This article examines the foundation myths of Brazil in the last two centuries, paying particular attention to the relationship between these myths and governmental attitudes toward the hybridity of Northern and Southern ethnic and technoscientific entities. Based upon this examination, the article argues that it is important to consider both the wider temporal frames and the shifts and sedimentations that have formed current foundation myths and shaped their relation to science and technology. Postcolonial science technology studies theories illuminate aspects of (...) this trajectory, but our analysis suggests a more complex scenario that involves internal political dynamics and the work of local intellectuals. We argue that the example of Brazilian social scientists should encourage scholars to go beyond the current focus on breaking the myths of technoscience and undertake mythmaking initiatives with wider societal resonances. (shrink)

‘Methods’ and their devices have been conventionally viewed as the means through which the move from world to representation might be reliably performed. An alternative view, perhaps most clearly exemplified by the post-ANT empirical programme of ‘material semiotics’, sees methods and devices as integral to the ways particular ‘realities’ are enacted in practices of inscription and intervention. Drawing upon this latter work, the present paper examines the role of satellite images, GIS and GPS data and devices in the methods utilized (...) in the location, identification and classification of ‘illegal deforestation’ in Brazilian Amazonia. Here we witness how efforts to render ‘deforestation’ into a stable object of knowledge, singular and coordinated, are countered by attempts to render it multiple and irreconcilable as methods and devices become entangled in the conflicts and antagonisms of social life. (shrink)