While scientists provide society with the knowledge for material life: economy, machines and agriculture; social scientists provide its raison d’être, spiritual and moral foundations and cultural mooring. Values needed to determine which sciences should be developed, how they may be utilized to optimize social benefit and what should be the balance of material inputs are based on social knowledge. If social scientists lack the confidence to address such issues, society is doomed to mismatch its resources and create imbalances. In Pakistan, under-confident custodians of social knowledge lack motivation. Therefore, mismatched and imbalanced perspectives/policies are more the rule than the exception.
Social knowledge can only be relevant to our society if it matches our social perspectives and Pakistani values. This requires that our social scientists should be highly motivated, this in turn implies that knowledge of society is placed on a moral high ground. We can achieve this if we link all three elements of social psychology: the individual, society, and culture. The individual, being the primary operative unit of culture is both, a component of society, and an independent entity; and consequently must be central to our solution.
Three types of questions must be studied empirically to understand dynamics of Pakistani society and the genesis of its culture: psychology of our children; adult social behavior [how Pakistanis deal with each other in daily life]; and tactics used by our leadership for influencing society. These will help us understand the motivational needs of three kinds of Pakistanis: the non-mature, mature achievement preferences, and opinion leaders.
Effective non-professional leaders evoke motivation in individuals. These include parents who practice child psychology; administrators who have effective managerial techniques; and inspiring people, who define achievement preferences by the brilliance of observable success. Such individuals lead groups, communities and societies; or become the moving spirit of associations, communal activities, social organizations and even political leaders. In Pakistan, the most important leader is a communal leader. Communal leadership may be based on ethnicity, culture, language, belief, occupation, economy, or lifestyle.
All cultures have anomalies or paradoxes that seem contradictory but are rationalized by societal usage. This is true for individuals also, anomalies and contradictions are merely eccentricities knit into a personality which sometimes have an exotic appeal. The word societal includes conglomerated forces that influence society; such as religion, language, culture, occupation on one hand and economics and politics on the other. Individuals in a society view things from perspectives based on these conglomerate societal forces. These perspectives are culture in action and include conflicting aspects of culture as amalgams of spiritual and mental forces of culture which are rationalized in a social mind.
Those who generate social knowledge in Pakistan must identify our societal perspectives and transform them into action oriented goals. History, literature, and philosophy are not action oriented disciplines, but they provide perspectives. Psychology studies the mental process preceding action, sometimes through action, but this too is not a study of action. Sociology and anthropology do study the actions of societies and communities but do not attempt to understand the relationship between perspectives and motivation in individual or collective action. This task is performed by disciplines of economics and politics in the pantheon of western knowledge. Economics [relations, forces and factors of production], along with language, beliefs, occupations, life-style, politics and social structures, studied through history, philosophy and literature will provide the key to understanding Pakistani culture and our perspectives. This is the social knowledge we must generate.
Taking these windows into our cultural, one by one, let us start with language since it is the key to communication. Language, the most obvious tool of communication, houses so many secrets of perspective. Its diction, vocabulary and syntax indicate culture, its formal or informal discourse depicts sensibilities. Beliefs on the other hand are the least obvious elements of perspective and can only be seen in canonical or dogmatic forms of religious expression. Occupations and economic patterns are generally more visible as perspectives in individual and communal entities that can be generalized on the basis of levels of skill, mobility and working hours involved for different economic activities. Similar patterns are visible in social units, life-styles and social-political existence as a whole.
In the Pakistani context language provides a highly complex platform which offers great potential for developing social perspective and motivation for cultural research. A land of many languages Pakistani cultural unity is visible in the commonalities of etymology and vocabulary in its languages and dialects. An average Pakistani may speak three languages and understand several dialects. The mother-tongue; Urdu, the national language, and one language of an adjacent district usually constitute a person’s linguistic skill. Prayers in Arabic and some English words are common for most urban Pakistanis.
English is at the top of the linguistic hierarchy of our age; but in Pakistan, occasionally it is challenged by Arabic [Persian or French]. Urdu often comes in as second with varying degrees of priority; the mother tongue is usually a poor last except in case of ethnocentric individuals. These priorities affect syntax and formality of discourse; mother-tongue of course having an ambivalent status as the most informal and the most expressive medium except among those who are comprehensively alienated from their culture and so, unable to communicate in it. The linguistic mosaic of Pakistani languages is also an index of the ethno-genesis that occurred during the last millennium because it depicts the extent of absorption of Arab, Persian, Turkic and Mongol linguistic elements.
In terms of their belief structure, the people of Pakistan tend to oppose polytheism and mythology but are usually not rigid in either observance or enforcement. Though fluid in religious practices, earnestness against sacrilege makes them less tolerant of irreverence in the north of the country than in its south. They are inclined to religious tolerance at the social level but do not envision a state that is neutral to belief. A vital difference from the modern political paradigm is that the demography of belief association is communal; the state enjoys residuary rights as a regulator of belief after fealty of faith to the community which may vary from a family unit to the largest parochial, ethnic or linguistic one.
This trait is also evident in history, where it is possible to observe a perpetual precedence of community over society and state. Communalism is also visible in occupation patterns of Pakistan; the social fabric is itself a function of occupations in the form of biradaris. The old nomenclature still survives but is being supplanted by new names such as vukala [lawyers] and tajir [traders], depicting restructuring of occupation types across previously established hereditary professions. In this process nomadic life is virtually abolished but pastoral existence is still common in the western half of Pakistan, where water is scarce. Due to limits of mobility, ethnicity is often demarcated geographically, but administrative uniformity is beginning to generate a new mixture in the linguistic fabric; which is likely to construct a fresh ethno-genesis. This has started altering the balance between rural and urban occupations and agricultural-industrial output, bringing skilled and unskilled, and private/public employment into a revised set of relations of production.
Translated into socio-political terms this means that the entire edifice of Pakistani life is being restructured within the infrastructure of history and the superstructure of state that has begun to take form over the past four to six decades. Certain perspectives have been reformulated, and uniformity in others is emerging; urban aesthetics and commercial culture are two prominent examples of practices that have become uniform, interdiction of English in the speech of educationist is facilitating inter-linguistic communication.
However, behind the evolution of the modern state of Pakistan lies a long and illustrious history of civilizations and cultural evolution that can be traced back some 60,000 years into the Stone Age. While it is instructive to know the extraordinary geological history of our land and study its human habitation prior to the time when civilization was born here, it is essential for us to dig deep into the cultural data made available by archeologists who have done a remarkable job of data collection for five out of six millennia of history. The work yet to be done is more in the field of history that links this data into chain of events to show the path of evolution. However, some archaeological studies are also needed.
Keeping the map of modern Pakistan in perspective, all known facts about the history and culture of peoples who are and have been resident within this territory throughout time should be collected and collated coherently to provide Pakistan’s people a comprehensive view of their heritage and its implication for our continued integrity and solidarity. This would mean starting with pre and proto-history of the territory of Pakistan, relating to the Soan Valley or even early period of time, and coming up to the present day. This leads to the field of historical studies which is classified as cultural history and is today held more important than political history. This kind of study provides the base for economic, social and intellectual history because it highlights the persona or identity of a nation.