Islands and Beaches in Science and Technology Studies

Abstract

The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annually awards the John Desmond Bernal Prize to one or more individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of Science and Technology Studies. Past winners have included founders of the field, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. This article is the revised text of Warwick Anderson's 2023 Bernal Lecture.

Let me begin by identifying myself as a white settler scholar located mostly on the unceded territories of the Wangal of the Eora nation, on what is now called the Balmain peninsula in Sydney—and sometimes on the lands and waters of the Guringai, on an island in Dyarubbin, more commonly known as the Hawkesbury River. Most of the Indigenous people along that stretch of Dyarubbin were driven out during the initial colonial invasions in the 1780s or died in the smallpox epidemic of 1789, but some descendants remain there (Karskens 2020). A few steps from the island house, often used as a writing retreat, one can find Aboriginal middens and rock engravings, probably thousands of years old. Local history suggests it is unlikely the island was permanently inhabited, though it certainly served as a ceremonial site, perhaps for the initiation of young men. Below the island house, at the base of a cliff, is a small beach, occasionally crossed, but not a place to linger. If you stand too long on that beach, your feet sink into the muddy sand, and you get stuck—not a beach that appeals to whitefellas.

From the veranda of the island house, one can look across Broken Bay almost to the western edges of the Pacific Ocean. My first encounters with the islands and beaches of the Pacific date to the early 1970s, when I traveled to Fiji. Before then, I’d heard about the Pacific and its littoral from my uncle and his family, who were based in Madang, New Guinea, then a disputed colonial appendage of Australia. As a teenager, I was encouraged by my father to read Bernard Smith’s revelatory European Vision and the South Pacific (1960)—my old man had come to know Smith through their mutual enthusiasm for Marxist theory and socialist realism. Gradually, I suppose, the Pacific became for me a place of enchantment. During the past thirty years or so, I’ve spent many months hanging out on boats, experiencing island life, sleeping among the plastic on isolated beaches, and visiting archives and collections across the vast sea of islands as Epeli Hau’ofa (1994, 1998) calls it. Despite the dreadful history of encounters with foreign invaders and beachcombers, the peoples of the Pacific—including those from island Southeast Asia, where I also worked—have been remarkably hospitable and generous to me, patiently explaining many things, such as what it might mean to do Science and Technology Studies (STS) in the region. I’ve learned much from Damon Salesa, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Teresia Teaiwa, Katerina Teaiwa, Tracey Banivanua Mar, and many others.

I have spent a lot of time at the Bishop Museum and the University of Hawai’i archives, here in Honolulu, attempting to commune with the dead—and sometimes also with the living. I’m grateful to Kānaka Maoli and other peoples of this archipelago for their kindness and generosity in allowing me to do this—in the past and now. I’ve learned much from Kehaulani Kauanui, Maile Arvin, and many other Hawaiian scholars. It still surprises me that the work of these and other Pacific intellectuals is not yet central to the STS canon.

I will return to the subjects of islands and beaches and oceanic feelings in due course, as they seem to offer compelling metaphors and models for doing STS in the Pacific and elsewhere. That is, I’ll reflect in a moment on distinct island ontologies and on the complexities of marginal contact zones or borderlands or beaches. How might islands stay habitable and epistemically viable despite the predations of European invasion, global capitalism, and climate change? And how might we outsiders respectfully inhabit or cohabit the beach, the borderlands?

Before I go on, I also want to thank the Society and the Bernal Prize Committee for this award, even though it has prompted some anxiety about premature closure. Surely, my greatest achievements are yet to come? Or is that a delusion?

