Science &
Technology in the post-colonial world:
Post-colonialism
Maria G. Mandourari
‘[…] even the most local studies should imply a network, suggesting connections with other sites through traffic of persons, practices and objects’ (Warwick Anderson 2002: 652)
Post-colonialism
Post-colonial Studies
Post-colonial Theory
Cultural legacies of colonialism and of imperialism
Contemporary history
modes of cultural perception
Historical sub-disciplines:
a) economic history
b) agrarian history
c) environmental history
d) history of medicine
Medical & environmental history
Identify & investigate technology related issues
“[…] an engagement of science studies and postcolonial theory would not simply provide us with instances of Western science and technology in different settings - potentially it might even 'colonialize' & destabilize conventional accounts of Western technoscience at
'home' Warwick Anderson, Introduction:PostcolonialTechnoscience, Social Studies of Science, 32: 5/6 (2002), pp. 643-658, 648
Challenge to diffusionist theories of technoscientific development
critics of development practising an anthropology of the modernities mutating beyond Europe
New modes of analysis
New world of social investigation
“History of the present” Systemic understandings of political
economies from local cultural worlds
Hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, complex transactions, displacements and fragmentations
Linking local and global identities
Analytical tools
west/non-west, developed/developing, or north/south techno-cultural divides
Science in motion Rarely mobilised explicitly to
explain the transaction, translation & transformation of science & technology