Naked Science

This is a collection of essays on different science traditions by scholars in the social sciences. The contributors demystify formal, Western science and encourage readers to "think of science in the plural and in lower-case". Anthropologists have tended to demarcate science as a domain that is separate from indigenous systems of knowledge. By drawing these boundaries, anthropologists have priviledged science and increased its power. The value of pulling together these different papers is that when science is viewed cross-culturally it becomes one of many knowledge traditions. The book covers different science cultures: physics, molecular biology, primatology, and ecology.