Downey, Gary Lee. 2001. “Anthropology of Science and Technology.
” International
Encyclopedia of the Behavioral and Social Sciences, 3rd Edition, Elsevier Ltd. (15pp
ms.)
44 Anthropology of Science and Technology
Gary Lee Downey
Center for Interdisciplinary Studies
332 Lane Hall
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0227
44 Anthropology of Science and Technology
The anthropology of science and technology is an expanding arena of inquiry and intervention that
critically examines the cultural boundary that sets science and technology off from the lives and
experiences of people. Most research in this arena draws on ethnographic fieldwork to make visible
the significance and force of this boundary, as well as meanings and experiences that cut across it or
otherwise get hidden. Key categories of projects include juxtaposing shared systems of cultural
meaning, following flows of metaphors back and forth across the boundary, and retheorizing or
relocating the boundary itself in ways that reconnect science and technology to people. While
advancing understanding of how people position science and technology in both specialized and
everyday worlds, the anthropology of science and technology also calls attention to cultural
possibilities whose realization might help expand participation in decision making about science and
technology.
Helping STS Fulfill Its Dual Objectives
The unique contribution of this field to science and technology studies (STS) is that it helps revive
and refocus questions regarding relations among science, technology, and people. STS research and
researchers are held together by their diverse, yet collective, efforts to trouble and transform the
dominant, but simplistic, model or image of science and technology in society. According to the
dominant model, researchers live in specialized technical communities whose deliberations are
essentially opaque and presumably free of cultural content. Knowledge, in the singular, is created by
these bright, well-trained people located inside the academy and then diffuses outside into the public
arena through mechanisms of education, popularization, policy, and the benefits of new technologies.
Its social significance is evaluated exclusively in the public arena, where knowledge is used, abused,
or ignored. The outward travel of knowledge preserves the autonomy of creation and establishes a
sharp boundary between science and technology on the one side and people on the other, including
the actual lives of scientists and technologists.
STS has sought to engage this model in two ways. First, it brings together researchers who
analyze the conceptual and the social dimensions of science and technology simultaneously and in
historical perspective. Second, by offering new ways of thinking, STS promises to afford society new
pathways for confronting and resolving problems that involve science and technology. STS thus
offers the dual trajectories of theory and intervention, of proposing new frameworks of interpretation
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and participating critically in societal problem solving. These activities complement one another.
Good theory defines pathways that make a difference, and successful acts of critical participation
depend upon novel theoretical insights.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, a major focus within STS was on a philosophical debate
between ‘objectivism’ and ‘(social) constructivism.’ Constructivism provided a major theoretical
advance over 1970s research on the ‘public understanding of science’ and the ‘impacts’ of science
and technology, which tended to take for granted the internal contents of science and technology (see
Public Understanding of Science; Technology Assessment). One important body of constructivist
work was often labeled ‘anthropology of science’ because it relied on the direct observation of
scientists in laboratories to link scientific practices to knowledge development. For more information
on this formative strand in the anthropology of science, see Laboratory Studies and Actor Network
Theory. By questioning how science and technology gain internal contents, the philosophical debate
between objectivism and constructivism concentrated attention on the science/technology side of the
cultural boundary with people. Also, a focus on the emergence and stabilization of either new
scientific knowledge or new technological artifacts tended to maintain the more general cultural
separation between science and technology (see Social Construction of Science; Social Construction
of Technology).
The newer strands in the anthropology of science and technology explicitly foreground the
interventionist potential of STS by moving back and forth across the boundary between
science/technology and people, investigating its force and making visible meanings and experiences
that get hidden when it is taken for granted. In this work, the commitment to ethnographic practices
forces attention to alternative pathways for critical participation as an integral part of theoretical
innovation (see also Ethnography).
Helping Anthropology Rethink Culture
As recently as 1988, the American Anthropological Association rejected proposed panels on the
anthropology of science and technology on the grounds such work did not fit under the AAA
umbrella. Things had changed by 1992 as a series of panels on ‘cyborg anthropology’ and on the
work of Donna Haraway attracted standing-room-only audiences in a ballroom setting.
Key to this shift was a growing recognition that anthropological debates over the status of cultural
analysis and cultural critique were similar to developments and deliberations in STS. Anthropologists
grew hopeful that analyzing and critiquing the dominant model of science and technology in cultural
terms might further people’s understanding of how sciences and technologies, including
anthropology, live in society. Emerging questions included: What are the implications of accounting
for science, technology, and people in cultural terms? Might the finding of wider cultural meanings
in science and technology improve searches for alternative configurations? To what extent has
anthropology itself depended on the dominant model of science and technology in society? How can
one participate critically in science and technology through ethnographic work?
