ABSTRACT
Through the anthropological research method called participant-observation I study the settings and events that the multinational high energy physics community physicists construct for themselves and observe the activities, formal and informal, they consider appropriate in those settings. 1 I learn what they believe they need to know in order to act effectively and strategically, whether locally or globally; I then find the patterns in their actions and cosmologies and how all this shifts over time as the ecology of their community changes. The central theoretical questions for my research have been: 1) how knowledge, especially so-called craft or tacit knowledge, is transmitted from one generation to the next in a multinational community that is committed to discovery and in which crucial features of their knowledge are never written; 2) how different styles of research practices emerge and survive; 3) how disputes and factions are formed and maintained; 4) how these practices differ along lines of class, gender, regional and national culture, and national and international political economy; and 5) how national and international political economies are shaped by these physicists and the work they do.
