Epistemological Rupture Research Articles

Beyond Reforms: The Politics of Higher Education Transformation in Africa

Abstract:In spite of over a half century of interventions and waves of “reforms,” higher education in Africa today consists of institutions, systems, and practices that lack distinct values and goals, or a mission and vision connecting them to the major challenges of their local and global contexts. What is needed in African higher education is true transformation, which will involve practical and epistemological ruptures with previous ways of doing things and a reconstruction of structures, relations, cultures, and institutions. Of particular importance are initiatives that will ensure gender equity, changes in the organization and process of knowledge production, and a reenvisioning of universities' funding sources and mechanisms.

Le concept d'adaptation : polysémie interdisciplinaire et implication pour les changements climatiques

The concept of adaptation: interdisciplinary scope and implication in environmental sciences. Adaptation refers both to a process and its outcome, leading to much interpretation and debate. The origin of this semantic duality is related to the epistemological rupture occurred during the 19th Century from the collision between an emerging Theory of Evolution and the established Creationism. The temporal scale of Evolution is an abstract concept outside the realm of immediate human perception which makes the adaptation debate more complex. Though, adaptation became a central concept in several major disciplines of social as psychology, anthropology or geography as well as many fields of biology. In each discipline, environment is strongly linked to the concept of adaptation. Environmental sciences are in the intersection of natural and social sciences and have a strong interdisci- plinary feature as adaptation does. That's why, because of the acceleration of global environmental and socioeconomic change, there is a growing interest in adaptation in the environmental science. Climate change

Paradigmas, valores e educação

O texto levanta os perfis epistemológico e socianalítico da questão paradigmática. Mauss evidenciara o moule affectif das noções científicas de força e causa. Posteriormente Baudouin falaria na indução arquetípica das noções e a antropologia do imaginário de Durand concluiria pela indução arquetipal do conceito pela imagem. Chegava-se, assim, ao desvendamento do substrato inconsciente das ideações, de um substrato regido pela catexis vetorializada, traduzindo-se nos valores como cerne das ideações. É o famoso a priori emotivo. Portanto, no texto, questionam-se dois mitos, esteios da ciência clássica: o mito da objetividade científica e o da neutralidade axiológica. Destaca, assim, a falácia da existência de uma ruptura epistemológica entre ciência e ideologia. A partir daí, as ideações tornam-se ideologias, sobretudo nas ciências do homem e nas ciências da educação que, ademais, tornam-se suporte de uma disfarçada luta ideológica, na qual, num "colonialismo cognitivo", as estratégias de conhecimento dissimulam as de preconceito. Entretanto, assumir a realidade desse suporte fantasmanalítico e ideológico propicia uma tarefa educativa salutar: os paradigmas tornam-se fantasias e, nessa relativização crítica, podem ser usados como um campo de objetos transicionais coletivos num ludismo cultural e educativo. No policulturalismo da sociedade contemporânea, o "politeísmo de valores" de Weber transforma-se num "politeísmo epistemológico", regido pelo "relativismo ontológico" de Feyerabend e por uma ética do pragmatismo. Articulando cultura, organização e educação, a antropologia das organizações educativas e a culturanálise de grupos de Paula Carvalho traduzem as heurísticas dessa dialética transicional.

A BUSCA PELA CIENTIFICIDADE NAS CIÊNCIAS HUMANAS NUMA ARQUEOLOGIA DO "MESMO" E DO "OUTRO"

This articles discusses the the grounds of modern scientific knowledge from the epistemological ruptures that reorganize the ordering and the construction of...

Religion and Medicine at the Crossroads: A Re-Examination of the Southern Rhodesian Influenza Epidemic of 1918

This article seeks to explore the nexus of religion and medicine in accounting for African and missionary responses to the 1918 influenza epidemic in Southern Rhodesia. Africans' explanatory models drew on a much wider sphere – sacred, social and biological – than their missionary and colonial counterparts, and their experience of the affliction led to an epistemological rupture in these explanatory models, resulting in a crisis in faith. Missionaries' explanatory models derived primarily from biomedicine, but missionaries were highly strategic in emphasising the sacred nature of the epidemic when it came to the possibility of African conversion. The ambivalence engendered by these competing explanatory frameworks (biomedical and African vernacular) would ultimately lead to a rejection of both in the form of anti-medical movements.

