Animistic Science/Scientific Animism

To elaborate a bit more on the science that Isabelle Stenger proposes - she defines good science by its willingness to be "at risk"

“…there exist constructions where the world and the scientist are both at risk.”  (Latour, in a preface for Stenger)

What is this “risk”?  

Instead of a science where the scientist exists separately from the object of study, in Stenger’s idea of science as a true and honest adventure the scientist (who could be anybody) will be changed, in perhaps uncomfortable ways, in the encounter with that which is being studied.   The object of study (that which is addressed by the experiment) will talk back and in that conversation, as in all true and dangerous conversations, what the scientist thinks he or she is - how she defines herself - is put at risk. 

It is a science that does not require an ever greater distance between this sovereign subject, the Scientist, and the abject, controlled object of study. It is the possibility of learning about the world without having to kill it first - epistemologically at the very least, if not in an actual slaughter.  (To make it hold still, to make it safe for us to study)

This would be science where we remember ourselves as animals among animals, with all that implies about our subjectivity, our relatedness, our duty of care to that which is related to us, our capacity to feel pain and joy that is not just ours.   It would be a science in which what we ate for breakfast or what birds live in our yard or who our grandparents were would be related to our doctoral dissertation (or our resume or the standardized test we are giving the children.) It would be  learning from an un-immobilzed world and we would understand and honor the risks in that. 

Science that is not another godtrick.