Reconstructing Colonial Sociology

The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought is a milestone in the history of sociology, far-reaching in its scope and objectives, and impressive in its material and archival basis. The book should impact strongly both the history of colonialism as a cultural, scientific, and epistemic project before and after WWII, as well as the history of sociology as an academic, disciplinary and intellectual field. The book, however, reaches beyond these contexts and provides new insights for interwar and postwar French intellectual history in a broader sense as well as for the interdisciplinary history of colonial knowledge; it, finally, differentiates our view on developmentalism in the French Empire.

Following a Bourdieusian approach, Steinmetz combines contextual and textual analysis with statistical evaluations moving progressively in time and scale to the moment of interest, the period from the 1930s to the 1960s. Tackling, for the first time, a Western European sociology in the perspective of a full-fledged historical sociology, the book reveals the relevance of colonialism as a determining context for the development of the discipline. It is well known that Pierre Bourdieu has developed the essential aspects of his “theory of practice” based on his activities as an ethnographer in the Kabyle villages in the middle of the liberation war in Algeria using also colonial ethnography. However, colonialism is still not a common feature in the history of the discipline, nor does the history of sociology feed the history of colonial knowledge. The book works out the generative importance of colonial situations for the fabrication of sociological knowledge, underscoring how colonialism shaped entire fields of research, and left its mark on the classical founding fathers of sociology. Colonial Origins may therefore help to set an end to the “colonial amnesia” in contemporary social science.

As a historian, I am impressed by the richness of sources that underpin the historical arguments. Steinmetz scoured the personal archives of his primary subjects, namely Balandier, Sayad, Elias, Dampierre, Soret; equally he researched institutional archives such as the Rockefeller archives, the UNESCO and the CNRS. Along with the detailed presentation of academic organizations, institutes and debates in the individual chapters, the appended materials and bibliography provide food for future historical research. The detailed compilation of data distinguishes Steinmetz’s approach – a “historical socio-analysis of science” – from other accounts of social science history that center around context-free texts as a basis for explanation.

Colonial Origins raises several important questions. I will consider two. First, how does the book determine the relationship between colonialism and sociology? Second, how can the book’s findings be classified in the longer historical account of colonial sociology?

Re(constructing) the field of colonial sociology

Steinmetz creates his own choreography, and the book moves to the center of its interest in circling the subject in several steps. To be brief, it first examines the reasons for colonial amnesia and explains the permeation of the empire by experts in the postwar era, depicting developmentalist policies, before it turns to the academic landscape to show how sociological education was linked to colonial issues. Steinmetz considers law, economics, psychology, history, statistics and demography, anthropology, and only in Chapter 8 comes to interwar sociology in France, which was still institutionally weak but formed the crucial platform for the postwar contexts discussed later (chapter 11). In doing so, the book combines close reading with the analysis of biographies, brief institutional presentations, and thus, approaches its narrower subject, “postwar sociologists of colonialism and their writings” (Steinmetz 2023: 349). The structure of the book is particularly noteworthy because it allows for expanding classical disciplinary-historical perspectives by taking into account the academic fields adjacent to sociology. A disciplinary-historical perspective would hide that the disciplinary core of sociology was constituted alongside but also against anthropology/ethnology in colonial contexts. But Steinmetz shows us in detail how this process unfolded and resulted in the emergence and consolidation of disciplinary fields. Furthermore, the book’s choreography thus bridges disciplinary history and a wider intellectual history.

In other words, the book succeeds in (re)constructing the field of colonial social knowledge, whose interwoven academic, disciplinary and political contexts and trajectories have always been difficult to pin down as they lie across dominant narratives and present social science ideas.

