SAINT JOSEPH ACADEMY

OF SAN JOSE, BATANGAS INCORPORATED

SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL DEPARTMENT

SECOND SEMESTER
MODULE NUMBER: 1 FIRST QUARTER
Date: ______________________________________ S.Y. 2020 – 2021

SUBJECT: Understanding Culture Society and Politics

NAME: _______________________________________________ TEACHER:
ENGR. RAFAEL E. AQUINO
GRADE AND SECTION: _________________________________ CONTACT #:

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

ANTHROPOLOGY | SOCIOLOGY | POLITICAL SCIENCE

You have always been fascinated by the lives of great scientists who contributed to the knowledge of
natural world. These giants include Galileo Galilei, (1564-1642) who invented the telescope, Nicolaus
Copernicus (1473-1543) who popularized that the view from the sun is the center of the solar system, Isaac
Newton who discovered gravity; Charles Darwin (1809—1882), who proposed the controversial theory of
evolution; and Albert Einstein ‘(1879-1955), who developed the theory of “big bang” to account for the
beginning of our universe. But you have not yet encountered the eminent "social scientists" who immensely
contributed to our knowledge of how society, culture, and politics work. They were the first to ask fascinating
questions such as as:

"What makes social sciences similar to natural sciences?“

"Does the society exist or only the individuals who compose it?“
”Do societies share the same culture and pattern of cultural development?"
"What is the best form of government?“
"How do you distinguish common sense from scientific way of studying society, culture, and politics?"
In this Unit, you will have the chance to get acquainted with the renowned social scientists who attempted to
answer these questions. They gave us theories and concepts to understand society, culture, and politics.
You will also be able to appreciate how social scientists study the nature of society, culture, and politics by
learning about the methods and procedures they use. If you think that studying the historical development of
the natural sciences such as earth science, chemistry, physics, and biology is exciting, then, in this Unit, you
will also get excited by studying the historical development of sociology, anthropology, and political science.
Before taking a deeper adventure about this lesson, bring and keep these words to your pockets that will
serve as your keys to drive down:
• Anthropology
• Colonialism
• Decolonization
• Enlightenment
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• Globalization
• Indigenization
• Modern Period
• Political Science
• Post-colonialism
• Reflexivity
• Sikolohiyang Pilipino
• Sociology
And now, let me introduce you your travel guards:
• Ruth Benedict
• Franz Boas
• Auguste Comte
• René Descartes
• Emile Durkheim
• Immanuel Kant
• Bronislaw Malinowski
• Harriet Martineau
• Karl Marx
• Margaret Mead
• R. Radcliffe Brown
• Max Weber
In the development and progress of human knowledge, the social sciences were the last to develop
after the natural sciences. And while the origin of the social sciences can be traced back to the ancient
Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, their development as separate fields of knowledge only
begun in the modern period (Collins 1994, p. 7).
Before the birth of modern social sciences in the West, the study of society, culture, and politics
were based on social and political philosophy (Scott 2006, p. 9). In return, social and political philosophies
were informed by theological reasoning grounded in Revelation based on the Bible. This was largely due to
the dominance of religious worldview and authority during this time. While pre-modern social thinkers
employed experiences and personal observation, just like modern scientists; they fit them within the overall
framework of their philosophy and the overall religious scheme of the Church.

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Philosophy is distinct from Science. Science would have not developed if it remained under the
wings of philosophy and theology. Philosophy is based on analytic understanding of the nature of truth
asserted about specific topics of issues. It asks the questions:
• “What is the nature of truth?”
• “How do we know what we know?”
Unlike philosophy, the sciences are based on empirical data, tested theories, carefully contrived
observation not ask the question about the nature of truth.
Don't forget!
Science seeks to discover the about specific causes of events and happenings in the natural world.
It is inductive. It proceeds observing particular cases and moves toward generalizing the properties
common to these cases to other similar cases under the same specified condition.
This definition of Science is a very modern description. Before the modern period, the growth of the
sciences was slowed down because of the dominance of religious authority and tradition. However, with the
breakdown of the Church and its religious power after the French revolution, the sciences grew steadily and
rapidly to become the most widely accepted way of explaining the world, nature, and human beings
(Harrington 2006).

