Science Across Regions in Asia

Neotraditional Sciences/Medicines
Session Leader: Projit Mukharji (Penn)

To prepare for discussion, please read the attached articles:

Jean-Paul Gaudilliére, "An Indian Path to Biocapital?: The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, Drug Patents, and the Reformulation Regime of Contemporary Ayurveda." East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal, Volume 8, Number 4 (December 2014), pp. 391-415.

David Hardiman, "Indian medical indigeneity: from nationalist assertion to the global market." Social History 34:3 (2009), 263-283.

Decolonization and the History of Science in East Asia
Lead Convenor: Mary Brazelton
 
This session builds on previous discussions of Asia as method and rethinking traditional divisions of time and space to ask: to what extent does the framework and vocabulary of decolonisation apply to the study of places and peoples identified with East Asia? How might we reckon with the imperial enterprises of China and Japan, as well as their resistance to subjugation by western peoples, in the modern period? A major point from our last session was the way in which European colonial legacies might inform definitions of science in important and long-obscured ways, and how this might inform our thinking about pre-colonial archives in the history of science. How should scholars parse the complex and 'hyper-imperial' nature of modern East Asian history when it comes to science studies? And how might the geopolitical events of the twentieth century have shaped the formation of Asian studies as a field - in the Anglophone and Western worlds, but also in China, Japan, and Korea - when it came to the formulation of questions about the history of science? 
 
For this session, we are again reading one case study, which provides a starting point for discussing methodological readings. Many of these focus on Chinese cases and settings, but our hope is that discussion will be wide-ranging. Before the session, please prepare one question about the readings or topic that you'd like to discuss.
 
Case Study: 
 
Shellen Xiao Wu, "Geography and the Reshaping of the Modern Chinese Empire," in Jeremy Adelman, ed., Empire and the Social Sciences: Global Histories of Knowledge, 2019.
 
Methodological readings:
 
Leigh Jenco, 'Teaching Chinese Political Thought is hard - is decolonising the curriculum the solution?'

Zhang Butian, "Translating History of Science Books into Chinese: Why? Which Ones? How?" Isis 109, no. 4 (Dec 2018): 782-88.

Lin Wen-yuan and John Law, 'A correlative STS: Lessons from a Chinese medical practice,' Social Studies of Science 44, no. 6 (Dec 2014): 801-24. We've also included the recent follow-up by Tereza Stöckelová and Jaroslav Klepal, "Chinese Medicine on the Move into Central Europe: A Contribution to the Debate on Correlativity and Decentering STS," East Asian Science, Technology and Society (2018) 12 (1): 57-79

 
Other readings of interest:

Ben Elman, 'China and the World History of Science, 1450-1770,' Education About Asia 12, no. 1 (2007): 40-44.
 
Fabio Lanza, "'America's Asia?' Revolution, Scholarship, and Asian Studies." In Asianisms: Regionalist Interactions and Asian Integration, ed. Marc Frey and Nicola Spakowski (Singapore: NUS, 2016).

Peter Perdue, "Writing the National History of Conquest," China Marches West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2005); also "Erasing the Empire, Re-racing the Nation: Racialism and Culturalism in Imperial China," in Imperial Formations, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, Peter Perdue (Santa Fe, NM: SAR, 2007).

Decolonial Methods in Precolonial History of Science
 
Lead Convenor: Shireen Hamza
 
The academic discipline of the history of science is increasingly focusing on “modern science”; in non-Western contexts, the modern is often defined in relation to European colonial history. In this session, we will focus on practices of researching and teaching about sciences in the periods before European colonialism. Unlike within the broader discipline of history, few historians of science have integrated the study of science in these periods with "postcolonial science studies" (Davis & Altschul 2009). 
 
For this session, we have selected one historical "case study," which will provide us a common ground on which to discuss the methodological readings (Ragab 2015). As you read, please think of one phrase related to decolonial methods in the history of science, and draw one (quick) map relevant to the history of any scientific tradition/discipline you have studied or researched. 
 
A fascinating, generative aspect of studying sources from this period is that knowledge about the natural world did not follow the disciplinary formations of science today. Historians must decide what to call science and why. What colonial and decolonial legacies inform the ways we define science (Harding 2011), especially in a period before our historical actors had to contend with that term? How does this relate to our contemporary ideas of who does science, as well as where and when? What definitions of science(s) can make this term inclusive of multiple ways of knowing and manipulating the natural world, across period and region? 
 
