Postcolonial Theory of Science and Other Knowledge Forms: The Engagement with Cognitive and Epistemic Justice[*]

Dhruv Raina

“Not wanting to know the truth about oneself is the contemporary state of sin; one redeems oneself these days through self-awareness … with the self as the object of study.”[1]

The subfield of the history of science that details the circulation of knowledge between Europe and the non-West was struggling to discard the stranglehold of Eurocentric theories and histories of knowledge in the last decades of the previous century.[2] The concern over the circulation of scientific knowledge was linked up with that of what counted as science. But with the passage of time and with the passing of several versions of diffusionism, what used to be a concern of epistemology became one of historical epistemology.

According to the definition offered by Lorraine Daston, historical epistemology is the history of emergence.[3] It is not concerned with evaluating the validity of theories, statements, beliefs, practices, or concepts, but with investigating how their emergence was made possible by certain normative regimes. Historical epistemologists attempt to explain the normative roles notions like objectivity, factuality, and probability play in knowledge systems.[4] Since Eurocentric versions of diffusionism encompass a theory of history, a process, and a way of framing the circulation of knowledge, diffusionism too calls for historical epistemological interrogation. However, that is not what this paper attempts. Instead, the essay paints a concise landscape that illustrates, with reference to the natural sciences in particular, how one way of framing the circulation of scientific knowledge made way for the emergence of other ways, while also revealing the associated context and geo-politics of knowledge. The much-quoted passage from Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge is relevant in this context:

These pre-existing forms of continuity, all these syntheses that are accepted without question, must remain in suspense. They must not be rejected definitively of course, but the tranquility with which they are accepted must be disturbed; we must show that they do not come about of themselves, but are always the result of a construction the rules of which must be known, and the justifications of which must be scrutinized: we must define in what conditions and in view of which analyses certain of them are legitimate; and we must indicate which of them can never be accepted in any circumstances.[5]

The diffusionism of modern natural science and its discontents

In recent decades, there has been a movement to widen the scope of the history of sciences to encompass the history of knowledge. This has a number of reasons, some having to do with how institutionally and geographically restrictive and, in some sense, untenable the history of sciences has proved to be in mapping the evolution of our understanding of the natural world. Equally significant were the multiple “turns” that have informed the history of sciences from the 1970s onwards, as we shall see in the present section. The move towards broadening the canvas of the history of sciences was produced, in part, by the social turn but also by the spatial turn.[6] As a result, we have several genealogical strands in the history of knowledge today, which have a contested relationship with the history of sciences. Lukas Verburgt, in an essay titled “The History of Knowledge and the Future History of Ignorance,” attempts to sort out the distinctive dimensions of this relationship. On the one hand, drawing upon the ideas of Daston on the subject, he points out that the history of knowledge is approached through the lenses of the history of sciences.[7] Nevertheless, the works of Daston and Jürgen Renn seem to argue that given the preoccupation with practices and other ways of knowing, history of science must eventually become a subfield of the history of knowledge.[8] On the other hand, there is the counterargument that the history of knowledge needs to emancipate itself from the history of sciences altogether. Verburgt infers this from his reading of Peter Burke as well as Sven Dupré and Geert Somsen,[9] and proceeds to articulate the central concerns and objectives of the field in the said article.[10] The argument of this essay, while recognizing the importance and salience of the latter position, comes closer to the stands taken by Daston and Renn.

Again, Christian Jacob, himself a classicist, clarified how he conceives of knowledge: “For me, knowledge is a broad frame encompassing sciences, but also techniques, arts, humanities, spirituality, magic, and so on … [It] includes theoretical and abstract ideas and concepts, but also technical and artistic practices, the savoir-faire and know-how, and even bodily knowledge.”[11] In a statement on the scope of his monumental work Lieux de Savoir, one can clearly discern the influence of Bruno Latour’s anthropology of science.[12] Jacob insists that knowledge should be studied like any other human activity such as hunting or cooking, while seeking to comprehend all the operations involved in the knowledge-making process. He thus prescribes an extension from the anthropology of contemporary science to an anthropology of past knowledge.[13] What thereby emerges is a transdisciplinary field, as becomes evident in Jacob’s further argument:

Looking at Western science and knowledge from other viewpoints, such as colonial and postcolonial studies, colonial studies deconstructs its claims to universality and shows how deeply it is rooted in specific places: the claim to scientific universality is a particular aspect in the political, economic, and cultural domination of Western culture.[14]

Irrespective of which side of the programmatic divide Verburgt situates himself on, we see that histories of science and the new histories of knowledge share an entangled genealogy, both in terms of their engagement with place—as territory, region, and sites of knowledge—and with methodologies derived from science studies, history of science, post-structuralism, and the humanities in general.

In this essay, I shall restrict my concern to the natural sciences and focus on the discussions regarding indigenous sciences within the fields of postcolonial history and the theory of science. In what follows, I attempt to narrate the history of this gradual shift in the history of sciences in the last decades of the twentieth century, following the literature of the time.

The history of science more or less commences by addressing the question of the emergence of modern science in Europe—a question well addressed even within the recent historical sociology of science.[15] However, this founding narrative then provides a genealogy for the subsequent outward diffusion of modern science from Europe. Contemporary histories of social sciences suggest that diffusionism has a long history in the sciences and social sciences, dating from the middle of the nineteenth to the third quarter of the twentieth century.[16] The essay is not concerned with all such forms of diffusionism, but only the Eurocentric history of science that takes recourse to particular diffusionist arguments (see Table 1). Beside other problems with the notion of diffusionism, it has dominated histories of sciences in the non-Western world as well, shaped its historiography, and methodologically institutionalized Eurocentrism. In the 1990s, The Gulbenkian Commission Report chronicled the history of the institutionalization of the social sciences. The report argued that developments after 1945 included changes in world politics following the end of World War II, such as the economic and political ascent of the United States of America as well as the struggle and reassertion of non-European peoples around the world. This was followed in the 1950s by the numerical and geographical expansion of universities everywhere, which led to an exponential growth in the number of professional social scientists.[17] The report pointed out that the new social realities posed a problem for the social sciences. Firstly, the domination of the United States influenced the choice of issues to be addressed, as well as the ways of addressing them. Secondly, the political reassertion of non-European peoples meant that many assumptions of the social sciences were called into question, for they were seen as reflecting the political biases of an era that was ending.[18] However, throughout the 1950s, modernization theory and growth models underpinned the core of development discourse even in nations that had liberated themselves from the yoke of colonial rule. The high tide of this diffusionist formulation is evident in George Basalla’s 1967 publication on “The Spread of Western Science.”[19]

