Volume 37 Number 3
Board Adopts Long-
Range Plan, Raises Dues
The AAA Executive Board unani-
mously adopted a long-range plan at its
January 1996 meeting, to “reaffirm the
Association’s central role in advancing
anthropology,” as well as to support
the discipline’s diversity. Noting that
anthropology faces serious challenges,
the Board voted to fund “a modest but
important start on the long-range plan.”
To provide funds to continue current
programs and to support the initiatives,
the Board also voted to increase AAA
Basic and At-Large dues [student,
retired and joint dues were not
changed].
In a letter that will be sent to mem-
bers with their membership renewal
notices, AAA President Yolanda
Moses and President-elect Jane Hill
wrote, “The decision to raise dues was
not made lightly, but your Executive
Board felt a plan delayed too often
becomes a plan not implemented. The
plan can help anthropology flourish.
To succeed, the plan needs your intel-
lectual and financial support. We ask
See Long-Range Plan on page 7
Behind the Genome’s Headlines, p 8
Taking the Path to Archaeoloe, p 9
Boundaries betweenHumanism and Science, 6 1 0
Preparing Students for Careers in Anthropology, p I1 .
Planning for AAA’s Future: Long-Range Plan in Detail, p 25
March 1996 American Anthropological Association
Not the Question
By Bruno Latour (Centre de Sociologie
de l’lnnovation, kcole &s mines, Paris)
To be or not to be scientific is not
the question. Contributions to this
year’s AN theme, “Science and Anthro-
pology,” have considered the science
of anthropology as if there were no
anthropology of science. Long debates
over the “scientificity” of our disci-
pline-whether it should imitate the
natural sciences, define itself separate-
ly, limit itself to hermeneutic circles or
recast itself as travel literature-imply
that science consists of a body of
method and rigor that exists entirely
“off camera.” The discussion does not
recognize that for the last 20 years the
practice of science has been carefully
documented by ethnographers who
have fundamentally modified the defi-
nition of scientific practice in the natu-
ral sciences-work that has clarified
what it means to be scientific.
Before the current debate can draw
on the resources of the anthropology of
scientific practice, we must consider
two obstacles. The first concerns the
confidence of anthropologists in their
own discipline; the second involves the
relative emphasis of methodology over
content in definitions of science.
Four Stages of Anthropology
There exists in anthropology a Law
of Four Stages, which 1 call “Sahlins’s
Law,” as a tribute to Marshall Sahlins.
Each stage represents a change in the
relative balance between anthropology
and its subject matter. In the first stage,
the cultures of the ‘world were hardy Observing the careful purijication process of a peptide chemistry laboratory, ethno-
and anthropology weak or barely exist- graphers can document all elements they find interesting: rituals, discipline, body
ing. In the second, as anthropology techniques, hierarchy (here between technicians and PhDs) and material culture.
gathered momentum, gained chairs, They can also observe such new phenomena as the natural agencies produced
journals, endowments and field sites, through the cultural achievements of scientists. It is not the symbolic representation
its subject matter-traditional cul- of nature that is at work here, but nature itselJL:(Photo courtesy of the Salk Institute.)
See Science on page 5

tures-weakened and began to disap-
pear. It was as if the ethnographer-an
antithetical King Midas-had been
cursed with the gift of turning every-
thing to dust. This was the turning
point of Tristes Tropiques. By the third
stage, anthropology had reached the
peak of its power, yet unable to bear
the vision of this field of ruins and
gnawed by the guilt of shouldering “the
White Man’s burden,” it began to deni-
grate its own achievements and to
deconstruct itself to death. In a symbol-
ic sacrificial rite of atonement, anthro-
pology thus endured the very destruc-
tion it thought it had wrought upon its
vanishing subject matter! Postmod-
ernism prevailed.
We are now entering a fourth stage,
where the presumed vanishing cultures
are very much present. They are active,
vibrant, inventive, proliferating in all
directions, reinventing their past, sub-
verting their own exoticism and turning
to their own good the very anthropolo-
gy so disavowed by postmodern criti-
cism: “reanthropologizing” whole
regions of the earth supposed to have
faded into the monotonous homogene-
ity of a global market and deterritorial-
ized capitalism. It is in this fourth stage
that, for the first time, we may antici-
pate both strong cultures and a strong
1 discipline of anthropology. The newly
reinvented cultures are much too robust
to dwell upon our past misdeeds or pre-
1 sent lack of heart. The current situation
needs an anthropology willing to
embrace its formidable achievements
and to further extend its many valuable
insights.