As it emerged from symbolic anthropology during the 1970s, the concept of culture drew from
the predominant model of language as an underlying grammar, structure, or system of symbols and
meanings (see Culture, Contemporary Views). Beneath surface differences in speech and action
among competent participants in a given community lies a more fundamental sharedness, a bounded
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‘culture.’ This concept of cultures as sets of shared assumptions or presuppositions depends upon a
contrast with the concept of 'nature.' Where nature provides people with base needs and desires,
culture provides content and meaning.
Until the 1980s, it appeared difficult to apply the concept of culture to science and technology.
While theorizing culture as a bounded system helped in accounting for differences across cultures,
this approach offered no means of accounting for differences within cultures. Yet research questions
in STS typically focused on the latter. Also, much research in anthropology itself, e.g., kinship
theory, depended upon the nature/culture distinction for its legitimacy. Treating anthropological
work itself as a cultural enterprise could have threatened to undermine the discipline.
As Franklin (1995) put it, by the 1990s "several trajectories coalesce[d] to produce . . .
momentum" for an emerging anthropology of science and technology. Feminist anthropology had
made visible the role of biological assumptions in gender and kinship studies (see Kinship in
Anthropology). Poststructuralism made it possible to think about power-knowledge relationships and
to make the conceptual limitations of the ‘human’ a focal point for social theory (see Knowledge,
Sociology of; Postmodernism in Sociology ). Postmodernist critiques of science and technology
called attention to the processes of their production, making 'progress' a contingent effect (see
Cultural Studies of Science). In revealing how anthropologists 'write culture' by turning people into
'others,' postmodernism in anthropology introduced 'cultural critique' as an anthropological practice
(see Cultural Critique, Anthropological). Cross-cultural comparisons of knowledge systems began to
reposition Western science as ethnoscience (see Anthropology of Knowledge; Indigenous Knowledge,
Science Studies and; Postcolonialism). The rise of interdisciplinary cultural studies juxtaposed
'popular' with 'high' cultural forms, revealing power relations between the two and re-theorizing
culture as a site of active work (see Cultural Studies of Science). Feminist critiques of science
demonstrated its saturation with gender metaphors, and feminist critiques of reproductive
technologies provided compelling accounts of women's experiences that could not be counted
unproblematically as the benefits of innovation (see Feminist Epistemology; Gender and
Technology). Cross-disciplinary interests in emerging transnational forms demanded simultaneous
attention to technology, knowledge, and capital (see Globalization, Anthropology of;
Postcolonialism; Capitalism, Global). Growing demands for accountability across the academy in
general fueled interest in how ethnographic research can make a difference in the arena under study
(see Ethnography; Advocacy in Anthropology).
During the early 1990s, cultural anthropologists studying science and technology actively resisted
the label ‘anthropology of science and technology’ on the grounds it masked these trajectories,
confining diverse work to a bounded subdiscipline. The label works only to mark a collection of
intellectual activities within which competition exists not to achieve domination but to make a
difference and where border crossing is accepted to enhance the life chances of what the dominant
model submerges. Ongoing projects fall into roughly three categories, with individual researchers
and studies often contributing to more than one.
Juxtaposing Cultural Systems of Meaning
The publication of Sharon Traweek’s Beamtimes and Lifetimes in 1988 marked the emergence of
projects that identify and juxtapose cultural systems of meaning in science and technology. Rather
than focusing solely on theory change in science, Traweek provides "an account of how high energy
4
physicists see their own world; how they have forged a research community for themselves, how they
turn novices into physicists, and how their community works to produce knowledge” (p.1). Studying
the culture of high energy physicists extends and transforms the anthropological project of cross-
cultural comparison by studying people who live in more than one culture at the same time, in this
case those of the international physics community, Japan, and the United States.
Demonstrating sharedness among high-energy physicists and then setting physicists off as a
community achieves two key contributions. It repositions the dominant model of science and
technology, which physicists both embrace and embody, into one among many possible cultural
perspectives without suggesting that all perspectives on physical knowledge are equal. The
ethnographic approach also locates the researcher within the power relations that constitute the field
of study and makes visible ways in which scientists function as people who live social lives.
The juxtaposition of shared systems of meaning has proven fruitful in analyzing public
controversies over science and technology. Articulating subordinate perspectives and locating these
alongside dominant ones demonstrates that factual claims gain meaning in terms of more general
frameworks of interpretation. Such work also intervenes in power relations in ways that highlight
mediation and collaboration as possible pathways for resolution (see also Scientific Controversies).
