Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the paradox of African critiques of Western Social Science using concepts derived from the latter by asking whether conceptual discussion can provide the ground upon which collaborative work can be pursued.

Paper long abstract:

When Indian scholars rhetorically asked whether the Subaltern could speak they set the ball rolling on the game of questioning the authority of scientific knowledge, but most of all on the warrant to speak on behalf of silent others. Since then much energy has gone into the critical interrogation of the political economy of western knowledge over the "Rest", including doubts over its claims to truthfulness as Valentin Mudimbe, among others, have pointed out. The problem however is that the critical stance which has come to define the "Subaltern's" discomfort with knowledge about his or her societies produced from far away has been formulated using vocabularies derived from the language of the Social Sciences almost under the assumption that the concepts upon which they are based are innocent. Well, maybe they are not. This paper addresses this apparent paradox by inquiring into the conditions under which social scientific concepts can be deployed to break the barriers of knowledge production. In other words, the paper asks whether conceptual discussion can provide the ground upon which collaborative work can be pursued and, if so, on whose terms and provided which adjustments to be made to which traditions of working with concepts. In fact, the paper addresses the challenge of collaborative work across cultures and continents with reference to the possibility of setting limits to claims to intelligibility.