Integration Problems: Introductory Report

Abstract

In selecting the word integration as a title for this session, the organizers have invited contributions that would question the possibility and conditions of a synthesis between modern Western science and the local scientific traditions. Issues to be addressed are of the following type: — How do local researches and native scientists find their way through the international scientific community? — Through which mechanisms of reception are scientific ideas transferred to a foreign culture? — In countries like British India, the cultivation of science was promoted both by colonial state institutions and by the rising native elite; was there, as a result of this double process of science cultivation, an integrated system of scientific knowledge?