When scholars have compared “African traditional religion” and “Western science,” they have often treated the terms of this comparison as racialized unitary entities, which are either radically different or somewhat similar (even as Western categories of rationality or nature remain the basis for these comparisons). This essay unsettles these assumptions by focusing on practices that are called “science” in the fields of both petroleum geology and Afro-Caribbean religion. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Trinidad, arguably the world’s oldest site of commercial oil extraction, I show how internal differences between those involved in “petroleum science” and “African religion” reveal a spectrum of meanings for the word “science” centered on relations to risk. At one end of this spectrum, science conveyed ideals of stable tradition that de-risked claims to knowledge for energy sector specialists intent on securing foreign investment or for “Yorubacentric” lineages of African religion centering initiation-based authority. At this spectrum’s other end, “science” foregrounded the risks of accessing hard-to-perceive forces in petroleum exploration or “spiritual work.” By focusing on heterogeneous practices rather than cultural essences or ideals of rationality, I show how the ethical implications of “science” depend on differing experiences of the risks of working with subterranean powers. While petroleum surveys at my field site in Trinidad required embodied risks by laborers, geologists backgrounded these contexts of power, representing the risks of their work as a problem of scientific accuracy. Afro-Trinidadian spiritual workers, in contrast, foregrounded the embodied risks of science as the ground of ethical practice.

Building institutional and procedural bridges between science and policy is a vital role for law. Fundamental to the success of this work is the development of more sophisticated, nuanced understandings of scientific knowledge production than those which are current in legal and policy spheres. In this paper, I consider scientific controversies that have emerged in the field of human and environmental health impacts of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), notably around methodological approaches to identifying such chemicals and analysing the risks they pose. Building on literatures in the philosophy and sociology of science, I identify bases on which bridge-building between science and policy could proceed and discuss the role that legal normativity can play in those processes.

Archaeologists’ excavation practices vary significantly from country to country and site to site. But variation in the most fundamental, ‘common-sense’ excavation practices is ‘black-boxed’ - it is not discussed outside casual, informal contexts, and is treated as having no effect on higher-level interpretation. These practices can, however, be a source of conflict when archaeologists from different communities of practice work together. In this paper, I explore what variation in excavation methodology reveals about the nature of archaeological knowledge itself. By comparing methodologies and the organization of labour on British and Andean excavations, I argue that archaeologists in different communities of practice have divergent understandings of what the object of archaeological investigation is, and of how it can be known, and by whom. This results in contrasting understandings of the nature of material/archaeological objects, as well as contrasting conceptualizations of excavation as an ‘expert’ practice – one requiring skills, knowledge and bodily practices that are specific to trained archaeologists. Situating these concerns in historical and ethnographic context, this paper suggests that archaeological excavation is, in fact, a far more complex, nuanced and variable practice than the lack of attention paid to it implies.

This article analyses the role of the pharmaceutical and medical device industries (‘pharma’) in the construction of scientific and medical knowledge. Pharma's activities are part of the broader dispositif of institutions, enterprises, regulations and constituencies within which medical-scientific knowledge is generated, but pharma's contributions exhibit a specific character reflecting commercial pressures. As drug development proceeds, research and marketing activities coalesce around ‘product canons’ that integrate scientific truth-claims and commercial positioning, generating knowledge with implicit commercial functionality. From this platform, pharma stamps consensus-building ‘narratives’ into medical-scientific discourse, in which ‘problems’ arise and are ‘solved’ by drugs. Concurrently, pharma modulates the structure of discourse and the social networks through which discourse proceeds. Implicit within these activities is a meta-science whose goal is to understand and technologize the operation of science to an external end. This mode of knowledge production can be viewed as a normative transformation of Kuhnian normal science, characterized by the attachment (and at times subordination) of paradigmatic tenets to extrinsic goals; exaggerated control of belief, research and consensus formation; and a capacity for infringement of traditional norms of scientific truthfulness. An International Standard of Integrity in Science would strengthen pharma's contributions to medical and scientific knowledge.

In late 1980s and early 1990s ‘breast cancer on Long Island’ emerged as a distinct object characterized by higher than average incidence rates that some speculated could be explained by environmental factors. The scientific community and its discourses have played an authoritative role in delimiting what is officially ‘known’ and ‘not known’ about this specific disease ontology. This article moves beyond an epistemological focus towards what Annemarie Mol calls a ‘praxiographical’ inquiry into the everyday practices that produce complex disease objects. We consider how multiple and multi-sited practices of mapping breast cancer on Long Island—by activists, scientists and the state—contributed to the emergence of this new object, and to its multiple and shifting enactments over time. We explore the tensions and power relations between the ‘lay’ public and scientific ‘experts’, and how these influenced mapping practices and produced ‘breast cancer on Long Island’ as a complex and ongoing politico-scientific event.

Introduction

On August 3, 1908, two young French clergymen with a passion for prehistory, the brothers Amédée and Jean Bouyssonie, discovered in a cave near the village of La Chapelle-aux-Sains (Department of Corréze) an almost intact Neanderthal skeleton. Recognizing both the importance of their find and their own inexperience with such fossils, they handed the skeleton to Marcellin Boule, professor of palaeontology at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris.