This paper centres the colonial pre-histories of ‘the digital’ to complicate posthumanist theorisations of subjectivity. Posthumanism helpfully undercuts human exceptionalism by presenting subjectivity as always-already co-constituted by technology. However, this paper argues that it insufficiently engages the human as the historico-political effect of negating the assumed non-technological colonial Other. Focusing on liberal humanism between the 16th and 19th centuries, the paper theorises the modern human as bound up in ‘technological onticide’. The presumed absence of technology became a (theo-centric, ratio-centric, bio-centric) (...) measure of the Other’s sub-humanity, at the same time as this Other was expected to be humanised through its technologisation. An emphasis on technological onticide complicates universalist theories of subjectivity that take it as always a matter of human-technology co-constitution. The paper argues that, to confront the legacies of ontological murder, conceptual room needs to be made for inhuman, counterhuman or unhuman theories of subjectivity. (shrink)

This essay has two purposes. One is to present a detailed analysis of a historical example to defend the validity of the idea of universal rationality. Although diverse arguments have been offered...

In the academic debate on infrastructures in the Global South, there is a broad consensus that (post)colonial legacies present a major challenge for a transition towards more inclusive, sustainable and adapted modes of providing services. Yet, relatively little is known about the emergence and evolution of infrastructures in former colonies. Until a decade ago, most historical studies followed Daniel Headrick’s (1981) “tools of empire” thesis, painting—with broad brush strokes—a picture of infrastructures as instruments for advancing the colonial project of exploitation (...) and subordination of non-European peoples and environments. This paper explores new research perspectives beyond this straightforward, ‘diffusionist’ perspective on technology transfer. In order to do so, it presents and discusses more recent studies which focus on interactive transfer processes as well as mechanisms of appropriation, and which increasingly combine approaches from imperial history, environmental history, and history of technology.There is much to gain from unpacking the changing motives and ideologies behind technology transfer; tracing the often contested and negotiated flows of ideas, technologies and knowledge within multilayered global networks; investigating the manifold ways in which infrastructures reflected and (re)produced colonial spaces and identities; critically reflecting on the utility of large (socio)technical systems (LTS) for the Global South; and approaching infrastructures in the (post)colonial world through entangled histories of technology and the environment. Following David Arnold’s (2005) plea for a “more interactive, culturally-nuanced, multi-sited debate” on technology in the non-Western world, the paper offers fresh insights for a broader debate about how infrastructures work within specific parameters of time, place and culture. (shrink)

(1998). Review of ’colonial technology: Science and the transfer of innovation to Australia’ by Jan Todd. Social Epistemology: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 135-141.

Drees makes a strong case for the importance of the humanities in the university, providing an excellent resource for anyone in the Western Academy. Its usefulness for those who want to work outside the West is limited, however, because he does not engage with literature that challenges its methods and disciplines. If we are to have a positive global impact, we need to do more than clarify existing boundaries, we need to blur them, beginning with an examination of inherent biases (...) reflected in its history, structure, and content. This article focuses on one critique, a decolonial critique of the Western view that ontology precedes epistemology (an external reality produces knowledge). Outside the modern Western Academy, epistemologies create ontologies (epistemic creations/stories about the world give us a sense of the world and its materiality). I describe a relational understanding of knowledge and how this changes our understanding of the humanities and our epistemic responsibilities. (shrink)

The apparently universal presence of digital technology is an insufficient condition for a global civilization. An examination of the distribution of the physical hardware of cyberspace reveals deep continuities with earlier patterns of international commerce and information flow, which contradict the supposedly revolutionary nature of the global information network. These patterns have reflected and continue to reflect hierarchical power relations—not global harmony—between the technological haves and have-nots.

In delineating a trajectory of human history, anthropology and other social sciences have tended to describe traditional life in particular geographic terms while leaving modem experience universal in scope. Studies of science and technology, while helping to locate and describe centers of modern practice, have less frequently explored their edges. Using a case study of the location of the primary French/european space launch site in French Guiana, this article examines technologies associated with the development of space beyond the atmosphere by (...) evaluating the impact of rockets and satellites on the construction of human space on the ground. Exploring the social significance of a modem sky and its transformation of one tropical margin into a technical center, the question of where things are becomes one of how they are defined. The modem appears less a placeless universal center and more a moving boundary, one dividing humans, nature, and technology into less stable domains. (shrink)

