The de-Westernisation of knowledge

Reading note by Séverine kodjo-Grandvaux

About the work of Thomas brisson, éditions La Découverte, 2025

Thomas Brisson’s book revisits the de-Westernization of knowledge thought of as a dual movement that corresponds both to an appropriation of Western knowledge by non-European elites and to a critique of that same knowledge by those same elites. This dual movement is concomitant. This means that there was no unthinking takeover of Western knowledge. But from the outset, the takeover was critical.

To do this, Thomas Brisson returns to a number of non-Western works which, from the nineteenth century onwards, have questioned the (non)relevance of Western concepts for apprehending non-Western realities and have evoked the possibility or necessity of (re)founding alternative modernities to Western Modernity. It focuses primarily on the Asian (India, Japan, Korea, China) and Arab (Egypt) areas.

Central and South America and Africa are absent from his thinking. It should be noted that at no point does he perceive Egypt as African… but relates it more to a so-called Arab or Middle Eastern area.

The de-Westernisation of Knowledge

This de-Westernization questions the universalization of the social sciences founded in nineteenth-century Europe, as well as the concepts and methodologies that these disciplines have produced.  What Thomas Brisson describes as the “de-Westernization” of knowledge thus corresponds to a dual movement, to two processes that he perceives a priori as opposed: the appropriation of Western knowledge by non-Westerners during a movement of globalization of Western knowledge; the critical recovery of this knowledge that will be used by non-Westerners to think against the West.

He writes:

“At first sight, then, the de-Westernization in question covers two opposing processes. The first describes the globalisation of Western knowledge, the appropriation of which beyond its context of emergence has enabled it to supplant or, at any rate, ‘deregulate’ indigenous knowledge; whereas the second refers to the questioning of its hegemony in the name of other ways of thinking that need to be revalued or invented. Unification on the one hand thus seems to be met by pluralisation on the other” (p.6).

But he immediately clarifies:

“Yet the hypothesis we defend is that, far from opposing each other, these two movements are in fact complementary and intertwined” (p.6)

The globalisation of knowledge is thus a phenomenon of both homogenisation and pluralisation of knowledge regimes.

What interests Brisson is seeing how researchers from the South have been able to appropriate Western knowledge and redefine it differently. There is never an identical repetition, but always reformulation, reinterpretation and selection. Brisson evokes missions sent to the West by various governments (Japan, Egypt, Korea, India, China, Tunisia) to understand what would make the latter strong and powerful with the idea that “making Europe’s knowledge their own was a way, for these states, of hoping to westernise themselves sufficiently to better resist the West”(p.9).

In addition to these official missions, there was considerable circulation, resulting in the creation of research institutes or universities based on the Western model, the dissemination of Western knowledge and, in many cases, the spread of a certain Western way of seeing and thinking about the world (not only the content of knowledge but also the forms of thought were disseminated); all the more so as this took place in a period of highly asymmetrical relations. What Arjun Appadurai has emphasised: the globalisation of the Western human sciences has helped to change the way we perceive reality. Thus:

“By helping to impose words and concepts, the Western humanities profoundly transformed some of the mental structures by which societies thought about the world.” (p.86)

Attesting to this is the question of the perception of time (linear / circular) and the fact that “the model of European historiography did indeed modify the way in which other peoples traditionally thought and wrote their own history ” (p.104) and led to a “questioning of progress and the capacity of each nation to drive its dynamics, even to embody it”(p.110)

Finally, “the upheaval induced by the globalisation of the European social sciences resided less in their substantive content than in their capacity to modify the way in which reality was cut up and apprehended” (p.116).

Brisson insists that this was never done with the passivity of the South, but he tends to show how and to what extent thinkers, governments, and literati in the countries of the South have been actors in the globalisation of Western knowledge.