Trauma and transformation: the political progress of John Bunyan

Vera Camden (ed.), Trauma and Transformation: The Political Progress of John Bunyan, Stanford, Ca., Stanford University Press, 2008, pp. xiii + 185, hb. $55.00, ISBN: 978-0-8047-5785-0.Twenty years ago, around the tercentenary of John Bunyan's death, two books - N. H. Keeble's landmark critical anthology and Christopher Hill's biographical study - heralded a renaissance of scholarly interest in the tinker-author. This attention has matured in myriad ways since 1988, with significant recent scholarship - Isabel Hofmeyr's 'transnational history' of The Pilgrim's Progress, and the essays collected by W. R. Owens and Stuart Sim on the theme of Reception, Appropriation, Recollection - evincing unprecedented historical, methodological, and theoretical sophistication. Vera Camden's new anthology sets tough new standards for Bunyan scholarship in particular, and for intellectual collaboration in general. Both individually and collectively, the contributions to Trauma and Transformation reveal a network of cultural 'fault lines' that run far beyond the nonconformist frameworks that remain a staple of Bunyan studies. They initiate a timely reassessment of Bunyan's career and its place within early-modern literary history.Trauma and Transformation originates in unique circumstances. Most of the essays began life as papers delivered to a 2001 conference of the International John Bunyan Society, held in the United States just weeks after the 9/11 bombings. This grim coincidence could have encouraged a sentimental slant. In Camden's organisational and editorial hands, it lends poignancy and heightened cultural relevance to the theme of religious difference and, indeed, to the spirit of collective intellectual endeavour: 'it seems uncanny', Camden writes in her introduction, 'how our ongoing crisis appears to have been adumbrated in the cultural cataclysms of Bunyan's England'.The volume is anchored in the premise that the decapitation of Charles I caused a fundamental rupture in the national sensibility. It is also predicated on a chronological coincidence which, again, is much more than an easy motif. Camden notes that the milestones defining Bunyan's adulthood - his coming of age, and his death - fell respectively within the years of two national rites of passage: the regicide of 1649, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This neat observation leads to a more subtle and pressing one: followers, readers, and researchers of Bunyan have focused almost exclusively on the Restoration phase of his career (1660-85). These dates bound not only the bulk of Bunyan's literary career, but also the defining period of nonconformity - the time of the 'great persecution'. Imprisoned at the Restoration for refusing to go through the motions of Anglican cooperation, Bunyan has inevitably been contained, to broader and narrower degrees, within the framework of dissent. These essays point out, cumulatively, some obvious facts that have not been stated before: that Bunyan lived through violent constitutional upheaval long before, and a few years after, the Restoration; that the personal and the political are seldom differentiated into black and white; and that Bunyan's silence over overtly political events does not mean he was not affected by them. Probing between the lines of Bunyan's writings, and of his documented biography, they open up significant new perspectives which suggest that the strict-nonconformist Bunyan of popular and scholarly familiarity is known partially and reductively.Following Camden's lucid introduction, Peter L. Rudnytsky controversially identifies T. S. Eliot's theory of 'dissociation of sensibility' as 'the single most seminal contribution to English literary history of the twentieth century'. He argues for the psychoanalytic notion of a 'primal crime' - the transgression, or fall, or 'epistemological rupture' caused, he states, by the decapitation of Charles I; the consequence of this fissure is a traumatised self-consciousness which suffuses the works of authors such as Milton and Marvell. …

An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania (review)

