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 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Sage Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Studies of Science. http://www.jstor.org 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 'alter- nativemodernities', 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] 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 644 Social Studies of Science 32/5-6 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 colo- nial 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 postcolonialsci- ence and technologystudies is in part a responseto risingconcern about corporateglobalization, increased commodification of science,and further alienationand circulationof intellectualproperty. How mightwe under- stand 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 - stud- ies 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 post- colonial 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 know- ledge 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 cri- tique', 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