The history of science and the history of bureaucratic knowledge: Saxon mining, circa 1770

This article looks into mining in central Germany in the late eighteenth century as one area of highly charged exchange between (specific manifestations of early modern) science and the (early modern) state. It describes bureaucratic knowledge as socially distributed cognition by following the steps of a high-ranking official that led him to discover a rich silver ore deposit. Although this involved hybridization of practical/artisanal and theoretical/scientific knowledge, and knowers, the focus of this article is on purification or boundary work that took place when actors in and around the mines consciously contributed to different circuits of knowledge production. For the sake of analysis, the article suggests a way of opposing bureaucratic versus scientific knowledge production, even when the sites, actors involved in, and practices of that knowledge production were the same or similar. Whereas the science of the time invoked consensus among equals to conflate competing knowledge claims, bureaucracies did so by applying a hierarchy among ranked individuals.

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The Early Royal Society and Visual Culture

Perspectives on Science ◽

10.1162/posc_a_00311 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 27 (3) ◽

pp. 350-394 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Sachiko Kusukawa

Keyword(s):

Visual Culture ◽

Early Modern ◽

Scientific Knowledge ◽

Royal Society ◽

Modern Science ◽

Early Modern Science ◽

Production Processes ◽

History Of

Recent studies have fruitfully examined the intersection between early modern science and visual culture by elucidating the functions of images in shaping and disseminating scientific knowledge. Given its rich archival sources, it is possible to extend this line of research in the case of the Royal Society to an examination of attitudes towards images as artifacts—manufactured objects worth commissioning, collecting, and studying. Drawing on existing scholarship and material from the Royal Society Archives, I discuss Fellows’ interests in prints, drawings, varnishes, colorants, images made out of unusual materials, and methods of identifying the painter from a painting. Knowledge of production processes of images was important to members of the Royal Society, not only as connoisseurs and collectors, but also as those interested in a Baconian mastery of material processes, including a “history of trades.” Their antiquarian interests led to discussion of painters’ styles, and they gradually developed a visual memorial to an institution through portraits and other visual records.

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Illicit Ecologies: Queer Animacy and Epistemological Erasure in History of Wolves

Meliora ◽

10.52214/meliora.v1i2.8735 ◽

2022 ◽

Vol 1 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Esther Goldberg

Keyword(s):

Scientific Knowledge ◽

Knowledge Production ◽

Life Forms ◽

The Novel ◽

Christian Science ◽

Scientific Knowledge Production ◽

History Of

This thesis attends to the slippages between life and nonlife in Emily Fridlunds 2017 novel History of Wolves. It traces the matter that is granted life or animacy, as well as the matter that is devitalized. Through the protagonist, Linda, the novel investigates the role of both scientific knowledge production and Christian Science in placing arbitrary biological limits on life forms, making some visible and others unseeable and unsayable. The thesis fleshes out the characters’ climate denial as yet another erasure of the animate agents. Ultimately, the thesis asks: if we can expand what is worthy of life, can we, in turn, expand what agents, actors, and matters are deserving of care?

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Introduction: Why Science Wars?

10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-6

Author(s):

Steven L. Goldman

Keyword(s):

Scientific Knowledge ◽

Modern Science ◽

Word Knowledge ◽

Production Of Knowledge ◽

Science Wars ◽

History Of ◽

Critical Scrutiny ◽

Knowledge Claims

While all definitions are stipulative by nature and reflect alternative usages, the meaning of the word “knowledge” is especially ambiguous. It carries profound consequences for what we mean by truth, reality, and rationality, but most importantly for our understanding of scientific knowledge claims. Rhetorically, knowledge trumps belief and opinion, but it is not clear that knowledge, even scientific knowledge, is essentially different from and superior to belief and opinion. As to the questions of what scientists know and how they know it, no answers have stood up to critical scrutiny in the history of modern science. Despite this uncertainty, modern science has claimed a hegemony in our society on the production of knowledge as superior to belief and opinion.

