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

Scientific work is heterogeneous, requiring many different actors and viewpoints. It also requires cooperation. The two create tension between divergent viewpoints and the need for generalizable findings. We present a model of how one group of actors managed this tension. It draws on the work of amateurs, professionals, administrators and others connected to the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, during its early years. Extending the Latour-Callon model of interessement, two major activities are central for translating between viewpoints: standardization of methods, and the development of 'boundary objects'. Boundary objects are both adaptable to different viewpoints and robust enough to maintain identity across them. We distinguish four types of boundary objects: repositories, ideal types, coincident boundaries and standardized forms.

and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39

Scientific work is heterogeneous, requiring many different actors and viewpoints. It also requires cooperation. The two create tension between divergent viewpoints and the need for generalizable findings. We present a model of how one group of actors managed this tension. It draws on the work of amateurs, professionals, administrators and others connected to the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, during its early years. Extending the Latour-Callon model of interessement, two major activities are central for translating between viewpoints: standardization of methods, and the development of `boundary objects'. Boundary objects are both adaptable to different viewpoints and robust enough to maintain identity across them. We distinguish four types of boundary objects: repositories, ideal types, coincident boundaries and standardized forms.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/285080.pdf

Institutional Ecology, `Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39:

How to Do Things With Words

This paper outlines a new approach to the study of power, that of the sociology of translation. Starting from three principles, those of agnosticism (impartiality between actors engaged in controversy), generalised symmetry (the commitment to explain conflicting viewpoints in the same terms) and free association (the abandonment of all a priori distinctions between the natural and the social), the paper describes a scientific and economic controversy about the causes for the decline in the population of scallops in St. Brieuc Bay and the attempts by three marine biologists to develop a conservation strategy for that population. Four ‘moments’ of translation are discerned in the attempts by these researchers to impose themselves and their definition of the situation on others: (a) problematisation: the researchers sought to become indispensable to other actors in the drama by denning the nature and the problems of the latter and then suggesting that these would be resolved if the actors negotiated the ‘obl...

Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay

Veterinary science draws on different traditions for knowing and acting, and mobilises different kinds of materials and techniques. This article explores these differences and their tensions for the diagnosis of foot and mouth disease in the UK in 2001. It shows that when they talk of foot and mouth disease, different veterinary traditions refer to the different objects. The clinic looks for deviances in animals, the laboratory detects the presence or otherwise of virus, while epidemiology focuses on patterns of transmission in populations. Despite the fact that they use the same word, clinic, lab and epidemiology are each involved with their own specific ontological variant of ‘the’ disease. At the same time other figures and configurations shift with the disease. This means that it is not possible to map different versions of foot and mouth disease onto a background of shared co-ordinates. So in 2001 clinic, lab and epidemiology diagnosed foot and mouth disease mobilising different kinds of materials, the entities inhabiting these practices had different qualities and they operated in different ways. Even time lines and spatial relations changed. Such differences are usually treated as a matter of perspective: it is assumed that everyone is looking at a single world. The article challenges this assumption by arguing that different veterinary traditions draw upon and contribute to different worlds in the plural. This shift makes it easier to explore the strengths of these worlds, their drawbacks and their limitations.

Veterinary realities: what is foot and mouth disease?

Describes STS approaches to material culture, attending in particular to actor-network theory and its successor projects, and feminist material semiotics.

The Materials of STS

This Note briefly describes the method of `co-word analysis', and presents some results of its application to the scientific literature in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). A sample of AI literature, published in 1984 and 1985, was drawn from the CNRS/INIST database in Paris. The co-word analysis of this sample suggests that AI is a field characterized by relative intellectual coherence in a specifiable `core'. In this, AI seems to differ from scientific studies of the acidification of the environment: a co-word analysis of the latter field reveals no evidence of the likely emergence of a unifying general theory. The policy implications of such co-word studies are discussed.

A Co-Word Study of Artificial Intelligence

This introduction to a themed section of Society and Space explores some of the implications that boundaries are enacted rather than given.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1068/d350t

Boundary Variations: An Introduction

In this paper we seek to expand the sense of what a device is. We draw from ethnography about contemporary farming practices, and in particular beef cattle farming, as we explore the craft of farming. Our concern with practices on the farm considers, in particular, the Cattle Tracing System (CTS) of the British Cattle Movement Service (BCMS). The CTS is important – nay financially crucial – to everyone who farms cattle in Britain, and it looks and feels like a metaphorical device. The CTS is systematic and it rests on an elaborate IT database, so it is mechanical or electronic in parts and hence it is machine-like. But are devices necessarily machine-like? We suggest that devices don't have to look or be that way. The Cattle Tracing System is a farming device that divides, separates, and classifies; it's a contrivance that is purposeful. But we also suggest that the work of the farmer in caring for cattle can also be imagined as a device or as a set of devices. In this expanded sense we treat devices as p...

John Law

Papers

Veterinary realities: what is foot and mouth disease?

The Materials of STS

A Co-Word Study of Artificial Intelligence

Boundary Variations: An Introduction

DEVICES AS RITUALS: Notes on enacting resistance