Basalla’s essay argued that the flow of modern scientific knowledge was grounded in an imaginary of a neutral value-free science. Further, this process manifested in the three stages of diffusion of modern scientific knowledge from Europe. During the first phase, the nonscientific society or nation becomes a location (and resource) for extending the dominion of European science. The term nonscientific was used to denote the absence of modern Western science and not the indigenous or ancient traditions of scientific thought encountered in the Old World. The second phase is that of colonial science, wherein a scientific tradition is installed on the model of Western institutions. The domain of sciences is, at this stage, restricted to the practice of field sciences involving the collection of data, which is then theoretically synthesized at the centers of modern science in Europe. In the third phase, the process of institutionalization initiated earlier is completed, and efforts to install a new national science system that is independent of Europe are initiated.[20]

Within a couple of years of its publication, critiques began pouring in against both diffusionism, and Basalla’s idea of colonial science claiming to be subaltern knowledge produced in the colonies and restricted to data gathering. By the late 1970s, the tide had turned against diffusionism as development theory, and the concept of trickle down, as well as the imaginary of science began to change.[22] We could argue that some of these ideas began to undergo revision during the first decade of decolonization, that is, in the 1950s. Take the work of Joseph Needham, who proposed the idea of an “ecumenical science” and employed the metaphor of a river to emphasize the connectedness of cultures and civilizations in the longue durée. The inference from his historical argumentation was that modern science was not singularly Western.[23] The river metaphor sought to overcome the historiography of pure origins and that of civilizational exceptionalism, inserting in its place an image of ecumenical science that clearly anticipated the later developments of transcultural and transnational histories.[24] But by the 1980s, the landscape had radically changed with the rise of post-Kuhnian philosophy of science or what came to be known as the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK); with feminist philosophy of science; and with post-colonial theory as elaborated in Sandra Harding’s book Is Science Multicultural?[25]

The much-discussed postcolonial theory of science can be reduced, for the purpose of this essay, to its theoretical components, which include theories of history, theories of transmission, and theories of knowledge. For the sake of discussion, we contrast a Eurocentric and postcolonial version of each of these theoretical components. The theories of transmission and history in each of these versions are premised on distinct understandings of connectedness and diffusion.[26] Table 1 schematically presents these differences.

Components of Postcolonial Theory of Science	Eurocentric Theories	Postcolonial Theories
Theory of history	Endogenously driven change over time	Globally connected histories
Theory of science	Science is conceived as disembodied knowledge	The notion of science is shaped by social context
Theory of transmission	Transmission visualized as unidirectional arrows of influence moving outwards from Europe	Transmission visualized as multiple bi-directional arrows connecting and constituting a global network

In the Eurocentric theory of history, changes at the civilizational level in Europe were driven solely by factors endogenous to Europe (I elaborate this argument later in the essay), while the Eurocentric theory of transmission claims that changes, including those in the realm of knowledge, diffused outward from Europe to the rest of the world. In other words, the underlying premises are the notion of endogenously driven development of Europe and that of the arrows of political and cultural influence shooting outwards, from their starting point in Europe. The third theoretical frame relates to epistemology or the theory of knowledge, which is considered to be de-contextualized and transcendental in the Eurocentric metanarrative.[27] Evidently, as far as the theory of transmission is concerned, there is an idea of diffusionism embedded within it. In the words of Steven Shapin, truth flows from regions with high truth concentration to those with low truth concentration.[28] This metaphor of osmosis recurs within the history of the colonized nations as the “civilizing mission” of the European colonizer.

On the other hand, the feminist philosophy of science, the sociology of scientific knowledge, and the postcolonial theory of science share the premise of acknowledging the contextual nature of scientific knowledge, albeit with appropriate qualifications. These contextualized theories, coming from feminist, postcolonial, antiracist, and anti-classist standpoints, reckoned with the importance of recovering and reinstating subjugated knowledge.[29]

It has been argued that there were several waves in the de-centering of Eurocentrism.[30] One of these waves was clearly an outcome of the humanism of the post-World War II period. This wave of humanism coincided with and piggybacked on the process of decolonization in several parts of the world. The idea of science as a cultural universal was as crucial to this period as the widening of the concept of knowledge is to the history of knowledge today.[31] Thus, after the end of World War II—a period concurrent with the second phase of decolonization in South Asia—the challenges to Eurocentrism in the domain of theory were largely related to the theory of history and the theory of transmission.[32] They brought into question the notion of the endogenously driven development of Europe and emphasized a global connectedness that long antedated globalization.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a revival of several interconnected strands in the sociology of knowledge that subsequently unfolded in different directions, but with entangled genealogies informed as much by the linguistic term as well as by post-structuralism. Coupled with the Foucauldian and Habermasian turns and the following ascent of social constructivism in the sciences,[33] these strands offered new readings of the politics and geographies of knowledge, underscoring in particular how Orientalist discourses were shaped by imperial institutions, and shapen them in turn.[34] These developments posed a challenge to histories and theories of science and knowledge within the sciences and social sciences that were grounded in positivism. The methodological tenets of symmetry and impartiality fundamental to the theories of science as a social construct raised the bogey of relativism and seemed to de-privilege the epistemic authority of science.[35]

However, in a continuation of an earlier trend set by Needham, Martin Bernal’s classic work Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Western Civilization identified different phases in Western historiography, which resonated with several of Edward Said’s insights into the history of Orientalism and the circumstances that shaped its rise.[36] This critique also resonated with crucial contemporary debates on Western historiography and the historiography of the sciences.[37] Even though Bernal’s work appeared in the 1980s and did not seem to reflect the social turn in science studies, it destabilized Eurocentrism historiographically, drawing upon the postcolonial and antiracist critiques of received histories of the ancient world.

