Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 35 – History and Historiography of Science

Primer: Malinowski and the Problem of Culture

Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (1884-1942) was the founder of the branch of Social Anthropology known as functionalism. Functionalism maintains that every aspect of the culture of a people, past or present, serves a purpose for the long-term maintenance of that society. Malinowski inaugurated a new standard for field-work, and served as an exemplar of ethnographic observation and inference for a generation of anthropologists. As a theoretician and as a individual, opinion of Malinowski remains sharply polarized.

malinowski

The British social anthropologist, Audrey I. Richards, as related in Jerry D. Moore’s Visions of Culture (2008), observed that Malinowski’s concept of culture was “one of his most stimulating contributions to the anthropological thought of his day.” Conversely, the anthropologist Edmund Leach opposed Malinowski’s contributions to ethnographic fieldwork to his dubious theoretical formulations. Leach noted that while Malinowski altered “the whole mode and purpose of ethnographic inquiry” he also made “numerous theoretical pronouncements of a general, abstract,sociological kind.” Malinowski’s conception of “Culture” amounted to a “platitudinous bore.” According to Malinowski’s former student, Raymond Firth, Malinowski the man was either loved or hated, lauded as an artist or derided as a “pretentious Messiah of the credulous.”

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Schaffer Turns to Practice

The two articles we are looking at today are among the best-known works of Simon Schaffer:

(1) “Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation,” Science in Context 2 (1988): 115-145.

(2) “Glass Works: Newton’s Prisms and the Uses of Experiment,” in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (1989), edited by David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer.

The articles stand at an important turning point in Schaffer’s oeuvre, and their style should be very familiar to history of science professionals working in the last 20 years, because both depart from Schaffer’s early concern with the construction of systems of ideas, and both put a specific epistemic practice under the microscope, in this case: striving for precision in observation, and replicating experimental results. At the time, though, these kinds of studies were reasonably novel. The Uses of Experiment volume, in particular, was an

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Happy 1,000 Thony C!

It’s a running source of amusement between Chris Donohue and me that by far the most popular post on this site is guest contributor Thony Christie’s discussion of Newton’s prism experiments and theory of color for Hump-Day History back in December, which has just received its 1,000th page view.

By coincidence we’ve arrived at Schaffer’s well-known piece on Newton’s prism experiments in our ongoing exploration of his work, so in honor of Thony’s massive success with his piece, I’ll be doing a write-up of that piece (combined with Schaffer’s piece on astronomy’s “personal equation”) some time this week

The Dart of Harkness

Having finished up Deborah Harkness’ The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution, I must say that I am wowed—it’s really a superb book that should be read by anyone working in the history of science, any period or location.

The thing that really makes this book work so well is its economical pacing and the presence of the author throughout. The subject matter—the knowledge economy of Elizabethan London as it pertains to the natural sciences—is necessarily diffuse. There are a few big names who enter and leave the story, but for the most part one is dealing with a wide pastiche of authors, medical practitioners, and so forth. The object is to characterize what these people did, how their communities worked, and how these communities intertwined. This is what Harkness accomplishes very nicely. Her expertise is constantly on hand to guide readers through the ins and outs of Elizabethan regulatory systems, investment schemes, and, of course, the London market place, and to leave readers with not only an argument, but a usefully organized knowledge about the subject matter. She conveys her point, produces the pertinent information, and moves on, dwelling on details only so long as to demonstrate how they relate to the larger picture.

Harkness’ economical style allows her to cover a lot of ground. She starts off with a discussion of the community of naturalists on Lime Street, but then goes on to chart the anatomy of London’s diverse medical market, the instrumentation market and the market for practical and theoretical mathematical education, the development of large-scale projects (mining, exploration, water works, etc., fueled by often suspect knowledge), and the compilation of practical knowledge in manuscript notebooks and printed books.