Whether it pertains to what is not considered, what cannot be determined, what is not allowed to be known, or what is deliberately concealed, absences figure as the constant shadows of what is made present by social research. This article explores the relation between what is presented and what is not by treating it first as a vexing conundrum for representation and then as a vehicle for understanding. The matters under examination include what is written about the social world as (...) well as the methods of writing employed. This article seeks an orientation toward both aspects that attends to the binds, contradictions, and possibilities of depicting what is missing. That involves addressing how authors labor to render absences present, the criteria for assessment, as well as the metaphors that guide activities. (shrink)

The “centre-periphery” relationship historically structured scientific exchanges between metropolis and province, between the fount of empire and its outposts. But the exchange, if regarded merely as a one-way flow of scientific information, ignores both the politics of knowledge and the nature of its appropriation. Arguably, imperial structures do not entirely determine scientific practices and the exchange of knowledge. Several factors neutralise the over-determining influence of politics—and possibly also the normative values of science—on scientific practice.In examining these four examples of Indian (...) scientists in encounters with their peers at the centre, exceptional scientists are seen in a social context where the epistemology of science supposedly describes its practice. Imperialism imposes practices and patronage, which moderate the exchange of scientific knowledge. But, at Level Two, the politics of knowledge and the patterns of patronage within it mediate exchanges between the centre and the periphery.The first step in reconfiguring exchanges between centre and periphery —in this case, between Europe and India during the period 1850 to 1930— is to recognise the relation between the acquisition of resources and the maintenance of legitimacy and identity.67 Political life is not confined to the core of political institutions.68 Second, in examining science as practised in the colonies, it is necessary to see stages of scientific institutions, whose development structures the exchange.From the encounter of Ramchandra and De Morgan, it is evident that the centre-periphery framework should be separated from the models of transmission embedded within it. The notion of “translation” helps to suggest that scientists bring personal motives and meanings to each encounter. Ramchandra, for example, sought a novel method of teaching Indians calculus, while De Morgan's interest lay in finding a place for algebra in a liberal education.The hierarchy inherent in the centre-periphery framework compels the conclusion that, at Level Two, the autodidact outside the institutions of science must have his work presented to scientists at the centre by authoritative figures from the centre. This is not mainly a question of imperialism, but rather of patronage. The peripheral scientist could not be granted direct entry into the collegial circle until his efforts at the periphery could be translated into the language and concerns of the central community. Ramanujan's enigmatic formulas were translated into the language of analysis by Hardy, which enabled the creation of a field to which Hardy was committed. Scientists from the periphery who were already part of the circle by virtue of their training, were not necessarily subject to the same degree of attestation as other scientists from the periphery. P.C. Ray, with his DSc from Edinburgh, and his position at Calcutta University, had less difficulty in winning the trust of colleagues at the centre, even when he returned to India. On the contrary, remaining at the periphery, he moved from a context of patronage to a sphere of competition. In addition, Ray's collegiality, even at Level Two, was more comprehensive, and connected him with Level One.Eventually, the professional Indian science graduate found collegiality within the international community of scientists. Saha's self-imposed progressive nationalism constrained his identification with the centre and made him a potential competitor instead. Once having achieved eminence in the world of science, C.V. Raman and Saha shifted their work to journals of physics published in India in order to further the cause of physics research in their own country.69To go beyond the limitations of the centre-periphery model, it is necessary not merely to examine exchanges between scientists functioning in a “shared epistemological universe”,70 but also to recognise the part played by institutions, the experience of colonialism, and the forms of patronage characterising both colonialism and science. Put another way, although there is relative epistemological autonomy within the disciplinary research communities of science, the interplay between knowledge and power structures this exchange.The scientific links between colonial India and Britain at the turn of the century were mediated by structures which prefigured change. Does structure determine all? If it does, we are left with an Orientalist reconstruction of the docile native, and a passive cultural medium into which science percolates. But this neglects the role of scientists in creating new structures within which they worked. A middle position—one more sensitive to the exigencies of colonial scientific life—would be one where the participants are seen not as the dupes of “structure nor the potentates of action”, but as occupying a ground between the two.71. (shrink)