Methodology vs Content
But then we confront the second
obstacle, that antiquated theory of sci-
ence to which the discipline clings
even more vigorously than to its cher-
ished guilt. Although there is consider-
able discussion about the scientific
method in introductory social science
textbooks, methodology never appears
in the natural science textbooks of
physics or chemistry. To be sure, epis-
temologists and philosophers of sci-
ence write a great deal about “the sci-
entific method,” but natural scien-
tists-sensibly e n o u g h 4 0 not bother
to read them. It is only the social scien-
tists who, insecure about their own sci-
entific status, take these discussions
seriously.
Rigor in science is more a question
of logistics than method, for objectivi-
ty, certainty and control are required
only when masses of data must be
stored, transported, combined or mod-
eled. “Scientific” has two different
meanings: logistics on the one hand,
and content on the other. Science is at
its .most productive when it defines
new agencies that share their life with a
scientific community. It is, thus, only
the social scientists who put the cart
before the horse by discussing the rigor
and certainty of a fact, before having
defined the new agencies under exami-
nation. Such methodological rhetoric in
anthropology carries no more meaning
than the construction of a highway, six
lanes wide and several hundred meters
long, located in the middle of nowhere.
It would be robust and “figorous,” yet
where would it lead? What kind of traf-
fic is it designed to carry? These are
the questions that take precedence over
the actual dimensions of the road.
Once we have rejected the useless
dreams of methodological rigor, where
does anthropology stand if it tries to
imitate not the purity of what it imag-
ines in the natural sciences, but the real
productivity of those disciplines-
embodied in the new agencies they
mobilize? One would never guess from
the discussion thus far in the AN that
anthropology has elicited, mobilized,
stored, documented, archived, com-
piled, theorized, assembled and mod-
eled more new facts and agencies than
many disciplines purported to be more
“natural,” “rigorous” or “scientific.”
The description of kula is on a par
with that of the black holes. The com-
plex systems of social alliances are as
imaginative as the complex evolution-
ary scenarios conceived for the selfish
genes. Understanding the theology of
Australian Aborigines is as important
as charting the great undersea rifts. m;
Trobriand land tenure system is as
interesting a scientific objective as the
polar icecap drilling. If we talk about
what matters in a definition of a sci-
ence-innovation in the agencies that
furnish our world-anthropology might
well be close to the top of the disci-
plinary pecking order.
Celebrate Our Achievements
Even more absurd in this debate
about over scientific anthropology, is
the fact that no one has acknowledged
that anthropology is already one of the
most advanced, productive and scien-
tific of all the disciplines-natural or
social. Ethnographers despair of reach-
ing what they and their forebears have
already achieved: a bewildering redefi-
nition of the humans who populate the
world! Imagine a world stripped of all
anthropological discoveries. What a
desert it would be without this scientif-
ic discipline. Only physics matches
anthropology’s ability to generate a
multiplicity of agencies and hybrids.
The guilt-ridden anthropologist will
say, “Yes, maybe we have accumulated
lots of factoids, but they are not scien-
tific enough. They are too controver-
sial, immersed in narratives, dependent
on shaky protocols and highly idiosyn-
cratic. We should be ashamed of not
living up to the ideals of epistemolo-
gy.”
A careful reading of the ethnogra-
phies that describe natural science
practices would soothe the worries of
our profession. What could be more
local, idiosyncratic, fragile or collec-
tive than the painstaking extraction of
data from a nerve ending by neurobiol-
ogists described by Michael Lynch in
Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science:
A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in
a Research Laboratory (1985)? If you
believe that only anthropologists are
caught by the narrative dilemma of
their own reflexivity, read the extraor-
dinary description of mathematical
practice by Bryan Rotman, Ad Infini-
tum: The Ghost in Turing Machine-
Taking God out of Mathematics and
Putting the Body Back In (1994). Rot-
man describes how the textual Mathe-
matician sends the semiotic slave
Agent to perform automatic calcula-
tions that no one else has the time or
the energy to do. There is even a com-
parative ethnography of formalism in
Helen Watson’s work on the arithmetic
of Aborigines and Australian white set-
tlers. The more that the experimental
sciences, formalism and intellectual
technologies are studied by anthropolo-
gists, the less intimidated and the more
optimistic anthropology as a science
among the scientific disciplines should
become.
