Instrumentalized rationality, cross-cultural mediators, and civil epistemologies of late colonialism

Abstract

This paper builds upon studies of the constitutive role of technology in the establishment of colonial order by demonstrating some of the ways in which a relationship between spiritual authority and technologies of the secular state came to be articulated together in the late colonial period, and hence embedded within contemporary postcolonial techno-politics. Focusing on adult public health campaigns in French West Africa, I suggest that that the end of colonialism sparked a host of debates about what counted as knowledge of political reality, the means to obtain that knowledge and the persons in which such knowledge was vested. Within this turbulent context, ideas about the ‘magico-spiritual’ were woven together with ‘secular’ instruments of the state, in the process forging new conceptions of political reality. By describing the dynamics of this process, my analysis of African socio-technical systems modulates some key science studies frameworks to make them more applicable to contemporary non-Western settings. While science studies can more than adequately account for how technology may be used to build ‘the nation’, to be applicable to postcolonial contexts such studies should also be able to address the role of socio-technical contestation for producing techno-political states of enduring instability and disequilibrium.

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