Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
- Cambridge Handbooks in Anthropology
- The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Intellectual Sources and Disciplinary Engagements
- Part II Aspects of Ethical Agency
- Part III Media and Modes of Ethical Practice
- Part IV Intimate and Everyday Life
- Part V Institutional Life
- 29 Modern Capitalism and Ethical Plurality
- 30 The Ethics of Commerce and Trade
- 31 Activism and Political Organization
- 32 Philanthropy
- 33 Science
- 34 Communist Morality under Socialism
- Index
- References
33 - Science
The Anthropology of Science As an Anthropology of Ethics (and Vice Versa)
from Part V - Institutional Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2023
By
Edited by
Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
- Cambridge Handbooks in Anthropology
- The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Intellectual Sources and Disciplinary Engagements
- Part II Aspects of Ethical Agency
- Part III Media and Modes of Ethical Practice
- Part IV Intimate and Everyday Life
- Part V Institutional Life
- 29 Modern Capitalism and Ethical Plurality
- 30 The Ethics of Commerce and Trade
- 31 Activism and Political Organization
- 32 Philanthropy
- 33 Science
- 34 Communist Morality under Socialism
- Index
- References
Summary
Ethical self-formation and epistemic virtues have been a focus of attention in the history of science for over three decades, and yet, despite some important early contributions, anthropologists of science have only recently started to pay more sustained and explicit attention to the ethical. This chapter argues that anthropologists of science could benefit from taking a closer and more systematic look at recent developments in the anthropology of ethics. Conversely it suggests that anthropologists of ethics might gain from a closer consideration of some of the specificities of Euro-American science as an (internally and externally contested, multiple, and perhaps in part fictitious) ethical tradition. The first half of the chapter explores the rather fitful genealogy of an interest in the ethical in the history, sociology, and anthropology of science, and points to some of the elements from which the anthropology of science as an anthropology of ethics might be (re)built. The second half of the chapter gives one extended, ethnographically grounded example of what such a (re)building might produce, and suggests some of the ways in which anthropology’s exploration of both science and ethics might benefit.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics , pp. 839 - 870Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023
References
Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Barad, Karen M. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, Louise, Blumstein, Daniel T., Clutton-Brock, Timothy H., and Kappeler., Peter M. 2013. ‘Taking note of Tinbergen, or: The Promise of a Biology of Behaviour’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 368, 20120352.Google Scholar
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. San Francisco, CA: Chandler Pub. Co.Google Scholar
Benedict, Ruth. 2005. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Bloor, David. 1999. ‘Anti-Latour’. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 30: 81–112.Google Scholar
Briggs, Jean L. 1991. ‘Expecting the Unexpected: Canadian Inuit Training for an Experimental Lifestyle’. Ethos, 19: 259–87.Google Scholar
Candea, Matei. 2010. ‘“I Fell in Love with Carlos the Meerkat": Engagement and Detachment in Human-Animal Relations’. American Ethnologist, 37: 241–58.Google Scholar
Candea, Matei. 2013a. ‘Habituating Meerkats and Redescribing Animal Behaviour Science’. Theory Culture & Society, 30, 105–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Candea, Matei. 2013b. ‘Suspending Belief: Epoche in Animal Behavior Science’. American Anthropologist, 115: 423–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Candea, Matei. 2013c. ‘Objects Made Out of Action’, in Harvey, P. (ed.), Objects and Materials Companion. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Candea, Matei. 2017. ‘Science’. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/science).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Candea, Matei. 2018a. ‘No Actor, no Network, No Theory: Bruno Latour’s Anthropology of the Moderns’, in Candea, M. (ed.), Schools and Styles of Anthropological Theory. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Candea, Matei. 2018b. ‘Paradoxical Pedagogies: Reassembling Individual (Animal) Subjects’, in Holbraad, M., Laidlaw, J., and Bodenhorn, B. (eds.), Recovering the Human Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Candea, Matei. 2018c. ‘The Two Faces of Character: Moral Tales of Animal Behaviour’. Social Anthropology, 26: 361–75.Google Scholar
Candea, Matei. 2019. Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Candea, Matei, Cook, Joanna, Yarrow, Thomas, and Trundle., Catherine 2015. ‘Introduction: Reconsidering Detachment’, in Candea, Matei, Cook, Joanna, Trundle, Catherine, and Yarrow, Thomas (eds.), Detachment: Essays on the Limits of Relational Thinking. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Clarke, Morgan. 2015. ‘Legalism and the Care of the Self: Sharīʿah Discourse in Contemporary Lebanon’, in Paul Dresch and Judith Scheele (eds.), Legalism: Rules and Categories. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 231–58.Google Scholar
Clutton-Brock, T. H., Russell, A. F., Sharpe, L. L., et al. 2002. ‘Evolution and Development of Sex Differences in Cooperative Behavior in Meerkats’. Science, 297: 253–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Collins, H. M. 1982. ‘Knowledge, Norms and Rules in the Sociology of Science’. Social Studies of Science, 12: 299–309.Google Scholar
Cook, , Joanna. 2010. Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Crist, Eileen. 1999. Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind. Animals, Culture, and Society. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Daston, Lorraine and Galison., Peter 2007. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books Distributed by the MIT Press.Google Scholar
Daston, L orraine and Mitman, Greg, eds. 2005. Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Dawkins, Marian Stamp. 2007. Observing Animal Behaviour: Design and Analysis of Quantitative Data. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Despret, Vinciane. 2004. ‘The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis’. Body & Society, 10: 111–34.Google Scholar
Faubion, James D. 2001. ‘Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of Autopoiesis’. Representations, 74: 83–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Faubion, James D. 2011. An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fortun, Kim and Fortun, Mike. 2005. ‘Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology’. American Anthropologist, New Series, 107: 43–54.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1994. ‘À Propos de la Généalogie de l’Éthique: Un Aperçu du Travail en Cours, vol. Dits et Écrits 1954–1988 par Michel Foucault: Tome IV 1980–1988’, in Defert, D. (ed.), À Propos de la Généalogie de l’Éthique: Un Aperçu du Travail en Cours. Paris: Gallimard: 609–31.Google Scholar
