Princeton Workshop in the History of Science, 1998-99 

TRADING ZONES OF KNOWLEDGE:

LOCAL SCIENCE IN WORLD CONTEXTS

Michael S. Mahoney and Mary J. Henninger-Voss, organizers

This year's theme explores the transmission and exchange of technical practice and natural knowledge across cultural boundaries. How have science and technology been transformed through cultural exchange, and how has culture been extended through scientific exchange? What role has been played by intermediaries, and who or what has played that role? In particular, how have agents of western and non-western science informed one another, and how have societies adopted, assimilated, or rejected various forms of foreign knowledge. What intellectual transactions have accompanied trade and conquest at different times in different places? What happens when knowledge produced in one location confronts knowledge produced in another location defined by a different set of laws and customs, different modes of material production, and different beliefs about nature, cosmology, and the human body? In short, how has travel affected the cultural identity of science and technology? Are all forms of natural knowledge affected in the same way, or are some ways of knowing and bodies of practice more mobile and adaptable than others? In our own age de facto universal practice of western science, technology, and medicine seems to render moot the question of whether science can be a genuinely oecumenical,as Joseph Needham once claimed, or will flourish as a complex of peculiarly western concepts and practices. Our sessions will focus on the following issues.

Traditional Cultures. Before 1500, western Europe was one of many traditional cultures with roughly comparable varieties of mathematical practice, technical skill, and explanatory accounts of the natural world. In the larger world of which Europe occupied a small corner in the northwest, the cultures of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia had long pursued their own forms of engagement with nature. How did these societies translate mathematics, medicine, cosmology, and technical crafts from other cultures into their own? How did they restructure the natural knowledge of cultures distant in time or place to fit new constraints and possibilities? Examination of these translations and re-makings over the period before western hegemony offers a form of intellectual longue durée, a field against which we might come to some different evaluation of technical practice and scientific activity that stands apart from the dynamic of European society since the Renaissance.

First Contact. In the Age of Discovery, missionaries, military men, and merchants were the shock troops of new cultural encounters beyond the traditional boundaries of the world known to the Europeans. To what extent was the experience of first contact framed by natural and technical knowledge, as Europeans infiltrated cultures from Mexico to China? How did the explorers' ends of "God, Glory, and Gold" frame the natural and technical knowledge they brought back to European shores? In what ways did so many commodities, marvels, and reports strain European scientific epistemologies , and what effects did European 'novelties' have on the frameworks of thinking about the natural world of the people they encountered?

Colonization. The colonial enterprise brought the European core to the periphery by negotiating a place for technology, science, and medicine in foreign societies, even while employing science to distinguish colonizer from colonized. What role did science and technology play in Europe's "civilizing mission"? How did Europeans seek to engage their colonial subjects in a common scientific enterprise? How was the practice of science transformed in colonial settings? In the interplay between dominating power and indigenous culture, how did these practices and beliefs intervene in perceptions of the body, in the use of natural resources, or in the structure of colonial society itself? The colonial setting allows scrutiny of the production of scientific knowledge under conditions of asymmetric power relations and of the degree to which various forms of scientific knowledge are culturally situated.

Globalization. The twentieth-century has been marked by the autonomous pursuit of western science and technology by societies around the world, both in collaboration and in competition with the nations of Europe and North America. Rapid transportation and instant communications connect people, materials, and information in a world-wide network, where logistics seems to outweigh culture in determining who does what where. As we come to share both our natural resources and labor force on a global scale, ecologists look to preserve both widely shared resources and very local nichesHow has this globalization of science both unified and fragmented the world? Do multinational firms and international research centers, or 'science cities' form a new cosmopolis of international science or islands of privileged knowledge? As the training of scientists and engineers appears to adopt western modes across the globe and as multi-national firms increasingly expand the distance between their places of engineering, manufacturing, and marketing, we can reexamine the cultural determinants of scientific knowledge and the degree to which it is locally situated.