Cultures without Culturalism: The Making of Scientific Knowledge by ed. Karine Chemla and Evelyn Fox Keller (review)

What thread joins together the evaluation of derivative financial commodities on Wall Street, quantum field theory in postwar Japan, a Cameroonian doctor's alternative treatment of AIDS, American sociologists' investigation of the glass ceiling for women in the workplace, a naturalist's enactment of paleontology in Napoleonic Paris, biologists' in vitro experimentation with cells, China's earthquake monitoring during the Cultural Revolution, and square-root computation in ancient China? Despite the obvious answer—they are all related to science—Karine Chemla, Evelyn Fox Keller, and twelve other contributors to this edited volume suggest a common keyword for all these topics: culture. Culture has been a popular notion to invoke in historical and contemporary studies of science since the rise of the sociological and anthropological approaches in the late twentieth century. In the humanities and social sciences at large, the concept of culture is diverse, broad, vexing, ambiguous, and allencompassing—in Clifford Geertz's famous quote of Clyde Kluckhohn's words, for example, culture has at least eleven different meanings (Geertz 1973: 4–5). Similarly, cultural studies of science have often been associated with investigations into its humanistic aspects that cannot be reduced to nature, logic, or personal psychology.

But the contributors to this book mean something more specific when they use the term culture. To them, culture refers to particular ways, shared by a group of individuals, of conceiving science, undertaking scientific activities, and making scientific knowledge. These ways of construing and doing things are somehow distinctive (from other ways by other groups) and stable (over time). While it is possible to transport these ways of being, knowing, and doing across geographic, political, or disciplinary boundaries, they maintain degrees of exclusiveness and tenacity and often become characteristics of a collective.

This idea is not new to historians, philosophers, or sociologists of science. In past decades they have come up with a number of powerful concepts aligning with this cultural perspective on science: Ian Hacking's extension of Alistair Crombie's "styles of reasoning," Karin Knorr Cetina's "epistemic cultures," Keller's "epistemological cultures," Peter Galison's "subcultures," and Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer's "forms of life," to name but a few. We can even trace the idea further back, to Thomas Kuhn's "paradigm" and Ludwik Fleck's "Denkkollektiv." It would not be exaggerating to state that these concepts about culture have developed into the disciplinary core of the history of science.

To Chemla and Keller, however, the issues of culture in science are far from settled. Some long-standing questions remain unanswered or are transformed into more pressing ones. New questions emerge in response to recent trends in historiography. Meanings and significances of culture need clarification and elaboration. And the methodological implications of culture to historical research demand further examination. Addressing these issues and reconsidering culture as an analytical category in the history of science are the aims of Cultures without Culturalism. Edited and introduced by Chemla and Keller, this book is a collection of fourteen articles ranging from theoretical reflections to case studies in various disciplines (mathematics, physical sciences, life sciences, medicine, social sciences), geographical areas (Europe, North America, East Asia, Africa), and times (from the first century to the present). To tackle different aspects of culture in sciences, the volume is divided into four parts: stating the problem, distinguishing the many dimensions of encultured practice, the making of scientific cultures, and what is at stake.

Part I raises a basic problem of using culture as an angle from which to analyze science: the risk of essentialism. While it makes sense to note that reduction to mathematical principles is a popular method in physics, or that numerous nineteenth-century Scottish scientists held a common-sensual empiricist view, simply labeling physics as mathematical reduction or nineteenth-century Scottish scientists as empiricists is an overgeneralization, for it ignores the diversity and heterogeneity of physics as...