New Worlds, New Technologies, New Issues ed. by Stephen H. Cutcliffe, et al

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 179 their traditional food crop. Have they cut down forests to make fields? Is their prize harvest the product of safe pesticides? Does their improved maize seed ensure diversity? The book contains so many other beautiful and useful photographs to feature. Why use this one? The second point is a shrewish response to the remark on page 77 that the only land mammals on the Greater Antilles were humans, bats, and hutias. Meet some other creatures, the large and interesting insectivores of the group Solenodon. Present then, but now extinct, are another genus of insectivores, Nesophontes, and spiny rats of the genera Boromys and Brotomys. Charlotte M. Porter Dr. Porter is associate curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. She recently curated the traveling exhibition “Better Gold: Plants and Animals of the New World” with a grant from the National Science Foundation. New Worlds, New Technologies, New Issues. Edited by Stephen H. Cutcliffe , Steven L. Goldman, Manuel Medina, and José Sanmartín. Bethlehem, Pa., and Cranbury, N.J.: Lehigh University Press and Associated University Presses, 1992. Pp. 233; notes. $36.50. This is the sixth volume in the Research in Technology Studies series published by Lehigh University Press. The essays collected here were drawn from a Hispanic-American conference, held in Valencia in 1989. The book aims to reflect international concern with the integral role played by modern technologies in a rapidly changing world. The papers are arranged in three groups—part 1: new worlds— the crystallization of new (cultural) worlds around new technologies; part 2: new technologies and political responses to them; and part 3: new (social and moral) issues precipitated by modern technologies. As with any collection ofconference papers, the quality is somewhat uneven, some points are made repeatedly by different authors, and others that might have been pertinent are not made at all. Many of the authors look to the past and to the rise of modern technology in order to contextualize present and future issues. But as is inevitable, given the brief space allotted to each author, there is no in-depth historical analysis. Links between the ideology of modernity and technological domination of nature are repeatedly referred to (having become something of a cliché), but these links are not examined critically. This weakens subsequent discussions of contemporary issues because it too easily allows the presumption that correction of the ideology is all that is required to ameliorate the exploitation of nature. The association of modernity with a problematic technology covers up issues concerning how an ideology might be changed, or whether indeed it is really ideology that must first be changed. Thus, although there are 180 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE significant differences between the four papers in part 1, I found them all less than satisfying because they all advocate changes of vision, culture, or ideology as a means to improving what they see to be the problematic aspects of technology, without considering what might actually be required to bring any such changes about. A theme that emerges in parts 2 and 3 is the political role of the claim that science and technology are value neutral. Manuel Medina claims that societies created by modern European culture have ceded control of technoscientific research, development, and innovation to the scientific community, and that by doing so they have created a culture in which avenues of scientific investigation, which entail high risks to human life, are accepted as natural. His analysis suggests that the core of this cultural problem resides in the prevailing theorycentered conceptualization of science. So once again the message is that the solution to the problem is a changed conceptualization, this time of science. However, this would not seem to be the only answer, as the interesting and much more concretely grounded contribution by Margarita Peña suggests. Her discussion of the technology debates in Latin America illustrates some of the points made by Medina. In particular she outlines the negative impact on research in developing countries of the prestige accorded to theoryoriented scientific research. She argues that in these countries re­ search projects need to be formulated around problems that need...