Abstract
Diverse as they may be, scientific accounts of the natural world develop through a set of everyday perceptions and constraints that isolate certain objects and relations from one another. Genetics, for example, is well recognized as isolating an object of study called the gene at the expense of the environment. Just as the sciences isolate their objects, so too do fields of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. While we focus on certain moments, materials, persons, and places, there is an inevitable tendency to push what is not the object of our focus into the periphery. This inclination, as Sandra Harding argues in her new reader on postcolonial science and technology studies (STS), is to the detriment not only of STS but also to feminist and postcolonial theory. Harding argues that we need to reconsider what is background and who and what we choose to foreground. The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader thus bridges what Harding calls theoretical and methodological dissonance between postcolonial studies, STS, and feminist epistemology.
The Reader is a curatorial creation, bringing together STS, feminist, and postcolonial approaches to mark the consolidation of a named field of study (postcolonial STS), as well as a more general pedagogical sensibility. In combining STS, postcolonial, and feminist approaches to questions of science, history, and inequality, Harding shows us that it is not possible to engage anticolonial discourse without addressing race, ethnicity, and gender. In other words, to read, think, and write about postcolonial STS requires being concerned with racism and sexism.
With a focus on colonial histories, imperialism, Cold War dynamics, and globalization, the selected essays cast a wide net. The mix of classic and contemporary essays demonstrate that both postcolonial and feminist approaches to science and technology are, like colonial encounters themselves, vast, tempestuous, and pushing in many different directions. The detailed connections, entanglements, and divergences between the 25 selected essays belie any inclinations toward the (post)colonial as a scholarly abstraction. Taken together they provide a vivid account of the dynamic trajectories of colonial encounters, similar to the image presented by Jeannette Armstrong (1991) in her poem History Lesson: Out of the belly of Christopher’s ship a mob bursts Running in all directions Pulling furs off animals Shooting buffalo Shooting each other left and right … Pioneers and traders bring gifts Smallpox, Seagrams and Rice Krispies Civilization has reached the promised land.
Like the mob bursting from the belly of Christopher Columbus’ ship, the promises of science and technology have long travelled rapidly in multiple directions. Indeed, the metaphors and descriptions of ‘promissory sciences’ (Fortun, 2008) often draw on colonial ideologies of exploration and territory. Take, for instance, this description of human genome variation research: ‘As scientists begin to explore the unknown territory of the human genome, they find themselves strangers in a strange land. And the landscape is vast’ (Genome Canada, 2012). The selected essays in the Reader illuminate these historical and contemporary connections between colonial encounters and science and technology.
The unruly and manifold journeys of persons, populations, objects, and materials (to name a few) are addressed within the four clusters that constitute the bulk of the Reader: ‘Counterhistories’, ‘Other Cultures’ Sciences’, ‘Residues and Reinventions’, and ‘Moving Forward: Possible Pathways’. Each cluster begins with a short introductory essay written by Harding that orients the reader to the intention of the cluster and signals the larger web of institutional and disciplinary sites that the essays are extracted from.
As the first reader in postcolonial STS, the book’s central thrust is to develop a postcolonial framework for thinking about sciences and technologies based on a body of scholarship that requires those working with ‘modern Western sciences’ to recognize their own location in social relations and history (p. 3). The Reader is both thematic and chronological, beginning with historiographies of colonial science and finishing with essays that engage the question, what is to be done? Essays are written by people working in anthropology, development studies, history, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, and STS more explicitly. Many of the selected essays come from either canonical edited collections or monographs.
Along with these selections, the Reader features writing from advocacy and nongovernmental bodies, such as the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology in Development. These selections illustrate how terms such as ‘indigenous’ and ‘indigenous knowledge’ come to be articulated in institutional and policy domains. While postcolonial studies as it is most often invoked has its foundations in the literary critique of colonial literatures, these policy-based texts demonstrate that the work of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and advocacy groups also enact postcolonial politics. In the United Kingdom and United States, increasing numbers of universities are offering graduate programs specializing in combinations of development, medical anthropology, and gender. Students enrolled in these programs often are already professionals, such as medics or program managers, and are using graduate study for professional advancement. It is likely that some of these students, who come from all over the globe, will be producing similar kinds of policy documents over the course of their careers. The thoughtful collection of essays in the Reader will be useful to counter claims (or complaints) from students that postcolonial and feminist theory is ‘too theoretical’ or not part of the ‘real world’ in which they work.
