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 i

Post-Western Revolution in Sociology

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004309982_001

ii 

Post-Western Social Sciences

and Global Knowledge

Series Editor

Laurence Roulleau-Berger (CNRS/ENS de Lyon)

Editorial Board

T.N. Madan (University of Delhi)

Xie Lizhong (Peking University)
Nira Wickramasinghe (Leiden University)
Han Sang-Jing (Seoul National University)
Toshio Sugiman (Kyoto University)
Svetla Koleva (Institute for the Study of Societies and Knowledge, Sofia)

VOLUME 1

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/psgk

 iii

Post-Western Revolution
in Sociology
From China to Europe

By

Laurence Roulleau-Berger

Translated by

Nigel Briggs

LEIDEN | BOSTON
 iv 

Cover illustration: Painting by Francis Berger.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Roulleau-Berger, Laurence, 1956- author. | Briggs, Nigel.

Title: Post-Western revolution in sociology : from China to Europe / by
Laurence Roulleau-Berger ; translated by Nigel Briggs.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2016] | Series: Post-Western social
sciences and global knowledge ; volume 1 | Includes bibliographical
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Identifiers: LCCN 2016000245 (print) | LCCN 2015045382 (ebook) | ISBN
9789004309982 (E-book) | ISBN 9789004309722 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Sociology--China. | Sociology--Europe. | China--Social
conditions. | Europe--Social conditions.
Classification: LCC HM477.C55 (print) | LCC HM477.C55 R68 2016 (ebook) | DDC
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 v

To Stéphane, Preden and Marjolaine

⸪
vi 
 Contents
Contents vii

Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1
1 Post-Colonial Studies and Global Studies 3
2 The Decline of the Western Hegemony 5
3 The Invention of a Post-Western Sociology 6

PART 1
Post-Western Revolution in Sociology: From China to Europe

1 Epistemic Injustice and New Frontiers of Knowledge 13

1 Epistemic Injustice and Autonomy 13
2 What is Post-Western Sociology? 16
3 Scientific Hegemony and Chinese Sociology 19
4 Reinvention and Internal Frontiers in Chinese Sociology 22

2 Traditions and Controversies 25

1 Epistemological Unpredictability and Scientific Pluralism in
Chinese Sociology 25
2 Affiliations, Shifts and Hybridisations between China and
Europe 27
3 Chinese Civilisation and Theoretical Variations Today 28
3.1 Chinese Civilisation and General Scope 29
3.2 Schools of Chinese Sociology Today 29
3.3 Constructivisms and Theoretical Variations 31
4 Traditions and Controversies in European Sociology since 1980 33

3 Fabric of Knowledge and Research Fieldwork 37

1 Research Fieldwork and Methodological Theory 37
1.1 Regional Rationalisms and Fieldwork Sciences 37
1.2 Chinese Singularities 38
1.3 Creating Knowledge and Research Methods 40
2 Multi-situated Sociology and Overlapping Perspectives 43
2.1 Methodological Cosmopolitanism and Multi-situated
Sociology 43
2.2 Entering Spaces 44
viii Contents

2.3 Contexts of Meaning and Scopes in Fieldwork Experience 46

2.4 Ethnographies of Recognition and Moral Economies 48
2.5 Politics of Intimacy and Narrative Pact 50
2.6 Translation and Publication 53

PART 2
Sociological Questions in Europe and in China

4 Urban Boundaries, Segregation and Intermediate Spaces 57

1 Social Stratification and Urban Hierarchies in the Chinese City 57
1.1 Urban Society and the New Middle-Classes 58
1.2 Segregation and the Rural Population 59
1.3 New Underclass and Urban Poverty 60
2 Social Division of Space in the European City 61
3 Migration and Ethnic Boundaries in Cities 63
4 “Foreigners” and “Hobos” in Cities 65
5 Circulations and Marketplaces in Chinese and International
Cities 68
6 Civil Society and Intermediate Spaces 70

5 Uncertainty and Economic Institutions 73

1 Uncertainty and economic transformations 73
2 Markets and Economic Institutions 78
3 Professional Relationships and Regimes of Employment 81
4 Youth Confronted with the “Risk Society” 86
5 The Relationship to Work and Generational Effects 88

6 Migrations, Inequalities and Individuation 93

1 Migration Policies and Panoptical Measures 93
2 New Inequalities and Plurality of Migration Routes 95
2.1 Mono-migrations and Linear Routes 96
2.2 Pluri-migrations and Spatial Capital 96
3 Gender, Economic Activities and Migrations. 97
4 Migration and Urban Integration 99
5 Migration, Employment and Flexibility 101
6 Social Capital and Migratory Circulations 103
7 Migratory Experiences and Bifurcations 106
8 Migration, Local and Global Stratification 109
Contents ix

7 State, Social Conflict and Collective Action 111

1 State and Citizenship 111
2 Bio-political Apparatuses and Self-government 114
3 Social Conflicts and Mobilisations in China 116
4 New Social Protests in China 119
5 Collective Action, Violences and Riots in Europe 121
6 Social Conflict and Care Policies 126

8 Ecological Risks and Environmental Sociology in Europe and

China 130
1 Social-ecological Change, Inequalities and Environmental
Injustice 131
2 Risks, Multi-governance and Bio-political Order 134
3 Geographies of Care and Communities of Destiny 136
4 Conciliation, Negotiation and Disputes 137
5 Regimes of Action, Capabilities and Re-socialisation 139

Part 3
Continuities and Discontinuities of Theoretical Knowledge

9 Continuities of Knowledge and Common Concepts 143

1 Structural Processes, Dominations and Resistances 143
2 Social Stratification and Inequalities 149
3 Mobility and Contemporary Societies 154
4 Social Networks and Social Capital 156
5 Autonomy and Subjectivity 159
6 Frontiers of We and Me 162

10 Discontinuities of Knowledge and Singular Concepts 166

1 Public Space and Pluralisation of Norms 166
2 Subjectivation and the Struggle for Recognition 169
3 Society and Intermediate Spaces in Europe 173
4 Diffused Religiousness in China 176

Conclusion 181

Bibliography 187
Index 222
x Contents
 Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments xi

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a very successful and quite long cooperation with my
Chinese colleagues started in 2006. I would like to thank warmly Li Peilin, Pro-
fessor at the Institute of Sociology and Vice-President of the Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences (Beijing), we have long enjoyed rich and excellent scientific
exchanges. The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Chi-
nese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and the Ecole Normale Supérieure de
Lyon signed an agreement to jointly establish an International Associated Lab-
oratory (LIA) “Post-Western Sociologies and Fieldwork in France and in China”
in 2013. Professor Li Peilin and I are in charge of this laboratory for China and
France respectively.
Many thanks are given to my colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences Professors: He Rong, Yang Yiyin, Li Chunling, Luo Hongguang and Liu
Zhengai; at the Department of Sociology, Beijing University: Professors Xie
­Lizhong, Liu Shiding, Qu Jingdong, Qiu Zeqi, Liu Neng, Tong Xin and Sun Feiyu,
associated Professor; at the School of Sociology and Political Sciences, Shang-
hai University: Professors Li Youmei, Zhang Wenhong and Liu Yuzhao; at the
Departement of Sociology, Tsinghua University : Professors Guo Yuhua and
Shen Yuan : and at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing Uni-
versity: Professors Zhou Xiaohong and Fan Ke.
I also would like to thank warmly Senior Translator Nigel Briggs, ENS de
Lyon, for his very rigourous and excellent translation in English.
xii Acknowledgments
 Introduction
Introduction 1

Introduction

In today’s world, the social sciences have become internationalised and have
been rejuvenated in other societies such as China, India, Brazil... Within a
movement towards the circulation and globalisation of knowledge, new cen-
tres and new peripheries form and new hierarchies appear – more or less
discretely – producing competition and rivalry in the development of “new”
knowledge. Centres of gravity in human science knowledge have been dis-
placed towards Asia – South, East, Central and Pacific Asia – where, in regional
forums, intellectuals from China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and India continually
discuss the modes of producing epistemic autonomies in a context of non-
Western hegemony. These exchanges are widely ignored in the Western world
where numerous intellectuals still believe in the reign of the universalisation
of the Western approach to science (Kuhn, 2013). Indeed, the early construc-
tion of dominances and hierarchies between Western, Eastern and Far-Eastern
contexts has produced instances of ignorance and occultation of entire bodies
of knowledge. Western sociologists have not a good access to the narratives of
distant societies such as China, Korea and Japan and have continually found
refuge in ethnocentric positions.
However, if India, Taiwan and Japan have been engaged in partial Wester­
nisation processes for several decades and Korea for a little less, the thirty years
of Maoism closed the gates to China with the result that Chinese intellectu-
als could not participate in the development of sociology, a forbidden field
from 1949 to 1979. This blank page in history produced a double invisibilisation
affecting not only the knowledge produced in that period but also that pro-
duced before 1949. On a continental scale, Chinese sociologists have recreated
and instilled new life into a social science which had become a dead or inert
science. The rebirth of sociological thinking in China represents a fundamen-
tal moment in the history of global thought. Western worlds have ignored the
sciences of Chinese society which, nevertheless, constitute practices as ancient
as those of Western society. In these Western worlds, there has been a sort of
epistemological, ideological, ethical and political indecency consisting in not
seeking to break the dissymmetry between Chinese and European knowledge.
Although the Chinese language might represent a barrier, the boundaries of
bodies of knowledge perceived, experienced and recognised as more legiti-
mate than others have been fixed, in the main, by Orientalists. Therefore,
in this work, we start from Chinese thought to return to European thought in
the field of sociology and, above all, open a new conceptual horizon around
doing Post-Western Sociology together involving both Chinese and European
sociologists. (Roulleau-Berger, Li Peilin, 2012)

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004309982_002

2 Introduction

This book is the fruit of ten years of exchanges, discussions, comparisons

and debates – focusing on sociologies, their de-Westernisation and interna-
tionalisation – with Chinese colleagues from the Institute of Sociology of
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing) and the sociology departments
of the Universities of Peking, Tsinghua (Beijing), Shanghai and Nanjin. It is
rooted in an epistemological approach to the sociology in which the diversity
of knowledge is organised in conceptual spaces linked to paradigms and pro-
grammes which in turn are linked to ethnocentred knowledge processes. As
important as the phenomena and issues of the domination and overlapping of
non-Western theories by Western theories might be, the issue of the blurring of
boundaries is of greater importance, particularly the blurring of the bounda-
ries between Western and non-Western sociologies. This blurring contains
non-declared competition and struggles for the recognition of ignored or for-
gotten scientific cultures.
The construction of a de-centred perspective enables us to gain access to: a
plurality of social worlds; a diversity of narratives told by societies about them-
selves; and the analysis of modes of legitimisation and/or disqualification of
narratives. This approach enables the undoing of intellectual dissymmetries
constructed by ethnocentrisms from determined places and temporalities.
However, we must make it clear that, in writing this book, we make no claim to
exhaustively cover the whole body of Chinese and European sociological
research. Moreover, entire areas of Chinese and European sociologies will
remain untouched insofar as we have not sought to describe the state of soci-
ologies in context but rather to work upon the intervals and gaps between
them in order to reveal a Post Western Space in which the sociologies come
into contact, meet, exchange and understand or fail to understand each other.
From the Chinese experience we are opening a Post-Western Space
of knowl­edge which means co-production and co-construction of common
knowl­­edge. This is a “global change” in sociology which imposes theoreti-
cal and methodological detours, displacements, reversals and conversions.
After Post-Colonial Studies, we have witnessed the emergence of what we
call a Post-Western Sociology in the context of globalisation and circulation
of ideas, concepts and paradigms in which some scholars are producing epis-
temic autonomy (Roulleau-Berger, 2011; Roulleau-Berger, 2014e). Post-Western
Sociology is first and foremost rhizomatous in that it is constructed from
connections between points located in knowledge spaces governed by very
different regimes of signs and the non-correspondence of different types of
situated knowledge. We will stop to conceive relationships as being between
entities, worlds, pre-constituted cultures, or in terms of a clear and contrasted
heterogeneity between these elements. An unmaking of pairs in order to work
Introduction 3

on the variations of degree and intensity, the continuities and discontinuities

of sociological knowledge.

1 Post-Colonial Studies and Global Studies

Easternism had meant the implementation of processes for collecting, captur-

ing and orienting gestures, discourses and points of view (Agamben, 2007).
This capture process has been particularly selective rendering active knowl-
edge invisible and apprehending “inert” knowledge such as that linked to
ancient philosophies to incorporate and imprison it in sub-categories.
During this period of the internationalisation of knowledge, the criticism of
Eurocentrism – already initiated by Edward Saïd, Immanuel Wallerstein,
Dipesh Chakabarty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Syed Farid Alatas amongst
others – has gained momentum. A consensus has formed around the idea of
the crisis of Western civilisation. In an article which appeared recently in the
French journal Socio, a central figure of Indian human and social sciences,
Rajeev Bhargava (2013), quotes Sri Aurobindo (1997: 39):

Nothing is our own, nothing native to our intelligence, all is derived. As

little have we understood the new knowledge; we have only understood
what the Europeans want us to think about themselves and their modern
civilisation.

