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What is the Anthropology of
Science and Technology?
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.”
What do we mean by “cultural
perspectives” on science and
technology?
How is “ethnographic fieldwork” of
science and technology done?
Some Challenges:

Science and Technology often appears
to us to be both:
– “hauntingly strange”
– “seductively familiar”
“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
Science’s Relation to Society
in the “Diffusion Model”
Science
Culture/Society
“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.”
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 (noncompliant patients, politicians, business, etc.)

Public needs to be educated about science and
technology
“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.”
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
“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.”
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.
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?
The “Science Wars”

For next class we will be reading some
of the diffusion model defenders:
– Carl Sagan
– Alan Sokal

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”
Science’s Relation to Society
Diffusion Model
Science
Other Possible Models
Society/
Culture
Society/Culture
Society/
Culture
Science
Science
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.
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’.

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.

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.
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.”
Some Fieldwork Strategies

Participant Observation

“Hiring In” - training and working as a
laboratory scientist
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
“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
David Hess
“If You’re Thinking of Living in
STS”
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?
Anthropology of Science and
Technology is just one of many
approaches to the study of
Science and Technology in
Society
What does ‘STS’ mean?

Science and Technology Studies?

Science, Technology and Society?
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
SSK scholars

Mostly Male

Mostly European (largely British)
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)
SSK intellectual history

Field begins to take off in the 1970s

Development of the “Strong Program”
in SKS generates enormous debate across the
sciences
Next Class

Continue talking about debate
surrounding the ‘strong program’ in
SSK, the emergence of the ATS, and
the “Science Wars” characterizing the
1990s
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)
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