When the captor is captive: Teaching Southern Sociology in the North?

Stéphane Dufoix

doi:10.20336/rbs.948

Authors

Stéphane Dufoix Université Paris Nanterre https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4938-3810

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.20336/rbs.948

Keywords:

History of Sociology, teaching sociology, captive mind

Abstract

In the 1970s, the Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas proposed an analysis to account for the teaching of social sciences in the developing world, and especially in Asia. He coined the phrase “captive mind” to describe those students whose training was biased towards Western theories, concepts, meanings and authors taught to them by “captor minds”, the latter being either Asian social science instructors reproducing what they had been taught in the West or Western teachers merely transplanting their “universal” sociology to students wherever they may be. Even if Alatas wrote in 1974 that “there is no counterpart of the captive mind in the West”, we may wonder whether, in the past and also nowadays, sociological teaching in the West has not suffered from the same drawback, almost constantly reproducing both the same kind of visual bias (hyperopia in the South and myopia in the North) and the same form of almost continuous reliance on the same canon. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that this “hegemonic” gaze also relies on a specific end of teaching in the West, examines its effects and proposes an alternative centered on a new understanding of universalism.

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Author Biography

Stéphane Dufoix, Université Paris Nanterre

Professor of Sociology at the University Paris-Nanterre and senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.

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