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Merton in South Asia: The Question of Religion and the Modernity of Science Dhruv Raina1 1. Introduction My own engagement with the work of the sociologist of science Robert K. Merton arose in relation to the set of nested questions that could be referred to as the Weber question, the Merton question or the Needham question. More recently I delivered a lecture in Istanbul on what the priority dispute meant at the periphery of science that began with a detailed discussion on Merton’s landmark paper on the subject (Merton 1957a, Raina 2008). The present paper briefly essays a genealogy of the social studies of science in India to understand the limited presence of Merton’s influence till the 1970s. En route, it also raises some issues that have to do with the late arrival of Merton’s work as sociologist in India that are related to the form of institutionalisation of the discipline in another context. Finally, I take up a discussion of some Mertonian themes that have resonated in the Indian research context, and then proceed towards explicating that context. However, as the other contributors to this volume deal with Merton’s theoretical evolution in greater detail, it should be possible to ride piggyback on those discussions. Several genealogies of the social studies of science in the West could be uncovered but all these genealogies encapsulate three socio-cognitive movements within which they were embedded. These have been referred to as the: [1] academic, [2] technocratic and [3] critical movements (Elzinga and Jamison 1981). In South Asia, while the first attempts to conceptually integrate science within society go back to the early decades of the twentieth century, the technocratic and critical traditions influenced by the “low church” of Bernalism blossomed throughout the 1950s and 60s (Raina 2003, Ch. 2 and 6; Vishvanathan 1997). The academic tradition within the social studies of science in 1 The first draft of this paper was written while the author was a Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin. South Asia remained a marginal one till the 1970s. The visibility of the technocratic and critical dimensions was an outcome of the mobilisation of science in the task of nation building and decolonisation that had begun to be planned since the mid-1930s (Abrol 1995). Both these projects were deeply connected with criss-crossed questions, themata and ideas flowing several ways. 2. The Reception of Merton and Context of his Reception/ Non-Reception in India Since our central question here is the life and reception of Mertonian ideas in India, there are two axes along which this cognitive movement should be explored: namely the half life of Mertonian ideas in the sociology of science and the locations of Mertonian theory within sociology proper. By and large, the field of disciplinary history in India is still to be developed, though of late some important works on the social sciences and sociology have emerged (Assayag and Bénéï 2005; Uberoi, Sundar, and Deshpande 2007, 2). As far as the disciplinary history of sociology and social anthropology are concerned contemporary studies in the history of the discipline were preceded by two rather well known reviews (Mukherjee 1977; Vidyarthi 1978). In Western universities sociology and social anthropology are institutionally separated, and differentiated in terms of theory and methodology while in India the evolution of the two disciplines is deeply entangled. As pointed out by India’s noted sociologist André Béteille: “This way of making a distinction [between sociology and anthropology] can lead to confusion. For if applied consistently, what anthropology is to an American will be sociology to an Indian, and what sociology is to an American will be anthropology to an Indian. The distinction will work only so long as all societies, Western and non-Western are studied only by Western scholars. It becomes meaningless when scholars from all over the world begin to study their own as well as other societies ” (Béteille, quoted in Uberoi 2007, 7). The two disciplines then are inextricably intertwined in India. The most recent disciplinary history of sociology and social anthropology in India entitled Anthropology in the East explores through a number of essays the writings of the founding fathers of the discipline in India in order to explore the connections between knowledge, institutions and disciplinary practices (Uberoi 2007, 3). A cursory examination of the index of the book 46 Concepts and the Social Order [18.227.48.131] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 10...

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