ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Pluralism and the Human Sciences in Imperial and Postcolonial Contexts

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Have the human sciences been more effective than the sciences in pluralizing knowledge in imperial and postcolonial settings? Recent scholarship has taken a predominantly critical view of the human sciences in the modern period, rightly emphasizing the extractive logics of salvage ethnography and the standardizing effects of the “big humanities.” These expansive editorial, archival, and classificatory projects consolidated global sources and asserted interpretive authority over them.

Yet within both imperial and postimperial settings, scholars in the human sciences also forged strategies to counter these tendencies. Their methods allowed them to shift perspectives, to work with intersecting epistemologies, and explore plural ontologies that deviated both from the universalism of the natural sciences and from the European-inflected Studia Humanitatis of the classical humanities. The session’s four contributions trace those efforts across a range of fields: the compilation of Indigenous rights within German colonial administrations; worldwide language surveying and resistance to the military goals of the U.S.-driven Center for Applied Linguistics; the different political mandates assigned to the sciences and the humanities in postcolonial India; and Pan-African intellectual movements that reshaped radio infrastructures to recuperate diverse languages and local knowledges.

By integrating diverse languages, reviving oral traditions, and pioneering new approaches to collecting, archiving, teaching, and communication, these historical initiatives broadened the scope of subjects and methods in the human sciences. Taken together, they offer strategies for a more pluralist knowledge society—while also providing cautionary reminders that essentialism, nationalism, traditionalism, and militarism in the human sciences continue to threaten competing forms of pluralized knowledge.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Anke te Heesen, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

Individual Presentations

• The Legal Surveying Movement: Capturing Indigenous Law in German Pacific Imperialism - Anna Echterhölter, University of Vienna

• Pluralism, Communication, and Resistance at the Center for Applied Linguistics - Judith Kaplan, Science History Institute

• Haunted by the Nation: Humanities in Postcolonial India, c. 1947–1984 - Projit Bihari Mukharji, Ashoka University

• Airwaves of Dissent: Pluralizing Knowledge on West African Radio, 1955–1962 - Viktoria Tkaczyk, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

Session Organizer

• Anna Echterhölter, University of Vienna