BOOK REVIEW

Statistically Motivated
George Varghese K

amakrishna Mukherjees book denitely invites a new rethinking on the theory and methodology of social sciences and humanities in the present context of heightened knowledge production and the incumbent confusions it has created. This is especially so when disciplinary mergers are occurring at present in the Occident with a never seen before intensity. Under the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary labels, disciplines and sub-disciplines belonging to strangest species are hybridising with great gusto, most often creating disgured epistemic monsters. In this context Ramakrishna Mukherjees intellectual intervention in the form of this book is very welcome. The book to some extent puts the disordered state of affairs in the realm of social sciences and humanities into better perspective. The book is divided into four chapters with the rst one Scientia and Discrete Human (Social) Sciences forming the introduction to his analysis. As an important scholar in statistics-based social analysis,
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Why Unitary Social Science? by Ramakrishna Mukherjee (Delhi: Primus Books), 2012; pp 132, Rs 695.

his approach to social sciences to a great extent is inuenced by this discipline. Statistics and its method constitute the core of his analytic perspective. For him statistics with its enumerative analysis can help the social sciences to take a correct perspective amidst the ood of subjectively inected data with which they are beleaguered at present. The Social and the Science After making this initial stress on the chaotic nature of social science data and therefore the importance of statistics, the author turns to another nuance in the method and practice of social sciences which also logically calls for the help of statistics. This is the fragmented and amphibious nature of a number of disciplines. For example, psychology has its one leg in humanities and the other one in pure sciences. While social psychology forms part of humanities, its other
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constituents like psychiatry, psychopathology and psychoanalysis veer towards pure sciences like physiology and medicine. Likewise, geography also has this fragmented nature. While human geography in every sense is part of humanities and social sciences, physical geography and cartography become parts of pure sciences (p 9). The case of anthropology also substantiates this disordered condition. Its division into the four elds of archaeology, physical anthropology, linguistic anthropology and cultural anthropology is telling evidence. When physical anthropology becomes a pure science, archaeology gets domiciled in the domain of earth sciences. The other two branches get congregated under humanities and social sciences (p 12). This break-up of sciences into multiple territories has prompted statisticians to formulate a new conceptual and methodological approach to them. The contributions of P C Mahalanobis, the illustrious founder director of Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata, become important in this context. In the 1950s he designated all the research channels of ISI as units in the place of the usual designation of departments. So Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Economics, Sociology, etc, became different units. These
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units formed nodes in an ever-expanding network that clearly reected the very dynamics of reality itself with its diverse facets. Among these units the analogous ones may enter into dialogue, homologous ones may merge, and certain ones with critical commonalties may form a new type of rhizomic bond. But the common link between all these ever-expanding units will be the probability principles of statistics (p 13). Attack on Anthropology The next three chapters deal with the project of constructing an ideal-type paradigm of social science which the author calls unitary social science. This new mode is specically handled in the last chapter. But the intervening two chapters become a critical conduit towards this ideal construct amidst the presumed debris of inessential vagaries and confusions leaked out by the present social sciences and humanities. The most severely blighted social science in this regard is anthropology. The main reason for the authors ire towards anthropology is its colonial parentage on the one hand, and the refusal of it to yield to quantication and enumeration as per his ideal of statistical method. For him anthropology and sociology seem to be committing a gross heresy in refusing to yield to the framework of statistics which is captured in their counterslogan: Quantify and Perish (p 96). The reasons for anthropologys backward state are directly accountable to the cardinal error in its phylogeny: of being given birth to it by the colonialists to manage the conquered people and races. But this initial tribal and meta-tribal situation in which it was fed and nourished no more exists today; the thinning of this life-sustaining medium has weakened or rather destroyed anthropology beyond recuperation. As a colonial discipline anthropology does not deserve any right to be revived or recuperated. Again, it is not only the colonialists who are the villains in creating this untimely monster, but the indigenous intellectuals too who carried with them the imperial hangover. M N Srinivas, the founding father of modern Indian sociology and anthropology, becomes
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such an imperial simulacrum in the authors eye. He had done irreparable damage to the scientic ideals of social sciences by implementing a Weberian agenda which in turn critically damaged the truer historical insights of Marxism on the Indian society. As Mukherjee accuses, Srinivas parochial sociological vision was stuck within an imperial frame and tied to the problematic category of culture. Historical determinants and the inuence of political economy on Indian society were criminally ignored. Caste mobility becomes the index of culture change and culture in turn becomes a self-explained category immured from any other economic or historical inuences (p 23). With all these critical aws anthropology is bound to sink and wither away in future; its classical version is already in its death throes struggling to survive amidst a set of disciplines enlightened by statistics and quantication (p 35). If anthropology is identied with the old imperial colonialism, the postsecond world war period witnessed the rise of another bad equivalent which Mukherjee terms as unied social sciences. This is part of the new imperialism and had its logical birth in the United States. The unied eld theory built across many social science disciplines was envisioned and supported by a few powerful American academic institutions and funding agencies like the Social Science Research Council of US, Carnegie Corporation, etc. The academic stimulus to this integrative revolution (Clifford Geertz) came from the theories of Max Weber. He developed a cultural sociology articulated on the important concepts like rationality, value, charisma, etc, which have universal applicability in contrast to the limited contextual relevance of historical or political economy paradigms. The universal applicability of Weberian model in turn gave rise to a universal scale of culture in which different societies could be located and calibrated (p 37). Unitary Social Science The Weberian model was supplemented by the economic model of W W Rostow. He divided the world into three different
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strata in terms of economic development: the lowest stratum was the so-called third world countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America; the uppermost stratum was formed of the developed countries mostly from Europe and North America; and a second layer was inserted in between them constituted of the former USSR and its satellite countries in free Europe. The combined effect of Rostowian model and Weberian cultural sociology became a powerful ideology that could be deftly manipulated by the US and its allies to dominate the third world countries. The crux of this ideology eventually congealed into a pseudo-political economy model that was forced upon the non-western poor countries under the duplicitous agenda of developmental salvation. This model was extremely exible too. The rst version was a hardened Weberian model which found all third world countries plunged in the morass of tradition which ought to be averted by bringing them into the light of modernity that characterises the developed west. Tradition-Modernity became a cryptic mantra of the ideologues of the western world; which found followers in the Indian milieu also in scholars like Yogendra Singh who wrote the book Modernisation of Indian Tradition, published in 1973 (p 41). Soon this model lost its ground due to resistance from the third world which resulted in the replacement of it with a new one. This rehashed new one was the Development-Underdevelopment model, which was only a repeat of the old one in a new uniform. The compulsive modelling mission of the west nally ended up in the creation of its most exemplary version: the organismic model. In this version society was constituted in the image of a human being with different organs, which again was something always evolving in a dynamic equilibrium. This model had three main organs: culture, economy and polity. Mukherjee draws up a parallel between this organismic model and the energy physics. Accordingly, culture constitutes the gravitational energy of society, economy, the kinetic energy and polity, the potential energy (p 41).
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The perceived drawbacks in the abovediscussed models prompt the author to suggest a new and comprehensive one which he elaborates in the fourth chapter titled Unitary Social Science. As the author denes it, the task of unitary social science is to build a social science in place of the social sciences (p 67). He emphasises upon the merits of unitary social science by pointing out the defects of other forms:
...the methodology for unitary social science does not present the innate property of rationality through various channels for elucidating the life and living of human beings. That is the kernel of spiritualist-idealist philosophy and was applied to Human Science under the label of Humanities via the Newtonian-Cartesian dichotomy ...( p 85).