The nation states that managed to liberate themselves from colonial rule, especially in Africa, realized within a decade or two that despite their sovereign status, they were ensnared in a relationship of dependence, since the distribution of economic resources and the map of political domination had not changed substantially from the colonial era: the idea of the “civilizing mission” had instead been substituted by the development discourse.[38] The decolonization of the 1950s thus entailed a political practice marked by the moral commitment to transform the conditions of exploitation and poverty. But when the race for development did not manifest the promised rewards, there commenced an interrogation of the paradigms that underpinned diffusionism and its theories of knowledge. At a global level, this included a questioning of developmental models, theories and instruments of technology transfer, and Walt Whitman Rostow’s growth models.[39]

Postcolonialism and the politics of scientific knowledge

The discourse on different ways of knowing and their marginalization within histories of knowledge and postcolonial science studies drew upon multiple resources, ranging from Said and Antonio Gramsci to the works of scholars such as Arturo Escobar, Ashis Nandy, Shiv Visvanathan, and eco-feminists like Vandana Shiva.[40] Postcolonial methodology came to signify the historical interrogation of European colonialism and how it had shaped (and continued to shape) the relationship between the West and the non-West, even after the passing of colonialism. This required the description of a continuous process of resistance and reconstruction from the perspective of the non-West. Like other critical theories that rose to prominence around that time, postcolonial theory thus demonstrated an engagement with the experience of the suppression, resistance, race, gender, representation, and difference that were manifest in the master discourses of Western history, philosophy, and linguistics.[41] More specifically, within the realm of social theory, the central concepts of modernity and development and their associated theories went up for a revision. As far as the field of postcolonial science studies was concerned, the integrity of the idea of “Western science” and its diffusionist premise were questioned by new histories and constructivist notions of science.[42] Gradually, as the body of scholarship around the Science and Empires research program expanded,[43] the idea of political justice was extended to the realm of knowledge, alongside an enhanced engagement with non-Western knowledge systems from a diversity of sources and perspectives. Justice, therefore, became an increasingly important concern within the politics of knowledge production, even as the discipline of history took a turn towards global, transcultural, and transnational historiographies.[44] In South Asia, postcolonial theory provided a framework for revising the exchange of scientific knowledge.[45]

In 2007, the Indian sociologist Shiv Visvanathan, who had been exploring the idea of cognitive justice since 1996, gave it a programmatic form and specified its imperatives, starting with the recognition of the right of different forms of knowledge to co-exist. It was not a question of simply allowing or tolerating a plurality of knowledge forms, but one of mandating the active recognition of the need for diversity in the domain of knowledge. Though these presented themselves as different ways of knowing, it was essential to recognize that in an institutional context, they were also forms of life. For knowledge forms to evolve and flourish, it was, therefore, essential to see them as relationally embedded within an ecology of knowledge(s).[46] Consequently, they were grounded in a particular cosmology and this embodiment further implied that it was difficult to extract or abstract knowledge from culture as a life form. Knowledge forms are deeply connected to livelihoods, life cycles, and lifestyles: they determine life chances. In other words, cognitive justice could be realized only by linking it up with programs of transformative action and policy.

The ultimate goal of cognitive justice is not so much a methodological or hermeneutic one, but one of reinventing the “democratic imagination” along the lines of a “non-market, non-competitive view of the world, where conversation, reciprocity, translation create knowledge.”[47] However, we could well argue that these principles could influence our methodologies or framing(s) when investigating other cultures, either as values or as taboos. In so doing , we could reorient our engagements with diverse communities of problem solving, the ultimate objective being to rework the democratic imagination by blending a neo-Gandhian politics with alternate conceptions of the democratic imagination shared by many social movements in the subcontinent.

However, there is a cognate version of this concept that Boaventura de Sousa Santos proposes in his Epistemologies of the South.[48] While the former conceptualization is paradigmatic, there is the need to develop a hermeneutic framing for methodologically implementing the tenets of cognitive justice in concrete analytical situations. The starting point, for both Visvanathan and Santos, has to be the de-privileging of the Western understanding of the world and its ways of knowing. This premise they share with discussions on decoloniality in Latin America and Africa.[49] From the perspective of emancipatory politics, there is a need to reckon with the idea that “transformations in the world may follow grammars and scripts other than those developed by Western-centric critical theory.”[50] In other words, neither the scripts of emancipation nor the theory of emancipation is universal, irrespective of their universalistic claims and aspirations. This diversity in script and theory “must be valorized” as a resource.[51] For Visvanathan, the realization of cognitive justice requires the reinvention of the democratic imagination; Santos’s notion also aspires for social justice but perceives it as the outcome of global cognitive justice.[52] This is the second sense in which the notions developed by Visvanathan and Santos overlap.

Santos’s main argument is thus grounded in a third idea, where he emphasizes the need for social justice as a prerequisite for cognitive justice. However, the third idea implicitly valorizes diversity and further connects Santos’s work with that of Visvanathan. Santos argues that in the contemporary world, “the adequate recognition of injustice and the possible overcoming of oppression can only be achieved by means of an epistemological break.”[53] The Frankfurt School, he argues, had failed to provide a satisfactory account of this oppression because its critique of this order shared “the same epistemological foundations that suppress the cognitive dimension of social injustice.”[54]

The endogenous and the indigenous

The issue is not just about a particular kind of knowledge but about political theory as well; this has been succinctly elaborated by Gurminder Bhambra, who argues that critical theory’s engagement with the emergence of European modernity has neglected the role of colonialism and slavery in constituting this modernity. In the process, it has denied the colonized any role in participating “in the development of freedom in their own right.”[55] This “substantive neglect of colonialism” is tantamount to “epistemological injustice.”[56] Over time, the concept of epistemic injustice has come to refer

to those forms of unfair treatment that relate to issues of knowledge, understanding, and participation in communicative practices. These issues include a wide range of topics concerning wrongful treatment and unjust structures in meaning-making and knowledge producing practices, such as the following: exclusion and silencing; invisibility and inaudibility (or distorted presence or representation); having one’s meanings or contributions systematically distorted, misheard, or misrepresented; having diminished status or standing in communicative practices; unfair differentials in authority and/or epistemic agency; being unfairly distrusted; receiving no or minimal uptake; being coopted or instrumentalized; being marginalized as a result of dysfunctional dynamics; etc.[57]

