By Sari Hanafi, American University of Beirut
In his book, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2018) offers a powerful political and epistemological proposal pointing out that, along with the oppressive practices of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism, there has been a massive epistemicide. This recognition is based on two premises: first, that knowledge of the world far exceeds the narrow confines of the Western understanding of the world; and, second, that the cognitive experiences of the world are extremely diverse. I begin this contribution with an explanation of what I find to be outstanding and inspiring about Santos’ work and follow up on this by highlighting some potential backfires when these thoughts travel into the Arab world.
Santos argues that global social justice cannot be achieved without global cognitive justice, and examines concrete propositions for theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical alternatives in our knowledge production. These explorations are continuations of his longstanding work regarding the exclusion along the abyssal line (i.e., the economic, social, cultural, political, and linguistic divisions between the Global North and the Global South), and include elaborations on the sociologies of absences and emergences, the ecologies of knowledge and intercultural translation, and the artisanship of sociological practices.
Santos unfolds some concepts that emerged in the struggles of resistance against Western-centric domination and formed in noncolonial languages and cultures such as ubuntu, Sumak Kawsay, Pachamama, chachawarmi, Swaraj, and ahimsa. For instance, Santos, along with the late British philosopher Roy Bhaskar, criticizes the Cartesian ethos that delineates a sharp difference between persons as subjects versus objects in the world (which includes other subjects). Both approach the ontology of persons in terms of the thought embodied in some southern African languages through the notion of ubuntu, which means roughly ‘I am because you are’ (Bhaskar, 2020). According to Santos, this concept exerted a decisive influence on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that dealt with the crimes of apartheid, and continues to serve as a topic of major debate in the field of African philosophy.
The concept of Pachamama, which is included in the Constitution of Ecuador, designates a non-Cartesian, non-Baconian conception of nature—one that considers nature not as a natural resource, but as a living being and source of life, to which rights are ascribed similarly as they are to humans.
For Santos, the credibility and usefulness of such epistemologies of the South depend less on erudite theoretical elaborations, and more on the practices of the social groups and movements that utilize them in their struggles against capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal domination. This kind of theoretical extension is always sensitive to power structures, from wherever they may come, and raise questions such as ‘whose voice?’ and ‘whose silence?’ Santos brings the example of Gandhi who used Hindi to express key concepts in his struggle against British colonialism. Santos does not romanticize Gandhi and proposes his work should be read with Habermas and Chomsky rather than as an ‘either/or’ selection. This reminds me of the excellent book Sociological Theory Beyond the Canon by Alatas and Sinha (2017), which, through reading Ibn Khaldoun with Max Weber, Fatima Mernissi with Nancy Fraser, Karl Marx with W.E.B. Du Bois, and José Rizal with Frantz Fanon—rather than ‘either/or’—mitigates some of sociology’s hegemonic and androcentric shortcomings.
When ideas travel …
To tell the truth, I read this book with caution, as I know how it could be perceived in the Arab region. Needless as it may be, I remind you of the way many leftists and Islamists in this region have appropriated Edward Said’s Orientalism, using it to help establish a sharp dichotomy between North and South, and using it to make the validity of a given knowledge dependent on its genealogy. While the title of Santos’ book alone can be misleading, Epistemologies of the South rejects epistemological or political ghettos, and calls for a search for expanded commonalities on the basis of otherness: “[t]he epistemologies of the South do not aim to replace the epistemologies of the North and put the South in the place of the North. Their aim is to overcome the hierarchical dichotomy between North and South” (p. 7).
My worries about the perception of the book are based on my work in knowledge production where I observed two problems or abuses in the postcolonial discourse in the Arab world and beyond (Hanafi, 2020). First, this post-colonial discourse has established a binary logic of antagonistic categories, such as East/West and universalism/contextualism. Santos clearly does not reject universalism, but gives it some qualifications—notably, rather than abstract universality, he calls for pluriversality. His kind of thinking promotes decolonization or creolization through intercultural translation, where such diversity translates into an “ecology of knowledges, that is, the recognition of the copresence of different ways of knowing and the need to study the affinities, divergences, complementarities, and contradictions among them in order to maximize the effectiveness of the struggles of resistance against oppression” (p. 8). In fact, his call is similar to the proposition of Michel Agier (2013) to replace universalism tout court with cosmopolitan universalism as sort of a bottom-up, subaltern cosmopolitan conceptualization of universal concepts.
