From subjugated knowledge to conjugated subjects: science and globalisation, or postcolonial studies of science?

Abstract

Given the continuing popularity of actor-network theory and rising enthusiasm for synchronic theories of globalisation in science and technology studies, it seems timely to return to the advocacy of critical postcolonial analysis of contemporary science, technology and medicine. This essay contrasts explicit postcolonial critique with the reconciliatory, or at least unexamined, postcolonial ‘vibe’ of some recent studies of the travels and new dwellings of modern science.

Acknowledgements

I am especially grateful to Suman Seth for encouraging me to return to this topic. Earlier iterations benefited from conversations with Vincanne Adams, Adele Clarke, Joan Fujimura and Gabrielle Hecht. I would like to thank Stacy Carter, Fae Dremock and Emma Kowal for their comments on this essay.

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77, Colin Gordon (trans), New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, p 71.

2. See Warwick Anderson and Vincanne Adams, ‘Pramoedya's Chickens: Postcolonial Studies of Technoscience’, in Edward J Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch and Judy Wajcman (eds), The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd edn, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, pp 181–207; Steven J Harris, ‘Long-distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge’, Configurations, 6, 1998, pp 269–304; Roy MacLeod, ‘Introduction’, in Roy MacLeod (ed), ‘Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise’, Osiris, 15, 2000, pp 1–13; James A Secord, ‘Knowledge in Transit’, Isis, 95, 2004, pp 654–672; David N Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

3. Simon Schaffer, ‘Late-Victorian Metrology and its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms’, in Robert Bud and Susan E Cozzens (eds), Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions and Science, Bellingham, WA: SPIE Optical Engineering Press, 1992, pp 23–56, p 23.

4. Steven Shapin, ‘Placing the View from Nowhere: Historical and Sociological Problems in the Location of Science’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 23, 1998, pp 5–12, pp 6–7.

5. Mario Biagioli (ed), The Science Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, 1999.

6. The history of medicine has found postcolonial analysis much more acceptable, perhaps because it has long been more closely aligned with social history and attractive to area specialists. See Henry E Sigerist, ‘The History of Medicine and the History of Science’, Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, 4, 1936, pp 1–13; and Warwick Anderson, ‘Postcolonial Histories of Medicine’, in John Harley Warner and Frank Huisman (eds), Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, pp 285–307. In medical anthropology, see Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Teresa Hyde, Sarah Pinto and Byron J Good (eds), Postcolonial Disorders, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. With its lingering association with big ideas and civilisation, science has presented a particularly hard case. In the remainder of this essay I focus on science and technology, not clinical medicine and public health.

7. Ashis Nandy, Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.

8. Michel Callon, ‘Four Models for the Dynamics of Science’, in Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E Markle, James C Petersen and Trevor Pinch (eds), The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995, pp 29–63; and Wesley Shrum and Yehouda Shenhav, ‘Science and Technology in Less Developed Countries’, in Jasanoff et al, Handbook of STS, pp 627–651.

9. Vittorio Ancarani, ‘Globalizing the World: Science and Technology in International Relations’, in Jasanoff et al, Handbook of STS, pp 652–669.

10. Helen Watson-Verran and David Turnbull, ‘Science and Other Indigenous Knowledge Systems’, in Jasanoff et al, Handbook of STS, pp 115–139. See also David Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 2000; and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books, 1999.

11. Anderson and Adams, ‘Pramoedya's Chickens’.

12. See Charles Thorpe, ‘Political Theory in Science and Technology Studies’, in Hackett et al, Handbook of STS, 3rd edn, pp 63–82; Christopher R Henke and Thomas F Gieryn, ‘Sites of Scientific Practice: The Enduring Importance of Place’, in Hackett et al, Handbook of STS, 3rd edn, pp 353–376; and Susan E Cozzens, Sonia Gatchair, Kyung-Sup Kim, Gonzalo Ordóñez and Anupit Sunithadnaporn, ‘Knowledge and Development’, in Hackett et al, Handbook of STS, 3rd edn, pp 787–812.

13. My effort to distinguish explicit and implicit postcolonialism may match Simon During's distinction between critical and reconciliatory postcolonialism, with the latter complicit in globalisation (Simon During, ‘Postcolonialism and Globalisation: A Dialectical Relation After All?’, Postcolonial Studies, 1, 1998, pp 31–47).

14. Callon, ‘Four Models for the Dynamics of Science’, p 60. See also John Law and John Hasard (eds), Actor-Network Theory and After, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.

