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Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields

Metaphors That Shape Embryos

Donna Jeanne Haraway Scott F. Gilbert

$32.99

Paperback

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English
North Atlantic Books,U.S.
15 July 2011
Acclaimed theorist and social scientist Donna Jeanne Haraway uses the work of pioneering developmental biologists Ross G. Harrison, Joseph Needham, and Paul Weiss as a springboard for a discussion about a shift in developmental biology from a vitalism-mechanism framework to organicism. The book deftly interweaves Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigm change into this wide-ranging analysis, emphasizing the role of model, analogy, and metaphor in the paradigm and arguing that any truly useful theoretical system in biology must have a central metaphor.
By:  
Foreword by:  
Imprint:   North Atlantic Books,U.S.
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 229mm,  Width: 152mm,  Spine: 15mm
Weight:   391g
ISBN:   9781556434747
ISBN 10:   155643474X
Pages:   256
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Donna Haraway is perhaps our most advanced scientific storyteller. She locates the myths, metaphors, and tropes that underlie a technologically companionable physical world. Without abandoning scientific method-in fact, by embracing it in its fullest applicability-she exposes and also celebrates our scientific narratives as our clan story. In the process she 'outs' our most fundamental distinctions and unexamined paradoxes- nature/culture, wild/domesticated, molecular/organic, animal/human, body/gender, et al. Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields is the first chapter of Haraway's epic tale of Western science. When she names it 'metaphors that shape embryos,' it should be clear that embryos also shape her metaphors, for she brilliantly illuminates the origin and dependence of each in each other. Donna Haraway is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Reviews for Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos

""This timely reprinting of Donna Haraway's Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields give cause for two audiences to rejoice. The first audience includes philosophers, cultural historians, semioticians, sociologists, and anthropologists. This group has been variously enlightened, entertained, and enlivened by Donna's analyses of our culture and her suggestions for alternative futures. Since Donna has been adamant that understanding the contextual nexus of origins is critical for understanding history and its outcomes, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields should provide this group with insights into how Donna came into her present views. Indeed, I would contend that one of the most important precepts in her most recent pamphlet - namely that the relation is the smallest possible unit of analysis - can be traced directly to the embryological science analyzed in this 1976 volume. No matter what else Donna's philosophy might be - Marxist, feminist, affectionate, ironic, cyborgian, anthropocanine - it is thoroughly and uncompromisingly epigenetic."" - Scott F. Gilbert, from the Foreword


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