Comments on: Science Studies is Anthropology

By: 2007 Highlights | Savage Minds

2007 Highlights | Savage Minds — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:19:23 +0000

[...] between anthropology and science also came up a lot. CKelty argued for the importance of science studies for anthropology, I discussed Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, why bad science happens, the [...]

Report this comment

By: Rex

Rex — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 18:10:02 +0000

You might want to look here:
http://en.stswiki.org/wiki/Core_literature

That entire website is great.

hth,r

Report this comment

By: Mallory

Mallory — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 14:06:36 +0000

I`m an anthropology undergrad studying the history of Science Studies. I`ve read “Emergent Forms of Life“ and Sarah Franklin`s article “Science as Culture, Cultures of Science“ (Annual Review of Anthroplogy 1995: 24: 163-84) and am trying to get a sense of how the field has developed and what questions it focuses on.

Can anyone maybe point me in the direction of more articles or books that overview the current work in Science Studies? Does it have a special journal or online community?

More specifically, would you say that Fisher`s article does a good job of explaining the current state of the field (pp. 459-467)? Did the “encyclopediaist“ make any major omissions as he reviews the history and present state of STS?

Thanks. I hope I am not abusing your blog, and would love to hear from you.

Report this comment

By: Biopower and the Contemporary » What we do, how we think; reflections on the Dewey and Latour exchange

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 22:07:27 +0000

[...] The second event is Chris’ recent posts on Latour’s visit to Rice, and the subsequent discussions both here and on Savage Minds. Chris’ post is a useful instigation for collective discussion and clarification. It brought into view at least two important figures: Dewey and Latour (I would welcome Lippman in as a new character in our motley ecology of thinkers; goodness knows he had some things to say about security). Dewey has been a central figure in some of Paul’s writing, particularly in Anthropos Today, where he is discussed mostly with great fondness, although with some concern about how he comes out as an anthropologist of the contemporary (answer: not too anthropologist; not too contemporary). Latour has not been discussed or written about as much in our circle, although there is hallway chatter, not all of which is very nice. So it seemed like review and reflection would be helpful. I have not read either very deeply (unlike Dr. Rees, who has offered more responsible reflections than I can). And I don’t mean the following to be anything like an official ARC position statement, but, rather, a reflection on how I see these two fitting in, and a rehearsal, again, of some of the ground already covered. [...]

Report this comment

By: Rex

Rex — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 20:21:45 +0000

1491 ftw!

Report this comment

By: ckelty

ckelty — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 16:49:27 +0000

John: i would definitely give Fischer’s recent CA article a spin. I don’t find it difficult at all–but in this case you can see the encyclopedic urge marshalled in an attempt to chart the 150 year history of the culture concept in novel ways that I think directly contribute to current debates about alternatives such as “experimental systems” social imaginaries, or for that matter, actor-networks.

strong: I didn’t hear anything from Latour about Diamond, but he bought two copies of 1491 to give to the undergraduates who chauferred him around…

Report this comment

By: strong

strong — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 16:35:28 +0000

Do we know what Latour thinks of Jared Diamond’s work?

Report this comment

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 12:17:46 +0000

A word of thanks to Biella and Adam. Encouraged by your comments, I am attempting a second reading of “Emergent Forms of Life.” Taken slowly, in small bites, it is making a lot more sense.

The one notion that crosses my mind is that where Geertz is an essayist, whose articles may be dense but stay focused on one idea, e.g., thick description or deep play, Fischer is, at least in this piece, an encylopedist, surveying multiple fields of knowledge and expertise and trying to organize a big picture. The result is, however, more like a Chinese or Japanese scroll painting, in which they eye is drawn here and there, than a Rennaissance painting where, however rich the detail, the eye is drawn to a single perspective.

Report this comment

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 23:35:29 +0000

I usually find if I plow on (possibly with the help of cheap Chilean wine, my favorite study aid) that the insights are worth the struggle.

I’m almost there. Could you give me a hand, though, and point out one or two of those insights and how they affect your thinking?

Report this comment

By: Biella

Biella — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 23:32:26 +0000

Adam,

Thanks for pointing us to his new CA piece. I have to say that his “Worlding Cyberspace: Toward a Critical Ethnography in Time,
Space, and Theory” in Critical Anthropology Now is one of my favorite pieces on the cultural significance of the Internet ( and my topic of choice computer hacking) and it is sometihng I teach time and time again, even if some of the information is a bit outdated (only because stuff happens to fast on the good ol’ Internet). It also is encyclopedic and does an amazing job at connecting the dots in ways that people were just not doing at the time (it was published in 1999).

