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The Ethnocentrism of the Social Science Implications for Research and Policy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Howard J. Wiarda
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Extract

The proposition advanced here is that the vast bulk of our social science findings, models, and literature, which purport to be universal, are in fact biased, ethnocentric, and not universal at all. They are based on the narrow and rather particular experiences of Western Europe (actually a much smaller nucleus of countries in central and northwest Europe) and the United States, and they may have little or no relevance to the rest of the world. A growing number of scholars, particularly those who have had long research experience in the so-called developing nations, have now come to recognize this fact; and among others new efforts are being made to reexamine the very “Western” experience on which so many of our social science “truths” and models have been based. Because these verities are still widely believed, however, by many scholars and policymakers alike, the ethnocentric biases and assumptions undergirding them need to be examined and their implications for research and policy explored.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , April 1981 , pp. 163 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1981

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References

1 The themes treated here complement those developed in Bendix, Reinhard, “Tradition and Modernity Reconsidered,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 9 (04 1967), 292–346CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reprinted in Bendix, , Embattled Reason (New York, 1970)Google Scholar. The present essay goes considerably beyond Bendix's argument, however, develops some distinctive propositions, and elaborates more far-reaching conclusions.

2 Glade, William P., “Problems of Research in Latin American Studies,” in New Directions in Language and Area Studies: Priorities for the 1980s (Milwaukee: Center for Latin America, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, for the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs, CLASP, 05 1979), pp. 81–101.Google Scholar

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6 Hamilton, Bernice, Political Thought in Sixteenth Century Spain (Oxford, 1963)Google Scholar; Lewy, Guenter, Constitutionalism and Statecraft during the Golden Age of Spain (Geneva, 1960)Google Scholar; Wiarda, Howard J., “Corporatist Theory and Ideology: A Latin American Development Paradigm,” Journal of Church and State, 20 (1970), 29–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 For more details see Bendix, , “Tradition and Modernity”Google Scholar; and Wiarda, Howard J., “Corporatism and Development in the Iberic-Latin World: Persistent Strains and New Variations,” Review of Politics, 36 (01 1974), 3–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 See especially the writings of Eisenstadt, S. N., e.g., “Post-Traditional Societies and the Continuity and Reconstruction of Tradition,” Daedalus, 102 (1973), 1–27Google Scholar; and “Tradition, Change and Modernity: Modern Society and Sociological Theory” (unpublished).

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20 The parallels in the rise and decline of such U.S.-sponsored programs as agrarian reform, “community development,” “family planning” would make an interesting study.

21 These considerations of “historical space-time,” a concept that has often confused U.S. observers, lay behind the efforts of Haya de la Torre and the Peruvian Apristas to develop an indigenous ideology for Latin America.

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26 Wiarda, Howard J., Critical Elections and Critical Coups: State, Society and the Military in the Processes of Latin American Development (Athens, Ohio, 1979).Google Scholar

27 The issue is discussed further in Wiarda, Howard J., “Democracy and Human Rights in Latin America: Toward a New Conceptualization,” Orbis, 22 (1978), 137–60.Google Scholar

28 My colleague Guenter Lewy is writing a book on “false consciousness”; I have profited from discussing the matter with him.

29 These themes are dealt with in greater detail in Wiarda, Howard J., ed., The Continuing Struggle for Democracy in Latin America (Boulder, Colorado, 1979).Google Scholar

30 For one such example see Wiarda, Howard J., Dictatorship, Development, and Disintegration: Politics and Social Change in the Dominican Republic (Ann Arbor: Xerox University Microfilms Monograph Series, 1975).Google Scholar

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35 Wiarda, Howard J., “Conceptualizing Third World Change: Toward a Non-Ethnocentric Theory of Development”Google Scholar (Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, 1981).

36 Samuel P. Huntington, in a personal conversation with the author; see also the volume edited by the author, Future Directions in Comparative Politics (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), which grows out of a faculty seminar with the same title organized at the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University.

37 Wiarda, Howard J., “Toward a Framework”; Politics and Social ChangeGoogle Scholar; “The Latin Americanization of the United States,” The New Scholar, 7 (1977), 51–85Google Scholar; and Corporatism and National Development in Latin America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1981).Google Scholar