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Alternative Science
Shiv Visvanathan
Theory Culture Society 2006; 23; 164
DOI: 10.1177/026327640602300226

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164 Theory, Culture & Society 23(23)

Alternative Science
Shiv Visvanathan

Abstract This entry counters the paradigmatic status of modern western science by
pointing to the existence of alternative knowledges that precede this hegemonic form,
and by showing the fruitfulness of alternative sciences that have emerged in contem-
porary times. It argues that the idea of an alternative science demonstrates that issues
of knowledge determine the possibilities of a politics that connects the question of
alternative lifeworlds to alternative livelihoods, lifestyles and life cycles.
Keywords ethnoscience, monoculturalism, museumization, pluralist world, Swadesi
movement, universalism

I
An idea of an alternative science somehow eludes a dictionary definition of the term. Such a
definition would fail to capture the poignancy, the Alice in Wonderland existence, of this word
and its world. An alternative presupposes a dominant domain. Alternative sciences are seen as
supplanting or substituting the current models that dominate science. They assume the hegemony
of modem western science that is seen as both the best and the most dominant form of knowl-
edge. Yet alternative sciences have always existed, whether one considers Ayurvedic medicine or
traditional agriculture. Only these sciences never made a claim to a universalizing validity that
modern western science insisted upon. In fact, it is only modern western science that has system-
atically adhered to its claims to be the universal basis of knowledge. As a result, an alternative
science today is often seen as another paradigm or gestalt that can challenge the current domi-
nance of science and offer a parallel claim of universalism. Such terms of discourse create a
captive text. It sets up a Kuhnian frame where only one system of knowledge can survive at a
time and where the idea of a pluralistic regime of proliferation is seen as a cognitive weakness.
Such a model of knowledge creates what has been called a monoculture of the mind and it is
precisely this which the discourse of alternative sciences seeks to break.
The phrase alternative science(s) demands an unfreezing of narratives, especially those of
the history of science. Second, it requires that we examine the relation of science to the other
forms of knowledge and explore how competing or dissenting forms of religion or politics have
sought to anchor themselves in some notion of a critical or alternative science. To the unfreez-
ing of history and the politics of the other, we can also add the politics of knowledge.
The idea of alternative science opens up a critique of an internalist and the esoteric history
of science, as opposed to the usual emphasis on an exoteric and externalist understanding of
science. The latter tends to provide a linear reading of science as one rational cumulative
sequence of knowledge from Aristotle to Einstein, sensitive only to issues of social and
professional organization and those of political economy. The former emphasizes issues of epis-
temology, cosmology and ontology, and also sensitizes one to a non-secular history of science,
relocating its roots in occult, magical and religious debates. It seeks to emphasize that the roots
of creativity of modern science lie in these diverse traditions and that the attempts to create
a battle between science and religion are of recent origin. The dream of alternative science is
a dream of science located in a different politics, a dream where epistemology and cosmology
might be as important as political economy. The politics of knowledge is thus not only about
the politics of the axiomatics of knowledge itself. It can debate how a notion of method or an
attitude to nature can be a source of violence. It does something more. It shows how modern

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Problematizing Global Knowledge Science/Alternative Science 165

politics, especially democracy, tends to black-box the content of knowledge. Knowledge, rather
than being an abstract entity or system, becomes a lifeworld connected to livelihood, lifestyles
and life cycles. Thus stated, the idea of alternative science is an attempt to open modern
western science to the possibilities it has suppressed both within and beyond itself. It seeks
to reset, as it were, the fundamental maps of modern knowledge and the questions we ask of
it. To open up this captive text, we have to unravel or extricate ourselves from the standard
Herculean ventures that the history and philosophy of science set for us.

