Towards a non-human ethnographic encounter? Book Review Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject, by Hélène Mialet
| Autor | Giancarlo Cornejo |
| Cargo | PhD candidate, Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley (United States) |
| Páginas | 217-219 |
Towards a non-human
ethnographic encounter?
Giancarlo Cornejov
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7440/res49.2014.17
v PhD candida te, Rhetoric, Uni versity of C alifornia, Ber keley (United Sta tes). Email: gianca rlofcs@gmai l.com
In this review I pay special attention to the con-
struction of eth nographic encounters in Mia let’s
book. By ethnographic encounter, I mean how the
knowing subject of thi s particu lar book is con-
structed, and of cou rse how the knowing subject
whom Stephen Hawking represents figures in it. How-
ever, to read it with this focus is to betr ay in some way
the book’s main arguments, so I wi ll first try to sum-
marize some of M ialet’s main ideas.
Mialet attempts to demystify the Western modern
notion that it is only an individual brilliant mind
(or brain) in itself that produces science. In the fi rst
page of her acknowledgments she succinctly states
her main argument: “an individual is always a col-
lective,” (p. vii) and from the very beginning, she is
skeptical of the myth of the al most incorporeal ge-
nius who creates theories and sc ience in radical iso -
lation. She is interested in the collect ive that hides
behind the figure of the genius. Perhaps there is no
better “subject of research” than Hawking, a man
who has been constructed by many actors and net-
works as a unique genius, and as an i ndisputable
example of the triumph of immater ial mind over
material body.
Contrary to any easy a ssumption by the readers (ap-
pealing to the t itle or the deceiving cover of the bo ok,
in which we see an isolated, froze n statue of Hawking
floating in space), this is not a biography of Hawking,
or at least not a common one. This is because the no-
tion of biography supposes that no matter how com-
plex a person’s life is, it can be wrapped up in a book,
and especial ly because it presupposes that it is about
one coherent unity (called the subject or individual),
without acknowledging how that appa rent coherence
or unity is produced. For Mia let the knowing subject,
of which Hawking is an ideal ty pe, is essentially an
extended body.
The knowing subject does not simply have an extended
body, but is an extended body. Hawking’s extended body is
the ever-changing collective or assemblage of assistants,
machines, physicists, PhD students, diagrammers, jour-
nalists, nurses, archivists, family members, the ethnog-
rapher herself and his own flesh-and-blood body, who
Mialet, Hélène. 2012. Hawking Incorporated:
Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press [272 pp.].
217
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