Deep sea science: A field or a lab?
In my proposed research, I am doing an ethnographic study among The Deep Submergence Laboratory and specificly among the Deep Submergence Operations Group (DSOG) that build and operate these remotely controlled submersibles. The group is responsible for their maintenance, navigation, piloting, and engineering. I am interested in looking at their practice of producing and mediating visual culture and the agency of social actors involved. I am interested in looking at visual images as having social agency and want to argue that visual images influence formation of social relations among scientists and others. I expect to investigate deep sea images as agents within the social processes of interaction of scientists that produce, circulate, and represent these images. Following Gell (1998), I want to propose that we can address questions of the efficacy of scientific images created of the deep ocean, where scientific images are perceived as a special form of technology. Gell argues that such technology functions as a device “for securing the acquiescence of individuals in the network of intentionalities in which they are enmeshed” (Gell 1998:43)
Visual images have revolutionized navigation, communication, fishing, and scientific data gathering in the underwater environment (see Rosenblum and Kamgar-Parsi 1994). The interest in visual images, however, conveyed by various disciplinary fields within the natural sciences is not in the social or cultural context of its image production and use. Nor does it seem in the literature on scientific visual images that they are granted social agency that influences formation of social relations. Rather it is limited to a mere passive, descriptive, and objective/documentary view where the concept of the "creator" (Thomas 2001:5), the medium (Ginsburg 2002) or "the image" is not problematized (McQuire 1998:4). This (tele)epistemology of visual representations is a branch out of the Cartesian perspectivalism developed in the Middle Ages that withdrew emotional entanglement, and I would argue cultural context as well, from the image maker with the objects depicted. (Jay 1988). The image maker was a craftsman that was detached from the scene he/she was drawing and, at the same time, he/she objectified nature and depicted it as "it was."
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) is the worlds largest independent oceanographic research center located in the village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Its mission statement is broad and open ended but focused on doing research “at the frontiers of ocean science” to “develop and effectively communicate a fundamental understanding of the processes and characteristics governing how the oceans function and how they interact with the Earth as a whole” (www.whoi.edu/home/about/ mission_statement.html) WHOI has about 650 staff members with more than half doing research in its many laboratories at Woods Hole and its many floating research vessels or “floating laboratories” as they refer to them.
WHOI is divided into several departmental units. One of them is The Deep Submergence Laboratory (DSL) but the laboratory is part of the U.S. National Deep Submergence Facility operated by WHOI for the U.S. ocean sciences community. It has about 34 scientists, engineers, researchers and administrators. The DSL has an operational group, the DSOG group, that operates the remotely controlled submercible Jason ll. Jason ll was launched in 2002. It can go down to 6.500 meters depth and can access 98% of the ocean floor. Jason ll can stay on the ocean floor for days, sending images and data to the surface ship. The control van for Jason produces real time integrated information on multiple screens that is very difficult, if not impossible, to recreate after the fact. Only fractions of the data is therefore available for scientists after the submergence of Jason. The data available is defined prior to the expedition in collaboration between the scientists and the DSOG group.
