Epistemological Boundaries Sample Clauses

Epistemological Boundaries. History is a clock that people use to tell the political and cultural time of the day; where they have been, what they have been, what they are [and] where they still must go and what they still must be.88 The linear approach of history encapsulated in this often quoted image by Xxxx Xxxxxxx Xxxxxx, the bedrock of modernisation theories, endeavours to measure political development along a linear model of development, which is chronologically ordered and knows starting points and logical endings. However, it remains a model, comfortably attuned to the human desire to simplify the understanding of one’s intricate politico-cultural milieu, but which may block sight of a reality comprising immense variability. As soon as such problematic simplification becomes the guiding star of decision-making, it risks narrowing the observer’s thought processes rather than opening his/her mind to broader and deeper understanding. If everything is perceived as happening in a natural sequence, everything must have an origin, a relative status, and an aim. The origin is then explained by causality: everything that ever had the slightest impact on a certain outcome must have been causal to it. The status is what one arbitrarily declares to exist relative to one’s aims, suggesting that a 87 Xxxxxxxx, Xxxxxx (1986), The Forms of Capital, in Xxxxxxxxxx, X X, Handbook for Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education Greenwood Press, Stanford, 241-258, p.257 88 Often cited without any reference as the remark of Xxxx Xxxxxx Xxxxx, the former xxxxx of Africanists in the United States final result has not yet materialised; and the result only exists in the form of uncertain predictions, or – for past events – with the benefit of hindsight. Predictions rarely come true if they are specific, hindsight always knows best, and Xxxxxxx becomes the prison guard of imagination. Modernisation theorists, starting from Xxxx Xxxx, had a point as long as economic, political, and cultural change appeared to proceed in concert, and as long as this hypothesis was not universally tested. The advent of increasingly complex post-industrial societies in the West and the spread of a post-modern political culture have already largely undermined the linkage between the economic infrastructure and the political superstructure at the heart of the theory. African developments query the theory even more as the region has experienced a delay in the development of modern states relative to other parts of the...