Cultures without Culturalism: The Making of Scientific Knowledge

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,...