And what of the material properties of the book? Just shy of 500 pages, it is compact, but not crowded, feeling more like a single-authored book in the hand, rather than the compilation of 25 essays previously published between 1995 and 2007. Like many Duke books, it is pleasing to the eye, easily lending itself to frequent use and circulation.
Feminism and postcolonial studies
In her introductory essay, Harding weaves together her long-standing engagement with STS, postcolonial studies, and feminist critique. What is the relationship between gender and postcolonial studies? Does a lack of women in colonial (and some postcolonial) writings mean that gender is irrelevant? For Harding, addressing these questions is fundamental to developing a viable program of postcolonial STS. Drawing on a range of arguments critical of modernist accounts of progress, Harding notes that science and technology are ‘the jewels in the crown of modernity’ (p. 2). Postcolonial STS might, then, be seen as a task of retrieval, tracing out the often dirty, muddy, and circuitous routes that these stones have taken to become part of modernity’s regalia. For Harding, however, this is not just a historical retracing but also a commitment to envisioning particular kinds of futures.
Curating this Reader has involved repositioning authors and texts. These processes of relocation are part of wider debates about knowledge production in the academy and particularly in bringing feminist and postcolonial studies together (Ali, 2007). For example, my own introduction to Harding was not as a postcolonial STS scholar but as a feminist philosopher who challenged dominant assumptions about the intellectual and social foundations of scientific thought through standpoint theory and strong objectivity. This particular approach (i.e. objectivity is restored by attending to the views and experiences of those traditionally excluded from legitimate knowledge production) was part of a larger turn toward reexamining whose views get to count.
Harding returns to standpoint as a methodological approach in her introduction. She points out that ‘standpoint methodologies have by now explicitly been adopted across the social sciences’ (p. 20). Both her work on strong objectivity and the work of other feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins (2000), Donna Haraway (1991), Nancy Hartsock (1999), and Hilary Rose (1994) developed approaches to research that placed political and social power center stage through a focus on the lives of those who are marginalized. The ‘mainstreaming’ of standpoint theory is reflected in the Reader’s essays where, for example, indigenous women’s knowledge systems are foregrounded and intellectual property rights are critiqued for their individualistic focus by the Gender Working Group for the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology in Development.
Recent decades have seen a rethinking of the contingency of gender within feminist theory and its methodological politics, as inquiry has moved from national spaces to transnational perspectives. The reception of these changes in domains outside feminist theory has been mixed, with some debate continuing to focus on what the proper objects and subjects of a feminist approach in, for example, STS might constitute. However, as Karen Barad has recently argued in this journal, a feminist approach to analyzing scientific knowledge does not always mean finding the ‘gender analysis’ in scientific practice, and the assumption that this is feminist theory’s sole offering to science studies derives from impoverished genealogies of social and cultural thought (Barad, 2011: 449).
Feminism and postcolonial theory may thus require more complex genealogies than they are often allowed. And explicitly bringing them together is a tricky task that Harding argues is not done enough in teaching, research, and writing. It is this goal of mutual co-constitution that animates her particular approach to postcolonial STS.
Like the broad aims of the introductory essay, which pushes the field of postcolonial STS forward, the terms that Harding uses to bring to life her vision are big. However, at times, they become all encompassing. The world is often cut between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’, ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’, and ‘First World’ and ‘Third World’. The labor required of these terms to propel Harding’s arguments is little discussed in the introduction. However, a series of footnotes sets out the rationale for this, providing threads to Harding’s previous collaborations with, for example, Uma Narayan (2000), where terms such as ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ come under scrutiny. Thus, while the introduction sets out the goals and aims of the Reader, the clusters of essays, to which I will now turn, carry forth this vision through detailed histories and lively accounts.
