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...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
1. Verfasser: Gänger, Stefanie (VerfasserIn)
Dokumenttyp: Article (Journal)
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: 21 October 2024
In: The historical journal
Year: 2024, Jahrgang: 67, Heft: 4, Pages: 769-784
ISSN:1469-5103
DOI:10.1017/S0018246X24000189
Online-Zugang: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
Volltext
Verfasserangaben:Stefanie Gänger
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung: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.
Beschreibung:Gesehen am 21.03.2025
Beschreibung:Online Resource
ISSN:1469-5103
DOI:10.1017/S0018246X24000189