Reviewed by: An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania Otilia Baraboi Marta Petreu, An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005, 332 pp. The translation of Marta Petreu’s An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania enhances the existing approach to the formation of ideological extremisms throughout the twentieth century, regardless of their left or right orientation. This oversight of Romania’s geopolitical crisis in the Balkans calls into question the role that the interwar Romanian intelligentsia played in the elaboration of the doctrine of the “Iron Guard” (right extremist movement), also known as the “Legion of the Archangel Michael.” Alimented by the discussion of “Romanianism,” a term that sums up a constant quest for identity often seen as the burden of belonging to a downtrodden country, Petreu’s insightful work conjoins an ethical personal drive to account for an “infamous” historical heritage and the epistemological imperative to contribute to the worldwide scholarship on the birth of violent ideologies in general. Furthermore, as Norman Manea notes in his foreword, the close examination of the Iron Guard’s highly problematic claim to ground its political agenda of self-sacrifice in Christian Orthodox spirituality sheds new light on fundamentalist religious terrorism at large. Accordingly, in a passage added to the American edition, Marta Petreu compares the “Legionnaire’s death” confined only to Romanian territory with today’s borderless “suicide bombers” (45). While serving the immediate purpose of capturing the attention of the reader preoccupied by the currently unequal dynamics of power in the world, this parallel needs to be carefully contextualized. Thus, Petreu orchestrates an impressive series of sources (newspaper articles, letters, pamphlets, unpublished personal archives, historical and philosophical writings of both European and Romanian thinkers) on a minutely detailed historical background. To further illustrate her argument, she places at the center of her inquiry the Romanian and French philosopher E. M. Cioran. In so doing, Petreu develops her case study from the vantage point of a work enshrouded by controversy—The Transfiguration of Romania (1936) and several newspaper articles and personal letters that testify to the ups and downs of Cioran’s support of the far right between 1933 and 1941. Petreu thus sets forth the extent to which Cioran’s biography [End Page 225] echoes the dialectical process of transfiguration that the young philosopher wanted for his “primitive” country. Convinced that all his personal achievements were conditioned by the national failure to equal the other leading European countries in power, Cioran believed that the far right violence against older politicians and intellectuals would save him from collective mediocrity. Thus, the Iron Guard’s vision of a dictatorial regime in Romania was in accordance with his plea for a dialectical leap into History, as opposed to a gradual adaptation to the Western European standards preferred by the older generation. Not only does Marta Petreu bring us closer to the parallel between Cioran’s personal turmoil and the political instability of interwar Romania, but she also highlights the significance of his “heretical” stands (pro-Occidentalist and anti-Christian Orthodox) within a group that eventually ceased to acknowledge him as one of its own. Moreover, her analysis of Cioran’s controversial stance regarding Romania’s minorities, especially Jewish and Hungarian minorities, further enriches our understanding of nationhood. In sum, this study is a remarkable and long-awaited attempt to fill in several epistemological ruptures still in place within post-Soviet identity narratives. With this in mind, Marta Petreu first lays the philosophical foundation for Cioran’s view on history as tributary to Spengler’s vitalism, as well as to Hegelian dialectics. Second, by establishing a close connection between Cioran’s “national collectivism” (a mixture of “state socialism” and the Bolshevik agenda) and Ceausescu’s dictatorship, she unravels the continuity between Romania’s Communist regime and the doctrines promoted by the autochthon intelligentsia. Third, by reading the apolitical French Cioran in the light of his endorsement of the Iron Guard, Petreu rightly traces his gradual process of disenchantment and detachment from his early political views in Romania, which culminates in his disapproval...

Sala de aula universitária e inovações: construindo saberes docentes

Researches tried to understand how teaching knowledges are being constituted in professional practice, and whether they represent innovations, considered as an epistemological rupture. Through a research, involving two Brazilian universities, taking eight undergraduate courses as a prioritary space of study, we tried to amplify this pressuposition using qualitative a methodology of ethnographic kind. The concept of innovation, based on the studies of Sousa Santos (1987, 2000), Lucarelli (2002), Leite (2002) and Cunha (1998; 2000), guided our reflection. The data obtained have been analized in the context of the public policies for higher education, introduced in the country; and they indicate that the living experiences in the field of the curriculum and the classroom, can be understood as a way of resistence to the regulatory processes, which incide on university teaching and on the processes of teaching-learning lived by the students and professors.

