Centre Alexandre Koyré

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Transformations that farmers bring to their traditional farming systems and their impacts on the conservation and evolution of maize varieties over a 12-year period are investigated using a longitudinal analysis. Despite the increased introduction and supply of improved maize variety seeds in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, over the last 12 years farmers continue to maintain a substantial amount of traditional maize variety diversity. Even with the increased availability of hybrid seeds, farmers in the community of Yaxcaba on average plant more than three quarters of their milpa fields to traditional maize varieties, with the latter one fourth predominately planted to a locally improved varietyNal Xoy, a farm cross of a traditional variety and an improved variety. We observed a significant reduction in yellow –x-Nuuk nal, a long-cycle traditional landrace, paralleled by an increase in short- and intermediate-cycle locally adapted improved maize varieties. We found great differences i...

Combining the cultural history of science and the sociology of social problems, this article analyzes the trajectory of policies and approaches for the conservation of crop diversity through a mosaic of international arenas from the early 20th century to the present time. We discuss how the concepts of “plant genetic resources” and “genetic erosion” became major policy issues in the 1960s. We show how these concepts emerged and evolved within a wider range of knowledges, imaginaries, and forms of life governance. We trace the evolution of the problem of disappearing local varieties from concerns about loss of genes as resources, to notions of “crop diversity” and “ecosystem services.” We analyze the effect of this new framing centered on the dynamic conservation of crop diversity within farming systems. Finally, we stress how, despite efforts to revise the concept of diversity as materials to exploit, this vision is still present today, shaping crop diversity conservation, and use.

Local seed systems remain the fundamental source of seeds for many crops in developing countries. Climate resilience for small holder farmers continues to depend largely on locally available seeds of traditional crop varieties. High rainfall events can have as significant an impact on crop production as increased temperatures and drought. This article analyzes the dynamics of maize diversity over 3 years in a farming community of Yucatán state, Mexico, where elevated levels of precipitation forced farmers in 2012 to reduce maize diversity in their plots. We study how farmers maintained their agroecosystem resilience through seed networks, examining the drivers influencing maize diversity and seed provisioning in the year preceding and following the 2012 climatic disturbance (2011–2013). We found that, under these challenging circumstances, farmers focused their efforts on their most reliable landraces, disregarding hybrids. We show that farmers were able to recover and restore the d...

In the light of increasing Anglo-Russian rivalry, the British felt they had to anticipate their rivals by mapping the contended regions of Transhimalayan Central Asia. But how were they to map region hostile both in terms of its population and its topography ? How could they possibly manage this task without traditional measuring instruments, too big and too conspicuous for these regions ? In Tibet, in the second half of the 19th century, Indians and British innovate : a new instrument of measure, efficient and discreet, with strong human component, is created. Indeed, for this Transhimalayan exploration, the traditional functions of standard surveying instruments are transferred to the body of native surveyors and their ritual objects -the prayer wheel and the rosary. This narrative constitutes vantage point to bring to light some of the conditions that made the kind of Indo-British collaboration described here possible and to examine how apparently, crude rough-and-ready methods could be made to produce reliable knowledge which squared with the requirements for precision of the later 19th century.

manuals (as noted above), she considers the significance of selectivity for naturalists' descriptions -the deliberate suppression of certain qualities in their representations of specimens -and generally helps the reader understand how complex and active a process was Linnaean observation. In the final case study, Andreas Roestorff looks at neurological imaging experiments, and considers how laboratories and workspaces can improve the visual skills needed for successful neurological science of this kind.

that maps do not present truth but, on deconstruction, reveal themselves as a complex tissue of persuasion and misrepresentation. He thus seeks to show that there is a fundamental and unbridgeable gap between the Enlightenment's reasonbased, epistemological ideal of the perfect panopticist survey 'based on correct and certain archives of knowledge' and the flawed hybrid cartographic image of India which the British actually constructed. Although his main concern is with the transplantation from Europe to India, by the British elites, of what he calls 'cartographic culture' based on a 'spatial architecture rooted in non-Indian mathematics and structures' (p. 25), he aims also to address wider questions about the nature of British imperial power. Edney sees his work as an extension of both the Saidean thesis that Europeans constructed an essentialist opposition between themselves and the 'colonised other', and Christopher Bayly's view that British representations were enshrined in myths of coherence, order and rigour.

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Sociologists of “Third World” science, who share the dominant assumption in the philosophy of science that the “culture” of specific substantive fields of scientific inquiry is invariant across the globe, have, after a period of blind optimism devoted to building a critical mass of scientists in the developing countries, relapsed into a bleaker mood and see the Third World as a peripheral region lacking in “creativity” in its research programs.
Challenging the doctrine of the universality of scientific practice by means of an in situ study of an Indian physics laboratory, an attempt is made to bring to light a particular community's shared ideals of knowledge (provided by the specific historico-cultural Indian context) which animate the everyday practice of its field of study and fashion its choice of problems, style of professional communication, attitudes toward experiment, etc. These local ingredients should not be understood as deficiencies with respect to some arbitrary norm (mostly taken as the practice in the particular field of inquiry in the “developed” world) but as what differentiates research practices in different parts of the world.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Founded in 1690 as an entrepôt by the English East India Company, Calcutta has been at the intersection of a number of heterogeneous long-and short-range networks of trade, finance, diplomacy, law, crafts and learning. This article explores the history of the first century of its existence during which it grew from insignificance to become the second most important city of the British Empire. During this period Calcutta also emerged as a world-city of scientific knowledge making in botany, geology, geodesy, map-making, geography, history, linguistics and ethnology. Calcutta thus provides an excellent case study of the co-construction of knowledge and urbanity in the early modern context of globalisation. As a contact zone between different ethnic, professional and religious communities, each with their specific knowledge practices, this article shows that new forms of knowledge, many at the heart of the second scientific revolution, were produced in this city through attempts at recognising and managing difference in this cosmopolitan context.

The end of the 18th century saw Great Britain and its empire under severe threat from revolutionary France, both through its military strength and the force of its egalitarian ideals. In 1800, in order to put a stop to the propagation of the «erroneous principles» of the French Revolution amongst its European employees, the English East India Company founded a college at Fort William in Calcutta.
There, the future servants of the Company were taught European science and literature as well as the languages, sciences, philosophies and the structure of the stratified societies of India, so as to inculcate in them «the true principles of religion and government». They had as teachers not only British orientalists but
also learned Indians, and when, in 1806, part of the teaching was moved to England, some of the Indian teachers were also moved to teach alongside the likes of the political economist, Thomas Malthus. This seemingly unnatural alliance partook of a larger movement in England where reformers allied with men of science to propagate a social and political model founded on global inequality, diametrically opposed to the universalist ideals of the French Revolution.