Angela Okune Annotations

TECHNO: (How) does the analyst account for the data practices and responsibilities of the people and organizations studied?

Thursday, August 23, 2018 - 5:52pm

AO: Tilley notes that it was not until the nineteenth century, and particularly the period after 1850, that scientific institutions and ideologies began to attain worldwide preeminence. While this worldwide preeminence is related to Europe’s pursuit of global colonialism, she notes it is also a result of factors including the greater organization of scientific congresses; shared nomenclature and methods; professionalization of the biosciences and field sciences; greater circulation of international scientific journals, and the standardization of laws regulating and defining science.

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DATA: (How) does the analyst account for their own data practices and responsibilities?

Monday, August 6, 2018 - 2:17pm
  • Tilley seeks to look at development of science at multiple levels (16). But most of her analysis is at the level of meta (the dominant discursive regimes of the time) and at the macro and meso (legal, politica, organizational).

  • Tilley’s own data is archival. She includes an appendix where she outlines colonial office lists that she used and gives context to the data in over 4 pages of narrative. She includes 29 tables of statistics the count over time of colonial offices in Africa. She also includes references to original documents in her endnotes. On page 440 she lists the archives she visited.

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NANO: (How) is “Africa” invoked when the author discusses data (as a place with unique demands or responsibilities, for example)?

Monday, August 6, 2018 - 2:17pm
  • The African survey team (including Maliniowski) tied their work with development. “Studying the continent in comparative terms, they argued, would enable colonial states to pursue “African development” less erratically and more success- fully.” (87)
  • The data work in Africa in the 1930s is justified as helping towards development and to “solve African problems.” Assumptions are that what works in one site may/will work in another. “The idea would be to have a model district, which might be eventually of use as a practice ground for young sanitary officers who have left Makerere and Mulago, before taking up a career.” The results, he argued, would include “less incidence of disease . . . a lower death rate, improved physique—greater intelligence, more inclination to work, [and] more enterprise.” Equally important, the data gathered would lead to new insights, “under present conditions in Africa,” about disease distribution, susceptibility, and immunity. “Such an experiment in health is a scientific necessity.” (170)
  • This appears to continue to hold true today based on my own observations of data and development rhetoric...
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TECHNO: (How) does the analyst account for the data practices and responsibilities of the people and organizations studied?

Monday, August 6, 2018 - 2:16pm
  • Data comes up throughout the book and most (of those that Tilley writes about) discuss data as quantitative numbers (climate data, health data, land data)
  • Tilley notes that many of the British scientists she was studying were calling for broader efforts to work together. For example, in 1930, Aurthur Tansley called for the work to move beyond narrow “specialist Departments” and coordinate data, not only through technical measures such as the compilation of bibliographies and new research monographs but also through cross-disciplinary approaches and “the study of problems which can only be investigated on the spot.” Doing this kind of cross-disciplinary work would help answer the complex questions like medical ecology in relation to disease, etc. “so central were these problems to development efforts that significant returns would come from studying them “on a broadly ecological basis.” (87) Points were made that it is important to avoid duplication: “he believed that existing departmental and disciplinary divisions got in the way of dealing with larger questions related to “African ecology.” (102)
  • As part of ecological surveys in the 1930s, Tilley discusses how researchers typically met with village elders and “asked a series of routine questions, [including] methods of land selection, pro- cesses of clearing land, planting, duration of cultivation, rest periods.” She writes that they supplemented their field data with information from administrators and agricultural officers, including Unwin Moffat, C. J. Lewin, and William Allan, who were enduring allies of the project, as well as specialists from the Amani Agricultural Research Station in Tanganyika. The amazing heterogeneity of the agricultural techniques they encountered is recorded in Trapnell’s diaries and notebooks, which fill more than 1,200 printed pages.” (148).
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TECHNO: (How) does the analyst account for the data practices and responsibilities of the people and organizations studied?

Monday, August 6, 2018 - 2:15pm
  • This quote from Tilley’s book highlights that the “Africa has no data/bad data” rhetoric has been around since at least the Berlin conferenc: “The head of the Russian delegation, Count Knapist, told the conference that “precise data on the climate of Africa are absolutely wanting, whereas the [International] Meteorological Committee have already gathered them in every other part of the world.” It would be a tremendous service to science if the conference might “facilitate the establishment of a meteorological station in the upper regions of the Congo.”” (54).

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MICRO: What did the analyst choose to describe as “science” and/or “data” in Africa?

Monday, August 6, 2018 - 2:14pm
  • In spite of Tilley’s 2010 piece calling for the study of the construction of “vernacular science,” this work largely traces British archives and thus centers the British empire as the main actor (although she works to complicate this to demonstrate the complexities of the production of scientific knowledge). She is limited methodologically with the archives that are available.

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META: What discourses does the analyst consider/leverage to characterize/theorize science and technology in Africa?

Monday, August 6, 2018 - 2:13pm
  • Tilley primarily situates the work in colonial British history. She also draws on postcolonial African studies like Mudimbe (The Invention of Africa) and Talal Asad. In contrast to arguments made by Mudimbe or Asad, Tilley makes it much more difficult to make the argument that there is a dominant colonial episteme imposed upon Africa -- that knowledge is made through many different modes and many actors, in conflict/tension with one another.

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MACRO: (How) are economic and legal infrastructures said to shape science and technology in Africa?

Monday, August 6, 2018 - 2:13pm
  • Desire for political relevance (and national competitiiveness) shaped many of the key decisions about funding for research in/on Africa (92)

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DEUTERO: How is this analyst denoting and worrying about “Africa”?

Monday, August 6, 2018 - 2:13pm
  • Tilley is interested in the effects and legacies of “colonial science” (a formulation that she seeks demonstrate is untenable and the construction and relevance of indigenous knowledge and ethnosciences. (330)

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DISCURSIVE RISKS: What are the analyst’s epistemic assumptions of “Africa”?

Monday, August 6, 2018 - 2:12pm
  • Tilley explores the points at which “representations” turned into “interventions,” as theory and research were applied in practice. Defined in this way, she sees interventions (including development projects) as part part of an ongoing process of knowledge formation and reproduction (16).

  • She includes indigenous knowledge here and argues that most things labeled “traditional knowledge” are in fact a variant of vernacular science; in other words, they have already been translated, selectively modified, and even tested (332).

  • Tilley (2011) found national and international scales were relied on and therefore uses a third tact, using a primary lens of “empire” to reveal how national, imperial, and international scientific infrastructures were constituted simultaneously.
  • Yet the process of localizing knowledge was paradoxical: as insights de- rived from African experiences were folded into the fabric of scientific dis- ciplines, as well as the policies of colonial states, Africans themselves were rarely at the helm of decision making. While there was much give and take in epistemic terms, there was little social parity. This meant that while colonial states and scientific projects might privilege “indigenous knowledge,” often calling into question any simple dichotomy between “Western” and non-Western science, empires in Africa could not entirely escape this di- chotomy. Lurking in the background were always other questions: could science be Africanized without African scientists? Just what counted as science, and who would decide?” (Tilley 2011: 342)
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