E-Book Overview
This new approach to the study of multiculturalism focuses on its applications to science and technology. It explores new studies that describe the role of culture and power in the making of theories, facts and machines.
E-Book Content
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