Historical lines

Steinmetz argues that colonial sociology changed from a shared field of knowledge (that had been established in the nineteenth century) to an institutionalized subfield of an academic discipline after WWII. As I demonstrate elsewhere (Kwaschik 2020), the evolution of this heteronomous colonial knowledge field reaches back to the era of new imperialism and results from a processual scientization of colonialism, establishing the colonial concurrently as an object of scientific knowledge and administrative regulation, thereby influencing the development of the social science fields in many ways. This revaluation of knowledge about indigenous populations belonged to the new language of colonialism as science that shaped colonial debates in Europe in the last third of the nineteenth century. Embedded in an environment of global mobilization and communication, the making of this language was associated with claims for more efficient forms of colonization and new native policies. These developments challenged European knowledge resources and their disciplinary division not least because the disciplines were unable to include and produce knowledge on indigenous cultures. As a consequence, provisional fields of knowledge such as the colonial sciences emerged and evolved in a specific scientific and educational landscape (Singaravélou 2011).

This nineteenth century context forms a background to Colonial Origins: Within this historic context, searching for a systematic and efficient way to colonize led to the invention of sociotechnical approaches that catalyzed research on behavior and thought patterns of indigenous populations, and thus, the genesis of fields of knowledge that later belonged to various social science disciplines. Characteristic of this period is the variety of syncretic labels that were found to express the new holistic perspective on cultures. New labels were created for supposedly new disciplines such as “colonial sociology” that however turned out to be transitional. Alongside with “colonial geography” and “colonial law” to name only the first of these eclectic approaches, colonial sociology was closely linked to politics as the influential Congrès international de sociologie coloniale illustrates. The conference took place at the occasion of the 1900 Paris Exposition and discussed the “social side of colonization” in a sociotechnical way and in terms of an applied science. In dividing political and administrative contexts from science, disciplinary history still tends to underestimate how closely colonialism and the development of social sciences are connected. However, neither the setting nor the fact that the number of colonial officers at this conference exceeded by large the academics (Mosbah-Natanson 2017: 83) should obscure the relevance of the colonial sociology field for the history of social sciences before their institutionalization. Instead, I argue that the conference exemplifies the specificities of this knowledge field and shows that there were no separated and autonomous fields, social scientific knowledge on the right sight and colonial administrative state knowledge on the opposite side, that at some point might or might not overlap, interfere or connect. Thus, when it became fashionable to speak of “sociology” the supporters of colonial sociology used this term in an attempt to incorporate social arguments in the new colonial language merging them with ideas from folk psychology and behavioral biology.

Put in this framework, Colonial Origins presents the contours of a consolidating field of colonial sociology whose contexts remain interwoven with other disciplines and with politics. I wonder, therefore, how established the field actually was during the examined period of the twentieth century. Steinmetz argues that colonial specialists were beginning to form a proper subfield within the discipline, and he establishes that almost half of the disciplinary field after WWII was constituted by colonial specialists (until 1965). Yet at the same time, colonial specialists were distributed across the discipline, and some of them in extremely marginal and disadvantaged positions without recognition. Furthermore, the contents and label “colonial sociology” were far from being accepted and institutionalized but (still) actively negotiated. Colonial sociology remained relevant as a kind of mixture of encyclopedic ethnology and governmental indigenous studies until the WWII. It was temporarily revived in the 3-volume work of Mauss’ student René Maunier “Sociologie coloniale. Introduction à l'étude des contacts de races” (1932–49). Steinmetz notes that the term “colonial sociology” fell out of favor. In fact, the book’s protagonists were among the main players of this shift or semantic reconfiguration. The term “colonial sociology” was confronted with the accusation of being “unscientific.” For example, Balandier made this accusation against Maunier’s “Sociologie colonial” (Balandier 2004 [1954]). The struggle for the distribution of disciplinary labels is part of the history of (colonial) sociology; and the involved boundary work structures the field that Steinmetz’s book discusses.

In my view, the book provides a portrait of a field that is (still) in motion and which features dissolution tendencies from the margins. Thus, the book demonstrates that the idea of two separated or entirely autonomous fields – sociological scientific knowledge on the one hand, and colonial (and maybe administrative) knowledge on the other – proves difficult to maintain even for the period after 1945 and despite considerable progress in institutionalization and academization. It follows that colonial sociology, as a research object, continues to require interdisciplinary and context-sensitive research in the twentieth century when the institutionalization of the social sciences advanced.

Colonial Origins contributes to an international and transdisciplinary research field investigating colonial sociological knowledge production. To advance this field, the present study on France is important and can be followed by systematic studies that focus on other national contexts and their transnational entanglements.