Thus, the restoration of epistemological justice has to take center stage in critical theory’s objective of developing a critical version of the Enlightenment project. Many of these concerns came up in the politics of scientific knowledge from the 1980s onwards and were indeed taken up by feminism, postcolonial theory, and history of sciences. What we then have is a family resemblance of concepts that give precedence to knowing and ways of knowing and framing prevalent among the communities at the margins and among the oppressed in order to achieve political justice.

The “epistemological rupture” that Santos speaks of is necessary to develop alternatives. However, his call is different from the one dating back to the decades of “alternativist” thinking, that is, the 1970s and 1980s in India and elsewhere, which was all about reinventing the scientific and technological system. In those decades, all counter-hegemonic discourses were about alternate sciences, alternate technologies, alternative imaginations, etc.[58] Santos, on the contrary, writes that today “we do not need alternatives so much as we need an alternative thinking of alternatives.”[59] In other words, what we need is a metatheory of alternatives. This enables us to go beyond the impasse encountered by earlier ways of thinking about alternatives, which reduced them to means of contesting the hegemonic authority of science and the West, envisioning them solely as the “other” of a constructed European imaginary.

Even so, Left thinking, including that of the Frankfurt School, needs to decolonize itself, and the strategy for doing so, according to Santos, is by traveling southwards. While recognizing that decoloniality marks a point of departure from postcolonial thinking, given the radical historical experiences of settler colonialism and colonialism by conquest, it is important to emphasize at this point that the discussion here is limited to postcolonial theory’s engagement with the issue of epistemic justice. The South is diverse and has its own hierarchies, and there is a need to caution against an imperial South: these are important points that are recognized by postcolonial theory.[60] Therefore, learning from the anti-imperial South with the aim of decolonizing theory would entail the earmarking of a different epistemological starting point, that of acquiring justice in the realm of theory or cognitive justice, which, as the cardinal premise suggests, is the stepping stone towards social justice.

Thus, Inuit concepts of climate are referred to and mobilized in international fora during discussions on climate change and the Anthropocene because of the part played by Inuit activists in generating public consciousness about climate change in the Arctic.[61] However, when the discussion of climate change in the Arctic is articulated in “mega-categories,” the lenses and philosophies of the indigenous people are erased from the theorizing.[62] This is the exclusion and silencing captured by the idea of epistemic injustice. While climate is certainly an issue of cosmopolitical concern, Euro-American academic audiences are oblivious of the “competing or similar discourses happening outside of the rock-star arenas of Euro-Western thought.”[63] There is, thus, a seething sense of epistemic injustice fathomable when Todd writes:

Because we still practice our disciplines in ways that erase Indigenous bodies within our lecture halls in Europe, we unconsciously avoid engaging with contemporary Indigenous scholars and thinkers while we engage instead with eighty year old ethnographic texts or two hundred year old philosophical tomes.[64]

This selective auditing or the use of a register that systemically renders visible and invisible is programmed, then, to draw a line of demarcation between the self and the other—it is a marker of “abyssal thinking.”[65] Both postcolonial theory and theories of decoloniality have challenged the premises of this historical insularity and historiographical framing, which foreground the notion of “endogenous European origins of modernity.”[66] There is then clearly a relationship between one version of diffusionism and ethnocentrism or civilizational exceptionalism, which, in interpretative terms, is perpetuated in a hermeneutics of deficit or abyssal thinking. In the words of Santos, “Whatever is produced as nonexistent is radically excluded because it lies beyond the realm of what the accepted conception of inclusion considers to be its other.”[67]

As postcolonial theories have suggested, such diffusionism rules out the possibility of co-presence or co-production on both sides of the dividing line.[68] This point is exemplified by Shapin’s argument that in the diffusionist perspective informed by the ocularcentric vision of the enlightenment, truth flows from regions of high truth concentration to those of low truth concentration—that is, from regions of brightness to darkness, from gravitas to a cultural vacuum.[69] Interestingly enough, Shapin alludes to this version of diffusionism in the context of addressing the metropolis-province dynamic in the history of science, which serves as a hypertext of the center-periphery model, but can also be applied to the discussion of the relationship between immanently modern societies and the modernization of traditional ones.

It has been pointed out that modernity in the West is pivoted on a socio-political paradigm founded on the tension between social regulation and social emancipation. Put another way, the idea of co-production of the natural and social order suggests that modern societies simultaneously form their epistemic and normative understandings of the world. Thus, scientific ideas and technological artifacts simultaneously emerge or co-evolve with representations, identities, discourses, and institutions.[70] According to this meta-discourse, the absence or co-presence of these institutions and knowledge forms separates metropolitan societies from colonial territories, when in fact, this tension is evident in more or less all metropolitan societies.

Thus, the connections between institutions and forms of knowledge need to be historicized and taken cognizance of in scholarly ventures. In modern societies, then, specific knowledge forms are embedded in modern institutions and legal regimes. In the case of South Asia, postcolonial scholarship has illustrated how colonial rule generated “complicated” forms of knowledge that were produced by Indians but codified and transmitted by Europeans.[71] In effect, colonialism was about knowledge that transformed cultural forms in societies by labeling them as traditional, thereby devalorizing pre-colonial forms of knowledge. Bernard Cohn’s work is an anthropology of colonial knowledge that sought to historicize knowledge schemas and institutional arenas of colonial knowledge and practice. The careful documentation and representation of the colonized were the instruments that transformed knowledge into power. The important point in Cohn’s work is that colonial knowledge continues to live on in the historiographic and anthropological assumptions that inform contemporary works.[72] This also suggests a domain, which Bhambra calls “sociological connectedness,” shared by the projects of postcolonial theory and decoloniality.[73] Aníbal Quijano—like Cohn who elaborates upon the language of command in the South Asian context—writes of the imbrication of colonial power in shaping the coloniality of knowledge and vice versa in the Latin American context.[74] Here too, we see similar if not identical methodological and praxeological programs and proposals in postcolonial theory and theories of decoloniality.

