The Object(s) of Culture [electronic resource] : Bruno Latour and the Relationship between Science and Culture / William E. Doll, Jr. and Stephen Petrina.
This paper begins by describing the type of newspaper stories about global warming, AIDS vaccines, and frozen embryos that are neither pure science nor pure politics. The paper states that the French sociologist and commentator on cultural trends, Bruno Latour, calls such stories "hybrid articl...
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| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
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1999.
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| Summary: | This paper begins by describing the type of newspaper stories about global warming, AIDS vaccines, and frozen embryos that are neither pure science nor pure politics. The paper states that the French sociologist and commentator on cultural trends, Bruno Latour, calls such stories "hybrid articles." It suggests that the purity of the traditional disciplines has not prepared people for dealing with these hybridized networks, which have no history, no parentage, either scientifically or socially. A perusal of U.S. newspapers unearths the same type of stories. An article on Congress' attempt to establish a National Defense Shield, for example, intermixes technology, politics, economics, and patriotism. The paper describes Latour's latest book, "ARAMIS or the Love of Technology" (1996), which explores the same questions posed by "Star Wars," but with all the true facts in the novel placed in a fictitious frame. It then considers Martin Heidegger's seminal, 1950s essay, "The Question concerning Technology" and its relation to Latour's novel. Conclusions are that in this process of building a "nature-culture" network, Latour intends to keep and maintain the autonomy of both science and society, while at the same time blending them into a new whole, a whole where all have voices. Includes 4 notes; contains 9 references. (BT) |
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| Item Description: | ERIC Document Number: ED434074. ERIC Note: Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (Montreal, Quebec, Canada, April 19-23, 1999). |
| Physical Description: | 14 p. |