In our last session, we discussed the ways some political and intellectual trends had informed various kinds of Pan-Asianisms in the last century. The geographies of various literate scientific traditions could also be a powerful resource for us in remapping historical connectivities -- as well as disconnections -- across Asia, over a longue durée (Pollock 2011; Subrahmanyam 2016). What if we take more shared cosmologies. philosophical methodologies, medical procedures or navigation techniques as the basis for mapping regions outside of colonial imaginaries? How can the critical scholar engage and subvert ethno-nationalisms based on particular visions within the histories of science? How do we study and teach about non-literate/indigenous knowledge traditions in these periods? Are there modes of “reading against the grain” relevant to pre-colonial archives? Continuing to learn with critical indigenous theory, we will also discuss the politics and ethics of this kind of scholarship (Smith 1999).
 
Case Study:
 
Ragab, Ahmed. "One, two, or many sexes: sex differentiation in medieval Islamicate medical thought." Journal of the History of Sexuality 24, no. 3 (2015): 428-454.
 
Methodology Readings: 
 
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (Zed Books Ltd., 2013):  29-41 [Chapter One, especially the seciton "Is History Important for Indigenous Peoples?"]
 
Harding, Sandra, ed. The postcolonial science and technology studies reader (Duke University Press, 2011): 151-158. [Other Cultures' Sciences]
 
Pollock, Sheldon, ed. Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500–1800 (Duke University Press, 2011): 1-16 [Introduction]
 
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. "One Asia, or Many? Reflections from connected history." Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (2016): 5-43.
 
Recommended Readings: 
 
Park, Katharine, and Lorraine Daston, eds. Early modern science. Cambridge University Press, 2016. [The Age of the New]
 
Davis, Kathleen, and Nadia Altschul. Medievalisms in the postcolonial world: the idea of "the Middle Ages" outside Europe. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
 
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (Zed Books Ltd., 2013): 1-18 [INTRODUCTION]

Introduction: Asia and Decolonization as Method
 
Session moderated by Fa-ti Fan (SUNY Binghamton)
Discussion led by Mary Augusta Brazelton, Elise Burton, Shireen Hamza and Charu Singh

This working group aims to bring together historians of science working on Asia, broadly conceived to include not only East and South Asia but also West Asia (i.e. the Middle East), Central Asia and Siberia, to discuss research in progress as well as pressing issues of methodology and pedagogy in our discipline. Our thematic focus this year is how our field can contribute to calls for decolonization in scholarship and teaching.

At this introductory session, we will introduce the convenors and goals of the working group, and then host an open discussion centered around three broad topics: 
1) the concept of "Asia as method";
2) the concept of "decolonization" and what it means for our field; and 
3) the current hegemonic languages and geographies for studying science in Asia, and how we might challenge these hegemonies.

For scholars who are new to these topics or would like a refresher on the recent literature, we are providing the following readings in a downloadable zip file (see "Readings" tab at the upper right side of this webpage). Please feel free to review any subset of this selection, or other relevant writings, to bring up in our discussion.

Asia as Method:
Anderson, Warwick. "Asia as method in science and technology studies." East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 6, no. 4 (2012): 445-451.
Fan, Fa-ti. "Modernity, region, and technoscience: One small cheer for Asia as method." Cultural sociology 10, no. 3 (2016): 352-368.
 
Decolonization:
Kumar, Prakash, Projit Bihari Mukharji, and Amit Prasad. "Decolonizing Science in Asia." Verge: Studies in Global Asias 4, no. 1 (2018): 24-43.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. "Decolonization is not a metaphor." Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society 1, no. 1 (2012). This is a longer reading, and our discussion can focus on the sections on p. 1-7, 17-23, 29.
 
See also: Rohan Deb Roy, “Decolonise science – time to end another imperial era.” The Conversation, April 5, 2018:
https://theconversation.com/decolonise-science-time-to-end-another-imperial-era-89189
 
 

Optional supplementary reading: 2018 special section from EASTS journal on Southeast Asia:
Anderson, Warwick. "Thickening Transregionalism: Historical Formations of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Southeast Asia." East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal 12, no. 4 (2018): 503-518.
Fischer, Michael MJ. "Theorizing STS from Asia—Toward an STS Multiscale Bioecology Framework: A Blurred Genre Manifesto/Agenda for an Emergent Field." East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal 12, no. 4 (2018): 519-540.
Duara, Prasenjit. "Time and Tide Wait for No Man: A Response to Warwick Anderson and Michael MJ Fischer." East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal 12, no. 4 (2018): 541-547.