Obituary: Diana E.

Forsythe (11 November 1947-14 August 1997)

Author(s): David Hess, Gary Downey, Lucy Suchman, David Hakken and Leigh Star
Source: Social Studies of Science, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Feb., 1998), pp. 175-182
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/285755
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Obituaries: Peter G. Winch & Diane E. Forsythe 175

family
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Diana
Diana E.
E. Forsythe
Forsythe(11
(11November
November1947-14
1947-14
August
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1997)

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diedlast
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a hiking
a hiking
accident
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in Alaska.
in Alaska.
Her colleagues
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herpassing,
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both as as
a valued
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andand
as a as
scholar
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research
research
was was
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increasinglyinfluential.
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her work
her work
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with which
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- the
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and
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Studiesof of
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tributes
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essentiallyas as
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Both
Both the
the mourning
mourningofof Diana
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missmiss
her greatly.
her greatly.
Diana
Diana Forsythe
Forsythehad hadanan
extensive
extensive background
background in anthropology
in anthropologyand was
and was
a key
key figure
figureininthetheanthropology
anthropology of of
science,
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technology,and work
and work
in thein the
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United States.
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anda aPhDPhDinin
anthropology
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Cornel
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Shehad
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in Scotland,
in Scotland,
and and
had had
produced
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a
number
number of
ofpapers
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and
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thethe
anthropology
anthropology
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theUnited
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knowledge
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I first met Diana shortly after I arrived at Rensselaer in 1989, when she
came to give a colloquium on her work as an anthropologist among
knowledge engineers. Since that time we have exchanged many papers and
worked together in various organizational settings. As long as I have known
her, there were at least two major themes in her work: the study of

Social Studies of Science 28/1(February 1998) 175-82

0 SSS and SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks CA, New Delhi)
[0306-3127(199802)28:1;175-182;004591]

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176 Social Studies of Science 28/1

computer software design as a cultural phenomenon, and the analysis of

the ways in which her position as a non-tenured researcher held lessons for
the potential and limitations of an anthropology of science, technology and
work. She continued to develop and refine those two themes over the
course of her career. It has been a very productive line of thinking that,
very sadly, has been prematurely ended.
One key problem, as Diana defined it in one of her earlier papers, was
that knowledge engineers were designing expert systems that users ended
up not using.' The engineers, as Diana pointed out with a characteristic
smile, had a name for the problem: they called it 'end-user failure'. Their
solution, either implicitly or explicitly, was the simple response that we also
find among scientists in the 'public understanding of science' literature:
educate the users so they behave the way they should.
No, said Diana, with her characteristic politeness that was both a
personality trait and a survival tactic for an anthropologist who lived on
soft money in an AI lab - the problem is not with the users. It lies instead
with the knowledge engineers' view of what knowledge is and what
knowledge acquisition involves. Knowledge engineers have a very formal
view of knowledge that becomes encoded in their expert systems. In
contrast, as an anthropologist Diana could point the way to a much
'thicker', less formal view of knowledge that might guide engineers 'to
avoid falling off the knowledge cliff', as she described it.
Diana's work embodied many of the themes that, I think, have become
central to the anthropology of science, technology and work. One is the
relationship between engineers and users as a subset of the more general
relationship of experts and their publics. Perhaps anthropology's most
profound contribution to STS as a whole at this point has been the
ethnographically-based analysis of the viewpoints of users, patients, con-
sumers, employees and other publics outside the citadels of technical
expertise. Anthropology has helped shift the focus of social studies of
science and technology from the epistemologically and politically problem-
atic question of the social construction of science and technology to the
much more interesting - and relevant - question of the reconstruction of
science and technology by new groups within science, and by the various
consumers and publics of science and technology. Diana's work repre-
sented a very special contribution to this literature, and I think it is fair to
say that she influenced many of us.
Diana was also charting out a model for a relationship between social
scientists and technical experts that was not confrontational, but never-
theless did not involve reducing social science to an adjuvant role. The key
- as many of us are increasingly coming to see - is through the question of
design. That is, knowledge engineers would undergo the gestalt shift in
which the technical can flip back and forth to the cultural and political. In
the process, they might design better - and more just - systems.
In her subsequent work, such as a study of expert systems for migraine
patients, Diana extended her analysis by showing how design choices that
were intended to help patients ended up reinforcing the power differential

