Thinking back and forth between the inside view and the outside view
Q. Let’s move to second question. In your book,
A. While I was working for the Ford Foundation in the Philippines and Thailand in the 1970s many scholars there noted that the concepts, and models they had studies in Western universities and that derived from Western experience were often unhelpful in analyzing or understanding their own societies. That to do that you had to begin with local understandings, the reality of the world from the inside, and to build models and theories out of those understandings. In other words, if you want to understand a society or culture, you must spend time there, know or learn the language, meet different kinds of people, and get a sense of the wide variety of their perceptions of their world. You also have to do historical work to understand that what you see in the present very often derives from things that happened 20, 50, or even several hundred years ago, depending on the subject. But while it is essential to get inside views, it’s also very useful to get outside views as well. The outsider can pick up things the insider doesn’t see or takes for granted. Thinking back and forth between the inside view and the outside view is really important.”(David L. Szanton)
