An old and familiar issue that has confronted the social sciences is the question of utility and practical contribution to the state of  Philippine education in general, and in particular to other academic disciplines, such  as agriculture. The month of November 1983 was a particularly challenging one. For the first time in many years, the social sciences was called to account for their role and contribution to the field of general education. Social scientists were asked to pause from teaching and other occupational activities so as to be able to assess their work, re-think directions, and the effectiveness of their academic pursuits.

The Social Scientists at U.P. Los Baños (UPLB) produces a commission report early in September which underscored the state of the social sciences at UPLB. The report depicted the U.P. social science faculty as “second class” citizens in the academic community. It made inquiries into the status, needs, and problems of the social sciences in such areas as academic programs, faculty competence, research activities and output, and extended the investigations to the larger issues that concern the social sciences.

The report noted among other things, that inspite of the academic competence of its staff, social science researches are conducted as a “free-wheeling venture” with no theoretical focus, research directions, or a research theme. The state of affairs presently obtaining in social science at UPLB is hardly conducive to a systematic development of an empirically based knowledge.

Philippine Social Science Education and Research for Agriculture Conference

The above report was one of the papers discussed in the conference on Social Science Education and Research For Agriculture held at UPLB last November 11-12, 1983. The conference was attended by representatives of college and university administration, international assistance agencies, officials from government agencies in agriculture and other ministries. The talks explored a possible prognosis for Philippine social science in the immediate future.

The paper of Edgardo Quisumbing, Director of the Agricultural Research Office of  the Ministry of Agriculture appeared to agree the UPLB critique of social science researches, in particular those related to agriculture. Dr. Quisumbing pointed out that with the exception of Agricultural Economics, other fields in the social sciences have contributed very little towards helping the Ministry of Agriculture design more efficient and effective agricultural programs. Among his observations was that the problem seems to be that the output of social scientists in general have failed to focus on the social environment of farmers. Philippine social scientists have yet to develop a theoretical system about the nature and dynamics of the agricultural environment.

Fr. Antonio Ledesma, S.J., representing the university sector, presented a paper on the status of social science education and research at Xavier University in which he identified certain constraints be setting social science researches in his area: delineating trade-offs between teaching and research, limited research resources and lack of linkages with other research centers.

The presentations of the foreign or assistance agencies dwelt on the role of the particular agency in supporting social science research and education. The U.S. Agency For International Development (AID) stressed its support for the training of social scientists in agricultural disciplines. Although the assistance is not directly made to colleges and universities, a new program will soon provide additional support to the social sciences.

The Rainfed Resources Development Program is designed to introduce certain changes in the old scheme of assistance. It will provide grants to agricultural institutions, colleges and universities, and research organizations. Training, both on the M.A. as well as Ph.D. levels, will most likely be an important component of the program.

Similarly, the Philippine Council for Agriculture, Resources Research, and Development (PCARRD) has been mainly involved in supporting the training for university based social scientists working on agricultural issues. PCARRD undertakes a manpower development program for upgrading the research capability of the national research network. About 50% of its fellowships was awarded to colleges and universities. PCARRD manpower development program encompasses a network that includes member colleges and universities. It admitted however, that grants for the social sciences constituted only a very small portion of its budget.

The First National Social Science Congress

The seminar at UPLB paved the way for an important milestone in the history of social science disciplines in the Philippines. The First National Social Science Congress was auspiciously held in the newly constructed Philippine Social Science Center building in Diliman. The date on which it was held pertained to a period of crises that highlighted the role that social science should play given the socioeconomic and political problems that presently plague the country.

The Keynote Speech of Edgardo J. Angara, President of the U.P. did not see the social science as performing its role effectively. Angara chided the social sciences for having been caught flat-footed in the present crisis.

   … the frantic guessing that is now going on shows that the crisis caught the social sciences flat-footed… The economists were apparently not monitoring economic trends because what we see now are the results of long-term trends. Equally oblivious.. were the political scientists. The social scientists are either gawking at events or are only now beginning to see how irrelevant their old lines of inquiry have become.

Angara challenged social scientists not only to add to the objective knowledge of reality but to confront the moral suggestion of programmatic action. The social scientists must henceforth use their expertise to perform their obligations as citizens.