Bhargava challenges the situation in which, in various parts of the world, the
analytical categories are derived from the Western experience and argues in
favour of putting an end to “the epistemic injustice of the colonialism of this
very small group of societies that we call the West”. We have entered a period
of graduated de-Westernisation of knowledge and co-production of relation-
ships between situated knowledge. We are at the centre of a global turning-point
– distinct from those before and their ephemeral nature – a turning-point in
the history of the social sciences (Dufoix, 2013).
In Asia, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian and other intellectuals have
mobilised to “fight” for the recognition of scientific productions rendered
invisible by the effects of domination and consequently not perceived as being
as equally valid as European productions. Over the last twenty years the crux
of the matter has become the issue of the international recognition of “de-
colonialised” knowledge (Bancel, Bernault, Blanchard, Boubeker, Mbembe,
Vergès, 2010). Intellectuals have been confronted with epistemic discrimina-
tion (Grosfoguel, 2010) and methodological eurocentrism focused on the
4 Introduction

Western model. These intellectuals, particularly sociologists, have reacted

against this Eurocentric fundamentalism which considers that the only epis-
temology capable of producing critical thought is the Western tradition and
thus consigns them to “suburbs of knowledge”. Knowledge produced outside
the Western world has been and still partially is considered as coming from
“suburbs of knowledge”, places of lesser legitimacy. The issue of the de-coloni-
alisation of knowledge is therefore raised in sociology. Another issue is the idea
of the on-going de-colonialisation reconfiguration process within ethnoscapes
(Appaduraï, 1996) which have taken shape out of assemblages of knowledge
originating with sociologists from China, Japan, Taiwan and Korea. These eth-
noscapes may have limited contact with European scientific spaces and are
defined according to scientific conventions and norms which are distantiated
from forms of colonial domination of knowledge.
According to Stéphane Dufoix and Alain Caillé (2013), the leading lights of
Global Studies – apart from Ulrick Beck – such as Arjun Appaduraï (1996),
Saskia Sassen (2007), Immanuel Wallerstein (2004) and Zygmunt Baumann
(2000) are quoted by European sociologists whereas Kenneth Pomeranz (2010),
Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), Ulf Hannnerz (2010) and John Urry (2000) are
mentioned to a lesser extent while other authors such as Patrick Manning or
Peggy Levitt are rarely referred to in European social sciences. Moreover,
Global Studies trends such as Global History are considered as always promot-
ing European thought and providing a profoundly European critique of
Eurocentrism (Bertrand, 2013). Although the discourse on the global issue
might signal a major transformation in the history of the social sciences, we
will join Michaël Kuhn in positing the hypothesis of a scientific revolution in
the social sciences. This scientific revolution imposes detours, displacements,
reversals, conversions and even epistemic vertigo. More specifically, in sociol-
ogy, within the perspective of critical science, we propose the manufacture of
knowledge inherited from both Western and Eastern traditions – situated and
universal, local and global.
Western sociology, like Western anthropology, has resisted the post-colonial
theoretical movement initially championed by researchers in history, philoso-
phy and literature (Saillant, Kilani, Bideau, 2011). Few Western sociologists
work on de-centring and look at what is on the other side of the boundaries of
knowledge. The publication of Orientalism by Edward Saïd was a landmark in
the history of post-colonial thinking. The works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
particularly “Can the Subaltern Speak?” also had a decisive impact on the inter-
national social sciences scene. However, these works have only recently begun
to be discussed and used in European sociology. Post-colonial theory has been
based on the slow de-construction of an “us and them” through the opening of
a universal space.
Introduction 5

This volume is positioned within reflexivity in sociology in which the diver-

sity of knowledge is organised in conceptual spaces, linked to paradigms, and
programs linked to ethno-centred knowledge processes. If we go beyond the
issue of the phenomena of domination and the overlapping of non-Western
theories – particularly those elaborated in China thousands of years ago – and
Western theories in the social sciences, then the focus is more upon the issue
of the blurring of the boundaries between Western and Eastern sociologies, a
blurring which contains undeclared competition and struggles for the recogni-
tion of ignored or forgotten scientific cultures. This volume is a contribution to
the sociological debate which takes as its starting point the putting into per-
spective of Western sociological knowledge in the light of non-hegemonic
knowledge and proposes a co-production of new narrative frameworks open-
ing out onto a non-uniform plurality of accounts while also revealing the
singularities of the co-present societies.

2 The Decline of the Western Hegemony

Michaël Kuhn (2012), uses the UNESCO World Science Report (2010) to support
the hypothesis of the marginalisation of Eurocentrism and the weakening of
European traditions in science. Although scientific thought has been con-
structed as an element of Western societies, although it has appeared incapable
of explaining phenomena produced in other societies, this phase in global soci-
ological reasoning has challenged the conditions for creating universalising
and tautological accounts in Western social sciences. Behind Kuhn’s critique
one can perceive a diversity of Westernisms – some more Eurocentric; others
more Americanocentric – either merging or in tension. As there is a diversity
of Westernisms there is also a plurality of Easternisms situated in different
epistemic spaces and constructed and ordered into hierarchies according to
differentiated political, historical and civilisational processes. The ambition
of Post-Western Sociology is to tear down or weaken the hierarchies between
Westernisms and Easternisms (Koleva, 2002).
Although the social sciences and particularly sociology may have been
almost monopolised by certain Western countries, for the most part they were
born in Europe. Today, however, the Western world has lost its hegemony over
the production of their paradigms (Wieviorka, 2007) which are organised
around two master narratives: the superiority of Western civilisation (through
progress and reason) and the belief in the continuous growth of capitalism.
Thus, for Sujata Patel (2013), the binary oppositions constructed between the
West and the East have created hierarchies positing a universality for “I” and
particularities for the Other. These binary oppositions within a colonial or
6 Introduction

neo-colonial perspective have produced dangerous amalgams, collapsing, for

example, India and Hinduism into each other. Paradoxically, voices of infra-
local sociological traditions contribute to an international sociology because
they produce networks between colonial societies and non-colonial societies.
After de-constructing the de-provincialisation of European universalism,
various theories have been advanced: Arif Dirlik (2007) proposed the theory of
global modernity, Ulrick Beck (2006) the theory of cosmopolitanism, Michaël
Burawoy (2005) the theory of public sociology. However, for Ulrich Beck and
Edgar Grande (2010), following in the footsteps of Samuel N. Eisenstadt (2002),
we are experiencing a “cosmopolitan turn” opening a conceptual space to the
possibility of a variety of different and autonomous interlinked modernities
between the First and the Second Modernities. Global entanglement (Randeria,
Eckert, 2009) and interconnectedness are the conditions required to under-
stand the assemblages and dis-assemblages between Western and non-Western
societies. But in this perspective we have to take into account new forms of
methodological nationalism from non-Western societies which have emerged
out of a narrative based on resistance against Western hegemonies.
Here we propose a theory of Post-Western Sociology which apprehends
the sociological knowledge produced by these cosmopolitan modernities and
­creates exchanges between them within a dynamic relationship of equivalence.
This approach highlights the shared concepts, concepts situated in Western
and non-Western – in this instance Chinese – spaces and global concepts.
The target is therefore the forging of conceptual tools for the recognition of
the forms and types of cosmopolitan modernity and above all the connections,
interactions and exchanges between them as well as societal discon­tinuities
within different Western and non-Western modernities. The concept of cos-
mopolitisation allows the articulation of the theory of reflexive modernisation
– opening out upon the existence of multiple modernities – and the theory
of multiple modernities – opening out upon the possibility of discontinuous
social change.
Westernisms form graduated, plastic and moving hierarchies which rapidly
become elusive. It is therefore vital to undo both Westernisms and Easternisms
in order to reveal transnational spaces which bring into the light of day a tissue
of knowledge which is still partially concealed even – in some cases – invisible.

3 The Invention of a Post-Western Sociology

Post-Western Sociology does not only mean encouraging a multiplicity of non-

Western narrative voices but also, and above all, identifying the theories they
contain and seeing how these can assist us in re-visiting and re-examining
Introduction 7

Western theories. Post-Western Sociology proceeds from de-centrings and

the renewing of universalisms originating in different Eastern and Western
spaces. Post-Western Sociology is above all relational, dialogue-based and
multi-situated. Contrary to global sociology and similarly to connected his-
tory (Bertrand, 2013), Post-Western Sociology refuses term for term structural
comparisons and favours intersecting viewpoints concerning registers of
understanding, agreement and disagreement as well as the scientific practices
of the co-present actors. This positioning goes beyond Post-Colonial Studies
which could be understood as reinforcing hegemonic positions by means of
a strong assertion of critical postures visible in the work of certain intellectu-
als from the Anglo-Saxon academic world. In Post-Western Sociology a strong
awareness of hege­monisms serves to reveal transnational knowledge spaces
in which the diversity of situated knowledge and shared or joint knowledge is
rendered visible.
In this volume, we will adopt a perspective allowing the conception of zones
of encounter, overlapping, tension, conflict and fertilisation as well as “episte-
mological blanks” between European and Asian social sciences; while being
fully aware that it would appear less relevant to conceptualise the plurality of
“provinces of knowledge” than the modes of formation of continuities and dis-
continuities, the combinations and disjunctions between the places of situated
knowledge in various parts of the world.
Post-Western Sociology can also be defined as a global critical sociology.
Sociology has often asserted its ability to produce situated critical science.
On a global scale, the thinking of Pierre Bourdieu has been the strongest
expression of a French critical science. The centres producing critical sociol-
ogy have remained mostly local and have slowly moved to the South where
invisibilised critical science has been produced by intellectuals facing politi-
cal, economic and intellectual hegemonies linked to globalised capitalism...
For its part, Western sociology has remained very Western while expressing a
desire to expand intellectual horizons. The vast majority of sociologists from
the West are massively ignorant of the productions of sociologists from the
South, whether from China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, the Middle East or
African countries... What is sociology today? Is it limited to only those coun-
tries which saw its birth and development such as France, Germany, Italy, the
United Kingdom... the United States? Or does it result from controlled assem-
blages and syncretisms between sociologies from both the West and the East?
In this work, we have opted for the second proposition.
However, in order to progress towards a global critical sociology we must
open knowledge spaces which have not all been rendered visible in academic
spaces. Being fully aware of a strong lack of symmetry in the visibility of
knowledge produced in Europe and in China, we shall open a space for active
8 Introduction

dialogue between western and non-western sociologies to show that contem-

porary sociology can only be the result of intellectual dynamics between the
various centres of the West and the East. Starting with China and returning to
Europe constitutes a stage in the conception of a global-centric sociology.
This approach converges with that of anthropologists who have challenged
their “central” position and begun a dialogue between Western and non-
West­ern anthropologies so as to progress towards a non-hegemonic global
anthropology ( Saillant, Kilani, Bideau, 2011). There are numerous avenues
leading to emancipation from Westernisms:

• Awareness and use of non-hegemonic theories while keeping in mind the

fact that they cannot become hegemonic
• The production of a renovated Westernism integrating fragments of
non-hegemonic thinking while retaining epistemic frameworks derived
from hegemonic frameworks
• The construction of genuine planes of epistemological equivalence
between hegemonic and non-hegemonic thinking
• The co-production of hybrid thinking by means of a strong emancipation
from the processes of epistemic colonialisation

Post-Western Sociology is elaborated from the connections between field prac-

tices and the intersecting exploration of what individuals in different situations
do, say and think. It utilises not the differences but the intervals between the
perspectives, practices and concepts of Chinese and European sociologies to
extricate itself from mutual indifference ( Jullien, 2007). Here, the principle of
term to term structural comparisons of institutions, organisations and social,
political and economic systems is rejected. This approach requires the inven-
tion of multi-situated narrative formats accounting for an epistemological
plurality within which researchers work at erasing the boundaries constructed
by different types of Westernism. This is the starting point of the construction
process of Post-Western Sociology and as such it precedes the conception of
theoretical and methodological combinations and assemblages. International
sociology and global sociology do not imply this erasing of epistemological
boundaries: this is precisely where the distinction between Post-Western
Sociology, international sociology and global sociology lies.
This work is organised in three parts.
In the first part we will raise the issue of the production of epistemic auton-
omies when faced with epistemic injustices and then propose a definition of
Post-Western Sociology. Then we will introduce a presentation of the post-1979
Introduction 9

work of re-inventing sociology in China which is widely ignored in Western

social sciences and reveals situations of epistemic injustice (Bhargava, 2013).
Secondly, putting the interval between Western and non-Western sociolo-
gies to good use, we identify the traditions and scientific controversies between
Chinese and European sociologies, focusing more particularly on French soci-
ology which appears to have had a more dominant status in the history of
Western hegemonies. We will demonstrate how the “shared” gives rise to a
diversity of differentiated constructivisms in both contexts.
We conclude the first part with a presentation of a methodological position
which is liberated from methodological nationalism as well as being multi-
situated and supported by an ethnography of recognition announcing field
practices: means of producing sociological knowledge in coherence with “Post-
Westernism” – a situation in which the fabric of knowledge is born out of
reciprocal capabilities to work upon the variations of the interval between
Western and non-Western sociologies.
The second part of the work portrays shared common research objects stud-
ied by Chinese and European sociologists; these are contextualised and
differently situated in the two contexts while enabling the interval between
European and Chinese sociologies to be maximally exploited. They will be
dealt with using the following thematics:

