We focus on two cases in which participants narrate and perform a new culture of expertise by constructing a bad expert, a reviled or dangerous figure of scientific credibility gone wrong. We show that a key mechanism in the construction of expertise cultures is the use of antithesis performances, which are performances of scientific and professional credibility that rely on telling stories...
This story is about the twentieth-century ethnobotanist, Richard Evans Schultes (1915-2001), and his research on hallucinogenic plants. Ethnobotany can contribute directly to science and technology studies in that the discipline makes cultural ways of knowing its scientific subject. Ethnobotanists must learn about plants through people, and are not able to conceal their interactions with...