Report this comment

By: Adam Henne

Adam Henne — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 17:35:54 +0000

Yeah, I’d concur about Fischer’s prose style, it can be seriously dense in a sphere of pretty dense writers. Still, I usually find if I plow on (possibly with the help of cheap Chilean wine, my favorite study aid) that the insights are worth the struggle. I recently read his piece in the new Cultural Anthropology…
http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/can.2007.22.1.1
which is encyclopedic, just stunning. How do people have that much in their brains?

Report this comment

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 02:02:10 +0000

Question for the Science Studies experts here: How do people feel about the work of Michael M. J. Fischer? I have just been reading “Emergent Forms of Life: Anthropologies of Late and Post Modernities” in Emergent forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice(Duke, 2003) and finding it a bit heavy going. Since I like both erudition and complex prose, that’s saying something. Anybody else have an opinion?

Report this comment

By: Adam Henne

Adam Henne — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 01:59:20 +0000

I guess I’m parting from the direction that this thread has taken, but I just had one question: what motivated Chris’s puerile/provocative colleague to ask if Latour felt responsible for the holocaust? I’ve heard other Frenchies (i.e. Baudrillard) accused of being ‘holocaust-deniers,’ but responsibility is another story. Is the implication that because Latour describes such widely distributed networks of agency, his theory might conceivably extend that agency in the case of the holocaust to any one of us, alongside Nazi generals, antisemitic philosophers, the steel industry, and sarin gas molecules? It’s weird, is all I’m saying.

Report this comment

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 11:52:44 +0000

Or….

This anthropologist has said for years that he studies people who are mainly smarter, richer and more powerful than he is and regards them as fellow professionals and colleagues.

Thus, in the acknowledgements for my book on Japanese consumer behavior, I write,

This book is dedicated to the memories of three men: Victor Turner, Tio Se-lian, and Kimoto Kazuhiko.

The first was an anthropologist whose teaching is inscribed in the shape of this book. He taught me that an anthropologist works with three kinds of data, things observed (here the Lifestyle Times, the internal newsletter produced by the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living that provides much of this book’s content), the native exegesis (represented here by the conversations with HILL researchers interleaved between the chapters), and the economic and demographic background that cultural analysis neglects at its peril.

The second was a Grand Master of Daoist Magic who allowed a fledgling fieldworker to become his disciple and, by trotting him the length and breadth of Taiwan, made it perfectly clear how much goes on in modern, urban Asian societies that escapes the boundaries of the villages and neighbourhoods in which anthropologists usually work.

The third was a Senior Creative Director who hired a hapless scholar and turned him, with much labour, into a copywriter unable to tolerate stereotypes of the kind this book attacks.

Looking back what I see in all three is a willingness to listen, a passion for detail, a flair for the dramatic, and a breadth of humanity that transcends the places and moments in which we met. I am proud to call them my mentors and to try, however poorly, to follow their example.

Isn’t it about time that we regard the people whose lives we share in the course of our research simply as people, fellow travelers who meet each other, wonder how that happened, and how the world in which we meet arrived at this particular moment.

Report this comment

By: Rex

Rex — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 05:54:57 +0000

I think its a well-documented fact that the current arrangement of disciplinary professions reached its current form more or less by the early 1920s, and that worries that we weren’t being ‘interdisciplinary enough’ started in the mid 1920s… :) Setting aside Jeremy’s Naive Stack Measurements (you know what they say about the size of a man’s book collection…) I agree with Chris that the ‘living edge’ of a lot of typically anthropological question (the ‘social construction of reality’ e.g.) has migrated into science studies. I also agree that anthropology and stss both share a certain delight in particularity and an unwillingness to decide — as it were — what the categories are before hand.

But at the same time, while it is good to be reminded that stss and anthro are ‘adjacent disciplines’ it strikes me that stss and anthro may be out of tune in many ways because of their relation to the paradigmatic ‘native’ that they study. E.g. anthros still imagine that what they mostly do is study people Less Powerful Than They while stss still stereotypically is engaged in Bringing The Scientists Down A Notch.

Or….?

Report this comment