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Scientists and Scholars in the Field: Studies in the History of Fieldwork and Expeditions
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 40 (2013) 109e121
directions that knowledge travelled, and suggests new, expanded limits to some of its journeys. Elizabeth Haines Royal Holloway University of London, Science Museum, London, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.01.011
Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen, Michael Harbsmeier and Christopher J. Ries, Scientists and Scholars in the Field: Studies in the History of Fieldwork and Expeditions. Aarhus, Denmark, Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2012, 476 pages, hardback DKK499,95. In their landmark Osiris volume of 1996 Kucklick and Kohler suggested that there was a significant lack of critical research that questioned what science is, means, and does in the field. Since that time, more literature has appeared to fill that gap and Scientists and Scholars in the Field is a collection of essays that firmly consolidates the fruits of these investigations. The contributions have been brought forward from a series of meetings organised by the Field Studies network (http://www.fieldstudies.dk/), in particular from the conference ‘Ways of knowing in the field’ that took place at the Carlsberg Academy, Copenhagen, in 2008. The essays were selected according to the most pressing themes that the editors felt had emerged from discussions within the network: interdisciplinarity, fieldwork in the public eye, mapping practices, technologies of travel, nationalising the field, and encounters in the field. In their introduction to the book Nielsen, Harbsmeier, and Ries emphasise their desire that historians think of fieldwork as a plurality of practices, and the volume certainly reflects that. The reader is presented with the opportunity to compare accounts of field ventures across an extremely wide range of disciplines from the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Between the covers of this book, engineers sit alongside natural historians and folklorists. These actors are presented by authors who themselves have a diverse set of affiliations. The volume also covers more than three hundred years, with seventeen chapters that run through from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. Some of the themes the editors pick out have seen more footfall than others (perhaps especially in historical geography), but overall they provide tentative interdisciplinary typologies to describe fieldwork practices that many may find useful. Some of these typologies are set out explicitly. The opposition of ‘intensive’ to ‘extensive’ field investigations is used to examine a variety of case studies. These categories allow reconsiderations of early Swiss (Serge Reubi) and contemporary (Mikkel Bunkenborg and Morten Axel Pedersen) anthropology, and challenge disciplinary genealogies. Jeremy Vetter goes beyond anthropology to analyse all forms of fieldwork between 1860 and 1920 in the American mid-west. This period saw the institutionalisation of scientific research at both federal and state level. Within this relative indiscipline, he identifies four ‘modes’ that define fieldwork according to where the data collection and data analysis activities were sited. Surveys were carried out along pathways of interest by a number of trained experts; lay networks sent samples and data to centralised agencies that coordinated their input; stations were more permanent sites of research where data was both collated and interpreted; and quarries were sites that were regularly visited but with the goal of extracting objects for examination elsewhere. Vetter shows how these categories can be applied to a vast range of work from meteorology, to geology, archaeology, and anthropology.
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Other categorisations are more implicit. Fieldwork is often carried out in putatively public sites rather than private spaces. Several essays investigate how narratives of the scientific self are constructed through the experience of multiple discourses and environments. These circumstances provoke specific forms of social encounter. They force more complex negotiations with those met during the scientific investigations, but also with the public ‘at home’. Dedicated scientific channels of communication may be, and often are, doubled or bypassed. Take, for example, the Galathea 3 Expedition, which left Denmark in 2006. This research voyage was proposed by a newspaper, organised by the government, staffed by scientists, and sailed on a navy vessel. Kristian Nielsen explains how all parties became enmeshed in multi-directional conflicts in the public sphere. On the other hand, Anke FischerKattner describes how the Abbadie brothers, at times happily, and at times less successfully, constructed their nineteenth-century accounts of travel in Ethiopia according to different interests and expectations among their publics. A further analytical approach the book suggests is the effect of more ‘banal’ technologies on the epistemology of fieldwork. Several chapters in Scientists and Scholars in the Field align in describing the profound phenomenological effects of mobility on science. Railways, telegraphy, and satellites alter the kinds of questions asked of different locations, and the length of stay considered necessary to receive answers. Esther Fihl’s ‘The rolling field station’ describes how a royal train-carriage was inhabited by late nineteenth-century Danish researchers in Central Asia. The coach allowed Olufsen and his companions to reproduce familiar domestic habits and sheltered them from more persistent contact with objects of their research. Fihl suggests that its materiality (part building, part vehicle), echoed debates between members of the group about the tempo of their voyage and outsider access to their private spaces. Their compromises exemplify divergences between older ‘expeditionary’ and later, more static forms of scientific research. The volume concludes with a historiographic review by Matthew Edney. He suggests that cartographic historians often (still?) neglect to describe the processes and communities that establish spatial discourses; of which maps are just one possible outcome. Those with a strong interest in material culture might wish that this book paid more attention to embodied experience in the field e to the objects, conditions, and techniques of the enterprises. (Esther Fihl’s aforementioned essay is one exception; Rengenier Rittersma’s account of eighteenth-century truffle research is another.) This problem is, perhaps, compounded by the image reproductions, which are often slightly too small to really be ‘read’. However, in their careful examinations of the communities and narratives that have shaped different fieldwork situations, the contributors to Scientists and Scholars in the Field are consistent and enlightening. Edney can take heart from this volume: it offers many examples of the kind of work he advocates. Elizabeth Haines Royal Holloway University of London, Science Museum, London, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.01.012
Kate Tiller and Giles Darke (Eds), An Historical Atlas of Oxfordshire, Vol. 67. Oxfordshire Record Society Publications, 2010, xii þ 193 pages, £35 hardcover, £20 paper. Historical atlases are a mixed bag. Some are cut and paste jobs for a popular market with a few indifferent maps thrown in to accompany text whose provenance is unclear, and with the onus being on
