Cultures without culturalism: The making of scientific knowledge

Karine Chemla (1) , Evelyn Fox Keller

1 SPHERE (UMR_7219) - Sciences, Philosophie, Histoire

Cultural accounts of scientific ideas and practices have increasingly come to be welcomed as a corrective to previous—and still widely held—theories of scientific knowledge and practices as universal. The editors caution, however, against the temptation to overgeneralize the work of culture, and to lapse into a kind of essentialism that flattens the range and variety of scientific work. The book refers to this tendency as culturalism. The contributors to the volume model a new path where historicized and cultural accounts of scientific practice retain their specificity and complexity without falling into the traps of culturalism . They examine, among other issues, the potential of using notions of culture to study behavior in financial markets; the ideology, organization, and practice of earthquake monitoring and prediction during China's Cultural Revolution; the history of quadratic equations in China; and how studying the "glass ceiling" and employment discrimination became accepted in the social sciences. Cultures without culturalism demonstrates the need to understand the work of culture as a fluid and dynamic process that directly both shapes and is shaped by scientific practice.

Mots clés: Cultural studies of science; Cultural essentialism; Feminist studies

Domaines: Histoire; Histoire, Philosophie et Sociologie des sciences

Karine Chemla (Dir.). Cultures without culturalism: The making of scientific knowledge. Duke University Press, 2017, 978-0-8223-6372-9. ⟨halshs-01509281⟩