Intimacy, Imagination and the Inner Dialectics of Knowledge Communities: The Synthetic Society, 1896–1908

Lubenow, William C.

doi:10.5871/bacad/9780197263266.003.0016

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“…108 More general scholarship on knowledge formation in the nineteenth century too show the centrality of networks of friendship, alliance and intimacy as crucial, latent determinants of knowledge and history. 109 The processes of consolidation of homoeopathy through public assertions of intimacy contributes to this scholarship. Further, in privileging 'intimacy' and 'familiarity' over objectivity, the homoeopaths, as practitioners of a family-oriented, informal, intimate science, avowed a special status for themselves, as indeed other sectarian groups caught up in family, caste, kinship or sacred networks, as producers of authoritative biographies.…”

Section: Biography History and A Familiar Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Biography and Homoeopathy in Bengal: Colonial lives of a European heterodoxy

Das¹

2015

Mod. Asian Stud.

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Despite being recognized as a significant literary mode in understanding the advent of the modern self, biographies as agenrehave received relatively little attention from South Asian historians. Likewise, histories of science and healing in British India have largely ignored the colonial trajectories of those sectarian, dissenting, supposedly pseudo-sciences and medical heterodoxies that have flourished in Europe since the late eighteenth century. This article addresses these gaps in the historiography to identify biographies as a principal mode through which an incipient, ‘heterodox’ Western science like homoeopathy could consolidate and sustain itself in Bengal. In recovering the cultural history of a category that the state archives render largely invisible, this article argues that biographies are more than a mere repository of individual lives, and in fact are a veritable site of power. In bringing histories of print and publishing, histories of medicine, and histories of life writing practices together, it pursues two broad themes: first, it analyses the sociocultural strategies and networks by which scientific doctrines and concepts are translated across cultural borders. It explores the relation between medical commerce, print capital, and therapeutic knowledge to illustrate that acculturation of medical science necessarily drew upon and reinforced local constellations of class, kinship, and religion. Second, it simultaneously reflects upon the expanding genre of homoeopathic biographies published since the mid-nineteenth century: on their features, relevance, and functions, examining in particular the contemporary status of biography vis-à-vis ‘history’ in writing objective pasts.

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Section: Biography History and A Familiar Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Biography and Homoeopathy in Bengal: Colonial lives of a European heterodoxy

Das¹

2015

Mod. Asian Stud.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Intimacy, Imagination and the Inner Dialectics of Knowledge Communities: The Synthetic Society, 1896–1908

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

Biography and Homoeopathy in Bengal: Colonial lives of a European heterodoxy

Biography and Homoeopathy in Bengal: Colonial lives of a European heterodoxy

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