The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader ed. by Sandra Harding (review)

Colonialism stands discredited in most intellectual circles, yet scientific and technological institutions and practices seemingly resist transformation in a postcolonial, globalizing world. These challenges are addressed in Sandra Harding's new reader, which contains an original introductory essay plus twenty-five academic articles, all published previously. Most of these articles are not easily accessed from JSTOR and Project Muse, as they originated in edited volumes that are hard to find. For this reason, Harding's reader makes an especially helpful contribution to faculty and students at institutions that lack large libraries. The book will serve admirably in classes for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in which the history and future of global science and technology policy are discussed.

The introductory essay by Harding lays the groundwork for the selections in the rest of the volume. She reminds readers that the complicity of scientists in the extension of empires was recognized, fifty years ago, by writers from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the theoretician Frantz Fanon to the empiricist historian Philip Curtin. According to Harding, decades of scholarship have shown that Western scientists participated in the exploitation of non-Westerners, while imperial governments used science as an instrument of domination. Not only that, but "triumphalist" Western science was actually impoverished through its insensitivity to local knowledge. Better science—and better science and technology policymaking— would result from greater awareness. Still, according to Harding, STS scholars tend to pay insufficient attention to the non-Western world, while mainstream university and corporate researchers appear to be indifferent. This volume aims to set the record straight.

In her introduction, Harding expresses the hope that standpoint theory, established mainly through the study of gender, will help scholars make necessary methodological breakthroughs. "In feminist hands," she argues, "the standpoint strategy directed researchers to begin thinking about any and every project from the standpoint of women's lives instead of from the conceptual frameworks of research disciplines or of the social institutions that such disciplines serve" (p. 19). Scholars of postcolonial STS may extend the same insight to their own studies, while hopefully avoiding the trap of essentializing their subjects.

Harding's selections will inspire seminar discussions about how history and STS may be enriched through a better understanding of the wider "world of sciences." The publisher's website gives a full listing of the chapters and contributors; here, it is worth mentioning some notable ones in order to provide readers with the flavor of the volume. Mary Terrall illustrates the many ways in which Western scientific explorers, learning about the world beyond Europe, were concerned to improve their masculinity. Londa Schiebinger and Lucile Brockway follow the trails of European naturalists in the Americas who were "bioprospecting" for drugs among the Native Americans and African slaves. Judith Carney shows how African knowledge of rice cultivation influenced the extension of the crop in South Carolina. The richness of non-Western knowledge is shown in a variety of essays, especially by Ward Goodenough, who provides a detailed account of the skilled indigenous navigators of the western Caroline Islands. Jenny Reardon shows the ways in which people from a variety of places and backgrounds objected to the race-based formulations of the otherwise well-meaning Human Genome Diversity Project. David Hess charts a way forward, calling for "epistemic modernization," which he defines as "the process by which the agendas, concepts, and methods of scientific research are opened up to the scrutiny, influence, and participation of users, patients, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), social movements, ethnic minority groups, women and other social groups that represent perspectives on knowledge that may be different from those of economic and political elites and those of mainstream scientists" (p. 420). Such an inclusive approach to science may seem impractical and idealistic, yet many of the articles in this volume suggest that before industrialization and imperialism, much of the world's science and technology was produced in precisely that way.