General accounts of the history of science and technology (or, more narrowly, of inventions) are scarce. The few that are available are also of fairly recent origin: obviously, the idea of a history of science (where science has been identified with Galilean science) and technology (identified with industrial technology) could not have appeared much earlier than this century. Not many people even know that the word “scientist” was first used by William Whewell in 1833.
Also, most available histories have remained the work of western scholars. This has not been an entirely happy circumstance. On the contrary, it has afflicted these histories with certain methodological and other infirmities which have had the effect of reducing them to mythological works. This is especially so when they are studied with regard to aspects of the history of science, technology, and medicine in the non-Western world.
One of the first is a history of technology and engineering written by Dutch historian R.J. Forbes. Forbes’s work appeared in 1950 under the title Man the Maker. In it, he conceded that technology was the work of humankind as a whole, and that “no part of the world can claim to be more innately gifted than any other part”. A few years thereafter, Forbes produced his rich and prodigiously detailed Studies in Ancient Technology which set out a remarkable description of the different technologies of Asia, Africa, pre-Colombian America, and Europe. However, it is in The Conquest of Nature that his Eurocentric assumptions came to the fore: in that work (as the title itself indicates), Forbes went on to subsume technological experience of people from diverse cultures under a philosophical anthropology that was unmistakably Western, if not Biblical - the domination of nature myth originating in Genesis. And after a discussion about the grievous consequences of a seriously flawed modern technology, he ended his book promising redemption from the technological genie through the Christian event of Easter. How does one prescribe a text like this to Hindu, Chinese, or Arab readers?
Another influential work of about the same period is A History of Western Technology by a German scholar, Friedrich Klemm. In it, Klemm provided a picture of technological development in the West in which non-Western ideas and inventions had no hand at all. The English translation which appeared in 1959 barely mentions Joseph Needham’s work on China in the bibliography. Klemm could not have substantiated his interpretation of Western technological development unless he consciously played down non-western technology. In fact, the only quote on Chinese technology in Klemm’s book is from the Guan yin zi, the work of a Daoist mystic of the eighth century AD: Klemm used it to prove why the alleged religiously colored oriental rejection of the world in China could not have provided a stimulus for the emergence of science and technology in that country.
This distorting Eurocentric perspective continued to hold sway even over the more standard (five volume) A History of Technology edited by Charles Singer, E.J. Holmyard and A.R. Hall. The first volume of this work appeared in the same year as Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China, and the editors themselves acknowledged that up to the period of the Middle Ages in Europe, China had the most sophisticated fund of technological expertise. Three of the Singer volumes dealt with pre-industrial technology, where logically China (and India) should have been given major space and Western technological development would have appeared in proper perspective in the nature of an appendix. However, Chinese, Indian, and other technologies were ignored and Western technology made the focus of the exercise.
In addition to manifesting such ignorance of non-Western science and technology, these histories suffered from another methodological limitation: they restricted themselves to a record of artifacts and machines disembodied from the latter’s social and cultural contexts. The problem was eventually recognized by some Western scholars themselves.
These histories are evidence that the western scholars associated with them proved incapable of stepping out of their cultural cages, either knowingly or involuntarily. Either way, this eroded the credibility of their work as it exhibited both their lack of objectivity and their general incompetence when called upon to deal with societies other than theirs.
They show that our dominant descriptive and evaluatory ideas of technology and culture both in the Western and non-Western world have been formulated over the past couple of centuries with reference to the West’s experience of these phenomena. Concepts and categories reflected from a limited area of human experience have been indiscriminately used to explain and assess the rest of the world.
New frameworks are therefore inevitable. We are in the post-traditional, post-colonial, post-modern age. But unless the outmoded intellectual environment that engendered this subjective and tunnel-visioned output is rigorously dissected, analyzed, and then jettisoned, the new frameworks needed for the alternative histories and encyclopaedias intending to take their place are in danger of turning into copies of the old.