In contrast to the European historical experience, Africa’s urban infrastructural systems are characterised by stagnation long before demand has been saturated. Water infrastructures have been stabilised as systems predominantly providing services for elites, with millions of poor people lacking basic services in the cities. What is puzzling is that so little emphasis has been placed on innovation and the adaptation of the colonial technological paradigm to better suit the local and current socio-economic contexts. Based on historical case studies of Kampala (...) and Nairobi, this paper argues that the lack of innovation in African urban water infrastructure can be understood using Pinch and Bijker’s concept of technological closure, and by looking at water technology from its embedded values and ideology. Large-scale water technology became part of African leaders’ strategies to build prosperous nations and cities after decolonisation and the ideological purpose of infrastructure may have been much more important than previously understood. Water technology had reached a state of closure in Europe and then came to represent modernisation and progress in the colonial context. It has continued to serve such a similar symbolic purpose after independence, with old norms essentially being preserved. Recent sector reforms have defined problems predominantly as of economic and institutional nature while state actors have become ‘unseeing’ vis-á-vis controversies within the technological systems themselves. In order to induce socio-technical innovation towards equality in urban infrastructure services, it will be necessary to understand the broader incentive structure that governs the relevant social groups, such as governments, donors, water suppliers and the consumers, as well as power-structures and political accountability. (shrink)

In contrast to the European historical experience, Africa’s urban infrastructural systems are characterised by stagnation long before demand has been saturated. Water infrastructures have been stabilised as systems predominantly providing services for elites, with millions of poor people lacking basic services in the cities. What is puzzling is that so little emphasis has been placed on innovation and the adaptation of the colonial technological paradigm to better suit the local and current socio-economic contexts. Based on historical case studies of Kampala (...) and Nairobi, this paper argues that the lack of innovation in African urban water infrastructure can be understood using Pinch and Bijker’s concept of technological closure, and by looking at water technology from its embedded values and ideology. Large-scale water technology became part of African leaders’ strategies to build prosperous nations and cities after decolonisation and the ideological purpose of infrastructure may have been much more important than previously understood. Water technology had reached a state of closure in Europe and then came to represent modernisation and progress in the colonial context. It has continued to serve such a similar symbolic purpose after independence, with old norms essentially being preserved. Recent sector reforms have defined problems predominantly as of economic and institutional nature while state actors have become ‘unseeing’ vis-á-vis controversies within the technological systems themselves. In order to induce socio-technical innovation towards equality in urban infrastructure services, it will be necessary to understand the broader incentive structure that governs the relevant social groups, such as governments, donors, water suppliers and the consumers, as well as power-structures and political accountability. (shrink)

Drawing on the analytic of the “colonial matrix of power” developed by Aníbal Quijano within the Latin American modernity/coloniality research program, this article theorises how a system of coloniality underpins the structuring logic of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. We develop a framework for critiquing the regimes of global labour exploitation and knowledge extraction that are rendered invisible through discourses of the purported universality and objectivity of AI. ​​Through bringing the political economy literature on AI production into conversation with scholarly work (...) on decolonial AI and the modernity/coloniality research program, we advance three main arguments. First, the global economic and political power imbalances in AI production are inextricably linked to the continuities of historical colonialism, constituting the colonial supply chain of AI. Second, this is produced through an international division of digital labour that extracts value from majority world labour for the benefit of Western technology companies. Third, this perpetuates hegemonic knowledge production through Western values and knowledge that marginalises non-Western alternatives within AI’s production and limits the possibilities for decolonising AI. By locating the production of AI systems within the colonial matrix of power, we contribute to critical and decolonial literature on the legacies of colonialism in AI and the hierarchies of power and extraction that shape the development of AI today. (shrink)

Drawing on an analysis of German national cybersecurity policy, this paper argues that cybersecurity has become a key site in which states mobilize science and technology to produce state power. Contributing to science and technology studies work on technoscience and statecraft, I develop the concepts of “territorialization projects” and “digital territory” to capture how the production of state power in the digital age increasingly relies on technoscientific expertise about information infrastructure, shifting tasks of government into the domain of computer scientists (...) and network engineers. The notion of territorialization projects describes states’ ongoing struggle to mobilize science and engineering in order to transform globally distributed information infrastructure into bounded national territory and invest it with patriotic meaning: making digital territory. Digital territory, in other words, is nationalized information infrastructure: it includes building and monopolizing infrastructure as well as normative ideas about nation—who is a digital citizen, and who isn’t; or what constitutes “good” and “bad” digital citizens. Nationalizing information infrastructure and placing statecraft into the hands of scientists and engineers might indicate an emerging form of “techno-nationalism”—a combination of nationalist and technocratic tendencies—raising urgent questions for STS scholarship to investigate the consequences of territorialization projects for justice, democracy, and civic life. (shrink)

