Postcolonial Technoscience

POSTCOLONIAL TECHNOSCIENCE

Warwick Anderson

UCSF/Berkeley

"Postcolonial technoscience" is a deliberately ambiguous title, calculated to elicit the question: "what might it mean?" Too often the "postcolonial" seems to imply yet another global theory, or simply a celebration of the end of colonialism.[1] But it may also be viewed as a signpost pointing to contemporary phenomena in need of new modes of analysis and requiring new critiques. Some older styles of analysis in science studies – those that assume relatively closed communities and are predicated on the nation-state – do not seem adapted to explaining the co-production of identities, technologies, and cultural formations characteristic of an emerging neo-colonial global order. A postcolonial perspective suggests fresh ways to study the changing political economies of capitalism and science, the mutual reorganisation of the global and the local, the increasing transnational traffic of people, practices, technologies, and contemporary contests over "intellectual property."[2] The term "postcolonial" thus refers both to new configurations of technoscience and to the critical modes of analysis that identify them. We hope that a closer engagement of science studies with postcolonial studies will allow us to question technoscience differently, find more heterogeneous sources, and reveal more fully the patterns of local transactions that give rise to global, or universalist, claims.

In this issue of Social Studies of Science we would like to explore further what postcolonial studies might offer science studies. At the most basic level, a postcolonial perspective would mean that metropole and post-colony are examined in the same "analytic frame."[3] But we would go beyond a recommendation of analytic symmetry and inclusion, and seek to understand the ways in which technoscience is implicated in the postcolonial provincializing of "universal" reason, the description of "alternative modernities," and the recognition of hybridities, borderlands, and in-between conditions. We would, moreover, argue that the study of science and technology has much to offer a postcolonial critique that has hitherto concentrated on literary representations, a "textualism" that often has the effect of erasing the materiality and specificity of neocolonial encounters.[4]

The postcolonial study of science and technology suggests a means of writing a "history of the present," of coming to terms with the turbulence and uncertainty of contemporary global flows of knowledge and practice. As Stacy Leigh Pigg puts it, we now need to find out more about how science and technology travel, not whether they belong to one culture or another.[5] According to Adele Clarke and her colleagues, "we need studies that specify and examine the sinews or networks along which products, services, knowledge, information and new forms of labor are traveling. These need to include the social, cultural, gender/racial, economic and other formations extant at the sites of both uploading and downloading."[6] Stuart Hall has argued that postcolonial studies have enabled this sort of "decentered, diasporic, or 'global' rewriting of earlier nation-centered imperial grand narratives" – a "re-phrasing of Modernity within the framework of 'globalisation.'"[7]

Significantly, the “postcolonial” does not imply the end of colonialism; rather, it signals a critical engagement with the present effects – intellectual and social – of centuries of “European expansion” on former colonies and on their colonizers. A postcolonial analysis thus offers us a chance of disconcerting conventional accounts of so-called “global” technoscience, revealing and complicating the durable dichotomies, produced under colonial regimes, which underpin many of its practices and hegemonic claims. These binaries still operate in terms of global/local, first-world/third-world, Western/Indigenous, modern/traditional, developed/underdeveloped, big-science/small-science, nuclear/non-nuclear, and even theory/practice. Attention to the “complex border zone of hybridity and impurity” should help us to understand how ideas about difference – racial (white/other or évolué/primitive), temporal (modern/traditional), class (elite/subaltern) – are enacted, and disturbed, in the performance of technoscience.[8] A postcolonial perspective might show us how scientific and technological endeavours become sites for fabricating and linking local and global identities, as well as sites for disrupting and challenging the distinctions between global and local.

In particular, some of us would like to believe that "movements provoke theoretical moments."[9] The effort to imagine a postcolonial science and technology studies is in part a response to rising concern about corporate globalization, increased commodification of science, and further alienation and circulation of intellectual property. How might we understand and engage with these transnational processes? The goal, as Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek have pointed out, is "one of taking very seriously the present moment in which we work, practicing and experimenting with ways of engaging with it intellectually, ethically, and as citizens in increasingly globalized economies and cultures."[10] "Before envisioning the global civilization of the future," writes Ashis Nandy, "one must first own up to the responsibility of creating a space at the margins of the present global civilization for a new, plural, political ecology of knowledge."[11] In a modest way, the postcolonial studies of science and technology presented here might help to make available a vocabulary for just such a discussion of the reconstituted identities and practices that emerge from reconfigurations of the “local” and the “global.” Moreover, they suggest ways of assaying local cultures and emergent political economies on the same scale.