There are two preliminary aspects of this intellectual mal-development that need elucidation. First, there is the perception of humankind as homo faber, a tool-making animal, which is basically a reflection of fairly recent Western experience with the machine. Fascinated by the bewildering profusion of tools and machines, Western historians began to look at the ability to produce these as a special field with its own history and set out to create a distinct species of man in the image of homo faber. This scholarly creation had its repercussions in encouraging the overestimation of the singularity or uniqueness of Western culture in comparison with others (although all cultures are unique and incommensurate). The elaborate, embarrassing exercise in culture-narcissism soon became routine since it was not to be challenged for nearly a century. (It is important to point out that the homo faber idea is quite recent to humankind: it is consistently absent in not just other cultures, but even within a large part of the West itself).
For instance, it was taken for granted that the system of production that got generated in the last century and a half in the West was the only one with any significance simply because in the light of the present-and to all appearances-it had apparently emerged as the dominant one. Therefore, its past was the only one worth considering. This notion was in turn bolstered by another: a self-generating model of technological development in which the historian attempted to trace the evolution of modern science and technology by working backwards to the experiences and ways of thinking characteristic of Mediterranean antiquity. Thus the roots of modern technology were shown to be exclusively founded on the work of Greek and Roman thinkers, mathematicians, engineers and observers of nature with no input from any other culture areas or people.
This brings us to the second aspect we have alluded to above, and this concerns the relationship between knowledge and power and the impact of this on interpretations of technology and culture. Throughout history, knowledge has generally remained closely linked with interests. Even when encyclopaedias, for instance, have traditionally sold themselves on the Francis Bacon principle that “knowledge is power”, they too have continued to reflect an undeclared, equally influential, political principle-that “power is knowledge”.
The intrusion of Europeans into non-European societies and the gradual establishing of political dominance and inequality between societies stimulated the inauguration of a new discourse about such societies. Political dominance came to be as routinely and unabashedly expressed in the form of knowledge as it was through the barrel of guns. Edward Said has already written on the invention of the discourse on “orientalism” and its direct political uses. But there are less controversial discourses that have had even larger repercussions only now being acknowledged. As a result, much academic knowledge in the Western world about the non-Western world, particularly the latter’s technology traditions, remains not only distorted or contaminated by the ethnic concerns, goals, theories, obsessions, and peculiar assumptions of Western scholars and universities; it is still largely defined, legitimized, and decided by them irrespective of whether there is any concurrence from the non-Western world.
The combination of these two aspects proved deadly: the emerging conception of Western man alone as homo faber, once it took firm roots within the situation of political dominance, rendered any appreciation of technique elsewhere-technique not necessarily reflected only in tools or machines-difficult and often impossible. In fact, the combination helped inaugurate its very own dark age. For it generated among Western (and not a few non-Western) scholars several major assumptions concerning technology and culture. We shall discuss three of these.
The first emerged in relation to Western man’s attitude towards the past, particularly with regard to pro-industrial technology. Homo faber exercised his new found power over the past by deriding it: this is reflected in the rewriting of history from today’s perspective in which the past is seen as mere prelude to the present. Earlier technological innovations are considered primitive precursors of later developments. Here we have a good example of the parochialism of the modern/Western mind as it proceeds to take experiences of technology and culture exclusive not just to the late twentieth century but to extremely small segments of the world population and makes these the basis for investigating, analyzing, assessing, and judging the general activities of human societies over hundreds of years. This was the case even when such societies were not so technologically enamored, dependent, or controlled as some of them seem to be now.
The second assumption relates to humankind’s so-called unique propensities for technology when compared with that of the animal world, an uncritical theory best summed up in a single word: speciesism. After deciding on the issue of the comparative technological competence of all living species in its own favor, the West came to the conclusion that the rest of creation, because inferior, was expendable if so required to further its own scheme of things.
But it is the third assumption that concerns us most seriously here: it is the idea that Western man can be equally distinguished from non-Western societies as well on the ground that the latter, like the animal and other “lower” species, also lacked technological development as it emerged in the West.
