Science And Technology In A Multicultural World: The Cultural Politics Of Facts And Artifacts

Columbia University Press New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 1995 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hess, David J . Science and technology in a multicultural world: the cultural politics of facts and artifacts / David J. Hess, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-231-10196-1 ISBN0-231-10197-X(pbk.) 1. Science—Social aspects. 3. Multiculturalism. Q175.5.H47 2. Technology—Social aspects. I. Title. 1994 303.48'3—dc20 94-34733 CIP 0 Case bound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface Acknowledgments 1. Introduction v " xi 1 2. The Cultural Construction of Science and Technology 18 3. The Origins of Western Science: Technototems in the Scientific Revolution 54 4. Temporal Cultures and Technoscience 87 5. The Social Relations and Structures of Scientific and Technical Communities 117 6. Science and Technology at Large: Cultural Reconstruction in Broader Society 161 7 Other Ways of Knowing and Doing: The Ethnoknowledges and Non-Western Medicines 185 8. Cosmopolitan Technologies, Native Peoples, and Resistance Struggles 211 9. Conclusions: Science, Technology, and the Multicultural Education 250 Notes 261 Bibliography 281 Index 307 Preface Like it or not we are living in a multicultural world. I use that term in a deliberately ambiguous way to signal various aspects of the contemporary (or postmodern) condition. To begin, it is a multicultural world. Developments in transportation and communication as well as the crisis of world ecology have created the so-called global society. Furthermore, as the globe has shrunk in size it has also become a multicultural world. People of diverse nationalities find themselves in increasing contact with each other. In many countries women, underrepresented ethnic groups, gays and lesbians, and other previously excluded groups have gained a greater voice in government, the media, and the professions. Finally, the cultural world in which people are living is marked by public debates on diversity, pluralism, oppression, exclusion, inclusion, colonialisms, identity politics, and other issues that can be glossed as multicultural. For many people involved in the debates the very word multiculturalism is controversial. From the right critics worry that increasing attention to identity politics will undermine citizenship, patriotism, and other mechanisms of national stability and integration. From the left critics worry that the attention to culture occludes racism or patriarchy by reducing them to a form of ethnocentrism, or that the official appropriations of multiculturalism represent a new form of political pluralism that glosses over conflict and domination. From either perspective the term viii Preface multiculturalism is itself problematic if not altogether wrongheaded. I am more sympathetic to the criticisms from the left than those from the right. Those on the right, I believe, worry about something that is not happening, for they miss the complexities of how national cultures continue to reproduce themselves in new settings—including, for example, national styles of multiculturalism or identity po