Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T03:13:23.717Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Origins and Barriers: Reflections on Subrahmanyam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2016

SIMON SCHAFFER
SIMON SCHAFFER*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom Email: sjs16@cam.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It has been said that if completely known and understood, a historical phenomenon is therefore dead. Yet how perverse, so it might seem, that the scholarly revelation of the complex history of a powerful concept might therefore be taken as an argument that it should therefore be entirely abandoned. This is, of course, not Sanjay Subrahmanyam's conclusion about the notion of Asia. The choice he poses is not between one Asia or none, but between a singular and overarching universal and an unevenly connected plurality. However, further complementary questions might pose themselves. Under what conditions can this plurality and these connections become anything like objects of knowledge? And of whose knowledge? These are, perhaps, issues where historians of the sciences might contribute. It is a distressingly familiar theme among those historians that it has too often been supposed that a demonstration of the historical construction and variable functions of an object is to be understood somehow as a denial of that object's existence or value.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 52 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Untimely Meditations, (ed.) Breazeale, Daniel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 260–62Google Scholar; van der Veer, Peter, ‘The foreign hand: orientalist discourse in sociology and communalism’, in Breckenridge, Carol and van der Veer, Peter (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 24–44, on pp. 25–28Google Scholar.

3 Far Eastern Economic Review (12 February 1987): Philip Bowring, ‘What is Asia?’, pp. 30–31; Jagdish Bhatia, ‘Self-enclosed village India’, pp. 33–35; Anwar Nasr, ‘Middle East countries struggle to be recognised’, pp. 42–43.

4 Bowring, ‘What is Asia?’, p. 31.

5 For scientometrics of Asian publications see Arunachalam, S. and Garg, K. C., ‘Science on the periphery’, Journal of Information Science 12 (1986), pp. 105–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arunachalam, S., Srinivasan, R. and Raman, V., ‘International collaboration in science’, Scientometrics 30 (1994), pp. 7–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nguyen, Tuan V. and Phan, Ly T., ‘Scientific output and its relation to the knowledge economy’, Scientometrics 89 (2011), pp. 107–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Jones, William, ‘A discourse on the institution of a society’ (May 1786), in Works, 6 vols (London: Robinson and Evans, 1799), Vol. 1, pp. 1–8, on pp. 1–4Google Scholar. For scriptural scholarship and enlightened learning, see David, Alun, ‘Sir William Jones, Biblical orientalism and Indian scholarship’, Modern Asian Studies 30 (1996), pp. 173–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Županov, Ines and Fourcade, Marie, ‘La question des Lumières en Inde’, in Županov, I. and Fourcade, M. (eds), L’Inde des Lumières: discours, histoire, savoirs (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2013), pp. 13–49Google Scholar.

7 Adas, Michael, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Tavakoli-Targi, Mohamad, Refashioning Iran: Occidentalism, Orientalism and Historiography (New York: Palgrave, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Raj, Kapil, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe 1650–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Wang Hui, ‘Reclaiming Asia from the West: rethinking global history’, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (2004), www.japanfocus.org/-Wang-Hui/1781/article.html, [accessed 13 September 2015].

9 Erimtan, Can, Ottomans Looking West: The Origins of the Tulip Age and its Development in Modern Turkey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008)Google Scholar; Ihsanoglu, Ekmeledin, ‘The introduction of western science to the Ottoman world: a case study of modern astronomy 1660–1860’, in Ihsanoglu, E., Science, Technology and Learning in the Ottoman Empire (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 1–44, on pp. 15–20Google Scholar; Erginbas, Vefa, Enlightenment in the Ottoman Context: Ibrahim Müteferrika and his Intellectual Landscape (Leiden: Brill, 2013)Google Scholar.

10 Playfair, John, ‘Remarks on the astronomy of the Brahmins’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 2 (1790), pp. 135–92, on p. 189CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Smith, Edwin Burrows, ‘Jean-Sylvain Bailly: astronomer, mystic, revolutionary’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 44 (1954), pp. 427–538, on pp. 455–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Murr, Sylvia, L’Inde philosophique entre Bossuet et Voltaire, 2 vols (Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve, 1987), Vol. 2, p. 177Google Scholar; Raina, Dhruv, ‘Betwixt Jesuit and Enlightenment historiography: Jean-Sylvain's history of Indian astronomy’, Revue d’histoire des mathématiques 9 (2003), pp. 253–306, on pp. 261–7Google Scholar.

12 Bailly, Jean-Sylvain, Essai sur les fables et sur leur histoire (Paris: Guillaume de Bure, 1797), p. 4Google Scholar; Smith, ‘Bailly’, pp. 480–1.

13 Smith, ‘Bailly’, pp. 460, 461 n. 66; Raina, ‘Betwixt Jesuit and Enlightenment historiography’, pp. 270–8.

14 Bailly, Jean-Sylvain, Lettre sur l’origine des sciences et sur celles des peuples de l’Asie (Paris: Debure, 1777), p. 198Google Scholar; Smith, ‘Bailly’, p. 462 n. 85.

15 Bailly, Jean-Sylvain, Lettres sur l’Atlantide de Platon et l’ancienne Histoire de l’Asie (Paris: Debure 1779), pp. 203–4, 208Google Scholar.

16 Raina, ‘Betwixt Jesuit and Enlightenment historiography’, p. 299; Županov and Fourcade, ‘La question des Lumières’.

17 Okakura, Kakuzō, The Ideals of the East, with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (London: John Murray, 1904), pp. 1–3Google Scholar.