15. Bruno Latour, ‘A Well-Articulated Primatology: Reflections of a Fellow Traveler’, in Shirley C Strum and Linda M Fedigan (eds), Primate Encounters: Models of Science, Gender, and Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, pp 358–381, p 365.

16. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, Alan Sheridan and John Law (trans), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, p 140.

17. Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, p 47.

18. John Law, ‘After ANT: Complexity, Naming And Topology’, in Law and Hasard, ANT and After, pp 1–14, p 6.

19. Shapin, ‘Placing the View from Nowhere’, p 7.

20. Marianne de Laet and Anne-Marie Mol, ‘The Zimbabwean Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology’, Social Studies of Science, 30, 2000, pp 225–263.

21. For a vigorous condemnation of the ‘linguistic idealism’ of some postcolonial studies, see Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique, London: Routledge, 2004, p 3.

22. Sandra Harding, ‘Is Science Multicultural? Challenges, Resources, Opportunities, Uncertainties’, Configurations, 2, 1994, pp 301–330, p 305. See also David J Hess, Science and Technology in a Multicultural World: The Cultural Politics of Facts and Artifacts, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

23. Harding, ‘Is Science Multicultural?’, p 326. See also, Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

24. Sandra Harding, Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, p 134, p 3, p 214.

25. Harding, Sciences from Below, p 16.

26. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987.

27. Gabrielle Hecht and Warwick Anderson (eds), ‘Special issue: Postcolonial Technoscience’, Social Studies of Science, 32(5–6), 2002; see also the special issue of Science as Culture, 14(2), 2005.

28. Warwick Anderson, ‘Postcolonial Technoscience’, Social Studies of Science, 32, 2002, pp 643–658, p 643.

29. Anderson, ‘Postcolonial Technoscience’, p 651.

30. Itty Abraham, ‘The Contradictory Spaces of Postcolonial Techno-science’, Economic and Political Weekly, 21 January 2006, pp 210–217, p 210. See also Itty Abraham, ‘Postcolonial Science, Big Science, and Landscape’, in Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek (eds), Doing Science + Culture, New York: Routledge, 2000, pp 49–70.

31. Anderson, ‘Postcolonial Technoscience’, p 650; and Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Catherine Porter (trans), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

32. Helen Verran, ‘Re-imagining Land Ownership in Australia’, Postcolonial Studies, 1, 1998, pp 237–254; and Helen Verran, ‘A Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies: Alternative Firing Regimes of Environmental Scientists and Aboriginal Landowners’, Social Studies of Science, 32, 2002, pp 729–762.

33. Edward W Said, ‘Traveling Theory’, in The Word, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983, pp 21–39, p 29.

34. Anderson and Adams, ‘Pramoedya's Chickens’, pp 183–184.

35. Anderson and Adams, ‘Pramoedya's Chickens’, p 184.

36. Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

37. For example, James Clifford, ‘Traveling Cultures,’ in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, 1992, pp 96–112; Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994; and Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

38. Anna Loewenhaupt Tsing, ‘The Global Situation’, in Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (eds), The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, pp 453–486, p 456. See also Anna Loewenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. For a review of some recent ethnographies of science, see Michael M J Fischer, ‘Four Genealogies for a Recombinant Anthropology of Science and Technology’, Cultural Anthropology, 22, 2007, pp 539–614.

39. Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, p 7.

40. Similarly, even in the history of medicine and public health we find now a profusion of conferences on the new ‘global health’ ecumene—as if colonialism and medicine were never entangled or the world was created afresh circa 1989.

41. Geoffrey C Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, p 115, p 118. In Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, Andrew Lakoff shows a similarly surprising resistance to postcolonial analysis of ‘globalizing forms of cosmopolitan science’ (p 4).

42. Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, p 67, p 71.

43. Rajan, Biocapital, p 278, p 66.

44. Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, p 23.

45. Waldby and Mitchell, Tissue Economies, p 22.

46. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p 3. For pioneering differentiation of contemporary globalisation, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989; and Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

47. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p 27, p 134–135.

48. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed), Globalization, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001, pp 1–21, p 4.

49. Stuart Hall, ‘When Was the “Postcolonial”? Thinking at the Limit’, in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curtis (eds), The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, London: Routledge, 1996, pp 242–260.

50. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton and Jed Esty, ‘Beyond What? An Introduction’, in Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl et al (eds), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, pp 1–38, p 2, p 8, p 30. See also Revathi Krishnaswarmy and John C Hawley (eds), The Post-Colonial and the Global, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.