Citadels and rhizomes
Downey has argued that science is a distinctly structured domain of activity that “acquires significance through contrasts with other domains, such as kinship, religion, politics, and economics.” (1988:30) Like some of those domains, science has acquired a privileged and idealized status through its decontextualization and has been “understood by its ideology rather than its practice, lacking in reflexivity.” (Nader 1996:3) The anthropology of science on the other hand explores the social and cultural aspects of the practice and institutional arrangements of science. Although the anthropology of science is a special field that has been formed during the last two decades or so, anthropologists’ interest in the concept of “science” as a social and cultural phenomenon goes back further. Malinowski, for instance, dealt with the question of primitive knowledge and whether or not it was irrational in his book Magic, Science and Religion (1948)
According to Martin anthropology has several novel approaches to the study of science that all point us toward the direction of how scientific knowledge is produced across a large array of cultural and social domains (1998:29). He suggests at least two metaphors in exploring this claim. The first one is science as a medival citadel or the popular notion about a culture without a culture, where scientists are constructing knowledge from nature and society but give the impression that their methods and theories exploring these phenomena are not constructed. Another component of this metaphor is that the knowledge constructed pours out of the citadel into the social and cultural landscape outside its walls. Martin suggests that anthropologists can critically question these assumptions where he/she takes them outside the citadel and investigates how they are sustained in a wider community. Secondly, the anthropologists can also question the simplistic image of the scientist who ‘lives’ within the citadel. Who is he and to whom does he connect? (1998:26). Martin criticizes the idealist image of the scientist that Bruno Latour creates in his book Science in Action (1987), but Latour depict scientists as very calculated and rational individuals. Martin on the other hand finds this depiction too limited in terms of strategy, power relations, gender and lived experience (1998:27). Third, is the claim by Martin that Latour and others suggest that scientific knowledge is produced with variety of inscription methods like writing, graphs and so forth. Martin on the other hand suggest that there might be other methods or processes that produce scientific knowledge, processes that are forging scientists acting, being and thinking that they bring with them to these inscriptions. (1998:28) Ethnographic research by anthropologists has shown that the notion about the citadel is rather limited in terms of describing the knowledge being produced and how it is disseminated into the larger framework of society.
The other metaphor that Martin uses, science as rhizomes is somewhat closer to the anthropological notion about science. Rhizomes “has an underground rootlike stem that sends up leafy shoots from the upper surface and roots from the lower….rhizomes can be broken entirely apart into segments and still grow up again as complete organisms” (1998:31). According to Martin this captures the discontinuous, fractured and nonlinear relationships between science and culture where every individual is contributing, one way or another, in build scientific knowledge of some sort. (Martin 1998:34).
Deep sea science a field or a lab?
Deep sea science is a term that embraces a number of scientific disciplines within the natural sciences like biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and geophysical oceanography. The category "deep sea science" implies that it is a homogenous group, but the field is hierarchically stratified and socially and culturally complex (Mukerji 1989). Mukerji states that ocean researchers seem an odd group of scientists as:
“[T]hey work in submarines as well as labs; after all they go to sea much of the time and work in laboratories on board ship that cannot compare to the more sophisticated ones on shore. But in needing expensive and sophisticated equipment, they are quite representative of large numbers of researchers in the greater scientific community. They are like space researchers who are dependent on rockets to get themselves or their experiments into space, and physicists and astronomers who find themselves only able to do their work when they can get “onto the machines” (telescopes, particle accelerators, or whatever) that they need for their experiments or observations” (Mukerji 1989:15).
There has not been much written about the skilled laboratory work of ocean researchers, but those who have refer to the laboratory in a way that resembles rhizomes more than a citadel (see Bernard and Killworth n.d., Goodwin 1995). Wenk (1995), for instance, who spent years researching nuclear submarine technique with the U.S. Navy, refers to laboratory work of deep sea scientists as challenging for cultural reasons. Wenk states that “problems with marital discord, infidelity, unruly children, in-laws, illness, alcohol abuse, and the like” inevitably affected the performance of his colleagues in the lab where he worked (1995:35). And Mukerji talks specifically about the laboratory work that research assistants, research engineers, and engineering scientists are part and parcel of the practice of doing deep sea science. Within the community of deep sea scientists there is, however, much derogation towards the technical skills of research assistants, research engineers, and engineering scientists. Mukerji argues that these technicians are socially invisible because of the high status that chief scientists have in American culture. The myth of the scientist, which Mukerji claims the scientists themselves seem to believe, is that he/she is a genius that with intelligence unravels the mysteries of phenomena, with little or no help from lab technicians and equipment (1989:135). Mukerji, on the other hand, argues further that this myth is fundamentally flawed, as when the social organization of the laboratories is observed, one cannot exist socially without the other.