II
The first of these intellectual problems is what we might call the Weberian agenda fulfilled at
one level by the Sinologist and embryologist Joseph Needham. The Weberian question was,
why did rational bourgeois capitalism and its great corollary, modern science, develop only in
the West. Max Weber attempted to answer the question by relating both capitalism and science
to their roots in Protestant thought, and seeking to answer why the conditions necessary for
capitalism did not develop elsewhere. Joseph Needham performed the Weberian exercise for
science. His Science and Civilization in China (Needham, 1954) is an attempt to show that,
while the Chinese invented everything from the compass to tea drinking, science in the modern
western sense failed to develop there. Despite a deep ethnography of Chinese astronomy,
medicine and agriculture, Needham failed to ask explicitly the question of whether Chinese
cosmology constituted the basis for an alternative science. One is still caught in the failure of
the Chinese to develop a modern science. Even for a Needham, other forms of knowledge still
exist as a prelude to science. China, for all its achievement, remains a failed chrysalis for science.
If the Weberian question is one Procrustean frame for the genesis of the alternative science
question, the battle between science and religion becomes the other dubious binary stemming
the possibility of an alternative science. Questions of an occult science, of spiritualism as a
science, or a Theosophist science all join an epistemological circus of defeated knowledges.
The affiliation between feminist politics and such ideas of alternative science added to the
sense that alternative sciences fuelled a search for the irrational. One senses this in the early
reaction to Mesmerism or Theosophy, where a search for a more non-violent science, or a
pluralistic notion of the body, was conceived as part of the irrationalist assault against the foun-
dations of science.
What was only a suspicion with Theosophy became a certainty in the age of fascism. The
Nazi search for a racial science or the Lysenkoist idea of genetics created, as it were, a stigma
around alternative science. Conventionally, the idea of an alternative science recalls the horrors
of Jewish physicists under the Nazi racist science or the travails of the geneticist Vavilov under
a Lysenkoist attack (Lecourt, 1977). A search for freedom became identified with the irra-
tionalities and whims of despotism. While Hitler and Stalin hardly constitute testimonies to
alternative science, it is necessary to break this hyphenation of memory, whereby a dominant
science virtually defines its idea of alternatives, in order to open the domain to new possibili-
ties. To do that, one has to examine how western science constituted its epistemological self
by defining its attitude to the other.

III
Zygmunt Bauman, in his Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), talks of the ambivalence of
modernity to the dichotomies it has built to sustain itself. The modern has always been ambiva-
lent to the stranger, whether as nomad, alien, monster or exotic. It has always sought a hegem-
onic mode of relating to the other and to other forms of knowledge. Modernity has always only
been hegemonic in the way it constructed the primitive, the peasant, the nomad, the tribal,
the madman, the woman, the patient and the worker. It panopticonized all these forms of life,
but, more particularly, appropriated and sucked out these life forms as forms of knowledge.
The primitive, like the patient, was the object of the gaze, to be studied, objectified,
measured, evaluated, mapped. The patients knowledge of his body or the tribals knowledge

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166 Theory, Culture & Society 23(23)

of his environment was read as irrational or condemned as ethno-knowledge. The primitives

