Showing papers in "Osiris in 2000"
TL;DR: In this article, the authors use the terms "local" and "locality" to indicate "places" in which science is accomplished in Mexico, including both centers and peripheries, and use them to describe the conditions that make legible and commensurable (for the center) all the observations, measurements, representations, and texts produced in the various peripheries.
Abstract: ions. When an historian studies a particular locality,4 by definition one would expect that locality to become the \"center\" of his or her interest. Yet positivist colonial historians of, say, science in New Spain were, in reality, often writing the larger social and intellectual history of Europe, and not the history of Mexico,5 seeking out local \"traces\" of European ideas and intellectual movements.6 \"'Europe\"' says Dipesh Chakrabarty, \"remains the sovereign theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call 'Indian,' Chinese,' Kenyan,' and so on.\"7 When historians sought richer, deeper, \"thicker\" accounts of science in non-European localities,8 they soon became dissatisfied with analyses in which every standard of truth and rationality was set in Europe, and in which the very meaning of \"rationality,\" \"enlightenment,\" progress,\" and \"useful knowledge\" had been defined on that distant continent. Thus, little by little, historians of local science sloughed off a paradigm of Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999). 3For example, Bruno Latour's writings have made a particularly useful contribution, both by insisting on eliminating the \"great divide\" between science and traditional modes of thought, and by locating the power of modern science in its distinctive international network of institutions. The workings of that network create the conditions that make legible and commensurable (for the center) all the observations, measurements, representations, and texts produced in the various peripheries. See especially Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987). 4In this paper I shall use the terms \"local\" and \"locality\" flexibly to indicate \"places\" in which science is accomplished. A locality may be a region, country, city, or even a single institution, incorporating social, cultural, political, and economic factors and relationships, and including both centers and peripheries. I In fact, Mexican historians have been somewhat less Eurocentric than historians of science in many other colonial localities. Nevertheless, atthe first Mexican colloquium in the field (September, 1963), thirty-four of the sixty-one papers presented were part of a symposium on the European Enlightenment in Latin America. Enrique Beltrdn, ed., Memorias del Primer Coloquio Mexicano de Historia de la Ciencia, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural, 1964). The history of Mexican science has a venerable and distinguished disciplinary history with antecedents in the nineteenth century. See Enrique Beltrnn, \"Fuentes mexicanas de la historia de la ciencia,\" Anales de las Sociedad Mexicana de Historia de la Ciencia y de la Tecnologia, 1970, 2:57-112; Juan Jose Saldafia, \"Marcos conceptuales de la historia de las ciencias en Latino America: Positivismo y economicismo,\" El Perfil de la ciencia en America (Mexico City: Sociedad Latinoamericana deHistoria de las Ciencias y la Tecnologia, 1986); and Elias Trabulse, \"Aproximaciones historiogrnficas a la ciencia mexicana,\" Memorias del Primer Congreso Mexicano de Historia de la Ciencia y de la Tecnologia (Mexico City: Sociedad de Historia de la Ciencia y de la Tecnologia, 1989), vol. 1, pp. 5 1-69. 6 See for example, Roland D. Hussey, \"Traces of French Enlightenment in Colonial Hispanic America,\" in Latin America nd the Enlightenment, ed.Arthur P. Whitaker, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 23-51. This book, originally published in 1942, uncovered useful material but remains a classic example of a project in European history focused on Latin America, and is one that helped set the agenda for writing colonial science history. All six of the distinguished contributing scholars were apparently English speaking and based outside Latin America. 7Dipesh Chakrabarty, \"Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?\" Representations, 1992, 32:1-26. 8 Clifford Geertz referred to the study of local cases as \"thick description,\" without which more general cultural meanings and power relationships cannot be understood. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). LOCALITY IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 223 cultural deficit, replacing it with a paradigm of cultural difference. Within the \"big picture\" Europe was progressively \"decentered,\"9 and in a very real sense, science was also decentered. PERIPHERAL CENTERS AND CENTRAL PERIPHERIES Because modern science arose principally in one geographic locale,'0 historians of science had taken the wheel as the metaphor for its international structure: its center was in Europe (displaced this century to the mid-Atlantic), with the rest of the world revolving around. But the metaphor of the wheel is exceedingly misleading. From the time of its cosmopolitan birth in the correspondence of Marin Mersenne (15881648) and Henry Oldenburg (1618-1677) and in institutions like the much neglected Casa de la Contratacion in Seville (1539?), the Florentine Accademia del Cimento (1657), and the Royal Society of London (1660), modern science is better understood, both metaphorically and actually, as a polycentric ommunications network.