If you were researching the construction of scientific facts, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a book called Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts might prove useful. It’s by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar and it came out in 1979, although you should get the newer 1986 edition because it has an extremely amusing reference to Borges (literally – it’s a reference) in the preface.
The concept is as promising as the title. Latour spends several months in a laboratory in California, living among scientists as an anthropologist would live amongst some strange south sea tribe, immersing himself in their practices and culture in an effort to better understand them. It’s an interesting idea, largely because (for me at least) it underlines the fact that even a layperson who is relatively well informed about science has little to no idea of the actual workings of a lab. This is a point which Latour and Woolgar provide some insight into – they say that scientists distance the knowledge they create from the material conditions of its creation. Science presents itself as pure knowledge, but thinking of it as such in a laboratory, amidst the machinery, caged animals, lab technicians and so on, proves difficult.
Although I don’t outright disagree with any of this, I’ve been having big problems with Latour and Woolgar. I think what makes me uneasy about their project is that whilst they have no problem critiqueing the assumptions of neuroendocrinology (the field in which the lab they study operates) they spend a lot of time making assumptions about the efficacy of anthropological and sociological method, which of course have their origins in exactly the same place.
‘Science studying science’ should be interesting but, for some reason, it isn’t. Jonas Salk, who runs the lab in question, writes in his rather guarded preface that “[t]he authors’ tools and concepts are crude and qualitative, but their will to understand scientific work is consistent with the scientific ethos”. Crude indeed – at one point, the layout of the lab is described through the eyes of a fictitious ‘observer figure’ who has all the cultural touchstones of western society (so he knows what a phone is, for instance) but is completely ignorant of the practices of science. The inevitable result is that science is Othered; appears strange and even ridiculous. These funny people write numbers on test tubes all day, then they throw the test tubes away. Isn’t that weird?! There is no part of any modern society that you couldn’t do this to, and surely one of the most susceptible figures for such a treatment would be this observer figure himself. Imagine if another observer were watching him.
This is a well-documented issue in anthropology, and I am not an anthropologist, so I am not qualified to discuss it. I am not a sociologist or a scientist either, so far from dismissing this book – which may well be of value to anybody working in these areas – I am simply going to say that I, personally, found it tough going, and, whilst thought-provoking, ultimately unrewarding.
I’m not the only one, though. Here’s Martin J. S. Rudwick in The Great Devonian Controversy (1985), another book I’ve been reading lately. It’s quite a long quotation, but I promise it will be worth it:
These ethnographers or microsociologists of science have given some detailed and illuminating accounts of routine procedures in scientific research. But with few exceptions they have described the research in a static manner, failing to show how the procedures are used in a temporal process to develop some new scientific conclusion. Furthermore, they often show an extreme skepticism – or at least, an extreme agnosticism – about the status of the knowledge the scientists claim to be producing. In miminizing if not discounting its reference to any ‘real’ external world of nature, their accounts of science open up a gulf in self-understanding between themselves and the scientists they observe – a gulf which surely no modern anthropologist would find tolerable in the interpretation of exotic cultures.
Then there’s a footnote which proves that this is a reference to Latour and Woolgar. Literally – it’s a reference.
Will Tattersdill
The book by Latour and Woolgar is a good example of anthropology of science. But if you are interested in this field, you must read the books of Annemarie Mol. Her book “The Body Multiple” is a must.
This is really interesting Will. I am often asked what it is that I *do* by scientist friends, which makes you realise that people have as little idea about the practice of English as about anything else. It makes you realise that we’re as odd as everyone else!
Sharon – Absolutely! A cornerstone of my argument is that English has become as distanced from the general public as Science has, and that the idea that ‘you just read books all day, that’s not a job’, &c. is as unhelpful to everybody as the ‘mere emperical facts’ perception of ’scientists’ in the media is.
Specialist practice is essential for the furthering of knowledge, of course, but when it becomes isolating, or isolationist, you get a damaging reduction in trust and, sometimes, it seems to me, an all-out war. Personally I take great comfort from knowing that we’re all, as you say, odd, and I don’t see why we need to fight so much…
Thank You for sharing your knowledge, Really nice post