Donna Jeanne Haraway.
Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: metaphors that shape embryos.
North Atlantic Books. 1976
Donna Haraway is perhaps our most advanced scientific storyteller.
She locates the myths, metaphors, and tropes that underlie
a technologically companionable physical world.
Without abandoning scientific method—in fact,
by embracing it in its fullest applicability—she exposes
and also celebrates our scientific narratives as our clan story.
In the process she “outs” our most fundamental distinctions
and unexamined paradoxes: nature/culture, wild/domesticated,
molecular/organic, animal/human, body/gender, et al.
Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields is the first chapter of
Haraway’s epic tale of Western science.
When she names it “metaphors that shape embryos,”
it should be clear that embryos also shape her metaphors,
for she brilliantly illuminates the origin and dependence of each in each other.