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Obituary: Diana E. Forsythe 177

between doctor and patient.2 The project, which included ethnographic

research as a contributing component to system design, ended up replicat-
ing hierarchies between patients and physicians, as well as between anthro-
pologists and computer scientists. In my own conversations with Diana, it
was clear to me that she saw these relationships in feminist terms, and I
think had she lived we would have seen her write much more on the topic
of power, knowledge and gender in these contexts. As she once told me,
she was reluctant to make claims that were too confrontational on the issue
of gender and power because she was aware of how her employers and
colleagues might react to them.
Diana explored some of the complexities of her own position in the
paper 'Ethics and Politics of Studying Up'.3 She contrasted the cultural
politics of classical fieldwork - something perhaps approximating her early
research in Scotland - and those of fieldwork at home among more
powerful groups with higher status. Based on her own experience, she
described the mechanisms of intellectual suppression and self-censorship
that shape the careers of untenured social scientists who write potentially
critical analyses of powerful people who read and often review what they
write. For example, one conflict over ownership of her field data led to a
dispute between two laboratory heads that eventually was resolved by two
university lawyers (who ultimately did not support her position).
My review of a few of her key papers and ideas here is entirely
inadequate; it would take a much more collective endeavour to give a
proper sense of her contribution to the field, and also the great promise of
future contributions that was lost. There were other directions that she was
embarking upon: for example, writing about her parents, especially her
mother, who gave up a brilliant career as a computer scientist because of
her family. We would have to review many more papers of hers than the
ones I have mentioned, and also to discuss her work on the anthropology
of Europe.
Let me instead shift to Diana's role as a catalyst in the formation of an
anthropology of science and technology. When I first met Diana, there was
much less of a coherent community of anthropologists in the STS field.
She played an important role as a catalyst in the formation of this
community in the United States. She helped bring together various groups
of anthropologists to form what eventually became the Committee of the
Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing of the General
Anthropology Division. She organized panels and, as programme chair for
the Society for the Anthropology of Work, helped facilitate programme
time for panels on the anthropology of science, technology and work.
Equally important, she helped redefine anthropology within the gen-
eral STS context. There is still a lingering misidentification of the anthro-
pology of science and technology with the laboratory studies of the late
1970s and early 1980s. Anthropologists attempting to publish in STS
journals in the late 1980s and early 1990s - and to some extent even today
- have had to face a rather bizarre situation of non-peer review. Whereas in
many interdisciplinary contexts peer reviewers can be people outside one's

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178 Social Studies of Science 28/1

discipline, the quirk of history by which non-anthropologists first appro-

priated the name of 'the anthropology of science' has led us to face the
oddity of non-anthropologists telling anthropologists that they are not
doing proper anthropology.
A version of these interdisciplinary misunderstandings occurred with
Diana in a reviewer's commentary of an article that she submitted to Social
Studies of Science in 1988 and eventually published in the journal five years
later.4 I remember the exchange very well, because Diana and I discussed
the review process and her response. Her reply to the only negative
reviewer of the article did a great service to all anthropologists by giving
readers of Social Studies of Science a crash course in the fundamentals of
how a person with a decades-long training and background in anthro-
pology understood the field. Her reply - which I encourage everyone who
has not read to read - reveals something of Diana as a person with a
backbone and a strong sense of self-worth. However, I also want to
emphasize that she was not combative; she was, in fact, one of the nicest
people I ever knew. She was a peacemaker, a gentle, Quaker soul among
us. She was a person with whom I always looked forward to sharing a meal
or drink together at meetings.
Diana's untimely death is a reminder of the precariousness of life, its
brevity, and ultimately the futility of the sandcastles that we build and
defend, knowing full well that ultimately they, too, will be swept away. Our
legacies last but an instant in the grand scale of time, but it is inside that
moment that we must make our meaning. If I can be permitted to
contribute one articulation of Diana's legacy for us, let it be her role as a
model of collegiality and her unfinished work that we must now complete.
I, for one, would like to see anthropologists and other social scientists
continue her project of developing a new, less politically naive under-
standing of the politics and ethics in the social studies of powerful groups.
From that perspective the Committee of the Anthropology of Science,
Technology, and Computing has decided to devote a memorial session to
Diana at the 1998 AAA annual meeting, where her work on that topic will
be discussed. Of course her legacy to us is multiple, and we will all need to
contribute to defining it in different ways, but I suggest that this topic
would be one fitting way for us to keep the spirit of her work alive among
us.

