Reading Response QuestionsWeek 9, Precepts April 7-9, 1998
Email: creager@phoenix.princeton.edu or manfredl@princeton.edu
Reminder: You may use these content-based questions as a springboard for your e-mail reading response, which should, however, focus on more general issues than the specific items detailed here. The response you send in to your preceptor each week should address all of the required readings (especially the primary source readings, which will be the focus for precept discussion); the text may include questions as well as analysis.
Note for Week 9: In precept, we will focus on Donna Haraway's rather difficult article (and Jolly's assessment of Haraway and primatology) as well as the selections from Silent Spring, the principle primary source for the week. (There is a mistake on week 9 in the syllabus; I listed an article by Sarah Blaffer Hardy rather than Allison Jolly's unpublished chapter.)
Week 9
de Steigneur, Age of Environmentalism, Chapters 2 and 3 2° source
p. 20: What social and economic issues in the 1960s contributed to the rise of environmentalism?
pp. 21-22: In what respects did World War II require total mobilization? How did both the war and the postwar economic recovery shape American culture and recreation?
pp. 22-23: How did the Cold War contribute to the public's mixed feelings about science and technology? What were the effects of Sputnik on the government's commitment to big science?
p. 24: How did the Civil Rights movement shape public participation in politics?
p. 30: What was the impact of Silent Spring? Why was Rachel Carson a good spokesperson for concerns about chemicals, especially pesticides? How was she vulnerable to criticism?
pp. 32-33: What episodes on post-World War II pest control did the most sensational damage to wildlife?
pp. 34-35: How did the chemical industries, the government, and the media respond to Rachel Carson's book?
p 39: From what sources did Rachel Carson receive vindication?Lear, "Rachel Carson's Silent Spring" 2° source
Note: There is some overlap in biographical material between this article and de Steigneur's chapter 3.
pp. 24-25: What factors limited Rachel Carson's education? What kind of scientific work did she find after college?
p. 28: What cataclysmic event had changed the relationship of humans to the world, in the eyes of Rachel Carson and many others who lived through World War II?
p. 29: How did divisions between different groups of entomologists shape research on pesticides? What government agencies had a commitment to wildlife preservation? How did this facilitate Rachel Carson's understanding of the debates over pesticides?
p. 30: What set Carson's voice apart from other commentators and scientists? How did the fact that she was a woman play into debates about her credibility as a scientist? Would you consider Carson a research scientist? Can a person in the postwar U.S. be a research scientist without the legitimation and resources of funding and an institutional position doing research?
pp. 36-37: What was the nature of personal attacks on Rachel Carson? What two groups represented most of her critics?
p. 40: Where was Ralph Nader awakened to the pesticide issue?
p. 42: What was Carson's legacy for conservation organization? For young scientists and activists?Carson, Silent Spring, pp. 1-37, 103-27, 187-98 1° source
Chapters 1-3
p. 6: What are chemicals the partners of? What public worry of the late 1950s does Carson draw on through her analogy to argue that synthetic chemicals pose a real threat not only to wildlife but to human health?
p. 7: How does she draw on insights from evolutionary theory in making her argument?
p. 8: How does natural selection thwart the effective use of pesticides?
p. 10: What are the ecological problems with large-scale agricultural monoculture? How has globalization of trade (including plant industry) contributed?
p. 12: What group of scientists does Carson single out as culpable for the problems?
p. 16: What spurred the twentieth-century synthetic organic chemical industry?
p. 17: How have we outdone the Borgias? (Another chapter which we are not reading is entitled " Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias.")
p. 28: What is the relationship between insecticide development and biological weapons development?
p. 32: How do synergistic effects between poisonous insecticides undermine confidence in their toxicity tests?
