Short Abstract:
This panel invites thick descriptions of and new perspectives on science and scientific activities, with a view to further anthropological engagement with diverse styles of socio-scientific life, human and material.
Long Abstract:
For a long time, science was regarded not as a cultural activity but as the self-explanatory endeavor of discovering truth. Even now, the anthropology of science is still an emerging area of inquiry. In recent years, however, the encounter of anthropology with science and technology studies has produced new perspectives for describing science. This encounter made interesting arena to understand science as culture. For example:
(1) material life in scientific research: scientific research cannot be reduced to mere representing activity. It also contains various kinds of intervening activities into materiality. In everyday life, scientists take bodily and emotional interactions with nonhuman entities such as animals and even graphs and diagrams. Scientific life in such unique environment are enough interesting for anthropological research to be conducted.
(2) symmetry of science and society: When science were identified as the "only one ultimate theory that corresponds to the world", social beliefs were in principle incompatible with them because they could not correspond to the real world. Contrary to universalist ideas, recent STS studies emphasize the symmetry of the practice of science and society. This perspective encourages to make revisions for conceptual frameworks in anthropology to understand socio-natural entanglements appropriately.
This panel aims at thick description of the diverse forms of socio-scientific activity and explore further theoretical perspectives. Conveners would appreciate fresh perspectives for analyzing socio-scientific life. We hope this panel to be the opportunity to find the visions which invoke various possibilities of the styles of relationship between human and material world.
Accepted papers:
Session 1
When an anthropologist meets hydrologists: a reflection on the sociology of knowledge of Mekong hydrology
Jakkrit Sangkhamanee
(Chulalongkorn University)
Paper short abstract:
The study examines the training of 'hydrologists' through the analysis of hydrological pedagogy and their field practices and argues against the very idea that scientific epistemology and methodology are objective, universal and pure from any other cultural factors that enclose it.
Paper long abstract:
The paper provides an ethnographic study of hydrology classroom and water laboratory activities and discusses how hydrological science came to be benchmark knowledge in water management in Thailand and Mekong basin. Based on sociological studies of scientific knowledge production as well as philosophical analysis of science practices, the study examines the training of 'hydrologists' through the analysis of hydrological pedagogy and their field practices. The paper also explores the lives and works of training hydrologists, their engagement with classroom and laboratory works, as well as the production and utilization of its representation such as hydrographs, maps, models, and river classification charts.
The author argues that scientific knowledge of water and the science community that produces it are no less a culture and cultural society. The findings show that hydrology as an applied scientific knowledge, instead of being universal and subjective-free, does not escape the fact that it is culturally constructed. In other words, this article argues against the very idea that scientific epistemology and methodology are objective, universal and pure from any other cultural factors that enclose it. The argument that seeing scientific knowledge production as paradigm-laden leads us to further question the sole domination of hydroscience and hydrologists in river management. The critique of the sole acceptance of scientific hydrology as the only benchmark knowledge system in river management allows policy makers to see its limitations and drawbacks. This opens up to other alternative knowledge on water to be recognized and integrated into practice.
Making factual visibilities of the earth's interior: dichotomies and components of geophysical practice
Sho Morishita
(Kyoto University / JSPS)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will examine how dichotomous concepts which geophysicists use are related with the components of their practice. The analysis will provide the vision of science as the practice to make differences between the boundaries of the dichotomies.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will examine how dichotomous concepts which geophysicists use (e.g. the earth's surface/interior, physical/empirical, model/observation, hypothesis/fact) are related with the components of their practice, such as figures, computer programs and observation networks.
The paper will describe the practice called "observation" and "modeling" in geodesy, a sub-discipline of geophysics. Observational networks are deployed on the earth's surface. They provide the data which provide many kinds of figures. The figures generate the geodetic visible world and enact the boundary between the visible and the invisible.
Modeling process moves the boundary between the visible and the invisible. In modeling process, geodesists make computer programs and add the graphical expressions of the Earth's interior onto the figures created by observational data. At first, graphical expressions created by observational data are thought to be "factual", whereas those created by computer programs are "hypothetical". But the figures function as the interface of them because both of them take the same form of expression and then are comparable. Geodesists have various techniques to compare them and they moves the boundary between the factual and the hypothetical. Through these processes, geodesists make the factual visibilities of the Earth's interior.
The analysis will provide the unique vision of science: the practice to make various differences between the boundaries of the dichotomies.
