Postcolonial Technoscience Author(S): Warwick Anderson Source: Social Studies of Science, Vol

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Introduction: Postcolonial Technoscience Author(s): Warwick Anderson Source: Social Studies of Science, Vol. 32, No. 5/6 (Oct. - Dec., 2002), pp. 643-658 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3183050 . Accessed: 10/11/2014 08:58

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This content downloaded from 128.173.127.127 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:58:57 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions S S S SpecialIssue: Postcolonial Technoscience

INTRODUCTION

PostcolonialTechnoscience WarwickAnderson

'Postcolonialtechnoscience' is a deliberatelyambiguous title, calculated to elicitthe question: 'what might it mean?' Too oftenthe 'postcolonial' seems to implyyet another global theory, or simplya celebrationof the end of colonialism.'But it mayalso be viewedas a signpostpointing to contem- poraryphenomena in need of new modesof analysisand requiringnew critiques.Some older stylesof analysisin sciencestudies - thosethat assumerelatively closed communitiesand are predicatedon the nation- state- do notseem adapted to explainingthe co-production of identities, technologiesand culturalformations characteristic of an emergingglobal order.A postcolonialperspective suggests fresh ways to studythe changing politicaleconomies of capitalism and science,the mutual reorganization of the global and the local, the increasingtransnational traffic of people, practices,technologies, and contemporarycontests over 'intellectual property'.2The term'postcolonial' thus refers both to newconfigurations of technoscienceand to thecritical modes of analysisthat identify them. We hope thata closerengagement of sciencestudies with postcolonial studieswill allow us to questiontechnoscience differently, find more heterogeneoussources, and revealmore fully the patterns of local trans- actionsthat give rise to global,or universalist,claims. In this Special Issue of Social Studiesof Science,we would like to explorefurther what postcolonial studies might offer science studies. At the mostbasic level,a postcolonialperspective would mean thatmetropole and post-colonyare examinedin thesame 'analytic frame'.3 But we would go beyonda recommendationof analyticsymmetry and inclusion,and seekto understandthe ways in whichtechnoscience is implicatedin the postcolonialprovincializing of'universal' reason, the description of 'alternativemodernities', and the recognition of hybridities, borderlands and in- betweenconditions. We would,moreover, argue that the study of science and technologyhas muchto offera postcolonialcritique that has hitherto concentratedon literaryrepresentations, a 'textualism' that often has the effectof erasing the materiality and specificityof neocolonialencounters.4

Social Studiesof Science 32/5-6(October-December 2002) 643-658 ? SSS and SAGE Publications(London, Thousand Oaks CA, New Delhi) [0306-3127(200210/12)32:5-6;643-658;029789]

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The postcolonialstudy of science and technologysuggests a means of writinga 'historyof the present',of comingto termswith the turbulence and uncertaintyof contemporaryglobal flowsof knowledgeand practice. As Stacy Leigh Pigg puts it, 'we now need to findout more about how science and technologytravel, not whetherthey belong to one cultureor another'.5According to Adele Clarke and her colleagues ...

. . . weneed studies that specify and examinethe sinews or networks along whichproducts, services, knowledge, information and new forms of labor are traveling.These need to includethe social,cultural, gender/racial, economicand otherformations extant at thesites of both uploading and downloading.6

StuartHall has argued thatpostcolonial studies have enabled this sort of 'decentered, diasporic, or "global" rewritingof earlier nation-centered imperialgrand narratives' - a 're-phrasingof Modernitywithin the frame- workof "globalisation"'.7 Significantly,the 'postcolonial'does not implythe end of colonialism; rather,it signalsa criticalengagement with the present effects - intellectual and social - ofcenturies of 'European expansion'on formercolonies and on theircolonizers. A postcolonial analysis thus offersus a chance of dis- concertingconventional accounts of so-called 'global' technoscience,re- vealingand complicatingthe durable dichotomies,produced under colonial regimes,which underpin many of its practicesand hegemonicclaims. These binariesstill operate in termsof global/local,first-world/third-world, Western/Indigenous,modern/traditional, developed/underdeveloped, big- science/small-science,nuclear/non-nuclear, and even theory/practice.At- tentionto the 'complexborder zone of hybridityand impurity'should help us to understandhow ideas about difference- racial (white/otheror evolue/ primitive),temporal (modern/traditional), class (elite/subaltern)- are en- acted, and disturbed,in the performanceof technoscience.8A postcolonial perspectivemight show us how scientificand technologicalendeavours become sitesfor fabricating and linkinglocal and global identities,as well as sitesfor disrupting and challengingthe distinctionsbetween global and local. In particular,some of us would like to believe that 'movements provoketheoretical moments'.9 The effortto imagine a postcolonialscience and technologystudies is in part a responseto risingconcern about corporateglobalization, increased commodification of science,and further alienationand circulationof intellectualproperty. How mightwe understand and engagewith these transnationalprocesses? The goal, as Roddey Reid and SharonTraweek have pointedout, is 'one of takingvery seriously the presentmoment in whichwe work,practicing and experimentingwith ways of engagingwith it intellectually,ethically, and as citizensin increas- inglyglobalized economies and cultures'.10'Before envisioningthe global civilizationof the future',writes Ashis Nandy, 'one mustfirst own up to the responsibilityof creatinga space at the margins of the present global civilizationfor a new,plural, political ecology of knowledge'." In a modest

This content downloaded from 128.173.127.127 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:58:57 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Postcolonial Technoscience: Anderson: Introduction 645 way, the postcolonial studies of science and technologypresented here mighthelp to make availablea vocabularyfor just such a discussionof the reconstitutedidentities and practicesthat emerge from reconfigurations of the 'local' and the 'global'. Moreover,they suggest ways of assayinglocal culturesand emergentpolitical economies on the same scale. In 1994, Sandra Hardingrecommended that we 'relocatethe projects of science and science studies that originatein the West on the more accurate historicalmap created by the new postcolonial studies'.12 As Harding recognized,scholars in India, the Philippines,and elsewherein what was called 'the Third World', had alreadybeen doing this formany years, but their work was virtuallyunknown in European and North Americanscience studiescircles until she drew attentionto it. During the 1990s, such effortsto 'provincializeEurope' have gained pace in many disciplines,"3but theyseem almostto have stalledin science studies,with the engine chokingperhaps on a lingeringresidue of the field'sobsession witha universalizedEuropean rationality.Here we tryto steeraway from abstractpostcolonial theories or all-encompassingmodels, and instead present a number of concrete case studies that help us to thinkabout supposedlyglobal representationsand practicesin specificsettings - studies thatreveal, in Helen Verran'sterms, the multi-sitedhybrid transactions that make global generalizationpossible. We hope that these essays will contributeto the 'materializing'of postcolonial studies, and to a postcolonial disruption,and disfigurementeven, of science and technology studies.

