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thought of as signifiers of disorientation in imaginaries of progress, markers for that which cannot easily be assigned to one side of the binary or the other, perhaps cannot even be properly categorised at all because they too are unknown, like the warnings placed over the uncharted portion of an incomplete map. To illustrate these points more clearly in the discussion that follows, we will draw upon both the Frankenstein story, as one of the original monsters in the socio-technical imaginary of progress through science, and more recent metaphors from popular culture
products have as much impact on public perceptions of science as the mass media. In popular works and in many scholarly texts the interface between science and religion has traditionally been depicted as one of unbridgeable conflict (Evans and Evans, 2008). This divide has a long pedigree in British Gothic literature. It takes early form in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein (Shelley 1998), where a scientist plays God and creates a grotesque creature, rendering himself monstrous in the making of what the outside world deems a monster. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (2003
) is replete with monsters. From Haraway’s cyborg (1991) to Latour’s appeal for us to love and care for our technologies rather than abandon them as Frankenstein did his creation (Latour, 2011), the central preoccupations of this field concern the (blurred) categories of and relations between nature; culture; the human, non-human or more-than-human; the scientific; technological; social; material; epistemic and the political: the construction, maintenance and disturbance of our ‘natural’ and ‘social’ orders and kinds. Whether leviathan in the sense of biblical sea
the EU –the custom agreement signed with Turkey was “Frankenstein’s poison.” Accordingly, the colonial, unjust, oppressive, Christian West was not an option, let alone that it is inferior. On a trip to Kuala Lumpur, in August 1996, Erbakan declared that Western development has been dependent on Islamic intellectual contributions – Arab arithmetic, for example – and that Western scientific progress is hindered by belief in the Trinity. “Many think he is often unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality,” commented Morton Abramowitz, Washington’s former