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Invisible Labour in Modern Science 3rd Edition Jenny
Bangham Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Jenny Bangham, Xan Chacko, Judith Kaplan
ISBN(s): 9781538159965, 1538159961
Edition: 3
File Details: PDF, 4.56 MB
Year: 2022
Language: english
Invisible Labour
in Modern Science
 Global Epistemics
In partnership with the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies (gloknos)

Founding Editor:
Inanna Hamati-Ataya (University of Cambridge)

Editorial Assistants:
Felix Anderl and Matthew Holmes (University of Cambridge)

Editorial Review Board:

Rigas Arvanitis (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement) | Jana Bacevic (University of Cambridge)
| Patrick Baert (University of Cambridge) | Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer (University of Chicago) | Maria Birn-
baum (University of Bern) | Avital Bloch (Universidad de Colima) | Jenny Boulboullé (Utrecht University)
| Jordan Branch (Brown University) | Sonja Brentjes (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) | Karine
Chemla (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique & Université de Paris) | David Christian (Macquarie
University) | James H. Collier (Virginia Tech) | Steven Connor (University of Cambridge) | Helen Anne
Curry (University of Cambridge) | Shinjini Das (University of East Anglia) | Sven Dupré (Utrecht University)
| David Edgerton (King’s College London) | Juan Manuel Garrido Wainer (Universidad Alberto Hurtado)
| Simon Goldhill (University of Cambridge) | Anna Grasskamp (Hong Kong Baptist University) | Clare Grif-
fin (Nazarbayev University) | Marieke Hendriksen (Utrecht University) | Dag Herbjørnsrud (Senter for global
og komparativ idéhistorie) | Noboru Ishikawa (Kyoto University) | Christian Jacob (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales) | Martin Jones (University of Cambridge) | Katarzyna Kaczmarska (University of Edinburgh)
| Isaac A. Kamola (Trinity College, Connecticut) | Alexandre Klein (Université Laval) | Tuba Kocaturk (Deakin
University) | Pablo Kreimer (Universidad Nacional de Quilmes) | Michèle Lamont (Harvard University) | Helen
Lauer (University of Dar es Salaam) | G.E.R. Lloyd (University of Cambridge) | Carlos López-Beltrán (National
Autonomous University of Mexico) | Eric Lybeck (University of Manchester) | Christos Lynteris (University
of St Andrews) | Amanda Machin (Witten-Herdecke University) | Tara Mahfoud (King’s College London)
| Maximilian Mayer (University of Nottingham Ningbo) | Willard McCarty (King’s College London) | Atsuro
Morita (Osaka University) | Iwan Morus (Aberystwyth University) | David Nally (University of Cambridge)
| John Naughton (University of Cambridge) | Helga Nowotny (ETH Zurich) | Johan Östling (Lund University)
| Ingrid Paoletti (Politecnico di Milano) | V. Spike Peterson (University of Arizona) | Helle Porsdam (Uni-
versity of Copenhagen) | David Pretel (The College of Mexico) | Dhruv Raina (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
| Amanda Rees (University of York) | Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
| Sarah de Rijcke (Leiden University) | Francesca Rochberg (University of California at Berkeley) | Alexander
Ruser (University of Agder) | Anne Salmond (University of Auckland) | Karen Sayer (Leeds Trinity University)
| James C. Scott (Yale University) | Elisabeth Simbürger (Universidad de Valparaíso) | Daniel Lord Smail (Har-
vard University) | Fred Spier (University of Amsterdam) | Swen Steinberg (Queen’s University) | Tereza Stöck-
elová (Czech Academy of Sciences) | Jomo Sundaram (Khazanah Research Institute) | Liba Taub (University of
Cambridge) | Daniel Trambaiolo (University of Hong Kong) | Corinna Unger (European University Institute)
| Matteo Valleriani (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) | Stéphane Van Damme (European Uni-
versity Institute) | Andrés Vélez Posada (Universidad EAFIT) | Aparecida Vilaça (National Museum, Brazil)
| Simon Werrett (University College London) | Helen Yitah (University of Ghana) | Longxi Zhang (City Uni-
versity of Hong Kong)
tinyurl​.com​/GlobalEpistem​ics | tinyurl​.com​/RLIglok​nos

Titles in the Series:

