Cultural Production of Scientific Facts
The Japanese Concepts of “Nature”
in a Neurophysiological Laboratory
Keywords: neurophysiology, Nature, Culture, Society, laboratory studies, ethnography, Japan
In this paper, I examine the Japanese concepts of “nature,” that Japanese experimental neuroscientists may conceive. In these argumenta processes, I also discuss if there are continuity and discontinuity among these three components; Human Beings including experimental neurophysiologists, the Experimental Animals that have both individual characteristics and vertebrate biological universalities, and the Recording Machine which is essential medium to bridge between concept of “nature” and “scientific fact.” The fieldwork have been done in an university laboratory of neurophysiology of visual perceptions in Western Japan, I have conducted interviews with some neurophysiologists and relating scientists and done participants observation in series of their activity of the laboratory from May, 2005 to present.
In the first section, “Introduction,” I contextualize historically this study in the six historical epoch phases of the development of neurophysiological theories and methodologies. Then the Michel Lynch’s hypothesis of 1988 on experimental animals as “ritual sacrifices” is examined and can be rejected because of the following reason. The process between ritual and animal experiment is superficially similar, but in the latter case sometime it is emerged different recovering process when the experiment can tend to be failed, the former never does.
The section II entitled “the Ethnographies of Science and Laboratory,” orients to the examination of previous ethnographic studies through the bibliographic review. Especially for comparative examination I take two representative studies; one is the Bruno Latour and Steve Woolger’s biochemical laboratory study in 1979, and another is the Paul Rabinow’s biotechnology laboratory study in 1996. The former is the milestone study of the Actor Network Theory, ANT, and the latter is good combination of between the actors’ narratives and the organization of one’s experience in a certain historical context in the laboratory. This study adopts opportunistically the latter’s researching strategy. Conventionally scientific activities are believed in objective and universal among peoples, that means cosmopolitan’s phenomena. So we might to give attention if a certain local cultural tradition can influence this universal character of the science, the means the importance of ethnographic studies.
In the section III, “the Producing Concepts of ‘Nature’,” how the experimental animals are treated for neurophysiological experiments is described ethnographically. Nevertheless that the experiment is not opened for ordinary people including the animal rights activists, the outcome should be opened by a certain justification of scientific procedure as cultural process. By this procedure, in the scientist image and feeling, the experiment animals, which hold individual character in pre-experiment phase, can be transformed discontinuously to objective matters after the experiment. The experimental scientists do not aware exactly this contradictory transformation, that is the main subject of my discussion in the following chapter.
In the forth section, “Legitimize Process of the Animal Nature,” I focus how scientists get “facts” of experimental datum and interpret them as the contents of “nature” or “scientific truth” by legitimization according established or authenticated protocols by their tradition. In this study Japanese experimental neurophysiologists tend to accept not only western dichotomy between nature and culture, but also other dichotomy in subsequent level dividing the nature between “tamed nature” domain and “wild nature” one.
In the last and concluding section, I advocate that the ethnographic study of natural sciences should clarify not only the local usages, similar with ethno-recognitions one, of the concepts of “nature” but also how to relate their cultural practice with the concept, that the author calls “coproduction of scientific knowledge.”
In this case, Japanese
scientist’s concepts of “nature” or “scientific truth” that do not
represented in ordinary conversation setting, may appear in the term of
“scientific fact,” and sometimes be focused in hybrid components in
experimental animals, recoding machine, and scientific datum. The
social production of these concepts of "nature" represents the total
facts of various practices, which are consisted as scientific
experiments, trying to publish their articles in scientific journals
and books, and other academic activities including teaching activities
in the university campus. This means that they are accepting the
dichotomy between nature and culture in anthropological sense, and then
they logically purify some elements of “discovery process” from the
entities of hybridity between experimental animals and instruments.
Their reality of producing “scientific fact” comes from the relations
between these animals and instruments.
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