The Machine in Me: An Anthropologist Sits Among Engineers
  
             
Routledge, 1998
                             
         

Gary Lee Downey investigates the body/machine interface in this remarkable ethnography of computer engineers. Drawing on interviews, observations, and personal interaction with engineers, he documents the everyday power of technology's dominant image in our society, a foce widely regarded as monolithically progressive. The Machine in Me helps us understand how deeply we and machines are configured through one another.

 
                           
Endorsements for The Machine in Me
 
"Engaged in earnest and honest dialogue with the engineers he studies and works with, Gary Downey shows us from the inside what working within a technology means to the lives of these scientists. Downey proposes - hope against hope - a vision of what a different world of technology and business might be. Admirable."
   
Introduction
- Paul Rabinow, University of California at Berkeley
 
Conclusion
"Downey has produced a most provocative analysis of the still emergent culture of CAD/CAM - machine and maker, students and users - based upon extensive field work, often as a participant. More than an engaging ethnography, he provides a refreshing critique of contemporary social studies of technology and society, moving beyond networks, impacts, agents, and actors to author a most compelling story."
 
 
- Louis Bucciarelli, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
     
 

Cyborgs and Citadels:

Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technology
School of American Research Press, 1998
     

Interactions between humans and technology are omnipresent today and permeate all of our lives. Yet only recently have these interactions been studied in cultural terms, as scholars have started to apply anthropological methods and theories to examine the practices and practitioners of contemporary science, technology, and medicine in the United States. This volume of essays is an important contribution to the exciting new anthropology of science and technology.

In Cyborgs & Citadels, some of this country's most imaginative and influential thinkers explore such questions as how science gains authority to direct turth practices (the "Citadel" problem), the boundaries between humans and machines, and how science, technology, and medicine contribute to the fashioning of everyday lives and selves (the "Cyborg" problem). Their fieldwork sites include a prenatal sonogram clinic, an inner-city AIDS clinic, a molecular biotechnology lab, a conference on Marfan syndrome, a center for brain imaging technology, a particle physics lab, an undergraduate engineering program, and the School of American Research advanced seminar that gave rise to this volume. A special section titled "Corridor Talk" offers essential and hard-to-find advice on careers, publication opportunities, and grant writing for scholars of emerging sciences, technologies, and medicines.
 
Introduction
 
Corridor Talk
Endorsements for Cyborgs & Citadels
 
Engineering Selves      
  A collection of first-order significance. Virtually all of the US scholars who have pioneered anthropology's entry into the arena of science and technology studies are included. This will certainly be a landmark publication for anthropologists.
     
- George E. Marcus, Rice University