Anderson - Postcolonial Science Studies

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Social Studies of Science

DOI: 10.1177/030631270203200502 2002; 32; 643 Social Studies of Science

Warwick Anderson Introduction: Postcolonial Technoscience

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INTRODUCTION

Postcolonial Technoscience

Warwick Anderson

‘Postcolonial technoscience’ is a deliberately ambiguous title, calculated toelicit the question: ‘what might it mean?’ Too often the ‘postcolonial’ seemsto imply yet another global theory, or simply a celebration of the end ofcolonialism.1 But it may also be viewed as a signpost pointing to contem-porary phenomena in need of new modes of analysis and requiring newcritiques. Some older styles of analysis in science studies – those thatassume relatively closed communities and are predicated on the nation-state – do not seem adapted to explaining the co-production of identities,technologies and cultural formations characteristic of an emerging globalorder. A postcolonial perspective suggests fresh ways to study the changingpolitical economies of capitalism and science, the mutual reorganization ofthe global and the local, the increasing transnational traffic of people,practices, technologies, and contemporary contests over ‘intellectualproperty’.2 The term ‘postcolonial’ thus refers both to new configurationsof technoscience and to the critical modes of analysis that identify them.We hope that a closer engagement of science studies with postcolonialstudies will allow us to question technoscience differently, find moreheterogeneous sources, and reveal more fully the patterns of local trans-actions that give rise to global, or universalist, claims.

In this Special Issue of Social Studies of Science, we would like toexplore further what postcolonial studies might offer science studies. At themost basic level, a postcolonial perspective would mean that metropoleand post-colony are examined in the same ‘analytic frame’.3 But we wouldgo beyond a recommendation of analytic symmetry and inclusion, andseek to understand the ways in which technoscience is implicated in thepostcolonial provincializing of ‘universal’ reason, the description of ‘alter-native modernities’, and the recognition of hybridities, borderlands and in-between conditions. We would, moreover, argue that the study of scienceand technology has much to offer a postcolonial critique that has hithertoconcentrated on literary representations, a ‘textualism’ that often has theeffect of erasing the materiality and specificity of neocolonial encounters.4

Social Studies of 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]

Special Issue: Postcolonial Technoscience


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The postcolonial study of science and technology suggests a means ofwriting a ‘history of the present’, of coming to terms with the turbulenceand uncertainty of contemporary global flows of knowledge and practice.As Stacy Leigh Pigg puts it, ‘we now need to find out more about howscience and technology travel, not whether they belong to one culture oranother’.5 According to Adele Clarke and her colleagues . . .

. . . we need studies that specify and examine the sinews or networks alongwhich products, services, knowledge, information and new forms of laborare traveling. These need to include the social, cultural, gender/racial,economic and other formations extant at the sites of both uploading anddownloading.6

Stuart Hall has argued that postcolonial studies have enabled this sort of‘decentered, diasporic, or “global” rewriting of earlier nation-centeredimperial grand narratives’ – a ‘re-phrasing of Modernity within the frame-work of “globalisation”’.7

Significantly, the ‘postcolonial’ does not imply the end of colonialism;rather, it signals a critical engagement with the present effects – intellectualand social – of centuries of ‘European expansion’ on former colonies and ontheir colonizers. A postcolonial analysis thus offers us a chance of dis-concerting conventional accounts of so-called ‘global’ technoscience, re-vealing and complicating the durable dichotomies, produced under colo-nial regimes, which underpin many of its practices and hegemonic claims.These binaries still operate in terms of global/local, first-world/third-world,Western/Indigenous, modern/traditional, developed/underdeveloped, big-science/small-science, nuclear/non-nuclear, and even theory/practice. At-tention to the ‘complex border zone of hybridity and impurity’ should helpus to understand how ideas about difference – racial (white/other or evolue/primitive), temporal (modern/traditional), class (elite/subaltern) – are en-acted, and disturbed, in the performance of technoscience.8 A postcolonialperspective might show us how scientific and technological endeavoursbecome sites for fabricating and linking local and global identities, as wellas sites for disrupting and challenging the distinctions between global andlocal.

In particular, some of us would like to believe that ‘movementsprovoke theoretical moments’.9 The effort to imagine a postcolonial sci-ence and technology studies is in part a response to rising concern aboutcorporate globalization, increased commodification of science, and furtheralienation and circulation of intellectual property. How might we under-stand and engage with these transnational processes? The goal, as RoddeyReid and Sharon Traweek have pointed out, is ‘one of taking very seriouslythe present moment in which we work, practicing and experimenting withways of engaging with it intellectually, ethically, and as citizens in increas-ingly globalized economies and cultures’.10 ‘Before envisioning the globalcivilization of the future’, writes Ashis Nandy, ‘one must first own up to theresponsibility of creating a space at the margins of the present globalcivilization for a new, plural, political ecology of knowledge’.11 In a modest

644 Social Studies of Science 32/5–6



way, the postcolonial studies of science and technology presented heremight help to make available a vocabulary for just such a discussion of thereconstituted identities and practices that emerge from reconfigurations ofthe ‘local’ and the ‘global’. Moreover, they suggest ways of assaying localcultures and emergent political economies on the same scale.