In any case, the award of the Bernal Prize makes me recall my initial tentative engagements with STS and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). I believe I first learned of this enterprise when the mercurial young Bruno Latour taught me at the University of Melbourne in 1988, though Helen Verran, who was a faculty member there, may have mentioned it a bit earlier. As graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, Gabrielle Hecht and I participated somewhat daringly in the legendary Bath STS meeting in 1990, where I met Joan Fujimura, Leigh Star, and Adele Clarke, who introduced me to feminist science studies, which changed everything. I accompanied Gabrielle when I attended my first 4S meeting at MIT in 1991—where we were dismayed to find the old white guys smugly clustering close to one another and ignoring the rest of us. Around this time, I briefly visited Gabrielle when she was studying at the École des Mines, which allowed me to renew contact with Bruno, who kept urging me to watch for mediations and translations. I remember talking to Bruno’s graduate students then about studying the environment—not a topic that seemed to interest him much at the time. How that would change.

After a few years, somewhat belatedly, I joined Gabrielle, Claudia Castañeda, Michelle Murphy (now Murphy), and others as they promoted postcolonial science studies in this Society. Since the late 1980s, I had been studying ideas about race and climate in colonial medicine and public health, first in Australia and then in the Philippines when it was part of the American empire. ¹ At the time, very few historians of medicine were interested in race and empire, but my exposure in Australia to settler colonialism and resurgent white nationalism sensitized me to these issues and made me aware of possible complicities. My “peculiar” research commitments already had given rise to some stimulating conversations with an old Melbourne pal, Dipesh Chakrabarty, who introduced me to subaltern studies. Later at Penn, around 1992, I took a bewildering class with Homi Bhabha, who somehow lured me into postcolonial theory. After a few more years, I was writing articles with titles such as: “Where Is the Postcolonial History of Medicine?” (Anderson 1998). I’m still seeking to answer that question.

In 2000, I was appointed to the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), where I teamed up with Adele Clarke, Lawrence Cohen, Vincanne Adams, and Philippe Bourgois, becoming more deeply immersed in postcolonial studies of science. (From Adele, I also learned to pluralize everythings and everywhens.) I was mixing with cultural anthropologists, who knew something about the need to decolonize methodologies. But these modish interests did not impress many historians at Berkeley, where I had a secondary appointment. Although perched on the eastern shores of the Pacific, Berkeley then boasted five historians of France but not one historian of the Pacific. There were about 500,000 Filipino Americans in the Bay Area but Berkeley completely disregarded Philippine history and culture. Twenty years ago, the notion that the university might recruit historians from Southeast Asia and the Pacific was evidently inconceivable.

Despite the aloof setting at Berkeley, Gabrielle Hecht and I arranged a workshop there on postcolonial technoscience as we began to call the project. We were joined by Clarke, Adams, Verran, Donna Haraway, Sharon Traweek, Paul Rabinow, Peter Redfield, Nick King, many intrigued graduate students, and other anthropologically minded figures who were more or less associated with STS at the time. Emboldened by our success, Gabrielle and I proposed a special double issue of Social Studies of Science on the topic, which eventually appeared in 2002 (see Hecht 2002). It’s hard to imagine now just how groundbreaking this proved to be. Mike Lynch, the journal’s supportive editor, told us that many members of the editorial board could not work out what we were doing. ² STS, they believed, was about expertise in Western Europe and North America. Mike hinted he had to overcome considerable resistance to get editors and reviewers to think about the rest of the world on its own terms. Regardless of any initial hesitation, 4S would soon prove fertile ground, a nurturing environment, for postcolonial approaches and later decolonial initiatives—unlike the History of Science Society, for example, where senior figures still rail against attempts to mark critically the persistent colonial structures of power within science, technology, and history itself. Postcolonial critique remains anathema in some circles, though not here in 4S—which implies, I believe, that we must be doing something right.

