Fearnley is identifying a shift in the epistemology and practices of scientists as they move from the lab to the field and poses the question of what this might mean for anthropologists of science: "In this essay, I argue that the changing sites and objects of contemporary influenza research are shifting the epistemological relation of the sciences to nature as scientists in the field come to see natural sites as human artifacts" (30). In this particular case, he documents a shift in virologists' conceptions of the "domestic-wild" interface that was influenced by the practices of goose breeders at Poyang Lake. Due to market demands, these breeders had developed a practice of "cultivating wildness" that problematized the virologists domestic-wild binary opposition. The virologists needed to abandon their previous categories of analysis--as well as the clean, controlled world of the laboratory--in order to come to grips with the messiness of the field and the open, emergent interaction of nature and society.
According to Fearnly, this also forces anthropologists to rethink the role of scientists and the lab in production of scientific knowledge. Laboratory studies, like those inspired by Latour, are not sufficient for understanding the production of scientific knowledge in the field. Lab sciences are about enclosure (detachment, purification, etc.). Field sciences, when they are at their best, account for, analyze, and engender openness. In a sense, Fearnly is describing an anthropologization of science, where they take on an “ethic of openness to new theory, to new topics, and to the possibility that the very categories of analysis that we have relied on in the past should be set aside” (Fortun 2003, 172). The production of world altering science is not confined to the lab and scientists are not the only human actors that create or alter the world. Field scientists, of both the social and natural varieties, are researching moving targets, ontologically unstable worlds that are impacted by diverse actors.