In 1994, Sandra Harding recommended that we ‘relocate the projectsof science and science studies that originate in the West on the moreaccurate historical map created by the new postcolonial studies’.12 AsHarding recognized, scholars in India, the Philippines, and elsewhere inwhat was called ‘the Third World’, had already been doing this for manyyears, but their work was virtually unknown in European and NorthAmerican science studies circles until she drew attention to it. During the1990s, such efforts to ‘provincialize Europe’ have gained pace in manydisciplines,13 but they seem almost to have stalled in science studies, withthe engine choking perhaps on a lingering residue of the field’s obsessionwith a universalized European rationality. Here we try to steer away fromabstract postcolonial theories or all-encompassing models, and insteadpresent a number of concrete case studies that help us to think aboutsupposedly global representations and practices in specific settings – stud-ies that reveal, in Helen Verran’s terms, the multi-sited hybrid transactionsthat make global generalization possible. We hope that these essays willcontribute to the ‘materializing’ of postcolonial studies, and to a post-colonial disruption, and disfigurement even, of science and technologystudies.

What Might be Postcolonial?

For 50 years or so, beneath various deployments, the ‘postcolonial’ hasproven a productively ambiguous intellectual site. It has been taken tosignify a time period (after the colonial); a location (where the colonialwas); a critique of the legacy of colonialism; an ideological backing fornewly created states; a demonstration of the complicity of Western know-ledge with colonial projects; or an argument that colonial engagements canreveal the ambivalence, anxiety and instability deep within Western thoughtand practice. At the risk of over-simplifying a complex intellectual enter-prise, it may help here to separate out colonial critique, postcolonialtheory, and the historical anthropology of modernity.14

As a recognized literary genre and political movement, ‘colonial cri-tique’, just one part of this constellation, was expressed initially by authorsfrom the imperial centres, then more frequently by scholars and activistsfrom colonial or postcolonial settings.15 Often Marxist in inspiration,colonial critique as an emerging academic interest has from the early 1980sexamined the suppression of local or Indigenous voices (in colonialism orneo-colonialism), and attempted to retrieve or re-invent autochthonousliteratures, histories and practices.16 In the case of literature, one of theeffects of this colonial critique has been the enlargement of the category toinclude writing from former colonies. It has also forced recognition that

Postcolonial Technoscience: Anderson: Introduction 645



the study of literature requires some of the techniques of sociology,anthropology and history. This literary enterprise has an analogue, too, inthe history of science and medicine. The efforts of scholars like DeepakKumar to construct a usable history of third-world science and technologyhave expanded the categories of ‘science’ and ‘technology’, and represent acritique of colonial power relations, embedded still in an implicitly nation-alist historiography.17

While many claim that Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Pan-theon Books, 1978) signals the beginning of postcolonial theory, othershave asserted its origins in the earlier work of Frantz Fanon, especially hisPeau noire, masques blancs (1952),18 where Fanon applies psychoanalysis tocolonialism, thus politicizing the modal personality of the oppressed.19

Fanon described how the unstable Manichean dichotomies producedthrough colonial practices – including medicine – shaped the identities andrelationships of the colonizers and the oppressed. More recently, Said,using Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse, has examined the impact ofthe cultural construction of Orientalism on colonial consciousness andmaterial practice. Thus apparently objective Western knowledge was com-plicit in colonial power relations; the Western academy has colluded,perhaps inadvertently, with colonial administration. But Homi Bhabha andother critics of Said have argued that he asserts too readily the hegemonyof colonial discourse. Bhabha, using a Fanonian socioanalysis, has decon-structed colonial literary texts to reveal a destabilizing ambivalence withinthese Western discourses. An apparently authoritative discourse mightdisguise an equivocation between repulsion and desire, an ambivalence orhybridity that is accentuated with culture contact and mimetic perform-ance in a colonial setting.20 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, another critic ofSaid’s assumption of the hegemony of colonial discourse, has chosen toemphasize, not internal destabilization, but rather the hitherto unrecog-nized persistence of alternative local knowledges, which sometimes mightbe retrieved by giving voice to those who are made mute in colonialism.Spivak has focussed on ‘epistemic violence’, the exclusions produced bycolonial discourse and academic practice.21

Postcolonial theory has thus often worked to destabilize, or at leastchallenge, the assumption that Western knowledge is objective, author-itative and universally applicable. If colonial critique has often appeared tobe generating local variations on the trajectory to the modern state –producing a lot of ‘minor’ literatures along the way – then postcolonialtheory has attempted to provincialize, or render colonial, the knowledgeproduction of the European and North American nation-state, to use aminor literature to reframe the ‘major’ literature.22 The ‘colonial’ mightthen join class, gender and race as a major category of social and historicalanalysis in any setting. Accordingly, an engagement of science studies andpostcolonial theory would not simply provide us with instances of Westernscience and technology in different settings – potentially it might even‘colonialize’ and destabilize conventional accounts of Western techno-science at ‘home’.




But many anthropologists and historians who study colonial culturesrecently have criticized the reductiveness and homogenization that areevident in much postcolonial theory. ‘There is an impasse’, laments theanthropologist Nicholas Thomas, ‘that arises from too dogged an attach-ment to “colonialism” as a unitary totality, and to related totalities such as“colonial discourse”, “the Other”, Orientalism and imperialism’. Dis-missive of the ‘global theory impulse’, Thomas argues instead for a morespecific analytic strategy ‘which situates colonial representations in termsof agents, locations, periods’. Postcolonial studies should avoid univers-alized psychoanalytic terms, seeking rather to fracture presumed authen-ticities, destabilize imperial and colonial categories, and reconstitute en-counters through the concentrated examination of particular historical,political and cultural contexts.23 Similarly, Frederick Cooper, a historian ofsouthern Africa, has called for studies of the ‘precise ways in which poweris deployed and the ways in which power is engaged, contested, deflectedand appropriated’ in a transnational frame. Influenced by the work of thesubaltern studies group of Indian historians, Cooper urges other scholarsto . . .