The Unprecedented Growth of Science

Scientific Revolution which begun with Nicolaus Copernicus historical changes in thought and belief,
to changes in social and institutional organization that unfolded in Europe roughly between 1550 and 1700.
It culminated in the works of Sir Isaac Newton (1643—1727), which proposed universal laws of motion and
mechanical motion of the universe. The 17th Century saw the rapid development in the sciences. Along with
Francis Bacon, who established the supremacy of the reason imagination, René Descartes and Sir Isaac
Newton laid the foundation that allowed science and technology to change the world. The discovery of
gravity by Sir Isaac Newton, the mathematization of physics and medicine paved the way for the dominance
of science and mathematics in describing and explaining the world and its nature. With the coming of the
scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason, in the 16th and 17th centuries, nature was to be into service
and made a slave-capra 1982. p. 56).
From the Medieval cosmology or model of the universe that defines it as divinely ordained, people
shifted to the model of the universe as a big machine. The triumph of this model of the universe was
physical from the spiritual, the body from the mind, also ked to the triumph of valuing the physical over the
spiritual. Once the physical universe is considered as a machine, it soon became apparent that human
beings can explore it according to science in order to reveal its secrets (Merchant 1986).

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René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician

and writer who is considered the father of modern philosophy. Descartes
advocated the use of rigorous philosophical analysis to arrive at truths
rather than basing them on dogmas.

The Secularization of Learning and Education

The modern period marked the growing triumph of scientific method over religious dogma and theological
thinking. The triumph of Reason (specifically Western Reason) and science over dogma and religious
authority began with the Reformation. The Protestant movement led by Martin Luther eroded the power of
the Roman Catholic Church. It challenged the infallibility of the Pope and democratized the interpretation of
the Bible. Then, there was the Enlightenment. This was largely a cultural movement, emphasizing
rationalism as well as political and economic theories, and was clearly built on the Scientific Revolution
(Stearns 2003, p. 70).

THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

In the Age of Enlightenment, philosophers led by Immanuel Kant challenged the use of
metaphysics or absolute truth derived mainly from unjustified tradition and authority such as the existence of
God. Kant advocated the use of reason in order to know the nature of the world and human beings. In 1
784, Immanuel Kant wrote his famous essay, "What Is Enlightenment?" Kant heralded the beginning of the
Modern Period when he defined Enlightenment as the courage to know.
Difficult to understand?

Rationalization

-means that social life is more subjected on calculations and prediction.

-another element of rationalization is the separation between different social spheres especially between the
Church and the universities. The collapse of religious authority and the gradual erosion of religious
domination over social life of the people led to the use philosophy and humanities to of classical humanistic
resources such as ancient human knowledge independent of Revelation (Zeitlin 1968, pp. 3ff).
The Dissolution of Feudal Social Relations
With the intensification of commerce and trade in the 17th century, many medieval guilds or
workers' cooperatives were dissolved and absorbed into the emerging factory system. The factory system
and the unprecedented growth in the urban centers due to trade and commerce, attracted a lot of
agricultural workers and mass of rural population to migrate to urban centers. This created the modern
cities. This development forced many social scientists during this time to study the effects of the dissolution
of feudal relations on the social life of the people.
Ferdinand Tönnies (1855—1936), a German sociologist, and contemporary
of Max Weber, lamented the passing away of gemeinschaft or community
because of urbanization. Tönnies' classic book Community and Society (1957)
showed how the modern way of life had drastically changed the way people
relate to one another. As capitalism replaced agricultural economy, people
began to see their relationships with other people as mere economic
transactions rather than as a form of personal relationships.