\" During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that network was fully institutionalized, which represented a revolution in knowledge making more significant for both science and society than the theoretical advances of the seventeenth century traditionally known as the Scientific Revolution. Thus, from the very beginnings of the scientific movement, Centrality or peripherality was not primarily a matter of geographical location, but the combined effect of social, scientific, and-not the least-power relations. . .. Scientists, like other people, bore identities, they belonged somewhere, and they were loyal to something. Even more importantly, the daily activities of scientists were carried out in a framework ofinstitutions, agendas, career opportunities, working language, financial support and patronage systems.'2 This is to suggest that the idea of science having a European center and a global periphery perpetrated a confusing, and ultimately spurious, understanding of the relations of science and place. Then and now, Europe had major centers, minor centers, and peripheries; cities like London, indeed, had central institutions and peripheral institutions. Of course, progressively other localities developed scientific enters and peripheries. Furthermore, within Europe and without, centers rose and fell. 9Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, \"Decentring the 'Big Picture': The Origins of Modem Science and the Modem Origins of Science,\" British Journal of the History of Science, 1993, 26:407-32. 10 \"Modem science\" as distinguished by its institutions, procedures, and technologies. It See Latour, Science in Action (cit. n. 3), pp. 215-57, and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985). Sverker Sorlin has given a clear description of early processes of scientific nternationalization: \"National and International Aspects of Cross-Boundary Science: Scientific Travel in the 18th Century,\" inDenationalizing Science: The Contexts of International Scientific Practice, eds. Elizabeth Crawford, Terry Shinn, and Sverker Sorlin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), pp. 43-72. See also Lorraine Daston, \"The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment,\" Science in Context, 1991, 4:367-86; and for the role of the Casa de la Contrataci6n, see David Turnbull, \"Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping the Construction of Knowledge Spaces,\" Imago Mundi, 1996, 48:7-14, and J. Pulido Rubio, El Piloto mayor de la Casa de Contrataci6n de Sevilla (Sevilla: Escuelade Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1950). 12 Sorlin, \"National and International\" (cit. n. 11), p. 45. 224 DAVID WADE CHAMBERS AND RICHARD GILLESPIE And whenever a scientific center arose within a locality, both science and the locality were changed by the event.'3 Eurocentric explanations of the growth of science received a great boost with the appearance of historian George Basalla's widely known model describing \"the introduction fmodem science into any non-European ation.\"' 4 The model predicted that localities peripheral to the European center would progressively \"receive\" the ideas of Western science, slowly establishing their own scientific organizations and personnel, perhaps producing along the way a few \"heroes of colonial science.\"\"5 In the final stage, after the colony had accomplished \"seven tasks,\" a broad and \"independent\" institutional support base for science would have been established, thus allowing the given locality to compete scientifically in the world of nations. 16 The seven tasks, which are rarely discussed in the critical iterature, included such activities as \"overcoming\" and eventually \"eradicating\" recalcitrant local \"philosophical and religious beliefs,\" founding scientific societies \"patterned after\" the major European organizations, and importing European technologies. This unrelenting Eurocentrism was only one of the many reasons that he Basalla model was finally rejected by most historians.'7 COLONIAL TO NATIONAL TRAJECTORIES Basalla's model was initially attractive b cause it showed-in fact, seemed to prescribe-the straight and narrow path to national scientific development. Each locality was to rise in invariant sequence from a colonial to a national stage, from scientific dependency to autonomy. Colonial science was, in effect, considered a scientific adolescence that might eventually grow with the new nation-states into the maturity that Europe had long since achieved. In countries like Australia, where European settlers predominated, the predictive capacity of the model might, at first glance, seem reliable. In just a little ove
236 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the continuous role that science has played in the establishment of a colonial and post-colonial "development regime" in Africa and show how African agrarian societies became objects of both state intervention and expert knowledge.
