Award Abstract #0240375
Dissertation Research: Metrics of purity: linguistic registers, cultures of waste-reckoning, and the circulation of scientific knowledge in La Paz, Bolivia

NSF Org:	SES Division of Social and Economic Sciences
Initial Amendment Date:	March 12, 2003
Latest Amendment Date:	March 12, 2003
Award Number:	0240375
Award Instrument:	Standard Grant
Program Manager:	John P. Perhonis SES Division of Social and Economic Sciences SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences
Start Date:	March 1, 2003
Expires:	February 28, 2005 (Estimated)
Awarded Amount to Date:	$10505
Investigator(s):	Michael Silverstein m-silverstein@uchicago.edu (Principal Investigator)
Sponsor:	University of Chicago 5801 South Ellis Avenue Chicago, IL 60637 773/702-8602
NSF Program(s):	Hist & Philosophy of SET
Field Application(s):	0116000 Human Subjects
Program Reference Code(s):	SMET,9179
Program Element Code(s):	1353

ABSTRACT

This dissertation research offers an ethnographic account of the circulation of scientific knowledge about water quality and wastewater discharge in La Paz, Bolivia. Recent ethnographies of science, technology, and society (STS) have emphasized the laboratory as an important site of cultural production. They have done so, however, by assuming the pre-existence of laboratory science as an authoritative institutional form -- research begins in the laboratory and follows scientists and engineers as they actively extend its sphere of

application. But how does laboratory science come into being as an institutional form in the first place? How is the institutionality and authoritativeness of a laboratory-based science of the everyday and everywhere -- a science of impurity -- established, or not, in La Paz? This research addresses these fundamental questions by supplementing STS studies with a linguistic anthropological analysis of registers (different ways of saying the same thing associated by speakers with socially-recognizable practices and their practitioners). Examining the circulation of knowledge in the framework of registers provides a means for modeling how people use verbal and textual representations to locate themselves in relation to the authority and institutionality of laboratory science, and how this self-positioning is transformative of the very same institutionality and authority. La Paz, a city of linguistic, ethnic, and demographic differences, is the setting for such inquiry, as the very existence and authority of laboratory science is rendered problematic. In the last 10 years, economic reforms in La Paz have led to the creation of a hotly contested market for scientifically managed water and wastewater services. Through an examination of speaker's usage and awareness of differentiable register phenomena used for reckoning waste/water (tractable formally as distinct linguistic repertoires involving measure-phrases and specialized lexemes), the objective of this research is to describe how the laboratory science is carved out (or not) as the authoritative center of a regime of circulating knowledge about waste/water. NSF is supporting data collection using ethnographic and linguistic methods in two research sites: at a private waste/water company in La Paz; and in an indigenous Aymara neighborhood. This research intends to make a practical contribution to debates about the growing worldwide waste-crisis, offering a cross-cultural perspective which includes documentation of an underrepresented people's lived-experience of an endemic waste-problem. It will also contribute to building an interdisciplinary bridge between STS and linguistic anthropology.

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