Imaginaries of Connectivity: The Creation of Novel Spaces of Governance
Edited by Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Suvi Alt and Maarten Meijer
Mapping, Connectivity, and the Making of European Empires
Edited by Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Laura Lo Presti and Filipe dos Reis
Invisible Labour in Modern Science
Edited by Jenny Bangham, Xan Chacko, and Judith Kaplan
Invisible Labour
in Modern Science

Edited by
Jenny Bangham, Xan Chacko, and
Judith Kaplan

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com

86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE

Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic
or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written
permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN 9781538159958 (cloth) | ISBN 9781538159965 (ebook)

∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Contents

Series Editor’s Note ix

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction1
Jenny Bangham, Xan Chacko, and Judith Kaplan

Part I: People: Commentary: People and the Processes of Erasure 25

Sabine Clarke
1 Under the Mexican Sun: Zelia Nuttall and Eclipses in Americanist
Anthropology 39
Julia E. Rodriguez
2 Escaping Immortality: Science, Civilization, and Lu Gwei-djen 51
Lan A. Li
3 Producing and Delivering Truth: The (In)visibility of Forensic
Scientists in Colombia 61
María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra
4 Of Animacy and Afterlives: Material Memories in Indigenous
Collections 71
Margaret M. Bruchac
5 Ex-prisoners of the Gulag in the Siberian Expeditions 81
Alexandra Noi

v
vi Contents

6 The Bureaucratic Ethic and the Spirit of Bio-capitalism 89

Laura Stark
7 “They Say They Are Kurds”: Informants and Identity Work at
the Iranian Pasteur Institute 99
Elise K. Burton
Part II: Power: Commentary: (Em)Powering Narratives of Technology 109
Gabriela Soto Laveaga
8 Categorizing Roma in Censuses, Surveys, and Expert Estimates 117
Mihai Surdu
9 Situated Knowledge and the Genetics of the Brazilian Northeastern
Population, 1960–1980 127
Ana Carolina Vimieiro Gomes
10 The Invisible Labour of Translating Indigenous Traditional
Knowledge in Canada 137
Sarah Blacker
11 Invisible Bodies: Psychoanalysis, Subjugated Knowledges,
and Intimate Ethics in Postwar Egypt 149
Omnia El Shakry
12 The (In)visible Labour of Varietal Innovation 163
Susannah Chapman
13 Coffee Breeders, Farmers, and the Labours of Agricultural
Modernization 173
Stuart McCook
Part III: Process: Commentary: Invisible, Secret, and Social 183
M. Susan Lindee
14 Citizen Seismology, Stalinist Science, and Vladimir
Mannar’s Cold Wars 195
Elena Aronova
15 Blood, Paper, and Invisibility in Mid-century Transfusion Science 205
Jenny Bangham
16 Invisible Vitality: The Hidden Labours of Seed Banking 217
Xan Chacko
17 Oneida Inscriptions 227
Judith Kaplan
18 Making Movement Matter 237
Whitney Laemmli
 Contents vii

19 Invisibility as a Mechanism of Social Ordering:

How Scientists and Technicians Divide Power 247
Caitlin Donahue Wylie
Part IV: Practice: Commentary: Teaching Practices with Invisible Labour 255
Judith Kaplan
20 Collecting Human Subjects: Ethics and the Archive 265
Joanna Radin
21 Locating Sources, Situating Psychiatry, Complicating
Categories: A Journey through Three German Archives 275
Lara Keuck
22 Turing, or An Exhibition Should Not Mean but Be 285
Boris Jardine
23 Invisibilities of Care: Reproductive Labour and Indigenous
Hospitalities in Post/Colonial Fieldwork 297
Alexandra Widmer
24 Invisible Infrastructures: A’uwẽ-Xavante Strategies to
Enrol and Manage Warazú Researchers 307
Rosanna Dent
25 Cultivating a Northern Australian Public for Yolŋu Cosmologies:
“Keeping Visible” Yolŋu Research Practices and Their Effects 317
Michaela Spencer