It’s all very well done, but my favorite bit has to be the discussion of one of Queen Elizabeth’s top administrators, William Cecil, and his efforts to come to grips with various issues relating to maintaining the value of currency, granting

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Primer: Jean-André de Luc’s Christian Geology

DeLucBPU5 — Click for Hasok Chang's page on De Luc

It was nice timing that Michael Robinson happened to bring up at his blog the relationship between Biblical and physical (i.e. “biological” to be somewhat anachronistic) accounts of human history and race. I’ve just been going over Martin Rudwick’s fantastic Bursting the Limits of Time (2005), and had decided to write a post on Jean-André de Luc (1727-1817), a devoutly Christian natural philosopher of the Earth’s history, and coiner of the term “geology”.

De Luc came from a family of Genevan clock-makers, and had a background in precision engineering. He was well-known for his design of a portable barometer, and established his reputation as an authority on meteorology. In 1773 he moved to England, where he resided for the rest of his life, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society and a “reader” (i.e. mentor) for Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III.

In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, the discipline now understood as geology was comprised of a variety of natural historical and natural philosophical fields of study: mineralogy, physical geography, geognosy (the study of the contents of the earth, related to mining), and the “physics” of the earth (which dealt with qualitative discussions of the earth’s mechanisms). An important intellectual activity in this period was the construction of vast logical “systems” that connected causal and historical explanations to account for observations, thereby establishing a potential comprehensive “theory of the Earth”. It was to describe this last activity that de Luc deployed the term “geology”, to distinguish it from more expansive cosmologies, which attempted to account for the workings of the entire universe.

As a devout Christian, de Luc felt embattled in a community of Enlightenment-era savants who embraced deistic, or

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Schaffer on the Politics of Inquiry

One of the ongoing themes in Schaffer’s work—perhaps the primary theme—is his commitment to the detailed investigation of the relationship between political ideology and natural philosophical inquiry from the 17th to the 19th centuries. It was at the center of Leviathan and the Air Pump, was central to his work on Priestley in the Enlightenment era, and his concern with the relationship between the natural philosophy of pneumatics and spirits (same post as Priestley).

Schaffer took pains to discuss politics as not simply something that interferes with inquiry, or as something that motivates inquiry, or something for which inquiry has implications. For Schaffer, both the subject and manner of inquiry were understood as being political themselves, linked intimately with principles of good governance. Politics not only defined what arguments one could make without incurring charges such as atheism, but, because these convictions were also held by natural philosophers, politics went so far as to define what kinds of questions and manners of inquiry made sense.

Today I’d like to do some sweeping up on this subject from Schaffer’s 1980s writings:

(1) “Occultism and Reason in the Seventeenth Century,” in Philosophy: Its History and Historiography (1985), edited by A. J. Holland. (Schaffer’s entry is available in full through Google Books.)

(2) “Wallification: Thomas Hobbes on School Divinity and Experimental Pneumatics,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science (1988): 275-298.

(3) “The Glorious Revolution and Medicine in Britain and the Netherlands,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 43 (1989): 167-190.

There is also one article I do not have easy access to that looks relevant:

(*) “The Political Theology of Seventeeth-Century Natural Science,” Ideas & Production 1 (1983): 1-43.

What must be the most interesting thing about being a historian of seventeenth-century natural philosophy is the sheer number of epistemological flavors deployed to address the same problems. In the 1980s, conscientious historians took it upon themselves to sort out different epistemological commitments, rather than to rely on wholly

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Primer: The Soviet Bomb

Igor Vasilevich Kurchatov, Photo Credit: Ioffe Physical Technical Institute, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives

The early history of the atomic bomb is necessarily a part of the history of physics, because in less than a decade what was an entirely novel physical phenomenon—the splitting of certain atomic nuclei when struck by neutrons—had been engineered into a military weapon with unprecedented destructive power.

The key experiments had been conducted in Germany at the end of 1938, but once the mechanism had been interpreted by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch (both of whom had fled the Nazis), its implications were appreciated across the world of nuclear physics, including in the Soviet Union.