. . . analyze in specific situations how power is constituted, aggregated,contested and limited, going beyond the post-structuralist tendency tofind power diffused in ‘modernity’, ‘the post-Enlightenment era’, or‘Western discourse’.24

Unwilling to jettison all of the insights of postcolonial theory, ArturoEscobar, on the other hand, suggests that notions of hybridity, for example,might still be elicited in an ethnography of modernity.

Instead of searching for grand alternative models or strategies, what isneeded is the investigation of alternative representations and practices inconcrete local settings, particularly so as they exist in contexts of hybrid-ization, collective action, and political mobilization.25

This is not so much an interrogation of the Western figure of the man ofreason as an empirical study of the translocal co-production of techno-sciences and social orders.26

Medicine has become a common reference point for many subalternhistories, as well as figuring in much historical anthropology, though it islargely ignored in contemporary postcolonial theories.27 Even scienceoccasionally earns a mention in postcolonial histories.28 When NicholasThomas drew attention to a ‘wave of new analyses and critiques concernedwith race, imperialism, orientalism and related topics’, he referred specifi-cally to ‘histories of science and medicine’.29 Frederick Cooper describesthe postcolonial contributions of studies of the ‘categories and tropes’ ofexplorers, scientists, doctors and officials, in particular, studies of thepropensity of colonial medicine to define susceptibility to disease in racialor cultural terms. In recommending that the institutions and rhetoric ofthe colonial state should be further scrutinized, he notes that ‘one subjectinto which this kind of inquiry has begun is health’.30 In postcolonial




studies, then, science and technology, especially in their medical forms, arealready recognized as significant colonial projects, requiring furtheranalysis.

From Modernization Theory to Alternative Modernities

In 1960, W.W. Rostow described the stages of economic growth in his‘non-communist manifesto’, a classic of modernization theory. Rostowemphasized the importance of science and technology in achieving a ‘take-off ’ from traditional society – indeed, the stimulus ‘was mainly (but notwholly) technological’.31 Science, it seemed, diffused from Europe andpooled where the ground was ready to receive it. A few years later, GeorgeBasalla amplified this diffusionist hypothesis, giving details of the phases inthe spread of Western science from centre to periphery. According toBasalla, in phase 1, expeditions in the periphery merely provided rawmaterial for European science; during phase 2 the derivative and depend-ent institutions of colonial science emerged; and sometimes, an independ-ent and national science, called phase 3, would later develop.32

Basalla’s simple evolutionary model of scientific development was toprovoke extensive criticism in science studies during the 1980s. The criticalresponse was inspired in part by the more general challenge of dependencytheories, and world systems theory, to the older diffusionist models ofmodernization and development.33 Roy MacLeod, for example, disap-proved of the linear and homogeneous character of diffusionist arguments,and noted the lack of attention to the complex political dimensions ofscience. He called instead for a more dynamic conception of imperialscience, the recognition of a ‘moving metropolis’, a function of empire,rather than a stable dichotomy of centre and periphery.34 David WadeChambers also rejected Basalla’s diffusionism, and asked for more casestudies of science in non-Western settings, and more interactive models ofscientific development. But Chambers warned that ‘without a more gen-eral framework, we sink into a sea of local histories’; he wondered aboutthe salience of the ‘colonial’, yet doubted at the time its explanatorypower.35 In the early 1990s, Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys, takingLewis Pyenson’s work as a proxy for diffusionism, also suggested that‘Western methods and knowledge were not accepted passively, but wereadapted and selectively absorbed in relation to existing traditions of naturalknowledge and religion and other factors’. Moreover, they pointed out thatimperialism had also shaped ‘metropolitan scientific institutions andknowledges’.36

Discussion of diffusion and nation building has gradually given way totalk of contact zones and network construction. Recently, MacLeod urgedagain the abandonment of centre–periphery models, and proposed insteada study of the traffic of ideas and institutions, a recognition of reciprocity,using ‘perspectives colored by the complexities of contact’.37 Such advicereflects the broader popularity in science and technology studies, since the1980s at least, of framing devices such as ‘local practices’ and ‘actor-




networks’. Science and technology are necessarily local practices, yet theycan travel. As Marilyn Strathern suggests, questions need to be asked notabout the boundedness of cultures, but about the ‘length of networks’.38

How is it, inquired Bruno Latour in 1984, that Newtonian laws of physicswork as well in Gabon as in England?39 How did Portuguese ships, askedJohn Law in 1986, keep their shape as they voyaged from Lisbon to distantparts of the empire?40 That is, how are scientific facts or practices, andtechnological configurations, stabilized in different places? Actor-networktheory initially was meant to provide an explanation for the production ofthese ‘immutable mobiles’, thus emerging, almost paradoxically, as anunintended variant of an older diffusionism; later versions have empha-sized a more fluid topology, describing the adaptation and reconfigurationof objects and practices as they travel. The Zimbabwean bush pump, forexample, changed shape and re-formed networks from one village to thenext, while staying identifiably a Zimbabwean bush pump.41 As Latourasserts, ‘even a longer network remains local at all points’.42 But often asort of semiotic formalism seems to supervene on the analysis of such localsites: the ‘local’ can seem quite abstract, depleted of historical and socialspecificity. The structural features of the network become clear, but often itis hard to discern the relations and the politics engendered through it. Apostcolonial study of science and technology might offer new, and morerichly textured, answers to many of the questions posed in actor-networktheory.43