Index327
About the Editors and Contributors 335
Series Editor’s Note

It has been a great privilege to accompany Jenny Bangham, Xan Chacko, and Judith
Kaplan in the final stages of this important collaborative project they began many
years ago. Invisible Labour in Modern Science returns science to the multitude of
epistemic labourers whose voices, perspectives, experiences, practices, concerns, and
values have been erased from our consciousness and memory. It does so by reconsti-
tuting, without ever simplifying them, the complex contexts and dynamics through
which modern science becomes constituted and operative as an autonomous but
socially situated field of action, and those through which its authoritative knowledge
is called upon to provide meaning and arbitration in various areas of human life.
Invisible Labour in Modern Science is also conceived as a purposeful interven-
tion with pedagogical intent. It will likely become a referential volume for scholars
and students of the history and sociology of science, but its contribution to critical
pedagogy and to the ethos of reflexive scholarship extends well beyond these fields.
Because of the place and authority of modern science in contemporary society and
academia, the elucidation of the erasures that accompany its formation and deploy-
ment is important to all of us. At the very least, the volume should prompt us to
interrogate what similar or other erasures and invisibilities we ourselves inherit,
ignore, and consolidate as we deploy our epistemic practice as researchers and
teachers.
Inanna Hamati-Ataya
Cambridge, January 31, 2022

ix
Acknowledgements

This book is the result of many years of collaborative dialogue. It first took shape at
the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (MPIWG), Germany, where
we were given the opportunity to convene a local workshop in June 2015 for col-
leagues whose interests converged on invisible labour in the human sciences. For
their contributions to the workshop, we wish to thank Josh Berson, Mirjam Brusius,
Eric Llavaria Caselles, Iris Clever, Samuël Coghe, Josephine Fenger, Donna Ger-
manese, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Petter Hellström, Myriam Klapi, Nina Lerman,
Nina Ludwig, Birgitta von Mallinckrodt, Johanna Gonçalves Martin, Minakshi
Menon, Christine von Oertzen, Jenny Reardon, Helga Satzinger, and Kathleen
Vongsathorn. The workshop was funded by Department II, then directed by Lor-
raine Daston, and the Independent Research Group “Histories of Knowledge about
Human Variation,” directed by Veronika Lipphardt.
Later, we expanded the geographical, political and disciplinary scope of the proj-
ect and in February 2021 convened a second online workshop hosted by Inanna
Hamati-Ataya of the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies (gloknos) in Cambridge,
UK (an international network of cross-disciplinary academics funded by the Euro-
pean Research Council). We are grateful to Inanna for hosting the 2021 workshop,
for her enthusiastic inclusion of this book in the Global Epistemics series, for the
valuable insights she brought to the project, and the careful attention she paid to the
manuscript. We thank the anonymous reviewers solicited by Rowman & Littlefield
and the patient and efficient editorial team, which has included Isobel Cowper-
Coles, Dhara Snowden, Frankie Mace, Deni Remsberg, and Mary Wheelehan. We
thank Nate Freiburger for the thoughtful and comprehensive index. Jenny Bangham
wishes to acknowledge support from the Wellcome Trust during this stage of the
project (grant number: 200299/Z/15/Z). For comments on the drafts of the intro-
duction, we thank Rohan Deb Roy, Nick Hopwood, Boris Jardine, Daniel Midena,

xi
xii Acknowledgements

Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Simon Schaffer, Laura Stark, and many of the participants of
the 2021 workshop. Our thanks also go to Susannah Chapman, Iris Clever, Petter
Hellström, Lara Keuck, Ahmed Ragab, and May Ee Wong, who helped us to refine
our summarizing blurb of the book.
Because this is a collaborative venture, and to save precious word quotas, we sug-
gested that authors leave out their individual thanks to the authors and editors of the
volume; but on their behalf we want to acknowledge the collegiate and cooperative
spirit that all participants brought to one another’s contributions. We are mindful
that editing is, itself, a representational practice, and during the project we have had
the opportunity to reflect on how invisible (to some) racialized, gendered, national,
and institutional power structures affect who takes part, or not, in books like this
one—we hope we can bring those lessons to bear on future projects.

