Broken tempos: Of means and memory in a Senegalese university laboratory
Broken tempos: Of means and memory in a Senegalese university laboratory
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破碎的节奏：塞内加尔大学实验室的手段和记忆
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发表时间：
2013
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通讯作者：
N. Tousignant
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作者：
N. Tousignant
本文以塞内加尔谢赫·安塔·迪奥普大学药学院毒理学和分析化学实验室为重点，将时间性作为非洲科学史后殖民时期的一个关键维度。与非洲各地的许多其他实验室一样，该实验室的现任和前任成员都感到供不应求。我探索了“手段”和过去在达喀尔和国外的科学活动的记忆如何赋予实验室作为一个充满了不活跃的“古董”和“残骸”的地方的后续体验意义。我认为，手段的衰落不仅将科学活动“转移到其他地方”，而且还破坏了它的节奏，改变了它的节奏以及它的社会、道德和情感品质。过去和未来的相互渗透产生了怀旧，分段叙事和轨迹，对即时性和连续性的追求，以及与科学规范和管理惯例的新接触。关注物质性和时间性的交叉点——通过认真对待非洲科学家对向前发展、保持步伐、从现在开始并填补时间的科学的渴望——从而开辟了新的途径，让人们理解科学的意义，以及在后殖民时期的非洲，在有希望和衰落、出现和中断、希望和不确定的时代做科学意味着什么。
Focusing on the Laboratory of Toxicology and Analytical Chemistry of the Faculty of Pharmacy at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal, this article foregrounds temporality as a key dimension of the postcolonial history of African science. This laboratory, like many others across Africa, is experienced by its current and former members as a space of shortage. I explore how memories of ‘means’ and past scientific activity in Dakar and abroad give meaning to subsequent experiences of the lab as a place filled with inactive ‘antiques’ and ‘wreckage’. I suggest that the waning of means not only displaces scientific activity ‘elsewhere’ but also fragments its tempos, altering its rhythms along with its social, moral and affective qualities. The interpenetration of past and future generates nostalgia, segmented narratives and trajectories, quests for immediacy and continuity, as well as new engagements with routines of scientific regulation and management. Paying attention to the intersection of materiality and temporality – by taking seriously African scientists’ longing for science that moves forward, keeps pace, begins now and fills up time – thus opens up new ways of understanding what science means and what it means to do science in times of promise and decline, emergence and interruption, hope and uncertainty in postcolonial Africa.