Modeling Amazonian environments: some ethnographic considerations on the science-policy interface in Brazil
Marko Monteiro
(University of Campinas)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores results from an ethnography of a large-scale scientific project aimed at integrating modeling and early alerts in the Brazilian Amazon. The paper will argue that science policy interface in this case relates to the challenges of modeling human and natural phenomena in an integrated manner.
Paper long abstract:
The Amazon region in Brazil is the site of many large-scale international scientific collaborative projects aimed at understanding, evaluating and modeling the dynamics of climate and the environment, with an important interest in deforestation. Recently, some projects are beginning to pay more attention to how human decisions impact such phenomena; this is related to both scientific concerns on how to improve modeling of the region's dynamics and to the need to better interface with policies aimed at the region. This article will explore results from an ongoing ethnography focusing on one such large-scale project, which has as its objectives to integrate modeling and early alerts that can be incorporated into decision-making in the Amazon. Among the dilemmas faced by the project's researchers is how to model human decisions, as such modeling would entail forms of measuring such human dynamics which are far from clear. The interplay between modeling human and natural phenomena and trying to build science and technology that can influence policy decisions can be seen as one key feature in how such projects are conducted and how they interface with policies and policy makers. The difficulties in establishing dialogue between different disciplines, as well as between scientists and other publics (such as policy makers) can be a fruitful field for further studies in science-policy interface within STS and anthropology.
To risk and to hope: the labor of science in contemporary Japan
Ieva Puzo
(Riga Stradins University)
Paper short abstract:
My paper explores scientific work in contemporary Japan as a labor process. It argues that, under the circumstances of increasing job insecurity, it is a coupling of risk-taking and hope that allows young scientists to make sense of their daily lives and envision their work futures.
Paper long abstract:
In the wake of prolonged economic recession, a sense of uncertainty about the sustainability of Japan has been increasingly exacerbated in contemporary political and popular discourses. To project a socio-economically secure future of Japan, such narratives mobilize scientists as innovators of technologies that are not only profitable, but also essential to the continuity of the country. Development of "excellent human resources" is posited as one of the bases of scientific innovation in Japan's recent science and technology policies. However, while scientists are tasked with the production of technologies that would ensure socio-economic security in Japan's future, their labor conditions are becoming more insecure amidst the increase in performance-based research institutions, focus on short-term projects and flexible employment.
My paper asks: What meanings do scientists imbue in their work when they are held responsible for securing the sustainability of the country while at the same time experiencing growing uncertainty regarding their own work futures? Based on an ethnographic study among young scientists - those most affected by the transformations in scientific labor regimes - in various public research institutions in Japan, I suggest that researchers experience scientific work as a process of highly individualized risk-taking and gambling for certainty in their personal futures. Conceptualizing contemporary scientific production as a form of "venture labor" (Neff 2012), I argue that, under the conditions of continuous withdrawal of job security and disappearance of permanent work structures, it is the convergence of risk-taking and hope that allows for "bargaining with normalcy" (Berlant 2007) among young scientists.
Love or indifference? Complicated relationships between scientists and experimental animals in a Japanese laboratory
Wakana Suzuki
(Osaka University)
Paper short abstract:
I discuss how scientists affectively commit to experimental animals. The Japanese way of honoring the animals killed for scientific research has been known for “offering a ceremony” for dead animals. This paper pays attention to not only the ceremony but also everyday caring practice in a laboratory.
Paper long abstract:
Love and indifference, attachment and detachment, and honor and fear with which scientists and technicians treat their experimental animals are a paradoxical aspect of everyday practices of Animal Experimental Room in a Medical Lab in Japan. The scientists kill, or tweak the genes of these experimental animals for their research with the very same hands they used to caress and feed these animals under their custody. In Japan, some scientists even fear that the spirits of the sacrificed animals may come back to haunt them. Holding rituals to appease their spirits is a common practice.
Gesa Lindemann has argued that neurobioloical scientists see experimental animals occasionally as "technical artifacts", "conscious organisms" or "organisms being merely alive"(Lindemann 2009). It means that scientists and technicians have various kinds of attitude to the animals depending on the situation. In addition, this paper demonstrates how scientific practice and Shinto's affective dimensions are entangled.
Japanese way of honoring the animals killed for scientific research has been known for "offering a ceremony" for dead animals (Kuyoo). This paper pays attention to not only to the ceremony but also everyday caring practice in the laboratory.
Thus, I discuss how scientists and technicians affectively commit to experimental animals. Inspired by Casper Bruun Jensen and Anders Blok (Jensen and Blok 2013), who developed Actor Network Theory through Japanese techno-aminism, I explore new dimensions of contemporary Japanese techno science.