Why we can't afford to be innocent

Abstract

Though different in style and approach these three texts have much in common. Even if mentioned explicitly only in Reyna, the debate on the modern versus the postmodern is present in all of them; all of them question the validity of modern scientific knowledge, as well as the dichotomy of subject/object that makes privileged validity claims possible; all of them are keenly aware of the cultural, political, and institutional embeddedness of modern science; finally, the theme of the Cold War and of Cold War science is present in all of them. In spite of all these convergences, however, there are significant differences among the three papers. While Price and Hancock present a critique of modern science, Reyna criticizes Geertz's postmodern science from a modernist viewpoint. While, for Price, the Cold War political establishment and its current reincarnations define populations and themes as objects of imperialist intervention which the Cold War scientific establishment transforms into objects of scientific inquiry, for Hancock, both the relation between subject and object and the process of intervention are more complex, since neither of them can operate without the active cooperation of the "object" or the "intervened." On the one hand, the subject/object relation is mediated by the presence of the "indigenous scholar," who is both a subject and an object of knowledge, a form of personalized authentic native knowledge provided by someone that is simultaneously an informant or student and a professor. On the other hand, the Cold War politico-scientific intervention is made possible by the active participation of local elites, interested in converting their specific kind of nationalism into the (general)