Hybrid Knowledge

As the editors of this volume note, the terms 'broker' and 'go-between' tend to evoke back-room introductions and the shuffling of suspicious papers, rather than the traditionally triumphal images of Enlightenment knowledge. The people who embodied the global connections through which information flowed between cultures have only relatively recently become a focus of English-language scholarship. This is in part the legacy of dualistic conceptualizations of race, empire and science in Anglo-American colonial discourse. In an imagined world divided between black and white, ruler and ruled, modern and traditional, scientific and emotional, rational and spiritual, the people or ideas that crossed boundaries posed not only an administrative headache, but also a threat to the cosmic order. A rejection of the idea of mixing, physically or intellectually, also came from many of those who opposed colonialism. For example, Anglo-Indians were generally sidelined rather than celebrated in the Indian independence movement. Writing from a colonial gaol, Nehru argued that despite the efforts of a few more enlightened individuals, opportunities for cultural, social and scientific exchange were deliberately quashed and that European and Asian systems of knowledge remained more or less separate.¹ During the colonial period, therefore, people who crossed the borders of knowledge, like those who transgressed racial categories, were characterized on all sides as untrustworthy and potentially treacherous.²

In Spanish, Portuguese and French, the words for the intermingling of cultures and those who are the agents of this process have a longer history of academic discussion and cultural politics. While fears concerning the dangers of cultural and racial mixing also permeated Iberian and French colonial discourse, the solution in some Latin American colonies was to construct elaborate racial classifications based on the degree of admixture of blood, referred to as mestizaje or métissage.³ The idea of métissage was reclaimed to express a positive mingling of cultures as early as the celebrated sixteenth-century work of the Peruvian humanist Garcilasco Inca da la Vega, son of a Spanish conquistador captain and an Inca princess. Post-colonial theorists adopted the term in their attacks on ethnographic studies that focused on, and perhaps in the process created, difference.⁴ Some scholars have recently attempted to move the discussion away from the emphasis on racial mingling, using the terms 'cultural métissage' or 'hybridization' to evoke the more general sense of people crossing boundaries, blending ideas and creating new forms of culture in the process.⁵ Serge Grunzinski's concept of passeurs culturels has influenced several contributors to this volume. Grunzinski and his collaborator Carmen Bernard have also sought to extend the geographical focus of this field of study, contrasting the continental hybrid that is Latin America to the 'planetary mé langes' emerging from the 'global-trotting' of Asian individuals and groups caught up in global economic trends.⁶ This idea has been taken up by Anglophone scholars, including in a recent collection edited by Stephen Greenblatt.⁷ Both Grunzinski and Greenblatt stress that métissage does not necessarily lead to the homogenization of world culture, noting rather that globalization can have the opposite effect: provoking fierce localisms, nationalism and attachment to strictly defined religious and ethnic identities. Greenblatt therefore calls on scholars to put aside both Manichean categories of difference and 'heady theories of creative mé tissage' in favour of 'detailed, individual, vital engagements with specific cases': a challenge which The Brokered World meets very well.

This volume is a hybrid of two historiographical trends, in which agents of cultural transmission are joined with a global history of science to reveal the importance of these agents, not just in translating and interpreting knowledge, but also in shaping ideas during the Enlightenment and the 'second scientific revolution'. The history of colonial science has had to undergo several metamorphoses in order to qualify Nehru's argument for the separateness of the knowledge of the colonized and the colonizers. A 'diffusionist' model, that saw modern science being created...