Some of the more densely realized stories of the contact zones ofmobile knowledge practices have focused on the contemporary interactionsof scientists and Indigenous peoples. The work of Helen Verran, DavidTurnbull, and their students, has been especially influential: they could besaid to represent a ‘Melbourne-Deakin school’ of postcolonial sciencestudies, shaped by local enthusiasm for ethnohistory, and building onconstructivist and feminist approaches to the study of science and technol-ogy.44 With the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land, Verran has studied theinteraction of local knowledge practices, one ‘traditional’, the other ‘scien-tific’, and described ‘the politics waged over ontic/epistemic commit-ments’. Her goal is not just to exploit the splits and contradictions ofWestern rationality: she aims toward a community that ‘accepts that itshares imaginaries and articulates those imaginaries as part of recognizingthe myriad hybrid assemblages with which we constitute our worlds’.45 Inher current research project, Verran seeks to move beyond description andto find ways in which one might do good work – such as negotiating landuse – within and between the messiness, contingency and ineradicableheterogeneity of different knowledge practices.46 David Turnbull, similarly,has studied the ‘interactive, contingent assemblage of space and know-ledge’ in diverse settings, arguing that ‘all knowledge traditions, includingWestern technoscience, can be compared as forms of local knowledge sothat their differential power effects can be compared but without privileg-ing any of them epistemologically’.47 That is, even the most generalized




technoscience, like any other practice, always has a local history and a localpolitics, even as the actors involved claim to be ‘doing global’.

While Verran and Turnbull take pleasure in the messy politics thatemerge out of local performances of technoscience, Sandra Harding andothers have sought to use cross-cultural studies of knowledge traditions toachieve epistemological clarity. For Harding, postcolonial accounts provide‘resources for more accurate and comprehensive scientific and techno-logical thought’. ‘We can employ the category of the postcolonial strategi-cally’, she writes, ‘as a kind of instrument or method of detecting phenom-ena that otherwise are occluded’.48 Influenced by ‘post-Kuhnian sciencestudies’, critiques of diffusionism, and feminism, Harding has emphasizedthe importance of local knowledge and called for more dynamic globalhistories, but her main goal is the strengthening of modern scientificobjectivity, a remedying of ‘dysfunctional universality claims’.49 This isprobably not the motivation of most other postcolonial scholars. LawrenceCohen has suggested that while Harding wants to ‘pluralize the field ofdiscourse’, most postcolonial intellectuals pine for ‘an insurrectionaryabandonment’. The danger of multicultural science studies, according toCohen, is its ‘mapping of difference onto an underlying hegemony’.50 Incontrast, Ashis Nandy and other postcolonial scholars have tried to revealthe heterogeneity and messiness of technosciences, and their attendant‘modernities’.51

Just as Bruno Latour questions the modernity of Europe, andChakrabarty calls for it to be provincialized, critics of ‘Third Worlddevelopment’ have begun to postulate alternative or multiple modernities.Just as Modernity is taken from Europe, it appears to proliferate elsewhere,in lower case. We have never had so many moderns. Perhaps this is the‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ to which Michel Foucault re-ferred.52 Arjun Appadurai, among others, describes ‘alternative modern-ities’; Lisa Rofel discerns ‘other modernities’ in China; and MarilynStrathern finds ‘new modernities’ at multiple sites.53 Reflecting on ‘anthro-pological enlightenment’, Marshall Sahlins reports on ‘the struggle of non-Western peoples to create their own cultural versions of modernity’,resulting in the production of ‘Indigenous modernities’. Notions of ‘centre’and ‘periphery’, Sahlins argues, now are useless as analytic terms.54 Hybridor incomplete modernities are reticulated everywhere, and no pure sourcecan be found.

Perhaps the strongest challenge to diffusionist theories of technoscien-tific development, to the assumption that modern science has simplyspread from a centre, comes from those critics of development practisingan anthropology of the modernities mutating beyond Europe. ArturoEscobar’s investigation of modernity ‘as a culturally and historically spe-cific phenomenon’ is surely part of the terrain of postcolonial science andtechnology studies.55 Akhil Gupta, similarly, in his study of agriculturaldevelopment in India, has used postcolonial theory as an ‘analytic frame-work to describe . . . hybrid discourses and practices and to delineate theintertwining of “local” practices with global and national projects of




development’. Like other postcolonial scholars, Gupta seeks to unsettle‘the binaries of colonial and nationalist thought in pointing to the imbrica-tion of the Indigenous in modernist discourse’.56 Thus, in becomingvariously modern, we have also become aware that we remain latentlycolonial.