This idea was appropriately reflected in academia in the emergence of two new sciences: the discipline of sociology, which focused on so-called advanced societies and their flair for technology; and the subject of anthropology which occupied itself with non-Western cultures, limited to primitive or pre-industrial tools. Anthropology’s political origins have been blandly asserted by Claude Levi-Strauss in his controversial Smithsonian lecture:
Anthropology is not a dispassionate science like astronomy, which springs from the contemplation of things at a distance. It is the outcome of a historical process which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent human beings have had their resources plundered and their institutions and beliefs destroyed, whilst they themselves were ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage, and contaminated by diseases they were unable to resist. Anthropology is daughter to this era of violence: its capacity to assess more objectively the facts pertaining to the human condition reflects, on the epistemological level, a state of affairs in which one part of mankind treated the other as an object.
It is within such an imperialist context that the histories and technological experience of non-Western societies could be written off or ignored: the latter, after all, were conquered peoples. When technology is seen through an anthropological prism, the emerging picture is bound to be far removed in character from a scenario that emerges from a sociological perspective. What is more, it is bound to be even more far removed from reality itself.
Some impression of that reality is discernible in the period before political dominance began to corrupt the objectivity of knowledge. Before the so-called “voyages of discovery”, though non-Europeans were conceived as fantastic, wild, opulent, even monstrous, they were rarely considered inferior or backward; and even the actual European encounter with the scientific, technologic and medical traditions of non-Western societies was different from what eventually became the stuff of politically directed myths. In fact, from the day that the Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama landed in India until almost three centuries later, Asia had a larger and more powerful impact on Europe than is normally recognized. Donald Lach has appropriately titled the first volume in his Asia in the Making of Europe “The Century of Wonder”. It was not without reason that an Englishman of the time addressed the Indian Emperor by describing himself as “the smallest particle of sand, John Russel, President of the East India Company with his forehead at command rubbed on the ground”. Nor can we forget that the first presents offered by da Gama to the King of Calicut included some striped cloth, hats, strings of coral beads, wash basins and jars of oil and honey. The king’s officers naturally found them laughable.
It would take a few more decades before the Europeans landing in the Indian subcontinent would notice anything beyond gold and spices. But by 1720 and for a period of up to a hundred years, a new category of observers came visiting, some from newly formed learned societies in England. Their detailed reports were a result of the European quest for useful knowledge in different fields.
In his pioneering volume, Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century, the Indian historian Dharampal includes several accounts from these observers which describe among others the Indian techniques of inoculation against smallpox and plastic surgery. (While the first was eventually banned by the English, the latter was learnt, adopted, and developed). The accounts also document Indian processes like the making of ice, mortar, and water-proofing for the bottoms of ships; water mills, agricultural implements like the drill plough, water harvesting and irrigation works, and the manufacture of iron and of a special steel called wootz.
More techniques (like those involved, for instance, in the manufacture of Indian textiles) are described in DeColonizing History (Alvares, 1991) and Science and Technology in Indian Culture (Rahman, 1984). But even this documentation, impressive as it is, is now recognized to be but the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
The Chinese, like the Indians at Calicut, had a similar experience with an embassy and its gifts from London. The edict of Qian Long to the embassy is worth quoting: “There is nothing we lack, as your principal envoy and others have themselves observed. We have never set much store on strange or ingenious objects, nor do we need any of your country’s manufactures” (Fairbank, 1971).
Immediately after the encounter, the graph of European reaction rises with esteem and wonder; and then, as political conquest and overlordship increase, the graph alters course and begins to record increasing denigration. A remarkable transformation of image thus takes place as the political relationship between Europe and non-European societies changes to the advantage of the former, rendering the Europeanization of the world picture almost an act of divine will.
By 1850, political dominance over the non-Western world was clearly installing distorted ideas not only about that part of the world but rebounding to distort Western man’s image of himself as well. Already by 1835, for instance, the British had acquired a flattering notion of their own civilization (Victorian England was seen to be at the top of the pyramid of civilization) and a thorough-going contempt for Asia.
