"Laboratory Life" and "Beloved"

Paper Summary:

The paper juxtaposes Bruno Latour and Larry Woolgar's "Laboratory Life" with Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved" to highlight these books' methods of knowledge gathering, synthesis, or creation. The paper discusses the scientific research in "Laboratory Life" and the mythical, supernatural epistemology of "Beloved" and shows how while both yield knowledge about the world, we cannot know which knowledge is "truer" or "more superior" to the other. The paper therefore comes to the conclusion that the epistemology of each narrative is incommensurable with the other.

Outline:
Laboratory Life
Beloved
Epistemological Issues of the Texts

From the Paper:

"Laboratory Life is an ethnographic account of a neurobiology laboratory in California. In the first chapters, Latour and Woolgar describe the daily activities of the scientists using the lens of an anthropologist, using "the same cold and unblinking eye with which cells, or hormones, or chemical reactions are studied" (Latour and Woolgar, 12). In other words, Laboratory Life details scientific activities in the same way that an anthropologist describes the activities of a tribe in Papua New Guinea.
"In Latour and Woolgar's observations, scientists produce facts by literary inscription, which is the material process by which scientists turn physical matter into "data", and finally into a "fact," or a sentence published in a journal (Latour and Woolgar, 45-53). For example, lab technicians extract liquids from rats' brains, and load the extracted liquid into various machines that produce a paper printout. This printout is "data", and the scientists interpret this data through discussions, letters, and phone calls. After interpreting the data, scientists write a paper that is published in a journal (Latour and Woolgar, 105-151)."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Latour, Bruno and Larry Woolgar. Laboratory Life. Princeton University Press: New Jersey, 1986.
• Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Penguin: New York, 1987.

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• Comparison Essay # 23154 : "Phaedo" and "Beloved"

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