In my introduction to the special issue, I wrote:

We hope that a closer engagement of science studies with postcolonial studies will allow us to question technoscience differently, find more heterogeneous sources, and reveal more fully the patterns of local transactions that give rise to global, or universalist, claims…. We would go beyond a recommendation of analytic symmetry and inclusion, and seek to understand the ways in which technoscience is implicated in the postcolonial provincializing of “universal” reason, the description of “alternative modernities,” and the recognition of hybridities, borderlands and inbetween conditions. We would, moreover, argue that the study of science and technology has much to offer a postcolonial critique that has hitherto concentrated on literary representations, a “textualism” that often has the effect of erasing the materiality and specificity of neocolonial encounters. (Anderson 2002a, 643)

The astute auditor will apprehend a few things. First, I was implying that the post in postcolonial was not a temporal argument, not a progressive trajectory—meaning it’s not what comes after colonialism. Rather, it meant trying to get the necessary analytic distance from which to critique persistent colonial hegemonies and distinctions. As Stuart Hall (1996), following Jacques Derrida, wrote, the post is “under erasure” in order to illuminate the durability of colonial inequities. Secondly, I clearly was building on the work of Sandra Harding (1998), a dear friend who in the 1990s had applied feminist standpoint theory to what we were still calling the Third World. Thirdly, I wanted to emphasize the materiality and specificity of postcolonial science studies, not indulge in an extension of postcolonial theory into domains of science and technology. Finally, you will have heard here the fluctuation between the recognition of hybrid formations and the structuring of alternative modernities—that is, between conjugated subjectivities and subjugated knowledges, as I later put it (Anderson 2009). This distinction prefigured tensions between interactive postcolonial analytics and decolonial foregrounding of Indigenous knowledges (Anderson 2020).

My pragmatism, or perhaps equivocation, would prove controversial, especially among South Asian scholars understandably sensitive to fascist assertions of Hindutva. Some of them took me to task for mentioning alternative modernities (Abraham 2006)—even though I did so only in passing (but see Anderson 2008, 2012). In any case, I’ve often said that the flaunting and privileging of Hindu knowledge claims as an alternative modernity perform a different politics from recognition of, and respect for, Yolngu knowledge claims to another modernity in northern Australia (Verran 2002). Some strategic essentialisms, to use Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988) phrase, do better politics than others. In other words, there is no single way to do postcolonial and decolonial critique. Sometimes, recognition of Indigenous knowledge will unsettle European assumptions of epistemic hegemony, and other times, it will lead to what Edward W. Said (1990, 85) called the “nativist impasse.” We therefore need to situate critique rather than enact it as another universalizing imperial discourse.

Some eight years ago, I set out a more inclusive manifesto:

Since the late 1980s, some postcolonial attitudes, or at least postcolonial premises, have slowly worked their way into science and technology studies, though their presence often is hidden or even denied. Studies that contest European and North American hegemony in science, situating and thereby dismantling global or universal claims, represent what might be called the postcolonial turn. Recognition of creditable knowledge making beyond North Atlantic shores constitutes a postcolonial approach. So too does the emphasis on hybridity, heterogeneity, and indeterminacy in what once appeared to be sovereign, uncontaminated categories. A postcolonial orientation directs attention to the complexities of relations in any contact zone. It re-examines the terrain that empire has tilled across the world, showing that dominance is never absolute—that imperial or authoritative knowledge, despite colonial fantasy and amour propre, must always adapt to local conditions, mix with other traditions, and incorporate difference. In this sense, the argument that we have never truly been modern is implicitly postcolonial. Thus an analysis that deconstructs imperial binaries such as nature–culture, modern–traditional, global–local builds on a postcolonial, or decolonizing, platform. Even if explicit recourse to postcolonial theory remains rare in science and technology studies, a postcolonial sensibility has infiltrated its critical scholarship. (Anderson 2015b, 652)

I would like to believe that remains true. Many of the presentations at this conference would attest to it, I think. The allusion to Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1993) was an unnecessary provocation, as it happened, since Latour, post-actor-network theory—in this case, the “post” really does mean after—had already been talking about the need for postcolonial analytics in STS. ³ Perhaps if Bruno had studied cultural anthropology in the Pacific instead of primatology in West Africa, he would have come to this realization even earlier.

Let’s look more closely at where we are. Let’s look again at the islands and beaches of the Pacific. Take a moment to think about exactly where we are right now. Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not at Berkeley anymore.

