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