For the latest survey on the abysmal state of our contributions to world social science, read EPW Jan 1, 2011 Commentary by Shyam Singh. Hegemony continues to rule and determine what is knowledge. Our intellectual contributions are simply not worth being put up there. Millions of social scientists generate “outputs” that the world considers rubbish. So why do we continue to work in such circumstances? Because our more “successful” intellectuals succumb to the few crumbs that drop from Western academia in terms of guest lectureships, conferences, seminars and probably appointments.

Intellectuals as mentally enslaved as this will take centuries to be free.

In the 1970s, most Asian social scientists were diagnosed by the late Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas with an insidious malady – intellectual captivity. Calling them captive minds, Alatas said their condition was chiefly symptomatic of “imitative” and “uncritical” thinking dominated by Western discourses in both local and foreign soils.

Much earlier, in the Philippines, proximate to Malaysia geographically and culturally, critical historian Renato Constantino did detect a similar problem – the mis-education of the Filipinos, whom he called the “carbon copy of their conquerors.” A few years before he was assassinated in 1983, the Philippines senator Ninoy Aquino criticised his compatriots for being “little brown Americans.”

For many years, a kind of intellectual captivity has infected my worldviews as a student and a teacher. Read the rest of this entry »

This popular article in the Star, Malaysia, by Prof. Shad Saleem Farugi, is worth reading by every one who wants to understand how much we live by laws that have been imposed on our societies over the past 200 years. These legal systems are not even appropriate for the Europeans for which they were originally evolved.

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/12/29/columnists/reflectingonthelaw/7691447&sec=reflectingonthelaw