Kew, caterpillars and ‘counterhistories’
If you visit Kew Gardens in London, there is a west-facing bench where you can sit and rest your legs. Nestled within the world’s largest collection of plants and fungi, this bench provides an opportunity to observe the very loud, very close, and continuous arrival of planes landing at Heathrow airport. Depending on the time of day, the planes fly quite low, landing every 2 minutes. If you turn around, you can see them lined up on the horizon, awaiting their turn. This mass movement of people feels quite oppositional to the green serene surroundings of Kew, also known as the Royal Botanic Gardens. But if you consider that Kew holds over one in eight known plant species in the world, you might ask yourself – just how did all these plant and fungi species from all over the globe end up in south west London? Answering questions such as this one is the central purpose of the first cluster of essays in the Reader, dedicated to the theme of ‘Counterhistories’.
The cluster begins with the introduction to what John M. Hobson calls the ‘oriental West’. His account unfolds through tracing the extensive importation of Eastern traditions in Europe (p. 41). Part of the fun of reading here is the reminder of what canonical figures actually said about things. Students might like to know that Karl Marx dismissed China as a ‘rotting semicivilization’ (p. 47). The conceptual power of the East/West division is given material dimensions by Steven J. Harris in his account of the colonial corporation. He offers a thought experiment: think about attaching a piece of thread to the objects that existed in European curiosity cabinets, like armadillo shells from Argentina or walrus tusks from Newfoundland (pp. 62–63). If we continued attaching threads to the relations of objects, we would go on attaching threads to plants, instruments, reports, people, and so on. Following these threads renders geographies of knowledge visible and provides a way to see how colonial corporations like the Dutch East India Company and the Casa de la Contratacion de las Indias were able to act at a tethered distance in colonial encounters (p. 65).
Travel, exchange, and circulation dominate as a theme in the remaining pieces by Mary Terral, Ella Reitsma, Londa Schiebinger, Lucile E. Brockway, and Judith Carney. Terral examines the astronomical expeditions mounted by the Paris Academy of Sciences to Lapland and Peru in the 1730s. She shows how the heroic narratives of colonial discovery were gendered, where ‘travel provided a supplement to the cerebral means of pursuing truth’ for men of science (p. 85). Through the body of the caterpillar, Reitsma chronicles the work of Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717). A woman of art and science, Merian asserted in 1679 that all caterpillars came from eggs (p. 103). Reitsma tells us why this was a very daring statement to make. Schiebinger charts the field practices of European naturalists in the 1700s, as they collected plants from the West Indies, answering the question: ‘How did new medicines such as ipecacuanha, jalapa and Peruvian bark arrive at London shops and Parisian hospitals?’ (p. 110). Continuing with the botanical theme, Brockway charts the role of Kew in the expansion of the British colonial empire. A broker of seeds, Kew, and the families that ran it, were a hub of transaction, where cinchona, rubber, and sisal were removed from Latin America to become established as commercial crops in Asia and some African colonies. Rounding out the ‘Counterhistories’ section, Carney argues that the African diaspora is one of both plants and people, as rice arrived in the Americas in the holds of slave ships. In telling colonial rice history, Carney shows that while Asia is often associated with the origin of rice, the grain was independently domesticated in West Africa.
By foregrounding caterpillars, plants, and other curiosities, the essays in this section demonstrate how knowledge travelled with and through colonial relations. The focus on objects and materials recuperates histories that were previously relegated to the background, both in STS and in academic postcolonial studies.
Property, practice, and ‘other cultures’ sciences
While recognizing that cultures are constructed, fragmented, and crosscut by multiple social and transnational relations, Harding asks in the preface to the second cluster of essays: ‘how should Western philosophies of science conceptualize and treat these sciences of other cultures?’ (p. 157) Throughout the Reader, many of the selected essays expose the contradictory, disaggregated, and fragmented aspects of scientific knowledge, demonstrating that anything called ‘Western science’ never lives up to its name. However, the emphasis on fragmentation and contradiction abates in this cluster, where the focus is on showing how different cultural practices become systematic, performed, and applied, particularly in relation to indigenous knowledge.
The cluster begins with ethnographic accounts from Ward H. Goodenough and Colin Scott. Goodenough writes about navigation in the Western Carolines, where men navigate watercraft from ‘tiny place to tiny place over fairly long distances of open sea’ (p. 159). This practice, Goodenough explains, ‘like any practical science’ is an art ‘requiring both knowledge and skill’ (p. 159). Exploring metaphorical connections between the social and the environmental, Scott provides a captivating ethnographic account of Cree hunting practices for geese. Continuing with a focus on the social and the ecological, Peter Mühlhäusler shows that just as sea currents or layers of ice are ‘memories’ of climatic changes, human languages are ‘memories of human inventiveness, adaptation and survival skills’ (p. 200). These fine-grained ethnographies and analysis provide ample opportunity to consider the epistemic status of cultural practices in a wide range of contexts.
