Nader, L. (ed.) (1996) Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge.

Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge argues that science is not an autonomous, universal and neutral domain, but a culturally situated practice shaped by boundaries, institutions, power and historical context. Edited by Laura Nader, the volume brings together anthropology of science, ethnoscience and technoscience to question the dominance of Western scientific self-representation. Its central claim is that Western science has often defined itself by contrast: science against magic, rationality against superstition, modernity against tradition, the West against “the rest.” These contrasts are not innocent; they create hierarchies, silence other knowledge systems and reinforce the authority of those who draw the boundaries. Nader proposes a “naked” science: stripped of its ideological clothing, science appears less pure, less detached and more embedded in social worlds than its official image suggests. The book examines navigation, Maya herbal medicine, Cree knowledge, immunology, genetics, nuclear testing, molecular biology, Japanese physics, Inuit knowledge and primatology to show that empirical knowledge is produced in many cultures and through many forms of validation. Indigenous and local sciences are not romantic survivals, but complex systems of observation, classification, experimentation and practical reasoning. At the same time, Western science is shown to be entangled with militarization, public funding, state power, commercial interests and institutional authority. The book’s major contribution is to replace the binary of science versus non-science with an anthropology of plural knowledge systems, attentive to how truth, expertise and legitimacy are constructed. Rather than rejecting science, it asks for a broader, more democratic and less ethnocentric understanding of knowledge. Its conclusion is that debates about science must move beyond glorification or denunciation, toward a critical study of how science works, whom it serves, what it excludes and how different traditions of knowing might interrogate one another.