Introduction
Jenny Bangham, Xan Chacko, and Judith Kaplan

It came suddenly, splendid and complete, into my mind. I was alone, the
laboratory was still, with the tall lights burning brightly and silently. . . . “One
could make an animal—a tissue—transparent! One could make it invisible! All
except the pigments. I could be invisible!” I said. . . . “To do such a thing would be
to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all
that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom . . .”1
—H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man, 1897

I am an invisible man . . . I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and

liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand,
simply because people refuse to see me . . . they see only my surroundings,
themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything
except me.
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952

Science fiction writer H. G. Wells put invisibility at the heart of a psychological

thriller. In his 1898 novel, The Invisible Man, a young scientist discovers how to
alter the human body’s refractive index so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light,
making it transparent. Elated by the possibilities of escaping scrutiny, he eagerly
tests the technique on himself, but fails to reverse the effects, and his optimism soon
fades. Despite attempts to hide his predicament by wearing clothes over his invisible
form, he appears as a phantom to those he encounters. The terror that ensues turns
the scientist into an agent of desperate destruction as he attempts to find a secluded
place to hide and search for an antidote. Wells explores invisibility as freedom from
surveillance, which (while it lasts) gives his protagonist liberty and power, and an
ability to observe events that no one else can.2

1
2 Jenny Bangham, Xan Chacko, and Judith Kaplan

Half a century after Wells’ novel, another book with a strikingly similar title
took on invisibility from a different perspective. Rather than the literal invisibility
of Wells’ protagonist, the narrator and central figure in Ralph Ellison’s debut
novel Invisible Man is made invisible by personal, social, and political forces that
deny his existence. A poignant commentary on racism and the promise of Black
Nationalism in the United States at mid-century, the novel follows the life of
an unnamed Black man who leaves the American South for New York City. At
every turn the narrator faces and negotiates the difficulty of being unseen, “being
bumped against by those of poor vision,” with the anguish of constantly needing
to convince himself that he exists.3 While the protagonists in both novels are invis-
ible to others, their juxtaposition highlights important differences in the ways that
invisibility is created. Wells wrote of a particular man, who through intellect and
hubris has ended up in a situation of his own creation. By contrast, Ellison (with a
title that purposefully omits the definite article) wrote of the abject powerlessness
that comes from being continually ignored: the protagonist is rendered invisible
by the unseeing gaze of others.4 Together, the novels capture the ambiguities of
invisibility in everyday life. They also explore the ways that surveillance and sub-
ordination can shape and define a person’s actions and examine how (in)visibility
is a property of position and perspective.
Invisible Labour in Modern Science explores the layers of invisibility that conceal,
eclipse, or anonymize people and practices in scientific research. The themes of
surveillance, subordination, and perspective raised by Ellison and Wells connect
invisibility to labour.5 Modern science is constituted by a workforce of diverse and
specialized roles, only some of which are part of the public face of science.6 In var-
ied ways, translators, curators, experimental subjects, citizen scientists, and ethics
review boards, for example, are often absent in formal publications and omitted
from stories of discovery. Reports of scientific methods are held to ideals of transpar-
ency, yet “objective” representations are the result of careful judgements about who
and what to reveal.7 Meanwhile, the credibility of professional scientists has often
traded on their apparent self-elimination, even when they themselves are celebrated
personalities.8 This book focuses on such omissions in an array of contexts, periods,
and geographic spaces to examine how the concealment of identities and practices
shapes knowledge.
Invisibility can empower as well as subordinate.9 It can make someone a privileged
observer, but it can also undermine credibility.10 Power structures built on hierar-
chies of race, gender, class, and nation frame what, and how much, can be seen.11
What is visible, to whom, depends on an observer’s position.12 For some, invisibility
can be a deliberate political strategy, or a necessary part of a paid role; for others, it is
a consequence of marginalization. Either way, there can be profound epistemological
consequences to the omission of people and practices from scientific representations.
Invisible Labour in Modern Science turns invisibility into a guide for exploring some
of the hidden processes, moral sensibilities, and politics of twentieth and twenty-first
century science.
 Introduction 3

INVISIBILITY AND LABOUR IN THE

HISTORY OF SCIENCE

Invisibility hides in plain sight as a leitmotif in the historiography of modern science.

