Work · Sociology & Social Theory
The Captive Mind in Development Studies
A diagnosis of Asian social science: imitative, uncritical, unable to raise its own problems – and a call for an autonomous tradition.
Introduction
Alatas published this essay in 1972 in the UNESCO journal International Social Science Journal and developed it two years later in “The Captive Mind and Creative Development”. He describes a type of intellectual in Asia whose thinking is shaped by Western scholarship in an uncritical and imitative way: problems, concepts and methods are taken over without asking whether they fit the society being studied. He insists that the captive mind is not a matter of where someone studied, and not a rejection of Western knowledge, but of a lack of independence in using it. The remedy he proposes is an autonomous social science tradition that raises its own questions. The concept has become a reference point in debates on the decolonisation of the social sciences.
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