were not only children of a lesser God but of a lesser science. It was not just that science was
monoparadigmatic; its monoculturalism extended beyond the surveillance of the gaze to the
fact that the creation of the object had to deny the subjective self and its knowledge. In relating
to the other, modern western science either eliminated, assimilated, ghettoized or museumized
them. Science had no place for defeated knowledges; the idea of an alternative science arose
as a charter to challenge the current politics of knowledge.
It was that great dissenting scientist Alfred Wallace who formulated the problem long before
Thomas Kuhn. In his Wonderful Century (Wallace, 1898), a portrait of the achievements of
19th-century science, Wallace begins with a celebration of western science and then observes
that a science at its moment of dominance tends to be coercive and to ignore competing theories
and hypotheses. Wallace believed that the success of science made it ethically and cognitively
imperative for the scientist to invent and explore alternatives. Wallace was, after all, one of the
first critics of the efficacy of vaccination and one of the most original defenders of spiritualism.
Wallaces sense of alternatives was at one with his biology. As opposed to the dominant evolu-
tionism of Huxley, which advocated the survival of the fittest, Wallaces work was a search for
diversity and the creative role of diversity in evolution. Wallaces perspective was complemented
by the observations of the geologist and aesthete Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy who once
asked: If God appeared on the earth and enquired of civilized western man for the Aztecs, the
Incas, the Red Indian, Australian aborigines and other slowly disappearing races, would he take
him to the museum? (1947). Coomaraswamy in fact argued that the museum, as the annex of
the laboratory, smelt of death and formaldehyde, embodying as it did the objectivity of a scien-
tific culture that preserves the folk song at the very moment it destroys the folksinger (1947).
Within a theory of alternative science, the museumization of knowledge, rather than being
a humanistic attempt to save knowledge, disembeds and fossilizes it. The museum also encodes
the doctrine of progress that often vociferously believes that there is a linear evolutionary
sequence between folk knowledge, traditional religious knowledge and scientific knowledge.
A theory of an alternative science cannot permit such limited grids of linearity, as this not only
embalms the past but also pre-empts a pluralistic future.
The whole modern idea of order-building, of which the panopticon and taxonomies of
modern science are a part, uses two strategies. Zygmunt Bauman, following Lvi-Strauss, has
dubbed them the anthropogenic and the anthropoemic approaches. The first annihilates the
stranger and his knowledge by devouring them. It is a strategy of assimilation, of making
the different similar by scienticizing it. The anthropoemic strategy vomits the stranger from
the limits of the ordinary world and, where exclusion is not possible, it destroys him/her phys-
ically. Both strategies negate the possibility of an alternative science and can be classically seen
in the modern idea of Development (see Sachs, 1992).

IV
Modern development was a process of nation-building. It was predicated on a social contract
between science and the nation-state to guarantee national security and promote development.
Its grammar was embodied in the model of transfer of technology from metropolis to periph-
ery, a sequence that involved a movement from invention and innovation to development. If
the project of development embodied the monocultural paradigms of knowledge, critiques of
development opened up, as it were, the framework for a postmodern democracy. One must
emphasize that this debate is not a monologue of binaries. The state or the corporation often
seeks to absorb, as well as suffocate, the dissenting knowledge. I will provide my examples
from India, partly for reasons of intellectual convenience.
The initial debates on development were debates about policy and planning, creating an
efficient ambience for professionals. To counter the technocratic impetus of science with the
need for justice and equity, the left movements of the 1950s began a campaign of taking science
to the villages. The Indian technocrat even articulated the idea of the scientific temper that
he almost visualized as a pedagogic vaccine which, if imbibed, would rid the superstitious tribal
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Problematizing Global Knowledge Science/Alternative Science 167

