I agree with Austin's last post, which brought some sober reflection on
this `heat' being generated on the wsn list. There really are no
scientifically grounded markers on race as a biological
category. And to extrapolate from the inconclusive to make a
solid case of `racial difference' is to unwittingly reproduce errors in
conceptualisation. We may need to consider the signal political
consequence of race as a social construct: how race and ethnicty
become less a relation among "us" as a difference `we' have with "them".
Such impulses I guess have led to a (re)igniting of the nationalist
imagination, but we are also aware of the destructive bent associated
with this. Here I wish to offer an observation that perhaps may
stimulate debate/clarifications. Bergesen did make a comment quite a
while back that it is in the latter years of the B phase (coincident
with a deconsolidating hegemonic phase), that we witness challenges to
orthodox scientific thought, and hegemonic modes of thinking. We may add
that in the backwash of such intellectual upheaval reappears old
conservative ideologies, sometimes xenophobic, racist, or exceptionalist
in character. These compete within the same space with deconstructivist
theoretical efforts (post-modernism, post-structuralism,
post-positivism). At the moment it does appear that ethnocentrism is
ascendant especially when we consider the all-out neoliberal counsel
emanating from core-based multilateral institutions, and the glib of
globalisation which really is chunks of modernisation theory being
peddled all over again. Yes modernisation theory has rebounded and with
it some of its crudest elements. What do you think?
Got to go.
Don D. Marshall
Department of Government, Sociology & Social Work
University of the West Indies.
Barbados.