Warwick Anderson - 'A Deakinite Knowledge Regime for STS?'

Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney

When Vincanne Adams and I were writing about postcolonial science studies for the 2007 iteration of the Science and Technology Studies Handbook, we observed that:

The work of Helen Verran, David Turnbull, and their students has been especially influential; they could be said to represent a ‘Melbourne-Deakin school’ of postcolonial science studies, shaped by local enthusiasm for ethnohistory, and building on constructivist and feminist approaches to the study of science and technology.[1]

We wanted to draw attention, in particular, to how Verran (a colleague of mine at Melbourne in the 1990s) had studied, in collaboration with the Yolngu people of Northeast Arnhem Land, the interaction of local knowledge practices, one ‘traditional’, the other ‘scientific’, in order to explain ‘the politics waged over ontic/epistemic commitments’. Her goal was not just to exploit the splits and contradictions of Western rationality; she aimed toward a community that ‘accepts that it shares imaginaries and articulates those imaginaries as part of recognizing the myriad hybrid assemblages with which we constitute our worlds’.[2] Note the interpolation: ‘in collaboration with the Yolngu people’. In my opinion, this ‘ethnographic’ engagement, or anthropological sensibility—this ethic of recognition and respect—is what really distinguished the Deakin tradition of science and technology studies (STS). It was never simply a branch office of Edinburgh, Paris, or Ithaca, NY. As an observer of local developments in STS during the 1980s and some of the 1990s, I saw the Deakin approach aligning more attractively with the concurrent ‘anthrohistory’ of Greg Dening (La Trobe and Melbourne), the incipient settler colonial critique of Patrick Wolfe (La Trobe), and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (Melbourne) work in subaltern studies and postcolonial theory.[3] But that’s just me, I suppose. For obscure reasons, many Deakin alumni often prefer to trace their genealogy to Bruno Latour, Steve Shapin, and Simon Schaffer, a dreary family romance if ever there was one. I happen to think they come from a more distinguished lineage—which might well include American ethnomethodology, but certainly is not limited to it.

The Deakin STS program focussed on producing superb teaching materials, which sadly have proven somewhat evanescent. They deserve to be read and cited far more frequently. That said, Wade Chambers and David Turnbull also were writing a number of important articles that reframed the understanding of how science travels and gets embedded in different places.[4] There are two books, both published belatedly, I regard as the main research fruits of the Deakin program: Verran’s brilliant Science and an African Logic (2001); and Turnbull’s Tricksters, Masons, and Cartographers (2000).[5] Even if not performing actual ethnography, Verran and Turnbull think creatively in an anthropological way, deliberating perceptively and riskily along the lines of Dening and Wolfe, as well as George Marcus and James Clifford, and the other enthusiasts for cultural critique.[6] Evidently, Max Charlesworth’s concern for Aboriginal spiritual thinking was an additional proximate influence.[7] As Verran points out, an orientation of this sort tended to make their project a hermeneutic exercise, not an epistemological inquiry. In any case, it allowed people at Deakin (and in the Top End) to do STS differently from anyone else, it meant they could construct a critical cognitive apparatus—a decolonising approach—unlike any other in the field. In the circumstances, Life Among the Scientists (1989) was an unfortunate diversion from their project. It reads as a rather desperate, and clearly conflicted, effort to reproduce Latour’s and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life (1979), without the panache or insight.[8] To this day, it functions as a shibboleth at the Hall Institute to ward off science studies scholars. My sense is that it might have succeeded if the authors had done some serious ethnography, rather than bungle the attempt at conjuring up ‘theory’.

There must have been something in the air over Port Phillip Bay in the 1980s. At La Trobe and Melbourne universities, ethnohistory and critical studies of settler colonialism were all the rage. Subaltern and postcolonial studies also permeated much scholarship in these institutions. Even the rather staid History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Melbourne was conducting conferences on scientific colonialism and challenging the conventional imperial accounting for the spread of science. There can be little doubt that contemporary Indigenous defiance of settler colonial claims to sovereignty was stimulating and informing this intellectual vitality. Accordingly, the Deakin STS program was one of the more robust and compelling examples of local endeavours to decolonise methodologies. As such, it should be recognised as an antecedent of the recent ontological turn in cultural anthropology, science studies, and Indigenous scholarship.[9] Thus, we must remember Deakin as a forerunner, trying not so much to give voice to others as to create an audience who might want to hear them.