Is Science Western in Origin Preview - CK Raju

Preview page 4 of 16Raju’s pamphlet, then, takes its place along others in thisseries that have probed the assumptions underlying thedisciplines of economics and anthropology. This pamphletseries, as I noted at the outset, is one of many enterprises tohave emerged out of the desire of some scholars, academics,activists, and public intellectuals, who first convenedtogether in Penang, Malaysia in early 2002, to create a newforum, which has been termed “Multiversity”, that will atonce enable a wholesale but rigorous and searching critiqueof the frameworks of modern knowledge as well as moreecumenical political and cultural futures. Multiversity’smembers are committed to the proposition that there needsto be less conversation with the West and more conversationbetween peoples of the South. Long before India, China,Southeast Asia, and Africa interacted with Europe, theyinteracted with each other; indeed, the Indian Ocean was aglobal world, a crossroads, but part of the effect ofcolonialism has been to obscure these earlier histories. Theconception of what constitutes the “world” has narrowed soconsiderably that everywhere outside Europe it meansknowledge only of one’s own country and of the Euro-American world. These, apparently, are the borders of oursupposed cosmopolitanism.…Readers are invited to learn more about the pamphlet seriesand Multiversity by accessing http://www.multiworld.organd http://vlal.bol.ucla. edu/multiversity/.University of California, Los AngelesJune 2009