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From: isa@emducms1.sis.ucm.es (International Sociological Association)
Date: Tue, 14 May 1996 09:45:20 -0400
To: Apparently-to: chriscd@jhu.edu
To: chriscd@jhu.edu
Subject: ISA, Letter from the President, No.4
Letter from the President, No.4, May 1996 by Immanuel
Wallerstein
Internationalizing the ISA
Internationalizing an international organization may
seem to be a curious objective. Yet, the reality is, as everyone
knows, that the International Sociological Association, like
every other world scholarly associations today, is less
international than it should be and claims to be.
The historical construction of the social sciences and the
geopolitics of the world-system are the two major constraining
parameters within which our association lives. Both are obvious.
The social sciences emerged, as university disciplines, only in
the late nineteenth century, and originally primarily in five
countries: Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United
States. To be sure, by 1945 they came to be established formally
in many other countries, and almost everywhere in the period
since 1945. But the geographic spread of their organizational
strength remains lopsided.
The historical reality is compounded and maintained by the fact
that financial resources are equally lopsided in their
distribution, which means that sociologists in the "South" do
not have at their distribution many of the elementary facilities
that are available to many sociologists in the "North": adequate
library facilities, rapid communications networks (today, access
to the Internet), research funds, travel funds, adequate
salaries, and all the other material bases of our work.
The ISA is in no position to affect significantly these
constraints. The question is what can it do to minimize their
negative effects? The first question is, why should the
Association care? The answer seems to me obvious, but I am not
sure everyone really agrees. Sociologists have always had, as
one of their basic premises, that social realities are socially
constructed, and that if one constructs them differently, the
outcome will be different. Few sociologists are "essentialists",
which means, in this case, that few sociologists believe that
the reason that sociology is stronger in some countries than in
others has to do with biology or climate or virtually
unchangeable cultural differences. In addition, sociologists
have tended to believe that one's social perspective, and hence
one's intellectual perspective, varies according to one's social
position. Many sociologists derive from this premise the belief
that the search for plausible representations of social reality
is enhanced by bringing to bear on this reality a multiplicity
of perspectives.
This is all, as I say, introductory verities but worth
underlining. Indeed, what I have said constitutes virtual
pieties, to which constant obeisance is made. But little is done
about it. What in fact can we do? For there is a third
constraint for an association like the ISA. It is very poor, and
cannot by largesse compensate in any significant way for
lopsided distribution of world resources for scholarship.
The first thing ISA can do - the easiest financially, but
perhaps the most important intellectually - is to transform the
norms. We need to recognize that, however much we aim at and/or
believe in the possibility of universal propositions, the weight
of our particularism (our varying social locations) is today so
great, and so consequential for the nature of our research and
our interpretation of its results, that we must systematically
take it into account in both the social science we do and our
reflections upon this social science. The particularism that we
all bring to bear on our work not only
determine/influence/distort our evaluations of reality (that is
to say, reflect our politics in the broad sense of the term) but
determine/influence/distort in many (complex) ways our
epistemologies. The former effect is more visible than the
latter.
We can ameliorate the situation in two ways: from the top down
and from the bottom up. Both are necessary. Both are already
going on. Both need to be reinforced. To ameliorate the
situation from the top down means that an organization like the
ISA needs to be constantly conscious of the importance of
allowing space for all points of view and working hard at
overcoming the numerical underrepresentation in our ranks of any
points of view by overrepresenting them proportionately in our
allocation of invitations to play intellectual roles at our
congresses and colloquia. We must regard this not as acts of
social welfare or even social justice but as acts required in
order to maximize collective intellectual gain.
The bottom up is more important and more difficult. In reality,
sociology (and all modes of knowledge) will only be truly
international when there are strong multiple bases. What is
important is that there are vibrant nodes of work in different
loci, each of which has a real internal life and sufficient
interaction to create its own minitraditions and sense of
priorities. One mechanism is regional associations. I was
recently invited to attend the XXth Congress of the Asociaci"n
Latinoamericana de Sociolog!a. I do not know what the first
nineteen were like, but I can say that the twentieth was
extremely alive intellectually (200 delegates, including a
significant group of students, with their own sessions) and with
a distinctive and unmistakable Latin American voice. Another
mechanism is publications of the region, circulating first of
all in the region and addressing its issues in terms of its
modes of analyses. Of course, if, and to the extent that, one
can create very strong singular research loci with outreach in
the region, the worldwide impact will be perhaps greatest.
I am in no sense calling for the creation of solid institutional
bases for a world sociology. Only when these regional bases are
truly vibrant, and truly original, will be able to begin to
overcome the particularist variety of universalist claims which
now prevails. It was this concern that led to my previous letter
on the languages of scholarship. Far from being an
administrative question (the conveniences of communication), the
question of multilinguality is another aspect of the effort to
construct a "pluralistic universalism".
This letter is full of good sentiments and is short on practical
solutions. I invite the members of ISA to offer the richness of
their experiences in responses. There will now be a Bulletin
Board* attached to each letter. Hence, all responses will be
available to the totality of those connected to the Internet,
but only ISA members (individual and collective) may contribute
to the debate. The Executive Committee of ISA will take
seriously all specific suggestions of what we can do as an
organization to "internationalize" our international
association.
* In order to participate in the Bulletin Board discussions,
please, send e-mail to isa@sis.ucm.es saying: JOIN ISA
DISCUSSION GROUP.
Prof. Chris Chase-Dunn
Department of Sociology
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD. 21218 USA
tel 410 516 7633 fax 410 516 7590 email chriscd@jhu.edu