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Sociology 125
So far as East Pakistan is concerned, we can hardly afford to ignore the richness and
variety of its culture and tradition which can form the basis of asocial theory of an
indigenous type; and thereby we can get ‘an idea of the whole’. In such a context the
‘anthropological techniques’ of direct participation and observation and knowledge
of the language (even of the variations in local dialects) of the people wil help under-
standing the social structure of East Pakistani society. Sociology, therefore, should be
social anthropology based on the background of our country at least for some years to
come. With facts, so gathered, we can try to formulate a social theoryof our c0untry.’4~
But leaving aside these so called sociographic or social anthropological con-
siderations, the argument in favour of a sociology which is responsive to local
needs and conditions has been put on a more theoretical basis :
What Comte, Saint Simon and Durkheim developed in France, or what Westermark
and Hobhouse evolved in England may not be exactly applicable here. The generaliza-
tions arrived at by W. I. Thomas are not and should not be applicable to conditions in
Pakistan, India and for that matter in certain parts of Europe. It is high time that we go
through the theoretical framework of sociology, test the efficacy of its methodology
and arrive at definite decisions as to what was valid for our society and what was most
efficient in our conditions ... It is a sort of acclimatization for a discipline developed in
foreign lands and in foreign CUI~LIT~S...~~~
However, it should be pointed out that not only in developing countries is it
recognized that Western, and in particular American social theory is not suited
to the explanation of local phenomena.
Thus, Petersen, an American, observes:
If one tries to analyse not the well-established, more or less discrete societies of the
modern West, but the social world of the past or of underdeveloped countries, then
Parsons is even less useful as a mentor. In such a case, to define one’s unit of study as
‘the social system’, which is made up of mutually interacting ‘subsystems’, begs the
most important questions. Was there a ‘France’ in AD 1000, or a ‘China’ in 1700; is
there a ‘Nigerian society’ or an ‘Indonesian society’ today? If one assumes that the
answer to such questions is unambiguously yes, then one is tempted to explain away
social phenomena that transgress these units (the ‘Chinese’ who were not part of ‘China’)
or that do not fit into them (tribal influences in Africa as ‘remnants’).142
Characteristics of a society’s culture can also affect the research methods employed
by sociologists. Habibullah has pointed to a number of cultural obstacles
encountered by survey researchers in East Pakistan.143 Rural Pakistanis lack
familiarity not merely with a certain vocabulary but with some of the basic
conceptual notions underlying survey research on economic development,
such as ‘man-day’, ‘gainful work‘, and ‘saving’. Another difficulty facing survey
research on this topic is the low degree of monetization of the economy and
absence of any kind of financial accounting. However, the greatest handicap to
conducting research in rural areas is the high rate of illiteracy which often
prevents respondents from giving correct expression to their ideas, and limits
their ability to think in abstract terms.
Closely related to this is the fact that people have difficulty in reacting to
hypothetical questions frequently used elsewhere in survey research. Thus :
In our study on capital formation in agriculture we wanted to measure the saving-
spending preferences of the rural community through a hypothetical situation, namely,