However, the preceding historical and anthropological discussion of political theory underpinning the politics of knowledge needs to be qualified by the recognition that the story is quite different in the history of sciences, despite the evident strong association between scientific modernity and Eurocentrism. Histories of colonialism and postcolonial accounts of the histories of science have revealed the manner in which modern science acquired hegemonic legitimacy by proclaiming itself as the singular authority to adjudicate claims of universal truth and falsity.[75] The exclusionary character of this monopoly is at the core of modern epistemological disputes between scientific and non-scientific knowledge forms.

The important lesson to remember is that “finding credibility for nonscientific knowledges does not entail discrediting scientific knowledge.”[76] This search acquires visibility in the struggle for indigenous knowledge(s) among the “first peoples” as well as in the claims of traditional or civilizational knowledge in those nations where these have been delegitimized by modern science.[77] Studies on indigenous responses and indigenous knowledge systems were refashioned by different geographies of knowledge and diverse disciplinary academic communities. As I have suggested elsewhere,

In recent decades, the term indigenous knowledge came to connote different entities in Africa, Australia and Latin America in contradistinction to the manner in which the term is employed in South Asia. … This renders the politics surrounding the use of the term quite ambivalent. In Australia, the term provides a cognitive or academic scaffolding and political lever in struggles for the rights of indigenous peoples; in South Asia, the term can potentially be, and frequently has been, appropriated by the high tradition, [at the expense of the little traditions]. This ambivalence percolates into transnational and transcultural approaches seeking to overcome the exceptionalism of civilizations and nations.[78]

What is needed is thus a broader dialogue with other knowledge(s), so that scientific knowledge, instead of posing as the hegemon, can veritably become as counter-hegemonic as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before it was transformed into a hegemonic force with the emergence of the military and medical-industrial complex over the last couple of decades.[79] Furthermore, there is much to be learnt here from the dialogue Bhambra has initiated between postcolonial theory and theories of decoloniality, domains that belong to different geopolitics of knowledge and come from different disciplinary genealogies. Bhambra underscores the “connected sociologies” of these approaches and underlines the importance of building both coalitions of resistance to powerful master narratives, as well as coalitions of understanding that require deeper levels of dialogicity.[80]

The quest for diversity, plurality, and connectedness

As pointed out elsewhere, the struggle of ensuring cognitive justice for other ways of knowing has been a long and arduous one, commencing with the anti-colonial struggles from the beginning of the twentieth century, with different programs and geographies involved at different points of the long century. The struggle to diversify ways of knowing and to have their claim to validity recognized is the latest trend in this movement. Philosophically, the problem has always been to ensure that the knowledge we speak of is robust.[81] In the diversified ecosystem of knowledge, what negative heuristic does one require, in order to ensure that the enterprise of knowledge is never epistemologically compromised by any system that is part of a new ecology in the making? Drawing upon the suggestion of forming “coalitions of understanding,”[82] it can be argued that the realization of the credibility of indigenous knowledge or non-scientific knowledge forms cannot be accomplished by discrediting scientific knowledge.

The transformation of the sciences, in the sense of widening their horizons, requires an engagement at two levels. First of these is the recognition that within the world of scientific knowledge, there exist alternative conceptions that have been rendered visible through the pluralistic epistemologies of various scientific practices—something that feminist epistemologies of science in particular have so clearly established. However, part of the imaginary of the natural sciences is the putative consensus prevailing in any of the sciences during the phase of what Kuhn called “normal science.” As historians and philosophers of science as well as practicing physicists such as Steven Weinberg have pointed out, there are several competing paradigms within the sciences at any time, but this understanding has not become a part of the training of graduate and doctoral students.[83]

The second important move would be to advance interdependence among the scientific knowledge(s) produced by Western modernity and other non-scientific knowledges. Again, Bhambra’s critique of critical theory and other theories of modernity points to the neglect of histories of slavery, colonialism, and racism in the constitution of European modernity.[84] While this theoretical injustice concerning the colonialities of power and knowledge needs to be rectified,[85] there is much we can learn from postcolonial, feminist, and post-Kuhnian philosophies and histories of science. Perhaps one needs to reckon with the historical roles played by other knowledge forms from the time of the commencement of the voyages of discovery, towards the end of the fifteenth century, in the emergence of modern science. James Poskett’s Horizons: A Global History of Science provides us with an instance of what looking at the Inca and Aztec knowledge forms and their encounters with Europe could accomplish in this regard.[86] A reflection on the formation and identity of modern sciences by postcolonial and antiracist science studies has disclosed the significance of addressing the reciprocity of exchange processes.[87] As Richard H. Grove shows, the interactions of different pre-Linnaean systems of botanical classification in Europe and those prevalent among the Ezhava community in Malabar need to be re-investigated from the perspective of the production of hybrid knowledge, rather than exclusively through the lens of modern European science.[88]

Consequently, the recognition of the pluralist traditions within science and their fruitful encounters with what lies outside is not merely a counter-hegemonic move, but also enables the visibility of the ecology of knowledges. However, there are still two objections, to which we need to respond. The first is the question of alternatives, that is, alternative epistemologies, alternative ways of knowing, alternative life forms, etc. While engaging with the ecology of knowledge(s), it should be kept in mind that the concept of an alternate knowledge form or epistemology does not inherently imply that it is in a position of subalternity or antagonism vis-à-vis mainstream science, even though that is very often the case.[89]

