The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World

Abstract

In February 1957 Lloyd Rudolph and I set forth into the "heat and dust" villages of Thanjavur district, South India, with 10 Indian graduate students from Madras Christian College. 1 Our objective was to conduct a survey on political consciousness. Six hundred urban and rural Tamils scattered across three districts constituted the random sample we had selected from the first electoral rolls of recently freed India. V. O. Key, that witty and groundbreaking doyen of electoral behavior analysis, had enticed us into survey research. Upon our return, the Michigan Survey Research Center provided a methodologically intense summer. 2 We were part of a wave of comparativist political scientists who had been motivated in the 1950s and 1960s by the proliferation of new nations following decolonization. Gabriel Almond, a senior participant in this move, wrote that political scientists moved into Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America "with all of the energy and commitment of pioneers who wanted to be the first to observe these new experiments in politics, or to observe primordial and traditional societies with the curiosity and fascination that we associate with anthropological field work." 3 Energy, curiosity-and a dose of liberal condescension.We had tuned in early to the liberating part of survey research. Survey data freed political scientists from the formalist/legalist approaches that characterized the institutionalism of that time. Survey results told us what the citizens thought they were experiencing and doing. It gave us access to the electoral behavior and political attitudes that shaped the practical meaning of political institutions. We imagined we were plumbing the true underpinnings of the Indian experiment in democracy. What we had not counted on was that American ideology, America's hegemonic Lockean liberalism, would shape the very concepts and methods we used to acquire knowledge about an unfamiliar society and its politics.When our bewildered interviewers returned from their first foray into the villages of Tamil Nadu, they complained of a radical disconnect between their training experience, modeled on best U.S. practice of that time, and their field experience. They had been led to expect that the mise-en-scène for the performance we call an interview placed the interviewer with his clipboard in the kitchen or living room of a suburban home, where he would record the personal opinions of the housewife within-a simple two-person interaction. This model highlights the assumptions of methodological individualism that characterize survey research as practiced in the United States. Respondents are singular. They respond one on one. Our interviewers did not expect the village woman, surrogate for the U.S. housewife, instead of compliantly revealing her preferences, to rearrange the staging and enlarge the cast: husband, father, and sons, and daughters appeared, sometimes joined by village notables. Responding to a survey question became a matter of collective deliberation, a veritable seminar. The e...

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