Studies over the past century have shown how politics, economy, forms of labour,
and power have shaped the creation and dissemination of scientific knowledge.
As the profession of history of science expanded, dialogue across the humanities
and social sciences brought into view a rich and varied cast of scientific characters
and emphasized the politics of their representation.13 Steven Shapin and Sharon
Traweek, for example, drew attention to the “invisible technicians” and graduate stu-
dents of the laboratory.14 Scholars highlighted the significance of “craft” and “tacit
knowledge” in science—those actions and meanings that are invisible (to some)
because they cannot be communicated in writing.15 The “turn to practice” encour-
aged descriptions of what scientists actually do as they work at the laboratory bench,
manage projects, and write papers, and of how scientific labour is organized.16 In
concert with this, scholars examined the strategies by which researchers constructed
scientific knowledge by deliberately alienating it from the idiosyncrasies and geogra-
phies of its producers.17
Meanwhile, historians of fieldwork practices highlighted the crucial mediation
and translation work of field “assistants.”18 Studies of science in colonial contexts
showed how forms of administrative control profit from the erasure, or extrac-
tive alienation, of Indigenous knowledge.19 Critical race scholars showed that the
construction of “universal” knowledge is predicated on a specific reference point:
the Western Man—the basis for what philosopher Sylvia Wynter calls the Western
world’s “referent-we.”20 Historians of science revealed how the creation of such
universalizing norms has often nevertheless depended on the bodies of human
experimental subjects marked through colonization and enslavement.21 Revealing
the many systematic exclusions that result from the racial invisibilities inherent in
science, scholars such as Katherine McKittrick, Alondra Nelson, and Ruha Benjamin
have propelled the fields that study science and scientists towards justice.22 Feminist
interventions in science studies moved beyond the binary of marginalization and
power to propose that invisibility is intersectional—that the functioning of invis-
ibility often operates together with and cuts across social categories of race, gender,
nation, class, and ability.23 A different strand of scholarship has explored the history
of ignorance, secrecy, and forgetting in science (including their virtuous ramifica-
tions).24 In these manifold respects, the recovery of the invisible has been at the heart
of the history of science and STS (science and technology studies) projects for many
decades; this book centres invisibility and asks how it is made and how it functions
in science.
In using the term “invisible,” we emphasize the ocular. Donna Haraway sensitized
audiences to the partial and situated nature of vision; what a person can observe is
always conditioned by their position, their experience, and their habits of seeing.25
One visual metaphor suggests others, such as the term “perspective” to emphasize
4 Jenny Bangham, Xan Chacko, and Judith Kaplan

that what is visible always depends on where one is standing and how and by what
means our eyes are focused. Ellison in his sophisticated use of the visual metaphor
of invisibility was careful to acknowledge the situatedness of vision. To clarify the
origin of the social invisibility experienced by the narrator of Invisible Man, Ellison
wrote, “That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of
the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their
inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon real-
ity.”26 Ludwik Fleck, writing just a few years earlier about epistemology in science,
made a related point about social positioning: “We look with our own eyes, but we
see with the eyes of the collective body.”27 Fleck was observing that the things that
we see and recognize in the world are created by our own environments, customs,
traditions, and prejudices. The chapters in this book examine the workings of such
“inner” and “collective” eyes, and they consider how these betray preconceptions,
preferences, and intentions but also promise the possibility of change.
Yet optical metaphors have limits; at a minimum they risk marginalizing the
scientific work done with aural and haptic senses. Critics of “ocularcentrism” have
worried that the privileging of sight turned our attention away from the interpreta-
tion of the observer and point out that the visual always risks seeming self-evident.28
And other metaphors are available: “voice,” for instance, is often used to evoke an
individual’s agency and the force of personal testimony. Many oral history projects
are explicitly political.29 Bearing that in mind, we have settled on the terms “vis-
ibility” and “invisibility” because of their multiple and flexible meanings, but we use
them in ways that go beyond the visual.
The term “labour” is built into scientific terminology: the English term “labo-
ratory” comes from the Latin laboratorium, or workplace.30 In everyday speech
“labour” evokes the corporeal and manual dimensions of human activity—labour
is done with the body, and it shapes the body.31 But we use “labour” in a capacious
sense, that is, to refer to mental, intellectual, emotional, and manual activities, and
to encompass efforts that are financially remunerated, as well as those that are not.32
We also include the donation of body tissues and participation in clinical trials—
corporeal contributions that might be termed “bio-labour.”33
In bringing “invisibility” and “labour” together, we are drawing on feminist
scholars who coined the phrase “invisible work” to characterize women’s unpaid
domestic, reproductive, and volunteer labour, which had been culturally and eco-
nomically devalued.34 We are influenced by Margot Lee Shetterly’s account of the
marginalization of African American women mathematicians in histories of NASA,
and the work of Mar Hicks on gendered labour that was gradually displaced in the
history of computing.35 Our choice of the phrase “invisible labour” gestures to the
analyses developed since the 1980s of the emotional labour performed by service and
health care workers.36 It acknowledges recent scholarship on the necessary invisibility
of infrastructures and the labours that sustain them—especially those of internet and
data management.37 And we also have in mind anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli’s
analysis of the failures of Western cultural notions of labour to incorporate forms
 Introduction 5

