bookreviews


is grounded in a particular theology: the 
religion of progress. You have to be a mem­
ber of this particular sect to appreciate 
whatever light it casts on the present. In 
the meanwhile, sceptics and agnostics will 
want to turn elsewhere for history and 
analysis.—Michael Ryan, University of Penn­
sylvania, Philadelphia, PA. 

Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into 
Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge. Ed. 
Laura Nader. New York: Routledge, 
1996. 318p. $69.95 cloth, alk. paper (ISBN 
0415914647); $22.95 paper (ISBN 
0415914655). LC 95-23650. 

Nader, professor of anthropology at the 
University of California, Berkeley, con­
vened a four-part symposium at the Ameri­
can Association for the Advancement of 
Science (AAAS) meetings in 1991 when she 
was head of Section H for anthropology. 
The papers in this edited volume stem from 
that multidisciplinary symposium, “An­
thropology of Science and Scientists,” and 
reflect its concerns: (1) “Is Science Univer­
sal?” (2) “The Study of Knowledge Forma­
tion and Its Use,” (3) “The Behavior of Sci­
entists,” and (4) “Science Traditions across 
Cultures.” Nader carefully sets the scene 
in the introduction, “Anthropological In­
quiry into Boundaries, Power and Knowl­
edge,” and gracefully closes it with her epi­
logue, “The Three-Cornered Constellation: 
Magic, Science and Religion Revisited.” The 
grounding in anthropological history is 
clear and present, but it does not intrude 
upon the accessibility of the intervening 
fourteen chapters, which read equally well 
as a whole or sampled here and there 
within the three parts. “Discovering Sci­
ence” is devoted to ethnoscience. It is fol­
lowed by “Culture, Power, and Context,” 
whose chapters deal with technoscience. 
The final part, “Conflicting Knowledge Sys­
tems,” explores areas in which ethno­
science and technoscience overlap. 

Many conclusions could be drawn from 
the selections included, but Nader is clear 
that this is not the intent. Instead, she en­
courages us to open our “minds to other 
ways of looking and questioning to change 
attitudes about knowledge, to reframe the 

Book Reviews 297 

organization of science—to formulate ways 
of thinking globally about science tradi­
tions.” We are given ample opportunities 
to do this. 

The ethnoscience articles explore the 
idea of what constitutes science, from navi­
gation systems in Micronesia to highland 
Maya ethnomedicine for gastrointestinal 
diseases, from Canadian James Bay Cree 
hunting practices to everyday mathemati­
cal procedures and concepts about im­
mune systems in this country. The worlds 
of high-energy physicists, nuclear scien­
tists, and molecular biologists are analyzed 
in the technoscience portion of the book, 
providing fascinating glimpses of the Hu­
man Genome Project, nuclear tests as ritual, 
and the position of the various branches of 
physics in the academic and economic 
structure of Japan. 

Boundaries become more explicit in the 
third part of the collection where research 
on local knowledge is brought into juxta­
position with other knowledge systems. 
Chapters deal with fisheries management 
in New England, Inuit indigenous knowl­
edge versus Arctic science, and the U.S. sur­
veillance system developed to anticipate 
Soviet development of an atomic bomb. 
The last chapter in this section provides an 
illuminating comparison of the develop­
ment of the field of primatology in Japan 
and the West, with implications far beyond 
the subject matter of the discussion. It is 
here that we are reminded again of how 
easy it is to fall into the trap of finding that 
which we are seeking. 

This is a book for which table of contents 
indexing in library catalogs is so important 
because each of the chapters is complete 
unto itself and at a level of specificity quite 
distinct from “Knowledge, Sociology of ” or 
“Science —Philosophy” or “Power (Social 
Sciences).” Obviously, these are the realms 
being considered: it is the generation of 
knowledge, uncolored by the vestments of 
science, which we are invited to explore. 
The usefulness of this lens is that it might 
enable us to view more clearly the issues 
involved in the management of knowl-
edge.—Joan Berman, Humboldt State Univer­
sity, Arcata, CA.