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

1 Results of GAP Analysis Level of agreeability to BPL 319 2 Results of GAP Analysis Level of agreeability to Videocon 321 3 Results of GAP Analysis Level of agreeability to Samsung 322 4 Results of GAP Analysis Level of agreeability to Sony 324 5 Results of GAP Analysis Level of agreeability to LG 325 6 Results of GAP Analysis Level of agreeability to Onida 327 7 Results of GAP Analysis Level of agreeability to Godrej 328 8 Results of GAP Analysis Level of agreeability to Philips 330 9 Results of GAP Analysis Level of agreeability to Whirlpool 331 10 Results of GAP Analysis Level of agreeability to Kenstar 333 11 Results of Gap Analysis Level of agreeability to brand extension of BPL 334

List of exhibits

The balance between benefit and radiation risk in a breast cancer screening programme has received much attention at the initial screening stage. This paper extends that attention to first stage assessment, i.e. the first stage at which women are recalled for further investigation because of suspected lesions or other suspect film features, and prior to any biopsy. Numbers of films, including magnification films, taken at this stage, have been established in two UK regions by different methods. Average total mean glandular dose has been calculated using published data of dose per film from initial screening and a multiplying factor to allow for magnification film dose. It is concluded that the benefit/risk ratio is considerably higher at first stage assessment than at initial screening by a factor of between 4 and 9, because of the very much higher cancer detection rate in this well-defined sub-group of women. Qualitatively, this conclusion is unaffected by the quite wide variation between screening centres in the numbers of films taken at first stage assessment.

Radiation benefit and risk at the assessment stage of the UK Breast Screening Programme.

This article analyses the question of agency considering the animal agency of Cumbrian sheep in the uprising of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK in 2001. The article explores the conditions required for an actor to be able to act as such. In that direction it shifts the usual meaning of the concept of actor separating it from the anthropocentric model and making it distant from the ideas of “intentionality” and “dominance” to emphasise how actors not only act, but they are habilitated and produced as such as a result of complex relations with other actors. That is, to become actors they have to be enacted. To do so, the article analyses some of the multiple forms in which Cumbrian sheep were enacted in the context of the uprising of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001. Finally the article considers what types of agency perform the Cumbrian sheep in each of them.

El actor-actuado: la oveja de la Cumbria en 2001

This chapter reviews Kai Erikson's account of the impact of disaster on communities in the context of the UK's 2001 foot and mouth epidemic Though the disaster was deeply destructive, it is argued that the 2001 events also led to creativity and sociality

Disaster: a further species of trouble? Disaster and narrative

The international spread of STS has reshaped the discipline in many ways, pushing it from its original core focus on technoscience in Euro-America to embrace new and wider agendas in other locations. For the practitioners of STS in East Asia, the complex relations between geographical region and forms of knowledge in technoscience are firmly on the agenda, and they have conceptualized these in a range of different and sometimes contradictory ways. The multiplicity of East Asian STS is also reflexively refracted in different assumptions about the character and location of the discipline in relation to other regional versions of STS. In what follows we simplify the complexities of a large and sophisticated body of writing by exploring a double question. On the one hand, we ask how scholars conceptualize the location of East Asian technoscience in the world. And on the other, a related question, we consider how they imagine the location of East Asian STS in relation to other forms of STS. We suggest that it is possible to identify at least six distinct spatially related strategies for understanding knowledge and technoscience in the East Asian literatures. In this article, we characterize these as diffusion, distortion, circulation, localizing, translation, and mis-translation and argue that East Asian STS may be understood as distinctive in the way it collaborates with other forms of STS not only because it identifies and characterizes other and different East Asian empirical contexts, but also because it makes possible the exploration of alternative and situated methodological approaches. © 2019 Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1215/18752160-6995634

John Law

Papers

List of exhibits

Radiation benefit and risk at the assessment stage of the UK Breast Screening Programme.

El actor-actuado: la oveja de la Cumbria en 2001

Disaster: a further species of trouble? Disaster and narrative

Where Is East Asia in STS