What is the Anthropology of Science and Technology?

1. What is the Anthropology of Science and Technology?

2. Downey and Dumit, Introduction to Cyborgs & Citadels • “This volume contributes to a diverse and rapidly expanding set of anthropological projects that are seeking new ways of locating and intervening in emerging sciences, technologies, and medicines through cultural perspectives and ethnographic fieldwork.”

3. What do we mean by “cultural perspectives” on science and technology? How is “ethnographic fieldwork” of science and technology done?

4. Some Challenges: • Science and Technology often appears to us to be both: • “hauntingly strange” • “seductively familiar”

5. “The Citadel Problem” • Citadel = small fortress or fortified part of a city which protects and oversees the larger city • Highlights the problem of disciplinary boundaries/ territoriality (‘sovereignty’). • Another effect of the citadel problem “is that science often appears as a culture of no culture” - as an entity independent of society. Researchers characterized as “living in specialized technical communities whose deliberations are essentially opaque and presumably free of cultural content.” • = “Diffusion Model” of knowledge in society

6. Science’s Relation to Society in the “Diffusion Model” Science Culture/Society

7. “Diffusion Model” • “…knowledge, in the singular, is created by bright, well-trained people located inside the academy and then diffuses outside into the public arena through mechanisms of education, popularization, policy and the impacts of new technologies. The test of cultural significance for new knowledge occur ‘out there’ in the public arena as it used, abused or ignored.”

8. Some Consequences of the “Diffusion Model” • The outward travel of knowledge preserves the autonomy of creation and separates creators from accountability for their products • Damaging effects of technology are seen as a result of abuse or ignorance of the public (non-compliant patients, politicians, business, etc.) • Public needs to be educated about science and technology

9. “Diffusion Model”(From Downey and Dumit) • “Claims to knowledge that fall inside a citadel can gain status, privilege, access to resources and authoritative lines of descent, and the possibility of becoming seated as permanent facts.” • “Claims that fall outside may have to struggle in a nether world of questionable legitimacy, marginal position, subsistence economy, and risk of punishment for acts of deviance.”

10. Science and Technology Studies (STS) questions the “Diffusion Model” of the relationship between science and society STS seeks to study is the nature of the relationship between (and sometimes even challenges the very idea of a separation between) science and society

11. “Cyborgs” in STS(Downey and Dumit) “The cyborg concept originated in Cold War space research and science fiction to refer to symbiotic forms of life that involve both humans and machines.” “The image of ‘Cyborgs’ [as used in STS] is designed to call attention to ways in which science, technology, and medicine routinely contribute to the fashioning of selves.”

12. Donna Haraway“Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985) • Claimed the cyborg as a feminist icon, in attempt to identify new ways of talking about the relationship between humans and technology (machines, specifically), and in attempt to open up discussion of different forms of analysis and activism in the blend of technoscience and capitalism (the “New World Order, Inc.”) that has created the possibilities for the construction of such beings. • Haraway is not anti-technological or anti-cyborg - she instead seeks to challenge the way these relationships are currently constituted, and seeks positive future possibilities.

13. Some Positive Aspects of Cyborgs (Haraway) • Because of their inherent hybridity, cyborgs cause us to rethink relations between technology and humans, and to refuse “easy origin stories as well as discourses of purity and naturalism, insisting instead on more complicated accounts of the production and mixing of human and nonhuman agencies.” • Might it be possible to formulate new strategies for improving the conditions of humans that accepted this mutual figurations of human and machine?

14. The “Science Wars” • For next class we will be reading some of the diffusion model defenders: • Carl Sagan • Alan Sokal

15. STS scholars, although concerned with issues of power, they tend not to be ‘luddites.’ In fact, they are often highly fascinated by science and technology (like many other scientists), and they tend to see both positive potentials as well as possible dangers in it. • However, unlike many (primarily physical science) scientists (Sagan, Sokal), they generally do not accept the premises of the relationship between science and society found in the “Diffusion Model”

16. Diffusion Model Other Possible Models Science’s Relation to Society Science Science Society/Culture Society/ Culture Science Society/Culture

17. Anthropology of Science • Fairly young/recent field. Science and Technology studies emerged largely in the 1970s and 1980s, Anthropology of Science and Technology emerged in the 1990s.

