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Technology and Culture 45.1 (2004) 173-175



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Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph Needham. Edited by S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999; paperback reprint, 2001. Pp. x+358. £11.99.

In the 1930s, just a few years after Bronislaw Malinowski challenged the intellectual arrogance of Westerners by suggesting that savages could and did do science (albeit in a "rudimentary" form), Joseph Needham took what the contributors to Situating the History of Science variously call epistemological egalitarianism or cognitive justice a giant step further. He decided to attack Western supremacism through one of its central pillars, the history of science, by demonstrating that modern science was not the product of unique Western genius. The mission that Needham set for himself as a historian was to illustrate how rivers of knowledge from all around the world had flowed into the sea that is modern Science. As a practicing scientist active in international science policy, he hoped that redressing the historical balance would also encourage a more equitable distribution of scientific resources among modern nations.

As befits the work of a biologist, Needham's monumental Science and Civilisation in China is a study of nurturance and growth, flows and adaptations. It charts not only the emergence and development of forms of natural [End Page 173] knowledge in local context, but influences and transmissions between societies. It notably highlights the European debt to concepts, theories, and artifacts from all over Eurasia. Yet Needham also had to wrestle with the reality that it was in Europe, not in China, that the scientific and industrial revolutions occurred. If such deep-rooted institutional factors as Confucian aversion to experiment or bureaucratic feudalism were to blame, as Needham tended to argue, then are we not back where we started, explaining difference through just another form of cultural essentialism? What alternative models of flow, of production and reception, of social context and intellectual dynamic might get us beyond this apparent impasse?

Irfan Habib and Drhuv Raina's exciting and enriching volume brings together five scholars from India, five from France, and one each from Canada, Sweden, and Britain, to discuss Needham's legacy in the light of subsequent developments in the history of science. The predominantly Indian and French perspectives offer a salutory reminder of how parochial and narrowly professionalized most Anglo-Saxon history of science remains in its concerns and cast of characters. It is refreshing to see the stage repeopled with a truly international cast, the better to understand their political, philosophical, and ethical—as well as historicist—agendas.

Gregory Blue connects Needham's choices as a historian to the wider framework of socialist and internationalist science of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Patrick Petitjean offers a fascinating account of UNESCO's Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind project, originally framed as a resolutely anti-Eurocentric enterprise, in whose development Needham, Lucien Febvre, and the Brazilian physiologist Miguel Ozorio de Almeida played key roles. The essays by Catherine Jami and by Raina and Habib situate Science and Civilisation in the broader framework of Chinese and of Indian history of science from about 1900 to the present, highlighting the fact that Science and Civilisation works better as an inspirational mantra than as a practical model.

Articles by Romila Thapar, Aant Elzinga, Steve Fuller, Shiv Visvanathan, Karin Chemla, Michel Paty, and K. Subramanian all focus on the theoretical challenges of a truly humanist, universal "world history of science": the definition of workable social entities and the conceptualization of their interactions across time and space; the virtues of studying ensembles of knowledge within a period versus the presentist tactic of tracing back the lineages of one branch of modern science; the pitfalls of navigating between historical specificity and cultural relativism; the tricky relations between internationalist and nationalist history of science; and the question of whether comparative history (the "Needham question") can ever escape the traps of entrenched intellectual hierarchies. All these issues are relevant to the history of technology as well as science, yet curiously—given the (much criticized...

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