The next series of essays in the cluster explores indigenous knowledge as both an epistemological challenge to ‘Western science’ and a political tool itself. As part of the Gender Working Group for the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology in Development, Helen Appleton et al. make the case for policy planning shaped by indigenous knowledge and local knowledge. Stephen B. Brush and D. Michael Warren both address the status of ‘indigenous knowledge’ in relation to biotechnology and genetics.
Despite caveats about their mutual co-imbrication, the analytical separation between ‘Western’ and ‘other cultures’ sciences in the Reader may forego other questions about how certain forms of knowledge become enrolled as either ‘indigenous’ or ‘Western’. While ‘Western’ science might be riddled with contradiction, fickleness, and transformation, so too can the deployment of its counterpart ‘indigenous knowledge’. The recent dumping of around 100 tonnes of iron sulfate into the Pacific Ocean as part of a geoengineering scheme off the west coast of Canada illuminates these ever-changing currencies between ‘Western’ and ‘indigenous knowledge’. Described as ‘rogue science’ and a ‘blatant violation of United Nations rules’ by a range of commentators (Lukacs, 2012), this intervention took place from a fishing boat 200 nautical miles west of the islands of Haida Gwaii. It was arranged and funded by American businessperson Russ George and the Old Massett Village Council, who are part of the Haida Nation. Before the dump occurred, the local council established the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation, and their website sums up the idea behind the action: ‘World class science, village style’ (http://www.haidasalmon.net). After the dump, a large plankton bloom covering an area up to 10,000 square kilometers was visible off Haida Gwaii. This action, which is now being referred to as an ‘incident’ in national and international media (as opposed to, say, an ‘experiment’), was originally billed as a salmon enhancement project that would help the marine environment and replenish the dwindling salmon stocks for Canadian First Nations.
Whose science was this? Reading a case study, such as this one, in relation to the readings in the cluster would be useful in considering what is at stake in analytically separating different kinds of science as ‘Western’ and ‘indigenous’. This is because the essays in this cluster speak to the intensifying debates over multiple forms of scientific knowledge, intellectual property, and the status of human bodies (and body parts). As the essays take readers through different fields of thought and action, from geese hunting to asserting claims of intellectual property, it is this section of the book where contestations over ownership, knowledge, and what counts as legitimate science are most explicitly addressed.
Repackaging, ‘residues and reinventions’
As the title of the cluster, ‘Residues and reinventions’, suggests, the next set of essays speak to the remainders of colonialism and imperialism, as well as how particular inequalities and relations of power continue to exist through other means. This cluster brings together a range of topics from development strategies, to structural adjustment policies, to bioprospecting in Mexico and the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP).
Arturo Escobar and Catherine V. Scott provide the foundational texts for considering the relationship between development and modernity. Both deconstruct the powerful ideologies developed by modernization theorists in relation to the ‘Third World’ and the gendered construction of the ‘Third World’. The continually repackaged ‘problem of population’ (Foucault, 2003) is addressed by Betsy Hartmann and by the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment, an alliance of women activists, community organizers, and health practitioners. Both criticize the assumption that population size and growth are the primary cause of environmental degradation.
The next two essays move from the scale of individuals and populations to the molecular scale of DNA, molecules, genes, and cells. These essays, by Jenny Reardon and Cori Hayden, represent pivotal approaches in examining the politics and ethics of collecting biological information from people and plants. Reardon’s essay charts the initial enthusiasm and ensuing controversy over the HGDP. Much to the surprise of HGDP organizers, the indigenous groups that the project had targeted in its collection of biological samples levied charges of racism. Hayden’s essay on bioprospecting in Mexico centers on her ethnographic question: ‘what is the contribution of local knowledge to the process of drug development’ (p. 345)? While plant material is initially in question for Hayden, she argues that within bioprospecting agreements, there are a range of representational dilemmas of which benefit sharing and its ‘ever-present twin biopiracy’ are central (p. 359).
