Has "Scientific Colonialism" been effective on the current state of knowledge between countries or not?
Abdulvahed,
This is a really interesting and at the same time difficult question in that while we can say by the dissemination of medicine has influenced the globe, still does this imply "scientific colonialism"? While the application of science may be spread across widely, the integration into the culture, and its people is really hard to say.
While many people think of ethical reasons of doing research, not too many people would reflect upon the right to impose scientific knowledge. A very important question to reflect upon.
Dear Arturo
I do agree with you.
Thanks for your comment.
Dear Eric
Thanks for your nice and comprehensive comment.
That you (Iran) and I (Colombia) we are scientists is a fact that somehow makes us cannibals zommbies: we have swallowed or failed colonize our knowledge (unless alternative knowledge) and act on our land with our brains colonized as zommbies.
For those societies of the third world countries where the dominant economic relations and cultural issues are governed by semi feudal semi colonial forces, "Scientific Colonialism" is not at all a fallacy; it is rather a very strong current, sometimes visible sometimes not; yet determining most of the time thrust areas of the major areas of research, aspirations and dreams of the scientists. This is the reason behind the vast gap between the heavily funded research areas and the needs of the majority of the masses. There is unnecessary secrecy practiced by the industries in data sharing. Of course, in the age of neo-colonialism lots of cultural sophistry in the garb of different grades of elitism with populist phrase mongering have surfaced but the crux of the mater hardly witnessed any change; science and the society as a whole could never get the real taste of liberation of minds.
Dear All: I am having a difficult time understanding how you are using this term 'Scientific Colonialism' although I would agree that there is an asymmetry in the diffusion of scientific knowledge. If one looks to the French case in terms of history, the label often meant a rational approach to the construction of empire and the development of the biological, demographic, and mineral 'resources' of the colony. Moreover, science is not a pristine package manufactured only in the West and delivered and diffused to the rest of the world. If you look at early cartography and accounting practices of the British Empire in India, the British often adopted rules of measurement used by rulers in South Asia. Some of those techniques were later used elsewhere.
So medicine, mining technology, cartography, ethnography, pro-natalism, etc. were the tools of the trade in the age of European Empires. A legacy of nineteenth century positivism often lurks behind the term scientific colonialism. There was too an appeal to the 'physiology of empire.' Some of this is very explicit and Claude Bernard's scientific physiology is a model for how the body of a Greater France (metropole and colonies included) ought to function. Cheers, M. Osborne
http://oregonstate.edu/cla/shpr/michael-osborne
www.imera.fr