Objective styles in northern field science

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2015.04.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Science studies often treat natural field sites as extensions of the laboratory.

  • But field practices may differ substantially from laboratory practices.

  • I address this difference in sociological terms, as a difference in style.

  • A distinctive field style depends on what I call “epistemic neighbourliness.”

  • Epistemic neighbourliness helps to explain the success of cross-cultural field science.

Abstract

Social studies of science have often treated natural field sites as extensions of the laboratory. But this overlooks the unique specificities of field sites. While lab sites are usually private spaces with carefully controlled borders, field sites are more typically public spaces with fluid boundaries and diverse inhabitants. Field scientists must therefore often adapt their work to the demands and interests of local agents. I propose to address the difference between lab and field in sociological terms, as a difference in style. A field style treats epistemic alterity as a resource rather than an obstacle for objective knowledge production. A sociological stylistics of the field should thus explain how objective science can co-exist with radical conceptual difference. I discuss examples from the Canadian North, focussing on collaborations between state wildlife biologists and managers, on the one hand, and local Aboriginal Elders and hunters, on the other. I argue that a sociological stylistics of the field can help us to better understand how radically diverse agents may collaborate across cultures in the successful production of reliable natural knowledge.

Section snippets

Introduction: Incommensurability and epistemic neighbourliness

If you leave Winnipeg travelling north down the Red River, you will eventually end up in the southern tip of enormous Lake Winnipeg. If you continue travelling much further north, until about midway along the eastern edge of the lake, you will arrive at the mouth of the Berens River. This is the home of the Berens River First Nation, a predominantly Ojibway/Saulteux-speaking people. It was among them that Irving Hallowell conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the 1930s and 1940s.

Hallowell argued

Decolonising the field sciences

The historical and sociological study of field science has been colonised by a specific and influential strand of laboratory studies. This colonisation process was not a surreptitious one. Advocates of these laboratory studies made it quite clear what they were doing: “Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world,” declared one well-known champion. After asserting that most new sources of knowledge come from the lab, Bruno Latour concluded that the social and political power of science

Objective styles

Hacking argues for the existence of different styles of scientific reasoning, each guided by its own distinctive techniques of verification. These techniques provide the basis for objective scientific knowledge. Hacking takes the inspiration for his notion of styles from Alistair Crombie's historical study of “styles of scientific thinking” (Hacking, 1982, p. 50). However, Hacking (1992, p. 3) swaps Crombie's word “thinking” for the word “reasoning” because, he says, thinking is too much in the

The Ruby Range Sheep Steering Committee

If one is interested in finding a natural field site inhabited by very different sorts of people who are going about very different sorts of business, then one could do far worse than to look to the Canadian North.8

The perils of overblown theorising

The preceding example demonstrated the utility of Hacking's stylistics of scientific reasoning for an analysis of the field sciences. A style is composed of the techniques used by practitioners to make sense of statements. Only intelligible statements can become candidates for objective agreement or disagreement. If a statement cannot be captured within the scope of those techniques, practitioners will experience it as scientifically meaningless, and so impossible to evaluate in objective

Putting a pin in “state power”

There is a striking sense in which Nadasdy's analysis complements that of Hacking: they both seek to explain the same phenomenon, namely, the apparently overwhelming power of certain techniques to determine the shape of locally produced knowledge. However, whereas Hacking appeals to the autonomy of that power, Nadasdy emphasises its dependency on the hegemonic machinations of the bureaucratic state. In both cases, the role of locally situated agents in determining the content of the knowledge

Calibrating scientific interests

In his historical survey of the science of Rangifer (the generic name for reindeer and caribou species), the anthropologist David Anderson argues that diverse groups in the Circumpolar North “have been knowingly or unknowingly engaged in a sort of partnership of inquiry for at least a century” (Anderson, 2000, p. 158). Definitive for such epistemic partnerships is the way scientific interests have been “calibrated” to the interests of local Aboriginal peoples (Anderson, 2000, p. 157). According

Constructive ambiguity in cross-cultural wildlife management

As the anthropologist Harvey Feit writes, in the 1920s and 1930s the James Bay region of Northern Québec suffered a serious decline in beaver populations, brought on by a boom in fur prices and the increasing accessibility of the region (Feit, 2005, p. 271). In the coastal community of Waskaganish (Rupert's House, at the time), the situation deteriorated to the point where the beaver had almost disappeared and the Waskaganish Crees' traditional system of family hunting territories (Ndoho Istchee

