Economic and Political Weekly January 21, 2006 210 I I n the special issue of Social Studies of Science on “postcolonial techno-science”, Warwick Anderson argues that a postcolonial approach “offers us a chance of disconcerting conventional accounts of so-called ‘global’ techno-science, revealing and complicating the durable dichotomies, produced under colonial regimes, which underpin many of its practices and hegemonic claims” (2002: 644). Anderson’s appeal is embedded in an understanding of globalisation that seeks to understand both the situatedness of local knowledge practices, and, their movement through space, allowing us to see “local cultures and emergent political economies on the same scale” (645). Particularly valu- able (and familiar) for those working in the field of science studies and the developing world is this appreciation that the hermetic separation of science studies in the developing and developed world, a separation that easily maps onto “less developed” and “more developed” science respectively, is not just empirically ill-informed, it is analytically misleading. However, Anderson also sees in postcolonial analysis the possibility of coming to grips with the alleged universality of Reason. In other words, he identifies the postcolonial as also a site for understanding the clash of knowledges and the formation of alternative modernities. Reason is the gloss for knowledge that is western, a fixed knowable and dominant entity that is counterposed to other, possibly alternative and un-modern know- ledge formations characteristic of subaltern or marginal sites in a global political economy. The need for this analytic turn, Anderson muses, is related to “rising concern about corporate globalisation, increased commodification of science, and further alienation and circulation of intellectual property” (644): in other words, the international political economy of unequal exchange. To the extent that postcolonial techno-science may identify and address “local” and incommensurable knowledges built around non-western ontologies, this formulation evokes the invisible knowledge work of subalterns being subsumed into capitalist property relations that will eventually lead to exploitation, ex- propriation and even extermination. Hence, a postcolonial techno-science approach may also offer, he notes, policy insights into the relationship of contemporary technology and processes of capitalist globalisation, not to mention the possible “disfigurement” of science studies itself. Is it possible that postcolonial techno-science can be an alter- native mode of analysis at the same time as the postcolonial indexes a locational site for alternative, i e, non-western, knowledges? One line of thinking appears to do away with the nation-scale, while the other seeks to reinforce it. Postcolonial techno-science as a field of enquiry that crosses geopolitical boundaries as it tracks flows, transmissions, travels and circuits of scientists, knowledges, machines, and techniques (see Prasad’s article in this review for an example) is a critical way of thinking about science and technology and their study that we can endorse with much enthusiasm. But when the postcolonial as a mode of analysis is linked to a fixed site of irreducible knowledge claims, it articulates an ontology that ties knowledge to location as a singular and essential quality of place. Suturing together these quite different thematics is only possible when postcolonial becomes an index of and reference to the third world – both third world as the prime site of weakness and underdevelopment, but also third world as a place filled with cultural histories of alternative knowledge organised on a national scale. India be- comes the home of Indian ‘gyan’/‘vigyan’, or, place becomes a metonym for a unique way of thinking tied to geo-cultural assumptions that can have little – other than ideological – meaning in a hybrid, reflexive and historical social universe. While I agree that Anderson’s re-scaling of the field of science studies resonates well with scholars working on science studies which take the non-west as their starting point, I also want to propose that his other proposal raises serious analytic concerns which have bedevilled the study of science in the third world for some time. By treating local knowledge primarily in terms of political economy, and to a lesser extent in terms of ethics, 1 Anderson fails to see the power of modern science in political terms, as ideology, particularly as a form of social legitimacy and political support for the modern nation state. The proximity of modern nationalism and its ideological reliance on “local The Contradictory Spaces of Postcolonial Techno-Science Postcolonial techno-science as a field of enquiry that crosses geopolitical boundaries as it tracks flows, circuits of scientists, knowledges, machines, and techniques is a critical way of thinking about science and technology and their study that we can endorse with much enthusiasm. But when the postcolonial as a mode of analysis is linked to a fixed site of irreducible knowledge claims, it articulates an ontology that ties knowledge to location as a singular and essential quality of place. Location matters: by refusing to isolate the South from the West in the study of science, one leaves open the possibility of seeing multi-directional influences and channels simultaneously. Postcolonial science studies need a proliferation of historical and sociological accounts of science as practice in order to set a standard against which we can more easily identify “Indian Science” as a discourse that shapes a political struggle that has little to do with science studies, even if it has much to do with India. ITTY ABRAHAM