What Might be Postcolonial? For 50 years or so, beneath various deployments,the 'postcolonial' has proven a productivelyambiguous intellectualsite. It has been taken to signifya time period (afterthe colonial); a location (where the colonial was); a critique of the legacy of colonialism;an ideological backing for newlycreated states; a demonstrationof the complicityof Western knowledge withcolonial projects; or an argumentthat colonial engagementscan revealthe ambivalence,anxiety and instabilitydeep withinWestern thought and practice.At the riskof over-simplifyinga complex intellectualenter- prise, it may help here to separate out colonial critique, postcolonial theory,and the historicalanthropology of modernity.14 As a recognizedliterary genre and politicalmovement, 'colonial critique', just one part of thisconstellation, was expressedinitially by authors fromthe imperialcentres, then more frequentlyby scholars and activists from colonial or postcolonial settings.'5Often Marxist in inspiration, colonial critiqueas an emergingacademic interesthas fromthe early1 980s examinedthe suppressionof local or Indigenousvoices (in colonialismor neo-colonialism),and attemptedto retrieveor re-inventautochthonous literatures,histories and practices.'6In the case of literature,one of the effectsof thiscolonial critiquehas been the enlargementof the categoryto include writingfrom former colonies. It has also forcedrecognition that

This content downloaded from 128.173.127.127 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:58:57 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 646 Social Studies of Science 32/5-6 the study of literaturerequires some of the techniques of sociology, anthropologyand history.This literaryenterprise has an analogue,too, in the historyof science and medicine.The effortsof scholars like Deepak Kumar to constructa usable historyof third-worldscience and technology have expandedthe categoriesof 'science' and 'technology',and representa critiqueof colonial powerrelations, embedded stillin an implicitlynation- alisthistoriography."7 While many claim that Edward Said's Orientalism(New York: Pan- theon Books, 1978) signals the beginningof postcolonialtheory, others have assertedits originsin the earlierwork of FrantzFanon, especiallyhis Peau noire,masques blancs (1 952),18 whereFanon applies psychoanalysisto colonialism,thus politicizingthe modal personalityof the oppressed.'9 Fanon described how the unstable Manichean dichotomies produced throughcolonial practices - includingmedicine - shaped the identitiesand relationshipsof the colonizers and the oppressed. More recently,Said, using Michel Foucault's notion of discourse,has examinedthe impact of the cultural constructionof Orientalismon colonial consciousness and materialpractice. Thus apparentlyobjective Western knowledge was com- plicit in colonial power relations; the Western academy has colluded, perhapsinadvertently, with colonial administration.But Homi Bhabha and othercritics of Said have argued thathe assertstoo readilythe hegemony of colonial discourse.Bhabha, using a Fanonian socioanalysis,has decon- structedcolonial literarytexts to reveala destabilizingambivalence within these Western discourses. An apparentlyauthoritative discourse might disguisean equivocationbetween repulsion and desire,an ambivalenceor hybriditythat is accentuatedwith culturecontact and mimeticperform- ance in a colonial setting.20Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, another critic of Said's assumptionof the hegemonyof colonial discourse,has chosen to emphasize,not internaldestabilization, but ratherthe hithertounrecog- nized persistenceof alternativelocal knowledges,which sometimesmight be retrievedby givingvoice to those who are made mute in colonialism. Spivak has focussed on 'epistemicviolence', the exclusionsproduced by colonial discourseand academic practice.21 Postcolonialtheory has thus oftenworked to destabilize,or at least challenge,the assumptionthat Western knowledge is objective,author- itativeand universallyapplicable. If colonial critiquehas oftenappeared to be generatinglocal variationson the trajectoryto the modern state - producinga lot of 'minor' literaturesalong the way - then postcolonial theoryhas attemptedto provincialize,or rendercolonial, the knowledge productionof the European and North Americannation-state, to use a minor literatureto reframethe 'major' literature.22The 'colonial' might thenjoin class, genderand race as a major categoryof social and historical analysisin any setting.Accordingly, an engagementof science studiesand postcolonialtheory would not simplyprovide us withinstances of Western science and technologyin differentsettings - potentiallyit mighteven 'colonialize' and destabilize conventionalaccounts of Western technoscience at 'home'.

This content downloaded from 128.173.127.127 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:58:57 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Postcolonial Technoscience: Anderson: Introduction 647

But many anthropologistsand historianswho studycolonial cultures recentlyhave criticizedthe reductivenessand homogenizationthat are evidentin much postcolonialtheory. 'There is an impasse', lamentsthe anthropologistNicholas Thomas, 'that arises fromtoo dogged an attach- mentto "colonialism"as a unitarytotality, and to relatedtotalities such as "colonial discourse", "the Other", Orientalismand imperialism'.Dis- missiveof the 'global theoryimpulse', Thomas argues instead fora more specificanalytic strategy 'which situatescolonial representationsin terms of agents,locations, periods'. Postcolonial studies should avoid univers- alized psychoanalyticterms, seeking rather to fracturepresumed authen- ticities,destabilize imperial and colonial categories,and reconstituteen- counters throughthe concentratedexamination of particularhistorical, politicaland culturalcontexts.23 Similarly, Frederick Cooper, a historianof southernAfrica, has called forstudies of the 'preciseways in whichpower is deployedand the ways in whichpower is engaged,contested, deflected and appropriated'in a transnationalframe. Influenced by the workof the subalternstudies group of Indian historians,Cooper urges otherscholars to ...

... analyzein specificsituations how poweris constituted,aggregated, contestedand limited,going beyond the post-structuralisttendency to findpower diffused in 'modernity','the post-Enlightenmentera', or 'Westerndiscourse'.24

Unwilling to jettison all of the insightsof postcolonial theory,Arturo Escobar, on the otherhand, suggeststhat notions of hybridity, for example, mightstill be elicitedin an ethnographyof modernity.