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The second problem or abuse in postcolonial discourse is the over-emphasis on external factors with a simultaneous neglect of local ones. Santos himself emphasizes the oppressive practices of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism, without giving much attention to authoritarianism—as if it comes as a sub-phenomenon of these three oppressive practices. Living in a revolutionary moment in the Arab world, and thereby witnessing history unfold, I often wonder why some left-wing forces have viewed the “revolution” (against authoritarianism) and “resistance” (against imperialism) as opposing, and even contradictory, concepts, rather than complementary ones. And this question does not only concern the Arab region. Participating in the Latin American Sociological Association (ALAS) conference in Lima (Peru) in December 2019, I saw some similarities between the pathologies of a trend among the Arab left and their colleagues in Latin America. This is why I call to take seriously the conceptualization of authoritarianism, and to supplement the postcolonial approach with an anti-authoritarian one. In Lebanon, in this revolutionary moment, there is a heated debate between two sides. One believes that the current youth uprising—which is calling for the end of the sectarian political regime and replacing the corrupted politicians—is simply a secondary contradiction that is negatively impacting the principal contradiction—which is the current struggle against imperialism in the region, particularly the one from 1948, when Israel was created and 900,000 Palestinians were expelled. The other side, which I belong to, believes that the demands of the uprising are urgent, and that the ‘resistance’ to imperialism and Israeli colonial practices is simply important (generally speaking but not urgent) at this time in Lebanon only. In the same vein, the side in favor of ‘resisting imperialism’ allies itself with the Syrian regime (ignoring its brutalizing, authoritarian nature and systematic deployment of torture) merely because this regime has been supportive of the Lebanese resistance (Hezbollah).
I found the debate in Latin America followed many of the same lines. The extraordinary congress of ALAS, attended by 3,300 participants, was one of the sites of such a debate, specifically regarding Venezuela and Bolivia. Some (rightly) argue that one needs to denounce the military coup in Bolivia, but also denounce Juan Evo Morales, who had previously acted against the Constitution (which does not allow more than one re-election). This topic was confirmed by a referendum that was called by the former government itself. Along the same lines, they argue one should denounce the personal power monopoly of President Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela, and raise the same question regarding both Bolivia and Venezuela: why did the two leaders, Morales and Maduro, not properly institutionalize their political parties in ways that would have created the possibility for other leaders to emerge? Why are there no second leaders in many leftist (but not only leftist) political parties that can run for office at the end of the original leader’s term? The same question can be asked in relation to other “progressive” regimes, such as those in Syria and Yemen, along with other republican regimes that have paved the way for the succession to power by their sons. Is there no possibility of resistance under democratic regimes?
The denomination of authoritarian regimes also impacts knowledge production. They stifle the imagination by seeking grey automations that follow their commands and outsource the task of censoring critical voices to the mob. The problem of social research in authoritarian settings is that it is impacted more by working conditions, which marginalize questions of epistemology (Hanafi & Arvanitis, 2019).
Having said that, I do agree with Santos that the hierarchy of knowledge and the invisibility of Southern knowledge persists in the North. The most telling and heated recent debate was about the way French (Christian) laicité frames the rituals (such as female veiling) in a religion like Islam in France. On 2 October 2020, President Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech to present his strategy for fighting separatism. He clearly targeted (and stigmatized) the Muslim community in the country (including 52 mentions of the words Islam and Islamism) insofar as members of this community have refused to be assimilated (to cultural majoritarianism). He thus repeated the framing of Islam that was typical of French colonial power: that Islam was a religion which presumably was experiencing a crisis today, all over the world.