• Urban hierarchies and internal boundaries

• Uncertainty and economic institutions
• Migrations, inequalities and individuation
• State, social conflict and collective action
• Ecological risks and the sociology of environment in Europe and China

We will deal with these research issues through the identification of specific
spaces and shared spaces formed by situated intellectual traditions. Moreover,
entire areas will be left untouched in both Chinese and European sociologies
insofar as we have employed the intervals between them and have in no way
sought to establish a panoramic overview of the sociologies in context. For
example, although, since 1979, Chinese rural sociology has mobilised the
majority of Chinese sociologists in the study of the evolutions of the economic
status of peasants, the development of the rural economy, the social differen-
tiation process of the peasant class and its modes of living, this has no
equivalent in Western European sociology in which the rural issue has been
decreasingly studied over the last thirty years. Conversely, research in the
so­ciology of art and culture in France represents a veritable sociological tradi-
10 Introduction

tion which has barely emerged in China. These dissymmetries in sociological

knowledge reveal the distances and specificities of sociologies in context.
In the third and final part of this work we will employ the intervals and
proximities between European and Chinese sociologies to co-produce a Post-
Western space; we will examine those forms of knowledge that appear to be
specific, those that seem to be the product of re-appropriation, re-interpreta-
tion, borrowing and hybridisation and those that seem to have been produced
in areas of non-translatability: that is, in spaces in which research practices
and sociological knowledge in Europe and China do or do not correspond with
each other. Consequently, in this part, we deal with the continuities and discon-
tinuities of sociological knowledge, the singular and common concepts between
major theoretical issues in European and Chinese sociologies.
As illustrations of continuities of knowledge and common concepts we
have selected:

• structural processes, dominations and resistances

• social stratification and inequalities
• mobility and contemporary societies
• Social networks and social capital
• Autonomy and subjectivity
• Frontiers of “we” and “me”

As illustrations of discontinuities of knowledge and singular concepts we will

deal with:

• Public space and pluralisation of norms

• Subjectivation and the struggle for recognition
• Society and intermediate spaces in Europe
• Diffracted religiousness in China

The production of critical global social science via the invention of Post-
Western Sociology means releasing into the wide world the debate about
minority expression and the voice of subaltern groups contained in “cultural
studies” and integrating it in the broader field of the social sciences. It also
means leaving behind Post-Colonial Studies with its proposal to re-visit the
perception of the Other since we propose bringing multiple Others to dia-
logue, exchange and work together. The crux and whole point of this work
reside in understanding how orders of knowledge and recognition are posi-
tioned in relationships of equivalence and combined in relationships of
exchange, tension and fertilisation in the production of a Post-Western space.
Introduction 11

Part 1
Post-Western Revolution in Sociology:
From China to Europe

∵
12 Introduction

Introduction to Part 1

Using the face-to-face confrontation of new tendencies in European sociology

and Chinese sociology (Roulleau-Berger, Li Peilin, 2012) and the symme-
tries and dissymmetries between different sociological fields, we will investigate
the ways in which dialogues, exchanges, connections and disjunctions are
formed between seats of sociological knowledge located in Europe and in
China. Consequently, we will open a transnational intermediate space that is
both local and global to draw conjunctive and disjunctive theoretical spaces
where the Post-Western Sociology can emerge and be developed. Our aim will
be to capture cultural variations in interpretative flexibility and their effects on
the implementation of theoretical methodologies. We will examine how
research practices and sociological knowledge are constructed by analyzing
the different forms of field experience in sociology to analyze the process of
elaboration of sociological knowledge.
Epistemic Injustice and New Frontiers of Knowledge 13

Chapter 1

Epistemic Injustice and New Frontiers of

Knowledge

1 Epistemic Injustice and Autonomy

How is the hierarchy between Western and Chinese sociologies as constructed

by colonialism, to be broken down? How to break hierarchies constructed by
scientific hegemony? Anthropologists such as Chakrabarty (2000) proposed in
Subaltern Studies (Bhabha, 2007) the “provincialisation of Europe”; then Post-
Colonial Studies were focused on the idea of taking over the broader narratives
and paradigms. It seems to us less pertinent now to address the plurality of
“provinces of knowledge” than to confront the new centralities. Instead of con-
ceiving the plurality of provinces of knowledge, continuities between European
and Chinese sociology have to be taken into account so that transnational
knowledge may emerge in social sciences, free from all forms of Orientalism.
Sociological thinking, like all thinking in the social sciences, is linked to the
evolution of the Western society from which it emerged (Kilani, 2009). While
the growing pluralisation of contemporary societies calls into question the
very idea of society as a narrative linked to the narrative of modernity, particu-
larly European modernity, Western thought has continued to perceive itself as
the universal mediator for all other histories (Chinese, Indian, Arab, African,
Brazilian, etc.) (Laplantine, 2007). Various forms of academic colonialism have
marked the development of sociological thinking.
The most pressing task, however, is to investigate the ways in which conti-
nuities and discontinuities, connections and disjunctions are formed between
seats of knowledge located at different places in the world and potentially
capable of bringing to light a transnational intermediate space that is both local
and global. Over the past twenty years, it has become evident that one of the
challenges facing sociology has been how to grant due recognition at the inter-
national level to the knowledge produced as a consequence of dewesternization
(Roulleau-Berger, 2011).
Rajev Bhargava (2013) considers

that an epistemic injustice is a form of cultural injustice which occurs

when the concepts and categories which a people include and use to
understand its universe are replaced or affected by the concepts and cat-
egories of the colonisers.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004309982_003

14 Chapter 1

When the epistemic framework of a group changes under the pressure of

another group it is under epistemic constraint and is the victim of injustice
which, according to Bhargava, may take on three forms:

• The imposition of a change affecting the content of the epistemic frame-

works
• The alteration of fundamental epistemic frameworks
• The damaging or loss of the capacity of individuals to maintain or develop
their own epistemic frameworks

Epistemic injustice is constructed by specific discourse, acts and practices and

processes of capture, misappropriation and occultation of knowledge. Inter­
national circulations enable the understanding of how globalisations impart
form upon political and economic institutions, Nation-States as well as the
collective and individual social practices of intellectuals. Reciprocally, these
circulation also enable the understanding of how they are redefined within
global frameworks.
Panoptic processes partially configure but also generate or block intel­
lec­tual paths and itineraries. They define differentiated accessibilities to
aca­­demic spaces and produce subjects and dispersed multi-localised powers.
They result from combinations of activities and spaces which are constructed
from circulations, regimes of knowledge, modes of visibility and small or large
coordination networks with fewer of more ramifications between intellec-
tual categories. These knowledge processes concern hierarchies and rankings
which assign places and roles within a division of scientific labour.
Epistemic injustice also means epistemic autonomy. Epistemic autonomy
signifies the passage from a colonial frame of norms and conventions of knowl-
edge to another epistemic frame of indigenous norms and conventions. It
requires a re-appropriation of a relationship to the world that makes sense for
those formerly colonised. That passage from one epistemic frame to another
supposes a very vigorous epistemological and political work for the intellectu-
als of the colonised countries confronted with Western categories of thought
still perceived as “universal” and emerging from very situated practices, that is
to say, Western (Barghava, 2013). These categories of thought are being increas-
ingly declared as limited and unfit to societal contexts, especially Asian ones.
Most Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian sociologists consider that the
imposition of Western epistemic frameworks has prevented them from access-
ing their own systems of meaning and interpretation and from understanding
their own societies (Nishihara, 2010). An epistemic autonomy is asserted today,
one which has been constructed differently according to societal contexts (Xie
Lizhong, 2009, 2012 a, b).
Epistemic Injustice and New Frontiers of Knowledge 15

In China, the assertion of an epistemic autonomy among sociologists

means the re-establishment of continuities with epistemic frameworks which
had been constructed before 1949, then forgotten and which are completely
unknown in the West. Today, epistemic autonomy means re-establishing conti-
nuities with epistemic frames built before 1949 and forgotten. It means creating
one’s own epistemic autonomy by taking inspiration from philosophical lega-
cies linked to Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. It also means, however,
the creation of specific paradigms freed from Western presuppositions. Today,
certain Chinese intellectuals think that their categories are still over-derived
from Western theories. For example Li Peilin (2015) proposed the concept of
“Eastern modernisation” to demonstrate that modernisation is fundamental
for Eastern societies such as China or India, but does not mean “a temporal
suspension” and is a concept to define the unicity of Chinese experience. For
instance, the Tianxianism perspective appears as a universal non hegemonic
perspective inspired from ancient Chinese philosophy in which the world
belongs to everyone in harmony with nature and culture. It is an attempt to
conciliate a universalism and what could relate to East-Asian cultures.
In South-Korea, where the fast economic and social transformations can be
compared with the Chinese situation, demand for an epistemic autonomy
partly goes through processes of testing and reformulating Western theories,
like those of Ulrich Beck’s first and second modernity. Han Sang Jin and Young
Hee shim (2010) argue for a methodological cosmopolitanism “from the bot-
tom” based on what they call an active dialogue instead of a passive one, taking
into consideration the genealogical characteristics of Asian history and culture
in order to define the plural Asian modernities. Kwang-Yeong Shin (2013) also
talks of the double indigenisation of social sciences and symmetrical compari-
son so as to open a new path to non-hegemonic knowledge; on the one hand,
double indigenisation means considering Western theories as indigenous and
evaluating them consequently, as rooted in the Western-world history; on the
other hand, it means reestablishing the institutional symmetries and resisting
forms of domination in disciplinary fields.
In Japan, according to Kazuhisa Nishihara (2010), sociologists, after having
suffered from the influence of American positivism, then that of Parsons and
Marx, have turned towards phenomenological approaches all the while inte-
grating authors like Habermas, Bourdieu and Giddens to state today their
fitting into a transnational and global sociological space. Shujiro Yasawa (2013)
shows how a reflexive sociology organised around the production of a tran-
scendental subject is developing: Yasusuke Murakami (1996) has distinguished
a transcendental approach focused on a post-reflexive self disjointed from the
world of life and from a hermeneutic approach in which the pre-reflexive self
16 Chapter 1

appears as embedded in the world of life. Japanese sociologists produce a form

of epistemic autonomy by proposing a sociology of the transcendental subject
which flirts with the idea of paving the way for a cosmopolitan humanity (Lee
Sung-Tae, 2016).
In India, social sciences were born under British colonial rule. Sociology
emerged in 1919, at Mumbai University. During the time of post-independence,
sociology produced a replica of the uses of anthropological theories and those
of the struggle against the production of the discourse of the colonial State on
the Indian society, or “Sinhalese”, as a non-modern society (Madan, 2011); in
that colonial narrative, India and Hinduism, already present in the 19th cen-
tury, were assimilated. It recategorised the different religious communities in
five major majoritarian and minoritarian religious traditions.
In the history of the construction of sociology, methodological nationalism
constituted in India a political and intellectual resource for distancing oneself
from dominant and colonial knowledge and putting forward an alternative
voice. That form of methodological nationalism had an influence in widening,
rather than in diminishing, international sociology. Nowadays, a significant
number of Indian intellectuals defend the idea of deconstructing the provin-
cialism of European universalisms by recognising a genealogy of knowledge
which is simultaneously European and linked to colonial history (Patel, 2013).
Since the 1980’s, new theories have been created in India, especially in the field
of subaltern studies, post-colonial studies and gender studies, alongside an
awareness that there would be no consensus yet about knowing what is to be
designated as indigenous or not (Uberoi, Nandini, Deshpande, 2013).