Insteadof searchingfor grand alternative models or strategies,what is neededis theinvestigation ofalternative representations and practicesin concretelocal settings, particularly so as theyexist in contextsof hybrid- ization,collective action, and politicalmobilization.25

This is not so much an interrogationof theWestern figure of the man of reason as an empiricalstudy of the translocalco-production of technosciences and social orders.26 Medicine has become a common referencepoint formany subaltern histories,as well as figuringin much historicalanthropology, though it is largely ignored in contemporarypostcolonial theories.27Even science occasionallyearns a mentionin postcolonialhistories.28 When Nicholas Thomas drewattention to a 'wave of new analysesand critiquesconcerned withrace, imperialism,orientalism and relatedtopics', he referredspecifi- cally to 'historiesof science and medicine'.29Frederick Cooper describes the postcolonialcontributions of studies of the 'categoriesand tropes' of explorers,scientists, doctors and officials,in particular,studies of the propensityof colonial medicineto definesusceptibility to disease in racial or culturalterms. In recommendingthat the institutionsand rhetoricof the colonial stateshould be furtherscrutinized, he notes that'one subject into which this kind of inquiryhas begun is health'.30In postcolonial

This content downloaded from 128.173.127.127 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:58:57 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 648 Social Studies of Science 32/5-6 studies,then, science and technology,especially in theirmedical forms, are already recognized as significantcolonial projects, requiring further analysis.

From Modernization Theory to AlternativeModernities In 1960,W.W. Rostow described the stagesof economicgrowth in his 'non-communistmanifesto', a classic of modernizationtheory. Rostow emphasizedthe importanceof science and technologyin achievinga 'take- off' fromtraditional society - indeed, the stimulus'was mainly(but not wholly) technological'.31Science, it seemed, diffusedfrom Europe and pooled wherethe groundwas readyto receiveit. A fewyears later, George Basalla amplifiedthis diffusionist hypothesis, giving details of thephases in the spread of Westernscience from centre to periphery.According to Basalla, in phase 1, expeditionsin the peripherymerely provided raw materialfor European science; duringphase 2 the derivativeand depend- ent institutionsof colonial science emerged;and sometimes,an independ- ent and nationalscience, called phase 3, would laterdevelop.32 Basalla's simple evolutionarymodel of scientificdevelopment was to provokeextensive criticism in science studiesduring the 1980s. The critical responsewas inspiredin partby the moregeneral challenge of dependency theories,and world systemstheory, to the older diffusionistmodels of modernizationand development.33Roy MacLeod, for example, disap- provedof the linearand homogeneouscharacter of diffusionistarguments, and noted the lack of attentionto the complex political dimensionsof science. He called instead for a more dynamic conception of imperial science, the recognitionof a 'movingmetropolis', a functionof empire, ratherthan a stable dichotomyof centre and periphery.34David Wade Chambers also rejected Basalla's diffusionism,and asked for more case studiesof science in non-Westernsettings, and more interactivemodels of scientificdevelopment. But Chambers warned that 'withouta more general framework,we sink into a sea of local histories';he wonderedabout the salience of the 'colonial', yet doubted at the time its explanatory power.35In the early 1990s, Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys,taking Lewis Pyenson's work as a proxy for diffusionism,also suggestedthat 'Westernmethods and knowledgewere not accepted passively,but were adapted and selectivelyabsorbed in relationto existingtraditions of natural knowledgeand religionand otherfactors'. Moreover, they pointed out that imperialismhad also shaped 'metropolitanscientific institutions and knowledges'.36 Discussion of diffusionand nationbuilding has graduallygiven way to talkof contactzones and networkconstruction. Recently, MacLeod urged again the abandonmentof centre-peripherymodels, and proposedinstead a studyof the trafficof ideas and institutions,a recognitionof reciprocity, using 'perspectivescolored by the complexitiesof contact'.3 Such advice reflectsthe broaderpopularity in science and technologystudies, since the 1980s at least, of framingdevices such as 'local practices' and 'actor-

This content downloaded from 128.173.127.127 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:58:57 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Postcolonial Technoscience: Anderson: Introduction 649 networks'.Science and technologyare necessarilylocal practices,yet they can travel.As MarilynStrathern suggests, questions need to be asked not about the boundedness of cultures,but about the 'lengthof networks'.38 How is it, inquiredBruno Latour in 1984, thatNewtonian laws of physics workas well in Gabon as in England?39How did Portugueseships, asked JohnLaw in 1986, keep theirshape as theyvoyaged from Lisbon to distant parts of the empire?40That is, how are scientificfacts or practices,and technologicalconfigurations, stabilized in differentplaces? Actor-network theoryinitially was meant to providean explanationfor the productionof these 'immutable mobiles', thus emerging,almost paradoxically,as an unintendedvariant of an older diffusionism;later versionshave emphasized a more fluidtopology, describing the adaptationand reconfiguration of objects and practicesas theytravel. The Zimbabwean bush pump, for example, changed shape and re-formednetworks from one village to the next, while stayingidentifiably a Zimbabwean bush pump.4' As Latour asserts,'even a longernetwork remains local at all points'.42But oftena sortof semioticformalism seems to superveneon the analysisof such local sites: the 'local' can seem quite abstract,depleted of historicaland social specificity.The structuralfeatures of the networkbecome clear,but oftenit is hard to discernthe relationsand the politicsengendered through it. A postcolonialstudy of science and technologymight offer new, and more richlytextured, answers to many of the questionsposed in actor-network theory.43 Some of the more densely realized stories of the contact zones of mobileknowledge practices have focusedon the contemporaryinteractions of scientistsand Indigenous peoples. The work of Helen Verran,David Turnbull,and theirstudents, has been especiallyinfluential: they could be said to representa 'Melbourne-Deakin school' of postcolonial science studies, shaped by local enthusiasmfor ethnohistory,and building on constructivistand feministapproaches to the studyof science and technology.44With the Yolngu people of ArnhemLand, Verranhas studied the interactionof local knowledgepractices, one 'traditional',the other'scientific', and described 'the politics waged over ontic/epistemiccommit- ments'. Her goal is not just to exploit the splits and contradictionsof Westernrationality: she aims toward a communitythat 'accepts that it sharesimaginaries and articulatesthose imaginariesas part of recognizing the myriadhybrid assemblages with which we constituteour worlds'.45In her currentresearch project, Verran seeks to move beyonddescription and to findways in which one mightdo good work- such as negotiatingland use - withinand between the messiness,contingency and ineradicable heterogeneityof differentknowledge practices.46 David Turnbull,similarly, has studied the 'interactive,contingent assemblage of space and knowledge' in diversesettings, arguing that 'all knowledgetraditions, including Westerntechnoscience, can be compared as formsof local knowledgeso thattheir differential power effectscan be comparedbut withoutprivileg- ing any of them epistemologically'.47That is, even the most generalized