p. 36: Carson is writing at a time when the Atomic Energy Commission was sponsoring a great deal of research on the effects of radiation on mutation rate and genetic modification. What link does Carson see with insecticides?Chapter 8
p. 113: How do insecticides disrupt the natural predatory cycles which keep insects in check? How is Carson's account similar to what we have read from Linnaeus and Darwin? Are there differences? (As you may be aware, Princeton harbors some of the few disease-resistance Dutch elms on the East Coast.)
pp. 116-17: What more ecologically sound method of disease control does Carson advocate? (Dutch elm disease continues to be a blight thirty-five years later.)
p. 126: What habit does Carson blame for the pesticide poisonings?
p. 127: With what metaphors does Carson end her chapter?Chapter 12
p. 189: How does Carson define ecology?
p. 192: Why is it difficult to establish a direct link between synthetic organic chemicals as environmental poisons and changing health patterns?Haraway, "Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body" 2° source
p. 57: How do the concerns of primatology seem economic? How have the findings of primatology legitimated or naturalized capitalist ideology?
p. 58: Given that Haraway is concerned with scientists' own debates and discussions about primates, how does feminism provide a valuable vantage point in understanding scientific developments?
pp. 59-60: What kind of research did Solly Zuckerman conduct? What was his important contribution to primatology? What kind of science did Thelma Rowell do? How were their viewpoints different? What commonalties underlie both programs?
p. 60: How was Rowell's work related to that of prominent physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn?
p. 61: What picture of society does functionalism in primatology provide? What feature of behavior did Washburn and Hamburg single out as central in their 1968 paper?
p. 62: Why is this behavior now maladaptive for human primates? What are their examples of the pathological consequences of these selected behaviors?
p. 63: How might a liberal scientist imagine solving the problem of "maladaptive" aggression?
pp. 63-64: What light does Washburn's longer career and other scientific contributions shed on his 1968 paper with Hamburg? What was Washburn's fundamental innovation in physical anthropology?
p. 66: What did Washburn take as the lessons of the baboon model system?
p. 67: How did Tanner and Zihlman's account differ from Washburn's? Which model system do they favor? How do they reinterpret Zuckerman's claim for the central role of female reproductive physiology? How does their story about the past make the present and future of humans look different than Washburn's?
p. 70: Which primatological theories seemed most compatible with feminism? Why is that surprising? What does Haraway mean in her claim that "Often the future is given by the possibility of a past.Jolly, "Women in the Wild" 2° source
Professor Alison Jolly agreed to allow our class to read this chapter from her book-in-progress, but as it is unpublished, we owe her the courtesy of not circulating it beyond the class.
p. 1: How have trends in primatological theories paralleled other social/historical changes?
p. 2: What does Jolly credit with drawing women into primatology over other fields?
pp. 3-5: What is Jolly's response to Haraway's controversial history of primatology? Do you think historians should write accounts of past science that scientists like?
pp. 6-7: In Jolly's view, what was Goodall's most important contribution to primatology? Where else did this development originate? Why? Was this perspective either gendered or cultured? How has primatology become politicized in recent years?
p. 8: What was Wrangham's important insight about primate societies? How was it indebted to Marx? (Remember Haraway's emphasis on "production and reproduction.") What other scientific work supported the emphasis on females?
p. 9: What was the second key insight? (From what I understand, this is Jolly's own contribution.)Fitzgerald, "Exporting American Agriculture" 2° source
p. 458: When did the Green Revolution begin? Why do many policy makers point to a later date?
pp. 459-60: We're back to the Rockefeller Foundation, which sponsored the birth control research program we read about last week, as well as the program for natural science funding for which the term "molecular biology" was invented (next week). How did their investment in agricultural development fit into their vision for philanthropy of science and technology? What other kinds of projects did the RF support? What was the origin of their interest in scientific agriculture?
p. 461: What is the nature of U.S. land-grant institutions as they were established to contribute to agricultural progress?
pp. 462-64: What problems did the Office of Special Studies (OSS) face in Mexico?
p. 467: How were American technological solutions ill-suited to the realities of Mexican farming for corn?
p. 469: Why did the wheat program work so much better than that for corn?
