From the beginning comes the missing masses

Cross-posted at http://alternative.asu.edu

It is perhaps appropriate to begin by narrating how I picked up the line of thought: Alternative Imagination of Science and Technology. Besides the identity politics as a woman of color and non-English speaker, I was mainly attracted to the idea of studying science in non-Western context through postcolonial and feminist accounts of sciences. Since this is not an academic essay, I will elaborate my encounter through personal anecdotes.

I’ll never forget what Said wrote in the preface to Orientalism in 2003 edition:

“Therefore, it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the reductively simplifying and confining ones, based on mutual hostility, that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long.” (Said 2003: xxiv)

Said is of course speaking to the scholarly community in Middle East studies. My disciplinary background approached his writing differently and interpreted as “it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the reductively simplifying and conflicting ones, based on exclusion and dominance, that have prevailed in science and science studies for so long.” The interpretative flexibility of this text is underscored by the ubiquitous characteristics of Western knowledge-making enterprise to reduce and exclude other, exotic, foreign ways of knowing. It is incumbent upon any conscientious intellectual not to be blinded by his/her academic genealogy and think outside of the box. I see it almost as a cogenital responsibility for those of us who are baptized to the intellectual voyage in the West to complicate the epistemological formula entrenched in Western discourses of nature, science and machineries of knowing.

“So what’s wrong with reduction?” As some of my friends in the physics department asked (After all, these people are trained to reduce nature to a few powerful formulas and equations). Besides the imperialistic and unbearable hubris behind the claim to reduce, the pivotal problem with the reductionist approach is that it twisted our understanding of how nature works. Now that nature is treated as if its individual components were isolated and unrelated, it is easy to separate the distribution of cost-benefit and cause-effect. If there’s a shortage of oil, go get some from other parts of the world as if the world can be truncated into individual pieces. Nature doesn’t work this way. We live in an interconnected circuit in which cause-effect/cost-benefit are interwoven into one big yarn. It’s important to remember that this yarn is the common breeding ground for humans on this planet we called Earth, and the cause-effect/cost-benefit are distributed across geopolitical and disciplinary borders. The social movement in Myanmar, the political turmoil in Tibet, the natural disaster in China bear direct consequences to the socio-econ-political climate in the US as much as the intellectual currents taking place in humanities affects the research practices in sciences. The world is a whole. Anthropologists come to grips with this organic principle pretty much from the inception of the discipline.

It seems to me that we have just begun to pick up the missing masses of how we know what we know.