Social Studies of Science

http://sss.sagepub.com Introduction: Postcolonial Technoscience

Warwick Anderson Social Studies of Science 2002; 32; 643 DOI: 10.1177/030631270203200502 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sss.sagepub.com

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Special Issue: Postcolonial Technoscience

INTRODUCTION Postcolonial Technoscience

Warwick Anderson
Postcolonial technoscience is a deliberately ambiguous title, calculated to elicit the question: what might it mean? Too often the postcolonial seems to imply yet another global theory, or simply a celebration of the end of colonialism.1 But it may also be viewed as a signpost pointing to contemporary phenomena in need of new modes of analysis and requiring new critiques. Some older styles of analysis in science studies those that assume relatively closed communities and are predicated on the nationstate do not seem adapted to explaining the co-production of identities, technologies and cultural formations characteristic of an emerging global order. A postcolonial perspective suggests fresh ways to study the changing political economies of capitalism and science, the mutual reorganization of the global and the local, the increasing transnational trafc of people, practices, technologies, and contemporary contests over intellectual property.2 The term postcolonial thus refers both to new congurations of technoscience and to the critical modes of analysis that identify them. We hope that a closer engagement of science studies with postcolonial studies will allow us to question technoscience differently, nd more heterogeneous sources, and reveal more fully the patterns of local transactions that give rise to global, or universalist, claims. In this Special Issue of Social Studies of Science, we would like to explore further what postcolonial studies might offer science studies. At the most basic level, a postcolonial perspective would mean that metropole and post-colony are examined in the same analytic frame.3 But we would go beyond a recommendation of analytic symmetry and inclusion, and seek to understand the ways in which technoscience is implicated in the postcolonial provincializing of universal reason, the description of alternative modernities, and the recognition of hybridities, borderlands and inbetween conditions. We would, moreover, argue that the study of science and technology has much to offer a postcolonial critique that has hitherto concentrated on literary representations, a textualism that often has the effect of erasing the materiality and specicity of neocolonial encounters.4
Social Studies of Science 32/56(OctoberDecember 2002) 643658 SSS and SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks CA, New Delhi) [0306-3127(200210/12)32:56;643658;029789]
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The postcolonial study of science and technology suggests a means of writing a history of the present, of coming to terms with the turbulence and uncertainty of contemporary global ows of knowledge and practice. As Stacy Leigh Pigg puts it, we now need to nd out more about how science and technology travel, not whether they belong to one culture or another.5 According to Adele Clarke and her colleagues . . .
. . . we need studies that specify and examine the sinews or networks along which products, services, knowledge, information and new forms of labor are traveling. These need to include the social, cultural, gender/racial, economic and other formations extant at the sites of both uploading and downloading.6

Stuart Hall has argued that postcolonial studies have enabled this sort of decentered, diasporic, or global rewriting of earlier nation-centered imperial grand narratives a re-phrasing of Modernity within the framework of globalisation.7 Signicantly, the postcolonial does not imply the end of colonialism; rather, it signals a critical engagement with the present effects intellectual and social of centuries of European expansion on former colonies and on their colonizers. A postcolonial analysis thus offers us a chance of disconcerting conventional accounts of so-called global technoscience, revealing and complicating the durable dichotomies, produced under colonial regimes, which underpin many of its practices and hegemonic claims. These binaries still operate in terms of global/local, rst-world/third-world, Western/Indigenous, modern/traditional, developed/underdeveloped, bigscience/small-science, nuclear/non-nuclear, and even theory/practice. Attention to the complex border zone of hybridity and impurity should help us to understand how ideas about difference racial (white/other or evolu/ e primitive), temporal (modern/traditional), class ( lite/subaltern) are ene acted, and disturbed, in the performance of technoscience.8 A postcolonial perspective might show us how scientic and technological endeavours become sites for fabricating and linking local and global identities, as well as sites for disrupting and challenging the distinctions between global and local. In particular, some of us would like to believe that movements provoke theoretical moments.9 The effort to imagine a postcolonial science and technology studies is in part a response to rising concern about corporate globalization, increased commodication of science, and further alienation and circulation of intellectual property. How might we understand and engage with these transnational processes? The goal, as Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek have pointed out, is one of taking very seriously the present moment in which we work, practicing and experimenting with ways of engaging with it intellectually, ethically, and as citizens in increasingly globalized economies and cultures.10 Before envisioning the global civilization of the future, writes Ashis Nandy, one must rst own up to the responsibility of creating a space at the margins of the present global civilization for a new, plural, political ecology of knowledge.11 In a modest
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way, the postcolonial studies of science and technology presented here might help to make available a vocabulary for just such a discussion of the reconstituted identities and practices that emerge from recongurations of the local and the global. Moreover, they suggest ways of assaying local cultures and emergent political economies on the same scale. In 1994, Sandra Harding recommended that we relocate the projects of science and science studies that originate in the West on the more accurate historical map created by the new postcolonial studies.12 As Harding recognized, scholars in India, the Philippines, and elsewhere in what was called the Third World, had already been doing this for many years, but their work was virtually unknown in European and North American science studies circles until she drew attention to it. During the 1990s, such efforts to provincialize Europe have gained pace in many disciplines,13 but they seem almost to have stalled in science studies, with the engine choking perhaps on a lingering residue of the elds obsession with a universalized European rationality. Here we try to steer away from abstract postcolonial theories or all-encompassing models, and instead present a number of concrete case studies that help us to think about supposedly global representations and practices in specic settings studies that reveal, in Helen Verrans terms, the multi-sited hybrid transactions that make global generalization possible. We hope that these essays will contribute to the materializing of postcolonial studies, and to a postcolonial disruption, and disgurement even, of science and technology studies.