of Indigenous productivity.38 As all of these scholarship shows, the (in)visibility of

labour operates along the axes of power.
By foregrounding invisibility with respect to scientific labours specifically, the case
studies here draw attention to the varied forms of recognition and remuneration
in science (or lack thereof). Although many participants exchange their labour for
money, rewards also often come in the form of authorship, citations, institutional
recognition, awards, political agency, or feelings of virtue or collegiality. Some par-
ticipate because they are institutionalized in prisons, schools, or hospitals; others
volunteer as, for example, blood donors or citizen scientists.39 In the spirit of the
scientific values of disinterestedness and self-denial, many workers accept anonymity
as a by-product of their participation, or purposefully cultivate invisibility as part of
their jobs. In science, then, “value” has a complex relationship to “visibility,” so that
the gains promised through the recognition of labour might not be the goal for all.

PEOPLE, PROCESSES, POWER, AND PRACTICES

The case studies in this volume consider “invisibility” and “labour” in twentieth and
twenty-first century science in varying geographic locations, political circumstances,
and disciplinary contexts. We have organized the chapters into four overlapping
domains. The first of these, “People” (with an accompanying commentary by Sabine
Clarke), explores how identities are made visible or obscured in ways that make
particular individuals credible observers, unbiased conduits, or authentic research
subjects. Some of the chapters investigate enterprises that engaged “ordinary” citi-
zens in scientific projects; others examine the practices and expertise of brokers and
translators, exploring how hierarchical, gendered, Indigenous, Western, or “local”
identities affect visibility. The chapters highlight some of the political conditions
under which participants become concealed or obscured, and they draw attention to
why many remain in the shadows.
The second section, “Power” (with a commentary by Gabriela Sota Laveaga),
ties participation in science to agency. Differences in gender, sexuality, class, race,
national, and community identity are leveraged to privilege or underplay contribu-
tions to scientific knowledge and control its effects on society. We see how extensive
political and epistemological work is required to transform knowledge into scientific
data worthy of recognition by state actors and policy-makers. There are stories in this
section of communities that recruit and train researchers to secure political visibility
in struggles for land, health care, and education.
Invisibility is not fixed, but is rather the outcome of multiple and often conflicting
processes. This conjecture is a major theme of the third section, “Process” (accompa-
nied by a commentary by Susan Lindee). The chapters here examine how abstracting
and effacing relations are part of the work of collecting specimens, assembling data,
and translating interviews. They also explore the perspectival and temporal qualities
of visibility and how people and processes come in and out of focus in the practice
6 Jenny Bangham, Xan Chacko, and Judith Kaplan

