Sharon Traweek

Biography

Sharon Traweek is an American anthropologist of science, associate professor in the History Department and the Gender Studies Department at UCLA. She has previously held positions in the Anthropology Department at Rice University and in the Program in Anthropology and Archaeology and the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT, with visiting positions at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center at Mount Holyoke, the Anthropology Department at UC San Diego, and the Program in Values, Technology, Science and Society at Stanford.

She received her doctorate in 1982 from the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, advised by Hayden White and Gregory Bateson, with a thesis committee including James Clifford, Shelly Errington, Triloki N. Pandey, Thomas Rohlen and Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo. Her earlier degrees are an MA in modern European history from San Francisco State (adviser Vartan Gregorian) and a BA in history from UC Berkeley (adviser Robert O. Paxton).

Beamtimes and Lifetimes

Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Harvard University Press, 1988; paperback 1992) is her principal work and a founding text of the anthropology of science.

The book is an ethnography of particle physicists, based on fieldwork at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and at Japan's KEK laboratory over more than a decade. Traweek's method is the ordinary method of anthropology applied to a community that regards itself as standing outside culture: she studies detectors, career paths, laboratory architecture, the allocation of beam time, gossip, apprenticeship and the stories physicists tell novices, and treats all of it as the culture of a group rather than as the neutral machinery of discovery.

Her most quoted formulation describes the physicists' self-understanding as producing "a culture of no culture" — a community whose members believe their practices to be determined by nature rather than by convention, and whose account of themselves therefore has to be studied rather than accepted. The comparison between the American and Japanese laboratories is what makes the argument stick: the same physics, organised through visibly different social arrangements, career structures and relationships between senior and junior researchers.

The book is also an early and careful account of how gender operates in a scientific community — not through explicit exclusion but through the shape of the career, the apprenticeship system and the definition of what counts as commitment.

Research Interests

Traweek's continuing work concerns Japanese big science, the crafting of cultural studies of science, technology and medicine, and the comparative study of how scientific communities in different countries are organised. She has published widely across anthropology, Asian studies, communications, cultural studies, history and women's studies, and has lectured internationally.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Traweek established that laboratories can be studied as field sites and that scientists constitute a culture with kinship structures, initiation rites, sacred objects and origin myths. That move is the precondition for cyborg anthropology: if the people who build technologies are working inside a culture, then the technologies carry that culture's assumptions, and both can be described. Her "culture of no culture" is also the most useful phrase available for the technical community's persistent belief that its choices are dictated by the problem rather than made by people.

Related Reading

• Russ Bernard
• The Idea Factory
• Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
• Sandy Pentland
• Digital Anthropology