The coming decline of social sciences

Shiv Visvanathan

Feb 9 2015 

The other day a friend of mine complained about the lack of gossip about the Social Sciences. He claimed that when an institution like the planning commission is erased, there should have been protest, debate, a sense of mourning because planning gave social sciences a focus. Planning demanded a new interdisciplinary among the social sciences and yet almost no one felt the need to debate its departure.

He said in an odd way the sources of social science are dying out. He cited three in particular. Civil society which provided the setting for many debates on energy, citizenship, democracy is silent. Even the debates on NREGA were more an act of accounting, budgeting than about citizenship and entitlements. Despite the best efforts of Jean Dreze, Aruna Roy, the NREGA debate, so symbolic of an approach to poverty, faded away. The problem exists but there is no problematic within which to discuss it fruitfully.

My friend claimed that TV had created a jingoistic, speeded-up social science. The social scientist lacks the telegraphic language of TV and, worse, lacks the space for debate. Apart from an occasional economist, TV hardly invites the social scientist. Even if it does, it pays court to the diasporic expert vacationing in India, pouring out his pound of nostalgia. Even newspapers have little that is academic, theoretical or philosophical. Print debates policy, confusing policy as plumbing with the music of socials science. Newspapers are content with catch phrases, instead of detailed analysis of a craft. 

Power of literature

They talk the language of smart cities when there should be full-blooded debates on migration, slums, the informal society, violence and unemployment. A bowdlerised social sciences relying on a few UN reports substitutes for critique. Indicators are the new substitute for ideology and social scientists are content with rankings, ordering societies in terms of development, education, gender and violence. It is as if someone memorises a Wimbledon seeding's list as substitute for understanding the creativity of tennis. 

The third threat is hardly talked about. It is the new effervescence in literature where Indian writing and publishing houses have made literary writing a profound source of power. Literature from Ananthamurthi to Taseer is more reflective, wiser about society than social scientists caught in the tired categories of modernity and post-modernism. Social Science has become a tutorial college, a parroting of ideas while the freshness of thought comes from the novelist. What is true of the novel is also true of journalism, especially journalists writing on the city who have produced an excitement about migration and urbanisation one cannot sense in social sciences. To understand the city, it is easier to read Jeremy Seabrook than plough through a tired academic sociology of the city.

The fourth threat comes from politics and politicians especially from the Right. The Left guards its ideological purity like virginity afraid of debate but the right has begun acquiring a custodyship over key terms like secularism, patriotism, wellbeing, development, nation state. Modi, Amit Shah or Bhagwat seem to provide the new correctness while social scientists watch helplessly. This reappropriation of terms and their transformations into an official vocabulary sends no warning bells into the academe. Even the few social scientists, especially historians, who object are of the Congress variety. Their academic sensibilities are as tired and faded as the political acumen of the Congress party.

Migrating to new domains

Another trend which is less noticed but critical is the fact that social problems like travelling facts tend to migrate into new domains. Questions of technology, ecology are deep-seated questions about society and not just management and cost-benefit analysis. The recent debates between the Madhav Gadgil and Kasturirangan reports on the Western Ghats are debates about how society constructs nature and about how people's knowledge about livelihood has to be part of the democratic imagination. In a different way, the power, presence and durability of an agricultural scientist like M.S. Swaminathan lay in his ability to hybridise the natural and social sciences in his work on bio-villages. Sustainability in that sense is a concept that has to include new notions of times, nature, memory, invention, justice to be viable. Viewed this way, Gadgil and Swaminathan are as important to social sciences as traditional scholars like Ashis Nandy and Andre Beteille.

One must emphasise the important of the market as a frame for the social science. Marketing surveys have become as important as electoral surveys and in fact contain a whole range of information on choice, desire, the body, sexuality and urbanisation which an ordinary academic sociologist is starved for. In fact, experts on the market like Santosh Desai and Rama Bijapurkar become philosophers of choice and desire and need to be taken more seriously in this context. 