or the illiterate villager of ignorance, astrology and communalism. There is a complete black-
boxing of science and all one talks of is community or participative development. One partici-
pates in science, one extends it, one questions scientifically but one does not question science.
One merely celebrates it as given.
By the 1960s and 1970s, when the development paradigm was revealing its first cracks,
there was a split in policy between science and technology. Science was conceived as universal,
but technology was seen as local and adaptable. This was the age of the intermediate tech-
nology movement, where local knowledge and local materials accounted for both creativity
and survival. It was the age of Schumacher and Claude Lvi-Strauss, the one announcing the
prospect of intermediate technology (Schumacher, 1973) and the other the arrival of the savage
mind, the bricoleur and ethnoscience (Lvi-Strauss, 1962). Ethnoscience was a savage science,
an inferior science, a local science, articulated in a local language emphasizing local ingenuity.
Lvi-Strausss The Savage Mind (1962) is a powerful exercise in local myth, local science, but
it is quite clear that he considers the Scientific American as superior to tribal ethnoscience.
The idea of local knowledge or ethonoscience hierarchizes science, with western science thus
encompassing traditional and folk knowledges. One can borrow Reserpine from a traditional
medical system and appropriate it, while discarding the local discourse on healing. Intermedi-
ate technology la the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) was a discourse of
technological contexts that left the scientific texts untouched.
It was in the 1980s and 1990s, as development became more visibly genocidal and ecocidal,
that dissenting scientists and human rights groups opened the black box of science, challeng-
ing it as a method, a cosmology and as a vision of justice. It was within the pluralism of feminist,
anti-development, human rights and environmental groups that a framework for an alterna-
tive science was once again created. It needed four separate axioms to sustain it.
The first was the idea of cognitive justice. The idea of cognitive justice goes beyond the
concepts of voice or participation to emphasize that the victims of development were theor-
ists, i.e. men and women of science. It holds that the tribal, the patient, the worker, the nomad
are scientists and that they carry their own notions of coping and inventing with them. Such a
notion of knowledge cannot be reduced to a patronizing or romanticized idea of ethonoscience
as an inferior or defeated science. It also demands, as it were, a simultaneous congregation of
knowledges and knowledge-makers to debate their assumptions. The idea of cognitive justice
does not ask for expert representation but for actual presence. Bruno Latour made famous a
parliament of things for science (Latour, 1993). The social movements sought to make famous
a parliament of knowledges for science, where a sense of cognitive plurality prevailed.
One must emphasize that cognitive justice was not merely the undergraduate insistence on
equivalence or equality that held Zande medical practice and western medical practice in the
same balance. It was not an esoteric plea but a practical idea, an appeal by marginal and
traditional societies who felt that they had something to add to western science, to its ideas
of complexity, time and sustainability. It also sought to legalize the position by claiming that
constitutions recognize the relation between knowledge, forms of life and survival.
The idea of alternatives requires the idea of a commons of knowledge. The idea of the
commons has been applied to a communitys access to natural resources. A commons is a
domain where an ordinary villager finds building materials, herbs and sites of grazing. But a
commons of resources includes a commons of skills and habituses that sustain these sources
of knowledge. A commons cannot be reduced to a collection of commodities or information
to be patented. It is a heritage but not something that one archives or museumizes or patents.
It is a legacy available to all, sustained by careful use. The commons is also not a monoculture
but a zone of diversity, of Vavilovian domains of skills, memories, techniques and theories,
which many marginal societies employ to cope with disasters and development.
Finally, one opens up the black box of invention, of science, to question its very epistem-
ology. There were two classic epistemological challenges to science during the development
debates. One came from the Patriotic and People-Oriented Science and Technology Group
(PPST) and its intellectual mentor Dharampal, who argued that agriculture in India was an

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168 Theory, Culture & Society 23(23)

epistemology that the colonial British destroyed. More intriguingly, the chemist and engineer
C.V. Seshadri argued that the laws of thermodynamics were not only ethnocentric but also
oriented to a capitalist idea of organization and work (Seshadri, 1993). The dominant notion
of efficiency tended to emphasize high temperature gradients while most of the work nature
did and Third World communities pursued took place at ambient temperatures. The ambient
hardly functioned in the calculus of modem energies. As a result, when choices had to be
made, their logic worked against the poor of the Third World and their biomass economies.
An alternative science of energy beckoned, on grounds of both survival and justice.
One must emphasize that this goes beyond the contention that western science, like other
sciences, is a bundle of local practices locally grounded. The emphasis is not on origins but on
the drama of the encounter. Seshadri is asking whether current notions of western time are
adequate to understand ecology and energy. His is a search for cosmologies and epistemolo-
gies engaging with each other, looking for improved ideas of efficiency and sustainability based
on more profound ideas of time. It is a dialogue of cognitive systems, not just of the political
economy of energy.