Gusterson, Hugh. 1998. Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (new edition). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna J. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna J. 1997. Modest-Witness@Second-Millennium.FemaleMan-Meets-OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Heywood, Paolo. 2015. ‘Freedom in the Code: The Anthropology of (Double) Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 15: 200–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer, Rodman, Peter, Charnow, Eric L., et al. 1996. ‘Sociobiology’s Successes’. Science, 274: 162–3.Google Scholar
Humphrey, Caroline. 2008. ‘Reassembling Individual Subjects: Events and Decisions in Troubled Times’. Anthropological Theory, 8: 357–80.Google Scholar
Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolution (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Laidlaw, James. 1995. Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Laidlaw, James. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8: 311–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laidlaw, James. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Laidlaw, James. 2017. ‘Fault Lines in the Anthropology of Ethics’, in Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life. New York: Berghahn Books: 174–96.Google Scholar
Langlitz, Nicholas 2020. ‘Warning Against and Experimenting with Morality’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 10: 1030–1035.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 1990. ‘Postmodern? No, Simply Amodern; Steps towards an Anthropology of Science’. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 21: 145–71.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 2004. ‘How to Talk about the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies’. Body & Society, 10: 205.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno and Woolgar., Steve 1979. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific facts. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Lehner, Philip N. 1996. Handbook of Ethological Methods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Marsden, Magnus. 2005. Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Martin, Emily. 1991. ‘The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles’. Signs, 16: 485–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Emily. 1994. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Martin, Emily. 1998. ‘Anthropology and the Cultural Study of Science’. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 23: 24–44.Google Scholar
Martin, Paul R. and Bateson, Patrick. 2007. Measuring Behaviour: An Introductory Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mattingly, Cheryl. 2012. ‘Two Virtue Ethics and the Anthropology of Morality’. Anthropological Theory, 12: 161–84.Google Scholar
Merton, Robert K. 1973. ‘The Normative Structure of Science’, in The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 267–80.Google Scholar
Mitroff, Ian I. 1974. ‘Norms and Counter-Norms in a Select Group of the Apollo Moon Scientists: A Case Study of the Ambivalence of Scientists’. American Sociological Review, 39: 579.Google Scholar
Mosko, M. S. 2015. ‘Unbecoming Individuals: The Partible Character of the Christian Person’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5: 361–93.Google Scholar
Pandian, Anand. 2008. ‘Tradition in Fragments: Inherited Forms and Fractures in the Ethics of South India’. American Ethnologist, 35: 466–80.Google Scholar
Pandian, Anand. 2009. Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Pels, Peter. 1999. ‘Professions of Duplexity: A Prehistory of Ethical Codes in Anthropology [and Comments and Reply]’. Current Anthropology, 40: 101–36.Google Scholar
Porter, Theodore M. 1992. ‘Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science’. Social Studies of Science, 22: 633–51.Google Scholar
Rabinow, Paul. 1992. ‘Studies in the Anthropology of Reason’. Anthropology Today, 8: 7.Google Scholar
Rabinow, Paul. 1996a. Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Rabinow, Paul. 1996b. Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Rabinow, Paul. 1999. French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Rabinow, Paul. 2003. Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Rabinow, Paul. 2011. The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Rabinow, Paul. 2012. Designing Human Practices: An Experiment with Synthetic Biology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Robbins, Joel. 2013. ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19: 447–62.Google Scholar
Shapin, Steven. 1992. ‘Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science as Seen through the Externalism-Internalism Debate’. History of Science, 30: 333–69.Google Scholar
Shapin, Steven. 1994. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (1st ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapin, Steven. 2008. The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Shapin, Steven and Schaffer., Simon 1985. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life – Including a Translation of Thomas Hobbes, Dialogus physicus de natura aeris by Simon Schaffer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Sharp, Leslie A. 2018. Animal Ethos: The Morality of Human-Animal Encounters in Experimental Lab Science. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Sloterdijk, Peter. 2012. The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom As a Practice. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Stengers, Isabel. 2000. The Invention of Modern Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn, ed. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Tinbergen, Niko. 2005. ‘On Aims and Methods of Ethology (Reprinted from Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie, vol 20, p. 410, 1963)’. Animal Biology, 55: 297–321.Google Scholar
Traweek, Sharon. 1988. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. http://library.wur.nl/WebQuery/clc/916015.Google Scholar
Paul S., White 2005. ‘The Experimental Animal in Victorian Britain’, in Daston, Lorraine and Mitman, Gregg (ed.), Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press: 59–81.Google Scholar
Wilson, E. O. 1975. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Yan, Yunxiang. 2009. ‘The Good Samaritan’s New Trouble: A Study of the Changing Moral Landscape in Contemporary China’. Social Anthropology, 17: 9–24.Google Scholar
Zigon, Jarrett. 2007. ‘Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities’. Anthropological Theory, 7: 131.Google Scholar
- 16
- Cited by