References
By Gabriele Rosenthal, University of Göttingen
In this blog post, I discuss the need for social research which is skilled and competent in terms of methods (understood here primarily as research practice) when carrying out investigations in the Global South. If we use interpretative, qualitative methods which follow the principles of openness and reconstruction, and use an abductive approach, we do not need different methods for research in the Global South. I argue that this is one of the big advantages of rigorous interpretative or reconstructive social research, which also implies reflecting on the researcher’s position in the social field and the positions of our field assistants. It also implies flexibility in our research design, meaning which methods we use, in which sequential order, and in which context.
Flexibility in research design and continuity in theoretical orientation
Before I wrote this blogpost, I had never explicitly considered the question of whether field research in countries of the Global South requires methods different from those we use in countries of the Global North. This does not mean, however, that the way I use my toolkit has not changed over the past thirty years in the context of my research in various countries of the Global South. I still use the same tools for data collection and data interpretation, but I have become more flexible in the way I apply them. While my main focus has always been on the collection and analysis of autobiographies, I have increasingly used other methodological instruments, such as participant observation, spontaneous or planned group discussions, family interviews, expert interviews and ethnographic interviews. In particular, I have become increasingly flexible, for instance in respect of the sequence or combination of methods used, or in the way I conduct interviews. With each succeeding research project, I have become more and more open as to the research design, depending on the conditions in the particular field.
However, it is my belief, or at least my hope, that this would have happened even if my research had been restricted to the Global North. My use of interpretative methods has developed in this way because I have always followed the principles of the so-called interpretative paradigm, Pragmatism, and the Chicago School. And my research has always been based on a social-constructivist, and in the last twenty years also a figurational approach, with a special focus on biographical research (see Bogner & Rosenthal, 2017; Rosenthal 2012). This theoretical orientation is bound up with the basic assumption that, in order to understand and explain social and psychological phenomena, we have to reconstruct their genesis—the processes of their creation, reproduction, and transformation. This assumption, together with the idea that we need to reconstruct the subjective perspectives of actors in the different phases of their life and in the present, and their courses of action, explains why sociological biographical research is so important for me. In the traditon of figurational sociology, this means adopting a processual, historical and intergenerational perspective that involves the reconstruction of figurations, of unequal and fluctuating power chances, and of the perspectives of both established groupings and outsiders (see Elias & Scotson, 1994).
My research is based on fieldwork, as well as other methods, including archival studies and document analysis, by which I mean discourse analysis of different texts, including media texts. In general, I follow the principles of openness and reconstruction, and use an abductive approach. In this context, the question whether we need different methods, can be answered as follows: it depends on the methodology, methods and research design we use.
In addition to doing research in Germany, and for several years in Israel, I have conducted field work in Kazakhstan, Palestine, Jordan, Brazil and several African countries—going right back to 1989. In Africa, I have carried out field studies in Ghana and Uganda, in the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa, along with short periods of fieldwork in Morocco. And my colleagues and I have been conducting interviews for several years now with refugees and migrants who have arrived in western Europe, Brazil, Jordan or Uganda, after leaving their homes in the MENA region, the Sahel or sub-Saharan Africa (Becker, 2021; Bahl et al., 2017; Rosenthal, forthcoming). Since the start of the pandemic, we have conducted online follow-up interviews with these migrants and refugees, and documented their situation in times of COVID-19 (Bahl & Rosenthal, 2021).
Especially when working in environments that as sociologists we are not familiar with, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, it is important to be flexible in accessing the field and in the use of different methods. This depends on which forms of access to the field open up more easily than others. In other words, which methods I use, and in which sequence, is always determined by how the work progresses. In some settings, we may begin with observations and group discussions, perhaps arising from chance conversations with different people, and then go on to conduct biographical-narrative interviews in a second step. By contrast, in a study I carried out with Artur Bogner of so-called child soldiers in northern Uganda who had returned from the Lord’s Resistance Army (Bogner & Rosenthal, 2020), we started by interviewing a former key actor in the peace process, who then worked as a field assistant for us and arranged contacts with returnees. After the interview with this key actor, we interviewed the returnees individually, and it was these interviews that led to our being invited to the compounds of their families of origin, and having the opportunity to conduct family interviews and biographical interviews with various family members who belonged to different generations in the genealogical sense.
