Will has been reminding me of my inactive presence on this blog so I finally decided to get my act together and contribute something more history of science-ish.
Having been inspired by Will’s numerous reviews on the recent Isis from June 2008, I thought I would tackle Jeremy Vetter’s essay (in the same issue) “Cowboys, Scientists, and Fossils,” which underscores several history of science questions about the tensions between local collaborators and experts from the “outside,” including professional collectors, scientists, and museum curators. While American paleontology in the early 20th century is not exactly a specialized interest of mine, it does, however, dovetail into some of the similar challenges faced by European geologists in the early 19th century (some of whom I do study). I did read the work of Robert Kohler a long time ago whose books Lords of the Fly and Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology stimulated my scholarly curiosity about how contestations in the field affected the bigger picture of making science and whose concepts are echoed in Vetter’s ideas about the status of the field site as a place of contentious negotiation. The intervention of
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