This panel builds on the careful attention to the life of the laboratory advanced by Bruno Latour (1947–2022) over the course of his career. Rather than seeing science as a product of pure intellect, Latour was fascinated by the contingencies of the material, social, and spatial conditions of knowledge-production. Laboratories, for Latour, became places that meaningfully shape how science gets done. The papers in this panel continue this consideration of living scientific and laboratory milieus, considering how religious, ethical, political, and cosmological dimensions define scientific cultures.
This paper explores the cosmological and moral aspects of the "systems" model used to model life in US Nuclear programs during the mid-20th century. Through the lens of the friendship between medical researcher and UN Atomic Energy Agency administrator Ralph Kniseley and artist and critic Charles Counts, it argues that the "systems" models developed in life sciences division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratories were deployed as a means of atonement for the scientists who developed the bomb, through which they sought to integrate "ethics" and "spirit" into scientific practice. Counts and Kniseley were both critics of and participants in this process. This paper reflects on the power of "systems" to capture the concept of "ethics," suggesting that contemporary theorists who draw from "ecosystems" and "networks" as a form of moral solution may be repeating the mistakes first made by nuclear scientists in those concepts' early past.
Recent advances in end-of-life technologies have destabilized religious notions of personhood, identity, and ethics; for example, in the reliance on specific device and tests to mediate decisions about when to end life support and declare death. As notions of personhood and identity in the medical setting are made to conform to the limits of the technology it deploys, some in the West have sought guidance in the techniques and views related to the dying process cultivated in other cultures and religions, particularly Tibetan Buddhism. This paper will explore this seeking behavior in connection with the author’s psychophysiological and ethnographic fieldwork (2016-2020) in the Tibetan Buddhist monastic community in India. The details and history of this fieldwork—a scientific, religious, and cultural collaboration to determine the effects of meditative practice on the post-mortem body—are also explored in relation to narrative and semiotic resonances in the intersecting spaces of exile, research setting, and death.
In 1971, Barney Oliver and John Billingham led a NASA-funded research study aimed at designing an instrument for conducting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The proposed instrument, a colossal array of 2,500 radio telescopes, was called Project Cyclops. The instrument was never built, but not for lack of trying. Oliver and Billingham worked to further an argument, common among SETI researchers, that a successful detection would mean more than we are not alone in the universe--it would prove that our nuclear age, the period at which our technology could occasion our annihilation, was survivable. Humanity could yet be redeemed by the mere presence of the far-off alien. All this talk of redemption and apocalypse certainly smacks of religion, and this talk will attempt to unpack the leveraging of this rhetoric and make a case for why something like Project Cyclops belongs in the domain of religious studies.
Over the course of his life, Bruno Latour has sought to unravel the taken-for-granted character of sharp distinctions between nature and culture, religion, politics and science. After recapping the trajectory of Latour's "political epistemology", I argue that Latour's account of the laboratory as a locus for the rearticulation of power enables the development of new categories to analyze the distinctive ways that scientific institutions may enact violence. The violence of "Non-reciprocity" and "Non-representative authority" may make themselves present even in scientific encounters which attempt to be more sensitive to the concerns of indigenous populations or racial minorities, illustrated by the encounter of D. Carleton Gajusek with the Fore people and the (failed) attempts to enlist African-Americans in Tuskegee for a purportedly antiracist genomics program. Focusing attention on how overlapping, but non-identical communities navigate politico-epistemological authority and the circulation of knowledge opens a new angle to approach the religion-and-science conversation.