Prostorne perspektive i izazov isprepletanja u povijesti znanosti

Abstract

The paper discusses the importance of entangled history for the history of science and the history of knowledge, and vice versa, the pioneering – and ambivalent – role of these two similar-yet-different fields in conceptualizing entanglement as a constitutive characteristic of history in general. It emphasizes the dual, historical and spatial contingency of knowledge, even the “universal” forms of scientific knowledge, to which a wide array of works in the history of science that challenged the so-called “view from nowhere” have pointed in the last couple of decades. The “spatial turn” has significantly expanded the scope of research labeled as history of science, convincingly showing that places/spaces do not merely speak of where science is being done, but also how and why, for locality is a crucial element in the process of production, circulation, and appropriation of (scientific, though not only scientific) knowledge. Besides the role of the spatial turn in re-conceptualizing one of the fundamental issues in the history (and philosophy and sociology) of knowledge – whether scientific knowledge is universal and what does it precisely mean – the paper examines the diffusionist paradigm that reified the difference and gap between “the West and the Rest,” as well as several more recent lines of research that have emphasized circulation, multidirectional exchange of ideas, people, objects, and practices; the coproduction of scientific knowledge in the centers and peripheries, especially in the context of colonial science; and the appropriation of knowledge as an inherently “localized” process that in itself creates new forms of knowledge. Building on the attempts to articulate an applicable methodological framework for studying the history of science, in the widest sense, in the European (semi-)peripheries, the paper finally addressed the position of Croatia, seen through the lens of the history of science, in a larger constellation, and points to a still insufficiently elucidated instance form the Croatian (and, in fact, entire Yugoslavia’s) modern history that embodies many of issues discussed.