These essays provide an opportunity to reflect on how inequalities and forms of racialization can quickly resurface even when they are considered to have been dismantled. The selections reveal that contemporary science and technology cannot be viewed as a set of steady achievements in relation to social progress or ethics. Given that these moments of resurfacing are subject to new and unexpected ‘mutations’ (Kowal et al., 2013), the question of what constitutes future interventions from a postcolonial STS approach looms large. It is this question of the future that the final section of the Reader explores.
‘Moving forward: possible pathways’
The final selection of essays is dedicated to movement – pushing forward, sideways, up and down, in order to open up new kinds of opportunities for thinking and acting. Fundamentally, this cluster of essays is about the public, both its promises and its perils. I want to return to experiences of travel and translation to consider the kinds of possible pathways offered at the end of the Reader. Sitting in the Vancouver airport, I was waiting for my flight and trying to ignore the television playing the 24-hour news cycle in the boarding lounge. A headline ran across the screen: ‘Landmark court decision determines that Métis and non-status Indians are now Indians’. Such a headline might read as nonsensical to many. What the headline really meant was that the legal and constitutional rights of those who the Canadian government counts as ‘status Indian’ now need to be extended to those the government considers to be nonstatus Indians and Métis in relation to Canada’s Indian Act.
That ‘Métis and non-status Indians are now Indians’ can be a current news headline speaks to the long-standing technologies of counting, sorting, and categorizing that shape settler colonial nations. These are not just the technologies of the past. They are also the technologies of the future (Canada’s federal government will likely appeal the ruling). These are the technologies of making publics and citizens – those deemed worthy, by the state, of particular types of recognition. It is significant, then, that the final cluster of essays in the Reader carefully considers the relationship between technology, the public, and citizenship.
The final cluster in the Reader offers a range of new perspectives and pathways that reject, collect, and reposition science and knowledge. Ziauddin Sardar outlines a typology of different kinds of Islamic science. Next, Susantha Goonatilake provides a series of personal and political reflections on science as a global endeavor. Developing a perspective from South Africa, the third essay by Catherine A. Odora Hoppers explores South Africa’s promotion and protection of ‘indigenous knowledge systems’ (IKS) in a global frame.
The final three essays, by Daniel Sarewitz, David J. Hess, and Karin Backstrand, discuss the role of experts, policy-makers, and citizens. Building on the long-standing engagements that STS has with the public, both as an object and as a subject of analysis, these essays seek to develop an integrative approach to scientific inquiry, participatory expertise, and emerging technical and deliberative approaches. While Sarewitz identifies a tension between the aims of science and democracy (p. 403), Hess explores the ‘alternative pathways’ that have emerged in US scientific endeavors (p. 419). In developing another approach, Backstrand builds on the concept of ‘civic science’ to promote sustainability (p. 439). The divergent pathways reflected in the selection of essays in this final cluster mirror the multidirectionality of colonial encounters, their reminders, and their residues, along with the possibilities for future twists and turns. But they also point to technologies of governing, which, like science, do not discover preexisting truths, but through diverse practices and processes, shape understandings of social and political possibilities.
Conclusion
The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader synthesizes a series of pioneering approaches to thinking, reading, and teaching about the many sites around the globe where colonial and postcolonial issues arise. The essays in the collection show that addressing categories of race, religion, sex, and gender is not a simple question of identifying marginalized groups but rather requires attending to how these terms, and the people attached to them, get defined, categorized, concealed, or projected in myriad ways. Intervening in historical, institutional, ecological, and political fields of knowledge, the Reader is indispensable for those who want to push the boundaries of the disciplines, institutions, and careers they find themselves in.
Writing in the New York Review of Books 22 years ago, Clifford Geertz (1990) reviewed the work of feminist STS scholars, including that of Sandra Harding: The feminist critique of science is clearly launched, and is clearly struggling. It seems unlikely either to melt away or turn everything upside down, but to become an abiding feature of intellectual life – ragged, various, and unignorable. Part of the scene. (p. 23)
More than two decades later, feminist STS is still ‘part of the scene’ along with other lively companions like postcolonial studies. And the vision put forth by Harding suggests that the aim might not be to ‘turn everything upside down’ as Geertz surmises but rather to inhabit the entanglements or as another one in Geertz’s review lineup recently put it: to stay with the trouble (Haraway, 2010).