Even as the conventional energy system is fundamentally challenged by the “energy-environment crisis,” its adherents have presented the prospect of “abundant” and purportedly “green” nuclear power as part of a strategy to address the crisis. Surveying the development of nuclear power in India, this article finds that it is predisposed to centralization and secrecy, that nuclear power as energy policy is based on a presumption that overabundance is imperative for viable forms of social and economic development; its institutionalization has tended (...) to reduce deliberations on energy policy and human well-being to narrowly technocratic terms. Given these proclivities, nuclear power, as evaluated in this article, is considered unlikely to facilitate a viable response to the energy-environment crisis. Alternatives are thus surveyed here to include the sustainable energy utility and the capability approach as well as synergies between them, to challenge the offer of nuclear power as a response to the energy-environment crisis. (shrink)

ArgumentMutuality in “contact zones” has been emphasized in cross-cultural knowledge interaction in re-evaluating power dynamics between centers and peripheries and in showing the hybridity of modern science. This paper proposes an analytical pause on this attempt to better invalidate centers by paying serious attention to the limits of mutuality in transcultural knowledge interaction imposed by asymmetries of power. An unusually reciprocal interaction between a Japanese forester, Ishidoya Tsutomu, at the colonial forestry department, and his Korean subordinate Chung Tyaihyon is chosen (...) to highlight an inescapable asymmetry induced by the imperial power structure. Ishidoya, positioning himself as a settler expert, as opposed to a scientist in Tokyo, pursued localized knowledge in growing interaction with Chung, resulting in Ishidoya's career change as a herbalist focusing on traditional medicine and Chung's leadership in Korean-only botanizing. However, their mutual transformations, limited by asymmetric constraints on their choices, did not unsettle the imperial power structure or the centrality of centers. (shrink)

China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), first announced by President Xi Jinping in 2013, has attracted widespread attention, with much discussion as to its meaning and intention. This article argues that one of the best ways to understand the BRI is to see it in the context of China’s two-thousand-year history as an empire. What kind of empire was the Chinese Empire? How did it see itself, and what was its characteristic mode of action? What was the meaning of the (...) “tribute system”? The celebrated voyages (1405–1433) of the Ming admiral Zheng He are taken as a typical example of Chinese imperial behaviour (rather than being seen, as is common, as an aberrant and exceptional episode). By examining this and other aspects of Chinese imperial history, it is hoped that some light might be shed on what the Chinese leadership as in mind with its Belt and Road Initiative, and what the rest of the world should expect from it. (shrink)

Mirroring the set of questions explored in the special report in which this essay appears and through a critical Cree standpoint, this essay poses three provocations intended to upend habits of thought relative to notions of goodness, biocitizenship, and the democratization of scientific pursuit. Styled as foreplay, the essay warms the reader up to the desirable possibility of being a bad biocitizen. I briefly establish the colonial conditions under which the fields of genomic science, biomedical research, and bioethics have been (...) made possible. I then offer Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society as an alternative project aimed at disturbing the territorial, political, and morally inflected claims of nation‐states and their citizens, research institutions and their researchers, and bioeconomies and their consumers to continue to possess Indigenous territories and to study Indigenous bodies while controlling the bioethical principles, protocols, and policies for doing so. The work of Indigenous STS seeks to break down the bounded knowledges of disciplinary reason and map the networked interrelations of problems inhibiting and solutions strengthening the empowerment of Indigenous peoplehoods. (shrink)