What Might be Postcolonial?

For 50 years or so, beneath various deployments, the postcolonial has proven a productively ambiguous intellectual site. It has been taken to signify a time period (after the colonial); a location (where the colonial was); a critique of the legacy of colonialism; an ideological backing for newly created states; a demonstration of the complicity of Western knowledge with colonial projects; or an argument that colonial engagements can reveal the ambivalence, anxiety and instability deep within Western thought and practice. At the risk of over-simplifying a complex intellectual enterprise, it may help here to separate out colonial critique, postcolonial theory, and the historical anthropology of modernity.14 As a recognized literary genre and political movement, colonial critique, just one part of this constellation, was expressed initially by authors from the imperial centres, then more frequently by scholars and activists from colonial or postcolonial settings.15 Often Marxist in inspiration, colonial critique as an emerging academic interest has from the early 1980s examined the suppression of local or Indigenous voices (in colonialism or neo-colonialism), and attempted to retrieve or re-invent autochthonous literatures, histories and practices.16 In the case of literature, one of the effects of this colonial critique has been the enlargement of the category to include writing from former colonies. It has also forced recognition that
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the study of literature requires some of the techniques of sociology, anthropology and history. This literary enterprise has an analogue, too, in the history of science and medicine. The efforts of scholars like Deepak Kumar to construct a usable history of third-world science and technology have expanded the categories of science and technology, and represent a critique of colonial power relations, embedded still in an implicitly nationalist historiography.17 While many claim that Edward Saids Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) signals the beginning of postcolonial theory, others have asserted its origins in the earlier work of Frantz Fanon, especially his Peau noire, masques blancs (1952),18 where Fanon applies psychoanalysis to colonialism, thus politicizing the modal personality of the oppressed.19 Fanon described how the unstable Manichean dichotomies produced through colonial practices including medicine shaped the identities and relationships of the colonizers and the oppressed. More recently, Said, using Michel Foucaults notion of discourse, has examined the impact of the cultural construction of Orientalism on colonial consciousness and material practice. Thus apparently objective Western knowledge was complicit in colonial power relations; the Western academy has colluded, perhaps inadvertently, with colonial administration. But Homi Bhabha and other critics of Said have argued that he asserts too readily the hegemony of colonial discourse. Bhabha, using a Fanonian socioanalysis, has deconstructed colonial literary texts to reveal a destabilizing ambivalence within these Western discourses. An apparently authoritative discourse might disguise an equivocation between repulsion and desire, an ambivalence or hybridity that is accentuated with culture contact and mimetic performance in a colonial setting.20 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, another critic of Saids assumption of the hegemony of colonial discourse, has chosen to emphasize, not internal destabilization, but rather the hitherto unrecognized persistence of alternative local knowledges, which sometimes might be retrieved by giving voice to those who are made mute in colonialism. Spivak has focussed on epistemic violence, the exclusions produced by colonial discourse and academic practice.21 Postcolonial theory has thus often worked to destabilize, or at least challenge, the assumption that Western knowledge is objective, authoritative and universally applicable. If colonial critique has often appeared to be generating local variations on the trajectory to the modern state producing a lot of minor literatures along the way then postcolonial theory has attempted to provincialize, or render colonial, the knowledge production of the European and North American nation-state, to use a minor literature to reframe the major literature.22 The colonial might then join class, gender and race as a major category of social and historical analysis in any setting. Accordingly, an engagement of science studies and postcolonial theory would not simply provide us with instances of Western science and technology in different settings potentially it might even colonialize and destabilize conventional accounts of Western technoscience at home.
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But many anthropologists and historians who study colonial cultures recently have criticized the reductiveness and homogenization that are evident in much postcolonial theory. There is an impasse, laments the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas, that arises from too dogged an attachment to colonialism as a unitary totality, and to related totalities such as colonial discourse, the Other, Orientalism and imperialism. Dismissive of the global theory impulse, Thomas argues instead for a more specic analytic strategy which situates colonial representations in terms of agents, locations, periods. Postcolonial studies should avoid universalized psychoanalytic terms, seeking rather to fracture presumed authenticities, destabilize imperial and colonial categories, and reconstitute encounters through the concentrated examination of particular historical, political and cultural contexts.23 Similarly, Frederick Cooper, a historian of southern Africa, has called for studies of the precise ways in which power is deployed and the ways in which power is engaged, contested, deected and appropriated in a transnational frame. Inuenced by the work of the subaltern studies group of Indian historians, Cooper urges other scholars to . . .
. . . analyze in specic situations how power is constituted, aggregated, contested and limited, going beyond the post-structuralist tendency to nd power diffused in modernity, the post-Enlightenment era, or Western discourse.24

