Laura Nader

Naked Science : Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge

Naked Science is about contested domains and includes different science cultures: physics, molecular biology, primatology, immunology, ecology, medical environmental, mathematical and navigational domains. While the volume rests on the assumption that science is not autonomous, the book is distinguished by its global perspective. Examining knowledge systems within a planetary frame forces thinking about boundaries that silence or affect knowledge-building. Consideration of ethnoscience and technoscience research within a common framework is overdue for raising questions about deeply held beliefs and assumptions we all carry about scientific knowledge. We need a perspective on how to regard different science traditions because public controversies should not be about a glorified science or a despicable science.

The life of the law : anthropological projects

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Evolving an Ethnography of Law: A Personal Document 2. Lawyers and Anthropologists 3. Hegemonic Processes in Law: Colonial to Contemporary 4. The Plaintiff: A User Theory Epilogue Bibliography Index

Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women

Presently there is a worldwide concern for improving the status of women. Some of this concern has come from the West. However, the implementation of strategies to &dquo;improve&dquo; women’s lives has moved out from national policies to the agenda at the United Nations. A central dogmal in both non-Western and Western states is that Western economic development and industrialization will improve the condition of Third World women. There is also a widespread belief that women in the United States and Western European countries are better off vis-a-vis their menfolk than their sisters in societies that are not

Sidney W. Mintz Lecture for 1995: Controlling Processes Tracing the Dynamic Components of Power

Ideas about culture are interwoven with notions of control and the dynamics of power. To show how controlling processes work to construct and institutionalize culture, I examine three ethnographic examples of different types of control‐‐‐(1) moving people to see harmony rather than justice as desirable, (2) inducing women to undergo body‐altering surgery under the illusion of free choice, and (3) dismissing the context of scientific work by emphasizing an idealized version of science. The processes involved are partly tailored to the projects at hand and partly reflections of larger cultural configurations. Any society undergoing rapid, continuous change is framed by the social organizations of colonialism and/or industrialism, but on close analysis we see that there is a flow of power and a link between ideas, institutions, and human agency whereby power is double‐edged and simultaneously centered and decentered.

Ethnography as theory

Ethnography is never mere description, rather it is a theory of describing that has always been controversial as to the what and how thus inspiring a dynamic intellectual process. The process has been methodologically eclectic and innovative, governed by both consensual and outdated rules. Throughout more than hundred years of Anglo-American ethnography, observation has been combined with a wide variety of theoretical outlooks from structured-functionalist to critical writings.

Dimensions of the “people problem” in energy research and “the” factual basis of dispersed energy futures

Those of us advocating adaptive behavior in times of scarcity and change of resources need to be more aware of the roles we are playing and of the ideas that influence our actions. Some important dimensions of the “people problem” often appear in binary opposition: institutional constraints vs individual freedom, credible vs non-credible, tangible vs abstract, restricted vs global time perspective, specialist vs generalist, voluntary vs involuntary, and progress vs decline or status quo. Several of these dimensions were central to our understanding of two transitional mechanisms in California: the Residential Building Code and the exploration of the potential of dispersed electric generators. The “people problems” of energy reach beyond the technical-science problems, and beyond educating the little people in the value of efficiency, conservation, and the impending exhaustion of fossil fuels. Indeed, they are central to any compilation of the factual basis of dispersed energy futures. Experts and decision-makers need to look within themselves for an improved understanding of what constitutes “the” energy problem and, indeed, what constitutes “the” factual basis for energy planning.

THE FRAMING OF TEENAGE HEALTH CARE: ORGANIZATIONS, CULTURE, AND CONTROL

Adolescent health is one of the most polemical healthissues that has swept the United States in recentyears. This study is about documenting the process ofa project on teenage sex, drug, and alcohol abuse ina small rural California town. It illustrates adynamic set of concerns that impinge on health issues:development and underdevelopment, experts and laypeople, young and old, in a context of thetransformation of a rural economy to a prison-basedindustry. It is also about covert forms of control,pacification, burnout, and teenagers caught in thecrossfire between bureaucratic institutions andcontradictory messages about adolescent health as theycorrespond to changing conditions betweeninstitutional power holders.

Moving On—Comprehending Anthropologies of Law

In 1965 I began my article on “The Anthropological Study of Law” with an assertion: “It is my belief that we are just now on the growing edge of an anthropological understanding of law in its various manifestations.” Such is still my belief. I went on to confess that “the anthropological study of law has not to date affected, in any grand way at least, the theory and methodology of the anthropological discipline…”(Nader 1965: 1). Such is still true. On the other hand, the anthropological study of law has had a good deal of impact on allied fields of law and social inquiry. “Our” terrain—the non-Western other—our approaches and methods such as participant observation, as well as what we have learned about social and cultural processes through ethnography, filtered into other disciplines. Notions of critique and comparison, culture and local knowledge, and various ideas about pluralism and perception also moved horizontally into sister disciplines. Indeed, an interest in one of our key subject matters—the disputing process—spread beyond the academic world.

Homo Sapiens and the Longue Durée

This essay connects anthropology with the spirit and substance of André Gunder Franks world history project, emphasizing the need to integrate efforts to understand global colonization by homo sapiens with the expansion of powerful complex societies, sometimes called empires. It also pursues Franks ‘hegemonic truncation in the world system’ by comparing structural similarities of the Mongols and the Europeans. Backwards history, as Frank and others call it, moves from the present to the past as a method for understanding continuing Euro-American expansions.

The anthropologist, the state, the empire and the ‘tribe’

This review of Akbar Ahmeds The thistle and the drone finds that the book opens new dimensions for understanding the relations between state and peripheral groups.