For many years, in postcolonial fashion, I have tried to work out the meanings for STS of the Pacific’s “constructed and disputed historicities, sites of displacement, interference, and interaction”—as anthropologically-minded historian James Clifford (1992, 101) characterizes this sea of islands. That task has required me, sometimes in collaboration with Islander scholars, to think otherwise about conventional weedy European historicity, as I once described it, meaning invasive historical sensibilities or the obsession with imposing prosthetic futures on the planet (Anderson 2018b). Collaborative postcolonial STS might therefore contribute to efforts to stop time running out for the peoples of the Pacific. This requires all of us to cross the beach, even to linger on the strand, to imagine how we might convivially inhabit multiple contact zones or borderlands. In other words, it forces us to think about how we might seek, collaboratively, to reconstitute and articulate subjugated knowledges as well as to recognize and respect conjugated subjectivities.

Having trained in cultural anthropology, Pacific historian Greg Dening—whom I came to know well in Melbourne—wanted to see Oceania in what he called a “double-visioned” way. He wanted to know the Pacific from both sides of the beach. That is, he wanted to conjure an “anthrohistory” of Islanders and strangers and their confused and complex encounters (Dening 1998, 170). In Islands and Beaches (1980), the white Australian historian tried to listen to the voices of Enata, the original inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands. He wanted to make their voices audible again to recover their worldviews. He laboriously tracked their encounters across the beach with various outsiders, including explorers, whalers, missionaries, traders, anthropologists, humanitarians, and beachcombers. For Dening, an eager structuralist, the beach served mostly as a boundary or frontier, separating two distinct cultures. Thus, he was particularly interested in what we in STS later came to know as boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989). His effort at epistemic reconstruction was principally an exercise in “decolonizing” Pacific knowledge systems—or at least an early prototype for it, some might now say (Anderson 2020). “Beaches are a mélange of order and disorder,” Dening (2004, 31) later observed, “of idealistic yet bloodied reality, of regressive yet progressive ambitions. Beaches are limen, thresholds to some other place, some other time, some other condition.” For Dening, beaches were largely emptied of meaning, rendered spectral, once contact, the encounter, was over.

The Pacific historian did not appreciate the mixed Marquesans still lingering on the beach. He could not imagine beaches—admittedly exiguous in those islands—as places of heterogeneous dwelling. Instead, he set up a boundary between dead Enata and living Marquesans, between the enthralling past and the degraded present, between purity and hybridity, that could not be crossed. Part of the problem was that Dening could not—at least, not then—bring himself to think beyond the land mass, the I-land; he could not encompass the beach and the ocean, particularly the ocean, as people of the Pacific do. At the time he was repressing that oceanic feeling; he therefore failed to understand that the grounds for decolonizing knowledge in the Pacific would be as much aqueous as terrestrial. The necessary conditions would be found where the sea met land, on the messy, littered beach.

Still, it is not enough for postcolonial STS scholars just to “put [Isaac] Newton on the beach where he belongs,” as Simon Schaffer (2009, 245) proposed—though transporting European luminaries to the Pacific is always a good start. ⁴ Schaffer shows us that the great natural philosopher was not a solitary genius and that the early modern information order, which he ruled, depended on “long-range systems of accumulation of facts and commodities.” But in this narrative, Newton continues to control the tides on his beach and to extract value from its grains of sand. What do Islanders make of this strange over-dressed figure as he struggles not to get wet? How do they contest his absurd claims on their land and sea? But that’s not all. There are other aspects of simply plonking Newton on a beach somewhere in the Pacific that disturb me. As anthropologist Margaret Jolly (2011, 58) asks: “How might such an emphasis on crossing the limen between Europeans and Islanders suppress parallel histories, other beach crossings, encounters between Islanders?” ⁵ Or, I would say, how does it erase other modes, often Indigenous modes, of habitation on the beach? Furthermore, does representing exchanges between Islanders and strangers as dialogic interactions “bleach the blood of conquest from the beach” (Jolly 2011, 58)? Are postcolonial STS scholars also fastidiously inclined to avoid the messier—and more violent—parts of the beach?