society by the culture of the people concerned (pp 85-86). In highlighting such a differential and substantive method Mukherjee draws upon similar insights, chiey from Max Planck, Paul Feyrabend, Karl Popper and Max Weber. Finally, statistics becomes the quintessential method that unites the unitary social science. But he is also cautious to warn us about the danger of overusing statistics since that would denitely erode the substantive base of social science (p 99). Overambitious The book is an ambitious project which tries to enfold more than it can handle. Though it tries to limit itself to a statistics-motivated approach essentially, the sheer volume of the material it has to handle defeats its aim to a great extent. This is reected in the gaps left by the book which at certain points surface as vituperative attacks on scholars like M N Srinivas and disciplines like anthropology. Again, approaching a question like the emergence and transformation of disciplines in the west, the author is required to address the problematic opened up

On the other hand, the methodology of unitary social sciences is concerned with the differential understanding of rationality which in turn is reected by the variable behaviour patterns of humans under different social conditions and situations. This methodology is not pivoted on an a priori rationality or determinacy, but is articulated as a mental construct which is motivated by economy, modulated by polity, and moored in

magisterially by Foucault and his theory of episteme in The Order of Things. This encounter could be a critique as well. This work has become the seminal classic on the birth and changes that has occurred to disciplines in the west from the 17th century onwards. Again, his attack on anthropology also misses the important critique anthropology has made of itself from the 1980s onwards, especially by the Writing Culture group under the inuence of postmodernism. An equally important event is what we call the symmetrisation of anthropology in the hands of Bruno Latour who perhaps have found out more savages in the laboratories and academic institutions of the west than in primitive Africa or Latin America. On the other hand, the book becomes important and relevant when approached from the angle of political and economy and world system theory. It is more Wallersteinian than Foucauldian. This denitely leaves the choice to the readers.
George Varghese K ([email protected]) is at Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, Karnataka.

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