A study of research scientists working at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute.

Johannes Fabian takes an historical look at anthropology to demonstrate the emergence, transformation, and differentiation of uses of Time. Anthropological theory, from its beginnings in philosophy and linguistics, has provided Western thought and politics with deep-rooted images and convictions amounting to a kind of political cosmology. The anthropologists are 'here and now, ' the objects of their discourse are 'there and then, ' and the existence of the 'other'-- the 'savage', 'the 'primitive, ' the 'underdeveloped' world -- in the same (...) time as ours is regularly denied. While written for the anthropologist, Time and the Other applies equally well to the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, and history. (shrink)

In this book, James A. Boon investigates the history, dialectics and practice of the symbolic analysis of cultural diversity. His aim is to formulate a general comparative approach to the study of symbolic processes, integrating the major different theories about symbolic forms that have been developed by other writers.

In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.

Language and the birth of "literature." A preface to transgression. Language to infinity. The father's "no." Fantasia of the library.--Counter-memory: the philosophy of difference. What is an author? Nietzsche, genealogy, history. Theatrum philosophicum.--Practice: knowledge and power. History of systems of thought. Intellectuals and power. Revolutionary action: "until now.".

The anthropological approach is the central focus of this study. Laboratories are looked upon with the innocent eye of the traveller in exotic lands, and the societies found in these places are observed with the objective yet compassionate eye of the visitor from a quite other cultural milieu. There are many surprises that await us if we enter a laboratory in this frame of mind... This study is a realistic enterprise, an attempt to truly represent the social order of life (...) in laboratories and institutes of research, just as they are. By bringing the philosophical issues to the surface as matters not of prejudgement but as matters of concern, Karin Knorr-Cetina has developed the first really positive challenge to the philosophy of science since the days of paradigms and internal definitions of meanings. (shrink)

In this book Bruno Latour brings together these different approaches to provide a lively and challenging analysis of science, demonstrating how social context..

The Predicament of Culture is a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in postcolonial contexts. In discussions of ethnography, surrealism, museums, and emergent tribal arts, Clifford probes the late twentieth-century predicament of living simultaneously within, between, and after culture.

SummaryThe convening of the first three Solvay Chemistry Conferences in Brussels from 1922–1928 marked an important turning point for the discipline of chemistry. Whereas much of nineteenth-century chemical endeavour had focused on compositional and functional analysis of chemical compounds, many leaders in chemistry were turning to questions of molecular dynamics by the early twentieth century. Two competing schools of chemical dynamics, which were represented at the Solvay Conferences, were a predominantly English group (Lowry, Lapworth, Robinson, Ingold) who worked out electron (...) and ionic interpretations of organic reaction mechanisms, and a French group (Perrin, Job) who developed a generalized radiation hypothesis of reaction activation. While differences in conceptual and stylistic approach separated the two schools, they agreed on the need to apply contemporary physical theory to old chemical problems, and to develop a theoretical chemistry complementary to theoretical physics. (shrink)

Anthropology is both outside of history and within it. Histories of anthropology tend to summarise particular authors' intellectual differences; but, as Marc Augé argues in this book, first published in English in 1982, these differences may in fact be intrinsically derived from intellectual divisions within anthropology as obvious as they are irreconcilable. Augé identifies, in contemporary debates in French anthropology, the paths that perhaps allow us to transcend these oppositions. On doing so, he explores and clarifies the relationship that anthropology (...) enjoys with history, on the intellectual plane, and with politics, on the historical plane. His argument is stimulating and challenging, and will interest all social anthropologists and sociologists concerned with the theoretical foundations of their disciplines, as well as demonstrating to historians and political scientists what anthropology has to offer them. (shrink)

Particle physicists constitute a community of sophisticated mythmakers—explicators of the nature of matter who forever alter our views of space and time. But who are these people? What is their world really like? Traweek, a bold observer of culture, opens the door to this unusual domain and offers us a glimpse into the inner sanctum.

Anthropology has gained in popularity, penetrating the ivy walls of literature departments, philosophical debates, historical texts. It is for this reason that it is useful to reflect on what has happened in this funny discipline, peddling otherness and debating human nature. Culture has become a rallying point for a number of disciplines and the joining of a historical perspective seems to be a giant step forward in the emergence of a more powerful human science. It is not just academics that (...) have become interested in culture, but even the state and the World Bank. Technologies, social formations, myths and mentalities have all become areas of inquiry. (shrink)

An attempt is made to establish the historical context in which the structure and function of haemoglobin were investigated by X-ray crystallographers in the 1940s and 50s. It is concluded that until the 1960s the interpretations of the data of crystallographic investigations were dependent upon the results of applying traditional techniques of physical and organic chemistry. In the case of haemoglobin, no less than in those of smaller organic molecules, crystallographic studies in the 1940s and early 50s served to validate, (...) and metricize conclusions already suggested or adopted on other grounds, but the subsequent tracing of the actual conformation of the polypeptide chains in the globin portion of the molecule was a unique achievement of the X-ray crystallographers and marked the beginning of the independent establishment of structures by this profession. The impact of this achievement upon the structure-function relationships of haemoglobin is discussed briefly. (shrink)