The ‘Other’ in Sociological Canons: Reading the Trinity through Critical Post-colonial Lens

The imagery of 'otherness' played a significant role in modern Europe's cognisance of the orient, the colonised, the feminine and the homosexual which were viewed as threats to the values of a 'rational, progressive and civilised' society. But how was 'the non-European other' represented in classical sociology's canons authored by the trinity of Durkheim, Weber and Marx? The paper focuses on Durkheim's examination of the Hindu sati as an altruistic suicide, Weber's theorisation that the European Protestant Christianity could only produce rationality and capitalism, and Marx's non-reflexive neglect of the progressive pre-modern from India's pre-colonial past. A critical post-colonial reading of the selected texts identifies the ahistorical, orientalist, racialised, colonialist and historicist fault lines that crisscross the sociological canons. The time is ripe to rectify the denial of subjecthood to the 'non-western other' that we often encounter in the sociological canons. The paper concludes that the 'non-western other' is capable of being a subject in her own right. The critical engagement with the sociological canons is a small step towards building the ground for a more reflexive and historically specific global sociology in the post-colonial era. As an intellectual endeavour of the post-colonial era, global sociology should be vigilant about global capitalism's tendency towards obliterating the diverse ways of thinking and acting. Keywords: Post-colonial SociologyGlobal SociologyGlobal CapitalismNon-western ModernityClassical SociologyDurkheimWeberMarxHindu SatiIndia Acknowledgements Thanks to Vince Moratta for his helpful suggestions. Special thanks to Indranil Chakraborty for his comments and support. Notes 1. The mission statement on the section is: The Section on Global and Transnational Sociology seeks to facilitate communication, expand networks, and provide a forum for intellectual exchange and debate among global and transnational sociologists, scholars, and teachers. Appropriate to its name, the Section also seeks engagement with scholars from all parts of the world and from disciplines other than sociology that address global and transnational issues. The Section welcomes members of all theoretical persuasions and substantive interests that are encompassed by the broad rubrics of global and transnational research. 2. Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism are all viewed by Durkheim as pantheistic religions. 3. The idea of 'reluctance' is mentioned by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) in his work Provincializing Europe. 4. In an agrarian social structure, the splitting of land could mean financial disaster for a family. 5. Orientalism and orientalist discourse are conceptualised by Edward Said (1978) in his work Orientalism. The concept is discussed in my critique of Marx's writings on India. 6. Note that Michel Foucault's notion of a disciplinary society can be located in its nascent form in this Durkheimian concept. 7. The age of marriage, especially among upper caste women, was very low and the age difference between the spouses was often high. Thus the proportion of young upper caste Hindu widow was very high in this period. 8. Later, it also produced a Hindu legal discourse based on brahmanical scriptures. The anti-caste, gender sensitive, secular, rational and egalitarian ethos (e.g. Buddhism's origin as a challenge to orthodox brahmanical Hinduism, and the Bhakti movement) that existed in pre-colonial India was completely ignored, and the nineteenth-century English educated Indian intellectuals were also partly responsible for this amnesia. 9. Interestingly, this text also communicates Weber's tragic vision of human history, where instrumental rationality dominates all walks of modern life and strips away moral and ethical values from individuals, subjecting them to bureaucratic regulation. The value-rational spirit of modernity gets clamped within the 'steel hard casing' of instrumental reason. 10. As Marx states: The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome. Initially, to subjugate every moment of production itself to exchange and to suspend the production of direct use values not entering into exchange, i.e. precisely to posit production based on capital in place of earlier modes of production, which appear primitive [naturwuchsig] from its standpoint. Commerce no longer appears here as a function taking place between independent productions for the exchange of their excess but rather as an essentially all-embracing presupposition and moment of production itself. (Marx Citation1973: 408) This is the dialectical method of Marx. The moment of production mediated through capital transforms all kinds of traditional ways of life creating new social relations. This transformation is a brutal expropriation of everything that is old but at the same time it creates more advanced social relations. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAnisha Datta Anisha Datta is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brandon University, Canada. Her current research project examines the relationship between a dalit caste community and the post-colonial Indian state. In broad terms, her works engage with the interaction among the nation-state, civil society organisations, and marginalised groups in a globalised socioeconomic and cultural environment