In 1994, Sandra Harding recommended that we "relocate the projects of science and science studies that originate in the West on the more accurate historical map created by the new postcolonial studies."[12] As Harding recognized, scholars in India, the Philippines, and elsewhere in what was called "the Third World," had already been doing this for many years, but their work was virtually unknown in European and North American science studies circles until she drew attention to it. During the 1990s, such efforts to "provincialize Europe" have gained pace in many disciplines,[13] but they seem almost to have stalled in science studies, with the engine choking perhaps on a lingering residue of the field's obsession with a universalized European rationality. Here we try to steer away from abstract postcolonial theories or all-encompassing models, and instead present a number of concrete case studies that help us to think about supposedly global representations and practices in specific settings – studies that reveal, in Helen Verran’s terms, the multisited hybrid transactions that make global generalization possible. We hope that these essays will contribute to the "materializing" of postcolonial studies, and to a postcolonial disruption, and disfigurement even, of science and technology studies.

What might be postcolonial?

For fifty years or so, beneath various deployments, the “postcolonial” has proven a productively ambiguous intellectual site. It has been taken to signify a time period (after the colonial); a location (where the colonial was); a critique of the legacy of colonialism; an ideological backing for newly created states; a demonstration of the complicity of Western knowledge with colonial projects; or an argument that colonial engagements can reveal the ambivalence, anxiety, and instability deep within Western thought and practice. At the risk of over-simplifying a complex intellectual enterprise, it may help here to separate out colonial critique, postcolonial theory, and the historical anthropology of modernity.[14]

As a recognised literary genre and political movement, “colonial critique,” just one part of this constellation, was expressed initially by authors from the imperial centres, then more frequently by scholars and activists from colonial or postcolonial settings.[15] Often Marxist in inspiration, colonial critique as an emerging academic interest has from the early 1980s examined the suppression of local or indigenous voices (in colonialism or neo-colonialism), and attempted to retrieve or re-invent autochthonous literatures, histories and practices.[16] In the case of literature, one of the effects of this colonial critique has been the enlargement of the category to include writing from former colonies. It has also forced recognition that the study of literature requires some of the techniques of sociology, anthropology and history. This literary enterprise has an analogue too in the history of science and medicine. The efforts of scholars like Deepak Kumar to construct a usable history of third-world science and technology have expanded the categories of “science” and “technology,” and represent a critique of colonial power relations, embedded still in an implicitly nationalist historiography.[17]

While many claim that Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) signals the beginning of postcolonial theory, others have asserted its origins in the earlier work of Frantz Fanon, especially his Black Skin, White Masks (1952), where he applies psychoanalysis to colonialism, thus politicising the modal personality of the oppressed.[18] Fanon described how the unstable Manichean dichotomies produced through colonial practices – including medicine – shaped the identities and relationships of the colonizers and the oppressed. More recently, Said, using Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse, has examined the impact of the cultural construction of Orientalism on colonial consciousness and material practice. Thus apparently objective Western knowledge was complicit in colonial power relations; the Western academy has colluded, perhaps inadvertently, with colonial administration. But Homi Bhabha and other critics of Said have argued that he asserts too readily the hegemony of colonial discourse. Bhabha, using a Fanonian socioanalysis, has deconstructed colonial literary texts to reveal a destabilising ambivalence within these Western discourses. An apparently authoritative discourse might disguise an equivocation between repulsion and desire, an ambivalence or hybridity that is accentuated with culture contact and mimetic performance in a colonial setting.[19] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, another critic of Said’s assumption of the hegemony of colonial discourse, has chosen to emphasize not internal destabilisation but rather the hitherto unrecognised persistence of alternative local knowledges, which sometimes might be retrieved by giving voice to those who are made mute in colonialism. Spivak has focussed on “epistemic violence,” the exclusions produced by colonial discourse and academic practice.[20]

