Non-western scholars, bourgeois virtues, and the international scientific community in the age of empire, 1870-1920

• Verfasst von: Gänger, Stefanie [VerfasserIn]
• Titel: Non-western scholars, bourgeois virtues, and the international scientific community in the age of empire, 1870-1920
• Verf.angabe: Stefanie Gänger
• E-Jahr: 2024
• Jahr: 21 October 2024
• Umfang: 16 S.
• Illustrationen: Illustrationen
• Fussnoten: Gesehen am 21.03.2025
• Titel Quelle: Enthalten in: The historical journal
• Ort Quelle: Cambridge [u.a.] : Cambridge Univ. Press, 1958
• Jahr Quelle: 2024
• Band/Heft Quelle: 67(2024), 4, special issue, Seite 769-784
• ISSN Quelle: 1469-5103
• DOI: doi:10.1017/S0018246X24000189
• Datenträger: Online-Ressource
• Sprache: eng
• K10plus-PPN: 1920244050

Abstract

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.