Knorr-Cetina argues that the culture of the laboratory is a set of relations between enhanced daily culture and the enhanced agent in the laboratory that has been trained in how to go about enquiry like a technical device that produces knowledge (1992). Scientists in laboratories process nature through sequences of states that transform and enhance the natural elements. In general terms, the laboratory science does not need to put up with objects as they are, as it can substitute all of its less literal or partial versions. Secondly, laboratory science does not need to accommodate the natural object where it is but can work on it at will in the laboratory. And third, laboratory science does not need to accommodate an event when it happens, as it has been pulled out of its natural environment or recreated for the purpose of continuous study (1992:117).
What laboratory studies suggest is that the laboratory is a means of changing the world-related-to-agents in ways which allow scientists to capitalize on their human constraints and social cultural restrictions. The laboratory is an enhanced environment which improves upon the natural order in relation to the social order. […] Laboratory studies suggest that [this improvement] rests upon the malleability of natural objects (1992:116. Italics in original).
An equivalent analysis has been done by Mukerji (1989:157) on how deep sea scientists "culturalize," to borrow a term from Helmreich (1998), nature in the laboratories. But deep sea scientists, for instance, the DSOG group that I propose to study, are digitizing and bringing in to a controlled environment biological and geographical information that bear resemblance to the real thing to some extent, but they are not it. In that sense we can characterize what deep sea science is as a lab, but to refer to a laboratory within deep sea science seems to be an established practice among scientists themselves and analysts, like Wenk and Mukerji. It is, on the other hand, a limited term in order to explain what kind of a scientific practice takes place within communities of deep sea scientists. A step in the direction of trying to clarify whether and to what extent we can talk about deep sea science as a field rather than lab is to mention few of the criticisms that laboratory studies have had from anthropological points of view.
Laboratory studies have been using ethnographic methods like participant observation since the 1970s, although they have mainly used literary theory as the main analytical tool. The seminal study by Latour and Woolgar (1979) has been influential in the sociology of science, science studies, and, to some extent, anthropology. Instead of discussing these studies, I will list some of the criticism that lab studies have been pounded with. Laboratory studies have been criticized on a number of things, like for the assumption that they argue that scientific reality is a consequence of scientific descriptions, like there is no reality prior to the discovery of it (Knorr-Cetina 2001[1995]:160-63). Anthropologists who are studying science are usually ultra sensitive to their own theoretical and methodological stance, although they are different in expressing their reflexive standpoints. Many of them seem to agree with the claim that their own research is situated knowledge (Haraway 1991) and just as theory laden as the scientific domains they are studying. Traweek’s work is, for instance, noteworthy (1992), as she is making an attempt to write "practice," which inevitably becomes reflexive, as scientists are always doing that, although that is missing from their accounts of the practice of doing science. Another criticism is that lab studies are not comprehensive enough to account for how agreements within the scientific community are being negotiated (Knorr-Cetina 2001[1995]:160-63). The picture that anthropology of science is painting of science is problematizing the idea of a scientific consensus or paradigm. Third is the criticism that lab studies ignore the social and cultural context of laboratories, including the political aspects of science and how that is influencing what goes on within the laboratories (Knorr-Cetina 2001[1995]:160-63). This is evident in terms of the technology that is being used in laboratories. Mukerji, for instance, states in her study that research engineers who have their own business in building machines for deep sea research and then sell/rent to laboratories are perceived by themselves and other "serious" scientists as serving science rather than as part of doing science. This belief, Mukerji argues, serves scientists in order to hold their position as hierarchically better positioned in terms of strengthening the myth of who does science, has power, gets prestige, and benefits financially more than the research engineers (1989:142). And lastly, anthropological studies within laboratories (cf. Traweek xxx, Helmreich xxx, Gusterson xxx) undermine the claim that knowledge is produced in laboratories, in a confined space, and then brought out to the world for consumption and appropriation. Anthropological studies include more in the frame (Layne 1998:12) and question arguments like the one made by Knorr-Cetina who characterizes laboratory studies as being studies of “unfinished knowledge” turned into constituted or finished product knowledge (2001[1995]).
