In the current issue

Peter Soppelsa, "Intersection: Technology, Mobility, Geography"

Film Review
Joseph November, "When Women Were Computers: LeAnn Erickson, Top Secret Rosies"

Essay Reviews
Shannon Jackson, "Technology, Bodily Limits, and Ways of Knowing: Joy Parr, Sensing Changes"

Eda Kranakis, "'And it is, it is a glorious thing/To be a Pirate King!': Adrian Johns, Piracy"

Peter A. Shulman,"The Richest Hills Unearthed: Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction"

Amy E. Slaton, "The Uses of Context: Steen Hyldgaard Christensen, Bernard Delahousse, and Martin Meganck, eds., Engineering in Context"

Technology and Culture
October 2011

Technology, Bodily Limits,
and Ways of Knowing:
Joy Parr, Sensing Changes

Shannon Jackson
Ways of knowing have ethical consequences. The use of the body as the primary instrument of knowledge keeps moral boundaries, the resistance of landscape, and the assessment of risk closely tied to social processes. Under such circumstances, the face-to-face, or the vivid present, sustains its privileged place as a test of validity. If global warming is one of the prices we pay for trading such situated knowledge for knowledge that transcends context and transgresses bodily limit, then the stories captured in Joy Parr’s Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953–2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. Pp. 304. $35.95) are precisely the stories we need to be telling.

These are stories that remind us that we embrace the promises of big science and big nation-building projects at our peril if we do so without close attention to the lived experiences of those caught up in their wake. Each chapter in Sensing Changes is about embodied forms of knowledge, historically cultivated to suit locally relevant standards, and what happens to them when new standards held to be universally relevant are introduced. Sometimes new standards and new bodily registers are developed that extend from senses already tuned to assess risk. The hazards of a nuclear power plant that emits hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere and is located near a tourist destination, for example, challenge locals to train and refine their sense of smell and to develop ways of communicating potential crisis. At other times, the landscape, which might be a field of radiation as much as a field of wheat, illustrates the importance of honoring the expertise that comes from lived experience and everyday experimentation. In other instances, bodily ways of knowing are so disrupted that there is no bridging past and present, as when the building of a dam involves the physical relocation of a whole community.

Parr contrasts flexible local standards that move between the tacit and the explicit as change naturally occurs in the landscape with the rigid universal standards of mega-projects, like dams and power plants, which require adjustment in the opposite direction. This distinction parallels similar contrasts other scholars have drawn between incorporation and inscription as strategies of knowledge transmission and between open Indigenous Knowledge Systems and closed Expert Systems (inference engines) as strategies for establishing validity. These contrasts often are used to sound an alarm about the impact of technology on popular access to, and ability to validate, knowledge. Because Parr insists that the body is itself historically situated and constituted, however, her approach does not present the body as a moral touchstone against which the new universal standard of sustainability can be measured.

Rather, Parr’s fundamental argument is that the human body operates as a particular kind of material limit to ways of knowing, and that this material limit collapses the social and the sensed as separate domains. They function, instead, in a sort of simultaneity. When these are teased apart, when head and hand, mind and body, are separated, even in the academy, we challenge our ability to both understand and innovate in ways that register and acknowledge the facts of sentience on seemingly abstract boundaries like technical expertise. An academic expert herself, Parr seeks to close this gap by keeping the lived experiences of informants, richly documented, in the foreground and the sharp edge of theoretical analysis in the background. Of course, this means it is sometimes difficult to assess the theoretical relevance of some of the detail included in the case studies.

Parr’s linkage of historical context and social process to the experiences of agents and informants keeps the book from falling into the conceptual cul-de-sac of nostalgia for simpler times. Such nostalgia is a common theme among social theorists who address the radical disembedding of the social agent in the modern era; technology is often cast as an autonomous force capable of severing the intimate connection between body and society and thus of creating a new set of perilous moral challenges. In contrast, Parr sees body and technology as continuous. To her, technology—and by extension technical expertise—are themselves evolving products of felt anxiety, felt risk, felt limit. Since the body, for Parr, never exists as a direct register of the natural, body and world are always bridged by technology and the very human compunction to manipulate, to project head and hand at the same time. This means that locally relevant tools and ways of knowing are sometimes inadequate: local social networks can get in the way of technological adjustment, just as imperial visions can render one blind to lived experience. Limit and resistance, felt at the level of the body, are as much social as they are material. Cultural diversity in the way experts are trained, in the way risk is managed, affects the outcome of change.

Although Parr is writing for geographers and historians of technology, the perspective she adopts is primarily ethnographic. In the spirit of good ethnography, she reminds us that experiences of the ordinary and the local matter. Such experiences problematize the tendency to cast “human” as the opposite of the technological, or to oppose nature to culture. Quite the contrary, it is these material relationships that anchor the entire case study and contribute to the ethnographic record, a place where we express understandings of the human, broadly conceived. The Canadians at the center of these stories further problematize tidy distinctions between traditional and modern, as some are communities tied to agrarian, task-oriented time, but rich with modern expertise and sensibility; others are specialized technicians using their bodies, refining their sensory instruments, to gauge risk. So, while Sensing Changes is specifically about Canadians living and working close to one another and how they connect abstract knowledge to lived experience, the stories captured say something generalizable about the ways we make use of expertise and landscape when the body remains the primary instrument of knowledge.

By the same token, language is never a full break from felt limit. The linguistic turn in anthropology taught a generation of ethnographers to focus on capturing discursive detail. The nonrepresentational continuum, which is the primary object of inquiry here, confronts this trend with attention to the robust capacity of the material to affect discourse before informants have decided what to say. The problem for the researcher, however, is the very nonrepresentational quality of this continuum. There are taken-for-granted boundaries of reality that cannot be accessed by simply asking informants about them or consulting written archives. Researchable traces are made available to locals, as well as to outside researchers, when boundary conditions, both disruptive and instructive, are brought to the surface through adjustment to change. Clearly, then, the researcher has to be open to the unanticipated, and has to be present and patient and participating in the realities she captures. Sensing Changes is thus methodologically innovative, providing a firmly interdisciplinary model for training one’s own bodily instrument and vocabulary to synesthetically register the practical expertise of others. (Of course, it also means that such case studies take longer to produce.)

Another methodological challenge is how to push at the limits of linear text, while bridging the gap between writing and experience. The ethnographer’s dilemma is how to coordinate the contingent nature of culture with the closed nature of text. Sometimes this can be facilitated by the basic principle of good storytelling: show, don’t tell. Archaeologists have the added benefit of museums and exhibitionary space, and some ethnographers utilize film to enhance text. The web-based media links that correspond to each chapter of Sensing Changes offer something analogous; sound and visual texture are digitally linked so that readers can use familiar and accessible technology, as well as more of their own bodies, to understand the Other.

A particularly compelling aspect of the postwar Canadian mega-projects documented here is the fact that “people in the way” tend to become invisible. Consistent with the metaphor of the panopticon in modern state formation, the illusion of the view from nowhere was built into the planning for centrally controlled projects. The knowledge and expertise accumulated in everyday bodies, whose movements and rituals imbricate with the fertility of the soil, the management of forests, and the navigation of rivers, became quaint, the stuff of nostalgic salvage, while the real focus, by the state, is on the global horizon of the future. The challenge, now, is to reckon with real loss in a way that is not merely romantic. The final story in the book, about seven deaths from E. coli, is essential to the complex moral of the larger tale. The villain here is not technology or even technological hubris; the villain is the loss of social tools to creatively engage environmental impact and the limits and possibilities of the relationship among context, technology, and the body.

Shannon Jackson is an anthropologist at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.