10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17097
application/pdf
2038-3460
17097
1
en
Michela Cozza
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Elizabeth B. Silva, Technology, Culture, Family. Influences on Home Life, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
4
Book Reviews
2013-07-12
2023-06-02
2013-07-12
2023-07-17
188-191
TS
Michela Cozza
2013/07/12
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17097
188
University of Trento
2038-3460
1
en
191
Elizabeth B. Silva, Technology, Culture, Family. Influences on Home Life, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17097/16033
4
188                                                           Tecnoscienza - 4(1)

Elizabeth B. Silva
Technology, Culture, Family. Influences on Home Life
New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 227
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Michela Cozza University of Trento

    Elizabeth B. Silva examines how changes in both technologies and
family life form part of processes of socio-cultural change. The trilogy in
the title – technology, culture, family – sounded as a promising one, but
the risk to read a rearrangement of known concepts was real. My hope
was to find an attractive approach to technological transformation, able
to match Gender Studies and Studies of Science and Technology analys-
ing the connections between objects, bodies and mundane practices
evoked in the title.
    Silva’s book is articulated in eight chapters based on an archival re-
search of technology and gender relations since the early twentieth centu-
ry, and an ethnographic study of uses of household technologies.
    In the Introduction, the author sheds light on her lines of argument
that generate three main areas of investigation: (1) the significance of or-
dinary home experiences; (2) the relation between the material and the
social; (3) the resources involved in relationality. The development of the-
se arguments is pursued through a “conversation” between the empirical
material of UK contemporary home life and the work of Pierre Bourdieu
and Bruno Latour together with some of their critics. This is a first inter-
esting contribute for readers, mainly because – as Silva recognises – per-
sonal and relational matters in home contexts are not areas of interest to
Bourdieu and Latour. Yet – Silva continues – their ideas are productive
as they provide a framework for exploring the connections between the
material and the social, and for directing attention to how ordinary prac-
tices connect and constitute the social world. From Bourdieu’s work she
takes the notion of practice. To capture “practice” empirically, Silva uses
Latour’s approach, in particular regarding a view of the social world em-
bedded in technologies and in our relations with them.
    It is exactly in Chapter 1 that Silva introduces the issues of materiality
and the subjective of everyday cultures and family practices. She discusses
the relations between things and people showing connections between
Latourian and Bourdieusian thinking. In Silva’s words, these approaches
share the desire to make visible what is hard to pin down: those relation-
ships that concern complex, messy, hidden and heterogeneous realities.
However, the key concepts and frameworks provided by Bourdieu and
Latour need to be modified when they are used to focus on families. For
this reason, Silva anchors to Feminist perspective her review of the two
French academics, embracing the critique to Bourdieu’s deterministic
concept of habitus and the scant attention paid by Latourian actor-
Book Review                                                            189
network theory (ANT) to gendering and empowering of technological
development.
     In Chapter 2 Silva considers the materiality of homes and the identity
processes of individuals in relationality, and addresses claims about ep-
ochal social changes related to technological transformations. She sug-
gests a combination of statistics, descriptions and case studies as a pro-
ductive way of accounting for refined processes of change where – echo-
ing feminist analyses – the economic, political and social changes at large
are seen to “impact” upon the family. Counteracting such position she
emphasises the interdependence and circularity of the public and private
spheres. Silva refines Bourdieu’s concepts of practice and the habitus en-
dorsing the claim that individual practices can be a lens for seeing what
becomes invisible within collective practice. This emphasis on Bourdieu’s
approach moves the discussion of Latour’s insights to the background.
    The issue of social and technological change is further pursued in
Chapter 3, where Silva outlines the theoretical concerns and findings of
“classic” studies on household technologies, mostly centred on the use of
women’s time in their homes. She takes into account also the more recent
research on gendered uses of time, accounting for cultural diversity and
contemporary changes in the ways that lives are lived in the home. I have
appreciated Silva's discussion about “time” in terms of the most routine
and material aspects (like body maintenance or emotional nurturing) that
happen over time and also happen all the time. This concern takes Silva’s
work away from the blindness of grand theories where routines matter
though remaining somewhat abstract.
    The ways in which household technologies are constructed in relation
to certain dispositions and practices related to normative expectations of
gendered everyday life in the home are explored in Chapter 4 in relation
to cooking. I believe that this part of the book is quite dense of relevant
references and concepts. While Silva shares the view espoused by ANT of
technology as doing, not as being, she also follows a perspective which
regards gender as “doing”, originally defined as such by West and Zim-
merman (1987). In Silva’s book this perspective incorporates a notion of
practices through which contexts for changing gender subjectivities are
captured by examining relationships between technology and users over
time. This involves seeing how gender “appears”, or how gender is per-
formed, in cooking practices.
    In Chapter 5, practices of cleaning are investigated regarding the
change over time in the instruments available for laundering and dish-
washing. This analysis echoes extraordinarily the “visible and invisible
work” discussed in Star and Strauss’ (1999) article. At the beginning of
this chapter Silva maintains that cleaning has involved large amounts of
the mundane work of women, much of it invisible in the home and also to
scholars. From my viewpoint there is a “noisy” continuum between the
“shadow work” in Star and Strauss’s article and their analysis of design
implications, and the “invisible work” in Silva’s book and their investiga-
190                                                            Tecnoscienza - 4(1)