Unwilling to jettison all of the insights of postcolonial theory, Arturo Escobar, on the other hand, suggests that notions of hybridity, for example, might still be elicited in an ethnography of modernity.
Instead of searching for grand alternative models or strategies, what is needed is the investigation of alternative representations and practices in concrete local settings, particularly so as they exist in contexts of hybridization, collective action, and political mobilization.25

This is not so much an interrogation of the Western gure of the man of reason as an empirical study of the translocal co-production of technosciences and social orders.26 Medicine has become a common reference point for many subaltern histories, as well as guring in much historical anthropology, though it is largely ignored in contemporary postcolonial theories.27 Even science occasionally earns a mention in postcolonial histories.28 When Nicholas Thomas drew attention to a wave of new analyses and critiques concerned with race, imperialism, orientalism and related topics, he referred specically to histories of science and medicine.29 Frederick Cooper describes the postcolonial contributions of studies of the categories and tropes of explorers, scientists, doctors and ofcials, in particular, studies of the propensity of colonial medicine to dene susceptibility to disease in racial or cultural terms. In recommending that the institutions and rhetoric of the colonial state should be further scrutinized, he notes that one subject into which this kind of inquiry has begun is health.30 In postcolonial
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studies, then, science and technology, especially in their medical forms, are already recognized as signicant colonial projects, requiring further analysis.

From Modernization Theory to Alternative Modernities

In 1960, W.W. Rostow described the stages of economic growth in his non-communist manifesto, a classic of modernization theory. Rostow emphasized the importance of science and technology in achieving a takeoff from traditional society indeed, the stimulus was mainly (but not wholly) technological.31 Science, it seemed, diffused from Europe and pooled where the ground was ready to receive it. A few years later, George Basalla amplied this diffusionist hypothesis, giving details of the phases in the spread of Western science from centre to periphery. According to Basalla, in phase 1, expeditions in the periphery merely provided raw material for European science; during phase 2 the derivative and dependent institutions of colonial science emerged; and sometimes, an independent and national science, called phase 3, would later develop.32 Basallas simple evolutionary model of scientic development was to provoke extensive criticism in science studies during the 1980s. The critical response was inspired in part by the more general challenge of dependency theories, and world systems theory, to the older diffusionist models of modernization and development.33 Roy MacLeod, for example, disapproved of the linear and homogeneous character of diffusionist arguments, and noted the lack of attention to the complex political dimensions of science. He called instead for a more dynamic conception of imperial science, the recognition of a moving metropolis, a function of empire, rather than a stable dichotomy of centre and periphery.34 David Wade Chambers also rejected Basallas diffusionism, and asked for more case studies of science in non-Western settings, and more interactive models of scientic development. But Chambers warned that without a more general framework, we sink into a sea of local histories; he wondered about the salience of the colonial, yet doubted at the time its explanatory power.35 In the early 1990s, Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys, taking Lewis Pyensons work as a proxy for diffusionism, also suggested that Western methods and knowledge were not accepted passively, but were adapted and selectively absorbed in relation to existing traditions of natural knowledge and religion and other factors. Moreover, they pointed out that imperialism had also shaped metropolitan scientic institutions and knowledges.36 Discussion of diffusion and nation building has gradually given way to talk of contact zones and network construction. Recently, MacLeod urged again the abandonment of centreperiphery models, and proposed instead a study of the trafc of ideas and institutions, a recognition of reciprocity, using perspectives colored by the complexities of contact.37 Such advice reects the broader popularity in science and technology studies, since the 1980s at least, of framing devices such as local practices and actorDownloaded from http://sss.sagepub.com by Diego Soares on April 14, 2009