Rather than investigating deep sea science as a lab, which is too limited due to reasons stated above, I prefer to approach it as a field as it comes closer to how I perceive what science is. Bourdieu's concept of "field" becomes appropriate tool in this context as it can be used to encompass the complexity of the domain of science. It also embodies mediating context between agency and structure and ways of how culture mediates relations at an institutional level. A field is a system of forces which exist between positions that stand in a hierachial relationship to each other by virtue of the access they afford to the goods or resources. These goods can be, according to Bourdieu, categorized as economic, capital, social and cultural capital. It is important to understand the concept of field in relation to Bourdieu’s outline of practice and habitus. His theory proposes a dialectical relationship between agency and structure, and habitus offers a research agenda for addressing the agency and structure issues. According to Bourdieu, practice connects action to culture, structure, and power, and action is “generated by the encounter between opportunities or constraints presented by situations and the durable dispositions that reflect the socialization of past experience, traditions, and habits that individuals bring to situations” (Swartz 1997:290). Each individual has a habitus or a set of structured dispositions acquired through a gradual process of inculcation and generated perceptions, practices, and attitudes that in turn incline social agents to act and react in certain ways (Swartz 1997: 95-116). What is of interest here is that individuals bring their own historically constituted habituses to different fields.
Looking at deep sea research as a field, it is necessary to examine the wider relational aspects of their individual habituses and other structures, such as institutions on various levels. In my research I perceive social agents as possible extensions or vehicles of agency of others, for instance, institutions of science, state, gender, education, and culture. The DSOG is a group of social agents that work closely with several other groups of scientists that they form social relationships with. These groups are the institutional framework that integrates them into processes of social practice with other scientists and other agents, a group of "lower level" scientists (Mukerji 1989) that build the visual technology of the submersibles. And third, a group of co-workers is the crew on board research vessels that supports the expeditions. The DSOG also works in research projects outside the institute collaborating with "transscientific fields" (Knorr-Cetina 1983) on building a variety of underwater solutions for deep ocean exploration. Members of the DSOG are presented publicly as being passive in the production of scientific data and also in communicating it to other members of the global scientific community. At the same time, they are central to the overall process of the "creation" of the globalizing force of social relations by means of a communication system that provides remote on-shore access for scientific collaboration and public outreach. The concept of field also draws insights to arenas of conflict and power relations which basically structure fields. According to Bourdieu, actors are strategies, although it has to be emphasized that Bourdieu does not think of strategy primarily as a conscious choice but as a tacit calculation of interest and pursuit of distinction.
Visual images have revolutionized navigation, communication, fishing, and scientific data gathering in the underwater environment (see Rosenblum and Kamgar-Parsi 1994). The interest in visual images, however, conveyed by various disciplinary fields within the natural sciences is not in the social or cultural context of its image production and use. Nor does it seem in the literature on scientific visual images that they are granted social agency that influences formation of social relations. Rather it is limited to a mere passive, descriptive, and objective/documentary view where the concept of the "creator" (Thomas 2001:5), the medium (Ginsburg 2002) or "the image" is not problematized (McQuire 1998:4). This (tele)epistemology of visual representations is a branch out of the Cartesian perspectivalism developed in the Middle Ages that withdrew emotional entanglement, and I would argue cultural context as well, from the image maker with the objects depicted. (Jay 1988). The image maker was a craftsman that was detached from the scene he/she was drawing and, at the same time, he/she objectified nature and depicted it as "it was."
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) is the worlds largest independent oceanographic research center located in the village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Its mission statement is broad and open ended but focused on doing research “at the frontiers of ocean science” to “develop and effectively communicate a fundamental understanding of the processes and characteristics governing how the oceans function and how they interact with the Earth as a whole” (www.whoi.edu/home/about/ mission_statement.html) WHOI has about 650 staff members with more than half doing research in its many laboratories at Woods Hole and its many floating research vessels or “floating laboratories” as they refer to them.