Conclusion: A postcolonial style for the field

In a recent book, John Sandlos (2007, p. 8) throws powerful light on the “historical antagonism” between Aboriginal peoples and state scientists in the Canadian North. He lays out ample evidence for how the Canadian state, from the end of the nineteenth century to around 1970, deployed intensive regimes of scientific wildlife management in order to gain administrative control over Aboriginal lives: “[t]he coercive programs designed to alter the subsistence cycle of Aboriginal people represented

Acknowledgements

Many people have positively influenced my thoughts and feelings about the topics discussed in this paper. None of them are responsible for the infelicities of the final result. They include: David Anderson, Darlene Auger, David Bloor, Michael Bravo, Jim Brown, Eugene Buffalo, Cecil and Marie Crier, Julie Cruikshank, Larry and Lorraine Cutarm, Harvey Feit, Sandra Harding, Tim Ingold, Emma Kowal, Martin Kusch, Billy-Joe Laboucan, Betty Lafferty Letendre, Mike Lynch, Kohkom Emma Rabbit, Simon

References (99)

  • A. Bala et al.

    Indigenous knowledge and western science: The possibility of dialogue

    Race & Class

    (2007)
  • B. Barnes

    Social life as bootstrapped induction

    Sociology

    (1983)
  • B. Barnes

    Practice as collective action

  • M. Berg

    A fruitful a-modernism of a lingering modernist: Commentary on Bruno Latour's ‘on objectivity’

    Mind, Culture, and Activity

    (1996)
  • D. Bloor

    Wittgenstein: A social theory of knowledge

    (1983)
  • D. Bloor

    A sociological theory of objectivity

  • S. Bocking

    Indigenous knowledge and the history of science, race, and colonial authority in Northern Canada

  • M.T. Bravo

    The accuracy of ethnoscience: A study of inuit cartography and cross-cultural commensurability (Manchester papers in social anthropology no. 2)

    (1996)
  • M.T. Bravo

    Cultural geographies in practice: The rhetoric of scientific practice in Nunavut

    Ecumene

    (2000)
  • G. Cajete

    Native science: Natural laws of interdependence

    (1999)
  • J. Cruikshank

    Legend and landscape: Convergence of oral and scientific traditions in the Yukon Territory

    Arctic Anthropology

    (1981)
  • Cruikshank, J., in collaboration with Sidney, A., Smith, K., & Ned, A. (1991). Life lived like a story: Life stories of...
  • J. Cruikshank

    The social life of stories: Narrative and knowledge in the Yukon Territory

    (1998)
  • J. Cruikshank

    Glaciers and climate change: Perspectives from oral history

    Arctic

    (2001)
  • J. Cruikshank

    Do glaciers listen? Local knowledge, colonial encounters and social imagination

    (2005)
  • P. Dear

    Intelligibility in science

    Configurations

    (2003)
  • P. Dear

    The intelligibility of science: How science makes sense of the world

    (2006)
  • M. Elam

    Living dangerously with Bruno Latour in a hybrid world

    Theory, Culture & Society

    (1999)
  • H.A. Feit

    Re-cognizing co-management as co-governance: Visions and histories of conservation at James Bay

    Anthropologica

    (2005)
  • M.M.R. Freeman

    Appeal to tradition: Different perspectives on Arctic wildlife management

  • M. Govind

    Modern science and indigenous techniques: Subalternity of knowledge production in India

  • I. Hacking

    Language, truth and reason

  • I. Hacking

    The archaeology of Foucault

  • I. Hacking

    Husserl on the origins of geometry

  • A.I. Hallowell

    Ojibwa ontology, behavior, and world view

  • D. Haraway

    Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective

    Feminist Studies

    (1988)
  • D. Haraway

    A game of Cat's cradle: Science studies, feminist theory, cultural studies

    Configurations

    (1994)
  • S. Harding

    Is science multicultural? Postcolonialisms, feminisms, and epistemologies

    (1998)
  • S. Harding

    Science and social inequality: Feminist and postcolonial issues

    (2006)
  • S. Harding

    Sciences from below: Feminisms, postcolonialities, and modernities

    (2008)
  • J. Heath

    Methodological individualism

  • D.J. Hess

    Science & technology in a multicultural world: The cultural politics of facts & artifacts

    (1995)
  • T. Ingold

    The perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill

    (2000)
  • J. Kochan

    Realism, reliabilism, and the ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of scientific knowledge

    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science

    (2008)
  • J. Kochan

    Popper's communitarianism

  • Cited by (7)

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text