Science & Technology in the post-colonial world: Post-colonialism

1. Maria G. Mandourari

2. ‘[…] even the most
local studies should
imply a
network, suggesting
connections with
other sites through
traffic of
persons, practices
and objects’ (Warwick
Anderson 2002: 652)

3. Post-colonialism
Post-colonial Studies
Post-colonial Theory
Cultural legacies of colonialism and of
imperialism

4. Contemporary history
modes of cultural perception

7.  Historical sub-disciplines:
a) economic history
b) agrarian history
c) environmental history
d) history of medicine
 Medical & environmental history
Identify & investigate technology related issues

8. “[…] an engagement of
science studies and
postcolonial theory would
not simply provide us with
instances of Western
science and technology in
different settings -
potentially it might even
'colonialize' & destabilize
conventional accounts of
Western technoscience at
'home' Warwick
Anderson, Introduction:PostcolonialTec
hnoscience, Social Studies of
Science, 32: 5/6 (2002), pp. 643-
658, 648

9. Challenge to diffusionist theories of technoscientific
development
critics of development practising an anthropology of
the modernities mutating beyond Europe

10. New modes of analysis
New world of social investigation
“History of the present”
Systemic understandings of political
economies from local cultural worlds
Hybrid identities, flexible
hierarchies, complex
transactions, displacements and
fragmentations

11. Linking local and global identities
Analytical tools
west/non-
west, developed/developing, or
north/south techno-cultural divides
Science in motion
 Rarely mobilised explicitly to explain
the transaction, translation &
transformation of science &
technology