Work in Progress

Jaume Navarro (Ikerbasque Research Professor, Universitat del País Basc): “Science, Religion and Nationalism: Local Interactions and Global Historiographies” 

Abstract: 

In his attempt to explain the emergence of the modern nation-state, the late historian Eric Hobsbawm argued that “invented traditions” played a major role in the consolidation of national identities. Based on the work of historians such as John H. Brooke, Ronald Numbers or Peter Harrison, this project explores the interaction between science, religion and nationalism, paying attention to the diverse roles religious institutions, specific confessional traditions or an undefined notion of “religion” had in the construction of modern science in national contexts. Coordinated by Kostas Tampakis (Hellenic Science Foundation) and myself, the project shall argue that the conflicts or alliances of “science” with “religion” played a significant role in the constitution of modern nation-states. Among such diverse interactions that “science-and-religion-plus-nationalism” could be thought to play, one might think of the following: the use of an anti-clerical rhetoric in order to find a scapegoat for a perceived scientific and technological backwardness; the role of religious institutions in the emergence of a sense of identity and tradition in new states; the creation of “invented traditions” that included religious and scientific myths so as to promote new identities; the struggles among different confessional traditions in their claims to pre-eminence within a specific nation-state, etc. Moreover, the case-studies in this project will illuminate the processes by which religious myths and institutions were largely substituted by stories of progress in science and technology which often contributed to nationalistic ideologies.

Jaume Navarro is Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country. He is author of A History of the Electron. J.J. and G.P. Thomson (Cambridge, 2012) and editor, among others, of Science and Faith within Reason (Ashgate, 2011), Research and Pedagogy A History of Quantum Physics through its Textbooks (with Massimiliano Badino, Edition Open Access, 2013) and Ether and Modernity (Oxford, 2018). Recently, he coordinated with Kostas Tampakis a thematic section on “Science and Religion in nineteenth-century Europe: non Anglo-American perspectives” in Zygon (2019).