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networks. Science and technology are necessarily local practices, yet they can travel. As Marilyn Strathern suggests, questions need to be asked not about the boundedness of cultures, but about the length of networks.38 How is it, inquired Bruno Latour in 1984, that Newtonian laws of physics work as well in Gabon as in England?39 How did Portuguese ships, asked John Law in 1986, keep their shape as they voyaged from Lisbon to distant parts of the empire?40 That is, how are scientic facts or practices, and technological congurations, stabilized in different places? Actor-network theory initially was meant to provide an explanation for the production of these immutable mobiles, thus emerging, almost paradoxically, as an unintended variant of an older diffusionism; later versions have emphasized a more uid topology, describing the adaptation and reconguration of objects and practices as they travel. The Zimbabwean bush pump, for example, changed shape and re-formed networks from one village to the next, while staying identiably a Zimbabwean bush pump.41 As Latour asserts, even a longer network remains local at all points.42 But often a sort of semiotic formalism seems to supervene on the analysis of such local sites: the local can seem quite abstract, depleted of historical and social specicity. The structural features of the network become clear, but often it is hard to discern the relations and the politics engendered through it. A postcolonial study of science and technology might offer new, and more richly textured, answers to many of the questions posed in actor-network theory.43 Some of the more densely realized stories of the contact zones of mobile knowledge practices have focused on the contemporary interactions of scientists and Indigenous peoples. The work of Helen Verran, David Turnbull, and their students, has been especially inuential: they could be said to represent a Melbourne-Deakin school of postcolonial science studies, shaped by local enthusiasm for ethnohistory, and building on constructivist and feminist approaches to the study of science and technology.44 With the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land, Verran has studied the interaction of local knowledge practices, one traditional, the other scientic, and described the politics waged over ontic/epistemic commitments. Her goal is not just to exploit the splits and contradictions of Western rationality: she aims toward a community that accepts that it shares imaginaries and articulates those imaginaries as part of recognizing the myriad hybrid assemblages with which we constitute our worlds.45 In her current research project, Verran seeks to move beyond description and to nd ways in which one might do good work such as negotiating land use within and between the messiness, contingency and ineradicable heterogeneity of different knowledge practices.46 David Turnbull, similarly, has studied the interactive, contingent assemblage of space and knowledge in diverse settings, arguing that all knowledge traditions, including Western technoscience, can be compared as forms of local knowledge so that their differential power effects can be compared but without privileging any of them epistemologically.47 That is, even the most generalized
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technoscience, like any other practice, always has a local history and a local politics, even as the actors involved claim to be doing global. While Verran and Turnbull take pleasure in the messy politics that emerge out of local performances of technoscience, Sandra Harding and others have sought to use cross-cultural studies of knowledge traditions to achieve epistemological clarity. For Harding, postcolonial accounts provide resources for more accurate and comprehensive scientic and technological thought. We can employ the category of the postcolonial strategically, she writes, as a kind of instrument or method of detecting phenomena that otherwise are occluded.48 Inuenced by post-Kuhnian science studies, critiques of diffusionism, and feminism, Harding has emphasized the importance of local knowledge and called for more dynamic global histories, but her main goal is the strengthening of modern scientic objectivity, a remedying of dysfunctional universality claims.49 This is probably not the motivation of most other postcolonial scholars. Lawrence Cohen has suggested that while Harding wants to pluralize the eld of discourse, most postcolonial intellectuals pine for an insurrectionary abandonment. The danger of multicultural science studies, according to Cohen, is its mapping of difference onto an underlying hegemony.50 In contrast, Ashis Nandy and other postcolonial scholars have tried to reveal the heterogeneity and messiness of technosciences, and their attendant modernities.51 Just as Bruno Latour questions the modernity of Europe, and Chakrabarty calls for it to be provincialized, critics of Third World development have begun to postulate alternative or multiple modernities. Just as Modernity is taken from Europe, it appears to proliferate elsewhere, in lower case. We have never had so many moderns. Perhaps this is the insurrection of subjugated knowledges to which Michel Foucault referred.52 Arjun Appadurai, among others, describes alternative modernities; Lisa Rofel discerns other modernities in China; and Marilyn Strathern nds new modernities at multiple sites.53 Reecting on anthropological enlightenment, Marshall Sahlins reports on the struggle of nonWestern peoples to create their own cultural versions of modernity, resulting in the production of Indigenous modernities. Notions of centre and periphery, Sahlins argues, now are useless as analytic terms.54 Hybrid or incomplete modernities are reticulated everywhere, and no pure source can be found. Perhaps the strongest challenge to diffusionist theories of technoscientic development, to the assumption that modern science has simply spread from a centre, comes from those critics of development practising an anthropology of the modernities mutating beyond Europe. Arturo Escobars investigation of modernity as a culturally and historically specic phenomenon is surely part of the terrain of postcolonial science and technology studies.55 Akhil Gupta, similarly, in his study of agricultural development in India, has used postcolonial theory as an analytic framework to describe . . . hybrid discourses and practices and to delineate the intertwining of local practices with global and national projects of
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development. Like other postcolonial scholars, Gupta seeks to unsettle the binaries of colonial and nationalist thought in pointing to the imbrication of the Indigenous in modernist discourse.56 Thus, in becoming variously modern, we have also become aware that we remain latently colonial. Over the ssured, disrupted ground of these decentred modernities one might locate technoscience at any number of sites, and track the translocal travel of its projects. Gabrielle Hecht, for example, in her study of uranium mining in Gabon and Madagascar, interrogates the nuclear/ non-nuclear distinction, revealing a range of disjointed socio-technical practices in which nuclearity, colonialism and decolonization confronted and shaped one another. At various sites, and in different ways, colonial power relations especially ethnic hierarchies have been conjugated into distinctive technological futures.57 Peter Redeld observes that postcolonial theory and science studies share a common oppositional stance to oating assumptions framing modernity.58 In his essay on the colonial contest of space exploration, situated in French Guiana and in outer space, Redeld seeks to decentre or provincialize Europe, and outer space, demonstrating that modern technoscience may take many forms, and is geographically unstable as well. Vincanne Adams also points to transnational recongurations of technoscience, describing the uneasy and partial incorporation of Tibetan medicine into American biomedicine, and the unequal participation of Tibetan practitioners in scientic research. Modern technoscience can appear as magical and as contingent as the practices it assesses. Scientic legitimacy and crime, fact and belief, are renegotiated and contested at multiple sites irregularly conjugated into a pharmaceutical future, perhaps as part of a postcolonial marketing of difference.59