Trade and Commerce

Lives des mervelles du monde recorded the travels of Marco Polo, an Italian merchant from
Venice. This book introduced the Europeans to Asia and China, and inspired Columbus' five journeys to
America (1492-1506). From Marco Polo's travels (1276-1291) to Magellan's circumnavigation of the world

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(1519-1522), the travels of this period fed the imaginations of the Europeans with vivid descriptions of
places whose very existence they had so far been unaware of.
These travelogues had not only inspired European merchants and governments to explore the non-
Western world but also provided the social scientists the raw data to create a universal model of social
development.
Harriet Martineau, a British political economist and sociologist, social
scientists shifted their attention to non-Western world as a model of the
early stage of Western civilization.

The Rise of Individualism

This led George Simmel (1858-1918), a German sociologist in the early

20th century, to decry the growing depersonalization of life due to the
introduction of money.

The intensification of commerce and trade gradually replaced barter with the introduction of money
and banking system. Soon banking system provided merchants and capitalists the leverage to
extend credit and transactions. The introduction of money enabled people to deal with people in an
impersonal manner. Money made possible the reduction of human interaction to mere business-
like transactions devoid of any warmth and personal touch.

Money economy transformed individuals to autonomous consumers who were released

from attachment to local contexts and traditions. The dominance of money in social life paced the
way for individualization and lifestyle and the birth of plural relationships. It compelled them to
explain how the “new economy”, which was industrial capitalism, that replaced the traditional
feudal relations, had drastically shaped human character and traits. The transition from feudal
economy to industrial capitalism heralded the creation of people who no longer relied on traditional
norms and prevailing culture.
Modern individuals asserted their freedom to choose. Through education and the spread of
scientific worldview, people saw their lives as no longer at the mercy of fate or destiny.

Individualism is simply the recognition of the power of the individual to assert one’s freedom
against the given norms and structures of society.
The vast intensive and extensive growth of our technology which is much more than just
material technology entangles us in a web of means, and means toward means, more and more
intermediate stages, causing us to lose sight of our real ultimate ends. This is the extreme inner
danger which threatens all highly developed cultures, that is to say, all eras in which the whole of
life is overlaid with a maximum of multi-stratified means. To treat some means as ends may make
this situation psychologically tolerable, but it actually makes life increasingly futile.

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The Birth of Social Sciences as a Response to the Social Turmoil of the Modern Period
Sociology
-is a branch of the social sciences that deals with the scientific study of human interaction, social
group and institutions, whole societies, and the human world as such.

-It also addresses the problem of constitution of the self and the individual, but it only does so in
relation to larger social cultures and processes.

-Is a science that studies the relationship between individual and the society as they develop and
change in history.

-it does not only study the existing social forms of interaction but also pursues that investigations of
the emergence of stable structures that sustain such interaction.

Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

- A French philosopher and mathematician the Founding Father of
Sociology
-He coined the term “Sociology” but he originally used “social physics” as a
term for sociology.
It aims to discover the social laws that govern the development of the
society.
-He suggested that there were three stages in the development of
societies, namely, the theological stage, the metaphysical stage and the
positive stage.
-His sociology always been associated with Positivism or the school of thought that says that science and
its method is the only valid way of knowing things.

Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)

- the founding mother of sociology
-an English writer and reformist
-with physical disabilities, she travelled a lot especially in the United
States and wrote her travelogues. In her accounts expressed in how
to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), the deep sociological
insights that we now call as ethnographic narratives are fully
expressed.
-She also wrote on political economy and was influenced by J. S.
Mill, David Ricardo and Adam Smith.

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

-A German philosopher and revolutionary
-He contributed to the development of sociology
-He introduced the materialist analysis of history which discounts religious
and metaphysical (spiritual) explanation for historical development -before
him, scholars explained social change through divine intervention and the
theory of "Great Men."
-He advocated the use of scientific methods to uncover the deep
structural tendencies that underlie great social transitions, for instance,
from agricultural to modern industrial capitalist society.
-He belonged to the realist tradition of social sciences that believed in the
power of scientific reason to know the nature of society and human beings
-He stands out as the sociologist who combined revolutionary activity with scholarly passion

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Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

