Culture Matters by Richard J Ellis

Author:Richard J Ellis [Ellis, Richard J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9780429980787
Google: kppLDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-02-12T03:35:53+00:00

Growth of Black Boxes

The opposite of trying vainly to formalize a shifting flow of substance is formalization so successful that we can forget the substance almost all the time. To understand routinization of new scientific knowledge into black boxes or machines (Latour 1987; Collins 1994a), it is useful to contrast the mechanics of rigid bodies in the nineteenth century with social anthropology in the twentieth century (sociology would do as well, but the argument is longer; see Cole 1994). It is clear that rigid bodies (steel roller bearings, gears, crowbars, camshafts, and the like) usually bear constant physical relationships to one another.3 A wide variety of mechanical processes can be built into reliable machines, representing blueprints accurately in a real mechanism, with specified machining tolerances, specifications in the purchase orders for motors, and so on. Once a mechanical process has been built into formalized pieces of the culture of machine design, only engineers need know what is there in order to design better machines, and machinists need to know how to create material machines that mirror the formalized culture of design. The design is then an algorithm, and the operation of the machine is a routine governed automatically by the algorithm.

These machines then can be fed into laboratory or industrial procedure as “black boxes” and can be bought on the market or produced in laboratory machine shops with little scientist input. They then can be combined into mechanical systems to study new physical or chemical phenomena, without having to think, for example, about how the telescope follows the sun or how the motor turns the fan in the wind tunnel.

But in anthropology the phenomena are constantly changing, as, for example, when the Shona move into Harare, study in English-language secondary schools, buy condoms (or do not but could), and treat their sewage rather than leaving it near the path to the maize field. One cannot therefore draw a blueprint of a Shona culture machine, producing the appropriate cultural products and actions, and build and operate its real-world equivalent to help one study, say, “cultural contact” under controlled conditions. Thus there are almost no black boxes in anthropology that we do not have to study any more because we already know all that is inside them. The flow of new substance into anthropology is as great as in the jury room, but anthropology has not committed itself to formalize control of all the inputs, so it does not quite produce a Wigmore on evidence (1940). Nineteenth-century mechanics becomes dull, “mere” engineering, whereas twentieth-century anthropology becomes a source of historical archives on the passing of Shona culture.

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