Objectivation du corps en médecine et incidences subjectives

The medical body and the body as experienced by the subject him–herself cannot be considered the same, and are sometimes even incompatible. The first one is the product of a constant process of objectification in the history of medicine, and is correlated to the extraordinary development of knowledge and techniques in this discipline. The second one, on the contrary, refers to a subjectivation process grounded in the world as experienced by the patient, with a special emphasis on notions such as the body proper and inter-subjectivity. Despite substantial improvements in the prognosis of some serious illnesses, this objectification has important effects on the patient's and on the physician's subjectivity, as well as on their relationship. This mechanization of the human body is strongly linked with the advent of science, as characterized by the philosophy of Descartes and by the first anatomical dissections by Vesale, it established a real epistemological rupture by separating man from his body. This break gave birth to three separate dimensions: the world, others, and oneself. Indeed, before Vesale, man was considered as a part of the world, inseparable from it, and an expression of God's will as any other part of the world. Anatomy thus introduced the human body as a particular study object, independent from its symbolic or material environment. Before, man was also a member of a strong community, defined by its values and by its laws. By contrast the anatomical body was then a desocialized one, without any of the usual signs that could demonstrate its membership of a given community. Finally, man was separated from himself, by the identification of his body to a machine, an object that could be reduced to a simple catalogue of organs. This separation between the anatomical body in medicine and the lived body of the patient leads to profound changes in the physician-patient relationship, detrimental to the subjectivity of both. In order to restore a real inter-subjectivity in this relationship, empathy could then be an important dimension to enhance the communication process in medical settings. Nevertheless, empathy, according to Husserl, is not only a capacity to represent or to infer the other's mental state, but is more profoundly based on the analogy between the bodies. The physician's body is then, in some way, implied in the apprehension of his patient's distress. A core dimension for a clinical psychology in medical settings could then be the fact of giving its proper place to this subjectivity, and more particularly to the subjectivation process within the illness experience proper. In this context, clinical psychology, without ignoring the contributions of medical sciences, is of particular importance in sustaining the subject and his singularity beyond his illness.

Les Maîtres Fous, de Jean Rouch: questões epistemológicas da relação entre cinema documental e produção de conhecimento

Este texto analisa um filme ícone do cinema documental, Les maîtres fous, de Jean Rouch, a partir do questionamento teórico discutido por Foucault em O que é um autor, e tendo como referência a tipologia de análise de filmes documentários proposta por Bill Nichols. Busca-se compreender o filme primordialmente como um discurso sobre o mundo e não como um filme de Jean Rouch. Isto força ao estudioso um desvio epistemológico, que consiste em não mais analisá-lo por suas informações evidentes, a "descrição" de um ritual, mas pela busca dos conceitos fundantes da narrativa fílmica, unidade dialética de forma e conteúdo. Proponho uma leitura em que o filme emerge como o derradeiro de uma tradição conservadora, cujas repercussões são decisivas para uma ruptura epistemológica e fílmica, essencial para os desdobramentos que a rica e significativa obra de Rouch desvelou posteriormente.

