Anthropology of Science

Graduate Seminar in Cultural Anthropology

Offered at the University of California, Riverside, Fall 2011

In recent decades, sociocultural anthropologists have taken the ethnographic methods they developed for studying exotic peoples in exotic locales and applied them to scientific communities and practice. Anthropology has become one of many disciplines contributing to and drawing from the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS). This course provides an introduction to STS, and focuses on two questions germane to the relation between STS and anthropology. First, how do recent developments in biotechnology upset boundaries between nature and culture, systems of classification, and notions of kinship? Second, how can STS engage with postcolonial conditions and both hybrid and radically other forms of knowledge?

A few notes

With some serious misgivings, I have decided to host materials for this course on iLearn (UCR's Blackboard installation) rather than on a public site. Feel free to contact me with questions.