Bautista: The Social Sciences in the Philippines

Maria Cynthia Rose Banzon Bautista presents her article on “The Social Sciences in the
Philippines: Reflections on Trends and Developments”. It outlines what are the major trends
and turning points in the growth of five of the six social science disciplines in the country:
anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. The sixth one is history.
It constitutes all the preliminary thoughts on how the social sciences in the Philippines have
developed or came into its very existence and purposes. It accounts the widening or the
heightening of the social sciences here in our country up to its standardization in the 1960s,
followed by a summative description of its evolution from the 1970s to the 1990s. It also
examines the effects of Marxism and the indigenization movement on the abovementioned
disciplines.

The article basically reminds us that watersheds in the development of the disciplines do
not actually coincides to the historical periods set in the different reading articles. It also
emphasizes that readers of this article must treat this paper as just an initial and unfinished
work, which, therefore, still subject for a continuous fabrication. There are quite number of
academic departments wherein Philippine social sciences have emerged. Aligned after the
American universities, the social science departments in the country were designed in different
years. There were Major National Associations of Social Scientists and Professional Journals
which have founded also from 1962 to 1977. Through these all, there was a defining moment or
a point in the existence of social sciences to undergo something fundamental changes such as
the conduct of varied systematic research.

Marxism and the indigenization movements reflected different intellectual projects that
often contradicted each other but in practice, drew the same followers and advocators. The
task of the social sciences is to set in judgement between diametrically opposed views based on
rules of evidence. As what Bennagen expresses, “If the aim of the social sciences is both to
understand and transform the world then the other claim of the others for self understanding
and self transformation sends to academics a signal for them to rethink their adaptive
strategies to help ensure their survival.”