18. Science Studies • Seem to follow a global shift whereby more wealthy countries have begun to move away from industrial and manufacturing-based economies to more service and information/ knowledge based economies (1960s-1970s). Manufacturing is increasingly being moved to ‘developing’ countries, as labor and capital becomes more ‘flexible’.

19. Many would argue that since the 1960s and 1970s, we are increasingly participating in “a worldwide social, political, economic, cultural, and intellectual transformation.” • Anthropologists of science are attempting to study this transformation both at home and abroad, trying to study what new relations and concepts are emerging out of this transformation, and also asking how ‘new’ (“modern”) this transformation really is.

20. Many anthropologists note that despite the dramatic changes both in relations of labor and capital and new forms of technology being currently developed, many older problems of racism, sexism, (neo)colonialism/imperialism, class differences, freedom and equality still persist.

21. ATS are not generally ‘anti-science’ although they do often challenge both popular and scientific conceptions of science • (Downey and Dumit, Introduction):“Challenging the citadel effects of science and locating scientific practices within cultural narratives need not be the same as practicing a popular theory of antiscience. The ‘antiscience’ label serves as a rhetorical political tool for devaluing that which cannot be labeled ‘proscience’ or is otherwise not wanted. The point is not to question science per se, but to characterize the roles of sciences, technologies, and medicines in our lives and imagine ways in which our lives might be better.”

22. Some Fieldwork Strategies • Participant Observation • “Hiring In” - training and working as a laboratory scientist

23. Challenges to AST • Question of “native” perspective - anthropology itself is a science;- much of what is studied involves/comes out of western culture • Insider/Outsider dilemmas • “Gee Whiz” factor • Questions of representation

24. “Growing Interest” in AST • In part, due to increasing numbers and increasing embeddedness of AST/STS researchers over the past generations • In part, probably due to generational shifts and the increasing openness of younger scientists to allow researchers into their labs • In part, due to a fundamental shift in the academy itself (“postmodern” in the social sciences/ “chaos” and “complexity” theory in the physical sciences) • Multiple papers in this volume give a good sense of the nature of contemporary research in this field

25. David Hess “If You’re Thinking of Living in STS”

26. Further Questions Where does the anthropology of science come from? (What is its intellectual history) What other fields in STS studies does it ‘compete’ with?

27. Anthropology of Science and Technology is just one of many approaches to the study of Science and Technology in Society

28. What does ‘STS’ mean? • Science and Technology Studies? • Science, Technology and Society?

29. What other approaches are there to STS? • Philosophy of Science • SSK - “Sociology of Scientific Knowledge” (sometimes referred to as the “constructivists”) • SSK more direct intellectual connection to ATS. Some SSK names include: Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Harry Collins, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Bruno Latour (?), Michael Lynch, Michael Mulkay, Andrew Pickering, Trevor Pinch, Steve Woolgar, Steven Yearley

30. SSK scholars • Mostly Male • Mostly European (largely British)

31. SSK intellectual history • Comes largely out of the sociology tradition, drawing from Marx, Durkheim and Weber • Karl Mannheim, Robert Merton • Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (originally published in German in 1935) • Probably the most influential early SKS study is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970s)

32. SSK intellectual history • Field begins to take off in the 1970s • Development of the “Strong Program”in SKS generates enormous debate across the sciences

33. Next Class • Continue talking about debate surrounding the ‘strong program’ in SSK, the emergence of the ATS, and the “Science Wars” characterizing the 1990s

34. To Read for Next Class • Introduction and the Epilogue to Alan Sokal’s book Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (1998) • Carl Sagan, “Science and Hope” from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996)

35. Also: • Search for at least three articles dealing with the relationship between technology and warfare in relation to the current war in Iraq • Start your journals • Come with a question for discussion next Tuesday