2 What is Post-Western Sociology?

Western sociology gravitates according to its own modalities around central

devices of knowledge in which “issues”, in the sense of Karl Popper, and “enig-
mas”, in the sense of Thomas Kuhn, occur. They refer to the cognitive situation
that triggers a research: a “dissonance” between a phenomena and its explica-
tive frame. Post-Western Sociology means working towards displacement and
the construction of planes of epistemic equivalence between the conjunctive
and disjunctive boundaries of knowledge to struggle against any form of “epis-
temic injustice”
Thus new centres of knowledge production are born out of: 1) the refusal to
imitate Western epistemic frameworks; 2) a concern to control hybridisations
of Western and non-Western knowledge based on the dynamics of the de-
territorialisation and re-territorialisation of non indigenous knowledge; 3) the
Epistemic Injustice and New Frontiers of Knowledge 17

recognition and validation of places of conjunction and disjunction between

Western and non-Western knowledge; and 4) the existence of “epistemic white
zones”, that is, zones in which the epistemic frameworks constructed in differ-
ent societal contexts cannot come into contact.
If, in the 1960’s, the “Post-Colonial” discourse expressed struggles for the
recognition of non-Western human and social sciences within the interna-
tional space, here we are talking of a “Post-Western” era which comes after
the “Post-Colonial” and recognises the end of the hegemony of the principal
intellectual traditions of the West in order to apprehend the plurality of hege-
monies of different intellectual traditions between which relationships of
exchange, conflict, competition, accommodation and indifference are devel-
oped. Before precisely stating what we mean by “Post-Western” it is worth
devoting a few words to Post-Colonialism. Post-Colonial Studies continue to
produce a binary vision of the world experienced whereas Post-Westernism
can produce a plural and dynamic vision of the world experienced. Talking of
Post-Western Sociology means producing a space for thinking which is based
upon European, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Brazilian… sociologies and which
has them exchange and influence each other. Whereas Post-Colonialism has
been widely criticised for its ambivalence in the way it blurs the distinction
between the colonised and the coloniser, its universalising displacements
and its “depoliticising implications” (Shohat, 1992), Post-Westernism relies on
“vernacular cosmopolitanisms” (Bhabha, 2007) and intellectual, moral and
political resources which produce new knowledge.
We define Post-Western Sociology first and foremost as rhizomatous in that it
is constructed from connections between points located in knowledge spaces
governed by very different regimes of signs and the non-correspondence of dif-
ferent types of situated knowledge. The knowledge produced in each context
is conceived for its intrinsic value, but the eye is focused on lines of segmenta-
tion, stratification, escape or de-territorialisation (Deleuze, 1980). Post-Western
Sociology is constructed from similarities and differences which cannot be con-
ceived according to a binary mode. It relies on different knowledge processes:

• “Knowledge niches” which appear to be specifically European or Asian and

do not signify a transferability of knowledge
• Intermediary epistemological processes which encourage the partial
transfer of sociological knowledge from Europe to Asia and from Asia to
Europe
• Transnational epistemological spaces in which European knowledge and
Asian knowledge are placed in equivalence
18 Chapter 1

Therefore Post-Western Sociology means allowing a rhizomatous, archipela-

gous or diasporic thought to spread against binary, static thoughts, against
atavistic sociologies.The issue of untranslatability as a condition of trans-
latability is then raised. Untranslatability does not mean the failure of the
passage of one code to another, but rather an asymmetrical ontological rela-
tionships as a foundation for the production of knowledge (Borutti, 1999).
We agree here with Affergan who considers the “untranslatability as a condi-
tion of translatability” or translation indetermination; indeed, we do not deal
with transparent languages and worlds, but we have to take into account their
mutual opacity linked to meaning disparities. We are confronted with the issue
of knowing how to translate what we look at in different under-examined con-
texts, what we can translate and what we cannot, and why in that way rather
than another. A positivist version of translation encouraging belief in a logic
of term to term, segment to segment, item to item correspondence cannot be
used here because we are more likely to restitute fragments of society through
horizons of meaning. In this epistemic perspective, the sociologist is invited to
inquire into the risks of excess and the lack of meaning that he may introduce
through translation.
As Thomas Kuhn has shown (1983), science is built around paradigms and
perspectives which encounter a certain success at a precise moment, and then
fade, dry up, or are even abandoned and then forgotten. This author mentioned
the “aptitude to identify a default” as a heuristic attempt at epistemological
clarification by making it a necessary condition for the production of scientific
knowledge. Emancipating oneself from any form of Easternism passes through
the identification of defaults in order to conceive scientific revolutions from a
non-linear substitution processing by which a spent paradigm is replaced by
a new paradigm. In contemporary Chinese, Japanese and Korean sociologies,
the dynamic co-existence of different paradigms is not an issue. It requires the
acknowledgment of blind-spots in Western theories, and the fact of looking at
an object by inhabiting it and by seising all things according to the facet turned
toward us (Merleau-Ponty, 1945).
This Post-Western scientific revolution directly implies that sociologists
work in contexts of uncertainty in which there can be no general and uni-
fied theory, nor any unequivocal connections between facts and theoretical
propositions, nor an opportunity to found a universal knowledge about par-
ticular facts and to blend them into a coherent whole. Post-Western Sociology
cannot be considered as a universal and organising gaze. Here, according to
Roland Barthes, the researcher is invited to learn again how to “unstitch real-
ity” from other cuttings, other syntaxes, to discover unheard-of positions of
the subject in the enunciation, to displace his own topology. It is consequently
Epistemic Injustice and New Frontiers of Knowledge 19

less a question of adopting a comparative position than of delving into a work

of epistemological reconfiguration so as to deconstruct reality on the basis of
other cuttings, proceeding step by step, one small journey at a time, so as to
escape from the contingency of the Western-inspired “normal science”, and to
keep at arms’ length our conceptual habitus, and to work on gaps slipping from
our mental, historical and psychological landmarks.

3 Scientific Hegemony and Chinese Sociology

Forms of scientific hegemony have marked the development of sociology,

the invention of Orientalism (Saïd, 2003) meant apparatuses which capture
and ­orient scientific knowledge. Dominations and hierarchies have been
constructed between Eastern and Western contexts; this has resulted in large
expanses of knowledge being ignored (Roulleau-Berger, 2011; Koleva, 2002).
For example, the effects of cultural hegemony and political imperialism have
prevented the recognition of knowledge produced in different places and
at different times. In Europe most intellectuals ignore renowned pre-1949
Chinese sociology; Li Peilin and Qu Jingdong (2011) in A History of Sociology in
China in the First Half of the Twentieth Century have demonstrated how Chinese
Sociology flourished in a context of intellectual blooming comparable to that
of the Spring and Autumn periods and to that of the warring States. Although
the influence of Western sciences increased in the East, several ideological
movements emerged in reaction to the violence of the foreigners’ invasions
and the humiliations inflicted on Chinese people. This is a context of social
reform in which intellectuals defend pragmatic positions. These authors note
that, in his 1923 conference “A history of thought in China during the last three
centuries”, Liang Qichao considers that Chinese thought, since the 16th cen-
tury, has been a pragmatic one which has developed in reaction to six hundred
years of Taoism; Li Peilin and Qu Jingdong have distinguished five currents
of ideas: historical materialism, rural construction and the social survey cam-
paign; the “Chinese School”; the “academic school” or “scholastic school”, and
the study of social history.
Li Peilin and Qu Jingdong distinguish different moments in the scientific
history of Chinese sociology in the first half of the 20th century. The first marx-
ist Chinese sociology used to rely both on historical materialism and scien­tific
socialism: historical materialism is a kind of “new sociology”, a “modern so­­
ciology”, which distinguishes itself from traditional Western sociology. Then
the social survey movement corresponds to an important movement hatched
at the beginning of the 20th century. It simultaneously opposes the tradition
20 Chapter 1

of Confucian thought and the mimicking of the elder or even the fascination
for the foreigners. Here to carry out surveys and fieldwork means living in the
countryside with the peasants and developing scientific methods. Tao Menghe
and Li Jinghan became leaders of that movement and carried out numerous
social surveys on labour, unemployment, poverty and the elderly. Tao Menghe’s
book, An analysis of the cost of living in Beijing, remains a major achievement
of the beginnings of social surveys in China. In 1925, Li Jinghan published
one of the first social survey models in China: A survey on the situation of
Peking rickshaw pullers. This study is based on 1,300 interviews of pullers, 200
of rickshaw renters, and about a hundred rickshaw pullers’ families. Then, in
1934–35, the famous Chinese sociologist, Chen Da carried out a major survey of
Southern China migrant communities. Alongside this movement, sociological
fieldwork methods were introduced by foreign invited professors. But, more
importantly, after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Columbia, Wu
Wenzao returned to China in 1929 and created the Chinese School of Sociol-
ogy in order to indigenise the discipline. He merged anthropology with so­ciology
and made community surveys a focal point, especially in rural areas. In 1930, at
the initiative of Sun Benwen, Wu Wenzao, Wu Jingchao, Li Jianghua, Chen Da,
Ke Xiangfeng, Xu Shilian, and Yan Xinzhe, the Chinese Society of Sociology was
created, then the Journal of Sociology, was founded with Sun Benwen as chief
editor. This school of sociology was based on cultural sociol­ogy, Western social
psychology, and the sociology that analyses issues of modern society. Robert
E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, Robert Redfield, figures of the Chicago school,
came to China to teach during that period and some trends left their mark and
influenced Chinese sociology of that time, especially concerning community
studies, which led to many surveys. Other works can be designated classics
of pre-1949 sociology, including Fei Xiaotong’s famous Peasant Life in China,
which was reprinted eight times between 1940 and 1948. Finally, sociology and
social history maintain a very close relationship. Historians try to link histori-
cal research and concerns for social issues, classical History of modern China
and modern social sciences.
If Chinese sociology was highly developed before 1949, it was then banned
for twenty seven years, only to rise rapidly after it was reinstated. Sociology
was removed from the universities when they were restructured in 1952.
Moreover, social psychology, social anthropology and demography were no
longer taught either from that moment on. In 1956, the 8th Central Committee
of the Communist Party declared “let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred
schools of thought contend”. Interest arose in Soviet sociology, which had been
banned for several years. A delegation was sent to the Third International
Conference of Sociology in Holland in August 1956 during which the Auguste
Epistemic Injustice and New Frontiers of Knowledge 21

Comte centenary was celebrated. Major figures of Chinese sociology such as

Chen Da, Wu Jingchao and Fei Xiaotong turned their gaze towards Western
sociology and proposed a restoration of sociology based on a double break
with the sociology of non-socialist China and the sociology of the West. To
them, the point was to build a specific sociology from Marxism-Leninism and
Maoism. But in June 1957, an anti-right campaign was launched and sociology
was perceived as an attempt to reinstate the bourgeois class. In August 1957
sociology was banned again, and it remained so until 1978, although the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe had already reinstated it.
In 1978, calls for the restoration of sociology and the revoking of its status
of “false science” grew in numbers. On March 18th 1979, the Chinese Sociology
Research Association was created presided by Fei Xiaotong: Sociology was rein-
stated in China. On 30th March, Deng Xiaoping underlined the need to develop
sociology and to train scholars. During spring 1980, the Institute of Sociology
of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was created. It was headed by
Fei Xiaotong and organised sociological research formations. According to Fei
Xiaotong, Chinese sociology had to be rebuilt using the legacy of previous gen-
erations of Chinese sociologists and Western sociologists. In 1980, Shanghai
University created the first sociology department in China. It was then fol-
lowed by Nankai University, Beijing University, Zhongshan University… In
twenty-two provincial cities (Hubei, Sichuan, Guangzhou, Harbin…), from
1979 to 1989, sociology institutes were created, while departments of sociology
were created in eleven universities. The issue of opening Chinese sociology to
Western sociology was raised from the moment of this restoration.Between
1979 and 1989, the years of “socialist modernisation”, great names of pre-1949
Chinese sociology reappeared: Fei Xiaotong, Luo Qing, Yuan Fang, Yan Xinzhe,
Ke Xiangfeng, Li Jingshan, Dai Shiguang, Wu Wenzhao, Lin Yaohua… Over a
period of ten years, they were to train a new generation of scholars. During
those years, research fields remained built around the theory/practice rela-
tionship and around the specificity of social issues thought of as being specific
to Chinese society. Consequently, the issue of the construction of a “Chinese
style” sociology was raised, but this implied a good knowledge of Western soci-
ology (Wu Duo, 1989).
The re-invention of Chinese sociology in 1979 constituted a major event in
the history of the humanities and social sciences. Prior to 1949, Chinese sociol-
ogy had been a highly developed discipline; after that date, it was to be
proscribed for 30 years only to re-emerge very rapidly and in force after it was
brought in from the cold. Indeed, during the 1980s, Chinese sociology as a sub-
ject became a leading light in the intellectual world. The abundance of its
academic output bears witness to a strong intellectual dynamic that produces
22 Chapter 1

work of genuine originality characterised by specificities linked to the history

of Chinese thought and to the complexity of its societal context (Li Peilin, Ma
Rong, Li Qiang, 2008).

4 Reinvention and Internal Frontiers in Chinese Sociology

To reinvent a discipline means re-founding and re-structuring it, drawing the

boundaries of subfields. Chinese Sociology has been progressively re-struc-
tured and has effected divisions into research fields, mainly rural sociology,
urban sociology, sociology of social classes, economic sociology, and political
sociology.
Before 1949 and since 1979 until the present, the rural issue has occupied a
central position in sociology as a means of understanding Chinese society. In
1979, Lu Xueyi wrote:

if one does not know about Chinese peasants, one does certainly not
know about Chinese society.

