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State Sciences and Development Histories: Encoding Local Forestry Knowledge in Bengal
Author(s) -
Sivaramakrishnan K.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
development and change
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.267
H-Index - 93
eISSN - 1467-7660
pISSN - 0012-155X
DOI - 10.1111/1467-7660.00147
Subject(s) - bengal , citizen journalism , devolution (biology) , sociology of scientific knowledge , state (computer science) , field (mathematics) , sociology , traditional knowledge , colonialism , scope (computer science) , political science , social science , geography , ecology , law , anthropology , computer science , biology , archaeology , algorithm , bay , programming language , mathematics , indigenous , pure mathematics , human evolution
Informed by debates on development discourse, local knowledge, and the history of colonial conservation, this article argues for a careful historical investigation of the manner in which scientific managerial knowledge emerges in the field of forestry. It makes its case by focusing on the specific period in the history of Bengal (1893–1937) when scientific forestry was formalized and institutionalized. The processes and conflicts through which local knowledge gets encoded as scientific canon have to be understood to generate effective managerial devolution in participatory projects. This requires an engagement with public understandings of science as practice that arises from a dynamic critique of static, and undifferentiated, notions of development discourse or local knowledge.