21A.340J / STS.075J
Technology and Culture
Fall 2003 MIT
Tuesdays 7-10PM Room 16-220
Dr. Stefan Helmreich Anthropology Program
Office: 16-225 Telephone: 39343
Office hours: Tuesdays 1:30-2:30PM or by appointment email: sgh2@mit.edu
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Course Description
This course examines relationships among technology, culture, and politics in a variety of social and historical settings ranging from 19th century factories to 21st century techno dance floors, from colonial Melanesia to capitalist Massachusetts. We organize our discussions around three broad questions, corresponding to three syllabus themes: What cultural effects and risks follow from treating biology as technology? How have computers and information technologies changed the ways we think about ourselves? How are politics built into the infrastructures within which we live? We will be interested in how technologies have been used both to facilitate and undermine relations of inequality, and in whether technology has produced a better world, and for whom.
Requirements
Students will write three 5-7 page papers. Each represents 30% of the course grade. No emailed papers accepted. Papers correspond to three thematic sections of the syllabus and will integrate class readings with a topic of each student’s choosing. Students will also be evaluated on class participation, including discussion and in-class writing exercises (10% of course grade). Punctual attendance is obligatory. There is no final.
Required Texts in MIT Coop
Martin, Emily. 2001. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, second edition. Boston: Beacon Press (first edition 1987).
Petryna, Adriana. 2002. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Helmreich, Stefan. 2000. Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, Updated Edition with a New Preface. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1996. Aramis, or The Love of Technology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Stephenson, Neal. 1995. The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. New York: Bantam Books.
chapters and articles listed below, designated with R, for “Reader” (at MIT Copy Tech)
Recommended Text
Bellamy, Edward. 1888. Looking Backward: 2000-1887. New York: Signet, 2000.
INTRODUCTORY THEMES
1. September 9
Introduction: Looking forward to Boston in the Year 2000 from the Year 1887
2. September 16
Theories of Technology and Culture
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1948. Magic, Science and Religion. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 17-35. R
Hugh Gusterson. 1996. Nuclear Weapons Testing: Scientific Experiment as Political Ritual. In Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge. Laura Nader, ed. New York: Routledge, 131-147. R
Marx, Karl. 1867. The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret. In Capital, vol. 1. Translated from the German by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976, 163-177. R
51 pages
film excerpt: The Matrix
THEME 1: BIOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY
3. September 23
Technologies of Sex and Gender: Reproduction and Birth
Martin, Emily. 2001. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, third edition. Boston: Beacon Press (first edition 1987).
film excerpt: The Handmaid’s Tale
4. September 30
Technologies of Race: Medical Experimentation
Kapsalis, Terri. 1997. Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction. In Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum. Durham: Duke University Press, 31-59. R
Jones, James. 1993. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment: “A Moral Astigmatism.” In The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future. Sandra Harding, ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, 275-286. R
Landecker, Hannah. 2000. Immortality, In Vitro: A History of the HeLa Cell Line. In Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics. Paul Brodwin, ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 53-72. R
61 pages
video: The Deadly Deception
5. October 7
Technologies of Death: Radiation
Petryna, Adriana. 2002. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
6. October 14
Genetically Modified Food
Massey, Adrianne. 2001. Crops, Genes, and Evolution. Gastonomica, Summer 20-29. R
Wynne, Brian. 2001. Creating Public Alienation: Expert Cultures of Risk and Ethics on GMOs. Science as Culture 10(4):445-481. R
Haraway, Donna. 1997. Mice Into Wormholes: A Technoscience Fugue in Two Parts. In Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_ Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 55-63, 79-94. R
72 pages
video: Stolen Harvest
BIOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY PAPER DUE
For this paper, you should write about a technological instrumentalization of biology, either another example of something we discussed in this thematic unit (reproduction, race, radiation, GM food) or something we did not read about (e.g. cloning, bioterrorism). You must use some of the theoretical tools offered in the readings for this section (e.g. Marx, Malinowski, Martin, Haraway) to analyze your case. Provide a bibliography, formatted in the way you see sources cited here in the syllabus.
