Paper short abstract:

Human/nonhuman and human relations in labs are structured in ways that affect the gendered interactions between researchers and technology. I explore how a snack-food talisman offered to humans and machines mediates lab social relations and scientific production of knowledge in Taiwan.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on the results of my anthropological research comparing medical and engineering labs in Taiwan, I explore how human/nonhuman and human relations in labs are structured in ways that affect the gendered interactions between researchers and between researchers and their technologies. I have found that differences in lab social orders shape the various gendered uses of a popular snack-food talisman (green-bagged, coconut-flavored Kuai Kuai-brand snacks) prepared and offered by lab workers to lab co-workers and lab machines. The social symbolic uses of the snack food are more diverse and dynamic in medical labs, where women are commonly hired as research assistants. They tend to give the good-luck-boosting packaged snack food to individual lab workers as well as to lab humans, animals, and machines as a unit; to animal spirits in memorial services; and to individual machines. In contrast, in engineering labs in Taiwan, the snack bags are only given to individual machines, with, for instance, a focus on magically or spiritually influencing software-hardware interfaces. I argue that the material and symbolic production of social relations in labs shapes and is shaped by the production of scientific knowledge as it is mediated through the giving of a magical commercial snack food to humans and nonhumans. I conclude that this offering- and gift-giving reflects the different ways in which labs are organized and run, and that the practice helps to build, maintain, and repair lab social relations and mediate the scientific production of knowledge.