In almost all settings, we (Artur Bogner, my co-workers and myself) work with local field assistants who undertake the task of translating the interviews, and with whom we are able to discuss not only the interviews but also our general observations. Sometimes we recruit these field assistants from the same grouping as our interviewees, for instance because of their knowledge of the language, as in the case of Wolof which was spoken by the Senegalese migrants we interviewed in Brazil. This is something that cannot always be planned beforehand. One challenge we were faced with when studying illegalized migrants, for instance, was that with each new field trip we met refugees with ethnic and national backgrounds that were different from what we expected, or from what we had experienced during previous field trips. This meant we had to react very flexibly, especially in respect of the ethnic and national background of the two interviewers (or interviewer and field assistant). During the subsequent analysis, this gave us very fruitful insights into how the rules of the we- and self-presentations changed according to the collective belongings of the field assistants.
Methodological background of interpretative research
In the tradition of “Grounded Theory” (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), the main focus is on the discovery of theory during the process of empirical research, with the help of sensitizing concepts as discussed by Herbert Blumer. A sensitizing concept “gives the user a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances. Whereas definitive concepts provide prescriptions of what to see, sensitizing concepts merely suggest directions along which to look” (Blumer, 1954, p. 7). Grounded theory does not mean an empiricism that is “free of theory,” but a conscious bracketing of theoretical presumptions, and a decided shift in the balance between theory and empirical discovery. This does not imply that the results of previous empirical studies and existing concepts should be ignored, but rather that one should bracket hypotheses at the outset of an empirical study along the lines of the procedure of abduction introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce (1985). Crucial to this procedure is that reasoning begins with data (or empirical phenomena) and then starts moving towards hypotheses.
An abductive inquiry does justice to the principle of reconstruction, which is generally required in interpretative methods. This means that the researcher does not approach the texts to be interpreted with an existing set of hypotheses, in order to avoid subsuming them under definitive categories. This consistently open approach that follows the logic of discovery, this completely unprejudiced view of social reality, and this avoidance of the logic of subsumption, determine not only how data is interpreted, but also the whole research process, including data collection and the research design. Following the principle of openness means (see Rosenthal, 2018, ch. 2):
• Starting with a tentative research question that is open to modification
• Forming hypotheses during the research process
• Developing theoretical samples during the research process
• Being willing at times to ignore one’s own particular research interests during observations or interviews
• During data collection, investigating the everyday relevance system of the actors (and not relying on that of the researchers)
• During analysis, giving priority to reconstructing the everyday relevance system of the actors
Graffities in the Moroccan city of Tangiers.
Photo: Courtesy of Dr. Artur Bogner.
Possible challenges connected with conducting interviews in the Global South
Regardless of the specific research question, I ask the person I am interviewing to tell me their whole life story and the history of their family. This applies regardless of whether I am interested in Christian and Muslim Palestinians in the West Bank and the figurations or relationships between them, or former child soldiers in northern Uganda and the processes of their reintegration into civilian society after returning from the Lord’s Resistance Army. This interview method is always accompanied by other methods, such as thematically focussed narrative interviews with so-called experts (such as members of NGOs, humanitarian organizations, the army or the local administration).
Now, we could ask, as some authors have done, whether requesting people to tell their own life story is a suitable method for interviews in the Global South, or whether we need to conduct them in a different way. The answer to this question has a lot to do with our expectations with regard to a biographical we- and self-presentation: whether we are prepared to accept the way the person responds to a request to tell his or her life story, or whether we only accept a response that corresponds to our own fixed idea of a biographical narration.