Abstract: This paper explores the continuous role that science has played in the establishment of a colonial and post-colonial "development regime" in Africa. Examining development schemes that flourished between 1930 and 1970, the paper shows how African agrarian societies became objects of both state intervention and expert knowledge. In pursuing large scale social engineering and social experiments, these schemes constituted a particular--colonial?--way of managing the African environment and of crafting knowledge on African societies. In constructing development ideologies and practices in the late colonial and post independence periods, they also played an important part in the construction of the African state. Their approaches shaped the future of tropical medicine, agriculture, and development studies. Ironically, they also created the preconditions for later interest in the values of indigenous knowledge.
173 citations
TL;DR: Efforts are made to show why many perceived acclimatization to be the paradigmatic colonial science with applications as diverse as agriculture, settlement schemes, field sports, and human health.
Abstract: This paper examines the institutions, personages, and theories that informed acclimatization activities in nineteenth-century France, England, and the two colonies of Algeria and Australia. Treating acclimatization as a scientific concept and activity, the essay begins with the conditions of its emergence in Enlightenment France. Subsequent sections trace the growth of the acclimatization movement and its translation to the British context, and consider reasons for its decline in the last third of the nineteenth century. Efforts are made to show why many perceived acclimatization to be the paradigmatic colonial science with applications as diverse as agriculture, settlement schemes, field sports, and human health. Emphasis falls on the French and British cultural spheres, as these were the dual epicenters of both modern colonialism and organized acclimatization activity.
134 citations
TL;DR: The search for new genetic and biological resources has become a major priority for the agrichemical and pharmaceutical industries, and despite continuation of the colonial tradition of appropriating indigenous knowledge and resources, new and more equitable models are being explored and developed within the convention's framework.
Abstract: Despite the rhetoric of decolonization following World War II, developing countries are, if anything, more dependent now on the science and technology of the developed world than they were in colonial times. This has led some critics to describe their situation as "neo-colonial." This paper will explore the issue in relation to the biotechnology industry, and to the 1993 United Nations Convention on Biodiversity. This convention challenged the assumption that the earth's biological and genetic resources are part of the "global commons" by giving property rights over these resources to the nation-states. While the objective of encouraging states to conserve biodiversity is universally endorsed, the strategy of using property law to do so is not. The search for new genetic and biological resources has become a major priority for the agrichemical and pharmaceutical industries, and despite continuation of the colonial tradition of appropriating indigenous knowledge and resources, new and more equitable models...
77 citations
TL;DR: In the Universal Monarchy, science was one of the main instruments of Iberian representation in the New World as mentioned in this paper and science defined by religious, courtier, and symbolic meanings shaped the dream of a universal Monarchy.
Abstract: This essay is devoted to the study of science in a long-successful political structure, the Universal Monarchy. Because the Iberian Empires did not survive into modernity, they have been viewed as incompatible with modern science. This, however, is a matter of perspective. From 1500 to 1800, science was one of the main instruments of Iberian representation in the New World. While it was not expressed in the familiar language of objectivity and was far from experimentalism, a kind of science defined by religious, courtier, and symbolic meanings shaped the dream of a Universal Monarchy. When this political concept became peripheral in the new Western order, Creole cultures reappropiated its practices to mark the identity of their new nations. However, even before colonial emancipation, these new national identities (American, not European; local, not universal) were based firmly in the natural knowledge of the New World regions they represented.
75 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines this bureaucratized scientific arm of France's contemporary "colonization machine" that included the Academie Royale des Sciences, the Academia Royale de Marine, the Observatoire Royal, the Jardin du Roi, the Societe Royale de Medecine, the Society of Agriculture, and the Compagnie des Indes.
Abstract: Although France's colonies were small in number and in size in the eighteenth century, their economic importance made France a major colonial power in the period. The central government, notably the Ministere de la Marine et des Colonies, systematically engaged the elaborate scientific infrastructure of Ancien-Regime France in its colonizing efforts, and French savants provided an essential expertise. This paper examines this bureaucratized scientific arm of France's contemporary "colonial machine" that included the Academie Royale des Sciences, the Academie Royale de Marine, the Observatoire Royal, the Jardin du Roi, the Societe Royale de Medecine, the Societe Royale d'Agriculture, and the Compagnie des Indes. These institutions and the individuals associated with them undertook coordinated efforts to support and extend contemporary French colonization. Their activities deal with tropical medicine, taxonomic and economic botany, cartography, and a host of related matters. With Paris and Versailles as the...
68 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the specificities of intercultural encounter in the subcontinent, the formalized institutions that were engendered, and the kinds of knowledge practices that emerged in the case of the geographical survey of India during the first century of British colonial conquest.