of research. In several of these chapters, archives and scientific collections take centre
stage. Authors reflect on the methodological difficulties of recovering the labour of
those who prepare, order, and assemble such collections. They also consider the legal
frameworks and changing ethical regimes that condition the continued existence of
scientific archives.
As we, as a collaborative group, considered these questions, our attention was
perhaps inevitably turned to how invisibilities figure into our own work as historians
and STS scholars. What are the moral and political motivations underlying historical
recovery projects, and where might such projects lead? How do social and profes-
sional identities—racialized, gendered, and disciplinary—affect whose scholarship
is included in a volume like this one?40 The final section of this book, “Practices”
(with a commentary by Judith Kaplan), reflects on these questions. The chapters ask
whether representation is always an unqualified good—should we always strive to
recover invisible lives and experiences, and how should we respect historical desires
for privacy?41 They question how historians’ own (varied) social relations affect their
narratives, and ask how archivists, curators, museums, and libraries define and shape
historians’ work. The chapters also discuss how access, visibility, privacy, and protec-
tion are constantly being remade in the present, and how these negotiations affect
what kinds of histories will be told.
There are many potential pathways through the topic of “invisible labour.” The
overall structure of the book, and the commentaries within, suggest one such pos-
sible path. The rest of this introduction offers another. We start with scientific
fieldwork. How might we question the assumed right of fieldworkers to speak on
behalf of others, human and non-human? Fieldwork also offers a rewarding oppor-
tunity to investigate some of the epistemic consequences of keeping the expertise
of interlocutors hidden in formal scientific accounts. Next, we engage the processes
of translation—between languages, between forms of inscription and between
knowledge systems—and reflect on how and why such processes are often hidden.
The following section explores why participants in science might consider it ethical
not to be included in formal accounts, choosing more anonymous rewards instead.
We juxtapose this with struggles to be made visible—specifically in the context of
activist “citizen science”—and consider how the experiences of harm can discredit a
community’s testimony.
Archives are fascinating terrain for understanding how people and events are
obscured from the historical record. Several chapters examine the processes through
which archives create such silences and reflect on the consequences of this for histori-
cal narratives. Others focus on such processes specifically as they relate to biographi-
cal narratives. Historical storytelling is all about choices—about what to include and
what to leave out—and two chapters consider this with respect to the curation of
museum objects. Finally, we study the affective relations that emerge in scientific
spaces. Taking “care” as a point of entry, we open the space for scientific practices to
engage and create value for relational practices between scientists (broadly conceived)
and their multi-species networks.
 Introduction 7

INVISIBLE FIELDWORK

Some of the best-studied instances of invisibility in science trace the labour of

fieldwork assistants, informants, and translators. From explorers to ethnogra-
phers, metropolitan researchers who gather data in the “field” have been adept
at concealing the efforts and expertise underpinning their work.42 Attempting to
recover lost stories about fieldwork, some historians have shown how to change
the frame of reference, from formal scientific outputs to the biographies and
practices of “brokers” who facilitate access to the sites under observation.43 His-
torian of anthropology Lyn Schumaker achieved such a shift in her history of
mid-century anthropologists in central Africa, when she focused her research on
the local assistants who guided the work of white British anthropologists in the
1950s and 1960s.44 In Africanizing Anthropology, Schumaker moved away from
the history of ideas about functionalism and changes to theory and method, and
instead immersed us in administrative practices and the day-to-day labour of
fieldwork.
In recovering the motivations and choices of fieldwork “assistants,” Schumaker
cautioned against reaching for any simple model of exploitation and also encouraged
historians to consider assistants’ agency and their management of anthropologists
for their own ends.45 Rosanna Dent (chapter 24) does precisely this in her work to
recover the labour and expertise of the A’uwe-Xavante community in Brazil. The
people in this community have been highly visible as “subjects” since the 1960s,
but not as knowledge-makers who guide and drive research. Dent demonstrates the
perspectival dimension of that invisibility, and creates a shift in that perspective to
show how A’uwe-Xavante people welcomed, enculturated, and guided the research
of several generations of U.S. anthropologists, including Dent herself.46
Other chapters attend to researchers whose methods go relatively unreported in
scientific publications; they also investigate how that invisibility helped to substanti-
ate claims about racial difference. Elise K. Burton (chapter 7) describes the work
of three Iranian scientists of the Tehran Pasteur Institute, who were employed by
French and U.S. visitors as reliable local informants and interpreters. She draws
attention to their relationships with both foreign scientists and the marginalized
research subjects that they studied—and examines how power relations became
manifest in the linguistic, geographic, and racial categories created by this field-
work. In a related case study, Ana Carolina Vimieiro Gomes (chapter 9) explores
the interests, motivations, and expertise of Brazilian geneticist Eliane Azevedo, who
worked with U.S. collaborators in the 1960s–1980s to study the population genetics
of Northeastern Brazil. Azevedo’s social position and experience of Brazilian society
shaped her scientific career and allowed her to make credible judgements about
racialized field data.47
Also focusing on the making of racial categories, Mihai Surdu (chapter 8)
recounts his experiences as a student researcher during the 1990s, when he gathered
sociodemographic information about Roma people in Romania. Surdu’s chapter
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