Facing the Millennium: Substantive and Institutional Challenges to the Human Sciences

Abstract

The paper scans some of the transformations in the social order as a consequence of globalization and technological change. Against this backdrop, it argues that the human sciences hover between, on the one hand, a known world with relatively stable institutions that shape the way people live and think, depending on the interface of their societies with industrial capitalism, and, on the other hand, unfolding social formations that defy the usual codification. The profound societal changes in this millennium pose substantive and institutional challenges to the human sciences. They range from the erosion of theoretical anchors as the classics become less relevant to contemporary questions, to the more mundane issue of survival in the wake of budget cuts for traditional disciplinary and multidisciplinary work. Reflecting primarily on developments in sociology in selected regions of the world, the paper concludes that the growth of the human sciences in the millennium will depend on the way they reinvent themselves in the context of the societies that host them. It is quite likely that the barriers artificially demarcating the human sciences from one another will totally break down, giving way to thematic areas of theorizing and research. The paper ends on a speculative note by playfully imagining scenarios for the human sciences in the Philippines.