Intertextuality in Theory and Practice

Intertextuality is a concept often associated with postmodernism, more particularly with that sphere of postmodernism where literature encounters critical theory.1 In many respects, and especially in the field of literature and poetics with which I am concerned, postmodernism can be viewed as a development of modernism which manifested itself during the first decades of the 20th century, in the years preceding and following the great fracture of the first World War. Modernism was characterized by the loss of stable values, by the loss of belief in the possibility of an objective truth and in the validity of totalizing ideologies, by the rejection of formal aesthetic theories, the emphasis given to subjectivity, to the discontinuous and the fragmentary, also by the place given to reflexivity and selfconsciousness in the production of texts. Postmodernism, I would suggest, merely went further in the same direction, sometimes with an added dose of scepticism and irony, mostly perhaps as a consequence of new developments like consumerism, the new technologies, globalization, but to me there was no new epistemological rupture like the one that took place with the emergence of modernism. What I will try to show in this lecture is that though the word for it had not yet been coined, the workings of intertextuality were already being explored by such modernists as T. S. Eliot and David Jones. In that respect also, there is an undeniable continuity between modernism and postmodernism, and I cannot imagine that if we have truly entered a new age “beyond postmodernism” we can do without the key concept of intertextuality to account for that all-important dimension of our experience as readers of literary texts, which we could call “the memory of literature”.2

Chinese Medicine: A Cognitive and Epistemological Review

In spite of the common belief that Chinese natural philosophy and medicine have a unique frame of reference completely foreign to the West, this article argues that they in fact have significant cognitive and epistemic similarities with certain esoteric health beliefs of pre-Christian Europe. From the standpoint of Cognitive Science, Chinese Medicine appears as a proto-scientific system of health observances and practices based on a symptomological classification of disease using two elementary dynamical-processes pattern categorization schemas: a hierarchical and combinatorial inhibiting–activating model (Yin-Yang), and a non-hierarchical and associative five-parameter semantic network (5-Elements/Agents). The concept-map of the five-parameter model amounts to a pentagram, a commonly found geomantic and spell casting sigil in a number of pre-Christian health and safety beliefs in Europe, to include the Pythagorean cult of Hygieia, and the Old Religion of Northern Europe. This non-hierarchical pattern-recognition archetype/prototype was hypothetically added to the pre-existing hierarchical one to form a hybrid nosology that can accommodate for a change in disease perceptions. The selection of five parameters rather than another number might be due to a numerological association between the integer five, the golden ratio, the geometry of the pentagram and the belief in health and wholeness arising from cosmic or divine harmony. In any case, this body of purely empirical knowledge is nowadays widely flourishing in the US and in Europe as an alternative to Western Medicine and with the claim of being a unique, independent and comprehensive medical system, when in reality it is structurally—and perhaps historically—related to the health and safety beliefs of pre-Christian Europe; and without the prospect for an epistemological rupture, it will remain built upon rudimentary cognitive modalities, ancient metaphysics, and a symptomological view of disease.

The State, Literacy, and Popular Education in Chile, 1964-1990

The State, Literacy, and Popular Education in Chile, 1964-1990

Gaston Bachelard and the Notion of “Phenomenotechnique”

The paper aims at an analysis of the oeuvre of the French historian of science and epistemologist Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962). Bachelard was the founder of a tradition of French thinking about science that extended from Jean Cavailles over Georges Canguilhem to Michel Foucault. In the past, he has become best known and criticized for his postulation of an epistemological rupture between everyday experience and scientific experience. In my analysis, I emphasize another aspect of the work of Bachelard. It is the way he conceptualizes the relation between scientific thinking and technology in modern science. Within this framework, the notion of “phenomenotechnique” is of crucial importance. It is one of the organizing concepts of Bachelard's historical epistemology, and it serves as the organizing center of this paper.

Territories of Knowledge

Shifts in the terms of reference of knowledge production have often been characterized as revolutionary transformations akin to conversion experiences, in part, because they fit with the historical narrative of periods of stability punctuated by sudden breaks or epistemological ruptures. In addition, such devices are usually inflected through a 'march of progress' in understanding the assemblages of social knowledge. The analysis of territoriality developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari provides an effective conceptual vocabulary for understanding the complex shifts in academic discourse and the construction of knowledge in the context of application whilst retaining the indeterminacy and contingency of 'the social' - that knowledge production and consumption is a social activity.

Inovações e projeto político-pedagógico: uma relação regulatória ou emancipatória?