Representative contributions in this category juxtapose Brazilian spiritists, parapsychologists, and
proponents of bacterial theories of cancer with 'orthodox' perspectives (David Hess); anti-nuclear
weapons groups with nuclear weapons scientists (Hugh Gusterson); creation science with
evolutionary science (Christopher Toumey); anti-nuclear power with pro-nuclear power groups (Gary
Downey); artificial intelligence researchers with expert system users (Diana Forsythe); advocates of
mid-wifery with obstetrics (Robbie Davis-Floyd); Marfan scientists with technicians and activists
(Deborah Heath); a unified Europe with separate nation states seeking space travel (Stacia Zabusky);
nuclear power plant operators with plant designers (Constance Perin); and competing workgroups in
industry (Frank Dubinskas). Recent work questions the culture/people relationship by understanding
cultures as, for example, shifting discourses (Gusterson) or recursive, cross-cutting perspectives in a
social arena (Hess). Future work will likely review the notion of sharedness, no longer asserting it as
a condition of anthropological analysis but exploring what gets accomplished when it can be
demonstrated empirically.
Following Flows of Metaphors across the Boundary
The publication of Emily Martin's The Woman in the Body in 1987 marked the emergence of projects
that follow flows of metaphors from general cultural life into science and technology and back again
into people's lives and experiences. Writing a cultural history of the present, Martin demonstrates
how medical conceptions of menstruation and menopause draw upon metaphors of production in
portraying these as breakdown, the failure to produce. In addition to contrasting descriptions from
medical textbooks with an ethnographic account of the actual experiences of women, Martin also
experiments with reimagining menstruation and menopause as positive processes of production.
Following flows of metaphors brings a new approach to the study of public understanding and of
what the dominant model of science and technology characterizes as impacts. It calls direct attention
to the existence and life of the cultural boundary that separates science and technology from people.
How do people import scientific facts and technological artifacts into their lives and worlds? How
5
does the dominant model of science and technology live alongside and inform other cultural
meanings?
Like the strategy of juxtaposition, following metaphors focuses attention on how people involve
themselves with science and technology, making visible those meanings and experiences that do not
have a place within the dominant model, alongside those that do. What sorts of effects do scientific
facts have in people’s bodies and lives? How do experiences with technologies go beyond the simply
positive, negative, or neutral? How do emerging sciences and technologies contribute to the
fashioning of selves? Such work makes visible patterns and forms of difference that may not
correlate with demographic categories of race, gender, and class.
Finally, following metaphors introduces the possibility of speculating on alternative cultural
possibilities, including narrative experiments with counterfactual scenarios. While sharing with
readers an anthropological method of critical thinking, such speculation also forces more explicit
attention to how anthropological accounts participate critically within their fields of study. How, for
example, might choices of theory and method combine with aspects of researchers’ identities to shape
pathways of intervention?
Work along these lines follows how sonography and amniocentesis accelerate the introduction of
medical expertise into pregnancies (Rayna Rapp); the cultural origins of Western science and its
shifts over time (David Hess); how people calculate in diverse settings (Jean Lave); the cultural
meanings of medicine in everyday life (Margaret Lock); the narrative construction of scientists’
autobiographies (Michael Fischer); creative adjustments when medical expertise fails to account for
pregnancy loss (Linda Layne); the flows of meanings that constituted the reproductive sciences as
sciences (Adele Clarke); what living with gender assumptions means for women scientists (Margaret
Eisenhart); how Bhopal lives as fact and image in different enunciatory communities (Kim Fortun);
and how patents travel around the world (Marianne De Laet).
Future work is likely to elaborate questions of scale and identity. How do metaphors gain effects
at different scales and how do meanings that live at different scales combine in people’s lives and
selves? How do people respond to meanings that summon and challenge them, positioning
themselves in searches for identities that work (see also Identity, in Anthropology).
Re-theorizing the Boundary between Science/Technology and People
The publication of Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women in 1991 marked the emergence
of projects that retheorize the boundary itself. Moving through the project of following flows of
metaphors to reimagine categories that “implode” on one another, Haraway calls for “pleasure in the
confusion of boundaries and . . . responsibility in their construction” (p. 150). Claiming the cyborg
(see Cyborg) as a feminist icon and key marker of what she calls the “New World Order,” Haraway
forges attention to the contemporary dissolution of boundaries between human and animal, human
and machine, and physical and non-physical. Challenging the ‘god-trick’ of universalism, she poses
‘situated knowledges’ (see Situated Knowledge) as a means of holding simultaneously to a radical
historical contingency and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world.
