Response to Farquhar, Cohen, and Kuriyama

Abstract

Response to Farquhar, Cohen, and KuriyamaSpecial Forum: Is Science Multicultural? Sandra Harding (bio) It is a real pleasure to read such thoughtful responses to my essay, and ones that agree with the main assumptions from which I begin my arguments, such as that modern sciences, too, are historically and culturally local, that Western thought about the familiar contrasts between “science” and the knowledge traditions of other cultures is Eurocentric—“arrogant and wrongheaded,” in Kuriyama’s phrase—and thus needs to be critically reexamined. Each response makes us think even more critically about the implications of these assumptions and “what should happen next.” However, what struck me most forcefully in reading the three papers was the glaring absence of anything that could be referred to as an even relatively uncontroversial discourse within which to continue the discussion. The words for most of what I—and no doubt they—want to say, and the logic to connect them, have already been occupied by other meanings and referents that steal our fragile attempts to say something outside Eurocentrism, and turn them into claims that we not only did not intend, but explicitly would disavow. This is the hardest task for us all as teachers, writers, and intellectuals: to keep thinking and talking, and to encourage others—students, readers, development workers—to join in the discussion, when the threat of getting publicly caught out failing to understand the consequences of our claims, of committing a political incorrectness, of alienating exactly those whom we want as allies, etc., threatens at every punctuation mark. In the face of such a minefield, it is not surprising that the [End Page 349] strategies recommended by the commentators to correct what each sees as the (different) major problems in my paper are themselves in conflict. Thus Kuriyama argues that “the only way to advance toward a genuinely pluralistic appreciation of knowledge in different cultures is actually to study these cultures, earnestly, humbly, in detail, over a long time. By itself, the most thoroughgoing critique of Western universalism contributes nothing” (p. 342). In contrast, Cohen argues: “The danger of a naive pluralism may lie in this mapping of difference onto an underlying hegemony. Beneath the talk of science’s multiculturalism in this essay lies the unexploded Occidentalism of ‘the West’ as synonymous with modernity” (p. 345); further, “Only when Greenwich has been dislocated from its meridional center—only when an archeology of the subjugated knowledges within European science is attempted—can a hermeneutic of other subjugated knowledges be constructed without reducing them to Romantic visions of epistemic alterity” (p. 347). Kuriyama is surely right to call for the kinds of respectful, careful ethnographies of knowledge traditions of other cultures that can decrease the systematic production of Eurocentric ignorance about those cultures, and also, in my view, about the real strengths and serious limitations of European knowledge traditions—strengths and limits that are invisible as long as one starts off one’s thinking from assumptions firmly planted inside European cultures. And Cohen is surely right to call for vigorous ideology critiques of those European cultures—a Europology of European discourses that takes as one of its central projects the historicization of “the West,” “the modern,” and their assumed equivalence. (How shall we refer to that thing which the familiar phrases “modern science” and “Western science” both distort?) But in my view, neither project can proceed at all outside of Eurocentric discourses without the other project. One must stand outside such conceptual frameworks in order to try to understand non-European cultures in “their own terms” 1 and, among other benefits, thereby to undermine the Eurocentric imposition of alien categories and valuations on other cultures. And one must from the very beginning of such a project already be deconstructing “the West,” “modernity,” and the rest of Eurocentric ideologies, in order, as Cohen points out, to avoid merely adding exotic Others to the all-too-solidly-central West. After all, there have been plenty of earnest, humble, detailed studies of other cultures that nevertheless remained fully contained by Eurocentric assumptions, and plenty [End Page 350] of critiques of Eurocentric ideology from which science as culture and practice, with both origins and effects...