O presente artigo discute o significado de inovação e projeto político-pedagógico sob duas perspectivas: como uma ação regulatória ou técnica e como uma ação emancipatória ou edificante. A inovação regulatória significa assumir o projeto político-pedagógico como um conjunto de atividades que vão gerar um produto: um documento pronto e acabado. Nesse caso se deixa de lado o processo de produção coletiva. A inovação de cunho regulatório nega a diversidade de interesses e de atores que estão presentes. Sob a perspectiva emancipatória, a inovação e o projeto político-pedagógico estão articulados, integrando o processo com o produto porque o resultado final é não só um processo consolidado de inovação metodológica, na esteira de um projeto construído, executado e avaliado coletivamente, mas um produto inovador que provocará também rupturas epistemológicas.

Evil and Testimony: Ethics “after” Postmodernism

Two different books share the same concern about the relation between ethics and postmodernism. As its title suggests, the collection of essays, after Postmodernism (2001), edited by Jennifer L. Geddes, approaches this question by focusing on the problem of evil, while Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz (1999) investigates this relation through an ongoing ethico-political commentary on the holocaust survivors' testimonies. Taken as a whole, after Postmodernism, an interdisciplinary collection engaging philosophy, history, sociology, literature, and sociology, asks not only whether postmodernism has changed our thinking about evil, but more importantly, whether it can provide resources for approaching evil beyond the opposition between fundamentalism and moral relativism. Conversely, it explores the ways in which historical experiences of evil challenge postmodern thought. The essays are grouped into three sections: Histories, which explores the implications of the postmodern break for moral reflection, Narratives, which explores the ways stories form the cultural understanding of evil, and Ethics, which focuses on the dilemmas and redefinitions of moral judgment in postmodern culture. The Histories section opens with Berel Lang's essay, Evil Inside and Outside History: The Post-Holocaust vs. The Postmodern, which focuses on the place of the holocaust in the moral history and on the genealogy of the ethics in postmodern thought. Although the importance of the essay lies in the acknowledgment of the importance of the holocaust for postmodern ethics, the essay ultimately contests the postmodern break by inscribing the holocaust within the continuous history of evil. What is at stake in this rejection of the historical and epistemological rupture of postmodernity is not only a call for the historical and moral reflection on the significance of the holocaust but

A epistemologia da educação

O conhecimento em Educação é examinado segundo o processo que toda ciência efetivamente realiza, na definição de seu objeto. Este objeto por sua vez é definido pelo paradigma que o sujeito científico assumir. Assim, a mudança de paradigma em uma ciência é uma ruptura epistemológica, que altera o próprio objeto dessa ciência. Entretanto, a ciência emerge pouco a pouco do cotidiano e de uma pragmática, que define seu projeto. É uma construção coletiva e cultural, da qual participam os sujeitos e na qual a palavra é o elemento-chave na organização do conhecimento.O sujeito científico é aqui entendido como sendo um conjunto de atividades estruturantes, ligadas a uma abordagem científica determinada e intencionalmente instituída para produzir o objeto científico.A intersubjetividade, segundo Habermas e a linguagem enquanto pragmática e discurso segundo Vygotsky, são examinadas para verificar a ação educativa, enquanto ação e enquanto comunicação, na tentativa de caracterizar o conhecimento da Educação como conhecimento científico. O conceito de interdisciplinaridade é necessário para tal caracterização, e vem da superação da ciência moderna, que é fragmentária, sendo sua fragmentação temática e não disciplinar. As condições de possibilidade da ação humana projetada no mundo a partir de um espaço - tempo local, levam ao tipo de conhecimento que é necessário em nossa época: não determinístico, nem descritivista, possuidor de uma linguagem que é o seu método, plural e transgressor, fora de parâmetros fixos e de territórios demarcados, utilizando a metáfora e a exemplaridade como procedimentos. No conhecimento em Educação, o sujeito é ao mesmo tempo objeto, o que vem a definir tal conhecimento como processo e não estado, sendo então aplicado, e particularmente aplicado.

THE TRANSITION FROM ALGEBRA TO CALCULUS: KEY TO ACHIEVE A MEANINGFUL UNDERSTANDING IN MATHEMATICS.

