حسين العطاس

الأعمال

• 1972العقل الأسير في دراسات التنمية (The Captive Mind in Development Studies)

  تشخيص للعلوم الاجتماعية الآسيوية: مقلِّدة غير نقدية عاجزة عن طرح مشكلاتها الخاصة – ودعوة إلى تقليد مستقل.

• 1977أسطورة المواطن الأصلي الكسول (The Myth of the Lazy Native)

  أربعة قرون من الصور الاستعمارية عن الملايويين والفلبينيين والجاويين، مقروءة بوصفها أيديولوجيا الرأسمالية الاستعمارية.

الموقف

Alatas worked with the sociology of knowledge, above all Karl Mannheim’s concept of ideology, and with Max Weber, whose thesis on religion and capitalism he examined for Southeast Asia (1963). In “The Captive Mind in Development Studies” (1972) and later essays he described a “captive mind”: a way of thinking, formed by Western institutions or texts, that takes over their problems, concepts and methods uncritically and cannot raise questions from its own society. He stressed that the remedy was not to reject Western scholarship but to stop imitating it, and called for an autonomous social science tradition in Asia. The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977) traced the image of the indolent Malay, Filipino and Javanese through colonial writing from the sixteenth to the twentieth century and argued that it served colonial capitalism: people who would not work on plantations and in mines on colonial terms were called lazy. He took up José Rizal’s essay on the supposed indolence of the Filipinos (1890). The last chapters turned against Malay elites themselves, especially Mahathir Mohamad’s The Malay Dilemma (1970) and the UMNO tract Revolusi Mental (1971), which in his view had given in to the vocabulary of colonial capitalism. He also wrote on corruption as a social problem. Edward Said discussed the book in Culture and Imperialism (1993), with C. L. R. James and Ranajit Guha, as an example of anti-colonial scholarship. Outside the Malay-speaking world he was long little read; since the 2000s he has been cited as a forerunner of the debates on decolonising the social sciences.

الحياة والسياق

Syed Hussein Alatas was born on 17 September 1928 in Buitenzorg, now Bogor, on Java in the Dutch East Indies, into a family of Hadrami Arab descent. He studied at the University of Amsterdam, where he took his doctorate in 1963. From 1958 he headed research at Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, the Malaysian institute of language and literature, and from 1960 he lectured in philosophy at the University of Malaya. From 1967 to 1988 he headed the Department of Malay Studies at the University of Singapore. In 1968 he co-founded the multi-ethnic party Gerakan, sat briefly in the Malaysian Senate and later helped form the party PEKEMAS. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malaya from 1988 to 1991 and later taught at the National University of Malaysia. He died in Kuala Lumpur on 23 January 2007. His son Syed Farid Alatas is also a sociologist.

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• The Sociology of Corruption (1968)
• “The Captive Mind and Creative Development” (1974)
• Intellectuals in Developing Societies (1977)