Whether it works straight away or not, whether it takes four hours or just a couple of minutes to get an answer, whether the answer is a long chain of arguments or a stream of narration: the manner in which the interviewee responds to my request to tell me the story of their life gives me first important clues to the nature of the setting or the grouping I am interested in. Thus it is not surprising that former child soldiers who have returned from the LRA usually begin with a detailed account of how they were abducted, and that they speak about their life before this event only after being asked about it in the second part of the interview; or that from a detailed account of their abduction and the first days with the rebels, in which they were forced to learn extremely cruel methods of killing, they jump to the time of their escape from the LRA, even though a period of maybe sixteen years lay between these two events.
This detailed narration, with hypermnesic memories of certain very bad experiences at the beginning of a phase of extreme traumatization, can be explained by the brutal invasion of this event into the everyday life of these young people, an event which ruptured their “earlier life line,” disturbed or damaged earlier self-images, and led to dramatic differences between their life before it happened and their life after it happened. We believe that these narrations also have the function of demonstrating that they were powerless in this situation and were abducted against their will. In such cases, the question is not whether it is a good interview or not. The important point is how this typical and frequently observed structure of the biographical self-presentations of ex-rebels can be explained. Useful in this respect is what we learn in the external questioning part of the interview, or in further interviews with the same person, about certain phases of their life, and how these are talked about, or whether there are phases about which the person consistently says nothing. In our interviews with ex-rebels in Uganda, we succeeded in eliciting biographical narrations concerning periods which they did not describe in detail or which they skipped in the first part of the interview, the so-called self-structured presentation.
Another example of a phenomenon that needs explaining is the fact that in most of the interviews that my co-workers and myself conducted in Palestine, more precisely in the West Bank, it was difficult to motivate our interviewees to tell us their life story. Rather, their primary concern was to present the argument that “we Palestinians have no internal conflicts, we only have conflicts with the (Jewish) Israelis” (Rosenthal, 2016). At first we thought that this was due to the presence of German researchers, but then we found that the interviews conducted by our Palestinian co-workers displayed the same phenomenon. Palestinians are anxious to resist any attempt—or Israeli policy—to divide them into different categories or “minorities,” which would make them even more powerless against the stronger conflict party of the Jewish Israelis. In their meetings with members of our team, they fought against these (more or less intentional) attempts to split them up by repeatedly insisting that they are a united, peaceful community or we-group, in which no one suffers discrimination because of their religion, their status as a refugee or a long-time resident, or their legal status. In the course of this research, there were nevertheless some interviews in which the interviewees spoke very openly about the conflicts within the Palestinian community. For them the interviews represented an opportunity to talk about their personal problems, or the way their we-group (or the grouping to which they are regarded as belonging) is discriminated against. Most of the interviewees who spoke openly about their experiences of discrimination could be regarded as outsiders in Palestinian society, such as members of binational families or people in a binational marriage relationship, people who have lived abroad for many years, or men who are defined as homosexual (Worm & Hinrichsen, 2016). Because of this empirical finding, the research team actively sought such outsiders as interviewees.
We usually hold more than one interview with each individual, usually combined with participant observations, inclusion of other people who are present during the interviews, and in some cases a transition to family interviews or group discussions with people who have been present from the beginning, or who have joined us at some stage during the interviews. Whether in the refugee camps in the West Bank, or in family compounds in northern Uganda, my experience shows that one must expect other family members or neighbours to come and show interest in the interview. A contrastive comparison, for instance of an interview in a hotel at which, besides myself and the interviewee, only a field assistant or interpreter was present, and one conducted with the same person in the presence of “the family” in their compound, would give us insights into dominant discourses, in other words the rules concerning what can or cannot be said by whom and in what context. The challenges involved in eliciting biographical narrations, conducting multiple interviews, and combining the findings from the interviews with data collected during observations or group discussions, are the same as those with which we are confronted when conducting biographical interviews with certain groupings in western Europe.