This content downloaded from 128.173.127.127 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:58:57 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 650 Social Studies of Science 32/5-6 technoscience,like any other practice, always has a local historyand a local politics,even as the actorsinvolved claim to be 'doing global'. While Verranand Turnbull take pleasure in the messy politics that emergeout of local performancesof technoscience,Sandra Harding and othershave soughtto use cross-culturalstudies of knowledgetraditions to achieveepistemological clarity. For Harding,postcolonial accounts provide 'resources for more accurate and comprehensivescientific and technological thought'.'We can employthe categoryof the postcolonialstrategi- cally',she writes,'as a kindof instrumentor methodof detectingphenom- ena that otherwiseare occluded'.48Influenced by 'post-Kuhnianscience studies',critiques of diffusionism,and feminism,Harding has emphasized the importanceof local knowledgeand called for more dynamicglobal histories,but her main goal is the strengtheningof modern scientific objectivity,a remedyingof 'dysfunctionaluniversality claims'.49 This is probablynot the motivationof most otherpostcolonial scholars. Lawrence Cohen has suggestedthat while Harding wants to 'pluralize the field of discourse', most postcolonial intellectualspine for 'an insurrectionary abandonment'.The danger of multiculturalscience studies, accordingto Cohen, is its 'mapping of differenceonto an underlyinghegemony'.50 In contrast,Ashis Nandy and otherpostcolonial scholars have triedto reveal the heterogeneityand messiness of technosciences,and their attendant 'modernities'.5 1 Just as Bruno Latour questions the modernityof Europe, and Chakrabartycalls for it to be provincialized,critics of 'Third World development'have begun to postulatealternative or multiplemodernities. Justas Modernityis takenfrom Europe, it appears to proliferateelsewhere, in lower case. We have neverhad so many moderns. Perhaps this is the 'insurrectionof subjugated knowledges' to which Michel Foucault re- ferred.52Ariun Appadurai, among others,describes 'alternative modernities'; Lisa Rofel discerns 'other modernities'in China; and Marilyn Strathernfinds 'new modernities'at multiplesites.53 Reflecting on 'anthro- pological enlightenment',Marshall Sahlinsreports on 'the struggleof non- Western peoples to create their own cultural versions of modernity', resultingin theproduction of 'Indigenousmodernities'. Notions of'centre' and 'periphery',Sahlins argues, now are useless as analyticterms.54 Hybrid or incompletemodernities are reticulatedeverywhere, and no pure source can be found. Perhapsthe strongestchallenge to diffusionisttheories of technoscien- tific development,to the assumption that modern science has simply spread froma centre,comes fromthose criticsof developmentpractising an anthropologyof the modernitiesmutating beyond Europe. Arturo Escobar's investigationof modernity'as a culturallyand historicallyspe- cificphenomenon' is surelypart of the terrainof postcolonialscience and technologystudies.55 Akhil Gupta, similarly,in his study of agricultural developmentin India, has used postcolonialtheory as an 'analyticframe- workto describe ... hybriddiscourses and practicesand to delineatethe intertwiningof "local" practices with global and national projects of

This content downloaded from 128.173.127.127 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:58:57 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Postcolonial Technoscience: Anderson: Introduction 651 development'.Like other postcolonial scholars,Gupta seeks to unsettle 'the binariesof colonial and nationalistthought in pointingto the imbrica- tion of the Indigenous in modernist discourse'.56Thus, in becoming variouslymodern, we have also become aware that we remain latently colonial. Over the fissured,disrupted ground of these decentredmodernities one might locate technoscienceat any number of sites, and track the translocaltravel of its projects.Gabrielle Hecht, forexample, in her study of uraniummining in Gabon and Madagascar, interrogatesthe nuclear/ non-nuclear distinction,revealing a range of disjointed socio-technical practices'in which nuclearity,colonialism and decolonizationconfronted and shaped one another'.At various sites,and in differentways, colonial powerrelations - especiallyethnic hierarchies - have been 'conjugated'into distinctivetechnological futures.57 Peter Redfieldobserves that postcolonial theoryand science studies share 'a common oppositionalstance to floatingassumptions framing modernity'.58 In his essay on the colonial contest of space exploration,situated in French Guiana and in 'outer space', Redfield seeks to decentre or provincializeEurope, and 'outer space', demonstratingthat modern technosciencemay take many forms, and is geographicallyunstable as well. Vincanne Adams also points to transnationalreconfigurations of technoscience,describing the uneasy and partialincorporation of Tibetan medicineinto American biomedicine, and the unequal participationof Tibetan practitionersin scientificresearch. Modern technosciencecan appear as 'magical' and as contingentas the practicesit assesses. 'Scientificlegitimacy' and 'crime', 'fact' and 'belief', are renegotiatedand contestedat multiplesites - irregularlyconjugated into a pharmaceuticalfuture, perhaps - as partof a postcolonialmarketing of difference.59

Reframingthe Local, ProvincializingTechnoscience It is futileto tryto drawa definiteboundary around postcolonial studies of science and technology:the enterpriseis surelyas heterogeneouslypopu- lated as the terrainit describes.To attemptto listthe canon of postcolonial science studieswould be to miss the point. Like 'modernity',it just keeps on mutating. A fewfeatures, however, do seem resilient.There is a strikingemphasis on the 'situatedness'of technoscience,an anthropologicalconviction that even the longernetworks, as Latour claims, are local at all points. Post- colonial science and technologystudies focus on what Mary Louise Pratt has called the 'contact zones' of empire.60As GilbertJoseph puts it, such contact zones 'are not geographicplaces with stable significations;they may representattempts at hegemony,but are simultaneouslysites of multivocality;of negotiation,borrowing, and exchange; and of redeploy- ment and reversal'.6"The localness of technoscientificnetworks, the situated productionof 'globality',the transnationalprocesses of displacement and reconfiguration,the fragmentationand hybridityof technoscience- all