This dissemination of Western human sciences took place within the framework of Western imperialisms and led to the contestation of their ethnocentric character. However, there is no rejection of these sciences as such (no rejection of the frameworks of thought), but criticism of their reading of the world (criticism of the content). This has led some thinkers to develop alternative forms of knowledge or to found modern sciences not in Europe but in the cultures of the South. This is evidenced by the many debates surrounding the translation into Japanese, Chinese, Arabic… of the terms sociology, psychology… Thus some thinkers have sought to found Arab sociology in the works of Ibn Khaldun, Chinese sociology on a basis specific to China or psychology in Buddhism… This has made it possible to “mobilise endogenous and ancient knowledge to project themselves into a new political and scientific universe”(p.120).

In addition, sociology, linguistics or even demography have made it possible, in China, India, etc., to map the population on the national territory and have contributed to the development of national policies and, to a certain extent, to nationalist movements.

Centrality of Europe?

Brisson returns to the fact that certain countries, such as Japan or Egypt, set up missions to send researchers/thinkers to study the West with the idea that it was necessary to a certain extent to westernise in order to become a leading power. The West was then synonymous

of power, progress and modernity. It was necessary “to know the reasons for European power so as to deal with them in the most effective way”(p.22). This ended up “favouring a plural dissemination of knowledge, split between knowledge placed at the service of States and that carrying a promise of autonomy”(p.24) and producing a tension between modern and traditional to such an extent that it could be argued that there is no modernity “without a reflexive return to one’s own traditions and history”(p.42) and in some cases, as in Japan, modernisation is accompanied by a valorisation of traditions.

In the 19th century, then, there was indeed a European centrality insofar as its power fascinated and would eventually transform its new knowledge into a model. Brisson believes that “if the missions originated in Europe’s effectively new position, they contributed just as much to anchoring this position in a transnational political imaginary and thus to reinforcing it. By making the West a pole of comparison and inspiration, the missionaries’ accounts gave substance to this presumed superiority”(p.31). But this does not mean that “this centrality was absolute and saturated all global relations”(p.33).

These approaches produced “a paradox, since, at the same time as they emphasised the idea of a prosperous and powerful West, they highlighted its many flaws and failures”(p. 32). And Brisson points out that “even among the most convinced supporters of modernisation, the passage through the West was an opportunity to reflect on its limits and on the positive counter-experience that non-European countries could provide” (p.33). This “will make Western knowledge as much an issue of appropriation as a tool for critiquing the West” (p.33)

According to Brisson, “all these missions have, in one way or another, the aim of drawing up an inventory of epistemological changes in modern Europe and enabling other countries to appropriate them”(p.27). They led to the opening of universities and institutions of research and knowledge on the Western model without, however, he believes, having completely dislodged the places that had hitherto produced the knowledge of these societies (“The Buddhist temples in Asia, the madāris and the katātīb in the Muslim world or the scholarly networks that gravitated around various courts and political authorities in no way ceased to exist ; but they now had to cohabit with “modern” universities that would gradually impose their centralities on places of learning redefined as “traditional”, pp.53-54)

“Thus, it was not only that the West invented the East, as Edward Said wrote in a famous thesis, at the moment of the modern colonial encounter. It is also that this same encounter provided the opportunity for the so-called ‘Oriental’ countries to appropriate the scientific discourses and schemes that were to set in motion this process of invention/looking inward. In short, the Orientals invented the Orient just as much, and did so thanks to a certain amount of Western knowledge that they appropriated” (p.42-43).

Moreover, he reminds us, South-South exchanges constitute “an early reality”which did not wait for Westerners. The Egyptians, for example, sent several travellers to Japan in the twentieth century “in the hope of understanding how the country knew how to both strengthen itself by westernising and remain true to itself”(p.43).

A Modernity or Modernities?

