Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities

Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies

by Sandra G. Harding

In Sciences from Below , the esteemed feminist science studies scholar Sandra Harding synthesizes modernity studies with progressive tendencies in science and technology studies to suggest how scientific and technological pursuits might be more productively linked to social justice projects around the world. Harding illuminates the idea of multiple modernities as well as the major contributions of post-Kuhnian Western, feminist, and postcolonial science studies. She explains how these schools of thought can help those seeking to implement progressive social projects refine their thinking to overcome limiting ideas about what modernity and modernization are, the objectivity of scientific knowledge, patriarchy, and Eurocentricity. She also reveals how ideas about gender and colonialism frame the conventional contrast between modernity and tradition. As she has done before, Harding points the way forward in Sciences from Below . Describing the work of the post-Kuhnian science studies scholars Bruno Latour, Ulrich Beck, and the team of Michael Gibbons, Helga Nowtony, and Peter Scott, Harding reveals how, from different perspectives, they provide useful resources for rethinking the modernity versus tradition binary and its effects on the production of scientific knowledge. Yet, for the most part, they do not take feminist or postcolonial critiques into account. As Harding demonstrates, feminist science studies and postcolonial science studies have vital contributions to make; they bring to light not only the male supremacist investments in the Western conception of modernity and the historical and epistemological bases of Western science but also the empirical knowledge traditions of the global South. Sciences from Below is a clear and compelling argument that modernity studies and post-Kuhnian, feminist, and postcolonial sciences studies each have something important, and necessary, to offer to those formulating socially progressive scientific research and policy.

Genres: Feminism, Science, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Gender and Sexuality, Anthropology, Academic

296 pages, Paperback

First published June 4, 2008

About the author

Sandra G. Harding was an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology, and philosophy of science. She directed the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996 to 2000, and co-edited Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society from 2000 to 2005. Until her deceassed, she was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education and Gender Studies at UCLA and a Distinguished Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. In 2013 she was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S).

Reviews

[JC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for comps. This is a book about modernity and its critics (feminist, postcolonial, and theorists in STS and development studies). The book has three sections:

Part 1 focuses on Northern perspectives on science and modernity, paying special attention to three particular angles: Latour’s work on how scientific projects expand their networks of bureaucracy, how modernity was never a thing (or at least never realized / reached completion), and that Marxist/externalist attempts to explain scientific advances solely through social causes is as insufficient as explaining them by appealing to nature alone (largely focusing on Latour’s books We Have Never Been Modern and Politics of Nature), Ulrich Beck’s notion of ‘risk society’ and his sociological studies of work, and finally a team of European sociologists (Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott and Michael Gibbons) who focus on the reorganization of technoscience following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. All three claim science has been a form of governance that bypasses processes of democracy in a way that is not legitimate (which curiously is how it was sometimes framed by cranks during the Covid pandemic). However, all three also believe science is redeemable, can eventually be made accountable politically, and has important contributions to make towards social progress.

Part 2 identifies limitations in Northern perspectives on science, being advanced by women’s movements, postcolonial science studies, and feminist STS, which identified five major concerns:
1.) the disproportionately small number of women in science,
2.) sexist results produced by scientific research,
3.) sexist ways in which scientific theory and knowledge has been applied,
4.) sexism that persists in scientific education and pedagogy
5.) epistemological sexism, both in methodologies and philosophies of science

Part 3 emphasizes the plurality of modernities that exist because postcolonial scholars emphasized the multiplicity of sciences and modernities, hence: “purportedly universal modernity can never completely replace local traditions; it must always (selectively) appropriate and redirect them to serve its own purposes. Moreover, modernity itself must always reproduce something it calls tradition as its Other in order to come into existence in the first place…”

One of the main frameworks discussed in this book, and Harding’s work more generally, is feminist standpoint theory, which Harding believes can leverage differences like “gender, race, and class, to provide resources for achieving stronger forms of the objectivity, reliability, and rationality of scientific work than conventional sciences and philosophies of science have produced.”