Over the fissured, disrupted ground of these decentred modernitiesone might locate technoscience at any number of sites, and track thetranslocal travel of its projects. Gabrielle Hecht, for example, in her studyof uranium mining in Gabon and Madagascar, interrogates the nuclear/non-nuclear distinction, revealing a range of disjointed socio-technicalpractices ‘in which nuclearity, colonialism and decolonization confrontedand shaped one another’. At various sites, and in different ways, colonialpower relations – especially ethnic hierarchies – have been ‘conjugated’ intodistinctive technological futures.57 Peter Redfield observes that postcolo-nial theory and science studies share ‘a common oppositional stance tofloating assumptions framing modernity’.58 In his essay on the colonialcontest of space exploration, situated in French Guiana and in ‘outerspace’, Redfield seeks to decentre or provincialize Europe, and ‘outerspace’, demonstrating that modern technoscience may take many forms,and is geographically unstable as well. Vincanne Adams also points totransnational reconfigurations of technoscience, describing the uneasy andpartial incorporation of Tibetan medicine into American biomedicine, andthe unequal participation of Tibetan practitioners in scientific research.Modern technoscience can appear as ‘magical’ and as contingent as thepractices it assesses. ‘Scientific legitimacy’ and ‘crime’, ‘fact’ and ‘belief ’,are renegotiated and contested at multiple sites – irregularly conjugatedinto a pharmaceutical future, perhaps – as part of a postcolonial marketingof difference.59

Reframing the Local, Provincializing Technoscience

It is futile to try to draw a definite boundary around postcolonial studies ofscience and technology: the enterprise is surely as heterogeneously popu-lated as the terrain it describes. To attempt to list the canon of postcolonialscience studies would be to miss the point. Like ‘modernity’, it just keepson mutating.

A few features, however, do seem resilient. There is a striking emphasison the ‘situatedness’ of technoscience, an anthropological conviction thateven the longer networks, as Latour claims, are local at all points. Post-colonial science and technology studies focus on what Mary Louise Pratthas called the ‘contact zones’ of empire.60 As Gilbert Joseph puts it, suchcontact zones ‘are not geographic places with stable significations; theymay represent attempts at hegemony, but are simultaneously sites ofmultivocality; of negotiation, borrowing, and exchange; and of redeploy-ment and reversal’.61 The localness of technoscientific networks, the situ-ated production of ‘globality’, the transnational processes of displacementand reconfiguration, the fragmentation and hybridity of technoscience – all




are vividly illustrated in the multi-sited studies of Hecht, Redfield andAdams. One might have imagined, in an old colonial way, that the ‘local’would be a property only of what used to be called the ‘periphery’ – but the‘centre’ in the multi-sited imaginary of postcolonial accounts is just aslocal, and should be considered as another node in a network. Thus in hisstudy of ‘global disease threats’, Nick King reveals the situatedness of‘doing global’, or reterritorializing, in North American biomedicine.62

Such an interrogation of the ‘centre’ along with the ‘periphery’ is, perhaps,what Latour really meant when he argued that anthropology should comehome from the tropics.

Postcolonial studies of science and technology might offer opportun-ities to generate systemic understandings of political economies from localcultural worlds, or at least they might offer us threads to follow through thelabyrinth. When Wade Chambers lamented a likely fragmentation of theinvestigation of ‘global’ science into countless local studies, he was stillseeking a means to connect them.63 There has been a tendency, asFernando Coronil points out, to identify political economy with an ab-stract master narrative, and cultural studies with fragmented local stories.But there is ‘no reason why social analysis should be cast in terms thatpolarize determinism and contingency, the systemic and the fragmentary’;one needs to try to ‘understand the complex architecture of parts andwhole’.64 Even the most local of studies should imply a network, suggestingconnections with other sites through the traffic of persons, practices andobjects.65 The recent emergence of richly textured, multi-sited studies ofmodern technoscience attests to the importance of both situating know-ledge and tracing its passage from site to site – to the need to understandwhat Redfield calls the ‘different spatial and temporal frames in which the“local” takes shape’.66 These new studies, whether at what used to becalled the ‘centre’ or at what used to be called the ‘periphery’, draw asmuch on an anthropological mode of inquiry as they do from the historicaland sociological methods more common in science studies. Bernard Cohnhas argued that historians conventionally have followed the nation, andanthropologists have followed the empire: postcolonial approaches chal-lenge this demarcation of territory, sending anthropologists of science tojoin historians studying the ‘nation’, and historians and sociologists ofscience to join anthropologists studying the ‘empire’.67

Multi-sited, interdisciplinary studies of technoscience would alwayshave been interesting, but now they are especially needed. With the fall ofthe old empires, and the decline of the nation-state, the idea of a territorialcentre of power is less sustainable than ever. How should we recognize andseek to explain an apparent proliferation of hybrid identities, flexiblehierarchies, complex transactions, displacements and fragmentations? Ofcourse, any new world order – if it can be dignified with that title – may becharacterized in many different ways. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negrihave proclaimed the emergence of ‘a world defined by new and complexregimes of differentiation and homogenization, deterritorialization andreterritorialization’ – and their tract serves at least to indicate the sense of




change that permeates contemporary social analysis.68 Something seems tobe happening, but how do we find out more about what it is? Escobar, inadvocating an anthropology of modernity, has argued that. . .

. . . the crisis in the regimes of representation in the Third World . . . callsfor new theories and research strategies; the crisis is a real conjuncturalmoment in the reconstruction of the connection between truth andreality, between words and things, one that demands new practices ofseeing, knowing and being.69

And again, according to Coronil, ‘collective identities are being defined infragmented places that cannot be mapped with antiquated categories’.70

The papers in this Special Issue of Social Studies of Science are contributingto a redrawing of the old map of technoscience, and helping us to discernsome new categories.