The rural issue appears to be built according to a specific mode because of the
evolutions of the socialist regime which has produced major changes and
mobilised sociologists in research into the post-reform evolutions of the eco-
nomic status of peasants and propriety, the development of the rural economy
versus industrialisation, the social differentiation process of the peasant class,
the peasants’ way of life, the evolutions of peasants’ familial structure, poverty
and social welfare in rural areas, and autonomy of regions.
Moreover, from the 1920’s to the 1940’s, much urban sociology research
resulted in major works which retain reference status today; examples include:
Wu Jingchao’s Urban Sociology (1929), or Shi Guoheng’s Kun Factory Workers
(1946). Later, surveys on small towns led by Fei Xiaotong and surveys on families
and Chinese cities led by Lei Jieqiong, would mark Chinese sociology. Urban
sociology really took off after 1984 focusing on themes of the social develop-
ment of small towns and big cities, inequalities between cities and countryside,
new forms of urban poverty, urban family structure, middle classes and urban
communities’ ways of life, phenomenon of marginalisation and urban segre-
gation of “inner migrants”. Nowadays, urban sociology is dominant in the field
of sociology, communicating with the sociology of social classes and economic
sociology.
Indeed, since the implementation of economic reforms, the structure of
Chinese society has changed radically and is characterised by increasingly
Epistemic Injustice and New Frontiers of Knowledge 23

tangible social stratification, producing new social inequalities, especially in

China’s large cities. Two related yet contradictory phenomena co-occur: social
polarisation and upward mobility, the latter tending to stagnate nowadays.
Surveys are undertaken focusing on these paradoxical research perspectives
in a sociology of social-classes that remains rather classical. There has been a
real sociological debate between theoreticians who insist on social reproduc-
tion processes in a context of transition and those working on the different
forms of social mobility which produce a multiplicity of inequalities between
social groups. Indeed, the income-gap is widening between the different social
classes. While a class of wealthy Chinese is taking shape and new political
and cultural elites have appeared, there has been a decline in the positions of
both peasants and workers. Sociologists have recognised the appearance of an
“underclass” mainly made-up of poorly qualified migrants, the unemployed,
youths, and other generations.
In this context of economic uncertainty and rising inner- and inter-gen-
erational social inequalities, the sociology of work and economic sociology
have undergone huge development with the great transformations linked to
social transition. Studies of the Danwei developed first, followed by studies
of its dismantling, the reducing of the size of State Companies, the growing
weight of the private sector, the slow-down of the rural employment market
and the increase in internal migrations. From 1978 onwards, labour markets
were thought of in terms of their diversification and re-configuration from
norms of strong production and rules of a globalised over-competition in a
context of capitalism co-existing with the remnants of a planned-economy.
Numerous surveys focused on the transformations of propriety regimes, the
access to employment markets for migrants and inequalities of the labour mar-
ket, the protection of workers’ rights, unemployments and social movements.
The question of the relationship between State, market, and society has
obviously assumed a central place in Chinese sociology. A substantial body of
research was produced concerning the relationship between State and society
in the Chinese countryside. Then, in a context of social and economic reforms,
new issues about unemployment, poverty, and social welfare came to the fore.
They triggered the construction of new public policies. Studies were then car-
ried out around issues of governance, the redefinition of public space and
citizenship, defining the silhouette of a sociology of public action.
As in any society, for each era, some research objects are labelled as more
“sensitive” than others. If, in France, the issues of urban violence, racism and
poverty are considered today as objects of scientific and political contro-
versy, in China, those linked to the violence undergone by migrant workers in
24 Chapter 1

labour markets, to ecological and sanitary risks, to propriety rights, to religious

practices, to social movements, are represented as “sensitive” issues.
In China during the 1980’s, sociology indeed became a flagship discipline in
the intellectual field amongst social sciences. The abundance of scientific pro-
ductions bears witness to the strong intellectual dynamic which has produced
true originality and true specificities linked to the history of Chinese thought
and to the complexity of the societal context. If at first the influences of
Western sociologies played a role in the conditions of re-invention of Chinese
sociology, the tendency may very well be reversing in the coming years in the
field of international sociology because of the re-foundation of that discipline
in a dynamic and vigorous society currently undergoing great transformations.
Chinese sociology has indeed really taken its place in both the Chinese and
international intellectual fields by building theories, positions and methods
which are positioned both alongside and against Western thought. Chinese
sociologists produce a thought of their own among a real diversity, all the
while reinterpreting or even Sinicising Western theories. This book will present
what appears to be most representative theoretical representations of Chinese
academic sociology. Of course, we do not claim to exhaustively cover all of
Chinese sociology, which is in essence plural, diversified, present as it is in the
sciences academies, particularly in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, and throughout
the entire continent in Chinese Universities.
Traditions and Controversies 25

Chapter 2

Traditions and Controversies

Before we can draw the theoretical continuities and discontinuities between

Chinese and European sociologies –especially French sociology since it
appears to be an emblematic case – we first have to define traditions and con-
troversies. In this chapter we will reconstruct the trajectories of some
sociological knowledge in Western Europe and in China. In the course of this
reconstruction, the question will arise of academic controversies that define
the inclusive and exclusive areas of action, as well as those that are shared.
Thus, on the basis of our analysis of trajectories of sociological knowledge and
the discipline’s structuring modes through its division into sub-disciplines, we
will identify and select loci of controversy in the production of sociological
knowledge linked to theoretical methodology and will use controversy as an
instrument to analyse the boundaries between the conceptual spaces and
methods deployed.

1 Epistemological Unpredictability and Scientific Pluralism in

Chinese Sociology

After a blank page lasting some thirty years, Chinese sociology has reconsti-
tuted itself since 1980 (Li Peilin, Ma Rong, Li Qiang, 2008; Roulleau-Berger, Guo
Yuhua, Li Peilin, Liu Shiding, 2008; Merle, 2008; Li Peilin, Roulleau-Berger,
2012). This process has encouraged a sort of epistemological unpredictability
which has produced a form of scientific pluralism. Seen from France, over a
period of twenty years the Weberian point of view of the polytheism of values
founded on the idea that we attempt to reconstruct reality from fragments has
been widely adopted by Chinese sociologists. Indeed, there has been a strong
presence of the idea that social reality is infinite, that our knowledge of reality
cannot exhaust it, that no concept, no theory can suffice to account for the
complexity, dynamics and diversity of the forms of social organisation.
Chinese sociology has been built around an internal division which is not
only made up of splits into fields or specific research areas but also viewpoints,
different ways of looking at fragments of social reality and different ways of
reconstructing them. Sun Liping (2008) wrote in his chapter:

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004309982_004

26 Chapter 2

each paradigm gives a new side of reality to look at. Each paradigm and
theoretical frame has its own analytical function (page 108)1.

From all these Chinese sociological works in the academic field, the prominent
idea is that of a scientific pluralism in which no unified, all-embracing theory
is imposed, and in which there could be unequivocal correspondences between
facts and theoretical propositions, and no sociology is thought of as superior to
another.
Chinese sociology seems to allow several norms of scientific legitimacy, and
this in turn allows the production of a diversity and a cohabitation of view-
points as long as a real dialectic between sociological practice and theory is
carried-out. If, in France for example, symbolic-interactionism, ethnomethod-
ology, the rational choice theory, the communicative act theory, the theoretician
theory of historicity, genetic structuralism, have at various points denied each
other any legitimacy (Berthelot, 2001), that does not seem to be the case in
China, possibly because the genealogical histories of the traditions could not
be built in a continuous way in the history of Chinese thought.
Some Chinese sociologies may appear structuralist, others more compre-
hensive or interactionist, but the diversity of research standpoints in the
scientific space seems legitimised as such in the academic space; they are not
thought of as excluding one another but rather as likely to shed light on differ-
ent aspects of a same social, economic, and political process. If, in the 1980’s in
France, sociology presented itself as a succession and juxtaposition of compet-
ing partially secant (Passeron, 1991) paradigms, Chinese sociologists have not,
until today, experienced anything equivalent. They explore theoretical uni-
verses born out of partial overlaps between different paradigms in order to
produce approaches of their own, ready to identify a defect that they perceive
as a heuristic attempt at an epistemological enlightenment (Kuhn, 1983).
This scientific pluralism implies a sense of the complexity and globality of
social phenomena, perceived in a dynamic perspective in which research pos-
tures are not fixed and defined within a stable conceptual space, but, rather,
as always moving, prone to transformations with the sociological objects
which always present visible and hidden facets and fall into the areas of inter-
est of different categories of sociologists. And inside that scientific pluralism,
the process of production of knowledge is born from a continuum between
theory and practice. The researcher therefore builds an ecology of the

1 Sun Liping, 2008, Sociologies de la transition et nouvelles perspectives théoriques, in Roulleau-

Berger, L., Guo Yuhua, Li Peilin, Liu Shiding, La Nouvelle sociologie chinoise, Paris: Editions du
CNRS, page 108.
Traditions and Controversies 27

conditions of production of the activity, practice, scientific purpose, all ele-

ments that hold complex, multiple, dialectic, conflictual, or even contradictory
relations with each other (Clarke, Fujimura,1992). But today, that scientific plu-
ralism gives way to the time of scientific controversies in the field of Chinese
sociology, animated by heated debates and discussions.

2 Affiliations, Shifts and Hybridisations between China and Europe

Chinese sociologists are familiar with the various schools of sociology in

Western Europe and America; in their various studies they both distinguish
them from each other and make connections between them, without with-
holding legitimacy from any one school. Indeed, considering that sociology as
a discipline was born in the capitalist world, the sociology they produce truly
has its roots in the Chinese civilisation of the past and the present, as well as in
a series of affiliations, shifts of perspectives and hybridisations with regard to
North American and European sociologists.
In Chinese sociology, we have seen visible affiliations with American and
European theories, particularly French ones. The first obvious affiliation was
with Marxism, which was introduced into China as early as 1917; it still influ-
ences sociological debates in China but now coexists with other affiliations.
It should also be remembered that the representatives of the Chicago School,
Robert Park and Robert Redfield, came to teach sociology in China in 1931–1932
and in 1948 (Zhou Xiaohong, 2004). Other affiliations clearly emerged sub-
sequently with pragmatism and interactionism in North America, as well as
with the constructivism of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, Max Weber’s
rationalisation theory and comprehensive sociology, strategic analysis and
actor theories, in particular the sociology of collective action and social move-
ments developed by Alain Touraine, François Dubet and Michel Wieviorka.
More recent affiliations have emerged with critical sociologies, notably Pierre
Bourdieu’s genetic structuralism. Finally, Chinese sociologists have drawn
extensively on the theories of Jürgen Habermas, Ulrick Beck and Anthony
Giddens.
The issue of the shifts of theory is a particularly complex one. To displace
means to translate, thus relating to a work of de-contextualisation-re-contex-
tualisation of concepts and notions which were built at a certain time in a
certain context. During these displacements of fragments of theory, re-appro-
priations, reinterpretations, and borrowings occur, but we have seen previously
how conceptual contact areas were born between North-American or European
and Chinese sociologies, and how Western concepts may be turned into
28 Chapter 2

Chinese ones, how contact points are truly established. However, certain cele-
brated sociologists have made little impact on the Chinese sociological scene,
including for example the German sociologists of the Frankfurt School.
Representatives of methodological individualism or, more recently, the many
European scholars who work on the contemporary individual do not appear in
the bibliographies either.
In Western European sociology, American scholars are widely cited, particu-
larly the pragmatists and interactionists, who occupy an important position in
France today, while the influences of constructivism remain very strong. On
the European sociological scene, the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Touraine,
Edgar Morin, Jürgen Habermas, Ulrich Beck, Axel Honneth and Anthony
Giddens occupy leading positions. However, they are followed by studies that
seek to reconcile different sociological traditions. The sociologists of globalisa-
tion, such as Manuel Castells and Saskia Sassen, but also Richard Sennett and
Mark Granovetter, exert considerable influence in Europe. However, Chinese
scholars are seldom cited in the bibliographies of European sociologists.
Whereas many European sociologists seem to be very ethnocentric and dis-
play little interest in other sociologies from across the world, this is not the case
with Chinese sociology, which began by turning to European and American
schools of sociology in order to assert its own originality. In Chinese sociology,
paradigm shifts and hybridisations are structured around a rejection of eth-
nocentric attitudes, resistance to the imposition of post-colonial intellectual
models and assertion of a ‘situated’ approach, whereas European sociologists
find it difficult to incorporate non-Western thinking (Zhou Xiaohong, 2010).

