.
Renowned Filipino writer Epifanio San Juan Jr.
(2006) provides a classic example for American
colonialism in tbe Philippines: "One example is
Dean Worcester, professor of anthropology at the
university of Michigan, who wrote one of the first
soucebooks of knowledge about the Philippines and
its people. 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".
The word "decolonization" only entered the lexicon in
the 1930s.
As two scholars rightly observed, "The story of the
Scientific Revolution in Europe itself is framed in the
ethnocentric Est-is-best discourse 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.
Ibn Khaldun(1332-1406) because him the muslim
scholars are now recovering.
His famous work is "Muqaddimah", which he finished
in 1378 and was intended as an introduction or
prolegomenon to "Kitab al-Ibar", is an empirical work
on the history of the Arabs and Berbers in several
volumes.
Khaldun can therefore be considered as the true
"Father of Sociology" from a global sociological point
of view.
Indigenization
of Social
Sciences in the
Philippines
The Philippines social sciences were part and parcel of
colonial education (Bautista 2000; Pertieta 2006).
The first courses in sociology were taught at the
University of Santo Tomas by Father Valentin Marin,
a Dominican friar in 1896 (Abad and Eviota 1982,132).
After World War II, the discipline of social sciences in
the Philippines simply perpetuated the colonial
knowledge production from American social sciences.
The first course in sociology offered at the University
of the Philippines, located in Manila, were in 1911 by
American professors; A.E.W. Salt and then by
University President Murray Barlett.
The Departments of Sociology and Economics and of
Political Science were established a year after the
Department of Anthropology in 1915 in the University
of the Philippines while the Department of Psychology
was intituted 11 years later.
It was in the 1960s that Filipino social scientists
clamored for making the social sciences relevant to the
Philippine society. Psychologist Virgilio Enriquez,
historian Zeus Salazar, and anthropologist Prospero
Covar Advocated for the indigenization of social
sciences.
Enriquez, known as the "ama ng sikolohiyang
Pilipino", and a former professor at the University of
the Philippine-Diliman, said that the clamor for
indigenization was done through "sikolohiyang
Pilipino" (Filipino psychology), which manifested its
beginnings in the 1970s.
Sikolohiyang Pilipino (SP) is defined as the psychology
rooted on the experience ideas, and cultural orientation
of the Filipinos.
The Pambansang Samahan sa Sikolohiyang Pilipino is
the only organization focusing on the advancement of
Sikolohiyang Pilipino in the Philippines.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o (B. 1938) is a Kenyan literary and
social activist, and currently a Distinguished Professor
of English and Comparative Literature at the
University of California, Irvine. As an activists, he was
imprisoned in 1977 and released in 1978.
Two leading exponents of SP, Narcisa Paredes-
Calinao and Maria Ana Babaran-Diaz, wrote:
"Sikolohiyang Pilipino refers to the psychology borne
out of experience, thought, and orientation of Filipinos,
based on the full use of the Filipino culture and
language".
Thus, Carolyn Sobritchea (2002) argued that the
srrategies for collecting information as suggested by
SP are very useful for doing feminist ethnography in
the Philippine context such as "pagmamasid"
(observation), "pakikirarmdam" (feeling your way
through), "pakikilahok" (participation), "pag
tatanong-tanong" (informal interview),
"pakikipagkuwentuhan" (informal coversation), and
"sama-samang talakayan" (focus group discussion).
Thank You for
listening!