This content downloaded from 128.173.127.127 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:58:57 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 652 Social Studies of Science 32/5-6 are vividlyillustrated in the multi-sitedstudies of Hecht, Redfield and Adams. One mighthave imagined,in an old colonial way,that the 'local' would be a propertyonly of what used to be called the 'periphery'- but the 'centre' in the multi-sitedimaginary of postcolonial accounts is just as local, and should be consideredas anothernode in a network.Thus in his study of 'global disease threats',Nick King reveals the situatednessof 'doing global', or reterritorializing,in North American biomedicine.62 Such an interrogationof the 'centre'along withthe 'periphery'is, perhaps, what Latour reallymeant when he arguedthat anthropology should come home fromthe tropics. Postcolonialstudies of science and technologymight offer opportun- itiesto generatesystemic understandings of politicaleconomies from local culturalworlds, or at least theymight offer us threadsto followthrough the labyrinth.When Wade Chambers lamented a likelyfragmentation of the investigationof 'global' science into countless local studies,he was still seeking a means to connect them.63There has been a tendency,as Fernando Coronil points out, to identifypolitical economy with an ab- stractmaster narrative, and culturalstudies with fragmented local stories. But thereis 'no reason why social analysisshould be cast in termsthat polarize determinismand contingency,the systemicand the fragmentary'; one needs to tryto 'understandthe complex architectureof parts and whole'.64Even themost local of studiesshould implya network,suggesting connectionswith othersites throughthe trafficof persons,practices and objects.65The recentemergence of richlytextured, multi-sited studies of modern technoscienceattests to the importanceof both situatingknow- ledge and tracingits passage fromsite to site - to the need to understand what Redfieldcalls the 'differentspatial and temporalframes in whichthe "local" takes shape'.66These new studies, whetherat what used to be called the 'centre' or at what used to be called the 'periphery',draw as much on an anthropologicalmode of inquiryas theydo fromthe historical and sociologicalmethods more commonin science studies.Bernard Cohn has argued that historiansconventionally have followedthe nation, and anthropologistshave followedthe empire: postcolonial approaches challenge this demarcationof territory,sending anthropologists of science to join historiansstudying the 'nation', and historiansand sociologistsof science to join anthropologistsstudying the 'empire'.67 Multi-sited,interdisciplinary studies of technosciencewould always have been interesting,but now theyare especiallyneeded. Withthe fallof the old empires,and the declineof the nation-state,the idea of a territorial centreof power is less sustainablethan ever. How should we recognizeand seek to explain an apparent proliferationof hybrid identities,flexible hierarchies,complex transactions,displacements and fragmentations?Of course,any new worldorder - ifit can be dignifiedwith that title - maybe characterizedin many differentways. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have proclaimedthe emergenceof 'a world definedby new and complex regimes of differentiationand homogenization,deterritorialization and reterritorialization'- and theirtract serves at least to indicatethe sense of

This content downloaded from 128.173.127.127 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:58:57 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Postcolonial Technoscience: Anderson: Introduction 653 changethat permeates contemporary social analysis.68Something seems to be happening,but how do we findout more about what it is? Escobar, in advocatingan anthropologyof modernity,has arguedthat...

... thecrisis in theregimes of representation in the Third World ... calls fornew theories and researchstrategies; the crisis is a realconjunctural momentin the reconstructionof the connectionbetween truth and reality,between words and things,one thatdemands new practicesof seeing,knowing and being.69

And again, accordingto Coronil,'collective identities are being definedin fragmentedplaces that cannot be mapped with antiquatedcategories'.70 The papers in thisSpecial Issue of Social Studiesof Science are contributing to a redrawingof the old map of technoscience,and helpingus to discern some new categories.

Notes I would like to thankGabrielle Hecht, Mike Lynch,Adele Clarke,David Turnbull,and an anonymousreviewer for their comments on thisIntroduction. As a whole, thisproject was shaped throughthe interactionsof the contributorsto thisSpecial Issue (and others)at the 1999 Meeting of the Societyfor Social Studies of Science (4S), and at the 2001 UCSF/ BerkeleyPostcolonial Technoscience Workshop (which was supportedby a grantfrom the Universityof CaliforniaHumanities Research Institute). Adele Clarke,Donna Haraway, Paul Rabinow,Hugh Raffles,Sharon Traweek and Anna Tsing were among the commentatorsat the 2001 Workshop.Thanks to MarilysGuillemin and RosemaryRobins, I was also able to presentan earlierdraft of thispaper to theTechnopractices meeting, held in Melbourne in 2000. The finalversion benefited from discussions with Claudia Castafieda,Lawrence Cohen and Gabriela Soto Laveaga. 1. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, 'What is Post(-)Colonialism?',Textual Practice, Vol. 5 (1991), 399-414; Anne McClintock,'The Angel of Progress:Pitfalls of theTerm 'Post- Colonialism',Social Text,Nos 31/32 (Spring 1992), 1-15; ArifDirlik, 'The Postcolonial Aura: ThirdWorld Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism',Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20 (1994), 329-56. 2. See forexample, Ariun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: CulturalDimensions of Globalization(Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1996); Lisa Rofel,Other Modernities:Gendered Yearnings in China afterSocialism (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1999); Aihwa Ong, FlexibleCitizenship: The CulturalLogics of Transnationality(Durham, NC & London: Duke UniversityPress, 1999). 3. Ann L. Stoler and FrederickCooper, 'Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinkinga ResearchAgenda', in F. Cooper and A.L. Stoler (eds), Tensionsof Empire: Colonial Culturesin a BourgeoisWorld (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1997), 1-56, at 4. 4. See Dirlik,op. cit. note 1, and Simon During, 'Postcolonialismand Globalization:A Dialectical RelationAfter All?', PostcolonialStudies, Vol. 1 (1998), 31-48. In general, thoughnot always,we have favouredthe term'technoscience' as a means to indicate the contemporaryconvergence and assemblageof scientificpractice and technology development,and to avoid sterileclassificatory debates. As Bruno Latour remarksin relationto technoscience:'the name of the game will be to leave the boundariesopen and to close themonly when the people we followclose them' (Sciencein Action: How to FollowScientists and Engineersthrough Society [Milton Keynes, Bucks., UK: Open UniversityPress, 1987], 175). 5. Stacy Leigh Pigg, personalcommunication (April 2001). See Stacy Leigh Pigg, 'InventingSocial Categoriesthrough Place: Social Representationsand Developmentin Nepal', ComparativeStudies in Societyand History,Vol. 34 (1992), 491-513.