WHOI is divided into several departmental units. One of them is The Deep Submergence Laboratory (DSL) but the laboratory is part of the U.S. National Deep Submergence Facility operated by WHOI for the U.S. ocean sciences community. It has about 34 scientists, engineers, researchers and administrators. The DSL has an operational group, the DSOG group, that operates the remotely controlled submercible Jason ll. Jason ll was launched in 2002. It can go down to 6.500 meters depth and can access 98% of the ocean floor. Jason ll can stay on the ocean floor for days, sending images and data to the surface ship. The control van for Jason produces real time integrated information on multiple screens that is very difficult, if not impossible, to recreate after the fact. Only fractions of the data is therefore available for scientists after the submergence of Jason. The data available is defined prior to the expedition in collaboration between the scientists and the DSOG group.
Citadels and rhizomes
Downey has argued that science is a distinctly structured domain of activity that “acquires significance through contrasts with other domains, such as kinship, religion, politics, and economics.” (1988:30) Like some of those domains, science has acquired a privileged and idealized status through its decontextualization and has been “understood by its ideology rather than its practice, lacking in reflexivity.” (Nader 1996:3) The anthropology of science on the other hand explores the social and cultural aspects of the practice and institutional arrangements of science. Although the anthropology of science is a special field that has been formed during the last two decades or so, anthropologists’ interest in the concept of “science” as a social and cultural phenomenon goes back further. Malinowski, for instance, dealt with the question of primitive knowledge and whether or not it was irrational in his book Magic, Science and Religion (1948)
According to Martin anthropology has several novel approaches to the study of science that all point us toward the direction of how scientific knowledge is produced across a large array of cultural and social domains (1998:29). He suggests at least two metaphors in exploring this claim. The first one is science as a medival citadel or the popular notion about a culture without a culture, where scientists are constructing knowledge from nature and society but give the impression that their methods and theories exploring these phenomena are not constructed. Another component of this metaphor is that the knowledge constructed pours out of the citadel into the social and cultural landscape outside its walls. Martin suggests that anthropologists can critically question these assumptions where he/she takes them outside the citadel and investigates how they are sustained in a wider community. Secondly, the anthropologists can also question the simplistic image of the scientist who ‘lives’ within the citadel. Who is he and to whom does he connect? (1998:26). Martin criticizes the idealist image of the scientist that Bruno Latour creates in his book Science in Action (1987), but Latour depict scientists as very calculated and rational individuals. Martin on the other hand finds this depiction too limited in terms of strategy, power relations, gender and lived experience (1998:27). Third, is the claim by Martin that Latour and others suggest that scientific knowledge is produced with variety of inscription methods like writing, graphs and so forth. Martin on the other hand suggest that there might be other methods or processes that produce scientific knowledge, processes that are forging scientists acting, being and thinking that they bring with them to these inscriptions. (1998:28) Ethnographic research by anthropologists has shown that the notion about the citadel is rather limited in terms of describing the knowledge being produced and how it is disseminated into the larger framework of society.
The other metaphor that Martin uses, science as rhizomes is somewhat closer to the anthropological notion about science. Rhizomes “has an underground rootlike stem that sends up leafy shoots from the upper surface and roots from the lower….rhizomes can be broken entirely apart into segments and still grow up again as complete organisms” (1998:31). According to Martin this captures the discontinuous, fractured and nonlinear relationships between science and culture where every individual is contributing, one way or another, in build scientific knowledge of some sort. (Martin 1998:34).
Deep sea science a field or a lab?
Deep sea science is a term that embraces a number of scientific disciplines within the natural sciences like biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and geophysical oceanography. The category "deep sea science" implies that it is a homogenous group, but the field is hierarchically stratified and socially and culturally complex (Mukerji 1989). Mukerji states that ocean researchers seem an odd group of scientists as:
“[T]hey work in submarines as well as labs; after all they go to sea much of the time and work in laboratories on board ship that cannot compare to the more sophisticated ones on shore. But in needing expensive and sophisticated equipment, they are quite representative of large numbers of researchers in the greater scientific community. They are like space researchers who are dependent on rockets to get themselves or their experiments into space, and physicists and astronomers who find themselves only able to do their work when they can get “onto the machines” (telescopes, particle accelerators, or whatever) that they need for their experiments or observations” (Mukerji 1989:15).