Abstract: In opposition both to the dominant vision of colonial science as an hegemonic European enterprise whose universalization can be conceived of in purely diffusionist terms, and to the more recent perception of it as a simple reordering of indigenous knowledge within the European canon, this essay seeks to show the complex reciprocity involved in the making of science within the colonial context. Based on the example of India during the first century of British colonial conquest, it examines the specificities of intercultural encounter in the subcontinent, the formalized institutions that were engendered, and the kinds of knowledge practices that emerged in the case of the geographical survey of India. The essay suggests that the knowledge created in this context is not just local in character, but participates wholly in the emergence of universal science, as well as of other institutions of modernity.
62 citations
TL;DR: This article assess the figuration of local and metropolitan scientific practices and theories in the eighteenth-century Hispanic Empire by focusing on two colonies: New Spain (Mexico) and New Granada (Colombia).
Abstract: This paper aims to assess the figuration of local and metropolitan scientific practices and theories in the eighteenth-century Hispanic Empire by focusing on two colonies: New Spain (Mexico) and New Granada (Colombia) In New Spain, Creole and metropolitan scientists negotiated the assimilation of old local wisdom with new European knowledge in their botanical studies of native plants Through the openness of both groups of scientists to new ideas, the naturalization of standardized procedures, and the verbalization of old problems in new terminology, the globalization process of scientific practices was successfully integrated there at the local level In New Granada, less favorably, the Royal Botanical Expedition (1783-1816) provoked disagreement between representatives of the viceroy and of the colony's Creole intelligentsia not only about plant classification systems, but about the proper relationship between scientific and political interests
60 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine science and information networks built by European scientists, often in connection with military and/or commercial enterprises and expeditions, focusing on Europe's northern peripheral powers, particularly the empires, or post-empires, of Sweden and Denmark.
Abstract: This essay examines science and information networks built by European scientists, often in connection with military and/or commercial enterprises and expeditions. It is focused on Europe's northern peripheral powers, particularly the empires, or post-empires, of Sweden and Denmark. Both Copenhagen and Stockholm/Uppsala served as brokerage centers for knowledge and commodified scientific objects. Both cities also had collections, academies, and other institutions that not only ordered northern Europe for science, but contributed significantly to ordering and mapping the world's natural systems so as to make them accessible for colonialism. Scientific travel is also analyzed here as an important part of the construction of value, both symbolic (collections, scientific prestige) and concrete (mercantilist import substitution).
53 citations
TL;DR: The last decades of the Raj (1930s and 1940s) saw some flickers of "constructive imperialism" but these came too late as discussed by the authors, and by then, nationalism had gathered strength.
Abstract: The turn of the twentieth century saw the apogee of the British Empire in India, while at the same time the seeds of decolonization sprouted. The last decades of the Raj (1930s and 1940s) saw some flickers of "constructive imperialism," but these came too late. By then, nationalism had gathered strength. Indian leaders--including Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru--and the government raced to raise development issues and debate the role of science and technology therein. By 1937, many committees had been formed and reports published, and the push was on to make India a modern nation-state. At first sight, there seemed to be unity of purpose, but in reality this was not so. As this paper shows, the thin veneer of the development discourse evaporated when put under pressure by class interests.
40 citations
TL;DR: This paper shows how legislation, class, institutional setting, and popular stereotypes could influence the form, timing, and degree of racism in the medical professional, and in medical theory and practice and argues for an analytical distinction between 'racist medicine' and 'medical racism.'
Abstract: Racism has been a particular focus of the history of Western medicine in colonial South Africa. Much of the research to date has paradoxically interpreted Western medicine as both a handmaiden of colonialism and as a racist gatekeeper to the benefits of Western medical science. This essay suggests that while these conclusions have some validity, the framework in which they have been devised is problematic. Not only is that framework contradictory in nature, it underplays differences within Western medicine, privileges the history of explicit and intentional racial discrimination in medicine, and encourages a separate analysis of racism in law, in the medical profession, and in medical theory and practice. Using the example of the Cape Colony in South Africa, this paper shows how legislation, class, institutional setting, and popular stereotypes could influence the form, timing, and degree of racism in the medical professional, and in medical theory and practice. It also argues for an analytical distinctio...