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6. Adele E. Clarke,Laura Mamo, JanetK. Schim,Jennifer R. Fishman and JenniferRuth Fosket,'Technoscience and the New Biomedicalization:Western Roots, Global Rhizomes' (unpublishedmanuscript, Department of Social and BehavioralSciences, UCSF), 34. A less programmaticvariant of this quotationcan be foundin Adele E. Clarke,Jennifer R. Fishman,Jennifer Ruth Fosket,Laura Mamo and JanetK. Schim, 'Technoscienceset nouvellebiomedicalisation: racines occidentales, rhizomes mondiaux',Sciences Sociales et Sante,Vol. 18 (2000), 11-42, at 32. 7. StuartHall, 'When was "the Post-Colonial"?Thinking at the Limit', in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (eds), ThePost-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London: Routledge,1996), 242-60, at 247, 250. 8. The phraseis fromAkhil Gupta, PostcolonialDevelopments: Agriculture in theMaking of ModernIndia (Durham, NC & London: Duke UniversityPress, 1998), 6. 9. StuartHall, 'Cultural Studies and itsTheoretical Legacies', in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler(eds), CulturalStudies (New York:Routledge, 1992), 277-94, at 293. 10. Roddey Reid and SharonTraweek, 'Introduction: Researching Researchers', in R. Reid and S. Traweek (eds), Doing Science+ Culture(New York& London: Routledge,2000), 1-20, at 6. 11. Ashis Nandy, 'Shamans, Savages, and theWilderness: On the Audibilityof Dissent and the Future of Civilizations',Alternatives, Vol. 14 (1989), 263-75, at 263. See also Ashis Nandy (ed.), Science,Hegemony and Violence:A Requiemfor Modernity (New Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press, 1988). 12. Sandra Harding,'Is Science Multicultural?Challenges, Resources, Opportunities', Configurations,Vol. 2 (1994), 301-30, at 327. 13. Dipesh Chakrabarty,Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and HistoricalDifference (Princeton,NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2000). 14. A similardistinction, using slightlydifferent terms, is made in Bart Moore-Gilbert, PostcolonialTheory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), esp. Chapter 1. 15. Bill Ashcroft,Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin,The Empire Writes Back: Theoryand Practicein Post-ColonialLiteratures (London: Routledge,1989). 16. Ranajit Guha and GayatriSpivak (eds), SelectedSubaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1988); and Gyan Prakash,'Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism',American Historical Review, Vol. 99 (1994), 1475-90. 17. Deepak Kumar, Scienceand theRaj 1857-1905 (New Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press, 1995), and Roy M. MacLeod and Deepak Kumar (eds), Technologyand theRaj: Western Technologyand TechnicalTransfers to India (New Delhi: Sage, 1995). 18. FrantzFanon, Black Skin,White Masks, trans.Charles Lam Markman (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 19. For surveysof postcolonialtheory, see RobertJ.C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing Historyand theWest (London: Routledge,1990); R.J.C.Young, ColonialDesire: Hybridity in Theory,Culture and Race (London: Routledge,1995); PatrickWilliamsand Laura Chrisman(eds), ColonialDiscourse and Post-ColonialTheory: A Reader(New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1994); Francis Barker,Peter Hulme and MargaretIversen (eds), ColonialDiscourse, Postcolonial Theory (Manchester, UK: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1994); PadminiMongia (ed.), ContemporaryPostcolonial Theory: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996); Moore-Gilbert,Postcolonial Theory, op. cit. note 14; Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism(London: Routledge,1998); and Leela Gandhi, PostcolonialTheory: A CriticalIntroduction (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998). 20. Homi K. Bhabha, The Locationof Culture (London: Routledge,1994); and H.K. Bhabha (ed.), Nationand Narration(London: Routledge,1990). 21. GayatriChakravorty Spivak, In OtherWorlds: Essays in CulturalPolitics (NewYork: Methuen, 1987), and G.C. Spivak (ed. Sarah Harasym),The Post-ColonialCritic: Essays, Strategies,Dialogues (NewYork: Routledge,1990). 22. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari(trans. Dana Polan), Kafka: Towarda MinorLiterature (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1986); Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'Postcolonialityand the Artificeof History:Who Speaks for"Indian" Pasts?',

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Representations,Vol. 37 (1992), 1-24; and WarwickAnderson, 'Where is the PostcolonialHistory of Medicine?', Bulletinof the History of Medicine, Vol. 72 (1998), 522-30. 23. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism'sCulture: Anthropology, Travel and Government(Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1994), at ix, 8. For an earlierplea forstudy of the culturesof colonialism,see BernardS. Cohn and Nicholas B. Dirks,'Beyond the Fringe:The Nation-State,Colonialism and theTechnology of Power',Journal of HistoricalSociology, Vol. 1 (1988), 224-29. Cohn and Dirks suggestthat 'colonialism is too importanta subjectto be relegatedeither to the historyof nineteenth-century Europe on the one hand or to the negativenationalisms of thirdworld studies on the other' (ibid., 229). 24. FrederickCooper, 'Conflictand Connection:Rethinking Colonial AfricanHistory', AmericanHistorical Review, Vol. 99 (1994), 1516-45, at 1517, 1533. See also Prakash, op. cit. note 16: Prakashdescribes a shiftin subalternstudies from the earliereffort to recoverthe subalternas an autonomoussubject, to a laterhistorically informed critique of colonial disciplines. 25. ArturoEscobar, EncounteringDevelopment: The Making and Unmakingof the Third World (Princeton,NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1995), 19. 26. Ruth Frankenbergand Lata Mani warn more explicitlyagainst postcolonial theory dwindlinginto a critiqueof Western philosophical discourse, another version of using the Otherto rethinkthe Western Self: see R. Frankenbergand L. Mani, 'Crosscurrents, Crosstalk:Race, "Postcoloniality",and the Politicsof Location', CulturalStudies, Vol. 7 (1993), 292-310. 27. David Arnold,a memberof the subalternstudies group, has writtenextensively on disease and the colonial state: see D. Arnold,Colonizing the Body: StateMedicine and EpidemicDisease in Nineteenth-CenturyIndia (Berkeley:University of CaliforniaPress, 1993). The neglectof medicineand science in contemporarypostcolonial theory is especiallyodd, givenFanon's earlyanalysis of the contributionsof technicalpractices to imperialism:see FrantzFanon, 'Medicine and Colonialism',in JohnEhrenreich (ed.), The CulturalCrisis of Modern Medicine (New York:Monthly Review Press, 1978), 229-51. 28. See, forexample, Gyan Prakash,Another Reason: Science and theImagination of Modern India (Princeton,NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1999). 29. Thomas, Colonialism'sCulture, op. cit. note 23, 18. Thomas citesArnold, Colonizing the Body (op. cit. note 27), and Megan Vaughan,Curing Their Ills: ColonialPower and AfricanIllness (Stanford, CA; StanfordUniversity Press, 1991). 30. Cooper, 'Conflictand Connection',op. cit. note 24, 1526, 1541. Cooper citesArnold, Colonizingthe Body (op. cit. note 27), Vaughan,Curing Their Ills (op. cit. note 29), and Randall Packard,White Plague, Black Labor: Tuberculosisand thePolitical Economy of Healthand Disease in SouthAfrica (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1989). 31. W.W. Rostow,The Stagesof Economic Growth: A Non-CommunistManifesto (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1960), 8. 32. George Basalla, 'The Spread ofWestern Science', Science,Vol. 156 (5 May 1967), 611-22. 33. See, in particular,Andre Gunder Frank,Capitalism and Underdevelopmentin Latin America(New York:Monthly Review Press, 1969), and ImmanuelWallerstein, The ModernWorld System (NewYork: Academic Press, 1974). Much of thiscritique retained an implicitdemarcation of centreand periphery,and the economismof diffusionist models: see GilbertM. Joseph,'Close Encounters:Toward a New CulturalHistory of US-Latin AmericanRelations', in G.M. Joseph,Catherine C. LeGrand and Ricardo Salvatore(eds), CloseEncounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of US-Latin AmericanRelations (Durham, NC & London: Duke UniversityPress, 1998), 3-46. 34. Roy MacLeod, 'On Visitingthe "Moving Metropolis":Reflections on the Architecture of ImperialScience', in Nathan Reingoldand Marc Rothenberg(eds), Scientific Colonialism:A Cross-CulturalComparison (Washington, DC: SmithsonianInstitution Press, 1987), 217-49.