Scientific Anthropology
It is now possible to draw upon the
subfield of the anthropology of science
to define what a scientific application
of anthropology should be.
Positive Reflexion
The ethnography of science channels
the reflexivity i n the practice of
anthropology in a productive and com-
parative fashion, and away from the
self-destructive denigration of its own
accomplishments. To be sure, the actu-
al practice of anthropology must be put
back into the picture: the building of
museums, writing of diaries, funding
patterns of public agencies, styling of
narratives, interviewing informants,
even the passage from fieldworker to
tenured professor. None of this descrip-
tion weakens the quality of information
produced, however. Anthropology,
along with biology, chemistry, physics,
economics and statistics, produces a
universality solid enough for all the
practical purposes in the sciences.
Broader Integration
By integrating anthropology within a
broader comparison of all disciplines-
natural and social-we can eliminate
the question of the “Outside Observer”
which has so paralyzed epistemological
debates in our field. There is nothing
especially cold or uninvolved in the
production of science. On the contrary,
experimental scientists are involved,
close to their subject matter and pas-
sionate. What matters in the production
of facts is not the “Objective Gaze,”
but what properties might be main-
tained in the transformation of informa-
tion through successive media. More
information is being produced by trans-
porting data from the Pacific Islands to
the University of Chicago, from there
to the card files compiled by LCvi-
Straws in Paris, back to the PhD pro-
gram in New Zealand and thence to the
texts used in schools throughout the
Pacific. The more mediations, the bet-
ter. This is as true for chemistry as for
botany, psychology and ethnography.
To believe that involvement, transfor-
mation, adulteration, reformatting and
displacement weaken a “Pure Science”
of “Pure Objectivity” is to have never
seen a practicing scientist at work.
Political Promotion
Through the new history and sociol-
ogy of the sciences, anthropologists
can learn the many ways in which poli-
tics, instead of being deleterious to the
sciences, is in fact beneficial. Contrary
to the claims of epistemologists who
try to separate science from politics
and facts from values, no scientific dis-
cipline could have survived had this
been the case. The slogan, “Science is
politics pursued by other means,” actu-
ally helps science because it insists on
Anthropology NewsletfedMarch 1996 5
those other means necessary to build a
society. To reason in 1996 that science
is a fortress that could survive only if it
were more insulated from the larger
society-and that anthropology is taint-
ed because of its innumerable ties to
the. larger collective-is more than a
sin, it is absurd. Such reasoning ignores
the history of the natural sciences, in
which science does not occur as a for-
eign body within a culture; it is part
and parcel of the collective.
Modern Redefinition
Finally, the comparative basis
offered by an anthropology of all the
scientific disciplines, affords a new
perspective on the question of what it is
to be a natural or ‘social science. If
anthropology is the study of cultures, it
covers only a tiny part of its program if
it leaves nature outside its purview.
This includes the unexamined extrater-
ritoriality, extrasociality, extrapolitics
granted nature by the Occidental self in
its understanding of its history. Ethno-
sciences take a completely different
shape when they begin to include
physics, chemistry, botany, high tech-
nology and medicine. We no longer
study belief systems, but also truth sys-
tems, where the very notion of belief
evaporates revealing a new field that I
have called “symmetric anthropology.”
To be or not to be scientific is not
the question. Rather than assuming this
defensive posture, I believe that it is
much more productive to be offen-
sive-in all meanings of the word-
and to include both the natural and
social sciences in the usual field sites
of anthropology. It is here that anthro-
pology’s next discoveries lie, and here
that we-according to Sahlins’s Law-
can be finally of use to our subject mat-
ter.
[Trained first as a philosopher and
later as an anthropologist in the Ivory
Coast, Bruno Latour has turned tofield
studies of scientists, engineers-and
innovators in general. He has recently
published We Have Never Been Mod-
em ( I 993) on the notion of a symmetric
anthropology that would include sci-
ence, and Aramis or the Love of Tech-
nology (1996), which details the life
and demise of an automatic subway
system. The anthropology of science is
part of a larger community called “sci-
ence studies” that includes historians,
philosophers, sociologists, psycholo-
gists and economists of science and
technology. Latour refers interested
readers to Sharon Traweek’s Beam
Times and Life Times: The World of
High Energy Physicists (1988) and A
Pickering’s Science as Practice and
Culture (1992). Latour wishes to thank
Monique Stark for kindly correcting his
English in this text.]