A Well-Articulated Primatology - Bruno Latour

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

The Divergent Case of Cultural Anthropology Nnotni Quittrt Â wontan sees hcrself being seen. Clutching her peltcil, slte rr.oncers hrr\r. ,,the discipiine" wilr 'i0w the wriling shc wants to do. wiil it he seen as too deri'ati\ c or male work? c)r too feninine? Too safe? or too riskv? Too seriousr or nalt srrious enough? Nran'er.es bore i, on her, rooring to see if she wiu do better or worse than rncn, or at least as $.ell as othel a.qn1sn. Rutlr Bt,hdr ( i995. 2) In this paper I trace the path that wonten studying gender, as a sometirnes rnore_ anci sontetinres less-iclentiûable group, have taken through the recent historv of one rliscipline, cultr-rral anthropologr'. As rrill l.rtc,rntr 311p;1rent, the cultural anthropology story is as nrucl-r about acadentic politics as about theoretical developments, irnplrcating the one deeply ir.r the other. In this respect, ,rine rs a cauti.nary tale for behavioral prinratologists. Marilyn Stratherr.r (19871 has argued that the sociar sciences contrast with the natural sciences simply in being fractious and fractured by nature, but I do not believe any academic discipline to be intmune to the kind of academic politics I will describe. On the other hand, we cannot assunle parallel developments in the two disciplines just because they happen to be rela_ tives and happened in the 1970s to be swimmrng in the same intellectual currents when, along n,ith other behav_ ioral and social sciences, both embarked on the renewed
A <strong>Well</strong>-Articulttted Pritrntology 359 type of causality, while the "culture" people would have insisted ad nauseam on the variability, pliability, and historicity of hurnan and animal behavior. Fortunately for all of us, we did not get stuck in these three different, but interrelated, false debates. Instead, we slowly and painfully moved toward another agenda that I would like to outline in this chapter by following, in three different sections, how each of those old and tired discussions was reconfigured, thanks to the extraordinary setup devised by the organizers and for which I am inhnitely grateful. The Vascularization of Science and Society The first originality of the meeting is to have brought together "science studies scholars" arrd scientists, who at ftrst were presented to each other as two "camps"-which appeared to me as bizarre as presenting prinlates as one camp and primatologists as another. Yet it was only a matter of time before things became far more complicated: alliances began to shift without obeying party lines. It was soon impossible to consider that there were only two sides, the frrst made up of those who believed data lvere fabricated out of thin air, and the second being those lvho believed they possessed an unmediated and indisputable access to the reality "out there. " The reason for this high learning curve is easy to understand in retrospect: "science studies" is to scientiRc practice what prirnatology is to primates. Without primatology, in order to speak of apes and monkeys, we would have to rely on a few anecdotes brought back bv missionaries and explorers; lve would have no data, no comparative basis, no nlore than the shabby represerltations of wilderness and savagerv n'itl.r n'hich \\restern culture has equipped us fiom the beginning. The challge in the qualin'of our representation of apes and monkeys might not be terribll" itnportant to the prin.rates-althougl.r it certainly does have an eiiect on the consL'rvation of many animal troops (see Strum this volume)-but it is certainhof great import to us as a human communitv. To deprive ourselves oi all the knowledge accumulated on primates in the last f,fty years (see Fecligarl and Strum this volume), would be an incredible loss. The same is largely true for science studies, although the rrlass of . knon'ledge is much smaller and the data softer (see 'lhompsort Cttssit-ts this volurne). Without the empirical studies of scientists at rçork, we would be limited to anecdotes and myths about a few stuffed "great scientists" hung on the rvalls of the Universitl' Hall of Fanre. Science studies misht make little difference to scientists at the bench, since, after all, they
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A Well-Articulated Primatology - Bruno Latour

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