This project calls attention to burgeoning collections of activities involving science and
technology that live across the purported separation between them or across their boundary with
6
people. It includes the exploration of emerging fields that do not fit conventional disciplinary
categories, such as biotechnology, biomedicine, and bioengineering, and documents the decline and
loss of a distinction between basic and applied science. Following novel activities in research and
production motivates the invention of new labels for the anthropological object of study, including,
for example, ‘technoscience’ and ‘technoculture.’
The project of retheorizing the boundary between science/technology and people highlights the
presence of the nature/culture distinction in anthropology of science and technology as well as in
other areas of STS inquiry and intervention. Pressing questions include: Through what sorts of
processes do analytic findings and interpretations become naturalized as facts in everyday, or popular,
modes of theorizing? In what ways might analytic accounts, including claims about culture, depend
upon facts from popular theorizing? How might new modes of theorizing about analysis contribute to
rethinking the nature/culture distinction itself?
Finally, by calling attention to the difficulty of living within existing categories while attempting
to theorize and embody new ones, retheorizing the boundary sharpens the question of intervention.
Locating experiences that live across categories invites researchers to examine how emergent
categories impact and inflect old ones. Through what sorts of pathways might reformulations actually
intervene and achieve change in specific cases? How might it be possible to assess the extent to
which reformulations and refigurations prove, in fact, to be helpful, and to whom?
Contributions to this diverse project explore how ideas of the natural help constitute cultural ways
of knowing (Marilyn Strathern); the situatedness of practices in machine design and machine use
(Lucy Suchman); opportunities for a ‘cyborg anthropology’ that studies people without starting with
the ‘human’ (Gary Downey, Joseph Dumit, Sarah Williams); how reproductive technologies blur the
facts of life (Sarah Franklin); emerging refigurations to constitute and categorize artificial life (Stefan
Helmreich); the activities of biotechnology scientists who move outside the academy to gain
academic freedom (Paul Rabinow); the importance of ‘good hands’ and ‘mindful bodies’ in
laboratory work (Deborah Heath); how practices of tissue engineering materilize new life forms
(Linda Hogle); experiences with PET scanning that escape the nature/culture distinction (Joseph
Dumit); the contemporary production of ‘cyborg babies’ (Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit);
experiences of computer engineers that belie the separation of human and machine (Gary Downey);
possibilities for reinvigorating general anthropology by locating technology and humans in the
unified frame of cyborg (David Hakken); and how African fractal geometry escapes classification in
either cultural or natural terms alone (Ron Eglash). See also Actor-Network Theory for an approach
that defines both humans and non-humans as ‘actants.’
Future work is likely to forge novel alliances among theoretical perspectives previously separated
by the nature/culture distinction. Actively locating academic theorizing in the midst of popular
theorizing will likely force modalities of intervention into focus. Finally, to the extent that the
anthropology of science and technology succeeds in challenging and replacing the simplistic
dominant model by blurring and refiguring the boundary between science/technology and people,
wholly new projects of inquiry and intervention will have to emerge to take account of the changing
context. See bibliography for additional reviews.
See also Anthropology of Knowledge; Common Sense, Anthropology; Culture, Contemporary
Views; Ethnography; Globalization, Anthropology of; Identity, in Anthropology; Ideology and
Culture; Interpretation in Anthropology; Public Culture; Subaltern Theory; Subculture,
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Anthropology of; Symbolism, in Anthropology; Technology; Sociology of Science; Indigenous
Knowledge, Science Studies and; Scientific Culture; Actor Network Theory; Gender and Technology;
Cultural Studies of Science; New Forms of Science.
Bibliography
Davis-Floyd, R, Dumit, J, eds. 1988. Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots. Routledge,
New York.
Downey, G L, Dumit J, eds. 1998 Cyborgs & Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging
Sciences and Technologies. SAR Press, Santa Fe, NM
Franklin, S 1995 Science as Culture, Cultures of Science. Annual Review of Anthropology. 24:163-
84.
Haraway, D 1991 Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, New
York.
Heath, D, Rabinow, P, eds. 1993 Bio-Politics: The Anthropology of the New Genetics and
Immunology. Culture, Medicine, Psychiatry 17 (special issue)
Hess, DJ 1995 Science and Technology in a Multicultural World: The Cultural Politics of Facts and
Artifacts. Columbia University Press, New York.
Hess, DJ, Layne, LL, eds. 1992 The Anthropology of Science and Technology. Knowledge and
Society, Volume 9.
Layne, LL, ed. Anthropological Approaches in Science and Technology Studies. Science,
Technology, & Human Values 23(1) Winter (special issue).
Martin, E 1987 The Woman in the Body. Beacon Press, Boston.
Nader, L, ed. 1996 Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and
Knowledge. Routledge, New York.
Traweek, S 1988 Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA