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35. David Wade Chambers,'Period and Process in Colonial and National Science', in Reingold& Rothenberg(eds), ScientificColonialism, op. cit. note 34, 297-321, at 314. See also D.W. Chambers,'Locality and Science: Mythsof Centre and Periphery',in AntonioLafuente, Alberto Elena and Maria Luisa Ortega (eds), Mundializacionde la cienciay culturalnacional (Madrid: Doce Calles, 1993), 605-18; and the essaysin PatrickPetitjean, Catherine Jami and Anne Marie Moulin (eds), Scienceand Empires: HistoricalStudies about Scientific Development and EuropeanExpansion (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992). More recently,Chambers and RichardGillespie have recommended investigationof the 'conglomeratevectors of assemblagethat form the local infrastructureof technoscience':D.W Chambersand R. Gillespie,'Locality in the Historyof Science: Colonial Science,Technoscience, and IndigenousKnowledge', in Roy MacLeod (ed.), Natureand Empire:Science and theColonial Enterprise, Osiris, Vol. 15 (2000), 221-40, at 231. 36. Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys,'Science and Imperialism',Isis, Vol. 84 (1993), 91-102, at 99, 100. Palladino and Worboysrecommend Macleod's notionof the 'movingmetropolis', in whichscientific relations are variableand polycentric. 37. Roy MacLeod, 'Introduction',in MacLeod (ed.), Natureand Empire,op. cit. note 35, 1-13, at 6. 38. MarilynStrathern, 'The New Modernities',in her Property,Substance and Effect: AnthropologicalEssays on Personsand Things(London & New Brunswick,NJ: Athlone Press, 1999), 117-35, at 122. 39. Bruno Latour, 'Irreductions',in his ThePasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and JohnLaw (Cambridge,MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1988), 153-236, at 227. Despite thisexample, Latour latercriticizes the 'perversetaste for the margins',and urgesanthropology to 'come home fromthe Tropics': B. Latour,We Have NeverBeen Modern,trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1993), at 122, 100. 40. JohnLaw, 'On the Methods of Long-Distance Control:Vessels, Navigation and the PortugueseRoute to India', in JohnLaw (ed.), Power,Action and Belief.A New Sociology ofKnowledge? (London: Routledge& Kegan Paul, 1986), 234-63. 41. Marianne de Laet and AnnemarieMol, 'The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology',Social Studiesof Science, Vol. 30, No. 2 (April2000), 225-63. 42. Latour,We Have NeverBeen Modern,op. cit. note 39, 117. 43. Perhapsas a supplementto JohnLaw and JohnHassard (eds), ActorNetwork Theory andAfter(Oxford & Malden, MA: Blackwell,1999). 44. Helen Watson-Verranand David Turnbull,'Science and OtherIndigenous Knowledge Systems',in Sheila Jasanoff,Gerald E. Markle,James C. Petersenand TrevorPinch (eds), Handbookof Science and TechnologyStudies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications/4S,1995), 115-39. Wade Chambers and otherswould, of course, be part of thisloose affiliationin Melbourne. For an example of the local interestin ethnohistory,and the dialogue betweenhistory and culturalanthropology, see Greg Dening, Islandsand Beaches:Discourse on a SilentLand: Marquesas,1774-1880 (Melbourne: Melbourne UniversityPress, 1980). For manyyears Helen Verranand Dipesh Chakrabartywere in the same departmentat the Universityof Melbourne, talkingabout postcolonialismand science studies.Another key reference point is Donna Haraway,'Situated Knowledges:The Science Question in Feminismand the Privilegeof PartialPerspective', in D. Haraway,Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:The Reinventionof Nature (New York:Routledge, 1991), 183-202. 45. Helen Verran,'Re-imagining Land Ownershipin Australia',Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 1 (1998), 237-54. Verranhere makes extensiveuse of the term'hybridity', derived from postcolonialstudies and fromthe laterwork of Latour.The notionof 'assemblage',and the practiceof 'nomad thought',derives from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,A ThousandPlateaus: Capitalismand Schizophrenia,trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1987), passim. 46. Helen Verran,'A PostcolonialMoment in Science Studies: AlternativeFiring Regimes of EnvironmentalScientists and AboriginalLandowners', in thisissue of Social Studies

