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The Study Of Social Sciences In Developing Societies: Towards An Adequate Conceptualization Of Relevance, Syed Farid Alatas

farid alatas

Since the 19th century, there has been a strong awareness of a lack of fit between the western1 social sciences and non-western realities. Many examples of the irrelevance of western concepts, theories and assumptions have been noted in the literature. The fact that the social sciences emerged in the West, were initially practised in the Third World by colonialists and other European scholars, and then finally implanted among the locals during and after formal independence, had raised the question of the relevance of these bodies of knowledge to Third World societies and their problems. Some nonwestern scholars in the 19th …