Description

"Sandra Harding is an intellectually fearless scholar. She assembled a bold, impressive collection of essays to make a volume of illuminating power. This brilliantly edited book is essential reading for all who seek understanding of the multicultural debates of our age. Never has a book been more timely." -Darlene Clark Hine Fueled by the declining legitimacy of Western authority and by critiques of Eurocentrism, a number of widely acclaimed analyses of the sciences have recently appeared. Sandra Harding draws from this body of scholarship to assemble an anthology of classic essays by Third World and Western thinkers who link the sciences to local, national, and international projects for making and remaking democracy. In this rich, diverse collection, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, political theorists, and scientists treat a wide range of issues: revaluating the sciences in premodern high cultures of China, Africa, and the Andes; disputes over science's legitimation of culturally approved definitions of race difference, from craniology to the measurement of IQ; overcoming the dependence of Third World research on First World agendas; race, imperialism, and the application of scientific technologies in health and reproductive areas; the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiments; developmental agriculture and applied biology in the Third World; environmental racism and environmental crises in developing countries; questions of values, objectivity, method, and nature in sciences; and visions of programs that create sciences for a democratic world community.