Everyday Sciences - by Eric Moses Gurevitch (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

How people across society in medieval South Asia--including coppersmiths, merchants, bureaucrats, philosophers, and physicians--pioneered new vernacular sciences.

Starting in the eleventh century, South Asian scholars and artisans began to investigate and shape the world in a novel manner. Intellectuals translated Sanskrit texts into regional languages such as Kannada, situating knowledge in particular places. At the same time, architects and artisans began to assert their intellectual and literary presence, often claiming the title of "scholar" as they negotiated a space between classical textual erudition, professional expertise, and personal experience. Working within the perilous world of court politics, a new class of scholar-administrators began collecting recipes and composing texts about weather prediction, horticulture, mathematics, astrology, sexual life, and medicine.

Everyday Sciences traces this emergence of vernacular sciences by engaging with untapped archives and an array of sources in multiple languages. By exploring how historical actors resolved disputes about the physiology of vision, the use of meat and alcohol in medicine, and the management of information in elephant stables, Eric Moses Gurevitch unveils the complex textual and social orders that structured medieval society in India. He argues that a focus on everyday sciences in the non-modern non-West allows historians to reassess how places outside--and even inside--Europe are brought into narratives of a global history of science. Gurevitch articulates a "big-enough" history of science in South Asia, one open to little voices and unexpected connections that might not make their way through the fray in other histories.

Everyday Sciences demonstrates how practical, everyday activities were engines of profound intellectual innovation--and it shows the promise of revisiting the past without colonial hang-ups, and with fresh eyes.

Review Quotes

"Everyday Sciences is a bold and welcome departure from the existing historiography of precolonial science in South Asia. Moving decisively beyond the philological approach of ordering and classifying texts on scientific subjects, Gurevitch presents us with something refreshingly new: a historical landscape characterized by a highly variegated and open-ended set of scientific formations that were increasingly transformed in the second millennium by vernacular intellectuals and practitioners into what he calls 'everyday science.' Through a series of tightly interwoven case studies on topics like agriculture, astronomy, mathematics, and optics (with a concern for language and epistemology throughout), Gurevitch paints a vibrant picture of second-millennium science, asks novel questions of our existing archives, and contributes to a growing decentered history of global science."

About the Author

Eric Moses Gurevitch is assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University.