This contempt finds expression in the famous Minute of Lord Babington Macaulay:
I have never found one amongst them (the orientalists) who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. . . It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgment used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.
Dharampal has produced an interesting record of these assessments of science and technology in India among Western observers as the relationship between India and Britain changed to Britain’s advantage.
Regarding the question of Indian astronomy, he discusses the case of Prof. John Playfair, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh and an academician of distinction. Playfair studied the accumulated European information then available on Indian astronomy and arrived at the conclusion that the Indian astronomical observations pertaining to the period 3102 years BC appeared to be correct in every text. This accuracy could only have been achieved either through complex astronomical calculations by the Indians or by direct observation in the year 3102 BC. Playfair chose the latter. Opting for the former would have meant admitting that “there had arisen a Newton among Brahmins to discover that universal principle which connects, not only the most instant regions of space, but the most remote periods of duration, and a De La Grange, to trace, through the immensity of both its most subtle and complicated operations.”
Similar attitudes prevailed concerning the knowledge of how Indians produced wootz. J.M. Heath, founder of the Indian Iron and Steel Company and later prominently connected with the development of the steel industry in Sheffield, wrote “. . . iron is converted into case steel by the natives of India, in two hours and a half, with an application “heat that in this country, would be considered quite inadequate to produce such an effect; while at Sheffield it requires least four hours to melt blistered steel in wind-furnaces ‘the best construction, although the crucibles in which the steel is melted, are at a white heat when the metal is put into them, and in the Indian process, the crucibles are put into the furnace quite cold”.
However. Health would not admit that the Indian practice was based on knowledge “of the theory of operations”, simply because “the theory of it can only be explained by the lights of modern chemistry”.
By the beginning of this century, the Western mind had already convinced itself that Western science and philosophy were the only approach to metaphysical truth ever attained by the human species and that the Christian religion provided wisdom and insight incumbent on all people everywhere to believe.
The result is reflected in the output of academia: a “history of art” turned out to be nothing but a history of European art and a “history of ethics” a history of Western ethics. While European music was music, everything else remained mere anthropology. The contemporary evaluation of human activity in the West as compared with the non-Western world was unabashedly provided by the late Jacob Bronowski in the Ascent of Mean in words calmest echoing Macaulay in 1837:
We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye. We are not one of those resigned. contemplative civilizations of the Far Fast or the Middle Ages,that believed that the world has only to be seen and thought about and who practiced no science in the form that is characteristic for us. We are active; and indeed we know. as something more than a symbolic accident in the evolution of man, that it is the hand that drives the subsequent evolution of the brain. We find tools today made by man before he became man. Benjamin Franklin in 1778 called man a ‘tool-making animal’ and that is right.
Now there were obviously perverse consequences of such a view: scholars in several non-western societies, schooled in an educational system imposed on their societies through the colonial establishment, readily incorporated similar ideas about their own histories. In an article in Nature 35 years ago, Joseph Needham had to chide a native scholar of Thailand for claiming that his own people had not made any contribution to science despite compelling evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, the colonization project succeeded in convincing many non-European intellectuals and scholars that only the West was active. They facilely accepted the idea that activity per se was desirable compared to judicious or necessary activity: that only the West was capable of thinking in the abstract sense. If this opinion were carried to its logical conclusion, would appear that if the rest of humankind had survived for hundreds of years, this must be due to some form of manna falling providentially from the heavens.
The damage done by these years of extremely ideological scholarship and a ruinous ethnocentrism to the history of technology was bad enough. Predictably, the impression of an empty technological wilderness invented by Western scholarship about non-Western societies had a parallel, simultaneous, destructive impact on the assessment of their cultures as well. So insidious was the nature of this outrageous assumption regarding Western and non-Western abilities, that even Joseph Needham, Mark Elwin, Abdur Rahman and a host of other scholars participated in pointless debates which often took it for granted. One major debate, for example, focused on why China (and India) did not produce either modern science or an industrial revolution on the European pattern, especially since Chinese technology had already reached a level of sophistication not yet attained in any other part of the world as late as the fifteenth century. Attempted answers compared and contrasted the internal conditions within Chinese society with those within Europe; the argument eventually succeeded in establishing the conclusion that no scientific or industrial revolution occurred in China because the social conditions in China were not the same as those within Europe. Thereafter, a host of cultural and social factors were dragged out of context and labeled probable “obstacles’ either to the development of technology or modern science.
