Donna Haraway

Donna J. Haraway (b. 1944–) counts among the most creative—and provocative—of cultural theorists today. Her gifts to critical thought have tracked from work on the history of biology, to the place of technology in feminist and socialist debates over objectivity, to the politics and ethics of genetic interventions into life forms, to expressions of multispecies companionship, kinship, and flourishing. For more than four decades, she has helped to develop realist, pragmatist, feminist, and antiracist problematics, continuously asking squirm-inducing questions about the politics and aesthetics of knowing. Originally trained in biology and the history of science, Haraway’s scholarship has altered the terms and debates of multiple fields, including anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), feminist studies, cultural studies, philosophy, literary theory, ecocriticism, animal studies, and disability studies, among others. Here, we focus chiefly on her influences on anthropology. Since publishing her first book in 1976, Haraway has offered prescient contributions to anthropological questions of what biology and culture (as well as aesthetics, technologies, and languages) might be. At the same time, our exploration of Haraway’s anthropological contributions will necessarily engage overlapping areas of inquiry, as she has helped channel rich transfusions of critical discourse across boundaries dividing STS, feminist theory, and sociocultural anthropology. This boundary-crossing amounts to something of a biographical imperative for Haraway, who has consistently channeled her Roman Catholic socialization as a child and her scientific socialization as a biology graduate student into imaginative, mythic refigurations of the cultures of technoscience. A figure deeply committed to the tropic powers of figures themselves (e.g., the cyborg, OncoMouse, the companion animal), Haraway has long fashioned herself as a border-crossing, canine-loving, chimerical human companion honing a quasi-ethnographic vision as she situates and resituates sciences, including one corner of biological anthropology’s kinship chart: primatology. Relentlessly committed to the generative effects of situating science as a complex of worldly material and semiotic practices, Haraway routinely supplants abstracted constructions of knowledge—often termed the “view from nowhere” or the “god’s eye view”—with fleshy, situated, self-aware accounts of knowing, as a contingent, often fragile, open-ended process. Through her singular, experimental, and passionate prose, Haraway refashions and re-mediates cultural, technological, and scientific systems, re-envisioning facts, values, technologies, signs, mythologies, and organisms as historically contingent, thoroughly entangled, often bumptious forms. These critical interventions have been widely received, debated, and extended within anthropological discussions of feminism, laboratory studies, technoscience, biopower, and multispecies ethnography, among other areas.