By Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu
In a most exciting lecture series, "Methodologies Beyond the West: Post-Ethnographic Explorations in Intercontinental Intimacies," I had the pleasure alongside Dr. Yu Qiu (Zhejiang University) of bringing together scholars and students to challenge conventional approaches to social science research and explore how we might reimagine research methodologies by looking beyond the Eurocentric academic traditions.
The lecture series began by examining the current methodological crisis in anthropology, particularly concerning fieldwork in the Global South. Traditional ethnographic methods, developed primarily in Western academic contexts, often struggle to capture the nuanced realities of non-Western societies. This limitation raises important questions about how we conduct research and whose knowledge we consider valid.
Perhaps most fascinating was the exploration of pre-17th century scholars from North Africa, Central Asia, and East Asia who conducted social research on "the other" long before European Enlightenment. For example, polymath Al-biruni from the 11th Century Central Asia teaches us in his extensive book on India (1030) how to approach different cosmologies not as mere belief, but as alternative ways of studying the interlink between the social and the astronomical, and that it may well take over a decade to master a language and culture – instead of about a year, as conventions of ethnography suggest. In a similar vein, “The Classic of Mountains and Seas”(Shan Hai Jing) from the 4th Century BCE allows us to think about the other differently as he illustrates a worldview in which distinctions between beings are fluid rather than hierarchically fixed.
Together with Dr Qiu, we studied how to think about methodologies differently by looking closely at such alternative work that offers valuable insights that could enrich contemporary research methods. By examining these historical examples, we can challenge the assumption that systematic social inquiry began with Western academic traditions.
The lecture series demonstrated that expanding our methodological toolkit isn't just about incorporating non-Western perspectives – it's about recognizing that diverse approaches to understanding human societies have existed throughout history and across cultures. This recognition helps decolonize our research practices and opens new possibilities for more inclusive and effective social science research.
This innovative series emerged from our three-year collaboration with Dr Qiu, resulting in a number of side-projects with the Zhejiang University, under the "Asia in Africa: Ethics and Intimate Interconnections Beyond ‘the West’" project, supported by the ERC StG (2019) Takhayyul Project and the Innovative Talent Foreign Expert Project Fellowship Award (2021-2022). The collaboration highlights the importance of international academic partnerships in developing new research paradigms that better serve our increasingly interconnected world.
As we move forward in social science research, these discussions remind us that the future of methodology might well lie in rediscovering and reintegrating knowledge systems that have been historically overlooked. By learning from approaches both beyond and before the West, we can develop richer, more nuanced, and quite transformative ways of understanding human societies and experiences.
Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu is Principal Research Fellow and Ethics Chair of the IGP and Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Intersectionality (EDII) Lead for IGP. She is leading on the ERC-funded project “Takhayyul”.
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