Chandra Mukerji

A Fragile Power: Scientists and the State

When the National Science Foundation funds research about the earths crust and the Department of Energy supports studies on the disposal of nuclear wastes, what do they expect for their money? Most scientists believe that in such cases the government wants information for immediate use or directions for seeking future benefits from nature. Challenging this oversimplified view, Chandra Mukerji depicts a more complex interdependence between science and the state. She uses vivid examples from the heavily funded field of oceanography, particularly from recent work on seafloor hot springs and on ocean disposal of nuclear wastes, to raise questions about science as it is practiced and financed today. She finds that scientists act less as purveyors of knowledge to the government than as an elite and highly skilled talent pool retained to give legitimacy to U.S. policies and programs: scientists allow their authority to be projected onto government officials who use scientific ideas for political purposes. Writing in a crisp and jargon-free style, Mukerji reveals the peculiar mix of autonomy and dependency defined for researchers after World War II--a mix that has changed since then but that continues to shape the practical conduct of science. Scientists use their control over the scientific content of research to convince themselves of their autonomy and to achieve some power in their dealings with funding agencies, but they remain fundamentally dependent on the state. Mukerji argues that they constitute a kind of reserve force, like the Army or Navy reserves, paid by the government to do research only because science is politically essential to the workings of the modern state. This book isessential reading not only for sociologists and students of science and society, and for oceanographers, but also for every scientist whose work depends directly or indirectly on government support.

Bullshitting: Road Lore Among Hitchhikers

This paper explores how people create tall tales to make frustrating activities “engaging“–as Goffman uses that term. The data are the stories hitchhikers tell one another about their travels-what they call “bullshit.“ The analysis of these data suggests that bullshitting provides people with a way of managing their problems. By using difficult situations as bases for heroic autobiographical stories, people can use their problems to produce a positive self-image. Hitchhikers appear to use these stories as partial solutions to their adolescent identity problems.

The Territorial State as a Figured World of Power: Strategics, Logistics, and Impersonal Rule*

The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenth-century France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics, was fundamental to state formation. Logistical activity circumvented patrimonial networks, disempowering the nobility and supporting a new regime of impersonal rule: the modern, territorial state.

The political mobilization of nature in seventeenth-century French formal gardens

According to Saint Simon, Louis XIV on his deathbed expressed regret about the pain caused others by his overwhelming passion for building and war. For Saint Simon, this is only a passingly sympathetic moment. He is more concerned about the suspect moral character of a king who would inflict so much suffering on his people to follow his own passion and who would wait until death to renounce his weakness. The deathbed confession is followed soon in Saint Simons diary by the descriptions of the general glee in France and throughout Europe that followed the announcement of the kings death a mirror, we suspect, of the authors own elation.1

Material practices of domination: Christian humanism, the built environment, and techniques of Western power

While all human communities must engage the natural world for survival, the degree and kind of legitimate intervention into the landscape has varied enormously historically and culturally even just in the western tradition. Materialist traditions of analysis have suggested that social organization is deeply embedded in patterns of extracting and using natural resources, making what is done with land fundamentally important to social life. Cultural traditions of social explanation have made it clear that even material relations are cultural forms.

Having the Authority to Know Decision-Making on Student Film Crews

This paper examines how people gain authority over areas of expert knowledge and use this authority to claim the right to make decisions in small group situations. Students who enter film crews are ranked and typed as members both of a school and of a crew. They claim decision-making authority based on these ranks. Thus, depending on the social characteristics students bring to crews, the authority and decision-making patterns of these groups can vary widely.

Intelligent Uses of Engineering and the Legitimacy of State Power

The destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11 not only brought terrorism to the forefront of politics, but also made visible the political significance of engineering. The targeting of a skyscraper and use of commercial airplanes for the attack were frightening because they displayed not just political rage, but an unexpected intelligence. Osama Bin Laden raised the scary specter of a terrorist engineer. Scholars in Science and Technology Studies have argued before that hybrids and built environments could be tools of power, but the significance of these analyses became newly evident on 9/11.

Tacit Knowledge and Classical Technique in Seventeenth-Century France: Hydraulic Cement as a Living Practice among Masons and Military Engineers

Roman technical practices that went out of common use in northern Europe during the Middle Ages were long thought to be forgotten after the fall of Rome. But in limited areas some of these techniques remained part of living traditions. One of them is the subject of this paper: the formula for hydraulic mortar. Its “rediscovery” in the eighteenth century was assumed to be a recovery of a lost art, but was really part of a longer process of reproduction and formalization. The “secret” of hydraulic mortar was apparently maintained throughout the Middle Ages as tacit knowledge, and techniques for making it were already starting to be formalized in the seventeenth century. Hydraulic cement had been used extensively by the Romans. It was employed, for example, to build a new seaport for the city of Rome at Ostia. Masons added a volcanic ash called pozzolan to the conventional mixture of lime and sand to create cement that would harden under water. This material was durable as well as versatile, so the Romans also used it for construction on land, and even added pozzolan to their plaster.1

Mass culture and the modern world-system

Pictorial prints1 were the first form of mass-produced images for popular markets. These mass-produced cultural goods first appeared and gained their distinctive identity in the Renaissance at the same time that elite art was becoming a distinct cultural form,2 thereby questioning much of the literature which treats mass culture as a child of the eighteenth century.3 By considering fine art as a product of the Renaissance and mass culture as a product of the industrial revolution, scholars have made it easy to argue that mass culture is a degraded derivative of elite culture.4 But if these two forms of culture emerged simultaneously, then students of mass culture will have to rethink the relationship between mass and elite culture.

Scientific techniques and learning: laboratory signatures and the practice of oceanography

We tend to think of techniques as practical means for getting things done in the world, moving objects from here to there, looking more deeply into some sample of tissue, or measuring the salinity of water samples. However, I want to argue in this chapter that techniques are also and importantly means for projecting meaning into the world by acting upon it. When a scientist studies a sample of seawater for chemical components, water in the area where the sample was collected is given qualities that it did not have before. It gains a scientific identity based upon quantitative and qualitative measures that come from science. The chemicals were there already, but the meaning of the chemicals was not. In the acts of gathering and measuring, nature is laden with the culture of science.