Syed Farid Alatas - Resume and Abstract

(via video presentation)

Name	Syed Farid Alatas
Title	Associate Professor of SociologyNational University of Singapore
Brief Introduction	Syed Farid Alatas, a Malaysian national, is Head of the Department of Malay Studies and Associate Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore where he has been since 1992. He obtained his PhD in Sociology from the Johns Hopkins University in 1991. He lectured at the University of Malaya in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies prior to his appointment at Singapore. His books include Democracy and Authoritarianism: The Rise of the Post-Colonial State in Indonesia and Malaysia (Macmillan, 1997) and Alternative Discourse in Asian Social Science: Responses to Eurocentrism (Sage, 2006). He has also edited Asian Inter-Faith Dialogue: Perspectives on Religion, Education and Social Cohesion (RIMA and the World Bank, 2003) and Asian Anthropology, with Jan van Bremen and Eyal Ben-Ari (Routledge, 2005). His articles include “Teaching Classical Sociological Theory in Singapore: The Context of Eurocentrism”, Teaching Sociology 29(3), 2001: 316-331(with Vineeta Sinha); “From Jami’ah to University: Multiculturalism and Christian-Muslim Dialogue”, Current Sociology 54(1), 2006: 112-132; “Ibn Khaldun and Contemporary Sociology”, International Sociology 21(6), 2006: 782-795; and “The Historical Sociology of Muslim Societies: Khaldunian Application”, International Sociology 22(3), 2007: 267-288. He is currently in the final stages of preparing a book manuscript for publication on the thought of Ibn Khaldun and is also working on another book on the Ba‘alawi Sufi order.

Paper:

An agenda for the social sciences in Asia

This paper aims to present a concise account of attempts to create alternative social scientific traditions in Asia. The structural and intellectual contexts of Eurocentrism, Orientalism, intellectual imperialism and academic dependency have been theorized by previous generations of scholars and is a given. As scholars there is not much we can do at the structural or material levels of these problems since we are neither in charge of institutions of learning nor the state. However, a great deal of progress can be achieved to transcend the problems of Eurocentrism or academic dependency at the intellectual level. At this level, the great variety of non-Western knowledge traditions and cultural practices are all to be considered as sources of social science theorising and concept building. Such alternative discourses must be understood as being identical to the process of universalizing and internationalizing the social sciences, rather than replacing Eurocentric social science with an equally ethnocentric social science. Alternative discourses are discourses that claim to be alternatives to what they regard as the Orientalist or Eurocentric social sciences of the Western European and North American tradition on which much of the social sciences elsewhere are intellectually dependent. In this paper, I discuss the need for a theoretically sound critique of Eurocentric social science as well as a concrete agenda to overcome the problems addressed in the critique. I provide Asian examples of what may be considered as alternative discourses in social sciences.