Sept/Oct 2000

ARTICLE TOOLS

Find similar articles E-mail this page

The idea that science displays regional characteristics runs against the grain of much conventional wisdom. Science, so the standard story goes, is a transcendental undertaking, devoid of parochial particulars. It stands above the messiness of social life and objectively pursues truth unsullied by the murky affairs of this world. After all, science is carried out in much the same way everywhere from Boston to Beijing; experimentalists replicate each other's results in Moscow and Melbourne; scientific conferences bring together researchers from Paris and Prague. The same depictions of the geological column and the periodic table of elements are to be found in London, Lima, and Lisbon. Besides, the very existence of such cultural merchandise as the Nobel Prize plainly attests to some sense of shared criteria of excellence. Of all the human projects devoted to getting at the truth of how things are, to laying aside prejudices and presuppositions, or to putting in place mechanisms to guarantee objectivity, has that venture we call science not been the most assiduous in prosecuting its ideals?

And yet. In a myriad different ways scientific inquiry does bear the stamp of local circumstance, so much so that it makes sense to append historical and geographical modifiers when speaking of that "imagined singularity" called "Science." Indeed the very idea that there is some unified entity called "Science" is the product of an Enlightenment project to present "Science" as standing transcendent and incorporeal above the untidy clutter of human affairs. But science is not above culture; it is part of culture. Science does not transcend our particularities; it discloses them. Science is not a disembodied entity; it is incarnated in human ...