Postcolonial theory has thus often worked to destabilise, or at least challenge, the assumption that Western knowledge is objective, authoritative and universally applicable. If colonial critique has often appeared to be generating local variations on the trajectory to the modern state – producing a lot of “minor” literatures along the way – then postcolonial theory has attempted to provincialize, or render colonial, the knowledge production of the European and North American nation-state, to use a minor literature to reframe the “major” literature.[21] The “colonial” might then join class, gender and race as a major category of social and historical analysis in any setting. Accordingly, an engagement of science studies and postcolonial theory would not simply provide us with instances of Western science and technology in different settings – potentially it might even “colonialize” and destabilise conventional accounts of Western technoscience at “home.”

But many anthropologists and historians who study colonial cultures recently have criticized the reductiveness and homogenization that is evident in much postcolonial theory. "There is an impasse," laments the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas, "that arises from too dogged an attachment to 'colonialism' as a unitary totality, and to related totalities such as 'colonial discourse,' 'the Other,' Orientalism and imperialism." Dismissive of the "global theory impulse," he argues instead for a more specific analytic strategy “which situates colonial representations in terms of agents, locations, periods." Postcolonial studies should avoid universalized psychoanalytic terms, seeking rather to fracture presumed authenticities, destabilize imperial and colonial categories, and reconstitute encounters through the concentrated examination of particular historical, political and cultural contexts.[22] Similarly, Frederick Cooper, a historian of southern Africa, has called for studies of the "precise ways in which power is deployed and the ways in which power is engaged, contested, deflected and appropriated" in a transnational frame. Influenced by the work of the subaltern studies group of Indian historians, Cooper urges other scholars to "analyze in specific situations how power is constituted, aggregated, contested and limited, going beyond the post-structuralist tendency to find power diffused in 'modernity,' 'the post-Enlightenment era,' or 'Western discourse.'"[23] Unwilling to jettison all of the insights of postcolonial theory, Arturo Escobar, on the other hand, suggests that notions of hybridity, for example, might still be elicited in an ethnography of modernity. "Instead of searching for grand alternative models or strategies, what is needed is the investigation of alternative representations and practices in concrete local settings, particularly so as they exist in contexts of hybridization, collective action, and political mobilization."[24] This is not so much an interrogation of the Western figure of the man of reason as an empirical study of the translocal co-production of technosciences and social orders.[25]

Medicine has become a common reference point for many subaltern histories, as well as figuring in much historical anthropology, though it is largely ignored in contemporary postcolonial theories.[26] Even science occasionally earns a mention in postcolonial histories.[27] When Nicholas Thomas drew attention to a "wave of new analyses and critiques concerned with race, imperialism, orientalism and related topics," he referred specifically to "histories of science and medicine."[28] Frederick Cooper describes the postcolonial contributions of studies of the "categories and tropes" of explorers, scientists, doctors and officials, in particular, studies of the propensity of colonial medicine to define susceptibility to disease in racial or cultural terms. In recommending that the institutions and rhetoric of the colonial state should be further scrutinized, he notes that "one subject into which this kind of inquiry has begun is health." In postcolonial studies, then, science and technology, especially in their medical forms, are already recognized as significant colonial projects, requiring further analysis.[29]

From modernization theory to alternative modernities

In 1960, W.W. Rostow described the stages of economic growth in his “non-communist manifesto,” a classic of modernization theory. Rostow emphasized the importance of science and technology in achieving a “take-off” from traditional society – indeed, the stimulus “was mainly (but not wholly) technological.”[30] Science, it seemed, diffused from Europe and pooled where the ground was ready to receive it. A few years later, George Basalla amplified this diffusionist hypothesis, giving details of the phases in the spread of Western science from center to periphery. According to Basalla, in phase 1, expeditions in the periphery merely provided raw material for European science; during phase 2 the derivative and dependent institutions of colonial science emerged; and sometimes, an independent and national science, called phase 3, would later develop.[31]