“Modernity must be understood in a plural way and in relation to historicities that often decisively recompose it” (p.64)

The import of the social and human sciences has thus led to questions about their universality but also to questions about the notion of modernity:

“it could be said that the idea of other modernities was contemporary with the idea of modernity itself, the latter finding itself reinscribed in plural contexts as soon as it spread from its Euro-American centre. Thinking of modernity in the plural, however, involved dissociating two initially confused dynamics: modernization and Westernization, in other words considering that the modernity embodied by Europe and North America was only one of several possible modernities.” (p.180)

In this process, Japan is the typical example of a desire to think of itself as modern without being Western. The effort was made to think of modernisation outside Westernisation (Kyoto School) once it had been observed that Japan had been modified by its contacts with the West and “rather than aspire to a hypothetical overcoming of modernity, it will henceforth be a matter of envisaging plural declensions of it, of imagining paths of modernisation that do not follow in the footsteps of the West, of tracing trajectories that are not homogeneous to its own”(p.182-183). Brisson then refers to works that have criticised Weber for linking modernity and the West and that have sought to think about other modernities.

“Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Jainism or Hinduism thus became functional equivalents of Weberian Protestantism, each associated with a singular modernity; the definition of the latter was thus pluralized and detached from the standardizing framework of theories of modernization” (p.190).

From then on,

“modernity is no longer considered simply from a socio-economic perspective (the combination of capitalism and a rational process of social differentiation), but includes a cultural dimension, rooted in the deep history of countries; then, modernity gives way to modernities in the plural, not only in their trajectories, but also in their definitions.” (p.190).

It can thus be said that “different modernities coexist at the same moment, Western modernity, however globalized, never being integral and hegemonic but, on the contrary, finding itself interwoven in the wider fabric of other modernities present at the same moment as it” (p.196).

Different histories can thus co-exist.

Against the idea of Western knowledge being imposed

Brisson is well aware of the asymmetrical (colonial) relations that allowed Western knowledge to impose itself. And he shows how the West (which is by no means homogeneous) has acted differently on this issue, being more or less permissive depending on the context; to such an extent that “a plural West represents as many possibilities for adaptation, hybridisation and ultimately divergence from the original model ” (p.58). But he also intends to show that the revival of Western knowledge has always been a critical revival of that knowledge.

“That Western knowledge imposed itself on other cultural areas in the modern era is undeniably a consequence of the forms of domination it exercised over them; nevertheless, its appropriation was quickly seen as a way of countering its imperialism.” (p.81)

This approach certainly avoids making non-European colonial subjects passive agents by showing their agentivity in this recourse to Western knowledge to construct their modernity, but it also leads to the conclusion, it seems to me, that there was no imposition of Western knowledge during the colonial and/or globalisation process. And this is all the more the case because Southern intellectuals have ended up “turning, against the West, knowledge regimes that are now fully integrated into postcolonial societies”(p.51-52).

Brisson states:

“these intellectuals are now exploring the hidden face of knowledge which, while it may have participated in a form of Western hegemony, also opens up as many counter-hegemonic horizons” (p.52)

For all that, Brisson is careful not to speak of the West’s ruse (we can think of that famous sentence by Mudimbe in L’Odeur du père : “for Africa, really escaping the West presupposes appreciating exactly what it costs to detach oneself from it; it presupposes knowing how far the West, insidiously perhaps, has come towards us, it presupposes knowing, in what allows us to think against the West, what is still Western; and measuring in what way our recourse against it is still perhaps a ruse that it opposes us and at the end of which it awaits us, motionless and elsewhere. “).

He writes:

“The knowledge of the West, perceived as the symbol and secret of its ascendancy, was also a means of standing up to it. It is not certain that fon would benefit from interpreting this ambivalence as a “ruse of imperialist reason”, in which the dominated would renew their domination while thinking they were getting rid of it. It seems more fruitful to see it as a form of extraversion: Western knowledge provided external resources that various local elites were able to appropriate according to their own political interests and in order to position themselves strategically both in the international space and within their own society.

