Research Background:My first research project focused on the European space program in French Guiana, comparing it to earlier French efforts to develop the region, especially the notorious penal colony known as Devil's Island. Between 1990 and 1994 I worked in both French Guiana and France, combining ethnographic fieldwork with archival research; the results appeared as a book for U.C. Press in the fall of 2000. At its core the book addresses the greater ecology of modern technology, examining the reconfiguration of French Guiana's social and natural landscape into a proper habitat for the assembly and launch of satellites into high orbit. My larger goal in writing it was to interrogate the success of a distinctly planetary system with a more local history, one rife with repeated colonial failure and unintended consequences. Current Research: In my present work I continue to extend a concern for spatial dimensions of science and technology outside the West, but shift focus from large to small technical systems and non-state actors along a shifting global frontier. My goal is to concentrate more directly on the complicated ethics and politics of technical intervention, and dilemmas of knowledge and action in modern life. To this end I am working on a book project about the organization Doctors Without Borders/ Medécins Sans Frontières (MSF). Founded three decades ago as a French effort to establish a more engaged and oppositional form of medical humanitarianism, MSF has grown into a transnational institution, known both for excellent logistics and for outspoken independence. MSF missions now stretch well beyond emergency responses to humanitarian disaster to target specific diseases and structural inequities in global health, always struggling between twin goals of efficacy and advocacy. I began active research on this project in the summer of 2000, and have continued to pursue fieldwork both at MSF's operational headquarters in Europe (especially sections in France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland), and selected project sites (primarily in Uganda). I anticipate completing the manuscript of this work in 2005. Other current research interests concern the history of anthropology's methodology and geography, tropical conservation, and conceptions of neutrality. Selected Publications: in press "Doctors, Borders and Life in Crisis." Cultural Anthropology. Publication anticipated 2005. in press "Foucault in the Tropics: Displacing the Panopticon”
Jonathan Xavier Inda, ed. Foucault and the Anthropology of Modernity".
Blackwell Books (publication anticipated in 2004). 2003 (with Silvia Tomaskova) "The Exile of Anthropology." In Rebecca Saunders, ed. The Concept of the Foreign. Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield), 71-90. 2002 "The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space." Social Studies
of Science (special issue on "Postcolonial Technoscience," co-edited
by Warwick Anderson and Gabrielle Hecht). 32: 6 (Dec.), 791-825. 2000. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. University of California Press. 1996 "Beneath a Modern Sky: Space Technology and its Place on the Ground." Science, Technology and Human Values, 21: 3 (June): 251-274. Courses taught: Anthropology 44: Human Dilemmas |
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