Vol. 5 No. 2 (2020): El régimen de Lo temporal en el devenir de las ciencias antropológicas
Estudios y Ensayos

The disciplinary emergence of Science and Technology Studies, the hybrid genesis of the ‘ontological turn’ and some contemporary debates

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  • David Antolinez Uribe
David Antolinez Uribe
Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29112/ruae.v5i2.855

Published 2020-12-26

Keywords

  • Estudios de la ciencia y la tecnología,
  • ontología,
  • inconmensurabilidad,
  • etnografía,
  • purificación
  • Science and Technology Studies,
  • onthology,
  • inconmensurability,
  • ethnography

How to Cite

Antolinez Uribe, D. (2020). The disciplinary emergence of Science and Technology Studies, the hybrid genesis of the ‘ontological turn’ and some contemporary debates. Uruguayan Review of Anthropology and Ethnography On Line: ISSN 2393-6886, 5(2), 51–67. https://doi.org/10.29112/ruae.v5i2.855

Copyright (c) 2020 David Antolinez Uribe

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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Abstract

The ‘ontological turn’ has been a recent intellectual trend that has received attention and criticism from both philosophy and anthropology. Actually, this movement is not part of any of those disciplines, but rather was constituted as the theoretical matrix of a new discipline: Science and Technology Studies. As these gained academic legitimacy and defined their professional identity, certain incommensurability emerged between this scientific community and the other disciplines that were threatened by this new trend. This article makes a historical account of the
parallel construction of Science and Technology Studies and the ‘ontological turn’, emphasizing the proposal of Bruno Latour, the first to articulate ontological theories with ethnographic methodologies, a founding gesture of Science and Technology Studies . Some recent criticisms made of the ‘ontological turn’ are also shown, which seek to undo this hybridization between philosophy and anthropology. It is concluded that, despite the accuracy of some of these criticisms, Science and Technology Studies manage to maintain a certain disciplinary dominance, while the ‘ontological turn’, as a theoretical matrix of this new discipline, must face those contemporary challenges.

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