CANCELLED: Minakshi Menon — Śāstra, Science, “Scientific Temper”
Tuesday, April 26, 2022 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CEST/GMT+2A Science & Religion Project Series Talk
The knowledge-making practices to which Europeans gave the name “science” became closely entangled with European colonization. In India, British colonizers found systematic forms of knowledge making that they deprecated as inferior to European science, while simultaneously converting them into European objects of knowledge to assist colonization. This process resulted in the development of “colonial sciences”, different knowledge forms brought together for purposes of colonial governance and resource extraction. What were the indigenous knowledge forms that the British encountered in India? How did they map onto the English word science? Did the making of the colonial sciences affect developments in post-colonial Indian science and technology? This lecture will consider these questions in order to understand what “science” means in India today.
Minakshi Menon is historian of science who studies natural knowledge making in colonial South Asia. She is a member of Research Group Krause at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, where she leads a Working Group on the seventeenth-century Dutch herbal the Hortus indicus malabaricus. She is currently working on a book manuscript with the working title Empiricism’s Empire: Natural Knowledge Making, State Making and Governance in East India Company India (1784-1840). She recently edited a special issue of the journal South Asian History and Culture on “Indigenous Knowledges and Colonial Sciences in South Asia” (2022).
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