Posted on Wednesday, March 16, 2005 2:56 PM
In
A Celebration of Difference: Science and Democracy in India Shiv Visvanathan, an anthropologist of science, writes:
"The debates about science in the nationalist era were debates about the politics of knowledge. They were not restricted merely to the uses of knowledge, of what one might call the applied science of good and evil; in addition, there was a concern about the grammar of violence implicit in science and about how science appeared at that costume ball called Indian civilization. It was a pursuit of cognitive justice, that is, of the right of different forms of knowledge to coexist without being marginalized by official, state-sponsored forms of knowledge. What was sought was a living ecology of knowledge, as expressed, for instance, in the debate between indigenous and new medical systems in 1923. Indian nationalism took the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity and applied them to the world of knowledge."
Further on Visvanathan writes:
"So the question of science in India shifted from cognitive justice to popularization, to science as consumption."
In my research I focus on digital information and communication technologies and how they affect knowledge diversity, the living ecology of knowledge. How do ICTs facilitate cognitive justice and how do they facilitate the commodification of knowledge?
There is a problem with the way I investigate this issue. It came up in the workshop with Uma Narayan and again this week in an email discussion. When I say that I work within a framework of cognitive justice - when I argue that other knowledges or alternative rationalities are as valid - fascism is used as the argument against the validity of other knowledges. One confusion may be the use of the word valid, which my critics interchange with good (not in my use and understanding of the word). But what if I argue that all knowledges are significant. Is that acceptable? Does that mean that there are no valid knowledges? Or is there one valid
Knowledge - the one produced by 'pure' science - and the other knowledges are significant but not good? Whose science and technology decides what knowledge is invalid? Is there a better way to tackle this issue?