A Well-Articulated Primatology - Bruno Latour

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$Factures/fractures: de la notion de réseau à celle d ... - Bruno Latour$

380 Chapter Seventeen etc.-not in order to elicit a new feature from the other, but so as to maintain the essentialist character of the causality that has been brought in. It gives no more critical edge to the proposition than to say that //genes are genes" or that "Westerners always see things as Westerners." Tautology is always a tautology, no matter if it comes from the inside of science or from the outside, no matter if it deals with nature or culture, from ultimate or proximate mechanisms. But these new features may also mean something entirely different. By bringing in women scientists or Japanese researchers, this new original standpoint will introduce a difference that will lead away from the standpoint. Once again, it is Thelma Rowell who provided the best example of this shift when, to ridicule the notion of standpoint, she said in passing, "lf a female scientist studies female baboons and sticks to them she will end up studying males because female baboons are very much interested in males!" That's exactly the quality of a standpoint: it allows movement in a different way than what was intended. Standpoints never stand still! Because of the new attention given by female researchers to female baboons, a new attention will be given to males that differs entirely from the original focus on the domineering males and that differs a/so from the focus on the fernale that rlas originally intended. When we contend that primatologl' "betravs" many Western cultural biases about animals, monke1's, apes, or Dark Africa, that's exactly it: primatology betrays these original standpoints by turning them into something completely different. \\hat is true for the gene, for hormone levels, and for aggression is also true for history and the sociology of science: the carrying over of indisputable necessity is always less interesting, and, in the end, less scientiflc than the revelation of active mediators all the way down. If I am allowed some Gallic exaggeration, I would be tempted to say that the meeting in Teresopolis had an historical significance. Too often, scientists believe that their science will be better served if they ignore as much as possible all the untidy connections that make it work, with which they deal on a daily basis. They might be gathered to reflexively evaluate their discipline, but this evaluation, in their eyes, can only be carried out by using an off-the-shelf philosophy of science that dates back sixty years-to be charitable. The aim of such reflexive gathering could only be to purify the discipline ever more from the last remnants of adherence to subjectivity, politics, mythology, ideology, or biases. Shirley and Linda led us along an entirely different trail, which I have tried to map in dotted lines using my own system of projection. What would happen to the collective understanding of a discipline, if scientists were no longer trying to extirpate themselves from the sin of being connected, but accepted the vascularization as so many positive features that would turn
A \Uell-Articulated Primatolog) 38'l their science into a well-articulated one? Primatology would not only be crucially important as a trading zone between anthropology, zoology, evolutionary theory, ethics, conservation, and ecologli but also an exemplary site for the renewal of philosophy of science. N O T E S T O C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N English in this chapter kindly corrected by Duana Fullwiley. 1. I am well aware that this distinction between representation and things, or, to speak more philosophically, epistemological questions and ontological ones, is built in the culture for much stronger political reasons that have nothing to do with primates or Teresopolis. I have traced elsewhere part of this genealogy (La- t o u r 1 9 9 7 ) . 2. The sentence is all the more interesting since it deals with a purely observa- tional etholoSy which has none of the usual features of laboratory experiments where it is always easier to show the artificiality of the setup (Hacking 1992|.For a treatment of a similar sentence by Louis Pasteur, see Latour 1996a. 3. See the beautiful case studies by Despert (1996) on the theories devised bv A. Zahavi about Arabian babble. See Glickman (this vohrnte) on rrhat happened tr> laboratory rats in the cages of the behaviorists. 4. I have tried to rvork out this limit of the philosoçrhv of action by' devising the concept of "factishes" (Latour 1996b). For one possible use of this notion in epistemology, see Stenger 1996. The notion of proposition is a central concept in Whiteheadian metaphysics (Whitehead 1929 [197811.It has close connection with the debates between "saltationist" and "deambulatorv" conceDtions of truth- making (James 1907). 5. For a more complete demonstration, see Latour 1999. 6. The question of why is it that the "greater number of active entities the better" cannot be tackled within the confines of this chapter since it depends on a further redefinition of the difference between science and politics. For a first-effort go at it, see Latour 1999. 7. This extends, as Despret (1996) has so elegantly shown, to those people rvho watch primatologists or ethologists at work: intelligence, so to speak, is infectious- s t u p i d i t y t o o . . .
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A Well-Articulated Primatology - Bruno Latour

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