Naked science. Anthropological inquiry into boundaries, power and knowledge. Edited by Laura Nader. New York and London: Routledge. 1996. xvi + 318 pp. Pb.: £14.99. ISBN 0 415 91465 5.

The scientific revolution. By Steven Shapin. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1996. xiv + 218 pp. Pb.: £9.50. ISBN 0 226 75020 5.

These two valuable scholarly volumes emerge from different disciplinary traditions in the study of western science – anthropology (Nader) and history (Shapin). Yet they are both informed and shaped by recent developments in the social studies of science. The authors endeavour ‘to portray science as the contingent, diverse and at times deeply problematic product of interested, morally concerned, historically situated people’ (Shapin 1996: 165). Writing in the shadow of recent controversies in the USA about the legitimacy of such portrayal, Shapin anticipates that he may be accused of trying to ‘expose science’ (p. 165), while Nader is unapologetically determined about the pursuit of ‘naked science’ – that is, of science stripped of its ideological pretensions and assumptions.