NotesI would like to thank Gabrielle Hecht, Mike Lynch, Adele Clarke, David Turnbull, and ananonymous reviewer for their comments on this Introduction. As a whole, this project wasshaped through the interactions of the contributors to this Special Issue (and others) at the1999 Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), and at the 2001 UCSF/Berkeley Postcolonial Technoscience Workshop (which was supported by a grant from theUniversity of California Humanities Research Institute). Adele Clarke, Donna Haraway,Paul Rabinow, Hugh Raffles, Sharon Traweek and Anna Tsing were among thecommentators at the 2001 Workshop. Thanks to Marilys Guillemin and Rosemary Robins, Iwas also able to present an earlier draft of this paper to the Technopractices meeting, heldin Melbourne in 2000. The final version benefited from discussions with ClaudiaCastaneda, Lawrence Cohen and Gabriela Soto Laveaga.

1. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, ‘What is Post(-)Colonialism?’, Textual Practice, Vol. 5(1991), 399–414; Anne McClintock, ‘The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism’, Social Text, Nos 31/32 (Spring 1992), 1–15; Arif Dirlik, ‘The PostcolonialAura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20(1994), 329–56.

2. See for example, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions ofGlobalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Lisa Rofel, OtherModernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1999); Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics ofTransnationality (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 1999).

3. Ann L. Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking aResearch Agenda’, in F. Cooper and A.L. Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: ColonialCultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56, at 4.

4. See Dirlik, op. cit. note 1, and Simon During, ‘Postcolonialism and Globalization: ADialectical Relation After All?’, Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 1 (1998), 31–48. In general,though not always, we have favoured the term ‘technoscience’ as a means to indicatethe contemporary convergence and assemblage of scientific practice and technologydevelopment, and to avoid sterile classificatory debates. As Bruno Latour remarks inrelation to technoscience: ‘the name of the game will be to leave the boundaries openand to close them only when the people we follow close them’ (Science in Action: Howto Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society [Milton Keynes, Bucks., UK: OpenUniversity Press, 1987], 175).

5. Stacy Leigh Pigg, personal communication (April 2001). See Stacy Leigh Pigg,‘Inventing Social Categories through Place: Social Representations and Development inNepal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 34 (1992), 491–513.




6. Adele E. Clarke, Laura Mamo, Janet K. Schim, Jennifer R. Fishman and Jennifer RuthFosket, ‘Technoscience and the New Biomedicalization: Western Roots, GlobalRhizomes’ (unpublished manuscript, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences,UCSF), 34. A less programmatic variant of this quotation can be found in Adele E.Clarke, Jennifer R. Fishman, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Laura Mamo and Janet K. Schim,‘Technosciences et nouvelle biomedicalisation: racines occidentales, rhizomesmondiaux’, Sciences Sociales et Sante, Vol. 18 (2000), 11–42, at 32.

7. Stuart Hall, ‘When was “the Post-Colonial”? Thinking at the Limit’, in Iain Chambersand Lidia Curti (eds), The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons(London: Routledge, 1996), 242–60, at 247, 250.

8. The phrase is from Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making ofModern India (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 1998), 6.

9. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies’, in Lawrence Grossberg,Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992),277–94, at 293.

10. Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek, ‘Introduction: Researching Researchers’, in R. Reidand S. Traweek (eds), Doing Science + Culture (New York & London: Routledge, 2000),1–20, at 6.

11. Ashis Nandy, ‘Shamans, Savages, and the Wilderness: On the Audibility of Dissent andthe Future of Civilizations’, Alternatives, Vol. 14 (1989), 263–75, at 263. See also AshisNandy (ed.), Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity (New Delhi:Oxford University Press, 1988).

12. Sandra Harding, ‘Is Science Multicultural? Challenges, Resources, Opportunities’,Configurations, Vol. 2 (1994), 301–30, at 327.

13. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

14. A similar distinction, using slightly different terms, is made in Bart Moore-Gilbert,Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), esp. Chapter 1.

15. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory andPractice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989).

16. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1988); and Gyan Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as PostcolonialCriticism’, American Historical Review, Vol. 99 (1994), 1475–90.

17. Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj 1857–1905 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,1995), and Roy M. MacLeod and Deepak Kumar (eds), Technology and the Raj: WesternTechnology and Technical Transfers to India (New Delhi: Sage, 1995).

18. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markman (New York:Grove Press, 1967).

19. For surveys of postcolonial theory, see Robert J.C. Young, White Mythologies: WritingHistory and the West (London: Routledge, 1990); R.J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridityin Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995); Patrick Williams and LauraChrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York:Columbia University Press, 1994); Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen(eds), Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory (Manchester, UK: Manchester UniversityPress, 1994); Padmini Mongia (ed.), Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader(London: Arnold, 1996); Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, op. cit. note 14; AniaLoomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998); and Leela Gandhi,Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998).

20. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); and H.K.Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990).

21. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York:Methuen, 1987), and G.C. Spivak (ed. Sarah Harasym), The Post-Colonial Critic: Essays,Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990).

22. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (trans. Dana Polan), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Dipesh Chakrabarty,‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’,




Representations, Vol. 37 (1992), 1–24; and Warwick Anderson, ‘Where is thePostcolonial History of Medicine?’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 72 (1998),522–30.

23. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), at ix, 8. For an earlier plea for study of thecultures of colonialism, see Bernard S. Cohn and Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘Beyond theFringe: The Nation-State, Colonialism and the Technology of Power’, Journal ofHistorical Sociology, Vol. 1 (1988), 224–29. Cohn and Dirks suggest that ‘colonialism istoo important a subject to be relegated either to the history of nineteenth-centuryEurope on the one hand or to the negative nationalisms of third world studies on theother’ (ibid., 229).

