Objective styles in northern field science
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
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