Science and Scientification in South Asia and Europe

This volume critically examines the role of science in the humanities and social sciences. It studies how cultures and societies in South Asia and Europe underwent a transformation with the adoption or adaptation of scientific methods, turning ancient cultural processes and phenomena into an enhanced scientific structure.

The chapters in this book

• Discuss the development of science as a method in modern and historical contexts and the differences between modern science, scientification and pseudoscience.

• Study the interactions between bodies of knowledge such as Sanskrit and computer science; mathematics and Vedic mathematics; science and philosophy.

Drawing on textual material, extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of philosophy, Indology, history, linguistics, history and philosophy of science and social science.

Axel Michaels is Senior Professor of Classical Indology at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany. Since 2006, he is Vice President of the Heidelberg Academy of Science and head of the project ‘Religious and Legal Documents of Pre-modern Nepal’. His research interests include social history and history of Hinduism, theory of rituals, life cycle rites of passage in Nepal as well as the cultural and legal history of Nepal. He is the author of Homo ritualis. Hindu Rituals and its Significance for Ritual Theory (2016); Hinduism. Past and Present (2004); Śiva in Trouble. Rituals and Festivals at the Paśupatinātha temple of Deopatan, Nepal (2008); and Kultur und Geschichte Nepals (2018).

Christoph Wulf is Professor of Anthropology and Education at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He is also a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Historical Anthropology, the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB, 1999-2012), and the Graduate School ‘InterArts’ at the Freie Universität Berlin. His books have been translated into 20 languages. He is Vice-President of the German Commission for UNESCO. His research interests include historical and cultural anthropology, educational anthropology, rituals, gestures, imagination, intercultural communication and aesthetics. He has authored and edited various books including (with G. Gebauer) Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society (1995); Anthropology. A Continental Perspective (2013); Human Beings and their Images. Imagination, Mimesis, Imaginary (German edition 2014; English edition in preparation); Exploring Alterity in a Globalized World (2016); (with J. R. Resina) Repetition, Recurrence, Returns: How Cultural Renewal works (2019); and Bildung als Wissen vom Menschen im Anthropozän (2020; English edition in preparation).