Harding goes on to locate standpoint theory’s origins in Marxist scholarship:

“Standpoint theory's development in feminism originated in attempts to explain two things. One was how what was widely recognized as "good science" or "good social science" could produce such sexist and androcentric research results as feminist social scientists and biologists were documenting. The other was to explain the successes of feminist work which violated the norms of good research, such as engaging in research that was guided by feminist politics. In both cases, the theorists sought an epistemology, philosophy of science, and methodology which provided more resources for such projects than did the prevailing feminist corrections to the standard empiricist or positivist approaches. A third reason for developing feminist stand- point theory was methodological and political: to direct attention to how to produce knowledge that was for women, not just about them. Women needed information about their bodies, their environments, and how social institutions worked that the existing natural and social sciences did not think worth pursuing. The early theorists all turned to the work of Marx, Engels, and Lukacs and their heirs in the Frankfurt School of critical sociology. The Marxian tradition had identified the importance of the standpoint of the proletariat to social transformation. However, the Marxian legacy seemed unable to overcome various limitations, and had pretty much been abandoned by the 1940s. Standpoint theory emerged anew in the 1970s and 1980s independently in the work of Nancy Hartsock, "Feminist Standpoint"; Alison Jaggar, "Feminist Politics and Epistemology"; Hilary Rose, "A Feminist Epistemology"; and Dorothy Smith, Everyday World as Problematic and Conceptual Practices of Power.”

Another place Harding rehashes this genealogy:

“Recollect the feminist standpoint mantra to "start off research and politics from women's lives," rather than from the conceptual frame- works of the research disciplines, to create the kinds of knowledge that women need and want to empower themselves and their dependents- children, kin, households, and communities. This was modeled on the Marxian directive to start off from workers' daily lives to understand how the economy works and to provide resources for workers' efforts to better their lives. We saw the postcolonial scholars and activists starting off from the lives of those ruled by Western imperial and colonial projects in order to understand how imperialism, colonialism, the "voyages of discovery," and Third World development policies had largely horrible effects upon the societies Europeans encountered, and especially how scientific rationality and technical expertise functioned within such projects primarily to benefit Westerners. Standpoint projects are designed to identify, explain, and transform the conceptual and material practices of power of the dominant social institutions, including research disciplines, in ways that benefit those who are least advantaged by such institutions.”

This is also how Harding casts the work of scholars like bell hooks:

“Margins as sites of radical epistemological possibility, bell hooks ("Choosing the Margin") argues that margins are sites of potentially radical critical thought. Thus when material life is hierarchically organized, as in societies structured by class, gender, race, ethnic, religious, or other forms of oppression and discrimination, the understandings of such hierarchical relations that are available to "rulers" and "ruled" will tend to be opposed in important respects…

One can see them [slaves] struggling to make their own human history in conditions not of their choosing (to paraphrase Marx). To take another example, Marx and Engels explained how the nineteenth-century capitalist economy worked from the perspective of workers' lives, contrary to the then- dominant understandings of it constructed from the experiences of the owners of industries and the financiers who served them. Similarly, the women's movement of the 1970s revealed how women's work was both socially necessary and also exploited labor, not just an expression of women's natural inclinations or only a "labor of love," as men and public institutions saw the matter. Feminists pointed out that women never asked for or deserved rape or physical violence, contrary to the view of their abusers and the legal system. Rather, as MacKinnon ("Feminism, Marxism, Method") argued, "the state is male" in its insistence on regarding as objective and rational a perception of violence against women that could look reasonable only from the perspective of men's position in social relations between the genders in our particular kinds of societies. Again, biologists, health researchers, and environmentalists identified many more inversions and, from the standpoint of women's lives, perverse understandings of nature and social relations in the conceptual frameworks of dominant institutions. These frameworks are in fact active agents in forming and maintaining gendered social relations. As Fredric Jameson points out, feminist standpoint theorists opened "a space of a different kind for polemics about the epistemological priority of the experience of various groups or collectivities (most immediately, in this case, the experience of women as opposed to the experience of the industrial working class)" (Jameson, " 'History and Class Consciousness'" 144)”

Another group this book would be of interest to would be development scholars as Harding, in working through critiques of modernity, inevitably has to deal with critiques of modernization theory, which has been of primary interest to various development theorists (Marxian or otherwise). Harding actually explicitly connects the approaches of postcolonial and post-Marxian scholars to standpoint theory:

“There are several ways in which this kind of standpoint work can be done. One can begin with the experiences and voices of the peoples Europeans encountered, past and present. Those of the past are not always easy to locate. Yet this challenge is no harder for science and technology studies than for researchers who seek such accounts from any other "silent" groups in history—peasants, women, subalterns (cf. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?"; Bridenthal and Koonz, Becoming Visible; Wolf, Europe and the People Without a History). What have been the science and technology concerns of these peoples? What are they today? Second, one can begin with the objective location in local and global political economies of these peoples, as evaluated through studies of economic production, trade, migration, global financial policies and flows, international political relations, international development policies, comparative census data, global health statistics, and other such measures. World Systems Theory and Dependency Theory have provided powerful resources here (Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America; Wallerstein, Modern World System). A third kind of resource has been found in the collective statements, analyses, manifestos, calls to action, protests against local or global policies, and so on of non-European peoples (for example, Third World Network, Modern Science in Crisis). All three kinds of sources are revealing, and no one is in itself sufficient to fully examine or understand science and technology histories and present practices around the globe.”