24. Frederick Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History’,American Historical Review, Vol. 99 (1994), 1516–45, at 1517, 1533. See also Prakash,op. cit. note 16: Prakash describes a shift in subaltern studies from the earlier effort torecover the subaltern as an autonomous subject, to a later historically informed critiqueof colonial disciplines.

25. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 19.

26. Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani warn more explicitly against postcolonial theorydwindling into a critique of Western philosophical discourse, another version of usingthe Other to rethink the Western Self: see R. Frankenberg and L. Mani, ‘Crosscurrents,Crosstalk: Race, “Postcoloniality”, and the Politics of Location’, Cultural Studies, Vol. 7(1993), 292–310.

27. David Arnold, a member of the subaltern studies group, has written extensively ondisease and the colonial state: see D. Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine andEpidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press,1993). The neglect of medicine and science in contemporary postcolonial theory isespecially odd, given Fanon’s early analysis of the contributions of technical practices toimperialism: see Frantz Fanon, ‘Medicine and Colonialism’, in John Ehrenreich (ed.),The Cultural Crisis of Modern Medicine (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978),229–51.

28. See, for example, Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of ModernIndia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

29. Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, op. cit. note 23, 18. Thomas cites Arnold, Colonizing theBody (op. cit. note 27), and Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power andAfrican Illness (Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press, 1991).

30. Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection’, op. cit. note 24, 1526, 1541. Cooper cites Arnold,Colonizing the Body (op. cit. note 27), Vaughan, Curing Their Ills (op. cit. note 29), andRandall Packard, White Plague, Black Labor: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy ofHealth and Disease in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

31. W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1960), 8.

32. George Basalla, ‘The Spread of Western Science’, Science, Vol. 156 (5 May 1967),611–22.

33. See, in particular, Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in LatinAmerica (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), and Immanuel Wallerstein, TheModern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974). Much of this critique retainedan implicit demarcation of centre and periphery, and the economism of diffusionistmodels: see Gilbert M. Joseph, ‘Close Encounters: Toward a New Cultural History ofUS–Latin American Relations’, in G.M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand and RicardoSalvatore (eds), Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of US–LatinAmerican Relations (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 1998), 3–46.

34. Roy MacLeod, ‘On Visiting the “Moving Metropolis”: Reflections on the Architectureof Imperial Science’, in Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg (eds), ScientificColonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison (Washington, DC: Smithsonian InstitutionPress, 1987), 217–49.




35. David Wade Chambers, ‘Period and Process in Colonial and National Science’, inReingold & Rothenberg (eds), Scientific Colonialism, op. cit. note 34, 297–321, at 314.See also D.W. Chambers, ‘Locality and Science: Myths of Centre and Periphery’, inAntonio Lafuente, Alberto Elena and Maria Luisa Ortega (eds), Mundializacion de laciencia y cultural nacional (Madrid: Doce Calles, 1993), 605–18; and the essays inPatrick Petitjean, Catherine Jami and Anne Marie Moulin (eds), Science and Empires:Historical Studies about Scientific Development and European Expansion (Dordrecht:Kluwer, 1992). More recently, Chambers and Richard Gillespie have recommendedinvestigation of the ‘conglomerate vectors of assemblage that form the localinfrastructure of technoscience’: D.W. Chambers and R. Gillespie, ‘Locality in theHistory of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge’, inRoy MacLeod (ed.), Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, Osiris, Vol.15 (2000), 221–40, at 231.

36. Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys, ‘Science and Imperialism’, Isis, Vol. 84 (1993),91–102, at 99, 100. Palladino and Worboys recommend Macleod’s notion of the‘moving metropolis’, in which scientific relations are variable and polycentric.

37. Roy MacLeod, ‘Introduction’, in MacLeod (ed.), Nature and Empire, op. cit. note 35,1–13, at 6.

38. Marilyn Strathern, ‘The New Modernities’, in her Property, Substance and Effect:Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things (London & New Brunswick, NJ: AthlonePress, 1999), 117–35, at 122.

39. Bruno Latour, ‘Irreductions’, in his The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridanand John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 153–236, at 227.Despite this example, Latour later criticizes the ‘perverse taste for the margins’, andurges anthropology to ‘come home from the Tropics’: B. Latour, We Have Never BeenModern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), at122, 100.

40. John Law, ‘On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and thePortuguese Route to India’, in John Law (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociologyof Knowledge? (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 234–63.

41. Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol, ‘The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of aFluid Technology’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 30, No. 2 (April 2000), 225–63.

42. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, op. cit. note 39, 117.43. Perhaps as a supplement to John Law and John Hassard (eds), Actor Network Theory

and After (Oxford & Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999).44. Helen Watson-Verran and David Turnbull, ‘Science and Other Indigenous Knowledge

Systems’, in Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Petersen and Trevor Pinch(eds), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: SagePublications/4S, 1995), 115–39. Wade Chambers and others would, of course, be partof this loose affiliation in Melbourne. For an example of the local interest inethnohistory, and the dialogue between history and cultural anthropology, see GregDening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774–1880(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980). For many years Helen Verran andDipesh Chakrabarty were in the same department at the University of Melbourne,talking about postcolonialism and science studies. Another key reference point isDonna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and thePrivilege of Partial Perspective’, in D. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: TheReinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 183–202.

45. Helen Verran, ‘Re-imagining Land Ownership in Australia’, Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 1(1998), 237–54. Verran here makes extensive use of the term ‘hybridity’, derived frompostcolonial studies and from the later work of Latour. The notion of ‘assemblage’, andthe practice of ‘nomad thought’, derives from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, AThousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1987), passim.

