FOUR GENEALOGIES FOR A RECOMBINANT ANTHROPOLOGY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

INTRODUCTORY OVERTURE The call of and for an Anthropology of Science and Technology requires a new generation of robust switches to translate legacy genealogies to public futures. Just as we have moved from Mertonian sociologies of science (stressing the regulative ideals of organized skepticism, disinterested objectivity, universalism, and communal ownership of ideas) to analyses of what scientists actually do (the slogans of the “new sociologies of science,” i.e., social studies of knowledge (SSK), and “social construction” of technology [SCOT], and of the anthropologically informed ethnographies of science and technology of the 1990s), so too we need now to formulate anthropologies of science and technology that attend to both the cultural switches of the heterogeneous communities within which sciences are cultured and technologies are peopled, and to the reflexive social institutions within which medical, environmental, informational, and other technosciences must increasingly operate. Public futures are playing out in culturally and socially contested sites around the world where knowledges are generated and infrastructures are assembled, empowering some and disempowering others, calling for effective engagement across cultural difference. These public futures can be seen emerging in today’s sciences of climate change and biodiversity built on knowledge of the Amazon, Indonesia, or the environment of circumpolar populations (Callison 2007; Lahsen 2001, 2004, 2005; Lowe 2006; Tsing 2005); in the way knowledge of the risks of