Reframing the Local, Provincializing Technoscience

It is futile to try to draw a denite boundary around postcolonial studies of science and technology: the enterprise is surely as heterogeneously populated as the terrain it describes. To attempt to list the canon of postcolonial science studies would be to miss the point. Like modernity, it just keeps on mutating. A few features, however, do seem resilient. There is a striking emphasis on the situatedness of technoscience, an anthropological conviction that even the longer networks, as Latour claims, are local at all points. Postcolonial science and technology studies focus on what Mary Louise Pratt has called the contact zones of empire.60 As Gilbert Joseph puts it, such contact zones are not geographic places with stable signications; they may represent attempts at hegemony, but are simultaneously sites of multivocality; of negotiation, borrowing, and exchange; and of redeployment and reversal.61 The localness of technoscientic networks, the situated production of globality, the transnational processes of displacement and reconguration, the fragmentation and hybridity of technoscience all
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are vividly illustrated in the multi-sited studies of Hecht, Redeld and Adams. One might have imagined, in an old colonial way, that the local would be a property only of what used to be called the periphery but the centre in the multi-sited imaginary of postcolonial accounts is just as local, and should be considered as another node in a network. Thus in his study of global disease threats, Nick King reveals the situatedness of doing global, or reterritorializing, in North American biomedicine.62 Such an interrogation of the centre along with the periphery is, perhaps, what Latour really meant when he argued that anthropology should come home from the tropics. Postcolonial studies of science and technology might offer opportunities to generate systemic understandings of political economies from local cultural worlds, or at least they might offer us threads to follow through the labyrinth. When Wade Chambers lamented a likely fragmentation of the investigation of global science into countless local studies, he was still seeking a means to connect them.63 There has been a tendency, as Fernando Coronil points out, to identify political economy with an abstract master narrative, and cultural studies with fragmented local stories. But there is no reason why social analysis should be cast in terms that polarize determinism and contingency, the systemic and the fragmentary; one needs to try to understand the complex architecture of parts and whole.64 Even the most local of studies should imply a network, suggesting connections with other sites through the trafc of persons, practices and objects.65 The recent emergence of richly textured, multi-sited studies of modern technoscience attests to the importance of both situating knowledge and tracing its passage from site to site to the need to understand what Redeld calls the different spatial and temporal frames in which the local takes shape.66 These new studies, whether at what used to be called the centre or at what used to be called the periphery, draw as much on an anthropological mode of inquiry as they do from the historical and sociological methods more common in science studies. Bernard Cohn has argued that historians conventionally have followed the nation, and anthropologists have followed the empire: postcolonial approaches challenge this demarcation of territory, sending anthropologists of science to join historians studying the nation, and historians and sociologists of science to join anthropologists studying the empire.67 Multi-sited, interdisciplinary studies of technoscience would always have been interesting, but now they are especially needed. With the fall of the old empires, and the decline of the nation-state, the idea of a territorial centre of power is less sustainable than ever. How should we recognize and seek to explain an apparent proliferation of hybrid identities, exible hierarchies, complex transactions, displacements and fragmentations? Of course, any new world order if it can be dignied with that title may be characterized in many different ways. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have proclaimed the emergence of a world dened by new and complex regimes of differentiation and homogenization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization and their tract serves at least to indicate the sense of
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change that permeates contemporary social analysis.68 Something seems to be happening, but how do we nd out more about what it is? Escobar, in advocating an anthropology of modernity, has argued that. . .
. . . the crisis in the regimes of representation in the Third World . . . calls for new theories and research strategies; the crisis is a real conjunctural moment in the reconstruction of the connection between truth and reality, between words and things, one that demands new practices of seeing, knowing and being.69

And again, according to Coronil, collective identities are being dened in fragmented places that cannot be mapped with antiquated categories.70 The papers in this Special Issue of Social Studies of Science are contributing to a redrawing of the old map of technoscience, and helping us to discern some new categories.

Notes
I would like to thank Gabrielle Hecht, Mike Lynch, Adele Clarke, David Turnbull, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on this Introduction. As a whole, this project was shaped through the interactions of the contributors to this Special Issue (and others) at the 1999 Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), and at the 2001 UCSF/ Berkeley Postcolonial Technoscience Workshop (which was supported by a grant from the University of California Humanities Research Institute). Adele Clarke, Donna Haraway, Paul Rabinow, Hugh Rafes, Sharon Traweek and Anna Tsing were among the commentators at the 2001 Workshop. Thanks to Marilys Guillemin and Rosemary Robins, I was also able to present an earlier draft of this paper to the Technopractices meeting, held in Melbourne in 2000. The nal version beneted from discussions with Claudia Castaneda, Lawrence Cohen and Gabriela Soto Laveaga. 1. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, What is Post(-)Colonialism?, Textual Practice, Vol. 5 (1991), 399414; Anne McClintock, The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term PostColonialism, Social Text, Nos 31/32 (Spring 1992), 115; Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20 (1994), 32956. See for example, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 1999). Ann L. Stoler and Frederick Cooper, Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda, in F. Cooper and A.L. Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 156, at 4. See Dirlik, op. cit. note 1, and Simon During, Postcolonialism and Globalization: A Dialectical Relation After All?, Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 1 (1998), 3148. In general, though not always, we have favoured the term technoscience as a means to indicate the contemporary convergence and assemblage of scientic practice and technology development, and to avoid sterile classicatory debates. As Bruno Latour remarks in relation to technoscience: the name of the game will be to leave the boundaries open and to close them only when the people we follow close them (Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society [Milton Keynes, Bucks., UK: Open University Press, 1987], 175). Stacy Leigh Pigg, personal communication (April 2001). See Stacy Leigh Pigg, Inventing Social Categories through Place: Social Representations and Development in Nepal, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 34 (1992), 491513.
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654 6.