-a French sociologist who made possible the professionalization of

sociology by teaching it in the University of Bordeaux.
-He was responsible for defending as an independent discipline from
psychology.
-As a social realist, he argued that society possesses a reality sui generis
(that is, its own kind or a class by itself, unique) independent of
individuals and institutions that compose it
-He famously argued that society pre-existed the individuals and will
continue to exist long after the individual is dead.
-His main contributions are in the field of: Religion, Education and Deviance

Max Weber (1864-1920)

-He was the founding father of sociology
-He stressed the role of rationalization in the development of society

Rationalization refers essentially to the disenchantment of the world .A science

begun to replace religion, people also adopted a scientific or rational attitude to the world -people refuse to believe
in myths and superstitious beliefs. In this way, modern individuals became dependent on science to order their lives
-the greatest application of scientific way of life is in bureaucracy, which Weber saw as a mammoth machine that will
eventually curtail human freedom. Because in bureaucracy, efficiency is considered as the supreme value, other
values such as personal relationships and human intimacies are gradually discarded

Anthropology
-a scientific discipline originated from social philosophy and travelogues of western travellers

-it grew out of the encounter of social scientist with the non-western world. According to Allan Barnard
(2004), "Anthropology emerged as a distinct branch of scholarship around the middle of the 19th century,
when public interest in human evolution took hold. An academic discipline began a bit later, with the first
appointments of professional anthropologists in universities, museums, and government offices." (p. 15)

-many pioneers in anthropology built a universal model of cultural development patterned according to
Darwin's evolutionary theory that locates all societies in the linear evolutionary process. Like sociology,
anthropology developed during the years of two world wars (Barnard 2004, p. 37)

The great Anthropologists that helped to formalize and advance Anthropology as a

Discipline

Franz Boas (1858-1942)

-He often considered as the father of modern American Anthropology
-He was the first anthropologist to have rejected the biological basis of
racism or racial discrimination.
-He also rejected the popular western idea of social evolution or the
development of societies from lower to higher forms .This kind of theory
influenced by Darwin was rejected by Boas in favour of historical
particularism. In this doctrine, each society is considered as having a
unique form of culture that cannot be subsumed under an overall definition
of general culture.
-He advocated cultural relativism or the complexity of all culture whether
primitive or not.

Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski

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(1884-1942)
-another anthropologist who contributed to the development of modern anthropology
-He was a polish immigrant who did a comprehensive study of Trobriand Island. Based on his field study, he
developed what social scientists now call as participant observation.
It is a method of social science research that requires the anthropologist to have the ability to participate
and blend with the way of life of a given group of people.
-He was also considered as one of the most influential ethnographers in the 20th century

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955)

-another influential anthropologist
-He did fieldwork in 1906-1908 on the Andaman Islands east of India and
published his reports in the diffusionist style, but later shifted his theoretical
orientation.
In 1937, he became the Chair in Social Anthropology in Oxford.
-He advocated the study of abstract principles that govern social change.
-He saw individuals as mere products of social structures. This view led to
the establishment of structural-functionalist paradigm in anthropology.
According to this view, the basic unit of analysis for anthropology and social
sciences are the structures and the functions they perform to maintain the equilibrium of society.

Political Science
-is part of the social sciences that deals with the study of politics, power and government.
-Politics refers to “the process of making collaborative decisions in a community, society or group through
application of influence and power” (Ethridge and Handelman 2010, p. 8).
-studies how even the most private and personal decisions of individuals are influenced by collective
decisions of a community.

-has a complex history. Its earlier form can be traced backed to the ancient Greek political philosophy of
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Later, it developed into religious oriented tradition beginning with Augustine,
Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau.
-Its focus has always been narrative of democracy.

The science of the political during the 19th Century was organized around the concept of the state
as elaborated by German émigré Francis Lieber, who taught at Columbia University.

In the 20th Century, the discipline of social sciences shifted from state-centered to pluralism as
evidenced in the works of Lawrence Lowell (Public Opinion and Popular Government, 1913) and later,
Walter Lippman (The Phantom Public,1925).