This article interrogates Andrew Feenberg’s thesis that modern technology is in need of ‘re-aestheticization’. The notion that modern technology requires aesthetic critique connects his political analysis of micro-contexts of social shaping to his wider concern with civilization change. The former involves a modified constructionism, in which the motives, values and beliefs of proximal agents are understood in terms of their wider sociological significance. This remedies a widely acknowledged blind-spot of conventional constructionism, enabling Feenberg to identify democratic potential in progressive agency (...) at the scene of technology design. Feenberg argues that the aesthetics of naturalistic modernism may serve as a bridge between such interventions and cultural transformation. Referring to developments in design culture, especially as this relates to the human-machine interface on digital artefacts, the article suggests that this part of Feenberg’s argument has been falsified. This kind of aesthetic modernism is hegemonic in contemporary design and it has not brought about significant progressive advance. In conclusion, the article suggests a different approach to aesthetic critique that is based on difference rather than wholeness, and on the principle that there is no inherent correspondence of aesthetic standards and ethics in technology design. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe circulation of science across cultural boundaries involves the construction of various representations by the various actors, who each account for their involvement in the process. The historiography of the transmission of European science to China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has long been dominated by one particular narrative: that of the Jesuit missionaries who were the main go-betweens for these two centuries. This fact has contributed to shaping Western images of China's history and science up to the (...) present day.To retrieve the multifaceted history of this transmission, more than one discourse needs to be taken into account. Even within the Society of Jesus, representations changed with the evolution of patronage of the mission, and the concomitant building up of state-sponsored science in Europe. Chinese sources yield different pictures, accounting for the reception of Western learning — rather than “European science” — in terms of integration rather than of conversion, and legitimizing it first by the Jesuits' status as scholars, then by the idea that Western learning was of Chinese origin. This shift corresponded to the imperial appropriation of this learning. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper discusses one aspect of the context in which atomic physics developed in Japan between 1905 and 1931. It argues that during this period, there was a social context in which atomic physics was valued as a study of the electron and was thus relevant to electrical engineering. To demonstrate this, I first show that after the Russo-Japanese War, electrical engineering was deemed a valuable and viable field of research in Japan. Second, I show that physicists wrote textbooks and (...) popular accounts about the electron, covering topics from both atomic physics and electrical engineering and presenting the former as relevant to the latter. Finally, as an example of how atomic physics partially emerged from this context, I discuss the group of Kujirai Tsunetarō, an electrical engineer who worked in the physics department of the Institute for Physical and Chemical Research. From Kujirai's group, Nishina Yoshio started his career and became the most important Japanese atomic and nuclear physicist of the 1930s. (shrink)

This article discusses how the way in which post-Enlightenment humans tend to relate to material objects is a fundamental aspect of modern capitalism. The difficulties that conventional academic disciplines have in grasping the societal and political aspect of ‘technology’ stem from the predominant Cartesian paradigm that distinguishes the domain of material objects from that of social relations of exchange. This Cartesian paradigm has constrained the Marxian analysis of capital accumulation from extending the concept of fetishism to the domain of technology. (...) Both Marxian and mainstream thought represent technological objects as empowered by their intrinsic properties, which derive from human ingenuity and tend to progress over time. To transcend this paradigm will be possible only through the kind of post-Cartesian perspective on material artefacts that has been championed by Bruno Latour. However, Latour’s own neglect of technological systems as social strategies of exploitation reflects his lack of concern with global inequalities. (shrink)

Technologies developed since the late eighteenth century differ from earlier forms of technology by being as dependent on world market prices of labour, land and other biophysical resources as on human inventiveness. Yet, whether their outlook is mainstream or heterodox, modern people tend to view technology simply as ingenuity applied to nature, while oblivious of the extent to which it is contingent on the asymmetric exchange of resources in global society. Although inextricably entwined in the real world, the phenomena studied (...) by economics and engineering are kept conceptually separate. This is achieved by disregarding the materiality of world trade. Modern technologies are not just instruments for solving problems but social strategies for redistributing time and space in world society, displacing work and environmental loads to sectors of the world system where wages are lower and environmental legislation less rigorous. Technology should not remain extraneous to social theory. A sociometabolic reconceptualisation of technology is particularly essential for critics of global capitalism. (shrink)

In the academic debate on infrastructures in the Global South, there is a broad consensus that (post)colonial legacies present a major challenge for a transition towards more inclusive, sustainable and adapted modes of providing services. Yet, relatively little is known about the emergence and evolution of infrastructures in former colonies. Until a decade ago, most historical studies followed Daniel Headrick’s (1981) “tools of empire” thesis, painting—with broad brush strokes—a picture of infrastructures as instruments for advancing the colonial project of exploitation (...) and subordination of non-European peoples and environments. This paper explores new research perspectives beyond this straightforward, ‘diffusionist’ perspective on technology transfer. In order to do so, it presents and discusses more recent studies which focus on interactive transfer processes as well as mechanisms of appropriation, and which increasingly combine approaches from imperial history, environmental history, and history of technology.There is much to gain from unpacking the changing motives and ideologies behind technology transfer; tracing the often contested and negotiated flows of ideas, technologies and knowledge within multilayered global networks; investigating the manifold ways in which infrastructures reflected and (re)produced colonial spaces and identities; critically reflecting on the utility of large (socio)technical systems (LTS) for the Global South; and approaching infrastructures in the (post)colonial world through entangled histories of technology and the environment. Following David Arnold’s (2005) plea for a “more interactive, culturally-nuanced, multi-sited debate” on technology in the non-Western world, the paper offers fresh insights for a broader debate about how infrastructures work within specific parameters of time, place and culture. (shrink)

An ethnographic approach to the South Indian festival Ayudha Puja reveals that the celebration plays a role in the construction of scientific communities. Ayudha Puja has the ability to absorb westerners, non-Hindus, and non-Brahmins into Indian science and engineering communities and is thus widely practiced in South Indian industry and academia. The practice of Ayudha Puja thus parallels what M. N. Srinivas labels “Sanskritization.” Within India, the process of Sanskritization refers to the adoption of high-caste habits and diet by upwardly (...) mobile lower-caste communities. While not actually an example of Sanskritization, participation in Ayudha Puja is analogous to that process: by joining a Hindu rite within the scientific and professional workspace, outsiders become part of local laboratory, department, or office culture. Such practices reveal the need for scholars to investigate scientific community building outside the domain of how scientists reveal new facts about the world. (shrink)

Scholarship has grown increasingly nuanced in its grappling with the intersections of religion, science, and technology but requires a new paradigm. Contemporary approaches to specific technologies reveal a wide variety of perspectives but remain too often committed to typological classification. To be vigilant of our obligation to understand and reveal, scholars in the study of religion, science, and technology can adopt a hydra‐logical stance: we can recognize that there are cultural monsters possessing scientific, technological, and religious heads. These heads may (...) work with a common agenda or they might not. They might disagree, pulling their shared body back and forth in a public commotion that lays waste to their surroundings. They might see past one another or move in tandem—purposively or not. Evaluations of climate response and AI benefit from seeing how the various heads are inseparable: indeed, cutting one off simply promotes the growth of new heads. Methodological and analytical clarity, therefore, emerges in the transition from schemes of classification to the recognition of hydras. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the fact that AI is predominantly portrayed as white—in colour, ethnicity, or both. We first illustrate the prevalent Whiteness of real and imagined intelligent machines in four categories: humanoid robots, chatbots and virtual assistants, stock images of AI, and portrayals of AI in film and television. We then offer three interpretations of the Whiteness of AI, drawing on critical race theory, particularly the idea of the White racial frame. First, we examine the extent to which this (...) Whiteness might simply reflect the predominantly White milieus from which these artefacts arise. Second, we argue that to imagine machines that are intelligent, professional, or powerful is to imagine White machines because the White racial frame ascribes these attributes predominantly to White people. Third, we argue that AI racialised as White allows for a full erasure of people of colour from the White utopian imaginary. Finally, we examine potential consequences of the racialisation of AI, arguing it could exacerbate bias and misdirect concern. (shrink)

This paper identifies ‘savage numbers’ – number-like or number-replacing concepts and practices attributed to peoples viewed as civilizationally inferior – as a crucial and hitherto unrecognized body of evidence in the first two decades of the Victorian science of prehistory. It traces the changing and often ambivalent status of savage numbers in the period after the 1858–1859 ‘time revolution’ in the human sciences by following successive reappropriations of an iconic 1853 story from Francis Galton's African travels. In response to a (...) fundamental lack of physical evidence concerning prehistoric men, savage numbers offered a readily available body of data that helped scholars envisage great extremes of civilizational lowliness in a way that was at once analysable and comparable, and anecdotes like Galton's made those data vivid and compelling. Moreover, they provided a simple and direct means of conceiving of the progressive scale of civilizational development, uniting societies and races past and present, at the heart of Victorian scientific racism. (shrink)

The rise of chauvinist, bigoted and sectarian politics in India coincided with the critique and blanket dismissal of modern science by some Indian intellectuals. The elective affinities between these two developments and the larger global intellectual and politial context have been analyzed in great detail by Meera Nanda. This paper provides a critical examination and appreciation of the enormous intellectual and political significance of Nanda's work.