Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India

Meera Nandas adjudge Prophets Facing Backward is an extraordinary and compelling book. a few(prenominal) in the West are aware of the alarming meeting of ideas arising out of the present-day(a) nationalistic politics of India with its endorsement of Vedic learning and the public postmodernist, social constructivist and sociological trends in scientific discipline studies in the West. Nandas book is an intellectual bombshell dropped on this potent combination. No unmatchable interested in the ways in which light and assimilation stand interact should ignore this book and the contend facial expression it makes against the prevailing orthodoxies of much that passes for Western acquaintance studies. It should serve for historic period to come as a reference point for what can go wrong in science studies when it is bothied with trendsetting but wrongheaded, and even deep perverse, manqué epistemologies, such as those provided in post modernity, social constructivism and their ilk. Nanda describes a phenomenon in India that strongly resembles what Jeffery Herf calls far-right modernism in his determine of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. This is an vista that enabled Germans to accept modern scientific technology while at the same time they adopted politically illiberal and reactionary policies and rejected much of the reason of the enlightenment that informs science.

Her thesis is that contemporary India is in the grip of a version of reactionary modernism in which political nationalism is accompanied by scientific advance; but the science that informs it has bee n stripped of its enlightenment context an! d relocated within the context of nationalistic religion, Vedic Science. The stripping and relocation fits admirably with doctrines from Western science studies that claim that all experience is local, that scientific belief is culturally caused, that power and knowledge are one, that there is no comprehensive rationality to science and that all scientific belief and its... If you compulsion to get a in force(p) essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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