AO: Tilley notes that it was not until the nineteenth century, and particularly the period after 1850, that scientific institutions and ideologies began to attain worldwide preeminence. While this worldwide preeminence is related to Europe’s pursuit of global colonialism, she notes it is also a result of factors including the greater organization of scientific congresses; shared nomenclature and methods; professionalization of the biosciences and field sciences; greater circulation of international scientific journals, and the standardization of laws regulating and defining science.
Tilley seeks to look at development of science at multiple levels (16). But most of her analysis is at the level of meta (the dominant discursive regimes of the time) and at the macro and meso (legal, politica, organizational).
Tilley’s own data is archival. She includes an appendix where she outlines colonial office lists that she used and gives context to the data in over 4 pages of narrative. She includes 29 tables of statistics the count over time of colonial offices in Africa. She also includes references to original documents in her endnotes. On page 440 she lists the archives she visited.
This quote from Tilley’s book highlights that the “Africa has no data/bad data” rhetoric has been around since at least the Berlin conferenc: “The head of the Russian delegation, Count Knapist, told the conference that “precise data on the climate of Africa are absolutely wanting, whereas the [International] Meteorological Committee have already gathered them in every other part of the world.” It would be a tremendous service to science if the conference might “facilitate the establishment of a meteorological station in the upper regions of the Congo.”” (54).
In spite of Tilley’s 2010 piece calling for the study of the construction of “vernacular science,” this work largely traces British archives and thus centers the British empire as the main actor (although she works to complicate this to demonstrate the complexities of the production of scientific knowledge). She is limited methodologically with the archives that are available.
Tilley primarily situates the work in colonial British history. She also draws on postcolonial African studies like Mudimbe (The Invention of Africa) and Talal Asad. In contrast to arguments made by Mudimbe or Asad, Tilley makes it much more difficult to make the argument that there is a dominant colonial episteme imposed upon Africa -- that knowledge is made through many different modes and many actors, in conflict/tension with one another.
Desire for political relevance (and national competitiiveness) shaped many of the key decisions about funding for research in/on Africa (92)
Tilley is interested in the effects and legacies of “colonial science” (a formulation that she seeks demonstrate is untenable and the construction and relevance of indigenous knowledge and ethnosciences. (330)
Tilley explores the points at which “representations” turned into “interventions,” as theory and research were applied in practice. Defined in this way, she sees interventions (including development projects) as part part of an ongoing process of knowledge formation and reproduction (16).
She includes indigenous knowledge here and argues that most things labeled “traditional knowledge” are in fact a variant of vernacular science; in other words, they have already been translated, selectively modified, and even tested (332).