Science and Technology in a Multicultural World: The Cultural Politics of Facts and Artifacts

304 Pages·1995·1.55 MB·English

by  David J. Hess

Columbia University Press
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 1995 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hess, David J.
Science and technology in a multicultural world: the cultural politics of facts and
artifacts / David J. Hess,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-231-10196-1
ISBN0-231-10197-X(pbk.)
1. Science—Social aspects. 2. Technology—Social aspects.
3. Multiculturalism. I. Title.
Q175.5.H47 1994
303.48'3—dc20 94-34733
CIP
0
Case bound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 987654 321
Contents
Preface v"
Acknowledgments xi
1. Introduction 1
2. The Cultural Construction of Science and Technology 18
3. The Origins of Western Science: Technototems
in the Scientific Revolution 54
4. Temporal Cultures and Technoscience 87
5. The Social Relations and Structures of Scientific and
Technical Communities 117
6. Science and Technology at Large: Cultural Reconstruction
in Broader Society 161
7 Other Ways of Knowing and Doing: The Ethnoknowledges
and Non-Western Medicines 185
8. Cosmopolitan Technologies, Native Peoples, and
Resistance Struggles 211
9. Conclusions: Science, Technology, and the
Multicultural Education 250
Notes 261
Bibliography 281
Index 307

