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404 Winfried Thielmann

The conceptual implications of this productive failure of intercultural
science transfer are very intricate (for a detailed analysis see Thielmann [2004:
296–302]). Here I shall focus on the intercultural dimension, which – on a large
scale – displays parallels to what has been said in Section 2.3. about power and
dominance within intercultural communication at school.
Yunus studied economics in a Western country. In the terms of the previous
analyses, he started out as a client of a foreign university and returned as a lec-
turer, as an institutional agent. As a client, he did not act ethnocentrically. On the
contrary, he embraced the new knowledge. He willingly expanded his cultural
apparatus. As an agent, being “enthralled by the beauty and elegance” of the
theories he had studied, he passed this knowledge on. He acted as a multiplier
within global science transfer – and he, unknowingly, was instrumental in im-
posing Western societal problem solutions on a society that worked differently. I
shall argue that Yunus’ initial ethnocentrism was due to the tacit assumptions
behind the theories he studied in America.
As Toulmin (2001: 47–66) demonstrates in his insightful chapter “Econ-
omics or the physics that never was”, Western economic theory formation was
highly influenced by early modern physics, especially by Newton’s theory of
planetary motion. Yet by the beginning of the 19th century, physicists already
knew that the solar system is much less stable than Newtonian law suggests.
Economists of the 20th century, however, were still modelling their theories in
the tradition of their predecessors, i.e. after a physics “that never was”. In ac-
cordance with an early interdisciplinary science transfer gone sour without their
knowledge, they expected their theories to hold, like a natural law, everywhere
at any point in time. They did not expect them to be subject to variations of so-
cietal makeup. This had major consequences for intercultural science transfer:
The knowledge that economic laws possess a status close to natural laws formed
an integral part of economists’ cultural apparatus. They tended to conceive of
economic laws as universally applicable problem solutions, as a set of recipes
that could be readily passed on as such.
Within intercultural science and knowledge transfer, the ethnocentricity that
lies in passing on knowledge based on such a presupposition is, however, not
likely to reveal itself: The appeal of recipes that supposedly hold for any society
makes multipliers uncritically reproduce their inbuilt ethnocentricity – with
potentially disastrous consequences for the society that imports solutions to
problems that are not its own.
The powerful corrective of 1974’s famine made Yunus fall back on another
part of his education: empirical methodology. His studies yielded economic
laws specific to his society, on the basis of which concrete measures for im-
provement could be put into place.
I have conducted this discussion without any reference to powerful insti-
tutions such as the World Bank or interest-driven policies of donor countries,