Traveling Comparisons: Ethnographic Reflections on Science and Technology

Abstract

This special issue aims to investigate some novel uses of the comparative method at the intersections of STS and anthropology through ethnographic accounts of technoscience in various Asian contexts. In today's globalizing world, knowledge is under constant negotiation and reordering around conflicting ideas of progress and development. Nowhere is it more evident than in the daily practices of living and working with old and new technologies. Scientists, mechanics, physicians, and farmers whom anthropologists encounter in the field see development, uniqueness, or backwardness in their innovations in the midst of complex relations, which connect local innovations and routines with the transnational circulation of people, objects, and information. How do these flows and unexpected connections stimulate innovators and users to make comparisons in their daily engagements with technologies? How should anthropologists and STS scholars reflect on the fact that while comparisons make connections, connections make comparisons as well? This introduction tackles such questions in order to account for the rich traffic between conceptual frameworks and methodological tools in the five articles that follow.

Keywords:

• ethnography
• comparative method
• mobility
• relationality

Acknowledgments

This special issue emerged from a session at the thirty-fifth annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) held in Tokyo on 25–29 August 2010. Several of the articles have also been presented in a series of sessions sponsored by Osaka University's Global Center of Excellence program “A Research Base for Conflict Studies in the Humanities.” We would like to thank the program members, as well as the discussants at 4S Tokyo, Marianne de Laet, Joan Fujimura, and Steven Brown and other participants for their clarifying and thought-provoking remarks. We are also grateful to the editorial board of EASTS for inviting us to bring out this special issue.

Notes

1 See, for example, Chen 2008, Fan 2008, Fu 2007, and Shineha, Ema, and Tsukahara 2010.

2 The example is, in fact, borrowed from Geneviève Teil (1998).