The "Racial" Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future

I. Early Non-Western Scientific Traditions

PART ONE Early Non-Western Scientific Traditions The discovery of primitiveness was an ambiguous invention of a history incapable of facing its own double. v. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa It is true that in modem Western culture, the theoretical models propounded by the professional scientists do, to some extent, become the intellectual furnishings of a very large sector of the population.... But the layman's ground for accepting the models propounded by the scientists is often no different from the young African villager's ground for accepting the models propounded by one of his elders. In both cases the propounders are deferred to as the accredited agents of tradition. . . . For all the apparent up-to-dateness of the content of his world-view, the modern Western layman is rarely more "open" or scientific in his outlook than is the traditional African villager. Robin Horton, "African Traditional Thought and Western Science" Resistance to the critique of Eurocentrism is always extreme, for we are here entering the realm of the taboo. The calling into question of the Eurocentric dimension of the dominant ideology is more difficult to accept even than a critical challenge to its economic dimension. For the critique of Eurocentrism directly calls into question the position of the comfortable classes of this world. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism Columbus's attitude with regard to the Indians is based on his perception of them. We can distinguish here two component parts, which we shall find again in the following century and, in practice, down to our own day in every colonist in his relations to the colonized.... Either he conceives the Indians (though without using these words) as human beings altogether, having the same rights as himself; but then he sees them not only as equals but also as identical, and this behavior leads to assimilationism , the projection of his own values on the others. Or else he starts from the difference, but the latter is immediately translated into terms of superiority and inferiority (in his case, obviously, it is the Indians who are inferior). What is denied is the existence of a human substance truly other, something capable of being not merely an imperfect state of oneself. These 26 / Early Non-Western Scientific Traditions two elementary figures of the experience of alterity are both grounded in egocentrism, in the identification of our own values with values in general, of our I with the universe-in the conviction that the world is one. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America Western histories of science conventionally have told the story of human scientific and technological achievements as one only about the modern West. They sometimes acknowledge that other peoples have produced technological achievements, such as the Egyptian pyramids, and that medieval Arabic mathematics was highly advanced. Little more needs to be said about non-Western scientific traditions, they assume. The roots of modern science are to be found in ancient Greece, they say, and modern science is uniquely an accomplishment of the modern West. In fact, according to its enthusiasts, it is the most distinguished of the West's many distinguished contributions to human progress: "who could deny that Newton's achievement is evidence that pure science exemplifies the creative accomplishment of the human spirit at its pinnacle?"l This kind of Western chauvinism has been used by generations of Western observers of nonWestern peoples to claim that it is the ability to produce scientific thought that distinguishes the modern West from what they see as these barbarian, primitive, or underdeveloped cultures. Without diminishing the brilliance or importance of modem Western science, a reevaluation has been emerging recently of the causes of its development, of its parallels and contrasts with independently valuable scientific traditions of other societies, of its debts to them, and of the adequacy of the common assumption that this Western science contributed only to "human progress" and not also at least equally to the de-development, the regress, of the Third World as well as of certain groups in the West. The three selections included in this section focus not only on the scientific traditions of three non-Western cultures but also on three Eurocentric strategies for devaluing them: deny that these achievements are really science; rewrite the history of the origins of European "civilization" to make it self-generating; and, through conquest, appropriate others' knowledge, recycle it as Western, and suppress knowledge of its origins. In the...