Abstract
The Way and the Word exemplifies a method of historical study that makes sense of the past in ways that more conventional approaches frequently fail to do.1 Historians of Asian science tend, for instance, to look at computational techniques and the social relations of mathematicians as distinct areas of inquiry. Putting something in context is, as one author after another reminds us, a good thing, but doing so is a voluntary matter of connecting two things that exist quite separately. Scholars rarely ask what unifies a problem’s philosophical, technical, social, economic, political, literary, and other dimensions. Choosing one of these dimensions to study, ignoring the rest because one is not a specialist in them, is more usual. The cost is often a stunted understanding. The Way and the Word is an experiment in doing away with foreground and context, and studying the emergence of science in each culture as what I call a cultural manifold. Cultural manifolds include not only the various dimensions of a complex phenomenon, but also the interactions that make all of these aspects into a single whole. That whole includes how people make a living, their relation to structures of authority, what bonds connect those who do the same work, how
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