3 Chinese Civilisation and Theoretical Variations Today

Today it should be said that Chinese sociologists are linked by a sort of intel-
lectual consensus concerning the following points:

• The idea of producing paradigms freed from any form of cultural hege-
mony or from the West’s overbearing gaze on Chinese society
• The recognition of the unicity and singularity of the Chinese experience
and transformation during the last 30 years
• The consideration of the effect of Chinese civilisation, both past and
present
• The rise of the notion of “the production of society”, through the analysis
of structural processes
Traditions and Controversies 29

3.1 Chinese Civilisation and General Scope

During the three decades starting 1980, most Chinese sociologists more or
less explicitly agreed that they were working in a society that was in full eco-
nomic and social transition in a globalised context. This sociology of transition
is both outside the theories of modernisation of Western developed coun-
tries and outside the sociology of the developing world elaborated upon the
basis of research into Latin America, Africa and East Asia since the 1960’s
and currently “in crisis”. However, this transition includes elements of mod-
ernisation without being reducible to it as well as elements of development
without being restricted to it (Sun Liping, 2007b). Chinese sociologists utilise
the effect of the cultural, historical and political context which builds civilisa-
tion (Braudel, 1979). However, it should be seen that the civilisational context
is conceived from the perspective of past Chinese civilisation revisited today.
Chinese sociologists use the civilisational order to summon structural proc-
esses, subjectivities and interactions. Different theoretical propositions are
thus engendered by different modes of combination between the civilisational
order, structural processes, subjectivities and interactions. Chinese sociologists
have constructed an original conceptual space within the field of international
sociology, a space for encounter and interaction between interactional, sub-
jective, structural and civilisational orders. Conceptual spaces which were not
predicted by Western sociological reasoning have emerged out of the thinking
specific to this Chinese sociological reasoning.
This epistemological unpredictability has yet to be examined. It can be
explained by the post-1980 need to rapidly integrate North American and
European sociologies without their history of academic controversies and par-
adigm conflicts. Here, as Raymond Aron put it, one can see that each society
produces the social science which it needs with Chinese society encourag-
ing its accelerated rebirth and development. Some Chinese sociologists are
named, others are not. But above all, Chinese sociology has diversified by pro­
ducing theoretical propositions based on the effect of Chinese civilisation,
propositions which combine differently structural processes, practical action,
interactions and subjectivities and which are distinguished from each other by
the different status granted to each concept.

3.2 Schools of Chinese Sociology Today

Sun Liping (2002) qualified his sociology as a “practice sociology”:

It analyses social facts in their dynamic, mobile and non-static aspect,

thus considering that their normal state lies in their practical situa-
tion, without of course neglecting structural and institutional factors.
30 Chapter 2

On the contrary, what is at stake here is to pay even more attention to

the effects induced by structures and institutions during function-
ing processes. Secondly, it stresses the discovery of the logics of things
and phenomena during practical processes, logics which are difficult to
reveal in their static-state. Thirdly, practice is “bigger” than structure or
static-institution.

Sun Liping has thus stepped away from Bourdieusian sociology that he has
qualified as “static” and proposed a sociology in which the actors play roles
consciously and in which the status of subjectivity has been conceived in rela-
tion with the diversity and the dynamics of social practices, historical events
and “invisible” social forms. A perfect illustration of this practical sociology can
be found in Guo Yuhua’s and Sun Liping’s research, starting in the middle of
the 1990’s with Chinese peasants’ life narratives during the revolution, and
undertaken with the purpose of understanding the reconstruction of the State
and society in rural China. This is also exemplified in Guo Yuhua’s and Chang
Aishu’s research on the biographies of jobless people, which articulated indi-
vidual events and historical social changes at a structural level. Also, when
Shen Yuan analysed the process of reforming the working-class by proposing
to analyse the micro-situations of working-class-labour, the economic institu-
tions and the context of double transformation based on the theories of
Polanyi and Burrawoy, he also stepped into that conceptual space.
Then, in a second movement, practical sociology has been used to develop
a theory of social transition as a communist-civilisation fact – civilisation as a
system of the values and functioning of social life – a specifically Chinese one
because of its radical difference with that of Eastern-European countries.
Practical sociology and the sociology of transition must be used together in
order to analyse social change in Chinese society, and more generally the great
civilisational turning point in which Chinese sociologists situate themselves
while working on a microsociological level in which they analyse the interac-
tions of daily-life and social practices. It is interesting to note that in the
practice sociology of the 1990’s, structural processes, even civilisational proc­
esses, interactions and subjectivities were initially thought of as being in an
equivalence. Progressively, a hierarchy was established between these con-
cepts, and structural and civilisational processes have acquired an important
status. One can suppose that the weight of “transition” is the reason why soci-
ologists were driven to give a new status to structural processes.
Today Li Peilin (2015) considers that a Chinese school of sociology, rather
close to what was the Chicago school, is appearing around the definition of
common research objects like migrants, urban marginalisation linked to
Traditions and Controversies 31

urbanisation and social change. Chinese sociology, from its starting point
onwards during its re-foundation process, received an obvious influence from
the Chicago School. According to Li Peilin (2015)

The term “Chinese school” can be traced back to 1930s when Malinowski
praised Fei Xiao Tong’s anthropological study of a Chinese village which
set the methodological foundations of the modern Chinese school of
Chinese sociology2.

Fei Xiao Tong took a lot of inspiration from the works of the Chicago school,
especially from those of Robert Park, to re-found sociology in China.
Chinese sociologists, confronted today with great social issues linked to the
specificity of China’s experience, produce an impressive amount of empirical
surveys and research. Zhou Xiaohong (2004) underlines also the influence of
the Chicago school on Chinese sociology – especially in urban sociology and
social psychology – but he points out its limits, theoretical and methodological
shortfalls that cannot exist in Chinese sociology.

3.3 Constructivisms and Theoretical Variations

Contemporary Chinese sociologies constructed from conceptions of the
proc­ess therefore appear to be placed within a sort of mosaic of situated and
con­textualized constructivisms often against backgrounds of historical or civi­
lisa­tional contexts in which objective constructivism, critical constructivism,
sociologies of action, interpretative constructivism, organisational or strategic
constructivism, interactionist constructivism, subjective constructivism and
more cohabit.
Within a form of revised social constructivism, knowledge is produced out
of the analysis of the construction of relationships between social structures
and institutions, between the State and society by raising the issue of social
polarisation within a historical perspective. From a socio-historical perspec-
tive, Li Peilin (2012, 2014) proposes a sociology of the China Experience by
raising the issue of social change in contemporary Chinese society taking as a
starting point the characteristics of traditional Chinese society; Zhou Xiaohong
(2012) would consider the Chinese Experience and micro Change of the
Chinese people’s social values and mentality. Chinese sociology of social
classes and social mobility also produces this form of constructivism based
upon the analysis of social and historical processes of the transformation of

2 Fei, Hsiao-Tung, 1939, Peasant Life in China: A field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley,
London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., LTD.
32 Chapter 2

Chinese society (Li Chunling, 2012; Li Qiang, 2012; Li Lulu, 2012; Tong Xin,
2008a; Chen Guangjin, 2013). Research in economic sociology (Liu Shiding,
2006, 2012; Liu Yuzhao, Tian Qing 2009; Liu Yuzhao, Tian Qing, 2014; Liu Aiyu,
2014; Tong Xin, 2012) also contributes to producing this type of social
constructivism.
A form of critical constructivism appears with the work of Sun Liping (2002)
who describes his work as a “sociology of practice”, or with the Chinese public
sociology produced by Shen Yuan (2012) or with Guo Yuhua (2014) who has
developed a theory focused on the production of voices of subaltern groups.
They have all shown how dominated individuals deploy reflexive, action
capacity in different social situations and arts of resistance.
We also could identify a form of interactionist constructivism with the soci-
ology of networks in which various theories of the guanxi have been developed
and in which the concepts of interaction and identity play an important role
(Yang Yiyin, 2012) but this interactionist constructivism is linked to a historical
perspective.
Another form of strategic constructivism could be illustrated, for example,
by Li Youmei (2007, 2012 a, b) who raises the question of the governance of
communities and neighbourhoods as the bases of Chinese civil society. Some
works, through a problematic of network, call on the concept of “strategies”,
which plays here a secondary role in the conceptual apparatus. This could be a
remainder of a structural-functionalist-inspired posture, but reconfigured in
the context of the contemporaneous Chinese civilisation. Other works on
urbanisation processes and social mobilities, show how individual and collec-
tive strategies are built within situations of economic and political constraints
that limit the power of action of actors in transitional contexts.
Sociologies of action give more space to the actor, an actor constrained by
the State and the market against a background of transition but capable of
reflexivity and forming herself/himself into a Subject, for example, in stud-
ies on new collective action (Shen Yuan, 2011; Liu Neng, 2004, 2009a and b).
Studies of social movements and collective actions clearly show how the con-
text, here one characterised by transition, produces interactions and collective
actions among various categories of populations which, in turn, produce spe-
cific demands for recognition in Chinese society.
Finally Xie Lizhong (2009, 2012a) has proposed an epistemological “Post-
sociology” which considers “reality” as a “discursive reality” constructed by
people under constraints of discourse system and which change with the
change of people’s discourse system. So Post-sociology means a pluralistic dis-
course analysis.
Today Chinese society is conceptualised more as an objective and subjec-
tive reality, never as being static or defined once and for all. This raises the
Traditions and Controversies 33

question of the construction of the individual. Subjectivity is conceived com-

pletely differently here, and is linked to the construction of “them” and “us” in
a context of social stratification, an increase in social conflicts and a crisis of
confidence in the Other. Studies of social movements and collective actions
clearly show how the Chinese context, here a context characterised by tran­
sition, produces interactions and collective actions among various categories
of populations which, in turn, produce specific demands for recognition in
Chinese society.
The Chinese sociologists have developed their own original approaches
and sociological reasoning, they have revealed conceptual spaces that are
unforeseen in Western sociological thinking. If, over the last thirty years, the
constructivist and hermeneutic poles have become visible in French sociology
by opening a space for a sociology of the individual, in Chinese sociology, the
objectivist and constructivist poles are the ones to have expanded.

4 Traditions and Controversies in European Sociology since 1980

What about traditions and controversies in European, especially French, soci-

ologies? Controversies arose around the modes of explanation of what
individuals are capable of doing, saying and thinking and thus how scientific
interpretation is produced in discontinuity or continuity with the shared
meaning. In the early 1980s, the competition between sociological trends was
such that it forced researchers to be in a process of discontinuity regarding
certain paradigms and a process of acculturation regarding others. If, previ-
ously, sociology was presented as a succession and a juxtaposition of competing
partially secant paradigms, today sociologists explore theoretical universes
which arise out of partial secants between different paradigms and are wary of
what appears to be “normal science” at any given moment or the history of sci-
ences at another.
In the 1970s and 1980s, neither Pierre Bourdieu’s (1987) structuralist con-
structivism, which continued to grant a certain primacy to objective structures
by means of the concepts of the field and the habitus, nor the competences of
individuals relative to their knowledge of the social world received much rec-
ognition, since they required researchers to position themselves within a
situation of epistemological discontinuity. In France, in 1979, Yves Grafmeyer
and Isaac Joseph (1979) translated the fundamental texts of the Chicago School
and, shortly after, Isaac Joseph introduced the interactionist theories which
triggered great controversies and conflicts within sociology. At that time, inter-
actionist theories were presented as “machines of war” against structuralisms
Another random document with
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It half digests the choice food, and disgorges it in the shape of a
delicate film to line the walls of the cavity where the egg is laid. Thus,
when first hatched, the larva finds food easy of digestion, which
rapidly strengthens its stomach and allows it to attack the under
layers which lack the same refinement of preparation. Under the
semi-fluid paste is a choice pulp, compact and homogeneous,
whence every particle of fibre is banished. Beyond are the coarser
strata [35]where vegetable fibres abound, and finally the outside of
the ball is composed of the coarsest materials felted together into a
resistant shell. Manifestly there is a progressive change of diet. On
issuing from the egg the feeble grub licks the fine paste on the walls
of its dwelling. There is but little of it, still it is strengthening and of
high nutritious value. To the bottle of early infancy succeeds the pap
of the weanling, intermediate between the dainty fare of the start and
the coarse nourishment at the end. This layer is thick enough and
abundant enough to make the maggot into a robust grub. Then,
strong food for the strong, barley bread with its husks, raw dung full
of sharp bits of hay. The larva is superabundantly provisioned with it,
and, having attained its growth, comes to the imprisoning outer layer.
The capacity of the dwelling has increased with that of its inhabitant.
The small original cavity with its excessively thick walls is now a
large cell with sides only a few lines thick. The inner layers have
turned into larva, nymph, or Scarabæus, as the case may be. In
short, the ball is now a shell, hiding within its spacious interior the
mysteries of metamorphosis.

My observations go no further; my certificates of the birth and

condition of the Scarabæus do not go beyond the egg; I have not
actually seen the larva which, however, is known and described by
various authors. Neither have I seen the perfect insect while yet
enclosed in the cell, previous to exercising its functions as ball-roller
and excavator, and that is exactly what I should most have desired to
see. I should have liked to find the [36]creature in its birthplace,
recently transformed, new to all labour, so that I might have
examined the worker’s hand before it set to its tasks, and for the
following reason.

