More common was for the technologies to be changed according to the version of the local context that was collaboratively assembled by Africans and Brazilians at the project front line. The project’s scope of action only reached as far as its more immediate context in the research institutes, which it sought to make more receptive to the new technologies through the provision of knowledge and research infrastructure . In their influential study, De Laet and Mol argued that the fluidity of the technologies is crucial in the transfer process, because it is what makes them more or less malleable to local adaptations by users. Indeed, some of the C-4 Project’s technologies turned out to be more fluid than others. While improved seeds are one of the most compact ways in which agronomic techno-scientific developments travel, they are also more rigid than technologies that function in the disaggregated form of systems, such as no-till. If the former demand significant interference in the local context in order to perform the work for which they were originally designed,dutch buckets system the latter is more malleable to changes in its internal composition and arrangement so that particular elements can be combined “selectively with other, more local elements, so as to fit better with existing styles of farming” .
As with De Laet and Mol’s bush pump, therefore, in the C-4 Project fluidity was fundamentally linked to the degree of disaggregation and substitutability of the technologies’ component parts. The tighter these parts were integrated, the harder it was to make adaptations. What these authors do not emphasize enough however is how this “quality” is imparted to the technologies according to the way they are assembled in the original context. As we saw, in Embrapa itself no-till was part of an ongoing research work involving regional adaptations and close interaction with different kinds of Brazilian farmers. But fluidity also depends on the way the technologies are reassembled and co-produced in the new context; without the special interest in this project component shown by the African agronomists and the project coordinator, for instance, no-till probably would not have been as fluid. Fluidity should not be seen therefore an essential quality intrinsic to a technology, but as itself a function of the process of assembling, transferring and reassembling it in the new context, as this new context is itself being made in relation to the technology. Moreover, technology transfer involves not just reshaping technology and context in a conceptual sense, as if an optimal balance between the two could be ascertained by getting technology design right once and for all.
As our account of the C-4 Project showed, the adaptation and transfer process was explicitly concerned with the relative controls that the various actors in the network exercised, or were expected to be able to exercise, at various scales. In other words, not just the way the contexts for transfer were made by selectively comparing them across common scales, but how agency was distributed across the project’s relational chain – between Brazilian and African researchers, and between these and technicians and farmers –, were key to the project’s potential for effecting successful, or robust, transfer. This attention to the relative distribution of agency across contextual levels was not just conceptual either; it imposed itself through a series of practical issues that the project workers had to face along the way. These issues were generally perceived as stemming less from mere difference than from asymmetries between contexts. The scales along which the Brazilian and West African contexts were brought together were not exclusive to their relation, but referred to a more diffuse kind of normativity – at time implicit, at times explicit – linked to globally hegemonic forms of agronomic research, farming, trade and governance. The next chapter will approach this issue by looking at the scaling moves and socio-technical controls involved in the project’s adaptive experiments.
The previous chapter concluded by looking at the C-4 Project from the perspective of how technology and context were co-produced in the case of each of its technical components. In various ways, the contexts in the C-4 countries “resisted”, or were expected to resist, the reassembling of the travelling technologies according to the same configuration in which they had been originally assembled back in Brazil. This was especially true when it came to their ultimate destination, peasant land, but was also found within the project’s more immediate organizational scope. Even if Embrapa and the African institutes shared much of the artifactual network necessary for carrying out collaborative adaptive research with the new technologies, transactions clearly unfolded along an asymmetric contextual topography. For an analysis that would follow strictly Latour’s prescription of “myopic” ethnography , this would not fundamentally alter the character of the network-based account. But when other scales beyond micro-practice are brought into the ethnographic picture, the constraints these asymmetries pose on the movement within the network become clearer, and the question of agency comes irresistibly to the fore: even if indeed distributed, agency is not evenly so. The evocation of broader scales in this case is not an illegitimate smuggling, a “ride from [a] faster vehicle” taken by the analyst to explain away the fundamental world-making processes unfolding on the ground, as Latour’s critique would have it. It was, rather, a major part of the latter, that is, of the context-making work carried out by the actors themselves. And they did it because, different from the myopic ethnographer, they were very much concerned with what would happen next: whether or not would the technologies disseminate to their ultimate context, the cotton farms. In other words, they were fundamentally concerned with present and future virtualities, not just with the flat immanence of actual practice. As we saw, during Phase I this concern took the form of projections about potential obstacles to transfer in local farming contexts, most of which laid beyond the project’s organizational scope. But if the project could not directly address many of these, it could at least try to provide for some of the local actors to do it themselves. This is, I will suggest in this chapter, one of the things towards which some of the front liners were working by the time I left the field. The key to technology transfer therefore came to lie not just in getting context-making right in a cognitive sense,dutch buckets but in addressing practical controls, or the relative distribution of agency along the various scales of the project’s broader assemblage.