One of  the answers to the above challenge came from economics. A paper on “Contemporary Science, Policies, and Programs” prepared by Alejandro M. Herrin evaluated the output of social science researches. Among the significant findings of the study was the fact that during the past ten years, social science research has been preoccupied with the evaluation of government programs and the assessment of the relationships between public policy instruments and policy objectives, at the expense of discipline-centered researches, not to mention theoretical studies. One of the more serious objection to contracted research is that it can undermine research quality since the resulting work is reviewed only by the end-user or the particular funding agency involved. Researches as scholarly pursuits need to be reviewed by academic peers, a practice that has ensured the high quality of scholarly work. A more serious problem is the restriction of research topics only to those identified by funding agencies.

On the other hand, the same paper noted the niggardly support that the social sciences are getting as compared to other disciplines like the natural sciences. Consequently, the study suggested that the government take the view that the mandate of the social sciences is much broader than simply responding to government-sponsored research programs. Social scientists must be free to examine social problems, formulate issues, and suggest a research strategy for a deeper understanding of these issues.

In the workshops that followed, the participants subjected these problems to further discussion, thus heightening their urgency. At the end, the workshops produced resolutions and recommendations some of which are the following:

1. Philippine social sciences should involve themselves in the resolution and alleviation of social issues and assume the role of social critic in addition to its primary concern of generating and transmitting knowledge.
2. Social Science disciplines should be indigenized and participatory research encouraged to develop a true “peoples’ science” based on popular perceptions and rooted in the collective indigenous experience.
3. The Social Sciences should have a code of ethics.
4. Research concerns for the next few years should be identified.

The 9th Congress of the IAHA

A truly multi-disciplinary gathering of social scientists was the 9th Congress of the International Association of Historians of Asia (IAHA) held in Diliman last November 21-25, 1983. Those attending included not only Asian practitioners of the craft of history but also social scientists from the USSR, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and other western nations. The range of topics offered a wide prism of interest such as Historiography, Asian Archeology and Prehistory, local History, as well as topics of current concern like Population Issues.

The Congress proper lasted for three days during which more than a hundred papers were read, reviewed, and criticized by peers from various disciplines. As in most congresses of this scale, papers were presented simultaneously in six different conferences or workshop rooms, so that the participants and observers were allowed only a fragment of the total presentations and discussions. On the average, a participant could only attend six sessions including the one in which he must present his own paper. This account therefore can only render comments on the few presentations that the author personally attended.

A paper on the “Intelligentsia’s Role in the Post-Colonial Societies of Asia” by Vlademir Li of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Science of the USSR presented a comprehensive interdisciplinary study of the post-war role of the intelligentsia in Africa and Asia. While maintaining the primacy of the role of the working class in the revolutionary struggle, the study pointed out the intelligentsias of Asia and Africa are increasingly performing a significant part in it.

The post-war intelligentsia is defined as that mass of medium and lower groups that have emerged “at the crossroads of the colonized autochthonous (non-European) and the colonizing European elements.” The history of the intelligentsia is seen as having undergone two stages: the period of the anti-colonial struggle, and the period after winning independence. At the initial stage, the intelligentsia acted as a political representative of a broad coalition of social classes interested in the liquidation of the colonial domination. In the second stage, its political role changed, and it began to speak for individual classes and interest groups.

The most important function attributed to the intelligentsia is the spread of revolutionary consciousness among the masses. Another basic function is to provide ideological backing for the national liberation movement. Among its main spheres of action is the cultural sphere where the intelligentsia of Asian and African countries address themselves to the tasks of cultural transformation. The intelligentsia is asked to merge with the progressive social forces for the choice of an advanced ideology.

A paper on “The Historical Perspectives of a Malay Urban Village” by Mohammed Aris Hj. Otham advocated the maintenance of traditional institutions as a way of preserving one’s identity in a heterogeneous urban community. Traditional institutions help recreate rural life in the cities and the preservation of rural values such as the spirit of communalism is held to be a good balance to the impersonalism of modern societies. The study however, poses a question as to what extent such a balance between tradition and modernization can be maintained.

Wilfred Wagner’s “Some Preliminary Remarks on the Social History of Mentawai (West Sumatra/ Indonesia)” is a study on the impact of modernization on a historical society. Wagner’s preliminary observations reveals that among the institutions of Mentawai that have given way to change is the traditional animistic religion. Likewise, the mode of production as well as crops produced have changed, along with the indigenous distributions and exchange systems. The question that remains to be asked is whether modernization has resulted in a better quality of life for the people of Mentawai.