Description:

GEORGE STEINMETZ
Sociology, University of Michigan

"The Colonial Moment in French and British Sociology, 1940s-1960s"

Description: This lecture examines French and British colonial sociology between the 1940s and the 1960s, asking about the ways political contexts, including colonial and imperial contexts, shape social research; about the sources of scientific autonomy and heteronomy; and about the construction and reconfiguration of disciplinary boundaries, especially the boundary between sociology and anthropology. The paper also explores the ways the two imperial intellectual fields differed, converged, and interacted with one another. The first finding is that colonies and empires constituted a central object and terrain of investigation for sociologists in both empires during this period, when sociology was reemerging as a scientific field. The widespread engagement with colonialism had a significant imprint on the discipline, even if this episode was subsequently forgotten. Sociologists engaged in imperial careering, moving from one colonial site to another and between metropoles and colonies. Imperial academic sociological fields began to emerge, with a primary orientation toward their metropoles and with asymmetrical but increasingly important relations between colonizing and colonized sociologists. Colonial sociology made several contributions, some of which have recently been rediscovered or unwittingly reinvented by theorists of postcolonialism, transnationalism, and race relations.

Bio: George Steinmetz works on the historical sociology of empires, states, and cities, with a focus on modern Germany, France, Britain, and Africa. His other main area is the history and philosophy of the social sciences and social theory. His books include Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 1993), The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences (Duke, 2005), The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago, 2007), and Sociology and Empire (Duke, 2013). He also co-directed a 92-minute documentary film “Detroit: Ruin of a City” (Art Films, 2012). In 2015 he is completing a book on British and French sociologists’ colonial research (1940s-1960s). George Steinmetz is the Charles Tilly Professor of Sociology and German Studies at the University of Michigan and has also taught at the New School for Social Research, the University of Chicago, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales.

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