“Science and empire studies emerged alongside World Systems Theory. Eric Williams (Capitalism and Slavery), a West Indian historian, looked at how the immense profits from Caribbean plantations had played such a large role in making industrialization in Europe possible. Several decades later, Ramkrishna Mukerjee (Rise and Fall), an Indian historian, began to examine how the British intentionally destroyed the Indian textile industry in order to create a market for the importation of British textiles. Scientific and technological knowledge, both in Europe and in Europe's overseas targets of imperial control, were central to both of these histories. In what was perceived then as "externalist history," it began to appear that European expansion and the destruction of other cultures' knowledge traditions bore significant responsibility for scientific and technological growth in Europe. Thus doubts arose about the prevailing diffusionist model of scientific and technological growth, and the presumed political innocence of Europe in such processes. Science and empires scholarship has radically expanded since these early works. These scholars ask if it was entirely an accident, as the standard histories of Northern science assume, that modern sciences began to flourish in Europe at about the same time as the Europeans began their "voyages of discovery." Their answer is that it was no coincidence. Rather, each project needed the success of the other for its own success. Moreover, this symbiotic relation between European expansion and the advance of modern sciences continues today through development projects and Western militarism (especially, it is mortify- ing to admit, U.S. militarism)—a point to which we return shortly.”

“Alongside the science and empires studies, anthropologists and historians began to reevaluate and examine more thoroughly both the traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) of other societies and their indigenous knowledge (IK) traditions more generally.”

This is a little excerpt where Harding briefly describes modernization theory and its early critiques coming from a Marxian tradition:

“The modernization theory originating in the nineteenth century was reinvigorated by post-World War II sociologists, such as Alex Inkeles and David H. Smith (Becoming Modern) and W. W. Rostow (Stages of Economic Growth), who were concerned with understanding and justifying the economic, political, and social changes occurring as the West's economic resources were being redirected from war efforts to social transformations around the globe and to Cold War dynamics. Its most powerful critics in the West have been the Marxian-inspired world systems theorists and dependency theorists, such as Wallerstein (Modern World-System) and Frank (Capitalism and Underdevelopment). In effect they propose an alternative theory of modernization. In this section I will identify four themes in modernization narratives which reveal their foundations in gender stereotypes, and how the benefits ofWestern sciences and technologies consequently are delivered primarily within male-supremacist conceptual frameworks”

There was also a very weird critique of Samir Amin in this book, which as far as I understand, seems to be a rather significant misreading of Amin’s work:

“A second proposal argues that the sciences in the South should "delink" from Northern projects. In 1990 , the Egyptian economist Samir Amin (Delinking) proposed that the economic systems of the South would never be able to flourish and to serve citizens of the South as long as those economies remained so firmly captured by Northern political agendas. Only complete withdrawal would permit Southern societies to develop on their own terms. The Third World Network put this kind of argument the following way: "Only when science and technology evolve from the ethos and cultural milieu of Third World societies will it become meaningful for our needs and requirements, and express our true creativity and genius. Third World science and technology can only evolve through a reliance on indigenous categories, idioms and traditions in all spheres of thought and action A major plank of any such strategy should be the delinking of the Third World from the secular dynamic which institutionalizes the hegemony of the West" (Third World Network, Modern Science in Crisis, 14). Certainly conventional histories of Western sciences and technologies routinely argue something similar about the ethos and culture of Western societies, though their exceptionalist and triumphalist assumptions are far more dangerous than those of a theoretically delinked Third World culture. The Westerners argue that modern (Western) science emerged in Europe because of the West's distinctive categories, idioms, and traditions, which originated in ancient Greek society, and were recovered for the European Renaissance. Why shouldn't Third World societies argue for their traditions in similar terms, albeit with a distinctive interpretation of their own exceptional- ism and a bit of justifiable trimphalism, both distanced from the predatory and imperial politics within which Europeans made such claims? Such a proposal seems unrealistic in today's world for two reasons. For one thing, it seems to be impossible now for a society to erect boundaries powerful enough to keep out transnational corporations, global media such as the Internet and cell phones, powerful transnational criminal activities such as arms and drug trades, and the expansion of terrorist projects. Since Amin proposed delinking, this project may have lost whatever plausibility it ever possessed as an actual political strategy. Second, pandemics such as SARS, AIDS, and Asian bird flu, as well as acid rain, desertification, and ozone holes, refuse to respect man-made borders. International cooperation is needed in attempts to head off such potential threats to human life and the life of the planet. So complete delinking, at least, seems both improbable and in important respects undesirable.”