tion into industrial policies. This cross reference – that is not mentioned –
could work as starting point for a further analysis of what counts as work
from a Feminist-STS perspective.
    Centred on a discussion of consuming and caring, Chapter 6 address-
es questions of which resources are felt to be necessary for everyday do-
mestic life and where these can be drawn from. Silva considers not only
time and money as core resources, but also personal connections, emo-
tional states and abilities. She mentions the distinction between care as
practice, and care as disposition, which is also constitutive of Bourdieu’s
concept of habitus. However, she stresses his limitation in understanding
the contemporary home and the domestic where emotional aspects of so-
cial actions matter. Practices and resources for consuming and caring
shape the material environment mutually and acts as a sort of “script for
action” in the terms developed by ANT. Silva’s reasoning outlines this
environment as the set where social positioning takes place. Gender im-
balance becomes clear in consumption practices, which are in narratives
and performances of selves linked to differential access to goods.
    Positioning is evoked at the beginning of Chapter 7 as it involves do-
mestic dilemmas, that is classification and judgements about how to act
morally. Silva’s understanding of morality points firmly towards practices
and concrete actions – as her ethnographic study testifies - in line with the
feminist literature on gendered ethics. She considers “morality” as an ac-
tivity grounded in the daily experiences and moral problems of real peo-
ple in their everyday lives, contesting Latour’s loose and flat conception
of the social and the determining aspects of Bourdieu’s ontology.
    Finally, Chapter 8 focuses on sexual lives in our technologically-
drenched everyday culture. Silva sheds light on ordinary sexual practices
as invisible within a politics of pleasure that gives primacy to danger and
transgression. This operation connects the final chapter to the first where
she noted that only recently the researchers have begun to explore the
processes of unravelling the taken-for-granted by applying more sophisti-
cated methods of “defamiliarisation”. It is interesting how Silva uses the
concepts of “noisy” and “muted” sexuality aimed at capturing the differ-
ent registers in the politics of pleasure and that are referred – in this chap-
ter – to new reproductive technologies and new communication technol-
ogies. Reproductive technologies have contributed to create new concep-
tions of relationships in the procreative sense as in the case where homo-
sexual “reproduction” takes place. Communication technologies have en-
abled the wide circulation of intimate acts in public spaces.
    I think that this work of Elizabeth B. Silva shares with Tecnoscienza
readers and STS audience the effort to incorporate the material world of
technology into the study of social change, particularly at the micro level
of individuals, ordinary life and human interdependence. She recognises
this contribution of Studies of Science and Technology. Yet, in my opin-
ion Silva joins with Feminist STS in interrogating “the conceptual and
empirical grounds of the collapsing but still potent boundary between
Book Review                                                                     191
those most foundational categories of science and technology, that is, na-
ture and culture” (Suchman 2008, 142). In conclusion, this book could be
an inspiring reading mainly for researchers interested to further under-
standing of the multidimensional interplay between technology and cul-
ture.

References
Suchman, L. (2007) Feminist STS and the Sciences of the Artificial, in E.J. Hackett,
   O. Amsterdamska, M. Linch and J. Wajcman (eds.), The Handbook of Science
   and Technology Studies, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, pp. 139-163.
Star, S.L. and Strauss, A. (1999) Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of
    Visible and Invisible Work, in “Computer Supported Cooperative Work”, 8,
    pp. 9-30.
West, C. and Zimmerman, D.H. (1987) Doing Gender, in “Gender & Society”, 1
  (2), pp. 125-151.

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Roberto Abadie
The Professional Guinea Pig. Big Pharma and the Risky World of Human
Subject
Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 184
   !
Stefano Crabu University of Padova

    They call it the new economy, the informational economy. And the other side
of this informational economy is the mild torture economy [...] (Spam, cit. in Ab-
adie 2010, 2).

    The book written by Roberto Abadie Ph.D (Graduate Center,
CUNY) starts with the reflection above and presents the results of an
ethnography of voluntary participation processes by human research sub-
jects in phases I (screening for drug's safety), II and III (screening for
drug's efficacy) of drug trials.
    The quotation recalls the utterance of Spam, a resident in West Phila-
delphia and “professional guinea pig”, which was an informant during
the research conducted by Abadie. Spam is one of the many healthy hu-
man subjects that, for a long time, have lent his own body for clinical
pharmacological trials. Spam's words are evocative, and they have led the
book’s author through a clear and effective itinerary of research to dis-