Rapidly, they served as much to reinforce state power as to nurture criticism of it within societies. It is also a bias of a certain postcolonial critique to envelop in the same unifying category the actors of the South, in frontal opposition to an equally monolithic North. Yet what do the first Japanese sociologists who saw sociology as a means of controlling society (in order to reconstitute the dominant position of the old elites that the new course of events threatened to topple) have in common with those who, in the name of political liberalism or Marxism, seized upon it in the hope of building a fairer society? In the end, not much, apart from the fact that they all made use of Western knowledge for their own particular agendas. The “Western” origin of a certain amount of knowledge is also an internal issue in non-Western societies, and the most conservative players are not

the last to play on the anti-imperialist fibre to discredit their opponents. Conversely, the most left-wing actors, who were the most consistent in their criticism of European and American imperialism, often have fewer scruples about using references or theories from Western universities.” (p.82-83)

In fact, Brisson intends to show that “the diversions via the scientific West appeared as a resource against the political West”(p.128). After highlighting colonial failings (racialisation and gendering of colonial policies of access to knowledge), he writes:

“While the various colonisers had seen it as a way of reinforcing their domination by training the elites of the countries they controlled, Western universities would, paradoxically, be a powerful incubator of anti-colonial sentiment. Politically, this link is well known: the founders of independent India (starting with Ghandi and Jawaharlal Nehru) and Pakistan (Muhammad Ali Jinna, Liaquat Ali Khan) all studied in the United Kingdom. But, as we intend to show in this book, this same link must be considered beyond the political framework and analysed in the very depths of knowledge. Western universities were not simply places where men and women exposed to colonial domination could meet and become aware of their common situation. Above all, they were places where concrete knowledge would find itself subjected to reinterpretation and twisting, enacting the passage from a de-Westernization understood as appropriation to a de-Westernization synonymous with critique.” (p.50)

It seems to me that by underlining the agentivity of non-Western countries in their appropriation of Western knowledge, Thomas Brisson is opposing, in a hollow way, the idea of an imposition of Western knowledge. Westerners cannot be accused of epistemicide. The colonised were complicit. Brisson writes: “the literati of colonial societies were producers in their own right of so-called colonial knowledge”(p.124)

Conclusion

The conclusion of this book is revealing of Brisson’s intentions and positioning, as he is keen to distance himself from both postcolonial and decolonial approaches, which I feel he addresses too broadly in these few pages (see below, p.203-207) and which he presents as theories that refuse to consider that colonial history has produced the common (“Because they focus exclusively on critical aspects and issues of power, some representatives of postcolonial and decolonial studies neglect that whole part of the process of deoccidentalisation of knowledge which consisted in the creation of shared epistemological spaces”, p.203). I have several problems with these pages. By thinking of this de-Westernisation of knowledge as the critical appropriation of Western knowledge by the literati of the South, he ends up diminishing its negative impact. And it avoids tackling the asymmetry from a structural point of view. From this point of view, there can be no coloniality of knowledge. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why Brisson does not equate the de-Westernisation of knowledge with the decolonisation of knowledge. Moreover, to use the term ‘appropriation’ in this way at a time when the phenomena of ‘cultural appropriation’ – and hence the asymmetrical relations existing between communities – are increasingly being denounced seems to me to be dubious. In a way, it’s pitting two phenomena that are not of the same order against each other. This would have been worth pointing out, but Brisson never mentions it.

When he writes that “it is the creation of a space of shared references that has armed the contestation of Western theoretical hegemony by making it possible to turn this knowledge against itself” (p.201), Brisson implies that it was thanks to this Western knowledge that the colonised were able to challenge the colonial order, whereas he could simply have noted that non-Westerners challenged the colonial or Western order in the very language of Westerners. But that is not what he does. He criticises – in a few lines, without further precision or precise references – postcolonial and decolonial works for a dichotomous reading that is erroneous and methodologically problematic. He also criticises them for failing to see that “all other scholarly traditions have been affected and reworked by European knowledge, there is no longer any system of thought closed in on itself likely to constitute vis-à-vis them an alternative or a counterweight”(p.206-207). So, for Brisson, it seems impossible to situate oneself outside the Western episteme (which is everywhere). Brisson’s final invitation to think, for example, about Braudel’s Arabisation or Hischman’s Turquisation, while it may seem generous, ultimately takes little account of the asymmetry that exists de facto at the scientific level and which also exists because if there is a dialogue of knowledge, it takes place outside the West and very little within it. The Arabisation of Braudel or the Koreanisation of Klein are not taught in the West in European universities, for example.