I will finish off with this little comment Harding makes on Angela Davis and national liberation struggles of the Third World more broadly (a critique of these struggles that I agree with in terms of their shortcomings with respect to gender and sexism, though they fared much better than capitalist and fascist political programs, a low bar for comparison):

“[Angela] Davis pointed out that the family, which middle-class white women rightly were finding oppressive, was for African American slaves a source of power, status, and creative energy. She implied that in the still racist society in which we live today, African American family labor remains an important site of resistance to white supremacist policies and practices. Caulfield documented this phenomenon in contexts of imperialism and colonialism more generally in her influential study of the importance of women's work in resistance to imperialism and colonialism. Yet national liberation struggles, whether in the West or in the formerly colonized societies of the Third World, frequently result in the formal liberation of men's democratic rights only. Women's destiny after such struggles is all too often to return to the household and kitchen, which, after the revolution, cannot confer the status and power to women that they earlier did. Economic and political issues are inextricably intertwined in these accounts… Theories of social change which do not account for how gender relations interact with other kinds of social relations fail to explain what happens in the historical eras on which they focus.”

[Tomás Narvaja · Rating 2 out of 5]

A really basic introduction to feminist and postcolonial science studies and the issue of modernity/tradition that mainly deals with the question of epistemology, but not also ontology as many feminist science scholars are doing presently, like Karen Barad, Elizabeth Wilson, Vicki Kirby, etc.

[Elevate Difference · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the current American climate, it is impossible not to relate everything I read to the staggering situation we find ourselves in environmentally, socially, and now economically. Sandra Harding’s latest feminist science studies read, Sciences from Below, is no exception. Harding’s book examines the role of science studies in our society, a discipline that locates scientific knowledge in a larger historical, philosophical, and social context (something that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore in a world where scientific studies are politicized and manipulated for monetary and political gain). Harding’s assertion is that the discipline of science studies ignores the contributions of feminisms and postcolonialities, disciplines and movements that interrogate the relationship between history, knowledge, and power. She also creates a framework for understanding how these seemingly separate fields could be mutually beneficial in moving toward a place that does not rely on the rigid boundaries of modernity/tradition and masculine/feminine.

Now, Sciences from Below is certainly no beach read. Harding makes up for what she lacks in the chick lit department by seamlessly weaving thoughts from some of the greatest postcolonial, feminist thinkers into her musings. The words of Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, Gayatri Spivak, and Chandra Mohanty (to name a few) pepper her pages. When discussing the title of her book she summons bell hook’s discussion of the margins as a potential site for radical thought. Sciences from Below brings forth the notion that science and the production of knowledge can occur on the periphery of the norm. In Harding’s case, this means the global south and outside the typical androcentric views of modern science, which call binaries of modernity/tradition and masculine/feminine into question, and that is precisely what Harding aims to do. Harding spends a good portion of the book grappling with the meaning of these binaries and finding ways of overcoming them.

Harding is a scholar first and foremost, and this comes across in her writing. Most of her arguments are so entrenched in theory that it is hard to interpret how science studies and their inclusion of feminisms and postcolonialities will really affect my life. Despite this, there were moments when I read her words as a call to action. She describes the appropriation of scientific knowledge as a process of colonization, how it was used to broaden the gap between rich and poor, and ultimately, how it lead to the economic, social, and environmental problems that are occurring around the globe today. These problems persist, and despite how it may seem in light of the impending economic crash, the global south is experiencing these problems disproportionately to the rest of the world. We live in a world where income gaps are widening, where the environment is suffering, and where economies are unstable. Harding has added a piece of scholarship to my feminist library that manages to grapple with theory and eloquently trace its place in the lives of people living around the world.

Review by Lizzy Shramko