46. Helen Verran, ‘A Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies: Alternative Firing Regimesof Environmental Scientists and Aboriginal Landowners’, in this issue of Social Studies




of Science, Vol. 32, Nos 5/6 (October/December 2002), 729–62. Verran emphasizes thatthis need not imply purification, compromise, synthesis, or conversion. See also LindaTuhiwari Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin,NZ: University of Otago Press, 1999).

47. David Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociologyof Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 2000), at 4, 6.

48. Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), at 8, 16. See also David J. Hess,Science and Technology in a Multicultural World: The Cultural Politics of Facts and Artifacts(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

49. Harding, Is Science Multicultural?, op. cit. note 48, 33.50. Lawrence Cohen, ‘Whodunit? – Violence and the Myth of Fingerprints: Comment on

Harding’, Configurations, Vol. 2 (1994), 343–47, at 345. This is a response to Harding,‘Is Science Multicultural?’ (1994), op. cit. note 12.

51. Nandy (ed.), Science, Hegemony and Violence, op. cit. note 11. See also ShivVisvanathan, A Carnival for Science: Essays on Science, Technology and Development (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1997).

52. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77,trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 71.

53. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a TransnationalAnthropology’, in Richard G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present(Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991), 191–210; Rofel, OtherModernities, op. cit. note 2; and Strathern, ‘New Modernities’, op. cit. note 38. GyanPrakash charts the emergence of a different scientific modernity in India in AnotherReason (op. cit. note 28). See also Itty Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb:Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State (London: Zed Books, 1998).

54. Marshall Sahlins, ‘What is Anthropological Enlightenment? Some Lessons of theTwentieth Century’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 28 (1999), i-xxiii, at xi, vi.

55. Escobar, Encountering Development, op. cit. note 25, 11. Escobar relates his‘anthropology of modernity’ to Paul Rabinow’s call to ‘anthropologize the West’.Rabinow goes on to urge anthropologists to ‘show how exotic [the West’s] constitutionof reality has been; emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal (thisincludes epistemology and economics); make them seem as historically peculiar aspossible; show how their claims to truth are linked to social practices and have hencebecome effective forces in the world’: P. Rabinow, ‘Representations are Social Facts:Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology’, in James Clifford and GeorgeMarcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1986), 234–61, at 241. See also James Ferguson, TheAnti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in the ThirdWorld (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Stacy Leigh Pigg, ‘“Foundin Most Traditional Societies”: Traditional Medical Practitioners between Culture andDevelopment’, in Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (eds), InternationalDevelopment and the Social Sciences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997),259–90.

56. Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India(Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 1998), quotes at 20.

57. Gabrielle Hecht, ‘Rupture-Talk in the Nuclear Age: Conjugating Colonial Power inAfrica’, in this issue of Social Studies of Science, Vol. 32, Nos 5/6 (October/December2002), 691–727, quote at 691 (Abstract); for ‘conjugating’ see 693.

58. Peter Redfield, ‘The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space’, in this issue of Social Studiesof Science, Vol. 32, Nos 5/6 (October/December 2002),791–825, quote at 792.

59. Vincanne Adams, ‘Randomized Controlled Crime: Postcolonial Sciences in AlternativeMedicine Research’, in this issue of Social Studies of Science, Vol. 32, Nos 5/6 (October/December 2002), 659–900.

60. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & NewYork: Routledge, 1992), Chapter 1.




61. Joseph, ‘Close Encounters’, op. cit. note 33, 5.62. Nicholas B. King, ‘Security, Disease, Commerce: Ideologies of Postcolonial Global

Health’, in this issue of Social Studies of Science, Vol. 32, Nos 5/6 (October/December2002), 763–789.

63. One can look at it the other way, too, of course. Kim Fortun, for example, seeks to put‘globalization into an ethnographic field of vision’: K. Fortun, ‘Locating CorporateEnvironmentalism: Synthetics, Implosions, and the Bhopal Disaster’, in George M.Marcus (ed.), Critical Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts, Shifting Constituencies,Changing Agendas (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1999), 203–44,at 241.

64. Fernando Coronil, ‘Foreword’, in Joseph, LeGrand & Salvatore (eds), Close Encountersof Empire, op. cit. note 33, ix–xii, at xi.

65. That is, they might allow ‘an anthropology of intersecting global imaginations’, in AnnaLowenhaupt Tsing’s terms: A.L. Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginalityin an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 289.

66. Redfield, op. cit. note 58, 793.67. Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1987).68. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

2000), xiii.69. Escobar, Encountering Development, op. cit. note 25, 223.70. Fernando Coronil, ‘Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical

Categories’, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 11 (1996), 51–87, at 80.

Warwick Anderson is Director of the History of the Health Sciences Programat the University of California at San Francisco, where he also directs thecampus humanities centre. Dr Anderson has an additional appointment inthe History Department at the University of California at Berkeley. In Spring2003, Basic Books will publish his study of race science in Australia, TheCultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny. He is currentlyworking on what he hopes is a postcolonial study of kuru investigations inthe highlands of New Guinea, and in Bethesda, Maryland (see ‘ThePossession of Kuru: Medical Science and Biocolonial Exchange’, ComparativeStudies in Society and History, Vol. 42 (2000), 713–44).

Address: Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine,University of California at San Francisco, 3333 California Street, Suite 485,San Francisco, California 94143–0850, USA; Fax: +1 415 476 6715;email: [email protected]




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Anderson - Postcolonial Science Studies