IV
Probably one of the finest examples of a cultural model for alternative sciences arose during the
last phases of the Indian national movement. The Swadesi movement, which was triggered by
the partition of Bengal in 1904, led to an efflorescence of ideas in education, culture, science
and technology. The self-critique that followed constituted one of the finest articulations of
alternative science in the public sphere. Indian attempts to critique science and technology (S&T)
can be schematically visualized in terms of the groups shown in Figure 1 (Visvanathan, 2001).
The nationalist movement faced a simple problem. How does one reconcile science with
Indian civilization? The ensuing debate produced a repertoire of fascinating responses. Two
things marked this process. The first was the notion of hospitality. The Indian national
movement allowed a host of Englishmen to participate in the debate and many of them created
what I call the other colonialisms, a site where India served as a model of possibilities that
England has lost or repressed within itself. Second, there was nothing provincial about the
experiments. In one sense, the neighbourhood reflected the wider cosmos.
Some nationalists realized that science was the model of the future and claimed Benares and
Puri have had their day. What is there in Benares but fat bulls and fat priests? What is there in
Puri but cholera? (Visvanathan, 2001). The Swadesi nationalists saw science and the discipline
of science as a model for the rishihood of the future. The chemist P.C. Ray went to the extent
of contending that it was the disciplinary rituals of science that destroyed native aniline and
madder dyes and the indigo industry. In response, the geologist and art critic Ananda
Coomaraswamy criticized this fear and trembling about science and contended that what India
had to preserve was diversity, the distinctiveness of the various shades of red in every village.
Coomaraswamy also wrote a critique of why India would not use the gramophone, as mechan-
ical contraptions destroyed the sense of communitas with society and nature. If the traditional-
ists criticized modern western science for having no filter against obsolescence, the Theosophists
built a critique of science as a mode of violence. They criticized the vivisectionist impetus of
science, arguing that experimentation on animals would lead to experimentation on men. They
advocated homeopathy as an alternative medicine that was both anti-vivisectional and more sensi-
tive to the individualities of patients. Neo-vitalists like Patrick Geddes and Tagore focused not
only on the possibilities of a new biology, but on the idea that the modern university needed to
recover the sense of dissenting academies because they helped to reshuffle the ideas of knowl-
edge in a university. If Geddes worked on the ecology of the university, Tagore believed that a
dialogue of civilization had to precede the remaking of the modern university. India and the West
had to debate their competing notions of nature. Tagore and Geddes forecast a clash between
the western city science of nature and the forest science of India (Visvanathan, 1997).
For Gandhi, every man was a scientist. Gandhi saw himself as a scientist; he criticized the
iatrogenic power of science and simultaneously maintained that the patient was a scientist
responsible for the iatrogenyDownloaded
of western medicine.
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Problematizing Global Knowledge Science/Alternative Science 169

Swadesi Nationalists

Traditionalists Theosophists
S&T
Neo-vitalists Gandhians

Organic Technologists Leninist Technocrats

Nehruvians
Figure 1. Indian critiques of science and technology

Albert Howard argued that Indian agriculture was a science whose understanding of soils
transcended those of modern fertilizer-based agriculture. Howard saw the farmer as a man of
knowledge and his organic farming was an attempt to transfer from India what England had
lost as a result of Liebig and Bosch and their commitment to artificial fertilizers.
The Leninists believed that India had to reconstitute its energy base and they advocated a
society based on the scientific method. A revolution in science presupposed a revolution in stan-
dards, calendars, planning. In the Indian debate, modern science itself was seen as an alterna-
tive. However, it was not a monoparadigmatic one, but one feasible model within a context of
embedded alternatives. What Leninists like Meghnad Saha articulated in a technocratic way,
Nehru absorbed into a more Lockean model of science. The point one wishes to emphasize is
that a whole matrix of knowledges was created where science, rather than being fundamental-
ist, absorbed, negotiated and dialogued with other forms of knowledge to create a pluralist
world of cognitive possibilities where emergence rather than reductionism was emphasized.

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Shiv Visvanathan is a Professor at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and

Communication Technology (Gandhinagar). His publications include A Carnival for Science
(Oxford University Press, 1997) and Foul Play: Chronicles of Corruption, 19471997 (Banyan
Books, 1998).

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