Faded concepts

I realised that one is facing a situation where social science is being emptied of social questions. It is as if society has seceded from social science and its contend with folklore concepts from management, new spiritual gurus and spinoffs from cybernetics and ecology. Caught between mediocrity and irrelevance, the social scientist realises that he cannot be a mere establishment annexe, that he has to deep dig into his roots and explore the fresh sources for eccentricity, dissent, creativity and insight. He has to realise that many of the concepts he employed like nation state, secularism sounds faded and ne needs to build a new philosophical dictionary of concepts, case studies and even methodologies. Firstly there has to be a return to storytelling, to ethnography, to case studies with thick description that the anthropologist Clifford Geertz talked about. The diversity of lived experiences has to come alive. Sociology which ones prided itself on village studies, participant observations has few classics like MN Srinivas’ Remembered Village to offer. A density of case studies gives the scholar something to fall back upon, to renew his sense of the classic, to feel at one with great examples of the field. They are equivalent of great epics for our discipline. To write such books, the anthropologist has to become a listener, allow for the varieties of time to enter his study. Quick visits and speed are no longer necessary. Sociology, like a Russian novel, must allow for the complexity time and diversity of characters who add nuance to narratives. The Social Sciences has to become a munshi, a recorder, a memory of cultures who stay in the oral imagination or disappear in the course of development. Not only does memory become crucial but time beyond history, development has to be captured. The body and the sensorium have to return to the society and a social science that celebrates the senses returns to the senses. Colour, taste, smell, touch add a different dimension to sensuality, suffering and memory. A disembodied sociology becomes an abstract sociology. Sociology needs a range of micro-sociologies to retain its sense of diversity and agency which ofted get lost in the impersonality of structures. 

Sense of the future

Our Social Sciences is so stuck in history that it needs sense of the future. Dream, imagination, design now become a part of sociology as we know to ask the question about the city, the future of democracy, the fate of technology. Social science under the Modi era has become a dismal science preoccupied about the narrow idea of India. Sociology can create new horizons of the imaginary beyond the current dreams of the RSS and the VHP. It must imagine new worlds, new bodies so that we escape the dismal science of development being created by the regimes of today.

The Social Sciences must recognise that religion as metaphor, belief, theology is creating world views and social sciences must encounter them in playful debates especially around new technologies, new visions of the city, and new heuristics for ethics. Reality is not just out there, it needs to be constructed.

The idea of India in its current forms as technocratic, managerial, behaviouristic is dull. As an imagination, India is being out thought and out fought while we hide behind derivative ideas from China and USA. Unless the Social Sciences creates a new imaginary for India, our middle class will become dull, aspiring to a mediocre competence, playing a secretariat to a more creative world.

Finally, as an aspirational society, we have little place for the displaced, the defeated, the obsolescent. As an ethics of memory, the social sciences must create a deeper sense of the possibilities of diversity, whether it is a dying language, craft, a species or a way of life of life. Years ago, the sociologist Boas Santos talked of a sociology of emancipation. The logic of liberation leads straight to power. Brown substitutes for white but what one needs is emancipation which is critical about its concepts and playful about the future. By constructing new realties, new possibilities, new critiques our Social Sciences may reinvent a new playfulness which can rescue India from the grimness of its current future. Diversity is not just about difference but how the logic of difference creates new grammars of democracy in India. India needs to surprise itself if it needs to be a creative force in the future. 

The writer calls himself a social sciences nomad

For society’s sake

Without detailed ethnography the social sciences become distracted disciplines. Further these studies should unfold Roshomon-like, so they unravel a kaleidoscope of diverse perspectives.

One needs new studies of riots, disasters, cities, laboratories,forests.

One must add that it is not just science but domains like cricket, Bollywood, fashion that carry their own penumbra of social science concepts.

Marketing surveys have become as important as electoral surveys and in fact contain a whole range of information on choice, desire, the body, sexuality and urbanisation which an ordinary academic sociologist is starved for.