Basalla’s simple evolutionary model of scientific development was to provoke extensive criticism in science studies during the 1980s. The critical response was inspired in part by the more general challenge of dependency theories, and world systems theory, to the older diffusionist models of modernization and development.[32] Roy MacLeod, for example, disapproved of the linear and homogeneous character of diffusionist arguments, and noted the lack of attention to the complex political dimensions of science. He called instead for a more dynamic conception of imperial science, the recognition of a “moving metropolis,” a function of empire, rather than a stable dichotomy of center and periphery.[33] David Wade Chambers also rejected Basalla’s diffusionism, and asked for more case studies of science in non-Western settings, and more interactive models of scientific development. But Chambers warned that “without a more general framework, we sink into a sea of local histories”; he wondered about the salience of the “colonial,” yet doubted at the time its explanatory power.[34] In the early 1990s, Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys, taking Lewis Pyensen’s work as a proxy for diffusionism, also suggested that “Western methods and knowledge were not accepted passively, but were adapted and selectively absorbed in relation to existing traditions of natural knowledge and religion and other factors.” Moreover, they pointed out that imperialism had also shaped “metropolitan scientific institutions and knowledges.”[35]

Discussion of diffusion and nation building has gradually given way to talk of contact zones and network construction. Recently, MacLeod urged again the abandonment of center-periphery models, and proposed instead a study of the traffic of ideas and institutions, a recognition of reciprocity, using “perspectives colored by the complexities of contact.”[36] Such advice reflects the boarder popularity in science and technology studies, since the 1980s at least, of framing devices such as “local practices” and “actor-networks.” Science and technology are necessarily local practices, yet they can travel. As Marilyn Strathern suggests, questions need to be asked not about the boundedness of cultures, but about the “length of networks.”[37] How is it, inquired Bruno Latour in 1984, that Newtonian laws of physics work as well in Gabon as in England?[38] How did Portuguese ships, asked John Law in 1986, keep their shape as they voyaged from Lisbon to distant parts of the empire?[39] That is, how are scientific facts or practices, and technological configurations, stabilized in different places? Actor-network theory initially was meant to provide an explanation for the production of these “immutable mobiles,” thus emerging, almost paradoxically, as an unintended variant of an older diffusionism; later versions have emphasized a more fluid topology, describing the adaptation and reconfiguration of objects and practices as they travel. The Zimbabwean bush pump, for example, changed shape and re-formed networks from one village to the next, while staying identifiably a Zimbabwean bush pump.[40] As Latour asserts, “even a longer network remains local at all points.”[41] But often a sort of semiotic formalism seems to supervene on the analysis of such local sites: the “local” can seem quite abstract, depleted of historical and social specificity. The structural features of the network become clear, but often it is hard to discern the relations and the politics engendered through it. A postcolonial study of science and technology might offer new, and more richly textured, answers to many of the questions posed in actor-network theory.[42]

Some of the more densely realised stories of the contact zones of mobile knowledge practices have focused on the contemporary interactions of scientists and Indigenous peoples. The work of Helen Verran, David Turnbull, and their students has been especially influential: they could be said to represent a “Melbourne-Deakin school” of postcolonial science studies, shaped by local enthusiasm for ethnohistory, and building on constructivist and feminist approaches to the study of science and technology.[43] With the Yolgnu people of Arnhem Land, Verran has studied the interaction of local knowledge practices, one “traditional,” the other “scientific,” and described “the politics waged over ontic/epistemic commitments.” Her goal is not just to exploit the splits and contradictions of Western rationality: she aims toward a community that “accepts that it shares imaginaries and articulates those imaginaries as part of recognizing the myriad hybrid assemblages with which we constitute our worlds.”[44] In her current research project, Verran seeks to move beyond description and to find ways in which one might do good work – such as negotiating land use – within and between the messiness, contingency and ineradicable heterogeneity of different knowledge practices.[45] Turnbull, similarly, has studied the “interactive, contingent assemblage of space and knowledge” in diverse settings, arguing that “all knowledge traditions, including Western technoscience, can be compared as forms of local knowledge so that their differential power effects can be compared but without privileging any of them epistemologically.”[46] That is, even the most generalized technoscience, like any other practice, always has a local history and a local politics, even as the actors involved claim to be “doing global.”