Like the United States, the Soviet Union was not a traditional leader in physics, but, like the United States, the physics community was respected and had a burgeoning nuclear physics community. This community, like others across the world, fully recognized the implications of nuclear fission before nuclear research went secret after the war began, and members of it played a leading role in the research and development of nuclear weaponry and energy.

During the war, because the Soviet Union quickly became embroiled in an epic ground war with the Nazis, Soviet nuclear research did not receive as strong a priority as it ultimately did in the United States, though a research project was established in the winter of 1942-43 once it was learned from spies that the Germans, British, and Americans had established their own programs. The

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Orchids! (And Enthusiasts)

Regular updates to continue tomorrow. Today I just thought I’d mention that on a springtime trip to the National Mall, my girlfriend and I took a quick swing through the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. This was sort of a getting-from-Constitution-Ave-to-the-Mall kind of swing-through (bless the free-of-charge Smithsonian!), but it did afford an opportunity to catch the Orchids Through Darwin’s Eyes exhibit, which is being put on by the Smithsonian’s Horticultural Services Division. (We later took a stroll through the United States Botanic Garden, which is also a a really attractive place).

I hardly ever go downtown (the crowds!), but I should, because I am spoiled with all the incredible curatorial and historical talent right here. As I weave my way through tourists, what I usually think about is the sheer amount of expertise that must go into crafting this stuff, when most people passing through must think, “Ooh, orchids!” if not, “How can we hit three more museums before dinner? C’mon kids, culture! Appreciate! Quicker!” The museum folks have always struck me as having a sort of bizarre, and slightly depressing, role to play.

But I’m probably wrong about that, because there’s also the enthusiasts, who, if nit-picky at times, are surely the most rewarding audience with whom to interact. In the future I’d like to go into a little bit more detail about history written by and for enthusiasts, as opposed to pop history. I get the impression academics who deal regularly with neither tend to conflate the groups, even though they couldn’t be more different.

One of these days we’ve got to get a curator over here to do a Q&A to talk about being spanned between the general public, enthusiasts, and academics. I know academics generally don’t like to get into the kinds of nitty-gritty issues that enthusiasts love (this would be background research, not publishable stuff), but it’s worth considering how historians might identify and serve this audience’s needs better, possibly improving scholarship in the process. I’m thinking here of something between the educational exhibit and the a-to-z reference resource, but I’ll have to come back to this thought later. Got to get home!

Less musing, more substance tomorrow. Promise!

1600: Impressions and Questions

Things are moving slowly around here what with the book and all, but a while ago in attempting to organize “what I think I know” about sciences-related things from a prior era well outside my expertise, I put together a snazzy little sketch of relations between areas of interest to historians of science and historians of ideas and creative practices more generally. The idea is that you could make the diagram into some computer 3-D ball-like model and rotate it around and look at various areas. Failing having a snazzy 3-D model complete with pull-up bibliographies, pictures, biographical databases, time-lines, and the like (but, seriously, how awesomely useful would that be?) I thought it would be of interest to toss out a few areas and connections between them that I am under the impression people who work on the pre-1600 period care about. The idea is to have a sort of first approximation of what a historiographical synthesis would look like, and then figure out how the picture is right and wrong. So, in no real order, the following represent chains of connections, rather than homogeneous categories….

1. Astronomy-mathematics/geometry: Big area of interest, classically on account the the exalted place of astronomy in the scientific revolution, but c. 1600 is mainly a wonky area of table-making, useful for calendars, astrology. Big specialist historiography.

2. Mathematics/geometry-mechanics-optics-music theory: The “other” mathematical fields. I really have no idea to what extent interest in these areas overlapped with interest in professional astronomy. Obviously some people had wide interests, but if you were to take a survey how deep would it run, I couldn’t make a good guess of what the results would be.

3–19 after the jump.

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Punt!

Finishing book manuscript… no time to deal with Hump-Day History this week… must fill in footnotes…. so very many footnotes….