A critique of the three assumptions we have surveyed above therefore becomes compelling and inevitable, if we are to eschew their myriad fallacies in future. We shall take each in turn.
The idea that the past was merely a prelude, and a primitive one at that, may come naturally to anyone who has begun to feel that the present era of technical change is inevitable. Yet future societies may assess their past (our today) basing themselves on values other than those celebrating mere technical change. Already mindless technical change and built-in technological obsolescence have been assaulted by several global thinkers on the ground of ecological unsustainability and resource scarcity. It would also be wrong to think that because man did not have technology is he now does, he was necessarily impoverished. If there is anything the past gives us it is this positive impression of survival in all kinds of environmental scenarios. There is also evidence of more widely dispersed creativity when man was not submerged by technology than there is today in many areas of human experience, we are yet to match oven the technological achievements of the past which were driven by values other than mere complexity for its own sake or profit.
A similar argument may be used against the assumption that humankind is the only tool-making species there is. Several naturalists and ethologists have documented the diversity of nature’s schemes at fabrication; most notably, Felix Paturi in his Nature, Mother of Invention and Karl von Frisch in Animal Architecture. Scholars like Lewis Mumford have gone further in stating quite bluntly that in their expression of certain technical abilities other species have for long been more knowledgeable than man.
Insects, birds and animals, for example, have made far more radical innovations in the fabrication of containers, with their intricate nests and bowers, their geometric bee-hives, their urbanoid anthills, and termitaries, their beaver lodges, than man’s ancestors had achieved in the making of tools until the emergence of homo sapiens. In short, if technical proficiency alone were sufficient to identify and foster intelligence, man was for long a dullard, compared with many other species.
Niko Tinbergen, another ethologist, after years of close observation of other species, has come to the following conclusion: “It was said that I. animals cannot learn; 2. animals cannot conceptualize; 3. cannot plan ahead; 4. cannot use, much less make tools; 5. it was said they have no language; 6. they cannot count; 7. they lack artistic sense; 8. they lack all ethical sense.” All of these statements, says Tinbergen, are untrue.
It cannot be said therefore that, in contrast with other species, humankind alone is a tool-maker. Thus the attempt to distinguish man from other living species because of his tool-making capacity is now seen to be a result of limited knowledge and unwarranted assumption of qualitative discontinuities between human beings and other species. It will also be useful to recall here that the ability to fabricate and organize is not a singular human trait-it is an intrinsic feature of nature since nature can exist only in a given form, whether at its most primary constituents at the sub-atomic level or even at the level of crystalline structures or the multiple tiers of a primary forest.
However, it is the third assumption-concerning the West’s genius for technology and the rest of the world’s incompetence in the same department-that contains the greatest mythological component of them all.
As we shall presently see, such an assumption has not only no historical basis, it is in fact contrary to historical and even to contemporary evidence. As for the gift of Greek rationality, suffice it to say that for two thousand years it gave no technological advantage to those who had it over those who did not. On the contrary, major scientific concepts, technological artifacts, tools, and instruments emerged in cultures that had nothing to do with either Greece or Rome.
The other problem with this assumption is it cannot even cope with the long established view that the science and technology traditions of most societies, particularly so of the West, are in significant ways mixed traditions. Even the little that we know about it indicates that the cross-cultural borrowing of technics and technology is impressive. Thus a very large number of critical inventions from both India and China helped fill significant gaps in the technological development of the West. A simple example from Francis Bacon’s work will suffice to illustrate this point. He wrote:
It is well to observe the force and virtue and consequences of discoveries. These are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure and inglorious; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world, the first in literature, the second in warfare, and the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes; inasmuch that no empire, no sect, no star, seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.