While Verran and Turnbull take pleasure in the messy politics that emerge out of local performances of technoscience, Sandra Harding and others have sought to use cross-cultural studies of knowledge traditions to achieve epistemological clarity. For Harding, postcolonial accounts provide “resources for more accurate and comprehensive scientific and technological thought.” “We can employ the category of the postcolonial strategically,” she writes, “as a kind of instrument or method of detecting phenomena that otherwise are occluded.”[47] Influenced by “post-Kuhnian science studies,” critiques of diffusionism, and feminism, Harding has emphasized the importance of local knowledge and called for more dynamic global histories, but her main goal is the strengthening of modern scientific objectivity, a remedying of “dysfunctional universality claims.”[48] This is probably not the motivation of most other postcolonial scholars. Lawrence Cohen has suggested that while Harding wants to “pluralize the field of discourse,” most postcolonial intellectuals pine for “an insurrectionary abandonment.” The danger of multicultural science studies, according to Cohen, is its “mapping of difference onto an underlying hegemony.”[49] In contrast, Ashis Nandy and other postcolonial scholars have tried to reveal the heterogeneity and messiness of technosciences, and their attendant “modernities.”[50]

Just as Latour questions the modernity of Europe, and Chakrabarty calls for it to be provincialized, critics of “Third World development” have begun to postulate alternative or multiple modernities. Just as Modernity is taken from Europe, it appears to proliferate elsewhere, in lower case. We have never had so many moderns. Perhaps this is the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” to which Michel Foucault referred.[51] Arjun Appadurai, among others, describes “alternative modernities”; Lisa Rofel discerns “other modernities” in China; and Marilyn Strathern finds “new modernities” at multiple sites.[52] Reflecting on “anthropological enlightenment,” Marshall Sahlins reports on “the struggle of non-Western peoples to create their own cultural versions of modernity,” resulting in the production of “Indigenous modernities.” Notions of “center” and “periphery,” he argues, now are useless as analytic terms.[53] Hybrid or incomplete modernities are reticulated everywhere, and no pure source can be found.

Perhaps the strongest challenge to diffusionist theories of technoscientific development, to the assumption that modern science has simply spread from a center, comes from those critics of development practicing an anthropology of the modernities mutating beyond Europe. Arturo Escobar’s investigation of modernity “as a culturally and historically specific phenomenon” is surely part of the terrain of postcolonial science and technology studies.[54] Akhil Gupta, similarly, in his study of agricultural development in India, has used postcolonial theory as an “analytic framework to describe… hybrid discourses and practices and to delineate the intertwining of ‘local’ practices with global and national projects of development.” Like other postcolonial scholars, Gupta seeks to unsettle “the binaries of colonial and nationalist thought in pointing to the imbrication of the Indigenous in modernist discourse.”[55] Thus in becoming variously modern we have also become aware that we remain latently colonial.

Over the fissured, disrupted ground of these decentered modernities one might locate technoscience at any number of sites, and track the translocal travel of its projects. Gabrielle Hecht, for example, in her study of uranium mining in Gabon and Madagascar interrogates the nuclear/non-nuclear distinction, revealing “a range of disjointed socio-technical practices in which nuclearism, colonialism and decolonization confronted and shaped one another.” At various sites, and in different ways, colonial power relations – especially ethnic hierarchies – have been “conjugated” into distinctive technological futures.[56] Peter Redfield observes that postcolonial theory and science studies share “a common oppositional stance to floating assumptions framing modernity.” In his essay on the colonial contest of space exploration, situated in French Guiana and in “outer space,” Redfield seeks to decenter or provinicalize Europe, and “outer space”, demonstrating that modern technoscience may take many forms, and is geographically unstable as well.[57] Vincanne Adams also points to transnational reconfigurations of technoscience, describing the uneasy and partial incorporation of Tibetan medicine into American biomedicine, and the unequal participation of Tibetan practitioners in scientific research. Modern technoscience can appear as “magical” and as contingent as the practices it assesses. “Scientific legitimacy” and “crime,” “fact” and “belief,” are renegotiated and contested at multiple sites – irregularly conjugated into a pharmaceutical future, perhaps – as part of a postcolonial marketing of difference.[58]

Reframing the local, provinicalizing technoscience

It is futile to try to draw a definite boundary around postcolonial studies of science and technology: the enterprise is surely as heterogeneously populated as the terrain it describes. To attempt to list the canon of postcolonial science studies would be to miss the point. Like “modernity,” it just keeps on mutating.

