This doctoral research explores international collaborations between field scientists from North and South America - specifically Chilean, Bolivian, US and Canadian archaeologists who work in Chile and Bolivia. The research methodology involves ethnographic study of academic practices in labs, universities and excavations. It aims to understand how scientific knowledge is generated and used at international, nation and local levels, in the context of postcolonial relations between North and South America, and a growing neo-indigenous movement. Through an ethnography of collaborations between local Aymara communities and international archaeologists, this project will determine how field sciences challenge our models of how scientific knowledge is produced and circulated. When the 'laboratory' is an unbounded space in the landscape, and the 'scientists' include indigenous workers and untrained students, how are scientific facts and data delineated as authoritative, independent, universal knowledge? Furthermore, how are field sciences sustained in the rapidly changing context of a postcolonial world, where both national governments and local communities actively seek a stake in the production and products of their research?
This project looks beyond the traditional remit of science studies, to ascertain whether the models of scientific knowledge production developed in the natural sciences and in laboratories can be extended to field sciences. It asks whether, precisely because of the conditions of its production, field sciences are more open to challenges to their authority. As international scientific research shifts towards greater inclusion of indigenous peoples, questions of fundamental importance are raised about the implications not only for the type of knowledge produced and how it is used, but also for the rights of those that produce it. In addressing these questions, this dissertation project will have an impact both on our knowledge of scientific practice, and on debates within anthropology surrounding the role of scientists, including anthropologists, on the international stage.
At a time when scientific and expert knowledge that relies on complex and critical knowledge forms is increasingly undermined or ignored, this dissertation makes a robust defense of the nuanced, empirical, but judgment based forms of knowing that the social and human sciences represent. I explore an established but still highly relevant theme in science studies: the authority of scientific knowledge. My dissertation makes an original and much needed contribution to this debate by a) looking at sciences that, according to established models of scientific knowledge, ought to be "weak" (namely the social and field sciences); and b) by looking at scientists in the Global South. Based on over two years of multisited research in universities, excavations and conferences in Chile, Bolivia, the US and Canada, my dissertation traces the mutual co-production of archaeologists and archaeological knowledge across disciplinary and geo-political borders. I argue that sciences like archaeology feel themselves to be epistemically and socially insecure, and are thus constantly reacting against models of scientific practice that come from outside their lived experience. Models of "real science" that are based on the physical and natural sciences; or models of academic labor and professionalization in the university that are increasingly shaped by the economic and political agendas of organizations like the OECD and WTO. During the period of this NSF award I conducted ethnographic research among three communities of archaeologists: Bolivian archaeologists based in La Paz; North American archaeologists who work in the Andean region of Bolivia and Chile; and Chilean archaeologists who work in the Tarapacá desert. Using a combination of participant observation, interviews and documentary research, I examined how both archaeological knowledge and archaeologists are created at a national and international level. Rather than focusing only on excavations, I followed archaeologists through their professional lives into classrooms and conferences, paying attention to how a discipline's moral values and epistemic ideals are created through formal and informal practices of socialization, professionalization and knowledge sharing. This research forms the basis of my doctoral dissertation. By looking at where challenges to authority actually come from, this dissertation argues that although archaeologists have embraced a postcolonial critique that compels them to actively include the interpretations of indigenous stakeholders into their research, the bigger challenge lies in acknowledging differences in social and economic power that underlie collaborations between academics from the Global North and South. Acknowledging the tensions that underlie unequal collaborations is risky, however, because it challenges the idea of a universal supranational scientific community, and thus also the conceptualization of scientific knowledge as infinitely mobile and value free. My analysis thus moves from the local to the global, connecting the recognition of expertise by individuals on excavations to growing pressures to neoliberalize universities in the US and Chile; the history on US political involvement in South American during the twentieth century; and a consideration of why the evaluation of scientific knowledge and expertise has been based on either mechanical-objectivity or trained judgment within specific historical and cultural contexts. Beyond providing a case-study for the social study of science, however, my dissertation finds its relevance in the growing distrust of scientific and expert authority in Late Industrial societies, and particularly in the US. If the complex and judgment based empiricism of the social sciences has been undervalued for some time, recent studies of, for example, creationism and climate denial, show that we are increasingly seeing attacks on all sciences, that aim purposefully to undermine the principle of complex knowledge and scientific expertise itself. My future research will thus actively engage with these debates, and, building on my dissertation research, explore potential collaborations between scientists from the social and physical sciences that would address these urgent issues.