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ofScience, Vol. 32, Nos 5/6 (October/December2002), 729-62. Verranemphasizes that thisneed not implypurification, compromise, synthesis, or conversion.See also Linda TuhiwariSmith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and IndigenousPeoples (Dunedin, NZ: Universityof Otago Press, 1999). 47. David Turnbull,Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers:Comparative Studies in theSociology ofScientific and IndigenousKnowledge (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 2000), at 4, 6. 48. Sandra Harding,Is ScienceMulticultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Bloomington:Indiana UniversityPress, 1998), at 8, 16. See also David J. Hess, Scienceand Technologyin a MulticulturalWorld: The CulturalPolitics of Facts and Artifacts (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1995). 49. Harding,Is ScienceMulticultural?, op. cit. note 48, 33. 50. Lawrence Cohen, 'Whodunit?-Violence and the Mythof Fingerprints:Comment on Harding', Configurations,Vol. 2 (1994), 343-47, at 345. This is a responseto Harding, 'Is Science Multicultural?'(1994), op. cit. note 12. 51. Nandy (ed.), Science,Hegemony and Violence,op. cit. note 11. See also Shiv Visvanathan,A Carnivalfor Science: Essays on Science,Technology and Development(New York:Oxford University Press, 1997). 52. Michel Foucault, PowerlKnowledge:Selected Interviews and OtherWritings, 1972-77, trans.Colin Gordon (New York:Pantheon Books, 1980), 71. 53. ArjunAppadurai, 'Global Ethnoscapes:Notes and Queries fora Transnational Anthropology',in RichardG. Fox (ed.), RecapturingAnthropology: Working in thePresent (Santa Fe, NM: School of AmericanResearch Press, 1991), 191-210; Rofel,Other Modernities,op. cit. note 2; and Strathern,'New Modernities',op. cit. note 38. Gyan Prakashcharts the emergenceof a differentscientific modernity in India in Another Reason (op. cit. note 28). See also IttyAbraham, The Making ofthe Indian Atomic Bomb: Science,Secrecy and thePostcolonial State (London: Zed Books, 1998). 54. Marshall Sahlins,'What is AnthropologicalEnlightenment? Some Lessons of the TwentiethCentury', Annual Reviewof Anthropology, Vol. 28 (1999), i-xxiii,at xi, vi. 55. Escobar, EncounteringDevelopment, op. cit. note 25, 11. Escobar relateshis 'anthropologyof modernity'to Paul Rabinow's call to 'anthropologizethe West'. Rabinow goes on to urge anthropologiststo 'show how exotic [theWest's] constitution of realityhas been; emphasizethose domains most takenfor granted as universal(this includes epistemologyand economics); make themseem as historicallypeculiar as possible; show how theirclaims to truthare linkedto social practicesand have hence become effectiveforces in the world': P. Rabinow,'Representations are Social Facts: Modernityand Post-Modernityin Anthropology',in JamesClifford and George Marcus (eds), WritingCulture: The Poetics and Politicsof Ethnography (Berkeley: Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1986), 234-61, at 241. See also JamesFerguson, The Anti-PoliticsMachine: Development, Depoliticization and BureaucraticPower in theThird World(Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1990); and Stacy Leigh Pigg, "'Found in Most TraditionalSocieties": Traditional Medical Practitionersbetween Culture and Development',in FrederickCooper and Randall Packard (eds), International Developmentand theSocial Sciences(Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1997), 259-90. 56. AkhilGupta, PostcolonialDevelopments: Agriculture in theMaking ofModern India (Durham, NC & London: Duke UniversityPress, 1998), quotes at 20. 57. GabrielleHecht, 'Rupture-Talkin the Nuclear Age: ConjugatingColonial Power in Africa',in thisissue of Social Studiesof Science, Vol. 32, Nos 5/6 (October/December 2002), 691-727, quote at 691 (Abstract);for 'conjugating' see 693. 58. PeterRedfield, 'The Half-Lifeof Empire in Outer Space', in thisissue of Social Studies ofScience, Vol. 32, Nos 5/6 (October/December2002),791-825, quote at 792. 59. VincanneAdams, 'Randomized ControlledCrime: PostcolonialSciences in Alternative Medicine Research',in thisissue of Social Studiesof Science, Vol. 32, Nos 5/6 (October/ December 2002), 659-900. 60. 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 PostcolonialGlobal Health', in thisissue of Social Studiesof Science, Vol. 32, Nos 5/6 (October/December 2002), 763-789. 63. One can look at it the otherway, too, of course. Kim Fortun,for example, seeks to put 'globalizationinto an ethnographicfield of vision': K. Fortun,'Locating Corporate Environmentalism:Synthetics, Implosions, and the Bhopal Disaster', in George M. Marcus (ed.), CriticalAnthropology Now: UnexpectedContexts, Shifting Constituencies, ChangingAgendas (Santa Fe, NM: School of AmericanResearch Press, 1999), 203-44, at 241. 64. Fernando Coronil,'Foreword', in Joseph,LeGrand & Salvatore(eds), CloseEncounters ofEmpire, op. cit. note 33, ix-xii,at xi. 65. That is, theymight allow 'an anthropologyof intersectingglobal imaginations',in Anna LowenhauptTsing's terms:A.L. Tsing, In theRealm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-WayPlace (Princeton,NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1993), 289. 66. Redfield,op. cit. note 58, 793. 67. BernardS. Cohn, An AnthropologistAmong the Historians and OtherEssays (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1987). 68. Michael Hardt and AntonioNegri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 2000), xiii. 69. Escobar, EncounteringDevelopment, op. cit. note 25, 223. 70. Fernando Coronil,'Beyond Occidentalism:Toward NonimperialGeohistorical Categories',CulturalAnthropology, Vol. 11 (1996), 51-87, at 80.

WarwickAnderson is Directorof the Historyof the HealthSciences Program at the Universityof Californiaat San Francisco,where he also directsthe campushumanities centre. Dr Andersonhas an additionalappointment in the HistoryDepartment at the Universityof Californiaat Berkeley.In Spring 2003, BasicBooks will publish his study of race sciencein Australia,The Cultivationof Whiteness:Science, Health, and Racial Destiny. He is currently workingon what he hopes is a postcolonialstudy of kuruinvestigations in the highlandsof New Guinea,and in Bethesda,Maryland (see 'The Possessionof Kuru:Medical Science and BiocolonialExchange', Comparative Studies in Society and History,Vol. 42 (2000), 713-44).

Address:Department of Anthropology,History and Social Medicine, Universityof Californiaat San Francisco,3333 CaliforniaStreet, Suite 485, San Francisco,California 94143-0850, USA; Fax: +1 415 476 6715; email:[email protected]

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