Social Studies of Science 32/56 Adele E. Clarke, Laura Mamo, Janet K. Schim, Jennifer R. Fishman and Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Technoscience and the New Biomedicalization: Western Roots, Global Rhizomes (unpublished manuscript, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, UCSF), 34. A less programmatic variant of this quotation can be found in Adele E. Clarke, Jennifer R. Fishman, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Laura Mamo and Janet K. Schim, Technosciences et nouvelle biom dicalisation: racines occidentales, rhizomes e mondiaux, Sciences Sociales et Sant, Vol. 18 (2000), 1142, at 32. e Stuart Hall, When was the Post-Colonial? Thinking at the Limit, in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (eds), The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London: Routledge, 1996), 24260, at 247, 250. The phrase is from Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 1998), 6. Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), 27794, at 293. Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek, Introduction: Researching Researchers, in R. Reid and S. Traweek (eds), Doing Science + Culture (New York & London: Routledge, 2000), 120, at 6. Ashis Nandy, Shamans, Savages, and the Wilderness: On the Audibility of Dissent and the Future of Civilizations, Alternatives, Vol. 14 (1989), 26375, at 263. See also Ashis Nandy (ed.), Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988). Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Challenges, Resources, Opportunities, Congurations, Vol. 2 (1994), 30130, at 327. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). A similar distinction, using slightly different terms, is made in Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), esp. Chapter 1. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Grifths and Helen Tifn, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Gyan Prakash, Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism, American Historical Review, Vol. 99 (1994), 147590. Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj 18571905 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), and Roy M. MacLeod and Deepak Kumar (eds), Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technical Transfers to India (New Delhi: Sage, 1995). Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markman (New York: Grove Press, 1967). For surveys of postcolonial theory, see Robert J.C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990); R.J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995); Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (eds), Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994); Padmini Mongia (ed.), Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996); Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, op. cit. note 14; Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998); and Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998). Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); and H.K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), and G.C. Spivak (ed. Sarah Harasym), The Post-Colonial Critic: Essays, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990). Gilles Deleuze and F lix Guattari (trans. Dana Polan), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature e (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Postcoloniality and the Artice of History: Who Speaks for Indian Pasts?,
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Representations, Vol. 37 (1992), 124; and Warwick Anderson, Where is the Postcolonial History of Medicine?, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 72 (1998), 52230. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialisms Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), at ix, 8. For an earlier plea for study of the cultures of colonialism, see Bernard S. Cohn and Nicholas B. Dirks, Beyond the Fringe: The Nation-State, Colonialism and the Technology of Power, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 1 (1988), 22429. Cohn and Dirks suggest that colonialism is too important a subject to be relegated either to the history of nineteenth-century Europe on the one hand or to the negative nationalisms of third world studies on the other (ibid., 229). Frederick Cooper, Conict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History, American Historical Review, Vol. 99 (1994), 151645, at 1517, 1533. See also Prakash, op. cit. note 16: Prakash describes a shift in subaltern studies from the earlier effort to recover the subaltern as an autonomous subject, to a later historically informed critique of colonial disciplines. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 19. Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani warn more explicitly against postcolonial theory dwindling into a critique of Western philosophical discourse, another version of using the Other to rethink the Western Self: see R. Frankenberg and L. Mani, Crosscurrents, Crosstalk: Race, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Location, Cultural Studies, Vol. 7 (1993), 292310. David Arnold, a member of the subaltern studies group, has written extensively on disease and the colonial state: see D. Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). The neglect of medicine and science in contemporary postcolonial theory is especially odd, given Fanons early analysis of the contributions of technical practices to imperialism: see Frantz Fanon, Medicine and Colonialism, in John Ehrenreich (ed.), The Cultural Crisis of Modern Medicine (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 22951. See, for example, Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Thomas, Colonialisms Culture, op. cit. note 23, 18. Thomas cites Arnold, Colonizing the Body (op. cit. note 27), and Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press, 1991). Cooper, Conict and Connection, op. cit. note 24, 1526, 1541. Cooper cites Arnold, Colonizing the Body (op. cit. note 27), Vaughan, Curing Their Ills (op. cit. note 29), and Randall Packard, White Plague, Black Labor: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 8. George Basalla, The Spread of Western Science, Science, Vol. 156 (5 May 1967), 61122. See, in particular, Andr Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin e America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974). Much of this critique retained an implicit demarcation of centre and periphery, and the economism of diffusionist models: see Gilbert M. Joseph, Close Encounters: Toward a New Cultural History of USLatin American Relations, in G.M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand and Ricardo Salvatore (eds), Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of USLatin American Relations (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 1998), 346. Roy MacLeod, On Visiting the Moving Metropolis: Reections on the Architecture of Imperial Science, in Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg (eds), Scientic Colonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 21749.
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35. David Wade Chambers, Period and Process in Colonial and National Science, in Reingold & Rothenberg (eds), Scientic Colonialism, op. cit. note 34, 297321, at 314. See also D.W. Chambers, Locality and Science: Myths of Centre and Periphery, in Antonio Lafuente, Alberto Elena and Maria Luisa Ortega (eds), Mundializaci n de la o ciencia y cultural nacional (Madrid: Doce Calles, 1993), 60518; and the essays in Patrick Petitjean, Catherine Jami and Anne Marie Moulin (eds), Science and Empires: Historical Studies about Scientic Development and European Expansion (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992). More recently, Chambers and Richard Gillespie have recommended investigation of the conglomerate vectors of assemblage that form the local infrastructure of technoscience: D.W. Chambers and R. Gillespie, Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge, in Roy MacLeod (ed.), Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, Osiris, Vol. 15 (2000), 22140, at 231. 36. Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys, Science and Imperialism, Isis, Vol. 84 (1993), 91102, at 99, 100. Palladino and Worboys recommend Macleods notion of the moving metropolis, in which scientic relations are variable and polycentric. 37. Roy MacLeod, Introduction, in MacLeod (ed.), Nature and Empire, op. cit. note 35, 113, at 6. 