“my copy of Latour and Woolgar’s (1986[1979]) Laboratory Life has been unpacked four times since I finished my Ph.D.”
“Treating science as a cultural process, aesthetic, or institution presents distinctive challenges for the anthropology classroom. Science may seem too close to home on the college campus for anthropology’s new student initiates. This semester I worked with prospective converts to the anthropological cause in a mid-level course pitched as “Science and Politics” alongside a more advanced undergraduate offering with one of those older anthropological titles, “Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion.””
“When the religion course arrived at the week on “Animism, Redux,” I’d been working for two-and-a-half months in my STS course to challenge what Latour calls the “modern settlement,” the purification of object from subject, science from the political. I’d set up points and counterpoints, implicit and explicit.”
“I’d guided and grappled, hewed and halted, contextualized and decontextualized, read closely and from a distance. I imagined us prodding passionately through a series of scientific controversies. I often found us plodding through them instead. This seemed to reproduce some previous results, namely that anthropology’s turn to science strikes students as either profoundly banal or hopelessly exotic (which says a lot about science and at least a little about the professor).”
“So, when the neo-animism-bound religion course turned to discussion of Marisol de la Cadena’s (2010) essay on “Indigenous Cosmopolitics,” I found myself acting more as anthropological observer than as professor, watching to see whether students’ eyes rolled around this exoticism, “cosmopolitics.” Instead, what I saw was a beaming affirmation that a semester’s religion readings—Tylor, Durkheim, Evans-Pritchard, Douglas, Geertz, Asad, and more—had led to an open and questioning attitude toward the configuration of politics and knowledge, be it “scientific” or “religious.” They didn’t need to be taught how to think and engage the world in cosmopolitical terms, how to construct common worlds where contradictory scientific, political, and metaphysical actors could coexist. They already knew.”
“It may be that college life hues to the pastel palette of sustained childishness, the wonder of a glistening eye that signals knowing without knowing how—or even that—it knows.”
“References”
“de la Cadena, Marisol. 2010. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond ‘Politics.’” Cultural Anthropology 25 (2):334-370.”
“Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1986[1979]. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press.”
“Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.”