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Patriotic hygiene: Tracing new places of knowledge production about malaria in Vietnam, 1919–75

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0022463413000313 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 44 (3) ◽

pp. 423-443 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

Michitake Aso

Keyword(s):

Malaria Control ◽

Scientific Knowledge ◽

Knowledge Production ◽

Industrial Hygiene ◽

Nation Building ◽

Medical Doctors ◽

Racial Hygiene ◽

Building Projects ◽

Scientific Knowledge Production ◽

History Of

This article examines knowledge production about malaria in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam. During the 1920s and 1930s, medical doctors cooperated with plantation managers in order to develop industrial hygiene techniques consisting of environmental modification and quinine use. By the 1930s, changing motivations, in particular racial hygiene and patriotism, drove malaria control efforts. The wartime pressures to control malaria between the 1940s and 1975 further encouraged patriotic hygiene. This history of malaria science in Vietnam highlights the tension between change and continuity and shows the importance of place in the conjunction of scientific knowledge production and nation-building projects.

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Anna Marie Roos. Web of Nature: Martin Lister (1639–1712), the First Arachnologist. (History of Science and Medicine Library, 22; Medieval and Early Modern Science, 16.) xx + 478 pp., illus., bibl., index. Leiden/Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2011. $177 (cloth).

Isis ◽

10.1086/678008 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 105 (2) ◽

pp. 442-443 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Mary Pickard Winsor

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

History Of Science ◽

Modern Science ◽

Early Modern Science ◽

History Of

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Making the History of Early Modern Science: Reflections on a Discipline in the Age of Globalization

Annales Histoire Sciences Sociales (English edition) ◽

10.1017/s2398568200001199 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 70 (02) ◽

pp. 307-334 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Antonella Romano

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

History Of Science ◽

Academic Research ◽

Modern Science ◽

Early Modern Period ◽

Homogeneous Field ◽

Early Modern Science ◽

Anthropology Of Science ◽

Change Of Scale ◽

History Of

Abstract What kind of history is the history of science? To what extent does the academic research labeled as such delineate a homogeneous field? What are the current challenges that it faces? The recent translation of Simon Schaffer’s works into French, along with the publication of his 2014 Marc Bloch Lecture in the Annales, provides the framework for this article’s historiographical reflection on the profound changes that have taken place within the discipline over the last thirty years, particularly within a French context. The analysis is twofold. First, it aims to trace how new approaches to the sociology and anthropology of science have reconfigured the boundaries of the discipline. Second, it considers the effect of the abandonment of one of its major historiographical paradigms by most of the scholars currently working on early modern science: the scientific revolution as the rise of scientific modernity, underpinned by a Eurocentric vision of the production of knowledge. Although most research on the early modern period now strives to distance itself from this narrative, it must also face new challenges and questions—in particular the role of science in the processes of globalization and the multiplicity of sites and social configurations that participate in this change of scale. These challenges point towards new methods and styles in the history of science and, more broadly, the social sciences.

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How Population Became an Environmental Problem

On Infertile Ground ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479873432.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 49-77

Author(s):

Jade S. Sasser

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Scientific Knowledge ◽

Knowledge Production ◽

Environmental Problem ◽

Environmental Problems ◽

Political Advocacy ◽

Environmental Sciences ◽

Population Politics ◽

History Of ◽

A Site

Chapter 2 explores the history of how population came to be known as an environmental problem, emerging through debates about eugenics, war, geopolitical stability, and land use. I begin the chapter by exploring how population was first identified as a central problem of state-making and security, and its role in the evolution of ecological sciences. Next, I trace the ways the environmental sciences and population politics have entwined and overlapped in subsequent decades. Throughout, I analyze the ways knowledge production linking population to environmental problems moved between political advocacy motivated by concerns about war and geopolitical security, concerns about planetary limits, and a site of scientific knowledge development and struggle.

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