In part because anthropology describes itself as a science, and perhaps because it has in the past struggled to maintain its scientific credentials, science has itself remained largely outside the anthropological lens. Instead, a guiding presumption of much early anthropology was the belief that European anthropologists possessed a superior *rationality which differentiated them from the peoples they studied (most notably Lévy-Bruhl). Even those, such as *Malinowski, who argued for the universal presence of scientific rationality, or its prototype, among the most ‘primitive’ peoples did so on the assumption that it had reached its highest expression among civilized European societies. Well into mid-century, modern anthropologists were more concerned to become properly scientific than to examine the unique cultural formation of science.
Early investigations of science as a social phenomenon emerged out of history and philosophy from investigators such as Ludwig Fleck, †Thomas Kuhn, and †Karl Popper, who were largely concerned with rationality and scientific knowledge. Robert Merton inaugurated the sociology of science through studies investigating its institutionalization and professionalization. This division, between the social institutionalization of science and its status as a form of rational knowledge, has continued within science studies and is evident in contemporary feminist and sociological literatures. From the historical tradition have emerged both approaches which seek rationally to explain the history of scientific achievement and discovery, and more radical approaches which seek to explore science as an emergent cultural phenomenon, examining, for example, its popular representation, visual dimensions and symbolic resources.
By the mid- 1980s, important works in the area of science studies began to bridge this divide (see especially Haraway 1989), opening the way for a greater diversity of approaches and challenging the equation of science with rational knowledge. As the definition of ‘science’ has begun to become more diffuse, anthropologists have played an increasing role in its analysis as a *cultural field. Recent science studies projects within anthropology, therefore, have examined a range of topics; from techniques such as Polymerase Chain Reaction, to concepts such as immunity or heredity. Communities of scientists have been studied in laboratory-based ethnographies, such as Traweek’s account of high-energy physicists in Japan and the US (1988), and through more multi-sited approaches which follow the cultural production of science across a range of sites and locations.
Following the examples set by Robin Horton and Joseph Needham, important recent studies have begun to address ‘science’ in cross-cultural perspective (Marcus 1995). This approach complements both critical accounts of Western science produced by non-Western scholars such as Susantha Goonitilake (1984) and debates over the uses of scientific knowledge in the context of *development studies. Key to both areas are also concerns about the appropriation of †indigenous knowledges by Western scientists and their elimination in the name of scientific progress.
Decreases of public funding for research science in many Western nations have contributed to the emergence of renewed dispute over the status of scientific truth claims, and their corresponding importance to matters of local, national and global advancement. Such debates in turn invoke questions about a *postmodern readjustment to conventional definitions of scientific progress, including a greater awareness of its risks and its effect on definitions of the natural and the environment.
Franklin, Sarah (1995) ‘Science as Culture, Cultures of Science’, Annual Reviews in Anthropology 24:163–84
Goonatilake, Susantha (1984) Aborted Discovery: Science and Creativity in the Third World, London: Zed Books
Haraway, Donna (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science, New York: Routledge
Heath, Deborah and Paul Rabinow (eds) (1993) ‘Bio-Politics: The Anthropology of the New Genetics and Immunology’, Journal of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 17 (special issue)
Hess, David and Lina Layne (eds) (1992) ‘The Anthropology of Science and Technology’, Knowledge and Society 9 (special issue)
Marcus, George (ed.) (1995) Technosaentific Imaginaries: Conversations, Profiles, Memoirs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Traweek, Sharon (1988) Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
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