A few features, however, do seem resilient. There is a striking emphasis on the “situatedness” of technoscience, an anthropological conviction that even the longer networks, as Latour claims, are local at all points. Postcolonial science and technology studies focus on what Mary Louise Pratt has called the “contact zones” of empire.[59] As Gilbert Joseph puts it, such contact zones “are not geographic places with stable significations; they may represent attempts at hegemony, but are simultaneously sites of multivocality; of negotiation, borrowing, and exchange; and of redeployment and reversal.”[60] The localness of technoscientific networks, the situated production of “globality,” the transnational processes of displacement and reconfiguration, the fragmentation and hybridity of technoscience – all are vividly illustrated in the multi-sited studies of Hecht, Redfield and Adams. One might have imagined, in an old colonial way, that the “local” would be a property only of what used to be called the “periphery” – but the “center” in the multi-sited imaginary of postcolonial accounts is just as local, and should be considered as another node in a network. Thus in his study of “global disease threats,” Nick King reveals the situatedness of “doing global,” or reterritorializing, in North American biomedicine.[61] Such an interrogation of the “center” along with the “periphery” is, perhaps, what Latour really meant when he argued that anthropology should come home from the tropics.

Postcolonial studies of science and technology might offer opportunities to generate systemic understandings of political economies from local cultural worlds, or at least they might offer us threads to follow through the labyrinth. When Wade Chambers lamented a likely fragmentation of the investigation of “global” science into countless local studies, he was still seeking a means to connect them.[62] There has been a tendency, as Fernando Coronil points out, to identify political economy with an abstract master narrative, and cultural studies with fragmented local stories. But there is “no reason why social analysis should be cast in terms that polarize determinism and contingency, the systemic and the fragmentary”; one needs to try to “understand the complex architecture of parts and whole.”[63] Even the most local of studies should imply a network, suggesting connections with other sites through the traffic of persons, practices and objects.[64] The recent emergence of richly textured, multisited studies of modern technoscience attests to the importance of both situating knowledge and tracing its passage from site to site – to the need to understand what Redfield calls the “different spatial and temporal frames in which the ‘local’ takes shape.” These new studies, whether at what used to be called the “center” or at what used to be called the “periphery,” draw as much on an anthropological mode of inquiry as they do from the historical and sociological methods more common in science studies. Bernard Cohn has argued that historians conventionally have followed the nation, and anthropologists have followed the empire: postcolonial approaches challenge this demarcation of territory, sending anthropologists of science to join historians studying the “nation,” and historians and sociologists of science to join anthropologists studying the “empire.”[65]

Multisited, interdisciplinary studies of technoscience would always have been interesting, but now they are especially needed. With the fall of the old empires, and the decline of the nation-state, the idea of a territorial center of power is less sustainable than ever. How should we recognize and seek to explain an apparent proliferation of hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, complex transactions, displacements and fragmentations? Of course, any new world order – if it can be dignified with that title – may be characterized in many different ways. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have proclaimed the emergence of “a world defined by new and complex regimes of differentiation and homogenization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization” – and their tract serves at least to indicate the sense of change that permeates contemporary social analysis.[66] Something seems to be happening, but how do we find out more about what it is? Escobar, in advocating an anthropology of modernity, has argued that "the crisis in the regimes of representation in the Third World… calls for new theories and research strategies; the crisis is a real conjunctural moment in the reconstruction of the connection between truth and reality, between words and things, one that demands new practices of seeing, knowing and being."[67] And again, according to Coronil, "collective identities are being defined in fragmented places that cannot be mapped with antiquated categories."[68] The articles in this issue of Social Studies of Science are contributing to a redrawing of the old map of technoscience, and helping us to discern some new categories.