• Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979 (Chapters 3 to 6)
• Gusterson, Hugh Nuclear rites: A weapons laboratory at the end of the cold war. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1996 (Chapter ??)

This is the eighth in a series of notes to eleven lectures for my class Technology and Culture.

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1. Obviously

   all of science and (military) engineering could be linked to earlier readings for the course:

   1. Wittfogel and the need/possibility for defense
   2. Wallace on the multiplicity of the people involved and their uncertainty about how to construct what they are working to construct given their dependence on others with possibly (probably?) different interests
   3. My interest in the practice of engineering as a form of cultural bricolage given an huge inventory of previously used parts (including objects, information, knowledge, etc.)
2. The construction of science labs

   Are science labs to science as schools are to education?

   What is it that people in labs do? That is what does one have to invoke in order to understand how it might make sense for people to do what they do/say in labs: science or, precisely, labs?

   1. From the "Photograph file" (Latour 1979, pp. 91ff). Imagine all the activities each of the scenes depicted require
      1. architecture, mechanicians, machine makers (p. 93-4)
      2. differentiating people and their tasks (p. 95-97)
      3. inscription of the past and re-presentation (making the past present): writing, reading and the problematics of trans-scription for the people-with-authority in the lab
      4. figuring out what is happening (consensus? what to agree to disagree about?) to make the (historical) "now" for all future purposes (when "now" will be "then") (p. 99)
      5. making new stuff (data?) for future inscription
      6. writing it all for the accountable audience. (people-with-authority outside the lab)
   2. "Microprocessing" (I would call it "local processing")
      1. Chapter 4 to be related to classroom and school ethnographies
   3. Facting (Durkheim/Garfinkel) a "scientific fact" (for future scientists, the media, policy makers and, perhaps, engineers)
      1. publishing (making public), controversy in the public, acceptance into a new "normal science"
3. Issues

   1. McClintock writes about educational research, but similar pieces have been written about all other fields of research

      Bourdieu on the dangers of demystifying science
   2. McClintock (among many others) on the usefulness of normal science (2007)
   3. Is the publishing of "scientific papers" what science is all about? 
      1. Questions of practical epistemolog
   4. On flying planes by wire and other products of the new ways of representing reality that lead to new realities to live by.
4. The construction of military engineering
   1. What Gusterson does:
      1. He reinterprets the bomb as a cultural symbol, and working on the bomb as a cultural practice.
      2. This involves his re-writing the discourse(s) of his informations into his own e.g.

         re-writing	testing for reliability (p.151-ff)	into	establishing authority ritual initiation metaphors of life
         	secrecy (p. 68, 80)	into	method for integrating/segregating a community (note that pointing at the social or imaginative consequences of maintaining secrets is not necessarily to criticize the need to place strong boundaries on the dissemination of information...)
         	practical functionalism (utilitarianism)	into	discursive practices with implications for future action (what are sometimes referred to as "constitutive" practices)

5. On applying anthropology:

   Another reading to explore matters that we have not quite explored so far:

   1. SO WHAT is the relevance (use) of cultural analysis not only for the understanding of technology but also for its practice and the development of policy relating to technology in general or particular technologies, particularly those that may have the most impact on our future, are thus arguably closer to the problematic center of America (e.g. atomic weapons and medicine), that is technologies that touch the sacred (to speak like an anthropologist...)?
   2. That is he uses the full panoply of anthropological interpretations (and in fact without particular focus on any of them: the book is relatively "atheoretical" from an anthropological point of view)
   3. WHAT'S THE POINT (of applying anthropology)?
      1. de-construction for a more analytic understanding of the human aspects of bomb making, for intellectual entertainment or for the better management of weapons' labs
      2. de-mystification: the anthropologist takes the position of Dorothy unmasking the Wizard of Oz
      3. political action (anti-nuclear politics)
      4. claim to authority at the national level (Margaret Mead's claim that anthropologists' would be useful to fight the war with Japan, and might contribute to the prevention of nuclear wars by pointing at the symbolic practices that might encorage or discourage such a war)
      5. better accounts of what we actually do and the price to pay for it.
         1. on webs of consequences