In general, I do not see these challenges as being connected with the method of narrative interviews. Rather, especially when beginning field research in unfamiliar cultures, we-groups, milieus or geographical regions, I have to cope with certain irritations or misunderstandings due to my ignorance of the local customs and discourses, or I hesitate to ask certain questions because I fear that people might be offended or embarrassed. And yet these irritations can be an advantage! In the literature on methods we find the suggestion that we should put ourselves in the position of a stranger when studying our own society or social milieu. This happens without any effort when starting with research in an unfamiliar milieu. And so it is a big advantage that we scholars from the Global North find ourselves increasingly confronted with the discovery of phenomena that do not easily fit into our categories (and vice versa, researchers from the Global South have this advantage when doing research in the Global North). This applies, for example, to our understanding of family structures, national borders, boundaries of groups, or concepts of state and “nation.”
In general it can be said that we should:
a) avoid subsuming phenomena too quickly under familiar categories
b) always have doubts that we understand what we hear or observe
c) never be afraid to ask questions in interviews.
Sometimes our ignorance of the regional or local context can lead us to think that certain phenomena are individual or special features of that region, when in fact they are far more widespread. For example, when I started working in Uganda, I had no idea how strong the belief in good and bad spirits is in many regions of Uganda, and of Africa in general. I gradually learned how widespread it is, that it does not depend on the interviewee’s educational background, and, very important, I had to learn what functions it can have. For example, family members of ex-rebels sometimes claim the returnees are possessed by bad spirits and give this as the reason why they have refused to allow them to return to the family compound—although the real reason is that the family does not want to recognize their rights to land or their right to participate in local decision-making processes. We also need to be aware that we- and self-presentations may be influenced by Western discourses, with the result, for example, that many do not mention bad spirits. So we need to be aware that interviewees may not mention certain things because they know that the interviewer is a European, and we need to be prepared to ask questions about these things just as naturally as about any other topic.
Even if some of the returnees believe that their mental problems are caused by bad spirits, for us they are clearly consequences of extreme traumatization such as we can also observe in the Global North. Extreme traumatization results from spending a long period exposed to constant death threats and not knowing whether or when this might come to an end. The consequences of this are not fundamentally different among different groupings of people; they are only interpreted differently. Whether they are traumatized by violence, or suffer from circumstances that are prescribed by inherited rules or accustomed discourses, they experience feelings of sadness and hopelessness, although they have been taught not to express these feelings, or they talk about them in a way that is different from what we researchers would expect. In other words, we should not assume that people from other parts of the world function according to completely different psychological mechanisms.
Significantly, I could have discussed the same challenges had I been asked to give a talk on interpretative research in Germany.
References
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Aldine Transaction.
Peirce, C. S. (1985). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (C. Hartshorne, Ed.; 5.). Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Rosenthal, G. (Ed.). (forthcoming). Transnational biographies: Changing we-images, belongings and power balances of migrants and refugees. Göttingen University Press.
Rosenthal, G., & Bogner, A. (2017). Biographies – discourses – figurations: Methodological considerations from the perspectives of social constructivism and figurational sociology. In G. Rosenthal & A. Bogner (Eds.), Biographies in the global South: Life stories embedded in figurations and discourses. Campus Verlag.
By Marian Burchardt, Leipzig University
Many sociologists have begun to recognize the necessity to provincialize Western sociology. Some have done so mainly out of ethical and political reasons while others have begun to take seriously the epistemological constraints that Eurocentrism has imposed upon sociological research and theory. In this context, global sociology and postcolonial sociology have emerged as two agendas which partly overlap and converge but which also entail some divergent assumptions and emphases. The relationship of these scholarly agendas, however, requires some further clarification. Such a clarification, I suggest, is imperative with a view towards depicting more clearly how sociological research practice after Eurocentrism, as it were, can look like.