The second is a larger philosophical concern with the shadow of relativism haunting the premises of contextuality and the pluralization of knowledge(s). This specter, especially discussions on whether contextualism breeds relativism, has probably been exorcized from the philosophy of science.[90] Nevertheless, the normative dimension is important in recognizing that not all kinds of belief are equally valid or can pass as valid knowledge, and not every conceptualization of social transformation, or the recognition of such projects as knowledge forms, is desirable. The issue is important because we are not engaging with a unitary conception of knowledge now, but with knowledge(s) in the plural, while simultaneously making explicit the self-referentiality of our descriptions. In the philosophy of science, the implications of pluralizing knowledge manifest in four problems—the dangers of self-reflexivity, the problem of relativism, the nature of otherness, and the relationship between knowledge and political action—and to some extent, we have cursorily touched upon all four of them here.[91]

Nevertheless, as mentioned, the problem of relativism indeed becomes a central one when we engage with a plurality of knowledge forms in their social embeddedness, and reflect on the conditions of dialogue between them, for relativism poses the challenge of radical incommensurability of knowledge forms or frameworks. Thomas Kuhn, in his close and insightful reading of the history of science, proposes such incommensurability between different frameworks of knowledge, which he seems to derive from a “holistic theory of meaning” and a historiography of discontinuity or radical rupture. Underlying both is the idea that frameworks can be singularly distinct, and that any reasonable conversation or adjudication across these frameworks is not possible, given the radically different or even contradictory premises that might separate them. This overlooks real world situations where rational debates and exchanges between frameworks are possible even in the absence of agreement on fundamentals, although the (partial) agreement among frameworks is certainly an enabling factor in such conversations.[92]

Diffusionist theories of exchange privilege the source of knowledge, and are therefore prone to hierarchies that have historically leaned in the direction of Eurocentrism. Thus, in arguing for cognitive justice, which is simultaneously a political and an epistemological project, it should be ensured that the conversation between scientific and other kinds of knowledge is not reduced to granting “equality of opportunity” (to achieve certain predetermined objectives) to the side with less epistemic authority. Such conversations should instead enable enriching epistemological arguments with a view to building “another possible world”—a society that is more just and democratic, as well as more balanced in its relationship with nature.[93]

In an exegesis of Needham’s idea of science, civilization, and history, his collaborator Gregory Blue thus maps out several qualities that Needham ascribed to modern science, in a series of propositions. Among these, Blue labels as “Proposition 2e” the “principle of epistemological egalitarianism, which asserts that knowledge is in theory communicable across cultural borders and that persons of any cultural background are in principle capable of utilizing it. This in turn implies that scientific activity itself tends to become a form of global ‘social integration.’”[94] What speaks to us across the decades is the persistent chorus and demand for epistemological egalitarianism and its conjugate justice. Nevertheless, there are several terms that need to be situated in Needham’s context and re-situated in our own. The most problematic of these remains “global integration.”

Needham’s generation was scarred by two world wars, and saw integration as an unproblematic and possibly even a utopian goal. In our own times, integration has unfolded and continues to unfold in its cultural, epistemic, political, and other dimensions, and needs to be problematized. Unlike the principle of epistemological egalitarianism, which would ascribe equal validity to all forms of knowledge, the ecology of knowledge opens up the possibility of a pragmatic discussion among alternatives and the revision of the criteria of validity, without immediately disqualifying whatever does not fit the epistemological canon of modern science. Thus, alternative ways of seeing, that were directed to achieving the same end as ours, have been articulated in an earlier discourse, but now the task needs to be one of conceptualizing alternative ends. If in the former case we were arguing for a progression from politics to knowledge, now we have to argue for a progression from alternate epistemologies to alternate futures.

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[*] An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Cluster Conference “Africa*n Relations: Modalities Reflected,” University of Bayreuth, July 14–17, 2021. I thank Iris Clemens, Joachim Kurtz, and Gordon McOuat for their comments as well as the two anonymous referees for their suggestions. The persistent drawbacks in the essay are due to failings on my part alone.

[1] Kazimierz Brandys quoted by Gerhard Wolf in his “Afterword” to Christa Wolf, Eulogy for the Living: Taking Flight (London: Seagull Books, 2018), 127.

[2] See James Morris Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: The Guilford Press, 1993); Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990); Dennis F. Almeida and George G. Joseph, “Eurocentrism in the History of Mathematics: The Case of the Kerala School,” Race & Class 45, no. 4 (2004): 45–59, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396804043866; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, with a New Preface by the Author (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Helaine Selin, ed., Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, 2 vols. (Berlin: Springer, 2008).

[3] Lorraine Daston, “Historical Epistemology,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, ed. James K. Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry D. Harootunian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 282–289.

[4] Omar W. Nasim, “Was ist historische Epistemologie?” [What is Historical Epistemology?], in Nach Feierabend: Digital Humanities, ed. Michael Hagner and Caspar Hirschi (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2013), 123–144.

[5] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 28.

[6] See Christian Jacob, “Lieux de savoir: Places and Spaces in the History of Knowledge,” KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 1, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 85–102; 86, https://doi.org/10.1086/692293; David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin, “The Place of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey,” Science in Context 4, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 3–22, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889700000132.

[7] Lorraine Daston, “The History of Science and the History of Knowledge,” KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 1, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 131–154, https://doi.org/10.1086/691678.

[8] Lukas M. Verburgt, “The History of Knowledge and the Future History of Ignorance,” KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 4, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1086/708341; Daston, “The History of Science and the History of Knowledge”; and Jürgen Renn, The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

[9] See Peter Burke, What Is the History of Knowledge? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016); Sven Dupré and Geert Somsen, “The History of Knowledge and the Future of Knowledge Societies,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 42, no. 2–3 (2019): 186–199, https://doi.org/10.1002/bewi.201900006.

[10] Verburgt, “The History of Knowledge and the Future History of Ignorance.”

[11] Jacob, “Places and Spaces in the History of Knowledge,” 86.

[12] Christian Jacob, “Introduction: Faire corps, faire lieu” [Introduction: Making bodies, making spaces], in Lieux de savoir: espaces et communautés [Knowledge places: Spaces and communities] (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007), 17–40; 20–25.

[13] Jacob, “Places and Spaces in the History of Knowledge,” 88–90.

