Reclaiming Modern Science for Third World Progressive Social Movements (original) (raw)
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In this term paper from summer 2018, I try to compare Merton's social theory of science with postcolonial studies. I try to bring out the elements of social structures of scientific communities in the subcontinent by identifying the key norms of science from Merton's sociology of science. Then I try to superimpose and compare these norms with some concrete anecdotes from the scientific communities in India and Pakistan. The aim of the paper was to scratch the surface of the expanse of postcolonial studies of science and try to locate myself in this territory. I admit that I have not done justice to the paper by leaving out some of the critical texts, but I continue to learn and grow...one step at a time.
Decolonizing Science and Modernity in South Asia: Questioning Concepts, Constructing Histories
Springer, 2024
This book offers a unique perspective on the colonial roots of modern science, technology, and medicine (STM) in South Asia. The book questions the deconstruction of imperial visions and definitions of science and modernity in South Asia. It presents an in-depth analysis of the contested relationship between science, modernity, and colonialism. It explores how new research can contribute to the diversification of perspectives in the history and sociology of modern South Asian studies. The chapters in the book delve into various aspects of STM in South Asia. It covers diverse topics, including the social, cultural, and pedagogic context of early modern Bengal, the popularization of science in colonial Punjab, the Hindi science periodical Vigyan, and the emergence of the Indian science community. The book also examines the intersection of indigenous medical practices, ayurveda, Unani, and medical revivalism and highlights peripheral creativity in science. The contributors engage with the existing historiography to raise new questions concerning the global circulations of scientific knowledge from the perspective of South Asia and the regional appropriation of the same. It connects the history of science and modernity with South Asia's socio-economic and cultural background. It offers valuable insights into the decolonization of STM. It greatly interests scholars and students of modern South Asian history, sociology, social anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society Studies (STS).
Science, State and Violence: An Indian Critique Reconsidered
Science as Culture, 2005
This paper explores the work of a specific group of Indian scholar activists who, during the 1980s, produced a body of writing critical of the Indian state's science, technology and environmental policy. They have been described variously as Luddites, anti-science cranks and polemicists . At the same time, they have been influential among activists critical of state development policies. This paper examines one particularly polemical set of their writings. It has three broad parts. It begins by providing some context and background and describing the methodological choices made in the acquisition and presentation of the material at hand. The second, substantial section is the exposition of the argument underlying the critique being discussed. Finally, the brief last segment explores the relevance of this work for studies of science and culture.
Practising Western Science Outside the West: Personal Observations on the Indian Scene
Social Studies of Science
Modern science, which was an indigenous product of Western culture, is now being practised in many non-Western countries. This paper discusses the peculiar social, cultural and intellectual problems which scientists of these non-Western countries face in adopting Western science in their situations, with special reference to India. It is pointed out that, in addition to money and communication, it is necessary to have a proper psychological gestalt to practise science satisfactorily. The author analyzes his experience as a physics student in India and in the United States to clarify the nature of this psychological gestalt, and to explain what makes it difficult for non-Western scientists to acquire it.
The intensification of global interrelations and the shift of centre of gravity from the West to the East in train at present are effectively transforming the form of science and thus necessitate a fundamental rethinking of research. It must gain a creative edge so as to make a constructive and meaningful contribution to the emerging world society and its sustainability. The reflective task of this Afterword to an anthology comprising fifteen diverse chapters by authors from the major civilizations and cultures of the world is to extrapolate the thrust of this transformation of form and to clarify the challenges which need to be met in rethinking research. As regards the rethinking of research, first, the Afterword reconstructs the trajectory of the meta-level upgrading of form from methodology, through the fundamentals of scientific practice, to the cultural embedding of science. Here the spotlight is successively shone on modes of inference, cognitive interests and goals, ontological and epistemological assumptions, different conventional cultural contexts and finally deep-seated or high-level meta-cultural presuppositions. These cultural and meta-cultural reflections lead, secondly, to a consideration of the larger context represented by the process underpinning the transformation of science’s form. In this case, the argument follows the epochal shift from ancient civilizations to the modern and currently emerging global civilization in order to focus on the relation and dynamics between the latter two. The wide-ranging critique of the follies and failings inspired by the cultural model of modernity is balanced by the offer of realizable possibilities preserved in ancient civilizations and cultures, including the Indian, Chinese, Islamic, Amerindian and African, which promise to infuse the nascent, synthetic, global cultural model with highly commendable, indeed, necessary features lacking thus far. Here the issues of cultural struggle and cross-cultural dialogue or intercultural communication stand out as being of central importance. The key question is how the modern, Indian, Chinese and other cultural models could productively be mediated so as to eventuate in a world society appropriate and fitting to humanity and its planetary home. The punchline of these reflections is that, if the ‘pluriversality’ (i.e., a plurality of embodiments of universals) called for is to be attained, the mediation of cultural models must take place by recourse to the meta-cultural cognitive order of the human sociocultural form of life. At the same time, it is imperative that the unconditional, indeterminate, infinite, continuous and open character of that presuppositional order, as well as of objective reality, be kept in mind throughout so as to allow the maintenance of proper and justifiable orientations toward both others and nature. Far beyond matters internal to science such as methodology, this is the ultimate consideration that bears on the form of science.
Postcolonial Studies, 2009
It could be said that a title in need of an explanation*for example, the heading above this text*is a title in need of replacement. Then again, such coded headings sometimes might better evoke a set of questions, a problematic, than plainer versions. They can, like this one, serve both to coalesce and to disintegrate a method or field of investigation. The term 'subjugated knowledge' has multiple resonances, of course. An echo of Michel Foucault crying out for insurrection, it also suggests the postcolonial legacy of Marxisant dependency theory and romantic visions of ethnoscience, along with the hopeful recovery of 'Third World' standpoints. 1 'Conjugated subjects' is trickier. It is meant to hint at postcolonial hybridity and heterogeneity, suggesting a more complicated and entangled state of affairs, one requiring intimate engagement with various theoretical stances popular in the humanities at the turn of the last century. Together these terms thus trace the trajectory of postcolonial studies of science, technology and medicine over the past twenty years or so. Further, the subtitle indicates my intention to track the recent decline (from a low base) of explicitly postcolonial approaches as scholars choose now to fetishise 'globalisation'. In science and technology studies (STS), as elsewhere, euphoric accountings of globalisation rapidly are displacing anhedonic postcolonial genealogies, often to the detriment of critical thought. The minor postcolonial agenda in STS has been generally subsumed in efforts to describe how formal knowledge and practice travel, and what happens to them at their points of arrival, how they articulate across and within cultures. 2 I use the word 'formal' to avoid defining or privileging anything in particular*but we all know the focus, willing or not, has been on those modern forms of science, technology or medicine commonly associated with Western Europe and North America. Since World War II, these efforts to explain how science travels, becomes transformed and interacts with other knowledge and practice have drawn on political theories of modernisation and dependency, development anthropology, sociological interactionism, and actor-network theory (ANT)*to name just a few approaches. While the phenomena continue to excite some scholarly interest, no one seems entirely