Why we need a revolution in the Social sciences: A post-colonial perspective

Description

We began our work in right and in serious earnest in the year 2005, November 14th, 2005 to be precise
when children’s day is celebrated all over India in commemoration of the birthday of Pandit Jawaharlal
Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India. The underlying philosophy of our work however, stretches back
to the early 1990’s, even the mid 1980’s, when we faced a great deal of cognitive dissonance in many of
our endeavours and daily walks of life due to a constant exposure to, and a bombardment by, a large
number of philosophies and ideas from different sources, both human and non-human. In the year
2005, particularly after the aforesaid date, we had reached out to several leading lights and luminaries
in the fields of science, religion, philosophy and spirituality with a great deal of hope, to meaningfully
engage with them and elicit their own pet theories, proposals and viewpoints on various issues and
topics. We had hoped that this would also help us in our own voyage and journey of discovery. The
results were indeed startling; there was a wide variation in viewpoints based on the scholar in question’s
own religious, linguistic and nationalistic affiliation, and loyalties. Therefore, the age of ideology has still
not formally or conceptually ended; ending this can change many fundamental equations at a grassroots
level, and can make life better for all of us living in different parts of the world. As a matter of fact,
Eurocentric biases in various fields of the social sciences has only served to throw up counter-reactions,
and exacerbate ideological differences. Intellectualism is also still weak in general, particularly in
developing countries, particularly owing to the following factors....................

About the Author

Sujay Rao Mandavilli is an IT professional (Governance Risk and Compliance) (Still practising as of 2024; Served major clients such as Tata Group, Mahindra Group, NECAM, Verizon and BAT, and also previously worked in IBM) and a born-again Anthropologist and researcher with major contributions to various fields of Anthropology and Social Sciences. He completed his Masters in Anthropology from the prestigious Indira Gandhi National Open University in New Delhi, India in 2020 with a first class. He has made major contributions to Anthropological Economics, the Sociology of Science, theories of socio-cultural change, Identity theory, Historiography, language dynamics, scientific method, Indo-European studies, the Aryan Problem, and the identity of the Harappans. His hypothesis is that most fields of Social sciences which are based on a study on social and cultural variables, are based on old Eurocentric paradigms, and that better theories can only come from intellectual multipolarity, and Ethnographic data collected from different parts of the world. He believes this will lead to better scientific research, and greatly boost scientific output in different parts of the world that have hitherto lagged behind the West in scientific research. He has also attempted to synthesize Anthropological theory with other fields of Social Sciences such as Economics and Pedagogy, generating several new paradigms as a result. He strongly believes that the ‘Globalization of Science’, with a particular emphasis on the social sciences, must become one of the major movements of the Twenty-first century. He has called for an "Indian Enlightenment" as well as similar renaissances in the developing world through a horizontal collaboration among developing nations. He is the Founder-Director of the Institute for the Study of the Globalization of Science (ISGOS) (Registered in India as the Globalization of Science Trust) which is has already started empaneling a group of researchers and scientists to plan its next course of action. In 2023, he launched the "Scholars and intellectuals for mankind" (SCHIMA) forum, which is reaching out to scholars and intellectuals from throughout the world to draft a common agenda. In 2024, he also created the blog "Abhilasha: This is not Utopia" to discuss burning and pressing issues of the day, particularly in relation to science, knowledge and society.....

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