In teaching and learning Calculus are very important problems, indicated by the poor understanding concepts, the deficient hability of reasoning, the constant repitence of the calculus courses, and the scholar desertion. This article proposes to study the causes problem not only in the calculus itself, but also the transition algebra to calculus, because the lenguage, the reasoning, the logic, the signs meaning, make an epistemological rupture with the traditional scholar algebra treatment. Then it isn't pertinent supposse that there is a natural transition and a continuos development from the algebraic knowledge to the calculus domain, and focus on limit concept, learning epistemological obstacles of the calculus and lenguage, and begin to trascend that obstacles by the way ofepistemological pedagogic actions.

Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843

Reviewed by: Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India Lisa Blansett Matthew Edney. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Pp. 458. $35.00. One of the major Enlightenment projects undertaken by the British lay in the area of measurement. Indeed, a kind of fetish for accuracy formed the foundation for a variety of instrumental practices that affected social order, spatial planning, and state formation. Another project was the construction of the British Empire, pushing the boundaries of the kingdom beyond the reaches of the setting sun. Examining the intersection of these two projects from an interdisciplinary perspective is a prodigious undertaking. Matthew Edney, whose academic title itself defies disciplinary boundaries, has produced an excellent study of mapping and empire, interesting and provocative in its analysis of the collusion between cartographic practices and the practices of “conquest and government” (1). As “associate professor of geography-anthropology and American and New England studies and faculty scholar in the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education at the University of Southern Maine” (book jacket), Edney has sought to dismantle the notion that the map is the territory, that it functions as an accurate and transparent transcription of the world. In fact, Edney rather boldly calls the assumptions underlying the realist-map “incorrect and lazy” (339). Despite this single instance of moralizing, his work modifies the assumptions of positivist science that he finds in the history of cartography and geography. Instead he examines shared codes and representations of “the arena of overlap between the ideology of map-making and the ideology of empire” (32). [End Page 113] The book is thus presented as a revision, and as such, sets out to transform the way scientists, including geographers and, to a certain extent, historians of cartography, have seen and re-presented one textual object, the map. To this end, Edney incorporates recent theories of representation, textuality, and cultural production. His most prominent invocation is of Michel Foucault, in particular his theories of knowledge detailed in The Order of Things (trans. 1970) and his history of the disciplinary panopticon (Discipline and Punish [trans. 1977]). Edney argues very ably that surveying, mapmaking, and the material map create an archive of knowledge, which then provides the reproducible documents for systematic control of India. Most compellingly, to my mind, he suggests that the map itself becomes the master metaphor of the archive and of knowledge, the symbol of property and domination. Edney’s comprehensive study covers the construction of the archive from the surveys of Bengal conducted by James Rennell, for the East India Company from 1765 to 1771, to the end of the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) under the towering figure, George Everest. Of the book’s four parts, sections 1 and 2 function in part as background in that they provide a history of science and an overview of the East India Company’s work in India. I found these two sections the most interesting: Edney theorizes the map and the gaze, as well as the class, racial (and, only briefly noted) gender implications of practicing British empiricist science; and how, through mapmaking, the British were able to create “an essentialist opposition between the Indians and themselves” (33). In addition, parts 1 and 2 detail important epistemological ruptures between its two historical points. With a variety of drawings, he demonstrates how science and aesthetics figure the gaze, as evinced in representations of the picturesque in India which, consequently, had to be refigured to fit the landscape. Edney also traces the differences between the two types of survey, the route survey with surveyor pushing a perambulator over hill and dale (all the while avoiding the odd pothole in the road), and the GTS in which “the surveyor first calculated the relative positions of locations and then plotted them” (105). The latter method is more abstract and more accurate, and creates a more perfect panopticon for the British. The British also used the mathematical skills required of trigonometry to create a “socio-intellectual hierarchy,” and “hierarchical division of labor by race” to keep most Indians out of helping map their country, thus limiting indigenous...