Non-western scholars, bourgeois virtues, and the international scientific community in the age of empire, 1870-1920
Historians have long argued that science was fashioned as a bourgeois, Western cultural practice by the late nineteenth century, in ways that allowed its practitioners to exclude or distance themselves - through a rhetoric of endeavour, utilitarianism, and progress - from the more useless, ‘frivolou...
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| Format: | Article (Journal) |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
21 October 2024
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| In: |
The historical journal
Year: 2024, Volume: 67, Issue: 4, Pages: 769-784 |
| ISSN: | 1469-5103 |
| DOI: | 10.1017/S0018246X24000189 |
| Online Access: | Verlag, lizenzpflichtig, Volltext: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X24000189 Verlag, lizenzpflichtig, Volltext: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/historical-journal/article/nonwestern-scholars-bourgeois-virtues-and-the-international-scientific-community-in-the-age-of-empire-18701920/7D3E0DD0613E5DB44EEDBE92E0E77EE8 
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| Author Notes: | Stefanie Gänger |
| Summary: | Historians have long argued that science was fashioned as a bourgeois, Western cultural practice by the late nineteenth century, in ways that allowed its practitioners to exclude or distance themselves - through a rhetoric of endeavour, utilitarianism, and progress - from the more useless, ‘frivolous’ learning of aristocrats, women, or, indeed, native ‘informants’ in the colonies. This article examines the case of scholars from outside northern Europe and North America - Japanese literati, creole intellectuals, and Lebanese scholars - who managed to participate in the period’s Western scientific networks as peers. It holds that these men were able to establish epistemic credibility not because their lower rung in a political and racial hierarchy was ever irrelevant, but because their status as upper-middle-class professionals and their bourgeois habitus - their ‘civility’, and ‘manners’ - in some measure made up for it. The article reveals, rather than forthright ‘exclusion’ and ‘silencing’ of non-Europeans, complex epistemic hierarchies and geographies of knowledge. It exposes the mechanisms of epistemic inclusion and its limits in the period: the functioning of an academic community that was - in many, rather significant ways - also a social world. |
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| Item Description: | Gesehen am 21.03.2025 |
| Physical Description: | Online Resource |
| ISSN: | 1469-5103 |
| DOI: | 10.1017/S0018246X24000189 |