This chapter will propose an account of how levels of context beyond the research institutes were scaled down into the most localized of project activities: field experiments. In this process, political controls at macro levels such as global trade or agricultural policies were scaled down into technical kinds of experimental controls at the micro level of adaptive experiments. While here, as in the “rendering technical” of development aid, there was a mutation of socio-political problems into technical ones, this did not imply a substitution of one for the other, or an eclipsing of broader socio-technical assemblages and the ways agency was distributed across them. As I will argue, technical controls exercised over non-human agencies were predicated on political controls exercised over human agencies, and vice-versa. This suggests that it is the opposition between political and technical controls that needs rethinking; anthropologists of development would therefore gain in looking at them as anthropologists of techno-science do: as being ultimately of the same kind. Even if, as I left the field for good in late 2012, the project’s next steps did not yet have one, clear direction, this chapter will conclude by addressing the question of technology transfer beyond the research institutes. This was the main concern of project front liners by then: how to make technologies thrive in the absence of the same socio-technical controls that shaped its development in the original context. Mine won’t be a disembedded – normative or theoretical – answer to this question, but a situated account foregrounding those lines of flight I see as promising for both field and desk . In terms of the first, it will be up to my field interlocutors to judge according to their own concerns. In terms of the latter, I will suggest how this experience in South-South engagement sheds light on aspects of technology transfer, and on the workings of techno-science more generally, to which the STS literature has not always given due significance. The section that follows will be dedicated to laying these out, before moving on to the account of the project experiments. One of the first things that struck me when going to biotechnology, soil, entomology and other research facilities in Embrapa and especially in the African institutes was how particular seemed to be the lab based on which Bruno Latour crafted his theory about techno-science and its relation to modernity . During fieldwork, it quickly became evident how fact construction in the way he described it is a privilege of some research scientists, while not so much of others. I do not think that this invalidates actor-network theory’s key insights; in fact, I am grateful to Latour for much of the sensibilities I brought with me to the field, and, self-fulfilling prophecy or not, they did turn out to be a quite valuable compass. What I wish to do, as I wrap up this dissertation, is a kind of critique that does not dismisses but works through and along some elements that are indicated but not sufficiently nourished by his theory. After doing fieldwork, for instance, it became obvious that what Latour saw inside the walls of the Salk Institute was allowed for by a much larger network of controls that stabilized not the chemical substances scientists were looking for and the scientific arguments they crafted for constructing them as facts, but the institution in which they worked itself. I am talking here not about experimental but political controls. These controls, largely invisible in Latour’s account, made sure that the Californian laboratory enjoyed a generous and reliable supply of the resources it needed for constructing facts: from an up-to-date collection of books and journals to a dependable electrical current; from well-paid and well- trained researchers and technicians to cutting edge equipment and materials. These preconditions for fact-construction are guaranteed by power, not by epistemology; as such, they are not equally shared by all laboratories everywhere. This question of political controls at broader scales turns out to be, indeed, one of ANT’s blind spots. As discussed in the Introduction, this is a particularly common qualm in the field of post-colonial science and technology studies. One of the things that the workings of technoscience in peripheral settings make irresistibly evident is precisely its embeddedness in power relations and deep-seated global asymmetries. A point that has not been much explored in this respect refers to the scaling moves whereby such broader power relations are brought to bear on“science in action”, not as external causality but as a constitutive part of it. This chapter will suggest how multiple scales came to be part of the assemblage brought together by the C-4 Project, and make a claim for the hybrid character of the controls – both political and experimental – involved in this process. A question raised by the literature on science and technology that deserves further exploration in this respect relates to what I will refer here as socio-technical controls, and the vitalities they aim at channeling. These twin aspects were especially salient in the kind of technoscientific work carried out by the project front liners. The chief aim of their experiments was not to produce new, readily universalizable scientific facts, but to test and re-calibrate the potential of certain technologies according to new sets of relations. Every technology is created with a performing potential in mind, and this potential is only actualized if it is calibrated according to an appropriate arrangement of controls, and made to work by an appropriate infusion of vitalities. This performance is shaped by normative directions that, as was argued in the previous chapter, refer to scales beyond micro-practice, such as global trade, techno-scientific networks, or public policies. Therefore, controls in this case are to be understood in a simultaneously technical and political sense.