Pluralism led to the emphasis on analysing group interests rather than the state. Society is viewed
as being composed of several competing groups with different interest that generate conflicts. Walter
Lippmann (1889-1974) was a newspaper commentator and respected world news anchor.

Later, political science will be dominated by behavioural orientation that defined the discipline as an
empirical science. An inquiry into the state of Political Sciences (1953). This was also the beginning of
liberal tradition in political science. Liberal tradition champions individual freedom as best embodied in
democracy. Like in sociology, critical tradition in political science was not marginal to the discipline. The
works of Herbert Marcuse and the members of the Frankfurt School became a loud critique within political
science itself.

In the 20th century, political science has moved from behavioural approach that emphasizes
scientific method towards doing research on more pressing social problems. Today, political science is
composed of diverse paradigms and interpretations.
 
The Colonial Origin of the Social Sciences

The Clamour for Decolonization of Social Sciences

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The images created by the social scientists around the 18th century carried a very European view of
non-Western world, Social sciences spread from the cent, to the peripheries of the world. Most of their
observations, mainly from anthropology were clothed in the cultural beliefs and attitudes of the fair
European.
It cannot be denied that social sciences as they developed in the West were employed by colonizers
in order to further subjugate the inhabitants of the non-Western world.
As Simale and Kincheloe (1999) observed, “The denigration of indigenous knowledge cannot be
separated from the oppression of indigenous peoples. Indeed, modernist science, anthropology particular
has been deployed as a weapon against indigenous peoples” (p. 29).

Social Darwinism
-proclaimed the survival of the fittest
-was used to justify the domination of native people as well as the exploitation of the underclass in industrial
societies.
In fact, most travelogues and descriptions of the European travellers were fug of factual errors and
had belittling descriptions of natives. When European explorers, just like social scientists, encountered the
natives, they found themselves different from the natives. Most Westerners looked at the natives as savage,
illiterate, and incapable of rational thinking. And these colonial biases were also echoed in the social
sciences during that time. For, instance, in the development of societies, European social scientists placed
the Western world in the lowest point in the evolutionary process. This kind of attitude also to colonialism
and the destruction.
 
E. San Juan, Jr. (2006) provides a classic example for American colonialism in the Philippines:

Complicit with the invading military, US academics were appointed to implement the systematic
"tutelage" of the Filipino subject. One example is Dean Worcester, professor of anthropology at the
University of Michigan, who wrote one of the first sourcebooks of knowledge about the Philippines and its
people. He participated in the first Philippine Commission in 1899 on the basis of his expertise on zoological
specimens collected in the archipelago. As Secretary of the Interior for 13 years, Worcester became
notorious for denouncing the "barbaric“ practices of slavery and peonage of the Muslims, thus judging
Filipinos unfit for being recognized as a people or a nation (p. 51).

Because social sciences were imported from the rich Western countries, many scholars in former
colonies and developing countries are now clamouring for decolonization of the social sciences. As two
scholars rightly observed, "The story of the Scientific Revolution in Europe itself is framed in the
ethnocentric West-is-best discourse of colonialism." Social scientists advocating decolonization or de-
Westernization of science believed that the methods and concepts, the epistemology, and the philosophical
worldview that inform
Western social sciences are not as universal as Western scholars claim. Western medicine, for
instance, is a unique product of Western civilization. Outside the Western civilization, there are other
existing alternative medical systems that are even much older than Western medicine.

ACTIVITY 1.0
If you will be the President of the Republic of the Philippines, what social sciences will you employ to seek
advise in any of the following issues:

 Population problem
 Poverty
 Corruption
 Global warming
 Sexual harassment
 Drug addiction
 Juvenile suicide or suicide of young people
 Illiteracy
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Explain your ideas about it in 300 words and write in a short bond paper. Create a poster in ¼ illustration
board and attach your explanation behind it. Second Semester – First Quarter - Module 1 – Activity
1.0. Please include your name, grade and section, subject and subject teacher.

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