I am a sociologist and ethnographer of East German origin but I have regional concentrations in Africa and I carry out much of my fieldwork in South Africa and Ghana. In April 2022, I participated in the congress of the African Studies Association of Africa in Cape Town in South Africa. Given that this is the meeting where mostly African social scientists meet to discuss African societies, I thought that this was an appropriate place to present my own work, which adopts—as Julian Go (2016) has called it—a Southern standpoint through its empirical focus and methodological orientation. What that means exactly, however, was not always clear to me. In one of my current projects, I am interested in the ways in which infrastructural innovations change healthcare provision in Ghana and Malawi. In particular, I am interested in far-flung digitization projects that are currently going on in healthcare systems—in Africa and elsewhere. We started with digitally driven logistics focusing on the use of drones for the delivery of vaccines, essential medicines and blood products used in medical emergencies (Umlauf & Burchardt, 2022).
Essential for the operations of medical drones are data: micro-weather data, GPS data, logistical data. Significantly, digitization projects in healthcare systems which have become pervasive on a global level, are often linked to one another: digital patient files, which construe people and populations as data, and digital supply chain management, which turn all transactions and uses of medicine as data have all led to a tremendous production of data—to the datafication of health (Ruckenstein & Schüll, 2017), as it were. Such data play major roles in the digital economy feeding platforms of all sorts. And they are extremely valuable not only for insurance companies but also for all sorts of platform providers who not only seek to make their services available to national healthcare systems but who also aim to make these systems dependent on them. Hence in our project, we also to explore how exactly people’s bodily functions and the prescription practices of nurses and other health professional are turned into data that feeds platforms, what happen with these data and who benefits from them. In the project, we collaborate with research teams from the University of Ghana as well as a research consortium from Malawi.
As a qualitative cultural sociologist, I have been trained to let the field drive the conceptualization, to follow—as Alfred Schütz called it—the relevance structures of the actors I am interested in, instead of imposing a predefined set of concepts and categories upon the field. But of course, as Michael Burawoy (2000)—among many others—suggested: without any conceptual lens we cannot even find and see the field. So, what as sociologists we are called upon to do is to adopt conceptual lenses that are locally adapted and use concepts that emerge from or have proven to be useful in a given local setting.
Distribution center of the drone-delivery service Zipline in Ghana.
Photo: Courtesy of Dr. René Umlauf.
But what exactly was the local setting in my case? I was studying the work of a drone operator that had its headquarters in Silicon Valley, where much of the computing was done in Belgium; a business that worked through service agreements with the national governments of Rwanda, Ghana and Nigeria and that was variously serving rural health centers in these countries. All of these sites were connected through a specific object, namely a technology, and through data. So what exactly was the locality? What was the locally adapted concept I could use? What I am describing here is a problem that sociologists and anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai (1996) encountered in the late 1980s and 1990s when they were first confronted with new ways in which the territorial boundaries of what they considered the field or the locality were blurred or even dissolving. The field was subjected to globalization as a form of spatialization, which left deep imprints on the “local.” And so, one of the questions that arises from this is this: is the relation of global sociology to sociology the same as globalization to locality or the nation-state? Is global sociology primarily a spatial disciplinary category, an orientation towards a spatial reality of social relationships that stretch the planet? Or is it, rather, a global conversation among sociologists from all parts of the world—such as those going on in the Global Qualitative Sociology Network—intent on working through concepts and universals? Or is it a kind of sociology that seeks to address this awareness of the multitude of forms of organization, and disorganization, of divergent forms of knowledge, local or regional epistemologies, and types of domination that have been absent from what, in many parts of the world, is considered “general sociology”? How can global sociology be a new way of building sociological theory?
The focus of the Global Qualitative Sociology Network is indeed on these questions—and it is on the kind of operations we use in qualitative social science to build theory, to construct the kind of sociological theory that brings the social worlds of the Global South more powerfully into the picture of general sociology than before. In other words, the main question is really, not only—as we have learnt to do—how to start from the ground, from the local, how to start from specific concepts developed from the material as suggested by the grounded theory approach for instance, but also: how do we generalize from there? How do we go further from specific cases to slightly more abstract real types, or even more abstract ideal types, a methodology that Max Weber had used in very fruitful ways in his comparative sociology of religion and of forms of authority? There is a need to engage in dialectical forms theorizing in which new findings are always used for the respecification of earlier hypotheses, dialectical forms of analysis in which the concrete leaves echoes in the more general concept and the concept echoes in the interpretation of new material.
