DOI: 10.1111/johs.12318 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Between the West and the World: Historical Perspectives on the Place of Sociology in Asia Stephane Dufoix | Hon‐Fai Chen 1 | WHITHER SOCIOLOGY IN ASIA Is there Sociology to be found in Asia? Unlike Western and Eastern Europe, North America and Latin America, the Asian continent is usually overlooked when it comes to describing the world panorama of sociology. Instead it is treated in the same way as regions mostly concerned with colonialism, such as the Arab world, or Africa south of the Sahara. In this respect, it appears the colonialism of sociology is not entirely over (Steinmetz, 2013). Although the first edition of Barnes and Becker’s Social Thought from Lore to Science (1938) devoted its last and 29th chapter (which is no less than 39 pages long!) to “Sociology in India, China, and Japan”, only eight years later Georges Gurvitch and Wilbert Moore (1946) failed to pay any attention to Asian sociology, discussing non‐Western sociology with regards only to Latin America and Eastern Europe. In 1961, in the third edition of their book, Barnes and Becker note at the very end of their chapter on India, China, and Japan that “only in Japan have there been notable recent advances in sociology. India has proceeded slowly, and China moved backward” (Barnes & Becker, 1961, p. 1174). Thus, on the whole, Asia is not regarded as having contributed to the discipline of sociology. The “soft” presence of Asian sociology within the larger picture can be characterized by four different features: the failure to recall the earlier history of sociology in Asia; the focus on some larger countries; the general emphasis on national developments; and a widely shared tendency to only address the issue of how successful Westerni- zation has been in this domain. Two recent entries concerning sociology in Asia and found in encyclopedias of sociology clearly demonstrate these features. Alvin So (2017) only focuses on East Asia (Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea) and his entry is content with studying one country after the other. If he acknowl- edges the “early” stages of sociological development in various countries, the emphasis is always placed on the post WWII period, thus over‐emphasizing the importance of Western influence. Although explicitly entitled “Asian sociology”, Chikako Usui’s (2017) entry only addresses Japan and China, treats these separately, and only grants roughly one page and a half—out of eight—to the 50 year period from the 1890s to the 1950s. Indeed most of the entry focuses either on Americanization (for Japan) or the diversification (for China after 1979 and Japan) of the discipline. Fortunately, in the early 2010s, two edited books, published with the support of the International Sociological Association (hereafter ISA), produced a more diverse vision of sociology in Asia, 1 including countries such as India, Iran, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Israel, Bangladesh and Turkey (Burawoy et al., 2010, Vol. 2; Patel, 2010). These works also served to de‐center sociology, or at least raise the issue of academic dependency (Alatas, 2010), though their multi‐authored nature and national perspective was restrictive. Beyond expediency, however, one may well argue Stephane Dufoix is Professor of Sociology, University of Paris‐Nanterre (France) and senior member of the Institut universitaire de France. Hon‐Fai Chen is Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Policy, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. All papers (except the last one) in this special issue were presented at the conference “Facing the West: Circulation, Cooperation and Contestation in the Post‐War Development of Sociology in Asia,” held in Hong Kong on June 5–6, 2019. 4 - J Hist Sociol. 2021;34:4–12. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/johs © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.