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CIAO DATE: 3/5/2007
Social Science Research Capacity in South Asia
Partha Chatterjee
January 2002
Abstract
Two themes occur repeatedly in most discussions about social science today in South Asia. One is an apparently pervasive sense of crisis, an idea that the institutions and practices of social science research are on the point of irretrievable collapse. The other-and associated-theme is the idea that the crisis is the result of the precipitous decline of major institutions of social science research built mainly in the decades following the end of colonial rule. Those who make these arguments have many observations to present as symptoms of the decline or crisis and many examples to illustrate their case.
A closer study of the facts, however, shows that the decline-crisis story does not hold for all regions of South Asia or for all social science disciplines. There are regions where social scientists do not believe that their institutions or research capacities are in a worse state today that they were, say, 20 years ago.There are disciplines in which there is little sense that opportunities or resources are less available for worth- while projects than they were in the 1970s or 1980s. More interestingly, even when one looks at specific institutions about which the story of decline is most commonly told, one discovers that it is not such a simple story after all.