Preface
Like it or not we are living in a multicultural world. I use that term in a
deliberately ambiguous way to signal various aspects of the contempo
rary (or postmodern) condition. To begin, it is a multicultural world.
Developments in transportation and communication as well as the crisis
of world ecology have created the so-called global society. Furthermore,
as the globe has shrunk in size it has also become a multicultural world.
People of diverse nationalities find themselves in increasing contact with
each other. In many countries women, underrepresented ethnic groups,
gays and lesbians, and other previously excluded groups have gained a
greater voice in government, the media, and the professions. Finally, the
cultural world in which people are living is marked by public debates on
diversity, pluralism, oppression, exclusion, inclusion, colonialisms, iden
tity politics, and other issues that can be glossed as multicultural.
For many people involved in the debates the very word multicultural-
ism is controversial. From the right critics worry that increasing atten
tion to identity politics will undermine citizenship, patriotism, and other
mechanisms of national stability and integration. From the left critics
worry that the attention to culture occludes racism or patriarchy by
reducing them to a form of ethnocentrism, or that the official appropria
tions of multiculturalism represent a new form of political pluralism that
glosses over conflict and domination. From either perspective the term
viii Preface
multiculturalism is itself problematic if not altogether wrongheaded.
I am more sympathetic to the criticisms from the left than those from
the right. Those on the right, I believe, worry about something that is not
happening, for they miss the complexities of how national cultures con
tinue to reproduce themselves in new settings—including, for example,
national styles of multiculturalism or identity politics. However, unlike
some critics on the left, I am not willing to censor either the word multi
culturalism or the value of a cultural perspective. I see multiculturalism
less as a monolithic social phenomenon than as a social and ideological
space that has opened up new possibilities for maneuvering and social
change. Because I see multiculturalism as a cultural space, a stage on
which conflicts are taking place and history is being made, I disagree
with appropriations of the word that would make it into the benign, con
flict-avoiding version of liberal pluralism that one finds among many cor
porate diversity trainers. I do not assume that the dramas on this stage
among different classes, genders, nationalities, races, ethnicities, and so
on are always or even mostly benign conflicts. This book is not going to
be a story of smiling, Disneyfied faces singing a happy multicultural song
about how small and diverse the world is.
In the United States the idea of multiculturalism is often associated
with debates about curriculum diversity, and as an educator that issue
is also very close to my heart. For the most part curriculum discussions
have focused on the literary canon, which in Western societies has been
dominated by men of European descent, often from the privileged class
es. Whether one is a canon defender, canon debunker, or an advocate of
some combination, it is no longer possible to compose a syllabus in the
humanities without considering questions of balance, bias, and the
inclusion of historically excluded voices. However, such is generally not
the case for introductory surveys of engineering, medicine, and the nat
ural sciences—or for surveys of the history, philosophy, and social stud
ies of the technical fields. Those courses generally still assume a canon
that runs from Aristotle, Galen, and Ptolemy through Copernicus,
Galileo, Harvey, and Newton, and on to Darwin, Pasteur, and Einstein.
The story of what constitutes international science and technology
today is largely limited to the viewpoint of the experts who are seen to
have produced their fundamental principles, and historically those
experts have been generally middle-to-upper-class men who were Euro
pean or of European descent.
In this book I take a step toward puzzling through a different approach
Preface ix
to science and technology, one that takes as its starting point the culture
concept and the question of how to include historically excluded per
spectives. The great strength of the cultural approach to issues of sci
ence and technology is in challenging people to consider how other cul
tures and groups may have new and different ways of defining the true
and the useful. My perspective is informed by an anthropological con
cept of culture; that is, I view culture as a symbolic apparatus that under
lies a wide range of ideas and practices. However, like many other
anthropologists today I believe that the culture concept must be flexible,
sophisticated, and above all not naive. It is fine to talk about diversity and
differences, but usually the people on one side of the difference have the
upper hand and want to impose their way on the other side. Thus, cul
tural analysis must go hand in hand with attention to questions of power.
The topic of multiculturalism, science, and technology is timely
because today's students and faculty, administrators and alumni, edu
cators and noneducators all recognize the importance of science and
technology in the global economy. They also recognize that scientific
and technical occupations in the United States and other countries are
becoming increasingly diverse and internationalized. Many students—
including many white males—now studying to enter the technical occu
pations are hungry for course materials on gender, race, ethnicity, non-
Western cultures, and diversity issues in general as they relate to sci
ence and technology. My experience of this general interest is firsthand,
because for several years I have been teaching courses on the topic. In
the process I have been puzzling through the problem of teaching about
power and domination issues without falling into the trap of science-and-
technology bashing.
One of the frustrations I have encountered in my teaching is that much
of the information on the topic is scattered through a wide number of
journals and books, many of which are difficult to locate or understand.
I therefore have written this book to make available a resource for a wide
variety of research on technoscience, culture, and power. I have written
it to be accessible to nonspecialists such as advanced undergraduates,
graduate students, science teachers, scientists, engineers, or other mem
bers of the reading public. In the role of a guide, I have also gone beyond
summaries and provided my own syntheses of research findings.
There are already several introductory texts to the field of STS, or sci
ence and technology studies (e.g., Webster 1991, Woolgar 1988a) as well
as histories of non-Western science and technology (e.g., Ronan 1982,
x Preface
Pacey 1990) and collections of essays on science, race, and gender (e.g.,
Harding 1993, Tuana 1989). My goal is to move questions of culture and
power closer to center stage of the rapidly developing interdisciplinary
dialogue of STS by synthesizing some of the research. Because my home
discipline of cultural/social anthropology has addressed many of the
questions with which I am concerned, many of my examples come from
that field. My aim, however, is not to slight other disciplines; rather, it is
to show some of the contributions from a perspective rooted in my home
discipline. I also draw on research in the history of science, intellectual
history, intercultural communication, the sociology of science, cultural
studies, and development studies. I would like to think of this book as a
kind of impressionist landscape painting; specialists in each area may
find some gaps in my discussions, but I hope that what may be lost in
depth is made up for in breadth. I write this book in the belief that there
is a role for generalists, for those who wish to see and save the forests of
the social sciences and humanities, for those who wish to resist the dis
ciplining of the disciplines.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Instructional and Development Program at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which provided me with a faculty
development grant that allowed me to begin research on this project. My
thinking also developed in the many exchanges with students and facul
ty in Rensselaer's Science and Technology Studies Department. I also
benefited from discussions in the university's Committee on Diversity
and Multiculturalism as well as the FIPSE-sponsored faculty research
group dedicated to cross-cultural studies of science and technology in
Rensselaer's School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Likewise, the
annual conferences on Comparative Science and Technology, organized
by members of the Massachusetts Five-College consortium, have been
very helpful. I had the privilege of organizing the third Comparative Sci
ence and Technology conference at Rensselaer, and I benefited from dis
cussions at that conference as well.
My project is only one book in a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field
of cultural and anthropological studies of science and technology. I have
developed my ideas in dialogue with a community of anthropologists
and feminist/cultural studies researchers, many of whom are mentioned
in the pages that follow. We have exchanged ideas in lively sessions on
science, technology, culture, and power at the Society for Social Studies
of Science, on cyborg anthropology at the American Anthropological
xii Acknowledgments
Association, and at the School for American Research seminar, also on
cyborg anthropology. Colleagues at those meetings provided useful
feedback on earlier versions of some of the chapters, as did my hosts for
invited colloquia at the Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities
and Cornell University's Science and Technology Studies Department. I
wish to thank specifically Kathy Addelson, Diana Forsythe, Shirley
Gorenstein, Deborah Johnson, John Koller, Linda Layne, Brian Martin,
Roxanne Mountford, Paul Rabinow, Sal Restivo, John Schumacher, Ray
Stokes, Sharon Traweek, and Jim Zappen for reading parts or all of the
manuscript and providing me with comments and additional biblio
graphic references.
Science and Technology
in a Multicultural World