Week 1 - Franklin and Martin

I leave the excerpt from Latour out of this week’s commentary (since we are reading more of this book in a later week), focusing on the articles by Sarah Franklin and Emily Martin.

Both texts give overviews of emerging work in the social studies of science up to the mid 1990s. The work they describe appears to be engaged in two tasks: first, to reveal the cultural embeddedess of scientific practices and knowledge; second, to challenge the power science accrues through boundary setting (science/nonscience; scientist/lay person) and the devaluation of nonscientific knowledge (e.g. the displacement of variolation by vaccination). To describe the terrain of cultural anthropology as applied to science, Martin uses the three images. The Citadel represents scientific claims to objectivity and value-neutrality, and the attempt to fortify science against two kinds of outside influence. First, science resists acknowledging its own enculturation. Second, such fortifications seek to protect science from outside influence, such as demands by Marfan patients that research should be more therapy oriented. With the image of rhizomes, Martin wants to emphasize the “convoluted, discontinuous linkages” between scientific research and wider cultural forms. Martin offers the image of ‘string figures’ as a model for envisaging science as a more open-ended, flexible and cooperative activity, rather than rule-bound and closed to the outside world.

Both articles also refer to the controversial and skeptical, even hostile, responses that critical science studies has met with, and perhaps some of the features that critics of science studies object to are evident in the articles. Their claims about science often seem caricatured (or just inaccurate), as when Martin states that “the sciences… claim to construct reality but not to be themselves constructed”. Or her implication that a view of the body as “made up of complex nonlinear systems inseparable from their environment” is heretical within science. Which science is she referring to? Her account of “Vera Michael’s” representation of the immune system as “more like a piece of almost tides or something… the forces, you know, the ebbs and flows”, and apparent valorization of this as a kind of subversive knowledge (outside the citadel) that might reshape scientific images, made me cringe. As did her account of yuppies in Santa Cruz and Santa Fe who “quite reasonably” prefer to “engage in a lifetime of preparation, training, and nurturing of their (and their children’s) immune systems through diet, exercise, avoiding stress and cultivating healthy practices” rather than submit to the “crude bludgeoning” of vaccination. Franklin acknowledges that the “apocalyptic tone” of some science studies research, and the “oversensationalization of novelty and crisis”, has drawn criticism. Yet her use of the phrase “information highway of virtual cultural space time” to refer to the internet and gaming communities, and reflection on “technoscapes” as “new forms of reality”, is an example of this tendency.