Gusterson, Hugh Nuclear rites: A weapons laboratory at the end of the cold war. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1996
This is the eighth in a series of notes to eleven lectures for my class Technology and Culture.

Possible readings out of the 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.)

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

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...)?

What Gusterson does:

He reinterprets the bomb as a cultural symbol, and working on the bomb as a cultural practice.

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 into discursive practices with implications for future action (what are sometimes referred to as "constitutive" practices)

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)

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)