Buch, Englisch, 248 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 522 g
Science and the Imagination of Modern India
Buch, Englisch, 248 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 522 g
ISBN: 978-0-691-00453-2
Verlag: Princeton University Press
Another Reason is a bold and innovative study of the intimate relationship between science, colonialism, and the modern nation. Gyan Prakash, one of the most influential historians of India writing today, explores in fresh and unexpected ways the complexities, contradictions, and profound importance of this relationship in the history of the subcontinent. He reveals how science served simultaneously as an instrument of empire and as a symbol of liberty, progress, and universal reason--and how, in playing these dramatically different roles, it was crucial to the emergence of the modern nation.Prakash ranges over two hundred years of Indian history, from the early days of British rule to the dawn of the postcolonial era. He begins by taking us into colonial museums and exhibitions, where Indian arts, crafts, plants, animals, and even people were categorized, labeled, and displayed in the name of science. He shows how science gave the British the means to build railways, canals, and bridges, to transform agriculture and the treatment of disease, to reconstruct India's economy, and to transfigure India's intellectual life--all to create a stable, rationalized, and profitable colony under British domination. But Prakash points out that science also represented freedom of thought and that for the British to use it to practice despotism was a deeply contradictory enterprise. Seizing on this contradiction, many of the colonized elite began to seek parallels and precedents for scientific thought in India's own intellectual history, creating a hybrid form of knowledge that combined western ideas with local cultural and religious understanding. Their work disrupted accepted notions of colonizer versus colonized, civilized versus savage, modern versus traditional, and created a form of modernity that was at once western and indigenous.Throughout, Prakash draws on major and minor figures on both sides of the colonial divide, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, the nationalist historian and novelist Romesh Chunder Dutt, Prafulla Chandra Ray (author of A History of Hindu Chemistry), Rudyard Kipling, Lord Dalhousie, and John Stuart Mill. With its deft combination of rich historical detail and vigorous new arguments and interpretations, Another Reason will recast how we understand the contradictory and colonial genealogy of the modern nation.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
- Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Wissenssoziologie, Wissenschaftssoziologie, Techniksoziologie
- Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Postkoloniale Geschichte, Nationale Befreiung und Unabhängigkeit
- Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften
- Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus
- Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik
- Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wissenschafts- und Universitätsgeschichte
- Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Human- und Sozialwissenschaften
- Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen Kolonialismus, Imperialismus
Weitere Infos & Material
Acknowledgments ix
CHAPTER ONE The Sign of Science 3
PART ONE SCIENCE AND THE RELOCATION OF CULTURE
CHAPTER TWO Staging Science 17
CHAPTER THREE Translation and Power 49
CHAPTER FOUR The Image of the Archaic 86
PART TWO SCIENCE, GOVERNMENTALITY, AND THE STATE
CHAPTER FIVE Body and Governmentality 123
CHAPTER SIX Technologies of Government 159
CHAPTER SEVEN A Different Modernity 201
CHAPTER EIGHT Divided Love 227
Notes 239
Bibliography 277
Index 295