TL;DR: This paper analyzed the development of geology as a highly imperialistic science in colonial Canada, in three chronological phases, and highlighted the experience of British North America during the Victorian age as a case study in the complex relationship between science and empire.
Abstract: This essay highlights the experience of British North America during the Victorian age as a case study in the complex relationship between science and empire. It analyzes the development of geology as a Victorian (and highly imperialistic) science in colonial Canada, in three chronological phases. During each, the study of geology helped to structure an imperial-colonial dialogue that reflected changing mutual perceptions and relationships. As colonists undertook geological exploration and interpretation, they modified imperial institutions to suit their goals. They also absorbed the means by which to colonize other peoples and regions. In this sense, the quintessential Victorian science exerted powerful cultural influences, transforming new landscapes into readable texts that redefined the future.
TL;DR: The loss of its colonies on the American continent, however, left Spain with only a modest imperial presence as mentioned in this paper, at precisely the time that the country, lagging behind other European powers, was taking its first tentative steps toward industrialization and modernization.
Abstract: Nineteenth-century Spain--using the resources that remained of its vast empire--struggled to maintain its place as an international power. Following the loss of its colonies on the American continent, however, it could assume only a modest imperial presence. This loss occurred at precisely the time that the country, lagging behind other European powers, was taking its first tentative steps toward industrialization and modernization. The delay in modernizing, along with Spain's still quite modest scientific and technological capacities, made it impossible for the country to become anything more than a spectator during the age of great imperial adventures. As the century closed, Spain, disillusioned, faced the crisis of 1898.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors reflect upon the milieu and the character of Brazilian and Argentinean natural history museums during the second half of the nineteenth century and argue that the museums were influenced not only by European and North American museums but by each other.
Abstract: This essay reflects upon the milieu and the character of Brazilian and Argentinean natural history museums during the second half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the museums were influenced not only by European and North American museums but by each other. Museum directors in the two countries knew each other and interacted. Some of the relationships between these museums were friendly and cooperative, but because they were in young, emerging nations, they also became deeply involved in the invention of nationality in their respective countries and interacted as rivals and competitors. Even through rivalry, however, they contributed to each other's development, as did rivalry among museums within each of the two countries. Later in the century they went well beyond the nationalist perspective, finding, through their research into paleontology and anthropology in their regions, a continental and uniquely South American scientific perspective, defined in reaction to North American and European views.
TL;DR: A case study of the intellectual and professional trajectories of two Brazilian colonial scientists illustrates the constitution of a local scientific context, its characteristics, and its limits as mentioned in this paper, showing that scientists in Brazil see themselves as inextricably linked to the Portuguese metropolis; their science was not seen as an instrument of colonial resistance, but rather as an improving factor, mobilizing natural resources for the achievement of economic and intellectual goals set by both imperial and colonial interests.
Abstract: This case study of the intellectual and professional trajectories of two Brazilian colonial scientists illustrates the constitution of a local scientific context, its characteristics, and its limits. In Brazil, colonial scientists saw themselves as inextricably linked to the Portuguese metropolis; their science was not seen as an instrument of colonial resistance, but rather as an improving factor, mobilizing natural resources for the achievement of economic and intellectual goals set by both imperial and colonial interests. The development of science in Brazil was not so much a process of transmission as a part of the same process that occurred contemporaneously in Portugal.
TL;DR: Although BELRA's efforts did little to change imperial medical and health agendas, they had an important impact locally and ideologically, and show how closely interwoven the themes of Christian caring, medical humanism, colonial development, and welfare policy had become by the outbreak of the Second World War.
Abstract: The history of medicine in twentieth-century empires has been dominated by studies of "imperial tropical medicine" (ITM) and its consequences. Historians have been fascinated by the work of medical scientists and doctors in the age of high imperialism, and there are many studies of medicine as a "tool of empire." This paper reviews work that explores colonial medicine as a broader enterprise than ITM in three spheres: missionary activity, modernization, and protection of the health and welfare of indigenous peoples. To illustrate the themes of mission and mandate, it discusses the development of policies to control leprosy in the tropical African and Asian colonies of Britain in the first half of this century, especially the work of the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association (BELRA). Although BELRA's efforts did little to change imperial medical and health agendas, they had an important impact locally and ideologically, and show how closely interwoven the themes of Christian caring, medical humanism, colonial development, and welfare policy had become by the outbreak of the Second World War.