Insects have each foot terminated by a kind of finger or tarsus,

composed of a series of delicate portions which may be compared to
the joints of our fingers. They end in a crooked nail. One claw to
each foot is the rule, and this claw, at least in the case of the
superior Coleoptera, especially the scavenger beetles, contains five
joints. Now by a strange exception, the Scarabæus has no tarsi on
its forefeet, while possessing well-shaped ones with five joints on the
two other pairs. They are imperfect, maimed, wanting in their front
limbs in that which represents, roughly indeed, our hand in an insect.
A like anomaly is found in the Onitis and Bubas, also of the
scavenger family. Entomology has long noted this curious fact
without being able to give a satisfactory explanation. Is it a birth
imperfection? Does the beetle come into the world without fingers on
its front limbs, or does it lose them as soon as it enters on its
toilsome labours?

One might easily suppose such mutilation a consequence of the

insect’s hard work. To grope, to excavate, to rake, to divide now
among the gravel in the soil, now in the fibrous mass of manure, is
not a work in which organs so delicate as the tarsi can be used
without danger. Yet graver is it that when the insect is rolling its ball
backward, head downward, it is with the end of the forefeet that it
grips the ground. What becomes of the weak feet, no thicker than a
thread, in this perpetual contact [37]with all the inequalities of the
soil? They are useless—merely in the way, and sooner or later they
are bound to disappear, crushed, torn off, worn out. Our workmen,
alas! are too often maimed by handling heavy tools, and lifting great
weights, and the same may be the case with the Scarabæus which
rolls a ball that to it is a huge load. In that case the maimed arms
would be a noble certificate of a life of toil.

But serious doubts at once suggest themselves. If these mutilations

be accidental, and the result of laborious work, they should be the
exception, not the rule. Because a workman or several workmen
have had a hand crushed in machinery, it does not follow that all
others should be maimed. If the Scarabæus often, or even very
often, loses the fore-claws in its trade of ball-roller, there must be
some which, cleverer or more fortunate, have preserved their tarsi.
Let us then consult facts. I have observed a very large number of the
species of Scarabæus which inhabit France, the S. sacer, common
in Provence; S. semipunctatus, which is seldom found far from the
sea, and frequents the sandy shores of Cette, Palavas, and of the
Gulf of Juan; also S. longicollis, which is much more widely spread
than the two others, and found at least as far up the Rhône Valley as
Lyons. Finally, I have observed an African kind, S. cicatricosus,
found in the environs of Constantine, and the want of tarsi on the
forefeet has proved invariable in all four species, at all events as far
as my observations go. Therefore the Scarabæus is maimed from
birth, and it must be no accident but a natural peculiarity. [38]

Moreover, we have further proof in another reason. Were the

absence of fore-claws accidental, and the consequence of rough
labour, there are other insects, especially among the scavenger
beetles, which undertake excavations yet more difficult than those of
the Scarabæus, and which ought therefore to be still more liable to
lose their front claws, as these are useless and in the way when the
foot has to serve as a strong tool for excavation. For instance, the
Geotrupes, who deserve their name of Earth-piercer so well, make
hollows in the hard and beaten soil of paths among pebbles
cemented by clay—vertical pits so deep that to reach the lowest cell
one has to use powerful digging tools, and even then one does not
always succeed. Now these miners par excellence, who easily open
long galleries in surroundings whose surface the Scarabæus sacer
could hardly disturb, have their front tarsi intact, as if to perforate tufa
were a work calling for delicacy rather than strength. Everything then
points to the belief that, if observed in its natal cell, the baby
Scarabæus would be found mutilated like the veteran who has
travelled the world and grown worn with labour.

On this absence of fingers might be based an argument in favour of

the theories now in fashion—the struggle for life and the evolution of
the species. One might say that the Scarabæus had originally tarsi
on all its feet in conformity with the general laws of insect
organisation. One way or another, some have lost these
embarrassing appendages on their forefeet, they being hurtful rather
than useful. Finding themselves the better for this mutilation,
[39]which proved favourable to their work, little by little they gained a
superiority over the less favoured ones, founded a race by
transmitting their fingerless stumps to their descendants, and finally,
the primitively fingered insect became the fingerless Scarabæus of
our time. I am willing to agree to this reasoning if it could first be
demonstrated why, with like labours,—labours even far harder,—the
Geotrupes has preserved his tarsi. Meantime let us continue to
believe that the first Scarabæus who rolled a ball, perhaps on the
shores of some lake where bathed the Palæotherium, was as much
without tarsi as him of our own day. [40]

Fabre subsequently completed the whole life-history and published it in the fifth
1
series of his Souvenirs (1897). ↑
[Contents]
III
 CERCERIS BUPRESTICIDA

Every one has met with books which, according to his turn of mind,
have been epoch-making, opening to him horizons whose very
existence he had never guessed. They throw wide open the gates of a
new world where henceforward he will use his mental powers; they
are the spark which, falling on a hearth, kindles into flame materials
otherwise never utilised. And very often it is mere chance which puts
into our hands some book which makes a new starting-point in the
evolution of our ideas. The most casual circumstance, a few lines
which happen to come under our eye, decide our future and impel us
into the path which thenceforward we shall follow. One winter evening,
beside a stove where the ashes were yet warm, while my family slept,
I was forgetting, while I read, all the cares of the morrow—the black
cares of the professor of physics, who, after having piled one
university diploma on another and rendered for a quarter of a century
services whose merit was not denied, earns for himself and family
1600 francs—less than a groom in a well-to-do household. Such was
the shameful [41]parsimony of that day in educational matters; thus did
Red tape will it. I was a free-lance, son of my solitary studies. Thus,
amid my books I was putting aside acute professorial worries when I
chanced to light on an entomological pamphlet which had come into
my hands I forget how. It was by the patriarch of entomology of that
day, the venerable savant Léon Dufour, on the habits of a
Hymenopteron whose prey was the Buprestis. Certainly long ere this I
had felt a great interest in insects; from childhood I had delighted in
beetles, bees, and butterflies; as far back as I can recollect I see
myself enraptured by the splendours of a beetle’s elytra, or the wings
of the great Swallowtail butterfly. The materials lay ready on the
hearth, but the spark to kindle them had been lacking. The accidental
perusal of Léon Dufour’s pamphlet was that spark. I had a mental
revelation. So then to arrange lovely beetles in a cork box, to name
and classify was not the whole of science; there was something far
superior, namely, the close study of the structure, and still more of the
faculties of insects. Thrilled by emotion I read of a grand instance of
this. A little later, aided by those fortunate circumstances which always
befriend the ardent seeker, I published my first entomological work,
the complement of Léon Dufour’s. It gained the honours of the
Institute of France, a prize for experimental physiology being adjudged
to it, and—far sweeter reward!—shortly after I received a most
flattering and encouraging letter from the very man who had inspired
me. From far away in the Landes the venerated master sent me the
cordial expression [42]of his enthusiasm, and urged me to continue my
studies. At that recollection my old eyes still grow wet with a holy
emotion. Oh, bright days of illusion, of faith in the future, what has
become of you!

I hope that the reader will not be sorry to meet with an extract from the
pamphlet which was the starting-point of my own researches, the
more so that it is necessary for the understanding of what follows. So I
will let my Master speak, only abridging slightly:—

In all insect history I know of no fact more curious and extraordinary than
that which I am about to relate. It concerns a species of Cerceris which
feeds its progeny on the most splendid kinds of Buprestis. Let me share
with you, my friend, the vivid impressions gained by studying the habits of
this Hymenopteron. In July 1839 a friend, who lives in the country, sent me
two Buprestis bifasciata, an insect new to my collection, telling me that a
kind of wasp which was carrying one of these pretty beetles had dropped it
on his coat, and that a few minutes later a similar wasp had let fall another
on the ground. In July 1840, having been called in as physician by my
friend, I reminded him of his capture of the preceding year, and asked about
the circumstances. Season and place corresponding with it, I hoped to do
as much myself, but that particular day was dark and chilly, unfavourable
therefore to the flight of Hymenoptera. Nevertheless, we made a tour of
inspection in the garden walks, and seeing no insects I bethought myself of
seeking in the ground for the homes of burrowing Hymenoptera. A tiny heap
of sand recently thrown up, like a miniature mole-hill, attracted my attention.
Scratching it away, I saw that it masked the orifice of a gallery descending
far down. We carefully dug up the ground with a spade, and soon caught
sight of the shining elytra of the coveted Buprestis. Soon I not only found
wing-cases but a whole Buprestis, nay, [43]three and four displayed their
gold and emerald. I could not believe my eyes. But that was only the
prelude to my feast. In the chaos caused by my own exhumations a
Hymenopteron appeared and was taken by me; it was the captor of the
Buprestis, trying to escape from amid her victims. I recognised an old
acquaintance, a Cerceris which I have found some two hundred times in
Spain and around Saint Sever.

But my ambition was far from satisfied. It was not enough to know ravisher
and prey: I wanted the larva for which all this rich store was laid up. After
exhausting the first vein of Buprestis I hastened to make new excavations.
Digging down more carefully I finally discovered two larvæ, which
completed the good fortune of this campaign. In less than an hour I turned
over three haunts of the Cerceris, and my booty was some fifteen whole
Buprestids with fragments of a yet greater number. I calculated, and I
believe it fell far short of the truth, that there were twenty-five nests in this
garden, a fact representing an immense number of buried Buprestids. What
must it be, I said to myself, in localities where in a few hours I have caught
as many as sixty Cerceris on blossoming garlic, with nests most probably
near, and no doubt provisioned quite as abundantly! Imagination, backed by
probability, showed me underground, within a small space, B. bifasciata by
thousands, although I who have observed the entomology of our parts for
over thirty years have never noticed a single one. Once only, perhaps
twenty years ago, did I see, sticking in a hole of an ancient oak, the
abdomen and elytra of this insect. This fact was a ray of light, for it told me
that the larva of B. bifasciata must live in the wood of the oak, and entirely
explained the abundance of this beetle in a district where the forests consist
chiefly of that tree. As Cerceris bupresticida is rare on the clayey hills of the
latter stretch of country compared to the sandy plains where grows Pinus
maritima, it became an interesting question whether this Hymenopteron
when it inhabits the pine region provisions its nest as it does in [44]the oak
district. I had good reason to believe that it did not, and you will soon see
with some surprise how exquisite is the entomological tact of our Cerceris in
her choice of the numerous kind of Buprestids.

Let us hasten to the pine region to taste new pleasures. The spot to be
explored is a garden belonging to a property in the midst of forests of the
maritime pines. The haunts of the Cerceris were soon recognised; they
were exclusively found in the main paths, where the beaten and compact
soil offered the burrowing Hymenoptera sufficient solidity for the
construction of their subterranean dwellings. I visited some twenty, and I did
it, I may say, by the sweat of my brow. It is a very laborious kind of
exploration, for the nests and provisions are only found at the depth of one
foot, so that it is necessary to invest the place by a line of square trenches
seven or eight inches from the mouth of the hole, first inserting a stalk of
grass in the gallery by way of clue. One must sap with a garden spade, so
that the central clod, thoroughly detached all round, may be raised in one
piece, then reversed on the ground and broken up carefully. Such is the
manœuvre which I found successful. You would have shared our
enthusiasm at the sight of the beautiful species of Buprestis which this new
style of research revealed to our eager gaze. You ought to have heard our
exclamations as each time the clod was reversed, new treasures were
revealed rendered yet more brilliant by the hot sun, or when we discovered
the larvæ of every age attached to their prey, or the cocoons of these larvæ
incrusted with copper, bronze, and emerald. I who had been for three or four
times ten years, alas! a practical entomologist had never beheld such an
enchanting sight or had had such good fortune. We only wanted you to
double our enjoyment. With ever increasing admiration we dwelt now on the
brilliant Coleoptera and now on the marvellous sagacity of the Cerceris
which had buried and laid them up for food. Can you believe it? Out of more
than 400 beetles dug up, there was not one which did not belong to the old
[45]genus Buprestis! Our Hymenopteron had not committed the smallest
error. How much there is to learn from this intelligent industry in so small an
insect! What value Latreille would have attached to the vote of this Cerceris
in favour of the natural system! 1

Let us pass on to the various contrivances of the Cerceris in making and

provisioning her nest. I have already said that she chooses ground whose
surface is beaten, compact, and solid. I should add that this ground must be
dry and in full sunshine. This choice shows an intelligence, or, if you like, an
instinct, which one is tempted to believe is the result of experience. Crumbly
earth or mere sand would of course be easier to work, but then how
construct an orifice which will remain wide open for ingress and exit, and a
gallery whose walls will not constantly fall in, yield, and become blocked by
the least rain? The choice is therefore both reasonable and perfectly well
calculated.
Our burrowing Hymenopteron hollows her gallery with her mandibles and
front tarsi, which accordingly are furnished with stiff points to act as rakes.
The orifice must not only have the diameter of the miner’s body, but be able
to admit a prey of larger bulk. This shows admirable forethought. As the
Cerceris digs deeper she brings out the rubbish, and this makes the heap
which I compared to a tiny molehill. The gallery is not vertical, as this would
have exposed it to be filled up by wind or other causes. Not far from the
starting-point it makes an angle; its length is from seven to eight inches. At
the far end the industrious mother establishes the cradle of her progeny.
Five cells, separate and independent of one another, are hollowed in the
shape and nearly of the size of an olive; within they are solid and polished.
Each can contain three Buprestids, the ordinary allowance for a larva. The
Cerceris lays an egg amid the three victims, and then stops up the gallery
with [46]earth, so that when once the provisions for the brood are laid in, the
cells have no communication with the outside.