[14] Jacob, “Places and Spaces in the History of Knowledge,” 90.

[15] Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England (New York: Harper and Row, 1970 [1938]); Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (London: Penguin, 2015).

[16] Björn Wittrock, “Early Modernities: Varieties and Transitions,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): 19–40; and Johan Heilbron, Lars Magnusson, and Björn Wittrock, ed., The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Rise of Modernity: Conceptual Change in Context (1750–1850) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998).

[17] Dominick LaCapra, “The University in Ruins?” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): 32–55, https://doi.org/10.1086/448907.

[18] Immanuel Wallerstein, Calestous Juma, Evelyn Fox Keller, Jürgen Kocka, Dominique Lecourt, Valentin Y. Mudimbe, Kinhide Mushakoji, Ilya Prigogine, Peter J. Taylor, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ed., Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Arturo Escobar, “Development and the Anthropology of Modernity,” in The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader, ed. Sandra Harding (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 269–289.

[19] George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science: A Three-Stage Model Describes the Introduction of Modern Science into Any Non-European Nation,” Science 156, no. 3775 (May 5, 1967): 611–622, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.156.3775.611; see also George Basalla, ed., The Rise of Modern Science: External or Internal Factors? (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1968).

[20] Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science.”

[21] Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” 612.

[22] Roy Macleod, “On Visiting the ‘Moving Metropolis’: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science,” Historical Records of Australian Science 5, no. 3 (1980): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1071/HR9820530001; Ziauddin Sardar, ed., The Revenge of Athena: Science, Exploitation and the Third World (London: Mansell, 1988); Zaheer Baber, The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996); William K. Storey, “Introduction,” in Scientific Aspects of European Expansion, ed. William K. Storey (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1996), xiii–xxi; Dhruv Raina, “From West to Non-West? Basalla’s Three-Stage Model Revisited,” Science as Culture 8, no. 4 (1999): 497–516, https://doi.org/10.1080/09505439909526560; Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Kapil Raj, “Colonial Encounters and the Forging of New Knowledge and National Identities: Great Britain and India, 1760–1850,” Osiris 15, no. 1 (2000): 119–134, https://doi.org/10.1086/649322.

[23] Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969). See also Joseph Needham, “The Historian of Science as Ecumenical Man: A Meditation in the Shingon Temple of Kongōsammai-in 金剛三昧院 on Kōyasan,” in Chinese Science: Explorations of an Ancient Tradition, ed. Shigeru Nakayama and Nathan Sivin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973), 1–8.

[24] Dhruv Raina, “After Exceptionalism and Heritage: Thinking through the Multiple Histories of Knowledge,” in 1001 Distortions: How (Not) to Narrate History of Science, Medicine, and Technology in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Sonja Brentjes, Taner Edis, and Lutz Richter-Bernburg (Würzburg: Ergon, 2016), 25–38.

[25] The core premise that these three cognitive movements share is that science is not just a social activity but that, contra positivism, scientific knowledge and theories are shaped by social conditions and that even scientific facts have a social life. See Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: University Press, 1986 [1979]); Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Culture and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

[26] Dhruv Raina, Images and Contexts: The Historiography of Science and Modernity in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).

[27] Harding, Is Science Multicultural?

[28] Steven Shapin, “‘Nibbling at the Teats of Science’: Edinburgh and the Diffusion of Science in the 1830s,” in Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780–1850, ed. Ian Inkster and Jack Morrell (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 151–178.

[29] Sandra Harding, Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

[30] Raina, “After Exceptionalism and Heritage.”

[31] Patrick Petitjean, “Needham, Anglo-French Civilities and Ecumenical Science,” in Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph Needham, ed. S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 152–197; Raina, “After Exceptionalism and Heritage.”

[32] The history of decolonization, prior to our own time, in South Asia can be mapped onto three phases. The first phase commences during the first half of the nineteenth century and is marked by the struggle to establish new universities of teaching and research with a revised curriculum; the second phase is that of political decolonization; the third sees the ascent of postcolonial theory in the late 1970s and 1980s.

[33] One could speak of a French tradition of discussing the importance of place in knowledge-making that extends from the work of Michel Foucault (from the time that he calls his “Bachelard-Canguilhem network phase”) to that of Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour. For an account of the relationship between the work of the Bachelard-Canguilhem network and that of Foucault, see Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 9–54. On the other hand, Jürgen Habermas was concerned with the relationship between knowledge, human interests, and the public sphere. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1989 [1962]).

[34] See Peter Burke, “Sociologies and Histories of Knowledge: An Introduction,” in A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 1–17.

[35] For theories of science as a social construct, see David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Barry Barnes and David Edge, ed., Science in Context: Readings in the Sociology of Science (Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, 1982); Dominique Pestre, “Pour une histoire sociale et culturelle des sciences: Nouvelles définitions, nouveaux objets, nouvelles pratiques” [For a social and cultural history of sciences: New definitions, new objects, new practices], Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 50, no. 3 (May–June 1995): 487–522, https://doi.org/10.3406/ahess.1995.279379. On relativism and the subversion of science’s epistemic authority, see Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); and Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Impostures intellectuelles [Intellectual deceptions] (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997).

[36] Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (London: Free Association Books, 1987); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978).

[37] See Ronny Ambjörnsson, “East and West: On the Construction of a European Identity,” VEST 8, no. 4 (1995): 97–111; and David Pingree, “Hellenophilia versus History of Science,” Isis 83, no. 4 (1992): 554–563, https://doi.org/10.1086/356288. Both these articles appeared in special issues of these journals that discussed Bernal’s Black Athena.

[38] Escobar, “Development and the Anthropology of Modernity”; and Adebayo Williams, “The Postcolonial Flaneur and Other Fellow-travelers: Conceits for a Narrative of Redemption,” Third World Quarterly 18, no. 5 (1997): 821–841, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436599714614.

[39] Claude Alphonso Alvares, Homo Faber: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West from 1500 to the Present Day (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980); and Wolfgang Sachs, ed., The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (London: Zed Books, 1992).

