In Taiwan, sociology is ‘the Western knowledge’ by its origin, and inevitably will be indigenized, especially in the process of teaching or researching. The development of sociology in postwar Taiwan takes a crooked path. It is in the crooked path to postwar that the indigenization in Taiwan’s sociology takes different faces, employing different terminology and constellating around different academic figures to embody the indigenization as we have known today. Although the path from sinicization to Taiwanization may nicely capture the basic line of Taiwan’s sociology after the Second World War, it does fail to reveal the details that can suggest to a more dynamic, more controversial side of indigenization. In this short article, we review the emergence, transformation, and invisibilization of indigenization in postwar Taiwan in the following three aspects: its periodization, the socio-political background in which the debate is embedded, and the key issues involved. While the indigenization debate has been subsiding in last decade, we will argue that the ideal which the debate evinces is still significant and influential. In conclusion, we propose an alternative view to rethink the indigenization of Taiwan’s sociology. In terms of reciprocal comparison and connected histories, Taiwan’s case exemplifies an alternative trajectory of modernity, which is potential to correct the hitherto double historical misrecognition of modernity upheld by classical sociological theories, and to build a new synthesis or a new theory of modernities.

Despite the huge and growing environmental movement to protect urban forests in Indonesia, the tensions between environmental activists’ past engagements with nature and the emerging environmental problems are under-studied. The inner contradiction between the intensive nature of the connections and experiences that the actor maintains and the recent external threat to the environment is the key energizer of an environmental movement. Through Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal concept of hysteresis, this article explores how activists’ previous experiences with nature suffer disjuncture caused by the threat of urban forest privatization occurring in their neighborhood. Drawn from in-depth interviews with the co-founders of an environmental movement organization, the activist narratives in this article reveal that the development of their current struggles was driven by feelings of disappointment, anxiety, anger and a fear of losing the urban forest. The urban forest, for them, not only constitutes a physical space, but serves social and spiritual purposes, represents local identity and is the basis for everyday life.

The world’s centre of gravity is changing, from the North Atlantic to Eastern Asia. As world centres of knowledge have correlated historically with world centres of power, this ongoing geopolitical change is likely to bring changes also to the global map of cognition. Knowledge and power are intrinsically related, knowledge is power, it is based on power, and it produces instruments of power. Moreover, the vistas of social scientists and scholars are always circumscribed by the power relations of the social world they are studying. A way of looking into this is to analyse the concepts and the narratives they use and produce. What features do they highlight, and what do they hide? Cognitive change is driven by two kinds of change, change (i.e. new discovery) of evidence, and change of power. On a macro scale, the major forces of power change bearing upon cognitive change have been social mobilizations, for example, of classes, women, and ethnic groups, the rise and decline of states, and, third, economic or ecological crises disrupting the functioning of existing powers. Indigenization and de-Westernization are different programmes. The former is synonymous with nativization and rooting in the particular culture of a population, whereas the latter may be, and often is, an emancipation from Western cultural domination in the name of another universalistic culture. De-Westernization is inherently confrontational, whereas indigenization may range from supplementary to isolationist. Academic indigenization and de-Westernization have in their cognitive challenges similarities with contemporary critical identity movements, such as feminism and ethnic movements. The cognitive challenges mounted by both types of currents proceed across four levels of cognitive depths, claiming canon inclusion of certain thinkers and role models, questioning and rejection of prevailing social narratives, practising new forms of knowledge production, and fourth epistemological or meta-sociological reflections on the old and the new knowledge paradigms. Indigenization should be treated as a limited supplementary project, whereas de-Westernization is likely to advance. It should be an opening of global horizons, not a closure. Pluralism of critique, challenge, and search for other, better ways are decisive for the development of knowledge.

This article focuses on the intellectual efforts to implement Western sociology into a Korean context during the country’s dynamic modernization. Three different types of responses are explored from the perspective of indigenization: historical sociology, critical sociology, public sociology, and comprehensive sociology. They suggest different approaches and strategies with their own research topics and academic activities. Although the simple dichotomy between Western universalism and Korean particularism is no longer presumed, intellectual efforts for indigenization remain an ongoing issue in Korean sociology.

This review essay discusses decolonial and revisionist approaches to the sociological canon, centring on a major new work, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory by Gurminder Bhambra and John Holmwood (2021). The challenge to ‘classical’ social theory and the demand to reconstitute the theory curriculum come in the context of increased visibility for wider decolonial agendas, linked to ‘fallist’ protests in South Africa, Black Lives Matter and allied antiracist organizing, and calls to decolonize public and civic spaces and institutions such as universities, effect museum restitution, and colonial reparations. The review identifies continuities and complementarities with Connell’s critique of the sociological canon, though Colonialism and Modern Social Theory takes a different tack from Connell’s Southern Theory (2009). Bhambra and Holmwood’s opening of sociology’s canon converges with Connell’s recent work to align a critical project of global and decolonial public sociology with a pragmatic programme for doing academic work differently.