Another well-known piece is Latour’s take on Special Relativity published in Social Studies of Science. Suffice it to say that the guy lacks the intellectual equipment even to deal with the rather simple derivations that underlie the special theory. The reaction of the physics community, or, rather, that fragment thereof that paid any atention to Latour, is one long horselaugh.

Sorry I can’t provide more useful websites, but Latour’s own provides plenty of references to his own work. Se also Sokal’s website.

You show that Latour will impress those who want to be impressed. It’s not surprising that there are lots of these in a world where homeopathy and worthless theories about the etiology of autism have such an easy time of it. Uri Geller is an even bigger success than Latour!

How much actual scientific work have you done, by the way? Not much, I infer. Nor have you come up with an explanation for Latour’s getting the bum’s rush at IAS (as also happened with the next Geertz nominee, Norton Wise) other than the obvious one: his work is worthless.

As to Latour (and Collins/Pinch, and Jasanoff and Bloor and Knorr-Cetina and Harding and Haraway and Shapin and Fox-Keller and Fuller and Hayles and Bloor and Herrnstein-Smith and Longino and so forth, ad infinitum), suffice it to say I’ve been in constant battle with that crew. Since I don’t want to blow my own cover, I won’t tell you where and how–but I’m still getting royalties for a book I published more than a decade ago on that very topic–not to mention perhaps 50 or 60 articles and book chapters written since. To get down to cases, Abu el Haj herself is unambiguous about claiming that science studies is her field, that she is, like Latour, an “anthropologist of science”. Her book makes it clear that she relies entirely on the literature of this crank field for her theoretical authority. Check this for yourself.

As to her politics: unlike Stern, who is hysterical as well as very careless, I don’t take Abu el Haj’s politics to be a crucial issue. I don’t like her politics, but I fully expect to find them in anyone with Palestinian roots. I dislike Stern’s politics far more, since I think that the “settlers” who claim an absolute right to seize land from Palestinian Arabs where and when they choose, are crazy, vicious, and dangerous. But the issue is the scholarly worth and fairmindedness of Abuy el Haj’s book, on which issues she must be judged harshly. The pity of it is that if she had abandoned the science studies folderol and addressed the politics candidly and directly, she might have produced a genuinely interesting book. For instance, she might have discussed the question of whether the demographics of a piece of land 2000 years ago and more has any bearing on how to reach a fair and just solution to current disputes over that territory. Frankly, I don’t think it has any relevance, whether we’re talking about Zionist ultra claims in the Middle East or Serbian claims in Kosovo. Thus the sin of Israeli archaeology, to the extent that it allies with the ultras, is not that it constructs illusory facts, but that it treats them as though they had something important to say about the present conflict. (But then, Abu el Haj overlooks the fact that for a generation or so, Israeli archaeology has been a thorn in the side of the ultra nationalists and the fervently Orthodox, in that its leading authorities have frequently debunked the supposed historicity of the Bible.)

But the crowd Abu el Haj was trying to impress did not consist of serous political scientists/philosophers, but rather the heirs of Geertz who, saturated with the cliches of postmodernism, have pretty well ruined cultural anthropology. Who wants to bear the hardships of true field work when they can sit on their asses and do “theory” instead? Note that Abu el Haj’s field work consisted of gadding about a modern country, with all its conveniences and luxuries, occassionally visiting a dig (but not overdoing it in this respect). At that, it’s a hell of a lot more taxing than what many of today’s supposed cultural anthropologists do. Then again, a hopelessly old-fashioned anthropologist like Napoleon Chagnon, who spent many years facing up to extremes of danger and discomfort in order to understand a people on its own turf, is rewarded for his efforts by a tsunami of slander by the very same postmoderists who think that quoting Foucault ad nauseam constitutes scholarship.