[40] See Ashis Nandy, “Introduction: Science as a Reason of State,” in Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity, ed. Ashis Nandy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1–23; Shiv Visvanathan, “Atomic Physics: The Career of an Imagination,” in Science, Hegemony and Violence, 113–166; and Vandana Shiva, “Reductionist Science as Epistemological Violence,” in Science, Hegemony and Violence, 232–256. Nandy himself refers to the writings of Amilcar Cabral, Escobar, and Frantz Fanon in his work.

[41] See Harding, The Postcolonial Science and Technology Reader.

[42] Harding, Is Science Multicultural?; and Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Even though decoloniality sets itself apart from postcolonial theory, it is evident that both have the practice of discarding the hegemony of Eurocentric premises in common.

[43] Patrick Petitjean, Catherine Jami, and Anne Marie Moulin, ed., Science and Empires: Historical Studies about Scientific Development and European Expansion (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992).

[44] Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); and Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, ed., The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: From the mid-19th Century to the Present Day (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

[45] Shiv Visvanathan, “The Strange Quest of Joseph Needham,” in Situating the History of Science, 198–219.

[46] Shiv Visvanathan, “The Search for Cognitive Justice,” Seminar 597 (May 2009), accessed October 15, 2024, https://www.india-seminar.com/2009/597/597_shiv_visvanathan.htm.

[47] Visvanathan, “The Search for Cognitive Justice.”

[48] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (London: Routledge, 2016).

[49] Catherine E. Walsh and Walter D. Mignolo, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” trans. Michael Ennis, Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–580, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/23906; Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” trans. Sonia Therborn, Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2007): 168–178, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353; Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Decoloniality as the Future of Africa,” History Compass 13, no. 10 (October 2015): 485–496, https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12264.

[50] Santos, Epistemologies of the South, 237.

[51] Santos, Epistemologies of the South, 237.

[52] Santos, Epistemologies of the South, 42.

[53] Santos, Epistemologies of the South, viii–ix.

[54] Santos, Epistemologies of the South, ix. For more of Santos’s discussion on the Frankfurt School, see Santos, Epistemologies of the South, 40, 71.

[55] Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Decolonizing Critical Theory? Epistemological Justice, Progress, Reparations,” Critical Times 4, no. 1 (April 2021): 73–89; 74, https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-8855227.

[56] Bhambra, “Decolonizing Critical Theory,” 74. Miranda Fricker theorizes about two kinds of epistemic injustice—testimonial and hermeneutical. See Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

[57] Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr., “Introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017), 1–9; 1.

[58] Ashis Nandy, Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1980); and Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India (London: Zed Books, 1988).

[59] Santos, Epistemologies of the South, 42.

[60] Sanjay Seth, Leela Gandhi, and Michael Dutton, “Postcolonial Studies: A Beginning …,” Postcolonial Studies 1, no. 1 (1998): 7–11, https://doi.org/10.1080/13688799890200.

[61] Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (March 2016): 4–22; 5, https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124.

[62] Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn,” 6–7.

[63] Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn,” 8.

[64] Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn,” 8.

[65] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledge,” Eurozine, June 29, 2007, accessed October 15, 2024, 1–42, https://www.eurozine.com/beyond-abyssal-thinking/.

[66] Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues,” Postcolonial Studies 17, no. 2 (2014): 115–121; 115, https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2014.966414.

[67] Santos, Epistemologies of the South, 118.

[68] Raina, Images and Contexts.

[69] Shapin, “‘Nibbling at the Teats of Science’”; and Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

[70] Sheila Jasanoff, “Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society,” in States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order, ed. Sheila Jasanoff (London: Routledge, 2004), 13–45.

[71] Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).

[72] Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge.

[73] Bhambra, “Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues,” 117–118.

[74] Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.”

[75] See Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; Baber, The Science of Empire; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; and Raina, “After Exceptionalism and Heritage.”

[76] Santos, Epistemologies of the South, 189.

[77] Dhruv Raina, “The Vocation of Indigenous Knowledge and Sciences as Metaconcepts,” in Engaging Transculturality: Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies, ed. Laila Abu-Er-Rub, Christiane Brosius, Sebastian Meurer, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos, and Susan Richter (London: Routledge, 2019), 277–290.

[78] Raina, “The Vocation of Indigenous Knowledge,” 277–278.

[79] Sheila Jasanoff, “The Essential Parallel between Science and Democracy,” Seed Magazine, February 17, 2009, accessed January 28, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20100114092039/http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_essential_parallel_between_science_and_democracy/; and Dhruv Raina, “Science and Democracy,” in The Public Intellectual in India, ed. Chandra Chari and Uma Iyengar (New Delhi: Aleph, 2015), 62–78.

[80] Bhambra, “Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues,” 117–119.

[81] Harding, Science and Social Inequality.

[82] See, for instance, Gurminder K. Bhambra, Connected Sociologies (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 138.

[83] Yehuda Elkana, “A Programmatic Attempt at an Anthropology of Knowledge,” in Sciences and Cultures, ed. Everett Mendelsohn and Yehuda Elkana (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981), 1–76; see also Yehuda Elkana, “Universities and Foundations,” unpublished lecture delivered at the Meeting of the Hague Club in Oslo, September 8, 2005.

[84] Bhambra, “Decolonizing Critical Theory.”

[85] Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.”

[86] See James Poskett, Horizons: A Global History of Science (London: Penguin, 2022).

[87] Needham, The Grand Titration.

[88] Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).

[89] As Santos points out, traditional African medicine is not an alternative to modern biomedicine, but a dialogue between the two clarifies “the contexts and the practices in which each operates and the way they conceive of health and sickness and overcome ignorance (as undiagnosed illness) through applied knowledge (as cure or healing).” See Santos, Epistemologies of the South, 190.

[90] Helen E. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Helen E. Longino, The Fate of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

[91] Patrick Baert, Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 166.

[92] Baert, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 70–71.

[93] Santos, Epistemologies of the South, 28.

[94] Gregory Blue, “Science(s), Civilization(s), Historie(s): A Continuing Dialogue with Joseph Needham,” in Situating the History of Science, 29–72; 53.