The Social Sciences in the Philippines: Reflections on Trends and Developments

Abstract

The article presents major trends and turning points in the growth of five social science disciplines in the country: anthropology, economics, political science, psychology and sociology. It provides a sweeping historical account of their post-war institutionalization up to the 1960’s, their polemical debates and contending theoretical and methodological positions during the 1970s and the 1980s and the convergence in perspective and plurality of discourses in the 1990s. For the period of intense disciplinal debates (1970s and 1980s), the effects of Marxism and the indigenization movement on the disciplines are examined. The paper concludes with the contributions of the social sciences to public discourses, policy and practice.