A Delicate Dance, or Musings about Challenging the Moral Superiority of Normal Science contra Making Space for Alt-Facts

Stories we tell ourselves as "novices,"
with help from highly mobile web comics.

Traweek’s chapter, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” is amusing, though perhaps not on purpose, because it is overly-descriptive. I really enjoy reading descriptive ethnography written up through the 70s, but this reads strikingly similar to the classic works on rites of manhood by old tuskers like Gilbert Herdt, Barry S. Hewlett, and Napoleon Chagnon. On the other hand, Traweek’s book was published in 1988, well after this kind of writing fell out of favor in anthropology, which tells me that she’s writing descriptively as a way of making the familiar strange. She does this by using the same voice that anthropologists have historically used in their exoticization of non-White, non-Euro Others, but with middle-class, male physicists. It is a political act, in a Horace Miner kind of way, which challenges what Bourdieu called the misrecognition – or taken-for-grantedness – of science as supracultural or men as scientists (and, by extension, rational-thinking penis-havers as independent from history and culture).

In his chapter, Gusterson focuses on another kind of physicist from Traweek: nuclear (not particle), female (not male). Rather than write of her (and other “weapon scientists”) descriptively, Gusterson leads with Haraway’s theorization of situated knowledges, a concept that emphasizes the personal histories, influenced by social, political, and economic histories, from which one cannot divorce themselves. In other words, as Traweek pointed out, science and scientists are not supracultural.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: The hero of the masses.

These readings have (at least) two things in common. First, they are all about occupational training, which draws our attention to the ways in which individuals learn and how they are taught. In other words, they are enculturated or socialized with particular practices and expectations. Focusing on training means focusing on a sort of transitional phase from “novice” to “specialist” (as Traweek and pre-Writing Culture ethnographers would have put it), and taking transition as a unit of analysis allows us to pay special attention to how practices and expectations become embedded. This is the second thing they all have in common: Whether physics or medicine (i.e. Good’s chapter), both practitioners and participants of both fields consider their corpora of knowledge to be – not just supracultural (I don’t think that goes far enough) – naturalized, misrecognized, taken-for-granted, a process that is institutionalized by the state, family, school, church and so forth. This ahistorical status allows those institutions and the practitioners of those sciences to – so long as it regards the practice of those sciences – elevate themselves above the same kind of political, moral, and ethical entanglements in which “softer” individuals might find themselves. We see this kind of self-aggrandizing from the scientific wing of the so-called "Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse" - Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. And as scientists argue for the moral superiority of the pursuit of scientific knowledge, it can even become violent and potentially genocidal. Here, I think of the case of the astronomers (yet another kind of physicist) who fought tooth and nail to put their thirty meter telescope on a sacred mountain in Mauna Kea, Hawaii against the wishes of Native Hawaiians.

Of course, the problem with challenging the unquestionable, ahistorical, supracultural formulation of physics, chemistry, geology, and biology is that we must then question the knowledge they produce, which then translates to (inadvertently) making space for...#altfacts.