ABSTRACT
Chapter 4, ‘The Elusive Case of Template “Beyond the West”’, takes up from where the previous chapter ends. It makes an extensive academic detour – in different subsections – South Asia, China, South East Asia, Japan, Arab World, Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean to analyse ontological, epistemological and methodological dimensions and negotiations of social sciences, mostly explicated by local scholars of those countries and regions. It reveals how in the midst of a bewildering variety of locations, ideologies, culture and politics, certain common perspectival threads are traceable in the way the non-western world, consciously or subconsciously, approaches and responds to the template issue. In a more specific manner it is argued that even amidst the widespread but largely elusive efforts to make social sciences more ‘scientific’, there is nevertheless a churning process marked by emergent acts of self-disclosure of vulnerabilities and self-critical discourse, with some potential for the construction of alternative template(s) of the non-western social sciences.