THEME 2: COMPUTERS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES
7. October 21
Our Machines, Ourselves: Computers, Subjectivity, Politics
Edwards, Paul N. 1990. The Army and the Microworld: Computers and the Politics of Gender Identity. Signs 16(1):102-127. R
Forsythe, Diana E. 2001. Engineering Knowledge: The Construction of Knowledge in Artificial Intelligence. In Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 35-58. R
Pfaffenberger, Bryan. 1988. The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution. Anthropological Quarterly 61(1):39-47. R
Helmreich, Stefan. 2001. Artificial Life, Inc.: Darwin and Commodity Fetishism from Santa Fe to Silicon Valley. Science as Culture 10(4):483-504. R
79 pages
film excerpts: 2001, AI
8. October 28
Simulating Life In Silico: Silicon Second Nature
Helmreich, Stefan. 2000. Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, updated edition with a new preface. Berkeley: University of California Press.
film excerpt: Jurassic Park
9. November 4
Our Machines, Our Music: From White Noise to Black Noise
Pinch, Trevor and Frank Trocco. 2002. Introduction: Sculpting Sound, Chapter 1: Subterranean Homesick Blues, Chapter 3: Shaping the Synthesizer. In Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1-31, 53-69. R
Rose, Tricia. 1994. Soul Sonic Forces: Technology, Orality, and Black Cultural Practice in Rap Music. In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, MA: Wesleyan University Press, 62-96. R
Williams, Ben. 2001. Black Secret Technology: Detroit Techno and the Information Age. In Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. Alondra Nelson and Thuy Linh N. Tu with Alicia Headlam Hines, eds. New York: NYU Press, 154-176. R
106 pages
film excerpt: Scratch
November 11
No Class: Veterans’ Day Vacation
10. November 18
Internet Infrastructure
Edwards, Paul. 1998. Y2K: Millennial Reflections on Computers as Infrastructure. History & Technology 15:7-29. Online: www.si.umich.edu/~pne/y2k.htm#
Stephenson, Neal. 1996. Mother Earth Mother Board: The Hacker Tourist Ventures Forth across the Wide and Wondrous Meatspace of Three Continents, Chronicling the Laying of the Longest Wire on Earth. WIRED 4(12):97-160.
Online: www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
Sundaram, Ravi. 2001. Recycling Modernity: Pirate Electronic Cultures in India. Online: www.sarai.net/journal/reader1.html
Kumar, Amitava. 2001. Temporary Access: The Indian H-1B Worker in the United States. In Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. Alondra Nelson and Thuy Linh N. Tu with Alicia Headlam Hines, eds. New York: NYU Press, 76-87. R
~98 pages
COMPUTERS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES PAPER DUE
For this paper, you should write about some aspect of computer and information technology, either another example of something we discussed in this thematic unit (computers and the self, artificial life, electronic music) or something we did not read about (e.g. cell phones, computer games). You must use some of the theoretical tools offered in the readings for this section (e.g. Edwards, Pfaffenberger, Rose) to analyze your case. Provide a bibliography, formatted in the way you see sources cited here in the syllabus.
THEME 3: TECHNOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND SOCIAL FORMS
11. November 25
Trains
Latour, Bruno. 1996. Aramis, or The Love of Technology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
12. December 2
Networking the Ocean
Crawford, T. Hugh. 1997. Networking the (Non) Human: Moby-Dick, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Bruno Latour. Configurations 5(1):1-21.
Online: muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/v005/5.1crawford.html
Höhler, Sabine. 2001. Floating Pieces, Deep Sea, Full Measure: Spatial Relations in Oceanography as a “Field Science.” Unpublished paper. Presented at the meetings of the Society for the Social Study of Science, Cambridge, MA. To be distributed in class.
Hamilton-Patterson, James. 1992. Charts and Naming. In The Great Deep: The Sea and Its Thresholds. New York: Henry Holt, 9-46. R
~75 pages
13. December 9
Nanotechnology
Stephenson, Neal. 1995. The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. New York: Bantam Books.
TECHNOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND SOCIAL FORMS PAPER DUE
For this paper, return to our discussions of Edward Bellamy’s technological utopia Looking Backward and, referring also to Neal Stephenson’s dystopia, The Diamond Age, imagine a future technology and the sorts of technological infrastructure and social forms that might accompany it. You must use some of the theoretical tools offered in the readings for this section (e.g. Latour) to think through your ideas. Provide a bibliography, formatted in the way you see sources cited here in the syllabus. Also be prepared to deliver a brief account of your paper on our final day of class, December 9. More than being part of your participation grade, this informal presentation will be a convivial way to revisit and extend with your classmates some of the concepts we’ve encountered this term.