There has not been much written about the skilled laboratory work of ocean researchers, but those who have refer to the laboratory in a way that resembles rhizomes more than a citadel (see Bernard and Killworth n.d., Goodwin 1995). Wenk (1995), for instance, who spent years researching nuclear submarine technique with the U.S. Navy, refers to laboratory work of deep sea scientists as challenging for cultural reasons. Wenk states that “problems with marital discord, infidelity, unruly children, in-laws, illness, alcohol abuse, and the like” inevitably affected the performance of his colleagues in the lab where he worked (1995:35). And Mukerji talks specifically about the laboratory work that research assistants, research engineers, and engineering scientists are part and parcel of the practice of doing deep sea science. Within the community of deep sea scientists there is, however, much derogation towards the technical skills of research assistants, research engineers, and engineering scientists. Mukerji argues that these technicians are socially invisible because of the high status that chief scientists have in American culture. The myth of the scientist, which Mukerji claims the scientists themselves seem to believe, is that he/she is a genius that with intelligence unravels the mysteries of phenomena, with little or no help from lab technicians and equipment (1989:135). Mukerji, on the other hand, argues further that this myth is fundamentally flawed, as when the social organization of the laboratories is observed, one cannot exist socially without the other.
Knorr-Cetina argues that the culture of the laboratory is a set of relations between enhanced daily culture and the enhanced agent in the laboratory that has been trained in how to go about enquiry like a technical device that produces knowledge (1992). Scientists in laboratories process nature through sequences of states that transform and enhance the natural elements. In general terms, the laboratory science does not need to put up with objects as they are, as it can substitute all of its less literal or partial versions. Secondly, laboratory science does not need to accommodate the natural object where it is but can work on it at will in the laboratory. And third, laboratory science does not need to accommodate an event when it happens, as it has been pulled out of its natural environment or recreated for the purpose of continuous study (1992:117).
What laboratory studies suggest is that the laboratory is a means of changing the world-related-to-agents in ways which allow scientists to capitalize on their human constraints and social cultural restrictions. The laboratory is an enhanced environment which improves upon the natural order in relation to the social order. […] Laboratory studies suggest that [this improvement] rests upon the malleability of natural objects (1992:116. Italics in original).
An equivalent analysis has been done by Mukerji (1989:157) on how deep sea scientists "culturalize," to borrow a term from Helmreich (1998), nature in the laboratories. But deep sea scientists, for instance, the DSOG group that I propose to study, are digitizing and bringing in to a controlled environment biological and geographical information that bear resemblance to the real thing to some extent, but they are not it. In that sense we can characterize what deep sea science is as a lab, but to refer to a laboratory within deep sea science seems to be an established practice among scientists themselves and analysts, like Wenk and Mukerji. It is, on the other hand, a limited term in order to explain what kind of a scientific practice takes place within communities of deep sea scientists. A step in the direction of trying to clarify whether and to what extent we can talk about deep sea science as a field rather than lab is to mention few of the criticisms that laboratory studies have had from anthropological points of view.
