期刊名称：Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences
印刷版ISSN：1944-1088
电子版ISSN：1944-1096
出版年度：2011
卷号：3
期号：2
页码：419-429
出版社：Guild of Independent Scholars
摘要：Everything flows. So goes the famous aphorism which has been repeatedly used in academia to characterize the essence of the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus' thought. This established statement often gives social scientists the luxury to make bold claims about social phenomena without any pretense of offering exhaustive analyses of the nature of social change. To claim that the social world has changed fundamentally in the last decades is a good example for this conventional practice. Since everything flows, and nothing stays the same, one would normally think that, to underline the fact that the social world is in constant change, without offering a comprehensive theoretical and historical analysis, does nothing but state the obvious. Although it is not problem freei, the concept of "the rise of the Global South", by focusing on the empirical phenomena of the emergence of so-called formerly emerging countries, does explain the specific character of the shift the world is experiencing today on the meta-level: the world has clearly gained a multicentric character, and it is not possible to investigate the social world with a set of presupposed universalisms anymore (Rehbein, 2010). In a world in which a good number of scholars (regardless of which generation they belong to or from what disciplines and schools of thought they derive their ideas) are still, in one way or the other, bounded by old ways of imagining the social world, Religion, Community and Development: Changing Contours of Politics and Policy in India (hereafter abbreviated as 'RCD') comes forward as a novel effort from the scholars of one of the most important countries of the Global South, India, to unthink the conventional practices of social sciences and tries to come up with an epistemological framework which would respond to the urgent need to modify the ontological premises of yesterday's social world (Beck, 2003). The book is a collection of fourteen articles, which are all informed to a good extent by the empirical research that the respective authors have conducted over the years; and/or, a closer examination of the Sachar Committee Report (SCR) – along with the Indian Census and National Service Scheme (NSS) findings – providing clear entry points and substantial bases for the contributors' arguments. While all chapters directly or indirectly come across fundamental discussion topics in Indian Social Sciences (e.g. development, modernity, modernization, secularization, the role of hierarchy in the Indian social structure), each chapter has an individual focus as well. If one tries to sketch a thematic overview of the fourteen chapters, two topics become specifically apparent: a critique of conventional social science indicators, and the relationship between religion and development with an elaboration on profiles of different religious communities in India. Such a thematic categorization can neither do justice to the individual chapters, as it excludes a set of specific topics which has been raised craftily by each author, nor avoid cross-cutting themes as the topics do overlap on different levels, vertically and horizontally. Nevertheless, as it is not the intention of the review to rehearse here what is already given in the table of contents of the book, a framework will be constructed to aid the readers in their efforts to grasp the topics in their larger contexts and make it possible for the review to respond to the issues raised in the book in a systematic manner