38. Marilyn Strathern, The New Modernities, in her Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things (London & New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 1999), 11735, at 122. 39. Bruno Latour, Irreductions, in his The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 153236, at 227. Despite this example, Latour later criticizes the perverse taste for the margins, and urges anthropology to come home from the Tropics: B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), at 122, 100. 40. John Law, On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and the Portuguese Route to India, in John Law (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 23463. 41. Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol, The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 30, No. 2 (April 2000), 22563. 42. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, op. cit. note 39, 117. 43. Perhaps as a supplement to John Law and John Hassard (eds), Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford & Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999). 44. Helen Watson-Verran and David Turnbull, Science and Other Indigenous Knowledge Systems, in Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Petersen and Trevor Pinch (eds), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications/4S, 1995), 11539. Wade Chambers and others would, of course, be part of this loose afliation in Melbourne. For an example of the local interest in ethnohistory, and the dialogue between history and cultural anthropology, see Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 17741880 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980). For many years Helen Verran and Dipesh Chakrabarty were in the same department at the University of Melbourne, talking about postcolonialism and science studies. Another key reference point is Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, in D. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 183202. 45. Helen Verran, Re-imagining Land Ownership in Australia, Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 1 (1998), 23754. Verran here makes extensive use of the term hybridity, derived from postcolonial studies and from the later work of Latour. The notion of assemblage, and the practice of nomad thought, derives from Gilles Deleuze and F lix Guattari, A e Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), passim. 46. Helen Verran, A Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies: Alternative Firing Regimes of Environmental Scientists and Aboriginal Landowners, in this issue of Social Studies
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of Science, Vol. 32, Nos 5/6 (October/December 2002), 72962. Verran emphasizes that this need not imply purication, compromise, synthesis, or conversion. See also Linda Tuhiwari Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago Press, 1999). David Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientic and Indigenous Knowledge (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 2000), at 4, 6. Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), at 8, 16. See also David J. Hess, Science and Technology in a Multicultural World: The Cultural Politics of Facts and Artifacts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Harding, Is Science Multicultural?, op. cit. note 48, 33. Lawrence Cohen, Whodunit? Violence and the Myth of Fingerprints: Comment on Harding, Congurations, Vol. 2 (1994), 34347, at 345. This is a response to Harding, Is Science Multicultural? (1994), op. cit. note 12. Nandy (ed.), Science, Hegemony and Violence, op. cit. note 11. See also Shiv Visvanathan, A Carnival for Science: Essays on Science, Technology and Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 197277, trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 71. Arjun Appadurai, Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology, in Richard G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991), 191210; Rofel, Other Modernities, op. cit. note 2; and Strathern, New Modernities, op. cit. note 38. Gyan Prakash charts the emergence of a different scientic modernity in India in Another Reason (op. cit. note 28). See also Itty Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State (London: Zed Books, 1998). Marshall Sahlins, What is Anthropological Enlightenment? Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 28 (1999), i-xxiii, at xi, vi. Escobar, Encountering Development, op. cit. note 25, 11. Escobar relates his anthropology of modernity to Paul Rabinows call to anthropologize the West. Rabinow goes on to urge anthropologists to show how exotic [the Wests] constitution of reality has been; emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal (this includes epistemology and economics); make them seem as historically peculiar as possible; show how their claims to truth are linked to social practices and have hence become effective forces in the world: P. Rabinow, Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology, in James Clifford and George Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 23461, at 241. See also James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Stacy Leigh Pigg, Found in Most Traditional Societies: Traditional Medical Practitioners between Culture and Development, in Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (eds), International Development and the Social Sciences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 25990. Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 1998), quotes at 20. Gabrielle Hecht, Rupture-Talk in the Nuclear Age: Conjugating Colonial Power in Africa, in this issue of Social Studies of Science, Vol. 32, Nos 5/6 (October/December 2002), 691727, quote at 691 (Abstract); for conjugating see 693. Peter Redeld, The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space, in this issue of Social Studies of Science, Vol. 32, Nos 5/6 (October/December 2002),791825, quote at 792. Vincanne Adams, Randomized Controlled Crime: Postcolonial Sciences in Alternative Medicine Research, in this issue of Social Studies of Science, Vol. 32, Nos 5/6 (October/ December 2002), 659900. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & New York: Routledge, 1992), Chapter 1.
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61. Joseph, Close Encounters, op. cit. note 33, 5. 62. Nicholas B. King, Security, Disease, Commerce: Ideologies of Postcolonial Global Health, in this issue of Social Studies of Science, Vol. 32, Nos 5/6 (October/December 2002), 763789. 63. One can look at it the other way, too, of course. Kim Fortun, for example, seeks to put globalization into an ethnographic eld of vision: K. Fortun, Locating Corporate Environmentalism: Synthetics, Implosions, and the Bhopal Disaster, in George M. Marcus (ed.), Critical Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts, Shifting Constituencies, Changing Agendas (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1999), 20344, at 241. 64. Fernando Coronil, Foreword, in Joseph, LeGrand & Salvatore (eds), Close Encounters of Empire, op. cit. note 33, ixxii, at xi. 65. That is, they might allow an anthropology of intersecting global imaginations, in Anna Lowenhaupt Tsings terms: A.L. Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 289. 66. Redeld, op. cit. note 58, 793. 67. Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 68. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), xiii. 69. Escobar, Encountering Development, op. cit. note 25, 223. 70. Fernando Coronil, Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 11 (1996), 5187, at 80.

Warwick Anderson is Director of the History of the Health Sciences Program at the University of California at San Francisco, where he also directs the campus humanities centre. Dr Anderson has an additional appointment in the History Department at the University of California at Berkeley. In Spring 2003, Basic Books will publish his study of race science in Australia, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny. He is currently working on what he hopes is a postcolonial study of kuru investigations in the highlands of New Guinea, and in Bethesda, Maryland (see The Possession of Kuru: Medical Science and Biocolonial Exchange, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 42 (2000), 71344). Address: Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, University of California at San Francisco, 3333 California Street, Suite 485, San Francisco, California 941430850, USA; Fax: +1 415 476 6715; email: wanders@itsa.ucsf.edu

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