Anthropology Matters Journal, 2005, Vol 7 (1).

Special Issue: New methods in the anthropology of science and technology (ASA postgraduate panel 2003).

Anthropology Matters would like to thank Rachel Borgman from Shimer College, USA for her editioral assistance in preparing this edition of the journal.

Editorial

Mattia Fumanti, Hannah Knox and Susanne Langer (University of Manchester)

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Articles

Negotiating development: the nuclear episode in the Sundarbans of West Bengal.

Amites Mukhopadhyay (University of Kalyani)

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This paper examines the dynamics of anti-nuclear campaigns in the Sundarbans of West Bengal. By focusing on a voluntary agency's (in this case, the Development Forum) engagement with the anti-nuclear protest, it seeks to interrogate the standard environmental narrative in South Asia, which frequently characterizes the environmental movements as the people's spontaneous emancipation from a destructive and monolithic state. This paper argues against such dualistic notions of state and society and documents local level negotiations in the wake of plans to set up a nuclear power plant; negotiations that render problematic theories treating the state or people as some kind of unified and monolithic unit.

Imitative participation and the politics of 'joining in': paid work as a methodological issue.

Hannah Knox (University of Manchester)

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In this paper I explore the ways in which participation as a research methodology is challenged by new kinds of anthropological enquiry and consider, from my own experiences, what the implications of these challenges might be for our expectations of how participation contributes to the construction of anthropological knowledge. I look at the ways in which different forms of participation affect what it is possible for the ethnographer to know, and look at the value attributed to not only what we know but also how we come to know it. This has important implications for our understanding of the interrelationship between different categories of knowledge and how to situate anthropological knowledge in relation to the processes of participation from which it is in large part derived.

Protecting Patients-Managing Persons.

Susanne Langer (Department of Social Anthropology, Manchester University)

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This paper is based on my experience of applying for ethics approval from two different Local Research Ethics Committees (LRECs) in the context of fieldwork with people suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS) in the Manchester area. I argue that LRECs are a form of audit intended to remove relationships from the decision process and to change practice. By focusing on the category of 'informed consent' and how it is conceptually and bureaucratically constructed, I analyse the ways in which ethics committees are able to preserve the notion of individual choice while at the same time defining its parameters. In so doing, ethics committees interfere with the efforts of people, such as the ones I worked with, to become productive in culturally-specific ways, for instance by being involved in research. I conclude by reflecting on how the removal of the relational dimension of research through bureaucratic technologies, such as ethics committees, affects anthropologists

Internet clinical trials: examining new disciplinary experiments in health care.

Jenny Advocat (Monash University, Australia)

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Internet-based clinical trials are the latest example of how technology is involved in altering the relationships between medical research institutions and society. This has the potential to change drastically the creation, delivery and access to health care research. An anthropology of science, technology and medicine is well-suited to examine the ways in which relationships (such as doctor-patient) are rearticulated in light of the deployment of new technologies in biomedicine. This paper examines how internet-based clinical trials may create socio-technical networks that form new kinds of subjects. Drawing on actor network theory, I discuss how the internet is co-opted for health research as an experimental disciplinary technology to constitute, normalize and shape the conduct of nomadic consumer-subjects for the purposes of developing new regimes of governing the health of populations.

Visions of the future: technology and imagination in Hungarian civil society.

Tom Wormald (University of Manchester)

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The question of 'new' methods in the anthropology of science and technology is perhaps better phrased as the need to improve our understanding of experiences-as both participants and observers-of these fields of enquiry. This paper is based on ethnographic research on the role of computers in Hungarian civil society at the Hungarian Telecottage Association (HTA), a movement seeking to promote locally-oriented technological development with the aim of empowering and improving the lives of local people. The members of this movement are geographically dispersed, each representing a telecottage in their own village community. They are united organizationally through a mixture of face-to-face and internet-based interaction.

The particular ethnographic case examined in this paper deals with how the geographical spaces between the members of the HTA are constructed in part through the processes of imagining and conjuring up spaces and relationships between spaces. It focuses on a dispute about control of the organization's website, and examines the different relationships between the geographic dispersal of the movement and the ways it is imagined specifically through the technology. The idea of moral technology is introduced, showing how, what are often referred to in a simplistic and generalized way as the discourses of technology, can be concretely understood in the case of Hungarian civil society.

Studying the role of the imagination in this process highlights how differently imagined ideas about what technology can 'do', what it is 'for' and how it should be 'innovated' lead to structural changes within the HTA, with lasting effects. These ideas are not based on a unified belief in technology but rather on precisely the opposite. Thus, in this paper I argue that it is only through the changes in the organization's power structures that ensue from debates about differently imagined technological properties that these ideas are in the end made commensurate.