Now all these three mechanical discoveries were Chinese. Yet here again Western scholars have found it hard to acknowledge their origin. Borrowing of techniques from India is easily documented as well.
The documentation of technology in other cultures is only beginning. For example, it was only in 1974 that Sang Woon Jeon’s Science and Technology in Korea appeared. There is as yet no major record of technology in Africa or South America though there is now available a large volume of documented evidence that both areas were rich in tools and techniques, from metallurgy to textiles.
In India, the other large storehouse of useful and appropriate tools (some still in productive use), the most extensive documentation of technology has only recently commenced, sparked in part by Dharampal ‘s Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century and the work of scholars like Abdur Rahman.
The immediate impact of these re-invigorated investigations, stimulated largely by political independence, is a fresh debate over the issue of technology and culture: the old assumption of one technology and one culture in which others are seen to make a few, presumably inconsequential, contributions, is in tatters. Whatever its own pretensions to be the only viable culture, the West is finally being seen by non-Western societies as only one among several: a certain balance between cultures gets restored even though economic inequality persists. In fact, in some cases the pendulum has swung to the other side with cultures unabashedly resuming their traditions. There has naturally been a reverberation in the climate of ideas.
Changes in perception of this kind have already come about in other academic disciplines. To cite just one example, world histories were once written as if Europe were the center of the planet, if not the cosmos. There has been progress since: Geoffrey Barraclough and Leon Stavrianos, for instance, have both succeeded in producing comprehensive histories which avoid the older Eurocentric perspectives.
But even assuming we are able to produce, culture by culture, a fairly objective and comprehensive record of science, technology, and medicine, we would still be uncomfortably close to the pet obsession and perception of the present epoch. If there is anything the recent past has shown us, it is that we can be all too zealous judges in our own cause. We continue to celebrate uncritically our technological feats even when we know that the principal criterion of success for any species (and the human species is no exception) is primarily its ability to survive.
Therefore, it may be best not to get trapped in the debates on what is basically a sub-history: the history of slave-machines or automation or the recent machine-propensity of some cultures. After all, the homo faber concept is itself a distorted reflection of the natural endowments of the human species, an example of reductionist thinking. We know now that reductionism readily distorts knowledge, often pauperizes it, but rarely enhances it.
What is required in the circumstances then is a paradigm shift. I would like to suggest this can be achieved by replacing the heavily loaded term “technology” (too close identified with externalized objects) with the more neutral word, “technique”. Technique has a larger ambit than technology and does not necessarily express itself only in the form of tools or artifacts. For the moment, we may define it briefly as every culture’s distinct means of achieving its purposes. The natural propensity of human beings is to rely on technique, not technology, for while it has been proven that we can survive without technology, we cannot survive without technique.
Thus there can be no technique without culture, no culture without technique. An investigation into a culture’s techniques is bound to be considerably more difficult than the recording of a culture’s artifacts. The important gain here would be that we would begin with a more democratic assumption: that there is no culture without a system of techniques. Such a postulate would inoculate us effectively against methodological, ethnocentric, and other fatal flaws the homo faber concept was both parent and heir to. It would nip in the bud any undesirable future forays into cultural narcissism or ethnocentric discourse.
If this is indeed so, the more logical assumption would be that every culture has relied on a corresponding system of techniques that has guaranteed survival. Understood in this way, it makes far better sense to talk of Western technique (even though today largely expressed in the form of technology), or African, Indian, Chinese, Maya, or Arabic techniques of survival (in which technology may not be given that importance for fairly valid reasons). But even a relatively low importance given to technology could never mean a poverty of technique. The idea that the human species is technique-natured could be empirically falsified if a human society could be found that lacked technique-and not just machines or artifacts.
