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Putting Science in its Place
Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge by David N. Livingstone Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003 234 pp. $27.50 |
In Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge, David Livingstone brings a geographer's gaze systematically to bear on Western science over the past five centuries. Place matters, he contends. That is the case not simply because human beings do science—dig out fossils, breed fruitflies, and split atoms—in particular sites. This book makes a bolder and more arresting case. The spaces in which human beings practice and produce science have shaped not merely its contexts but also its content. Those seeking to understand science must take space (and geography) as seriously as time (and history). The scientific enterprise is "inescapably spatial."
This thesis may strike some readers as counterintuitive or even disturbing. Many modern people think of science as universal. Gravity draws apples earthward as surely in Tehran as in Tokyo. Quantum physicists from Vienna to Vancouver debate the latest theories in a common, global scientific language. Science enjoys remarkable cultural authority in the modern world, many scholars have argued, thanks to its capacity to transcend locality. By setting aside prejudice, presupposition, and parochialism, scientists secure the most objective, trustworthy, and universal knowledge human beings can attain. On this view, science constitutes a fundamentally "placeless" enterprise whose workings the geographer can illuminate in only minor, inconsequential ways.
Putting Science in its Place constitutes a lively, lucid, and compelling argument against this view of science. Situating scientific projects in a remarkable variety of spaces—material, social, intellectual, cultural, religious, acoustic, olfactory, and so on— from the 16th through the 20th centuries, Livingstone argues that science bears "the imprint of its location." We should think of it not as a "transcendent entity that bears no trace of the parochial or contingent" but rather as "a human enterprise, situated in time and space." Heterogeneous and pluriform, science "is always an ancient Chinese, a medieval Islamic, an early modern English, a Renaissance French, a Jeffersonian American, an Enlightenment Scottish thing—or some other modifying variant."
Chapter 2 illustrates and advances this argument by focusing in detail on the remarkable range of sites in which Westerners have cultivated science over the last five centuries. These include the laboratory, the botanical and zoological garden, the field, the home, the ship's deck, the coffeehouse, the cathedral, the observatory, the museum, the hospital, the asylum, the public house, and the human body. Fascinating examples highlight the spatial dimensions of science in ways that I found captivating.
Livingstone begins his geohistory of "laboratory life," for example, in the home of John Dee, Elizabethan England's most famous natural philosopher. Strange sounds and foul fumes emanated from Dee's private workroom, off-limits to his wife, where he communed with angelic forces and engaged in alchemical experiments. By the late 17th century, however, the fact that an experiment "worked" in the privacy of an alchemist's basement chamber no longer established its credentials as reliable knowledge. Now the eminent English natural philosopher Robert Boyle and his colleagues at the Royal Society of London moved "houses of experiment" up and out into the public sphere. Boyle's experiments in the laboratory of his London home had to be seen and sanctioned by trustworthy observers—preferably Christian gentlemen of status, means, and reputation—in order to secure credibility. The "experimental public" played a key role in certifying natural knowledge and conveying it from inside the laboratory to the outside world. Examples such as these nicely illustrate the ways in which spatial perspectives illuminate the culture of early modern English science.
