Agenda

 Unit overview
 Colonialism and Science: History
 Prep for next time
Unit Overview
 Structure
 Week 5: Framework and  Hindu cases
Context  Vivekananda
 Week 6: Colonialism  Gayatri Pariwar

 Week 7: Globalization  Buddhist Cases

 The “Scientific Buddha”
 The Dalai Lama
 Terms and Concepts
 Colonial  Regions
 3rd/1st world
 Postcolonial
 South/North
 Globalization  East/West

 Transnationalism  Developing/Developed

 Cosmopolitanism  Positionality
 Reflexivity
Colonialism and Science:
History
 A Eurocentric Perspective
 Western culture as the telos of humanity
 Other cultures: stagnation and decline
 Solution: fix other cultures
 Colonize them and attempt to replace their cultures
 Encourage westernization through softer means
 A Postcolonial Perspective
 Roots of western imperial power is not inevitable, but
accidental.

 Western imperialism solidifies through exploitation and

appropriation of the colonized world.

 Valuable contributions of colonized people to humanity

have been erased and must be reclaimed as part of
decolonization.
Case Study: Precolonial India
 Case Study: Colonial India
The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our
power to teach this language, we shall teach languages in
which, by universal confession, there are no books on any
subject which deserve to be compared to our own, whether,
when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems
which, by universal confession, wherever they differ from those
of Europe differ for the worse, and whether, when we can
patronize sound philosophy and true history, we shall
countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines which
would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would
move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history
abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand
years long, and geography made of seas of treacle and seas of
butter.

“Minute on Indian Education” (1835) by Thomas Macaulay (1800-1859)

 Case Study: Colonial India
We must at present do our best to form a
class who may be interpreters between us
and the millions whom we govern, a class of
persons Indian in blood and colour, but
English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and
in intellect. To that class we may leave it to
refine the vernacular dialects of the country,
to enrich those dialects with terms of science
borrowed from the Western nomenclature,
and to render them by degrees fit vehicles
for conveying knowledge to the great mass
of the population.
”Minute on Education” (1835)

Thomas Macaulay (1800-1859)

 Case Study: Colonial India
 (Western) science as superior to indigenous knowledge
 Science as a way to signify authority
 Science as a way to facilitate governance of colonized
peoples

 Colonized societies as a source of information

 Case Study: Postcolonial
India
 Hybridity
 Reimagining Indian intellectual traditions in light of
Western impositions

 Development of hybrid sciences

 Comparisons to creation science?
 Alternative Case: Japanese
Empire
 Opium Wars (1839-1842,
1856-1860)
 The Perry Expedition (1852-
54)
 Weakening of the Tokugawa
Shogunate
Alternative Case: Meiji Era (1868-
1912)
 Focus on industrialization
 Embrace of Western ideologies
 Military modernization
 Expansion by conquest
 Understanding PCSTS
 What are the implications of these histories for studying
science and technology?

 How can we debunk the historical narratives of

Western scientific and technological superiority?

 How should decolonizing societies respond to the

Western imposition of Western science and
technology?

 How can science accommodate a diversity of

intellectual cultures? Can multiple sciences coexist?
 Prep for Next Time
 A critique of STS
 Basic argument: postmodern
and postcolonial critiques of
science bolster far-right
Hinduism
 Hindu nationalism: overview