Laboratory studies have been using ethnographic methods like participant observation since the 1970s, although they have mainly used literary theory as the main analytical tool. The seminal study by Latour and Woolgar (1979) has been influential in the sociology of science, science studies, and, to some extent, anthropology. Instead of discussing these studies, I will list some of the criticism that lab studies have been pounded with. Laboratory studies have been criticized on a number of things, like for the assumption that they argue that scientific reality is a consequence of scientific descriptions, like there is no reality prior to the discovery of it (Knorr-Cetina 2001[1995]:160-63). Anthropologists who are studying science are usually ultra sensitive to their own theoretical and methodological stance, although they are different in expressing their reflexive standpoints. Many of them seem to agree with the claim that their own research is situated knowledge (Haraway 1991) and just as theory laden as the scientific domains they are studying. Traweek’s work is, for instance, noteworthy (1992), as she is making an attempt to write "practice," which inevitably becomes reflexive, as scientists are always doing that, although that is missing from their accounts of the practice of doing science. Another criticism is that lab studies are not comprehensive enough to account for how agreements within the scientific community are being negotiated (Knorr-Cetina 2001[1995]:160-63). The picture that anthropology of science is painting of science is problematizing the idea of a scientific consensus or paradigm. Third is the criticism that lab studies ignore the social and cultural context of laboratories, including the political aspects of science and how that is influencing what goes on within the laboratories (Knorr-Cetina 2001[1995]:160-63). This is evident in terms of the technology that is being used in laboratories. Mukerji, for instance, states in her study that research engineers who have their own business in building machines for deep sea research and then sell/rent to laboratories are perceived by themselves and other "serious" scientists as serving science rather than as part of doing science. This belief, Mukerji argues, serves scientists in order to hold their position as hierarchically better positioned in terms of strengthening the myth of who does science, has power, gets prestige, and benefits financially more than the research engineers (1989:142). And lastly, anthropological studies within laboratories (cf. Traweek xxx, Helmreich xxx, Gusterson xxx) undermine the claim that knowledge is produced in laboratories, in a confined space, and then brought out to the world for consumption and appropriation. Anthropological studies include more in the frame (Layne 1998:12) and question arguments like the one made by Knorr-Cetina who characterizes laboratory studies as being studies of “unfinished knowledge” turned into constituted or finished product knowledge (2001[1995]).
Rather than investigating deep sea science as a lab, which is too limited due to reasons stated above, I prefer to approach it as a field as it comes closer to how I perceive what science is. Bourdieu's concept of "field" becomes appropriate tool in this context as it can be used to encompass the complexity of the domain of science. It also embodies mediating context between agency and structure and ways of how culture mediates relations at an institutional level. A field is a system of forces which exist between positions that stand in a hierachial relationship to each other by virtue of the access they afford to the goods or resources. These goods can be, according to Bourdieu, categorized as economic, capital, social and cultural capital. It is important to understand the concept of field in relation to Bourdieu’s outline of practice and habitus. His theory proposes a dialectical relationship between agency and structure, and habitus offers a research agenda for addressing the agency and structure issues. According to Bourdieu, practice connects action to culture, structure, and power, and action is “generated by the encounter between opportunities or constraints presented by situations and the durable dispositions that reflect the socialization of past experience, traditions, and habits that individuals bring to situations” (Swartz 1997:290). Each individual has a habitus or a set of structured dispositions acquired through a gradual process of inculcation and generated perceptions, practices, and attitudes that in turn incline social agents to act and react in certain ways (Swartz 1997: 95-116). What is of interest here is that individuals bring their own historically constituted habituses to different fields.
Looking at deep sea research as a field, it is necessary to examine the wider relational aspects of their individual habituses and other structures, such as institutions on various levels. In my research I perceive social agents as possible extensions or vehicles of agency of others, for instance, institutions of science, state, gender, education, and culture. The DSOG is a group of social agents that work closely with several other groups of scientists that they form social relationships with. These groups are the institutional framework that integrates them into processes of social practice with other scientists and other agents, a group of "lower level" scientists (Mukerji 1989) that build the visual technology of the submersibles. And third, a group of co-workers is the crew on board research vessels that supports the expeditions. The DSOG also works in research projects outside the institute collaborating with "transscientific fields" (Knorr-Cetina 1983) on building a variety of underwater solutions for deep ocean exploration. Members of the DSOG are presented publicly as being passive in the production of scientific data and also in communicating it to other members of the global scientific community. At the same time, they are central to the overall process of the "creation" of the globalizing force of social relations by means of a communication system that provides remote on-shore access for scientific collaboration and public outreach. The concept of field also draws insights to arenas of conflict and power relations which basically structure fields. According to Bourdieu, actors are strategies, although it has to be emphasized that Bourdieu does not think of strategy primarily as a conscious choice but as a tacit calculation of interest and pursuit of distinction.
Invited lecture given at the University of Aberdeen, March 21 2005
Please do not site. This is a work in progress.
Please do not site. This is a work in progress.
posted by Sigurjon at 9:51 PM
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