Changing the subject. Western knowledge and the question of difference

Abstract

By analyzing critiques of the mechanistic use of memory by Indian students and their instrumentalist view of education since the mid-nineteenth century, this article reflects on the link between modern knowledge and the production of knowing subjects. It shows how, influenced by traditional educative practices, these students rearticulated both the way of acquiring academic knowledge (through memory) and the social function of British education (a way of getting a Government employment). Purposely avoiding usual misapprehensions of indigenous practices and knowledge, the author explains this process by the survival of subjectivities other than Western modern ones. At the same time as he reflects on the contradiction implied in the use of the notion of subject when studying societies with different ways of being and knowing, as such a notion is a specifically modern one».