What makes us modern? This is a classic question in philosophy as well as in political science. However it is often raised without including science and technology in its definition. The argument of this book is that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology. This division allows the formidable expansion of the Western empires. However it has become more and more difficult to maintain this distance between science and politics. Hence the postmodern predicament - the feeling that the modern stance is no longer acceptable but that there is no alternative. The solution, advances one of France's leading sociologists of science, is to realize that we have never been modern to begin with. The comparative anthropology this text provides reintroduces science to the fabric of daily life and aims to make us compatible both with our past and with other cultures wrongly called pre-modern.

We Have Never Been Modern

The Fall of Public Man

This book demonstrates the relevance, rigor, and creativity of interpretive research methodologies for the social and human sciences. The book situates methods questions within the context of broader methodological questions--specifically, the character of social realities and their "know-ability." Exceptionally clear and well-written chapters provide engaging discussions of the methods of accessing, generating, and analyzing social science data, using methods ranging from reflexive historical analysis to critical ethnography. Reflecting on their own research experiences, the contributors offer an inside, applied perspective on how research topics, evidence, and methods intertwine to produce knowledge in the social sciences.

Interpretation and Method : Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn

The civilizing process

Engineering sketches and drawings are the building blocks of technological design and production. These visual representations act as the means for organizing the design to production process, hence serving as a "social glue" both between individuals and between groups. The author discusses two main capacities such visual representations serve in facilitating distributed cognition in team design work As conscription devices, they enlist and organize group participation. As boundary objects, they facilitate the reading of alternative meanings by various groups involved in the design process. The introduction of computer-aided design into this visual culture of engineering restructures relationships between workers in ways that can hamper the flexibility necessary for these crucial capacities to take place. The data are drawn from a study of the daily practices of engineers engaged in redesigning a turbine engine package. The method is participant observation.

Flexible Sketches and Inflexible Data Bases: Visual Communication, Conscription Devices, and Boundary Objects in Design Engineering:

Introduction: Sharon Macdonald (Sheffield University). Part I: Contexts: Spaces and Times:. 1. Museums and Globalization: Martin Prosler (Tubingen, Germany). 2. How Societies Remember the Past: John Urry (Lancaster University). Part II: Contests: Differences and Identities:. 3. Museums as Contested Sites of Remembrance: The Enola Gay Affair: Vera Zolberg (New School of Social Research, New York). 4. Into the Heart of Irony: Ethnographic Exhibitions and the Politics of Difference: Henrietta Riegel (York University, Canada). 5. Seeing through Solidity: Feminist Perspectives on Museums: Gaby Porter (Manchester Museum of Science and Industry). 6. Decoding the Visitorsa Gaze: Rethinking Museum Visiting: Gordon Fyfe and Max Ross (Keele University). Part III: Contents: Classifications and Practice: . 7. The Utopics of Social Ordering: Stonehenge as a Museum without Walls: Kevin Hetherington (Keele University). 8. Maintaining Boundaries, or a Mainstreaminga Black History in a White Museum: Eric Gable (Yale University). 9. A Trojan Horse at the Tate: Theorizing the Museum as Agency and Structure: Gordon Fyfe (Keele University).

Theorizing Museums Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World

The editors and contributors focus on the visual dimension of social relations, showing that depiction and picturing are ubiquitous aspects of human interaction. This book should be of interest to postgraduate students of sociology, cultural studies, art history.

Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations

Sociology and the Social Aspects of Museums

This chapter reports preliminary findings from visitor research being executed by one of the authors in a conurbation of the English Midlands. The fieldwork consists of fifteen in-depth interviews administered at a random sample of households and with a total of circa 35 subjects. The report places the research design in the theoretical contexts of class, culture and locality, presents data from three interviews and provides a detailed analysis of one interview. The data suggest:



1
that local museums are mediators between identity and structure;

2
that museum meanings are diversely determined in relation to the class trajectories of subjects;

3
that museum visiting is to be understood as a social relationship rather than as an attribute of individuals and

4
that subjects readily conceptualize locality and identity through the visual vocabulary of museums and heritage sites.

Decoding the visitor's gaze: rethinking museum visiting

It is argued that sociology lacks an adequate conceptualization of the museum/society relationship. It is further argued (1) that the museum is an agency of classification; (2) that it is a relationship of cultural interdependence and (3) that museums have an internal relationship to modernization. The institution of the museum is shown to arise out of the indeterminacies of modernization. A dispute in the early history of London's Tate Gallery is explored as it illuminates that institution's organization of the contradictions of modernization. Pace Bourdieu and Elias, a key contradiction is seen to arise from a differentiation of the field of power and the cultural field. It is argued, against essentialist accounts of museums, that the Tate produced its point of view through the medium of this contradiction.

Gordon Fyfe

Papers

Theorizing Museums Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World

Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations

Sociology and the Social Aspects of Museums

Decoding the visitor's gaze: rethinking museum visiting

A Trojan Horse at the Tate: Theorizing the Museum as Agency and Structure