How do we resist returning to the beach as a kind of celebrity crossing point? Much as I would like to imagine the beach as a site of heterogenous articulations, of mixed dwelling, we seem to keep reverting to the notion of the beach as boundary, an inhospitable line of sand, between land and sea, between onshore and offshore, and sometimes even between culture and nature. We are prone, like Dening, to reiterate the old structural binaries, to prefer flat surfaces to immersions (except in archives). Perhaps other metaphors of the contact zone would serve better. Having surfed poorly at Waikīkī, I’m attracted to Isaiah Helekunihi Walker’s descriptions of the “boarder-lands” or “surf zones” of the Pacific. “The Hawaiian boarder-land,” he writes, “was a place where white hegemony was uncertain and Natives inverted dominant social categories.” Thus, “Waikīkī beach was…a place where both Hawaiian and haole worlds were redefined and reconstituted”—sometimes cooperatively, sometimes violently (Walker 2008, 90, 94; see Anderson 2015a).

Then, we have coral reefs, which might also be good to think with, to inhabit epistemically, and to reimagine as contact zones. Perhaps they are more generative places than the average beach (Helmreich 2016). I recall traveling through the Tuamotu archipelago, getting stranded on the atoll of Fakarava, where people live not on or around beaches but on or with coral formations, engaging daily with liminal reefs. My experiences on the reef there came back vividly when I read Greg Dvorak’s Coral and Concrete, his rhapsodic auto-ethnography of life on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Coral, he writes, “is the stuff of migration, ancestry, connectedness, and land…a sacred, liminal threshold that connects and separates” (Dvorak 2018, 21). Layers of human histories have sedimented into these enormous and dynamic structures—and continue to do so. Thus, “human beings who travel these waters and settle these islands are all reef organisms. Like coral they bring their own histories to the reef, territorializing and reterritorializing, adapting to their new surroundings” (p. 22). But colonialism and militarism have sought, vaingloriously, to reduce the multiplicities of the reef to homogeneous and fixed concrete. According to Dvorak (2018, 25), “concrete is the pulverization, amalgamation, and flattening of all these coralline histories into one condensed and monolithic mass.” Even so, in the fullness of time, concrete—like any hegemonic colonial narrative—will crack and disintegrate, and coral will again force its way up from the depths. Or, so our postcolonial desires whisper to us.

Beaches, surf zones, coral reefs. What am I saying here? I may seem to be digressing. Toward the end of my postcolonial wanderings, I come back to Clifford (2013, 49), who wrote, while looking out to the Pacific from Santa Cruz, CA, “We need to work at multiple scales and among discrepant histories, engaging with multiplicity and contradiction, inhabiting paradox.” This is not to substitute island ontologies or creeping continental systems of thought for concretizing white mythologies but rather to realize that within STS, we work in situations of epistemic turbulence, of “constitutive ambivalence” (Clifford 2013, 87), and of mixedness or hybridity. We work among the colonial ruins, the imperial debris, and the netherworlds of global capitalism (Stoler 2008). That is, we need to appreciate life in its various forms and temporalities and mixtures and imposed inequalities, on the beach, among the boarder-lands, in the reefs. ⁶ We also need to recognize these heterotopias (Foucault 1986) as places of suffering and death, in the aftermath or wash up of contested modernities.

In the guise of anthrohistories of parts of the Pacific, I have presented you with allegories for approaching postcolonial STS, perhaps even everywhere and everywhen. But with relentless human-induced global heating, the beaches are shrinking, the reefs are dying, and the atolls and islands are disappearing. Soon, it may not be possible for anyone to tell these stories. As the king tide comes in, as the “long, measured, dirge-like swells of the Pacific,” to use the words of Herman Melville (1996 [1846], 10), begin to submerge us—time is running out.