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This article introduces a series of ideas about the categories of science and politics, by way of actor network theory, Gell's theories of index and agency, and governmentality studies. It explores the ways in which science has become a discursive element in contemporary government, and examines the tensions between the purifying categorizations of politics and science, and the re-embedding (or hybridizing) of science into national political discourse. What emerges is a series of practices by which science is nationalized, domesticating the ideal of a generalized science into localized political debates at both national and sub-national levels, practices which may be transformed at national boundaries. While we acknowledge that science in practice is not abstract or generalizable (since it must engage with a world which is not abstracted), it is the abstracting and purifying work attributed to science which makes it attractive as a political alibi for particular political projects. Rather than seeing science as politics by other means, perhaps we should be examining the creation of a rehybridized science-politics.

Klintman, Mikael. 2017. Human Sciences and Human Interests: Integrating the Social, Economic, and Evolutionary Sciences. London: Routledge.

Jetzkowitz, Jens. 2019. Co-evolution of Nature and Society: Foundations for Interdisciplinary Sustainability Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

This is an essay – along with another, by Frank Pearce – on The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim (2005). The collection is heterogeneous, and good in parts. But there are also basic themes, driven by the concerns of the editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Alexander – especially with a 'cultural turn' in how Durkheim is interpreted. Accordingly, a major criticism is that Durkheim's 'culturalism' isn't a relativistic 'culturalism', but looks for universals. His work conjugates the contextual and the universal. It also conjugates the rational and the emotional, in a continuation rather than a radical break with Kant. But it is above all in a commitment to science, and to a search for explanation through intelligible connections in the underlying dynamics of social life. Accordingly, another major criticism is not only the collection's tendency to downplay reason, but a sort of black hole in which it fails to tackle Durkheim's very idea of a social science.

Typically, magic takes no stance against the socialized beliefs that determine it, in contrast with both science and modern religion, which, in the face of doubt, assert the truth-value of their propositions against such determination. In other words, science and religion engage in 'believed belief'. Their aversion to magical belief is the one thing they can agree on. Believed beliefs produce convictions of truth sufficiently intense to base actions on, such as the killing of someone identified as a witch. Ethnography on Sukuma healing allows us to distinguish this experience of the witch from that of oracles and magical remedies. While research in terms of belief(s) tends to oppose cultures, an approach based on experiential structures links up seemingly distinct practices from different cultures, while differentiating seemingly similar practices within a culture.

This special symposium grew out of a workshop held in Hamburg in 2011 (Krauss and von Storch 2012) and of a long-term interest in climate research as post-normal science. A decade earlier, Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch (1999) stated that the management of uncertainty and its extension into the political and social realm make climate science a case for post-normal science. Interpreting a survey among German and American climate scientists, they suggested that scientific policy advice is the result of both scientific knowledge and normative judgment.