Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

SCIENCE

areas of experience at the same time’ (1970:129), such that the scientist never meets objective reality directly and ‘proponents of different paradigms practice their trades in different worlds’ (1970:150).

Most scientific practice is taken up with a fine-tuning of the paradigmatic model of reality, then, and only very occasionally, as anomalies gradually accrue and finally cannot be ignored, is there a crisis, a ‘breakthrough’, a ‘discovery’—and the institutionalization of new paradigmatic theories, methods, standards and norms. At no time, however, is there no conventional paradigm guiding scientific hypothesization, experimentation and validation. And while, conventionally, the scientists’ models are meant to be free-standing—the issue of discovery rather than invention—they are in fact marionettes: puppets which act according to the grace of the paradigm which determined their existence and extent. As Schuetz elaborates (1953:37):

A total harmony has been pre-established between the determined consciousness bestowed upon the puppet and the pre-constituted environment within which it is supposed to act freely, to make rational choices and decisions. This harmony is possible merely because the puppet and its reduced environment are the creation of the scientist. And by keeping to the principles which guided him, the scientist succeeds indeed in discovering within the universe, thus created, the perfect harmony established by himself.

In other words, scientific truth, far from a solemn and severe master, may better be conceived of as a docile and obedient servant. The scientist deceives himself who sees himself stoically dedicated to its search; for he ‘as much decrees as discovers the laws he sets forth, as much designs as discerns the patterns he delineates’ (Goodman 1978:18).

Human beings have a passion for world-making, Goodman elaborates, but we satisfy this passion at different times, for different purposes, in a number of different ways. Science is one such way, religion another. Science predicates itself upon observation, generalization, system, but its truths are nevertheless fabricated, not found: ‘primarily a matter of fit’ with a pre-existing paradigm rather than of correspondence with an objective reality (1978:138). Scientific facts are imbued with scientific theories, in short; facts, indeed, are small theories and theories big facts. Scientific worlds, like all socio-cultural worlds are made; perceiving them consists in producing them, discovering them in drafting them; recognizing them in imposing them.

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SCIENCE

A number of well-known ethnographic studies have attempted to elucidate this process of the scientific construction of facts, often focusing their attention upon high-profile and hi-tech laboratories in which cutting-edge research is said to occur (e.g. Traweek 1988; Gusterson 1996). Studying science labs as communities of members intent upon establishing and maintaining their symbolic stature, identity, legitimacy and wealth, within a field of like communities, the broader anthropological agenda has been a querying of the equation between science and rationality (cf. Haraway 1989), and an exploring of science— sciences, better—as cultural productions (cf. Franklin 1995; Marcus 1995). Here is science as identified as tautological discourse, employing criteria for evidence and proof which are internal to itself, unable to validate itself except in terms of narratives which are socio-culturally grounded.

In Laboratory Life (1979), for instance, Latour and Woolgar describe how the daily activities of working scientists lead to the construction of facts in a California neuro-endocrinology laboratory. Neuroendocrinology, as a field of study, originated in the 1940s as a result of the hybridization of the study of the nervous system and the study of the hormonal system. This precipitated a new paradigm or culture, with its own myths, precursors and revolutions, and attempts to isolate, characterize, synthesize (reproduce) and understand the modes of action and interaction of ‘releasing factors’: how the brain controls the hormonal system through releasing peptides comprising amino acids. Members of the California laboratory struggle to deal with a disorderly array of alternative interpretations through the application of frameworks of explanation which cut out most stimuli as noise. By and large, this is a literary exercise, constantly performing operations on literary statements: citing, enhancing, borrowing, modifying, proposing anew. An overview suggests that these scientists are constituting the truth of substances through their artful creativity.

Hundreds of statements are produced in this way in hundreds of laboratories: from scribbled results on paper, to lectures, to pre-prints, to published papers in Nature and Science. And out of the small fraction that survive uncontested and unchanged, Latour and Woolgar suggest, new ‘facts’ are constituted. A new statement joins the stock of taken-for- granted features which are removed from daily scientific activity, incorporated into a large body of old knowledge, and transferred to textbooks. The statement becomes ‘objective reality’:

The result of the construction of a fact is that it appears unconstructed by anyone; the result of rhetorical persuasion

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SCIENCE

in the agonistic field is that participants are convinced that they have not been convinced; the result of materialization is that people can swear that material considerations are only minor components of the ‘thought process’; the result of the investments of credibility is that participants can claim that economics and beliefs are in no way related to the solidity of science; as to the circumstances, they simply vanish from accounts.

(Latour and Woolgar 1979:240)

Facts can be seen as consequences of scientific work rather than their cause, and ‘reality’ the outcome of a settling of scientific dispute.

