Conference Review
Are We Ready to Recast the History of Science?
20 May 2009
(a) Summary
There has been a growing body of work in the history of science which seeks to reposition ideas, knowledge and science in world history. Scholars are stressing a range of scales: the global, the regional, the local, as useful ones in making sense of the circulation, utilisation and reception of science. Non-European peoples are being brought into the narrative even as the world outside Europe is placed in sharper focus, in order to challenge the standard story of how Europe saw the emergence of science. Yet this new work has not been brought into the centre of the history of science, and is usually published in specialist area studies journals. The impact of this work is also being tempered with some serious methodological questions, about source criticism, translation, contextualisation and outreach.
This meeting brought together a younger generation of scholars who are seeking to engage in this exciting enterprise of rethinking science’s place on the world stage. All the participants had either published or were working on their first books. The papers that were presented will be published as a set of strategic methodological essays in Isis, the leading journal of the history of science. At the conclusion of the meeting, several senior scholars in the history of science were of the view that the conference marked an important intervention: science’s history would not look the same again. The need to displace Europe had been clearly established. The closing commentator noted that any general undergraduate course in the history of science – from Galileo to the Atomic Bomb – needed reworking.
(b) Conference Review
The intellectual agenda of the meeting was met in large measure. There was a general feeling that the published essays from this meeting would become required reading for historians of science, even at undergraduate level. The meeting generated a great deal of discussion about the best methods to be utilised to forge an alternative and less Euro-centric history of science.
On the one hand, the importance of reflexivity emerged as key. For there have been previous attempts to craft a global history of science, tied to the natural history and natural philosophy. Instead of attempting a total history of science, contributors wished to aim for a more pluralised picture of science’s place in world history. There should be room for an account of how knowledge is shared, exchanged and made mobile; at the same time, the need to attend to locality and immobility emerged as important. While some types of knowledge have been circulated over vast distances, others have resisted such processes of displacement and remained pretty localised. As far as methodology is concerned, the need to turn to anthropology emerged as an important point. Yet the need to be critical in this engagement was established– for it was out of an earlier collaboration of anthropologists and historians that the idea of a lesser type of indigenous or folk knowledge emerged in history.