directions that knowledge travelled, and suggests new, expanded limits to some of its journeys. Elizabeth Haines Royal Holloway University of London, Science Museum, London, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.01.011
Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen, Michael Harbsmeier and Christopher J. Ries, Scientists and Scholars in the Field: Studies in the History of Fieldwork and Expeditions. Aarhus, Denmark, Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2012, 476 pages, hardback DKK499,95. In their landmark Osiris volume of 1996 Kucklick and Kohler suggested that there was a significant lack of critical research that questioned what science is, means, and does in the field. Since that time, more literature has appeared to fill that gap and Scientists and Scholars in the Field is a collection of essays that firmly consolidates the fruits of these investigations. The contributions have been brought forward from a series of meetings organised by the Field Studies network (http://www.fieldstudies.dk/), in particular from the conference ‘Ways of knowing in the field’ that took place at the Carlsberg Academy, Copenhagen, in 2008. The essays were selected according to the most pressing themes that the editors felt had emerged from discussions within the network: interdisciplinarity, fieldwork in the public eye, mapping practices, technologies of travel, nationalising the field, and encounters in the field. In their introduction to the book Nielsen, Harbsmeier, and Ries emphasise their desire that historians think of fieldwork as a plurality of practices, and the volume certainly reflects that. The reader is presented with the opportunity to compare accounts of field ventures across an extremely wide range of disciplines from the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Between the covers of this book, engineers sit alongside natural historians and folklorists. These actors are presented by authors who themselves have a diverse set of affiliations. The volume also covers more than three hundred years, with seventeen chapters that run through from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. Some of the themes the editors pick out have seen more footfall than others (perhaps especially in historical geography), but overall they provide tentative interdisciplinary typologies to describe fieldwork practices that many may find useful. Some of these typologies are set out explicitly. The opposition of ‘intensive’ to ‘extensive’ field investigations is used to examine a variety of case studies. These categories allow reconsiderations of early Swiss (Serge Reubi) and contemporary (Mikkel Bunkenborg and Morten Axel Pedersen) anthropology, and challenge disciplinary genealogies. Jeremy Vetter goes beyond anthropology to analyse all forms of fieldwork between 1860 and 1920 in the American mid-west. This period saw the institutionalisation of scientific research at both federal and state level. Within this relative indiscipline, he identifies four ‘modes’ that define fieldwork according to where the data collection and data analysis activities were sited. Surveys were carried out along pathways of interest by a number of trained experts; lay networks sent samples and data to centralised agencies that coordinated their input; stations were more permanent sites of research where data was both collated and interpreted; and quarries were sites that were regularly visited but with the goal of extracting objects for examination elsewhere. Vetter shows how these categories can be applied to a vast range of work from meteorology, to geology, archaeology, and anthropology.
117
Other categorisations are more implicit. Fieldwork is often carried out in putatively public sites rather than private spaces. Several essays investigate how narratives of the scientific self are constructed through the experience of multiple discourses and environments. These circumstances provoke specific forms of social encounter. They force more complex negotiations with those met during the scientific investigations, but also with the public ‘at home’. Dedicated scientific channels of communication may be, and often are, doubled or bypassed. Take, for example, the Galathea 3 Expedition, which left Denmark in 2006. This research voyage was proposed by a newspaper, organised by the government, staffed by scientists, and sailed on a navy vessel. Kristian Nielsen explains how all parties became enmeshed in multi-directional conflicts in the public sphere. On the other hand, Anke FischerKattner describes how the Abbadie brothers, at times happily, and at times less successfully, constructed their nineteenth-century accounts of travel in Ethiopia according to different interests and expectations among their publics. A further analytical approach the book suggests is the effect of more ‘banal’ technologies on the epistemology of fieldwork. Several chapters in Scientists and Scholars in the Field align in describing the profound phenomenological effects of mobility on science. Railways, telegraphy, and satellites alter the kinds of questions asked of different locations, and the length of stay considered necessary to receive answers. Esther Fihl’s ‘The rolling field station’ describes how a royal train-carriage was inhabited by late nineteenth-century Danish researchers in Central Asia. The coach allowed Olufsen and his companions to reproduce familiar domestic habits and sheltered them from more persistent contact with objects of their research. Fihl suggests that its materiality (part building, part vehicle), echoed debates between members of the group about the tempo of their voyage and outsider access to their private spaces. Their compromises exemplify divergences between older ‘expeditionary’ and later, more static forms of scientific research. The volume concludes with a historiographic review by Matthew Edney. He suggests that cartographic historians often (still?) neglect to describe the processes and communities that establish spatial discourses; of which maps are just one possible outcome. Those with a strong interest in material culture might wish that this book paid more attention to embodied experience in the field e to the objects, conditions, and techniques of the enterprises. (Esther Fihl’s aforementioned essay is one exception; Rengenier Rittersma’s account of eighteenth-century truffle research is another.) This problem is, perhaps, compounded by the image reproductions, which are often slightly too small to really be ‘read’. However, in their careful examinations of the communities and narratives that have shaped different fieldwork situations, the contributors to Scientists and Scholars in the Field are consistent and enlightening. Edney can take heart from this volume: it offers many examples of the kind of work he advocates. Elizabeth Haines Royal Holloway University of London, Science Museum, London, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.01.012
Kate Tiller and Giles Darke (Eds), An Historical Atlas of Oxfordshire, Vol. 67. Oxfordshire Record Society Publications, 2010, xii þ 193 pages, £35 hardcover, £20 paper. Historical atlases are a mixed bag. Some are cut and paste jobs for a popular market with a few indifferent maps thrown in to accompany text whose provenance is unclear, and with the onus being on