Technique, then, is nothing but the permanent but dynamic expression of an individual culture. Cultures can only express themselves or survive through technique: the alternative is chaos. Non-human species may be guided in the exercise of technique by inflexible inborn patterns of behavior. But the human world is as rigorously bound by the controls imposed by the symbolic universe that emerged as a substitute for weakened instinctual patterns. Myth, for instance, is technique. Interaction with (or manipulation of) nature may take place either through myth-making, scientific construction, and myriad other ways. All are expressions of the symbolic universe human beings inherit because they are human beings.
Thus we share the necessity of functioning through technique-not just through tools-with other living species-from the mammoth geobiological processes of Gaia to the cross-pollination of the rice plant to species of bird and animal, some of which, like the bower bird, are more prone to technology than others. Thus the so-called potter-wasp is known for its technique in constructing what we human beings culturally recognize as pots: however, the small vessels are the conclusion of technique: without it, there would be no “pot”, no propagation and, therefore, no survival.
This will also explain why so-called primitive societies are often more complex in their social-cultural arrangements-their rich fund of botanical knowledge, slash-and-burn techniques, elaborate myths are as much an expression of technique-than modern societies.
Our new paradigm-based on a thorough-going analysis of technique-will enable us to concentrate more effectively on those aspects of human experience in non-western societies where there may be appropriate development of technology (as in India and China) but a superabundance yet of technique. A large number of these, particularly in India or in the Islamic cultures, may be located squarely within the domain of the sacred. They would be unintelligible outside such a framework of understanding.
We shall also observe in such societies that even where there is sophisticated technology, it retains an unobtrusive (not invasive) character. This can be seen from the merged outlines of Arab architecture to the irrigation works of South India or Sri Lanka.
An encyclopaedia of non-Western science, technology, and medicine may restrict its scheme to a bare description of the evolution of machines or artifacts incompetently covered by earlier conventional Western works, but it must do so guided by the background of the larger canvas of technique. Here the scholar will eventually examine theories of language in the same detailed manner as he would the culture and preparation of food or the control of breath-all extremely detailed sciences in India and China; he would examine irrigation and animal husbandry techniques, the domestication of cultivars of crop plants, record the elaborate knowledge of plants and of the human body, and seek to understand theories of cosmic phenomena and of the behavior of annual events like the monsoons.
The aim of the historian is to describe the nature of this individual system and not place it within a hierarchical ordering of societies. His task is to document this immense richness, not endeavor to swamp and drive it into oblivion on the questionable assumption that Western technology is the only direction that human technique will take. The growing anxiety over Western technology is closely associated with the threat it is perceived to pose to the fate of the planet and to survival. We may have to examine its history clinically to diagnose why it has generated the kind of problems it poses for humankind. Here, only a proper study of technique and culture within non-Western societies (and not as Forbes hoped, the event of Easter) will bring some balance and provide urgent clues to the origins of what Jamal-ud-din described as the illness of occidentosis, the plague of the West.
Claude Alvares
References
Alvares, Claude. De-Colonizing History: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West: 1492 to the Present Day. Goa: The Other India Press, 1991.
Barraclough, G. An Introduction to Contemporary History. London: Penguin, 1967-1974.
Dharampal. Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century. Delhi: Impex India, 1971.
Goody, J. Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Jeon Sang-woon. Science and Technology in Korea. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1974.
Lach, Donald F and E. Van KIey. Asia in the Making of Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. “The Scope of Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 7(2): 112-123,1966.
Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967-1970.
Nasr, S.H. Science and Civilization in Islam. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968.
Nasr, S.H. Islamic Science: an Illustrated Study. London: World of Islam Festival Publishing Co., 1976.
Needham, J. et al. Science and Civilisation in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954.
Rahman, A., ed. Science and Technology in Indian Culture-a Historical Perspective. Delhi: NISTADS, 1984.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
Sardar, Z., ed. The Touch of Midas: Science, Values and Environment in Islam and the West. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983.
Stavrianos, L.S. Global Rift. New York: Morow, 1981.
Teng, Ssu-Yu. China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1939-1923. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1954.
Tinbergen, N. “The Cultural Ape.” TLS: Times Literary Supplement, 28 February 1975, p. 217.