Cerceris bupresticida must be an indefatigable, daring, and skilful huntress.

The cleanness, the freshness of the beetles which she buries in her den
testify that they are seized just as they emerge from the wooden galleries
where their final metamorphosis takes place. But what inconceivable instinct
urges a creature that lives solely on the nectar of flowers to seek amid a
thousand difficulties animal food for carnivorous offspring, which it will never
see, and to post itself on trees quite unlike one another, which hide deep in
their trunks the insects which are to fall her victims? What entomological
tact, yet more inconceivable, makes her lay down a strict law to select them
in a single generic group, and to catch species differing very considerably in
size, shape, and colour? You observe how unlike are Buprestis biguttata,
with its slender long body and dark colour; B. octoguttata, oval-oblong, with
great stains of a beautiful yellow on a blue or green ground; and B. micans,
three or four times the size of B. biguttata, with a splendid metallic greeny
gold.
 [To face p. 46.
CERCERIS BUPRESTICIDA AND ITS PREY, BUPRESTICIS
MICANS AND BUPRESTIS FLAVOMACULATA

There is another very singular fact in the manœuvres of our assassin of

Buprestids. The buried ones, like those which I have seized in the grasp of
their murderers, give no sign of life, and are unquestionably quite dead, yet,
as I observed with surprise, no matter when they are dug up, not only do
they keep all their freshness of colour, but every bit of them—feet, antennæ,
palpi, and the membranes which unite the various parts of their bodies—is
perfectly supple and flexible. At first one supposes the explanation, as far as
concerns the buried ones, to be in the coolness of the ground, and absence
of air and light, and for those taken from their murderers, in the very recent
date of death. But observe that after my explorations, having isolated in
cones of paper the numerous Buprestids dug up, I have often left them over
thirty-six hours before pinning them out. And yet, notwithstanding the
dryness and great heat of July, I have always found the same [47]flexibility
in the joints. More than this, after that lapse of time, I have dissected
several, and their visceræ were as perfectly preserved as if I had used my
scalpel on the live insect. Now, long experience has taught me that even in
a beetle of this size, when twelve hours have passed in summer after its
death, the interior organs are either dried up or corrupted so that it is
impossible to be sure of form or structure. There is some peculiarity about
Buprestids put to death by the Cerceris which prevents corruption or
desiccation for a week, or perhaps two. But what is this peculiarity?

To explain this wonderful preservation which makes an insect dead for

several weeks into a piece of game not even high, but, on the
contrary, as fresh as when first caught, and that during the greatest
heat of summer, the skilful historian of Cerceris bupresticida supposes
that there must be an antiseptic liquid acting as do the preparations
used in preserving anatomical specimens. This liquid can only be the
poison injected by the Hymenopteron into the body of the victim. A
minute globule of the venomous humour accompanying the dart or
lancet, destined for this purpose, acts as a kind of pickle or antiseptic
fluid to preserve the flesh on which the larva is to feed. But then how
superior to our processes are those of the Cerceris with regard to
preserved food! We salt or smoke or enclose in tins hermetically
sealed provisions which remain eatable, to be sure, but which are far,
very far from having the qualities of fresh meat. Sardines drowned in
oil, Dutch smoked herrings, cod hardened into slabs by salt and sun,
—can any of these sustain comparison with the same fish brought
alive to the kitchen? For meat properly so-called it is still [48]worse.
Beyond salting and drying we have nothing which even for a short
period can keep meat eatable. At the present time, after innumerable
fruitless attempts of the most varied kind, special ships are equipped
at great cost, which, furnished with powerful freezing apparatus,
convey to us the flesh of sheep and oxen slaughtered in the Pampas
of South America, frozen and kept from corruption by intense cold.
How far superior is the method of the Cerceris, so rapid, so cheap, so
expeditious! What lessons we should have to learn from such
transcendental chemistry when an imperceptible drop of liquid poison
renders in an instant the prey incorruptible! What am I saying?—
incorruptible?—that is far from being all; the game is put into a
condition which prevents desiccation, leaves their suppleness to the
limbs, and maintains all the organs in pristine freshness, both the
internal and external. In short, the Cerceris puts the insect into a state
differing only from life by a corpse-like immobility.

Such is the conclusion arrived at by Léon Dufour before this

incomprehensible marvel of the dead Buprestis untouched by
corruption. An antiseptic fluid, incomparably superior to anything that
human science could produce, would explain the mystery. He, the
Master, skilful of the skilful, thoroughly used to most delicate anatomy;
he who with magnifying glass and scalpel has scrutinised the whole
circuit of entomology, leaving no corner unexplored; he, in short, for
whom the organisation of insects has no secrets,—can advance no
better conjecture than an antiseptic liquid to give at least a kind of
explanation of a fact which leaves him confounded. Let me [49]insist on
this comparison between the instinct of the animal and the reason of
the sage in order the better to demonstrate in due time the
overwhelming superiority of the former.
I will add but a few words to the history of the C. bupresticida. This
Hymenopteron, common in the Landes, as we have heard, seems to
be rare in the department of Vaucluse. It is only at long intervals that I
have met with it, in autumn, and always isolated specimens, on the
spiny heads of Eryngium campestre, in the environs of Avignon or
round Orange and Carpentras. In the latter spot, so favourable to
burrowing hymenoptera, from its sandy soil of Mollasse, I had the
good fortune, not indeed of being present at the exhumation of such
entomological riches as Léon Dufour describes, but of finding some
old nests which I feel certain belonged to Cerceris bupresticida, from
the shape of the cocoons, the kind of provender stored up, and the
existence of the Hymenopteron in the neighbourhood. These nests,
hollowed in a very friable sandstone, called safre in those parts, were
filled with remains of beetles, easily recognised, and consisting of
detached wing-cases, empty corslets, and whole feet. Now these
remains of the larva’s feast all belonged to one species, and this was
a Buprestis, Sphænoptera geminata. Thus from the west to the east of
France, from the department of the Landes to Vaucluse, the Cerceris
remains faithful to its favourite prey; longitude does not affect its
predilections, a hunter of Buprestids among the maritime pines of the
ocean sand-hills, it is equally so amid the evergreen oaks and olives
of Provence. [50]The species is changed according to place, climate,
and vegetation—causes influencing greatly the insect population, but
the Cerceris keeps to its chosen genus, the Buprestis. For what
strange reason? That is what I shall try to demonstrate. [51]

The beetles dug up belonged to the following species:—Buprestis octoguttata, B.

1
bifasciata, B. pruni, B. tarda, B. biguttata, B. micans, B. flavomaculata, B.
chrysostigma, B. novem-maculata. ↑
[Contents]
IV
 CERCERIS TUBERCULATA

With my mind full of the great deeds of the Buprestis hunter, I watched for an
opportunity of observing in my turn the labours of the Cerceris, and I watched so
closely that finally I got my chance. True, it was not the Hymenopteron
celebrated by Dufour, with such sumptuous provisions that when dug up they
made one think of the powder from a nugget broken by the miner’s pickaxe in
some gold field: it was a closely related species, a giant brigand which contents
itself with more modest prey—in short, Cerceris tuberculata or C. major, the
largest and strongest of the genus.

The last fortnight in September is the time when our Hymenopteron makes its
burrows, and buries in the depths the prey destined for its brood. The position of
the domicile, always sagaciously chosen, is governed by those mysterious laws
varying with the species, but unchangeable for any one of them. The Cerceris of
Léon Dufour requires a horizontal, beaten, compact soil, like that of a path, to
avoid landslips and changes which would ruin its gallery with the first rain. Ours,
on the [52]contrary, selects vertical ground. By this slight architectural
modification she avoids most of the dangers which might threaten her tunnel;
therefore she is not particular as to the nature of the soil, and hollows her gallery
either in friable earth with a little clay, or in the crumbling soil of the Mollasse,
which makes the labour of excavation much easier. The only indispensable
condition seems to be that the soil should be dry, and exposed to the sun for the
greater part of the day. It is therefore in the steep bank along a road, and in the
sides of hollows made by rain in the sandy Mollasse, that our Hymenopteron
makes its abode. Such conditions are frequent near Carpentras in what is
known as the hollow way, and it is there that I have found C. tuberculata in the
greatest abundance, and have collected most of the facts relating to its history.

It is not enough to choose this vertical situation; other precautions are taken to
guard against the already advanced season. If some bit of hard sandstone
project like a shelf, or if a hole the size of one’s fist should have been hollowed
naturally in the ground, it will be under this shelter or in this cavity that the gallery
is made, a natural vestibule being thus added by the Cerceris to its own edifice.
Although there is no kind of community among them, these insects like to
associate in small parties, and I have always found their nests in groups of
about ten, with orifices, though usually far apart, sometimes touching.
When the sun shines it is wonderful to see the ways of these hard-working
miners. Some patiently extract bits of gravel from the bottom of a hole [53]with
their mandibles, and push out the heavy mass; others scratch the walls of their
tunnel with the sharp rakes of their tarsi, forming a heap of rubbish which they
sweep out backward, and send sliding down the steep incline in long dusty
streams. It was these periodical sand waves thrown out of galleries in process of
construction which betrayed my first Cerceris, and led to the discovery of the
nests. Others, either weary, or having completed their hard task, rested and
polished their antennæ and wings under the natural caves which usually protect
their dwelling, or else sat motionless at the mouth of their holes, only displaying
their wide, square faces, barred with yellow and black. Others again were flying
with a deep hum on the bushes near the cochineal oak, where the males,
always on the watch near the burrows in process of construction, speedily join
them. Couples form, often troubled by the arrival of a second male, which tries to
supplant the happy possessor. The humming grows menacing, quarrels begin,
and often both males roll in the dust until one acknowledges the superiority of
his rival. Not far off the female waits with indifference the upshot of the struggle,
accepting finally the male bestowed on her by the chances of the fight, and the
pair fly out of sight to seek peace in some distant thicket. Here the part of the
male ends. One half smaller than the females, they prowl about the burrows but
never enter, and never take any part in the hard work of excavation, or that
perhaps yet harder of provisioning the cells.

In a few days the galleries are ready, especially as after some repairs those of
the preceding year [54]are used again. Other Cerceris, as far as I know, have no
fixed home, transmitted from one generation to another. True Bohemians, they
establish themselves wherever the chances of their vagabond life may lead
them, so long as the soil suits them. But C. tuberculata is faithful to her penates.
The projecting shelf of sandstone used by its predecessors is used again; it
hollows out the same layer of sand hollowed by its forbears, and, adding its own
labour to theirs, obtains deep-seated retreats sometimes only visited with
difficulty. The diameter of the galleries would admit a thumb, and the insect can
move about easily, even when laden with the prey which we shall see it capture.
Their direction is horizontal, from four to eight inches, then makes a sudden turn
downward more or less obliquely, now in one direction, now in another. Except
the horizontal part, and the angle of the tunnel, the direction seems to depend
on the difficulties of the ground, as is proved by the windings and changes in the
farthest part of this kind of canal, which is half a yard in length. At the far end are
the cells, not numerous, and provisioned with five or six dead beetles. But let us
leave the details of how a Cerceris builds, and turn to more wonderful facts.

[To face p. 54.

CERCERIS TUBERCULATA DRAGGING WEEVIL TO ITS BURROW

The victim chosen to feed the larvæ is a large weevil (Cleonus ophthalmicus).
One sees the captor arrive, carrying the victim between its feet, body to body,
head to head. It alights heavily some way from the hole to complete the journey
without the aid of wings, and drags the prey laboriously with its jaws, on ground
if not vertical, at least very steeply inclined, which often results in sending
[55]captor and captive headlong to the bottom, but the indefatigable mother
finally darts into her burrow, covered with dust, but with the prey of which she
has never let go. If she does not find walking with such a burden easy, it is
otherwise with her flight, which is surprisingly powerful, if one considers that the
strong little creature is carrying a prey nearly as large as and heavier than
herself. I have had the curiosity to weigh the Cerceris and her prey separately,
and the first weighed 150 milligrammes, and the second about 250, almost
double.

These weights speak eloquently for the vigorous huntress, and I never wearied
of watching how swiftly and easily she resumed her flight, and rose out of sight
with the game between her feet when approached too closely. But she did not
always fly away, and then, though it was difficult to do so, and yet avoid hurting