2 - Alternative Macro Visions

Summary

It is unfortunate but true that international cooperation in ‘science’, defined in its broadest sense as approaches to a systematic study of nature, does not exist across different world cultures. Whether Chinese, Indian, African, South American or Western, scientists today are all members of the same scientific club. And while scientific institutions have been established in different geocultural regions, their work is completely insulated from their own indigenous sciences, which may be based on very different ways of knowing nature.

We begin by citing a striking example of the fallacious conclusions that can be arrived at in cross-cultural studies. In his monumental work, Science in Traditional China, no less an authority than Joseph Needham concludes that while the technological contribution of the Chinese to the world has been diverse and impressive, its ‘shortcoming’ lies in that it did not culminate in ‘science’. The ethnocentric assumption of Needham is that Western scientific expression is the preferred and highest mode of flowering of any knowledge system. There are similar conclusions by European scholars regarding the nature and status of Indian contributions to mathematics, medicine and astronomy.

While the worldviews of the Indian folk as well as codified medical traditions overlap, they are both very different from the worldview of Western medicine. This difference is not surprising as the genesis of Indian medicine, both in terms of time as well as the cultural space in which it evolved, is so different from that of Western medicine.