David Hess
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Thank you for being present to honour the memory of Diana Forsy
Diana was my colleague and my friend. Her loss came as a shock, a sh
of realization that our lives are fragile, and that what we so often take fo
granted could suddenly be taken away. Her loss also made me angry.
death is simply not fair.
Diana was in her prime. I believe the last few years had been am
the happiest in her life. Everything had come together for her. Her w

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Obituary: Diana E. Forsythe 179

was going well. She had gained significant recognition among scholars in
anthropology, science and technology studies, and human-computer inter-
action. But most importantly, I think, she had found peace in her personal
life. She had built a permanent relationship with a partner, knew she was
making a difference, and seemed to have come to terms with the overall
conditions of her life. She gave a powerful, intensely personal presentation
at the AAA in 1996. She demonstrated deep understanding of the roles
gender stereotypes had played in the opportunities and lives of both her
parents. By sharing with us the loss of her mother through breast cancer,
and her own fears of following in those footsteps, she movingly articulated
the importance of understanding how scientific knowledge figures in the
fashioning of human bodies and selves.
During part of our decade-long friendship, Diana had been mad at
me. She felt that I and other close colleagues had not cited her work as
much as we might have. She was right. I learned a lot about the power
dimensions of academic discourse from discussing citation practices with
her. She changed the way I work. I also learned from these interactions
how much being part of a community meant to her. It helped me
understand her lifelong commitment to activism, nonviolence and com-
munity through the Society of Friends. I saw and admired how the various
parts of her life were all of a piece.
I am angry that she is gone, ripped away from us all so abruptly. Yet I
thank her for helping me understand once again that collegiality is far more
than a narrow professional practice. I also take solace in the fact that I have
in my possession a means for cherishing her memory, a way to keep alive
and relive both a connection and a commitment, an academic practice for
helping Diana Forsythe continue to make a difference. I can continue
citing her work. I urge you to consider doing the same.

Gary Downey
Virginia Tech

Diana Forsythe was a sister-traveller to many of us in the anthropology of

work and computing. My own connection with Diana centred on our
shared concern with the subtleties of cultural inscription in computational
artifacts and, in particular, with the ways in which purportedly innovative
technologies may in actuality give us, in Diana's phrase, 'old wine in new
bottles'.5 In remembering Diana today I want to recount two scenes that
stand in my memory as glimpses into the matters of mind and heart that I
believe shaped Diana's work.
The first scene is set some years ago on the campus of Stanford
University, in a colloquium series sponsored by Stanford's Knowledge
Systems Laboratory, where Diana was a postdoc doing research in artificial
intelligence. Diana's talk on that day was attended by some of the leading
proponents of AI, in the full flush of AI's ascendency and its promise of
cognitive and social transformation. In her talk, Diana advanced the

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180 Social Studies of Science 28/1

proposition that anthropology might have something critical - in the sense

both of importance and of re-examination - to say about the premises and
practices of'knowledge elicitation' in AI. I have repressed the details of the
response from her audience beyond a vague sense of a barrage of extra-
ordinarily hostile, and equally naive, attacks on anthropology's scientific
adequacy. I do remember, however, going up to her at the end of the
colloquium and commenting, in as loud a voice as I could muster, that it
was an excellent talk but that this was clearly an audience unworthy of her
efforts.
Scene two is set in the more familiar environment of the 1994 AAA
meetings in Atlanta, Georgia. As was often the case, Diana had taken a
leading hand along with Susan Anderson, Gary Downey, Joe Dumit,
Deborah Heath, Linda May and Sharon Traweek in organizing an ex-
tended, three-session panel on Cultural Studies of Science, Technology
and Medicine. The panel abstract read:

Many of us are also trying to take account of our positioning inside

science, technology, and medicine. Beyond the comfort of radiant pes-
simism, we approach our work with both friendship and fear, curiosity
and anger, humor and concern. Doing fieldwork in powerfully ambiguous
locations, we find ourselves friends, partners, consultants, and sometimes
opponents across the boundaries of social worlds. While oppositional
politics have their place, we now have opportunities to elaborate politics of
participation.

Within the panel, Diana and I were in a session together with the title,
chosen I believe by Diana, of 'Feminist Perspectives on Work in High
Technology and Cyberspace'. Our session considered the gendered charac-
ter of self and other in such settings, including the systematic deletion of
gender from technical discourses, and its denial in technical practice. As is
customary at the AAA, there were to be six of us in a 90-minute session,
plus a discussant: but on this occasion only three of us were, in the end,
actually able to participate. This meant that we could read our full papers,
in place of the usual breathless race through excerpts from our texts.
Diana's abstract for the session had pointed to her ongoing concern
with the ways in which gendered presumptions about the neutrality of
scientific practices and artifacts could surface through ethnographically-
based excavations of technical work. This included how the everyday work
of erasing gender rendered women, in Diana's words, 'simultaneously
hyper-visible and invisible in the high-technology workplace'. I had heard
Diana speak, always articulately and with feeling, about the anthropology
of technical practice in AI and medicine. But on this occasion she did
something quite different, something eloquent, unexpectedly impassioned,
and deeply moving. As I have no copy of the paper, I rely on my memory
for its general outline. Titled 'Disappearing Women in the Social World of
Computing',6 it spoke of Diana's own family, specifically her father and,
most centrally, her mother. Both were eminent computer scientists at
Stanford University, where her father is celebrated as the founder of the
Computer Science Department. What I remember most clearly is the

