Ethnoepistemology Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Se hace un análisis epistemológico de los conocimientos y saberes locales; se aborda la perspectiva etnoecológica y sus relaciones ínter y trnasdisciplinarias; se discute la estrategia metodológica de la etnoecología; se reflexiona sobre... more

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- Epistemology, Political Ecology, Biocultural Diversity, Ethnoepistemology

Nimhans What is the relationship between colonialism and psychiatry (ëthe science of mindí) in India?î This is a huge question and here we do not have the space to untangle the entire conceptual complexity of the question let alone the history of this relationship. Our task will merely to explore some general points and to report on some preliminary findings from a project initiated circa mid-1990s in which the authors have been involved. One of the issues we are interested in investigating is the extent to which colonization, as a political enterprise of conquest and economic exploitation, had deeper ramifications for the indigenous traditions of science, technology and culture of care for the sick and diseased. Whether, that is, colonization brought with it its own tradition of medicine and science, which it imposed on the colonized regions. Or whether, colonization interrupted the traditional knowledge-systems, which led to their radical decline, disturbing the balance of medico-scientific development within the extant traditional framework? And perhaps a third possibility: whether there was happy blending, intermarriage and hybrid fecundation of the two traditions at encounterñi.e. between tradition and modernityñthat made for a regenerative nexus between science and colonization. 1 What are ethical or moral ramifications of such a ëprogressíñor be it regressóin civilization terms? We are interested in exploring these questions in relation to the arrival and growth of the discourse of psychiatry in India, with a particularly focus on the South, especially the principality of Mysore (narrowing down to the metropolis of Bangalore) during the British commercial and administrative presence in India. A caveat should be registered at the very start in respect of the tendencyó already transgressed in the opening paragraphóof thinking of psychiatry as though it were a discipline very much like or alongside physical and life-sciences, or even medicine, which diagnoses and treats physical illness. The point is that, as writers like Michel Foucault have been at pains to argue, psychiatry is a discourse of much recent origin in seventeen century Europe. It conjures itself out of the emergent alienation of the ësubjectí, disjunctured from Late Middle Ages notion of the redemptive ësoulí or psyche, and the repressed confines of the asylum culture with its punitive measures for the supposed delinquents that was rampant through this period even as it was

Pages 207-252 in “The Scaffolding of Our Thoughts”: Essays on Assyriology and the History of Science in Honor of Francesca Rochberg. Ancient Magic and Divination 13. Edited by C. Jay Crisostomo, Eduardo A. Escobar, Terri Tanaka, and Niek... more

- by Jeff Cooley
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- Etymology, Ethnoepistemology, Hebrew Bible, Book of Genesis