An ancient city of knowledge-practices

In considering science as a way of knowing and a body of knowledge related to a diversity of other ways in a socio-cultural milieu, Geertz adapts a Wittgensteinian image. For Wittgenstein (1978:8):

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight, regular streets and uniform houses.

For Geertz (1983:74), ‘language’ in the above may be replaced by ‘culture’ and equal sense be made. (Wittgenstein is, after all, talking about language-games and forms of life.) Geertz‘s point is that within a socio-cultural milieu, as in a city, people inhabit, frequent and travel between a range of different symbol-systems or knowledge-practices; a socio-cultural milieu is made up of a number of such ways of knowing, thinking, speaking and feeling, each different in terms of its character, longevity, complexity, and the manner, time and extent in which it is used by members. Common sense might represent one such symbolsystem and way of knowing, then, religion a second, art a third, science a fourth, sociology a fifth, computer studies a sixth, and so on. These boroughs or suburbs of the ‘ancient city’ of a culture or society exist in different and developing relations to one another (some expanding, some declining at their expense), and are visited differently by different individual members, perhaps at different times of the members’ lives. Some areas are lived in every day, others only entered for special reasons and the seeking of specialist advice (medical, spiritual, financial).

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SITUATION AND CONTEXT

This Wittgensteinian—Geertzian image is useful here for reflecting phenomenologically upon the way in which scientific thought, language and practice are experienced by individuals at particular times and places. An increasing number of anthropological studies are concerned with this, examining, for instance, the reception of science in the Third World (Goonatilake 1984), the (oracular) deployment of the lie-detector in a Western police force (Rapport 1993b), or the implications of the Human Genome Initiative (Rabinow 1996).

A particularly fruitful area of recent study has been into the representation, dissemination and local understandings of ideas surrounding new reproductive technologies (NRTs) such as in vitro fertilization, surrogacy and genetic counselling (Strathern 1992a; Edwards et al. 1993; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Franklin 1996). How might such scientific advances in the assisting of conception alter people’s sense of the reproductive process, of kinship relations, even of a nature/culture dichotomy and relations between ‘nature and nurture’? How might these senses differ in the contexts of government bureaucracies, medical clinics and family homes?

For example, in the context of the small town of Bacup in northern England, Edwards (2000) explores the extent to which discussions surrounding NRTs and their possible or actual local usage problematizes taken-for-granted ideas of (‘social’ or ‘biological’) relatedness and differentiation, and leads to new cultural practices for the reproduction and differentiation of local identities. New scientific ideas are seen to be appropriated as part of an evolving set, a diverse (and ancient) fund, which individuals variously, and contingently, employ in the continuing business of making present sense. As people consider what being ‘born and Bred in bacup’—among Bacup houses, factories, local services, history, characters, dialect, churches and occupations—now entails, an ethnomethodology may be observed by which local persons and relations are created and recreated afresh.

See also: Classification, Common Sense, Ethnomethodology,

World-Making

SITUATION AND CONTEXT

The concepts of situation and context draw attention to a number of important aspects of social life: its processual nature, its perspectival and plural quality, and the part played in its constitution and reconstitution by individual agency.

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The point is made succinctly by reference to two quotations, the first from Gregory Bateson (1951:238, 212):

The concept of [social] reality is slippery because, always, truth is relative to context, and context is determined by the questions which we ask of events…. [M]an lives by those propositions whose validity is a function of his belief in them.

The second is from Edward Sapir (1956:151):

The true locus of culture is in the interactions of specific individuals, and, on the subjective side, in the world of meanings which each one of these individuals may unconsciously abstract for himself from his participation in these interactions.

Taken together, these point up the way in which socio-cultural reality does not exist beyond the interpretations which individuals ongoingly make of it and the extent to which they continue to act upon the assumption of its existence. It has no sui generis existence; it is no thing- in-itself. If individuals stop believing in socio-cultural reality and its institutions, and acting in certain routine ways vis-à-vis the latter, then the reality ceases to exist.

Furthermore, the interpretations of socio-cultural reality made by different individuals can be expected to be diverse, for it is in the nature of individuality that each begins from and operates with a unique perspective upon the world. And since each individual is also a unique ‘energy source’ (Bateson 1972:126), each will be responsible for acting upon these interpretations in an equally unique way. Hence the importance of focusing upon moments of interaction: of the coming together of individuals in conversational and behavioural exchange. For it is here that diverse interpretations and lines of action converge and it is here that processes of social life emerge. Social organization and structure are the result of ongoing processes of negotiation between individuals operating in terms of diverse world-views and agendas. Social organization and structure continue to exist because individuals in interaction maintain the process of their reconstitution, and act on the basis of the outcome of their negotiations.

Another way of saying this is that in situations of interaction, a plurality of individual contexts come into contact, where ‘context’ is understood as the way an individual frames, and distinguishes between, things, people and events in the world. Context refers to the

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