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Obituary: Diana E. Forsythe 181

courage with which, in her quiet, always careful and even restrained way,
Diana brought her mother's story into view. Predictably, it was a story of
the erasure of her mother's prodigious achievements in the official histories
of her father's place in the field of computer science.
Diana's work was, I think, deeply about that autobiography. Diana
herself, despite her obvious accomplishments, seemed always somehow
vulnerable. I hope now that she realized the admiration that we had for her,
our appreciation for her presence and for her enormous contribution to
building an anthropology of technoscience. Diana's loss reminds us to tell
each other both how much we relied upon her being there, and how much
we all rely upon each others' company, as we continue down the path -
always fascinating, often heartbreaking - that she so courageously helped
to define for us.

Lucy Suchman
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

From somewhere over the midwest, I join you virtually in celebrating the
life and work of Diana Forsythe. On the work side, I draw attention to
Diana's years as chair of the programme committee for the Society for the
Anthropology ofWork (a unit of the AAA). In this role, Diana set such high
standards (as she did in everything) that she soon became the AAA role-
model for diligence. The result was a revival of interest in work as an
anthropological topic. On the personal side, I celebrate Diana's passion, as
in her last AAA paper, on appropriations of ethnography by systems
developers. What captured her Quaker ire was not the use of ethnography,
but the one-way conversation, the willingness of so few IS professionals to
discourse over the profound issues arising when one studies IT in the use
context. It is this sense of how to be in the world, as perhaps an ethical
organic intellectual of Gramiscian dimensions, which I treasure as my
memory of Diana, who is sorely missed.

David Hakken
(President, Society for the Anthropology of Work)
SUNY Institute of Technology

I first met Diana in about 1984. We were both working as ethnographers of

- and with - artificial intelligence research. The indescribable relief on
finding another one of my own tribe was enormous. Diana and Luc
Suchman were my only friends - and my only women friends - with whom
I could discuss what it was like to live with computer scientists. All of u
struggled to remain open, political and good social scientists in an ofte
surreal intellectual and moral atmosphere. Diana had so much courage
and integrity in continuing her long, honest and difficult relationship with

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182 Social Studies of Science 28/1

her respondents. She made me feel sane, and often healed me with her
gentle questions, assurances and hugs.
She took me once into the Knowledge Systems Lab at Stanford, a
sterile lab with grey and beige cubicles filled with pale men bent over
terminals. Diana's office was filled with books, colours and a sense of
her own personality. The other offices had whiteboards and computer
manuals, and no books. As we walked into the lab, I saw her body language
change. We had been walking across campus, hands gesturing and often
touching each other's arms, or nodding vigorously as we talked. As we
entered the lab, Diana's shoulders became very still, and her hands went
tight around the notebook she was carrying. She introduced me to the guys
in the lab. I think she was trying to say: 'Wheee... there's someone else
who does what I do; I'm not alone'. Being with her that day helped me
understand what an extraordinary patience and perception she brought to
bear on her experience, and again what courage. I shall always miss her.

Leigh Star
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Notes

1. Diana Forsythe, 'Blaming the User in Medical Informatics: The Cultural Nature of
Scientific Practice', in David Hess and Linda Layne (eds), Knowledge and Society, Vol
The Anthropology of Science and Technology (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1992), 95-1 1 1.
2. Diana Forsythe, 'New Bottles, Old Wine: Hidden Cultural Assumptions in a
Computerized Explanation System for Migraine Sufferers' Medical Anthropology
Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1996), 551-74.
3. Diana Forsythe, 'Ethics and Politics of Studying Up' (unpublished ms.).
4. Diana Forsythe, 'Engineering Knowledge: The Construction of Knowledge in Artific
Intelligence', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 23, No. 3 (August 1993), 445-77; 'STS
(Re)constructs Anthropology', ibid., Vol. 24, No. 1 (February 1994), 113-23. (A
footnote about the sociology of the review process that Diana received was deleted from
the latter.)
5. Forsythe, op. cit. note 2.
6. Diana Forsythe, 'Disappearing Women in the Social World of Computing' (unpublished
paper presented to the AAA, Atlanta, GA, 3 December 1994).

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