But what are the implications of these methodological principles for understanding the drone distribution centers in Ghana where we do our fieldwork, and the people working there? In general, it became clear that the kind of problems with which people in charge of moving medicine from stores to clinics are faced are not entirely different between, say, the rural South or mid-West of the US and central Ghana. Challenges to logistics involve weather contingencies, hurricanes that flood roads and decaying or underdeveloped road infrastructure. On that level there was no need to develop concepts that are somehow uniquely focused on what happened in Ghana.
However, there is more to the story once we shift our attention to the question what drives the datafication of health and healthcare. It is clear that data are harvested primarily by Western companies—especially the big five platforms (Amazon Webservices, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook’s Meta Platforms) or some subsidiary, in collaboration with governments in Africa and elsewhere, and these data are then used to develop AI driven medicine of all kinds, for instance what is called precision medicine and other types of medical therapies based on big data and algorithms. And in this context, we clearly see the ways in which a global order of health governance and medical capitalism is made of regional concentrations of capital and expertise, of a distribution of labor which assigns different tasks to different regions and which yield highly unequal economic outputs for these regions. We see new forms of data extractivism that operate not least by putting the burden of data production, for instance, on the shoulders of nurses in rural Malawi. With their enrolment in the national electronic health record program that is part of the country’s e-health agenda, they have to hammer into their tablet not only the usual data collected in regular maternal health check-ups but also lots of other data on the habits of mothers and children. AI research companies need these data for their business model. Big data is not only traces in the internet, it is also labor provided by health workers. We can call this division of labor “colonial” and conceptualize it through the lens of the “coloniality of power” as Aníbal Quijano (2000) suggested, and we ask the question of what is gained by calling it that way.
Such kinds of analysis, however, seems to suggest that social life in the Global South only matters for sociological theory, or general sociology, if it is located at the receiving end of global commodity chains, if it consists of labor supplied for global health science, as medical anthropologist Johanna T. Crane (2013) called it. It seems to suggest that in global sociology we would only need to pay attention to structural features in the Global South and the social practices that produce them if, and to the extent, they are linked to, and sustain, structural features elsewhere, within the framework of global orders of different types.
The merit of postcolonial sociology is precisely to call attention to these global orders of colonial power, who are themselves central components of global capitalism in its financialized and digital iteration. In doing so, postcolonial sociology appears to privilege narratives of continuity, the continuity of global power relationships from the period of formal colonialism into the present, and it privileges genealogical critique over ethnography and interpretation. Yet in some of its presently dominant forms, it is mainly interested in unsettling certain visions of the metropole, and thus also cements inherited understandings of what metropole and colony, or center and periphery are. It is therefore sometimes more about confirming, elaborating and commenting on existing theory instead of creating new theory.
The relationship between postcolonial sociology and global sociology may thus perhaps be construed in matters of emphasis. Both are closely related but surely not. Both agendas share concerns regarding the critique of Eurocentrism, of Eurocentric theories of modernization, urbanization and industrialization and of modernity at large, and both share the notion that Eurocentrism is primarily an epistemological problem. Postcolonial critical sociology reminds us of the fact that under the global condition, no social relationship unfolds outside of power relationships that are global in scope. Global sociology, by contrast, reminds us of the pitfalls entailed in the idea that this global power relationship always needs to be the central subject of our studies. Such a focus reduces actors in the social worlds of the Global South to passive subjects of global capital whose everyday life is determined by that subject position. And it thereby reiterates the aporia of earlier structuralist determinisms of divergent theoretical shades. In contrast, I suggest that the social worlds of healthcare workers and those who run logistics centers in Ghana matter to general sociology not only to the extent we can trace the colonial power relations that shape their lives but also as objects of study and theorization in their own right.
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