Iranian Sociology, Global Sociology, Peripheral Sociology
I just returned from a short trip to Tehran, where I attended the first day of a conference hosted by the Iranian Sociological Association. The opening keynote was delivered by Professor Michael Burawoy from U of C Berkeley:
Burawoy and others spoke about a simple but often unmentioned fact in the global field of knowledge production. Social science theories are typically produced in a few rich countries and then consumed by everyone else, no matter how useful or correct they tend to be. Sociologists in the global South can usually gain prestige within their own educational institutions only by publishing in a few “international” journals in the global North, usually in English. The accreditation and prestige rankings of journals tends to overlap onto the global hierarchy of wealth in the world economy.
For example, as Professor Tina Uys pointed out, the South African Journal of Sociology is not given the coveted ISI ranking as an international journal, even though it is peer-reviewed and rigorous, but the British Journal of Sociology is ranked highly by ISI.
Concepts tend to be produced in the elite centers of scholarship in the North, and then applied uncritically to countries in the South. Take a concept like “social capital” - it emerged from very specific studies of French class structure by Pierre Bourdieu, or education institutions of the US by James Coleman. It was meant to be a highly context-specific understanding of the relationships and networks that individuals are embedded in, and how they use these social relations to achieve coveted socio-economic positions or exclude others from those positions, often by participating in communal group activities.
Today, in Iran, many sociology students are obsessed with the idea of social capital, but not as a context-specific lubricant of social life. Instead, social capital is what Iran “lacks,” because the concept has become so abstracted from its origins that it is used as a remainder to explain the absence of what countries in the global North supposedly possess: democracy, capitalism, women’s rights, happiness, etc.
This is not just in Iran. Social science in much of the former Third World, because it is already in a precarious situation, uses the most mainstream concepts from social science and applies them towards their own areas. Writing tends to remain in the abstract, presents “Western” social science as a monolithic entity devoid of controversy, and elides the use of local case studies and deep ethnography which may question the validity of such concepts. Quantitative methods with a sheen of “science” are preferred over qualitative analysis.
Just for example, from a different viewpoint, it is almost impossible to look anywhere in Iranian society and not see “social capital” in operation. Everyone’s livelihood depends, to a large extent, on their negotiation and maintenance of multiple social networks. Mosque networks, women’s clubs, sports leagues, cultural centers, underground DJ nights, basiji volunteer groups - what are all of these but avenues for different Iranians to cultivate and expand their access to certain exclusionary social positions?
Personally, I rarely use the term “social capital” at all, because it is a buzzword stolen from social science and used by management gurus and insta-pundits. Yet I still have to deal with it because my own students in the US use the concept the same way as Iranians.
Two hopeful points to end on, though. First, plenty of the best and most innovative social science of the 20th century came from the global South, not the North. Much of radical development theory came from Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s. World-systems analysis is Africanist in its origins (Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, and Giovanni Arrighi all studied in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s). The post-colonial paradigm, while certainly full of abstruse French post-structuralism, comes from the Indian subcontinent’s re-thinking of their own history in the 1980s and 1990s. Lastly, the Chinese experience of peasant revolution and market development presents a challenge to mainstream understandings of capitalism and modernity for the 19th century Western social thought which bore the core theories of contemporary sociology. The current structure of global knowledge production, however, means that much of the insights that these areas hold for our understandings of the world first have to come to the North, get re-packaged, and then exported again to the global South.
Second, I met a few sociology students on this trip who, unlike their colleagues, were genuinely interested in local ethnography. They discussed using detailed case studies to critically utilize the sociological toolkit to better understand Iranian social life. This is quite different from the oft-heard Iranian dismissal of all social science as “western,” which is equally misguided as the uncritical use of sociology in an “one size fits all” version. Those two positions do not actually understand the sociological project. To wit, not a few sociologists in the Middle East hold that Ibn Khaldun’s political sociology of state formation and collapse is a precursor of later social science, which is correct. But Khaldun’s theories of city vs. tribe are embedded in the politics of the Maghreb during the 14th century, and should not be universalized as a unique theory of “muslim societies,” as Ernest Gellner once argued.
Every time I travel back to Iran, I am always surprised by what is being translated into Persian. On this trip, I noticed new and beautiful translations of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction and Perry Anderson’s Lineages of the Absolutist State. Here’s to the translators, publishers, and scholars in Iran who exemplify the critical, reflexive, and innovative traditions in global sociology.
