DAVID J. HESS Crosscurrents: Social Movements and the Anthropology of Science and Technology ABSTRACT Along with growth and acceptance of the anthropology of science and technology has come a narrowing of focus both topically and methodologically. An alternative topic of inquiry (social movements) and an alternative method (a limited return to nomothetic inquiry) offer potential for research that is relevant to both social change actors and social scientists such as sociologists and political scientists. A comparative analysis of existing anthropological research on science, technology, and social movements provides the basis for limited generalizations regarding the types and circumstances of charged cultural repertoires that both social movements and elites invoke. [Keywords: social movements, science, technology, cultural repertoires, theory] S INCE THE LATE 1980s, the anthropology of science and technology has developed from a small group of researchers who faced difficulties of recognition to a sub- discipline with representation and acceptance in major de- partments. However, along with growth and acceptance has come a narrowing of focus. To some degree the field has un- dergone disciplinarization around cultural analyses of the changes in nature–culture relations associated with emer- gent biosciences and biotechnologies. In this article, I ex- plore an alternative approach to science and technology that emphasizes the potential of social and cultural anthro- pology to contribute to interdisciplinary conversations in the social sciences as well as to broader political conversa- tions regarding enhanced democratic participation in the choice of future research agendas and technologies. BACKGROUND In the late 1980s, the anthropology of science was defined largely against the backdrop of laboratory studies, which used ethnographic methods but were theoretically oriented to the sociology of scientific knowledge and the philoso- phy of science (e.g., Knorr-Cetina 1981; Latour and Woolgar 1986; cf. Hess 2001). An exception was Sharon Traweek’s early work (1988), which focused largely on the labora- tory but was conceptually oriented to anthropology. An- thropologists soon began pushing ethnography out of the laboratory to study a range of broader issues (e.g., Downey and Dumit 1997; Hess and Layne 1992), and as the num- ber of anthropologists reached a critical mass, the ethnog- raphy of science and technology became more historical AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 109, Issue 3, pp. 463–472, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. C  2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/AA.2007.109.3.463. and cultural. A large proportion of the subsequent stud- ies examined the changes in fundamental cultural cate- gories that have occurred as nature has become increasingly manufactured, commodified, digitized, and, in general, so- cially shaped by new research fields and associated tech- nologies. Ethnographic studies explored that historical and cultural proposition regarding modernity and science for a wide variety of biocultural categories, such as death (Lock 2002), life (Franklin and Lock 2003; Franklin et al. 2000; Haraway 1997; Helmreich 2000), blood (Rabinow 1999), kinship (Franklin and Ragon´ e 1998; Strathern 1992), preg- nancy (Layne 2003), the body (Martin 1994), body parts (Hogle 1999), the self (Dumit 2004), microbes (Helmreich in press), and plants (Hayden 2003). The focus on new definitions of nature and culture was able to bring the anthropology of science and technol- ogy into conversation with issues that have been impor- tant historically in the four-field approach of U.S. anthro- pology. The network of research and researchers drew on and critiqued theories of nature, culture, and kinship that had been developed in mid-20th-century structuralism and functionalism and revised later by feminist anthropologists (e.g., Franklin and Lock 2003; Goodman et al. 2003). Al- though the focus on nature, culture, and life compellingly made the case that the anthropology of science and tech- nology could offer significant critical reappraisals of central concepts in the history of anthropology, the parallel focus on the biosciences tended to preclude ongoing conversa- tions with ethnographic research on scientific and techni- cal fields that were located outside the triangle of nature,