Memo+11+Three+Annotations


 * Harding, Sandra. //Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Espistemologies.//

1. “The way the dominant conceptual schemes organize social relations, including those of scientific and technological changes” (p. 159)

“Scientific and technological changes are inherently political, since they redistribute costs and benefits of access to nature’s resources in new ways.” (p. 50)

“Scientific research clearly was not intended to increase ‘human’ freedom and general social welfare ….but to increase the share of social benefits that accrued to small elites” (p. 46)

2 .All knowledge is local and emerges from specific historical, social and physical contexts. The ways in which specific cultures are situated within the natural world, their location, their relationship to nature, their cultural framework for organization, their methods of interpretation, and their social organization all contribute all play a role in the construction of a particular knowledge system.

3. Harding creates her own program of Strong objectivity, which has two major components, the first is a recognition of modern science as being gendered and racist, favoring the Western white male perspective. The second is the development of an alternative framework which recognizes non-white, non-male and non-Western perspectives, which simultaneously refutes any charges of epistemological relativism or realism. Harding is also able to draw on canonical science studies works (Kuhn) to support her argument, and I think that she could have easily drawn correlations in her work/argument between Restivo and Bourdieu as well. I also think that, although she did not explicitly state this, her work has contributed to the body of subaltern studies.

4. Harding cites “post-Kuhnian” science studies but is for the most part non-specific. The main contributions are to feminist studies and postcolonial studies. I think a third contribution is somewhat tenuous. I think this book could have contributed to subaltern studies if Harding had brought up the topic. Otherwise I would say the next contribution is to epistemic cultures from the perspective of Knorr-Cetina. Certainly the greatest contribution of this text is the postcolonial studies, an area in which it seems to me that this book is considered canonical.

5. Harding's basic argument is that all knowledge is local and emerges from specific historical, social and physical contexts. This focus on the local production of knowledge is inherent to my project, and in the way it supports my argument of local production of knowledge and the appropriation of that local knowledge. Harding's main objective is to outline how colonization has contributed to the development of modern science and technologies in Europe and its impact on European expansion. Harding also demonstrates how the emergence of “modern science” as we know it has omitted and eventually completely blotted out other indigenous interpretations of science and technologies.

6. As previously mentioned, I will be able to use Harding's argument for the local production of knowledge effectively in my paper, as well as her argument around colonial science and European expansion, since I am positioning my project within this time period. I believe I can draw correlations between her perspective to postcolonial peoples/science and my study of criminals. I also think that I can use her argument of politics and power to support my hypothesis that there has been a deliberate appropriation and whitewashing of colonial science not produced by recognized Western experts. I think that I can also incorporate her theory of strong objectivity into my program, especially when it is combined with Turnbull's comparative methodology and perhaps some aspects of the strong programme.


 * Turnbull, David. //Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers:Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge//

1. “...there is not just one universal form of knowledge (Western science), but a variety of knowledges. Moreover, a cross-cultural, comparative form of analysis is required to understand our own knowledge traditions.” (p3)

“...it is having the capacity for movement that enables local knowledge to constitute part of a knowledge system. This mobility requires devices and strategies that enable connectivity and equivalence, that is the linking of disparate or new knowledge and the rendering of knowledge and context sufficiently similar as to make the knowledge applicable.” (p20)

“The cathedrals were thus a site at which a range of social, religious and technical roles and activities were assembled, while at the same time the process of cathedral building served to transform and develop those roles and activities. The cathedrals simultaneously created and were produced in a knowledge space.” (p79)

2. Turnbull adopts a sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) perspective and seeks to understand, if not demonstrate, how we can have a “technoscience that does not dominate nature but is compatible with it, that does not exploit and demean people but enhances their lives” (pg. 3) by providing a new framework that transcends both modernism and postmodernism. By focusing on the localness of knowledge production it is possible to create a comparative study between the ways that interpretations of the natural world have been produced by different cultures at different times (p. 19).

3. Turnbull uses a number of examples and correlations (between medieval cathedrals, Micronesian navigation and various examples from other indigenous cultures) to support his claim. He is also able to draw parallels between “Foucault’s epistemes, Kuhn’s paradigms, Callon, Law and Latour’s actor-networks, Hacking self-vindicating constellations, Fujimora and Star’s… boundary objects and Knorr-Cetina’s reconfigurations” to support his methodology (pg 44).

4. I would say that it primarily draws on science studies, most specifically sociology of scientific knowledge and also provides an interesting approach to ethnography and anthropology. More specifically there are contributions to the history of science in areas of medieval architecture, cartography and navigation.

5. It will support my argument. I plan on using similar if not the same methodology of comparative study. Turnbull's book has been fairly well received so I believe that it will support my case. Furthermore, several of his case studies will be similar to mine (cartography and navigation) and I may end up using them as a research resource.

6. I think that this text is a good supporting document for my argument. I am primarily drawing upon Turnbull's methodology – he is able to create connections between seemingly unrelated topics in order to support his argument. I will also be using his study of Micronesian navigation as a comparative case of my own. I think I can incorporate his statement/perspective that “technoscience that does not dominate nature but is compatible with it, that does not exploit and demean people but enhances their lives” into a postcolonial perspective. I also think that that his focus on the localness of knowledge production will help support my study of cultural cognition and lend credibility to my claim that deviant/criminal epistemic cultures can produce novel scientific knowledge.


 * Hutchins, Edwin. //Cognition in the Wild.//

1. I don't have a copy of the book right now, I'll see if I can get a copy and update this memo before Tuesday.

2. It is about softening some boundaries that have been made rigid by previous approaches. It is about locating cognitive activity in context, where context is not a fixed set of surrounding conditions but a wider dynamical process of which the cognition of an individual is only a part. The boundaries to be softened or dissolved have been erected, primarily for analytic convenience, in social space, in physical space, and in time. Just as the construction of these boundaries was driven by a particular theoretical perspective, their dissolution or softening is driven by a different perspective - one that arose of necessity when cognition was confronted in the wild. The aim is to provide better answers to questions like these: What do people use their cognitive abilities for? What kinds of tasks do they confront in the everyday world? Where shall we look for explanations of human cognitive accomplishment?

3. Hutchin's uses adopting David Marr's paradigm, cognition as computation. Hutchin's also brings together aspects of anthropology and cognitive science: he examines a set of phenomena that have fallen in the cracks between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that are different from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture: the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system.

4. The main contributions are to cultural cognition, indeed it is a canonical text in this field. Second would be cognitive studies as a whole and anthropology. I believe he draws primarily on anthropology, along with some aspects of psychology, but I do not know that field of work.

5. The reason I chose this book, as with all these books, because it supports my project conceptions. I think the way in which anthropology has been combined with psychology will be useful in demonstrating the validity of my own interdisciplinary approach. I also think that I can draw correlations between Hutchin's study of the indigenous mind/science and criminal science.

6. According to Hutchin's “A brief historical review of the development of modern navigation shows that the representational and implementational details of contemporary practice are contingent on complex historical processes and that the accumulation of structure in the tools of the trade is itself a cognitive process. (emphasis added)” I think that I will be able to build on this emphasis on historical process and draw correlations between issues of access to science and technology and Hutchin's discussion of the accumulation of structure. I think structure can refer to both the development of particular communities, as well as knowledge exchange and epistemic communities.