Technoscientific Musings at WUSTL

As I was doing my lab ethnography last week, one thing that I was thinking about was how, as I was analyzing the lab setting and how people interacted there, someone could probably also do some kind of ethnography on how I was integrating my anthropology knowledge into my interviews and observations. I really liked Dr. Song's comment during the first class when she talked about how someone could potentially analyze our class and the knowledge and language we developed as anthropologists. While I was observing, I found myself trying to remember what Knorr Cetina had focused on during her lab observations or what Gusterson had tried to pinpoint when he was talking to nuclear weapons physicists. Gusterson had tried to analyze the moral justifications that the scientists had made, and I similarly tried to look at something the lab members might feel they had to justify. I was highly conscious of this, because when I was asking about it, I felt somewhat guilty. It felt like I was asking leading questions even when I wasn't because I kept trying to dig deeper into something that I thought would have a lot of writing potential, not necessarily in a natural way. Because we had an assignment of sorts, it was difficult for me to make it as open ended as an ethnography should be. It made me wonder what kind of biases and influences other anthropologists had and how they affected their articles in ways we don't see when we're reading the article. It also elucidated for me how we end up using our past knowledge and experiences to color our understanding of the present, and how it can be difficult to break out of that.