Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge

by David N. Livingstone

We are accustomed to thinking of science and its findings as universal. After all, one atom of carbon plus two of oxygen yields carbon dioxide in Amazonia as well as in Alaska; a scientist in Bombay can use the same materials and techniques to challenge the work of a scientist in New York; and of course the laws of gravity apply worldwide. Why, then, should the spaces where science is done matter at all? David N. Livingstone here puts that question to the test with his fascinating study of how science bears the marks of its place of production.

Putting Science in Its Place establishes the fundamental importance of geography in both the generation and the consumption of scientific knowledge, using historical examples of the many places where science has been practiced. Livingstone first turns his attention to some of the specific sites where science has been made—the laboratory, museum, and botanical garden, to name some of the more conventional locales, but also places like the coffeehouse and cathedral, ship's deck and asylum, even the human body itself. In each case, he reveals just how the space of inquiry has conditioned the investigations carried out there. He then describes how, on a regional scale, provincial cultures have shaped scientific endeavor and how, in turn, scientific practices have been instrumental in forming local identities. Widening his inquiry, Livingstone points gently to the fundamental instability of scientific meaning, based on case studies of how scientific theories have been received in different locales. Putting Science in Its Place powerfully concludes by examining the remarkable mobility of science and the seemingly effortless way it moves around the globe.

From the reception of Darwin in the land of the Maori to the giraffe that walked from Marseilles to Paris, Livingstone shows that place does matter, even in the world of science.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, History Of Science, Science, Read For School

244 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

David Noel Livingstone is a Northern Ireland-born geographer, historian, and academic. He is Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at Queen's University Belfast.

Educated at Banbridge Academy and Queen's University Belfast (B.A., Ph.D.). Following graduation, he continued at Queen's as a Research Officer and Lecturer, becoming Reader and then full Professor. He has held visiting professorships at Calvin College, Michigan, University of British Columbia, University of Notre Dame, and Baylor University.

Reviews

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book! It touches on something I've wanted to explore in my own research, which which relates to how the specificity of place influences how scientific knowledge is produced, if at all. It’s one way I think environmental history and the history of science can be in dialogue with one another. One paper idea I’ve wanted to work on, but have had no time for, is on a place called Camp Naivelt along the Missinihe (Credit River). I wanted to write a longer environmental history of that place, stretching back from Indigenous uses of the land, to its milling history, to its siting of a Jewish summer camp full of anarchists and communists that hosted musicians like Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson. And the angle I want to take is the large number of women scientists and medical doctors that spent their childhoods at that camp and how, if at all, the specificity of that environment was related to the rich cohort of feminist scientists who came to change medical practice and science more broadly in Ontario. Perhaps I will get a chance to do some research for that idea this summer.

It’s a short text that introduces and proposes what Livingstone calls a geography of science. The core chapters of the book are on: (1) sites (venues), (2) regions (and cultures), and (3) circulation (and movements).

A few great examples of the way Livingstone talks about venues in Chapter 2. This is his description of how Maxwell merged the factory workshop with the university in the form of the laboratory (which would displace the study and the chapel as the central spaces of the academy):

“To grasp the factors involved in this reconfiguration of the geography of Cambridge science, it is illuminating to glance at the apologia for the new space made by James Clerk Maxwell, the nineteenth-century Scottish physicist and student of electromagnetism. Maxwell knew only too well that the values of the factory workshop were alien to the dominant university ethos of his time, and that he needed to find some way of domesticating the world of the laboratory to the prevailing culture of scholarship… [Maxwell] retained a strongly metaphysical cast of mind, and he applied it to the disputed connections between algebra and geometry. This enabled him to urge that providing facilities to ensure precise computational standards was analogous to the Anglican God’s work of calculation and measurement. Thereby he could forge a strategic alliance between God and mammon, between philosophy and the factory. Not surprisingly, displayed over the Gothic entrance to the Cavendish, suitably decorated with the family coat of arms, were words from the book of Psalms. The new physical laboratory was a spatial and symbolic incursion into the university’s scholarly domain. The chapel and the study now had to make room for the laboratory. Work carried out here on electrical technologies would transform the social polity.”

Also a fascinating description of how colonial archives were filled by all the scientific societies and their voracious appetite for more and more data:

“At no time, perhaps, was the obsession with amassing and arranging global data more feverishly nursed than at the height of Victorian Britain’s overseas imperial adventure. From institutions like the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Royal Society, and most particularly the British Museum, the acquisitive tentacles of empire snaked their way around the globe. Yet the fact- fascination that characterized such spaces ultimately reduced universal geography to the cabinet-sized exhibit and file-sized archive. In turn these became the way administrators, bureaucrats, and the general public encountered the “collective improvisation” that was the British Empire. By accumulating, reorganizing, and reproducing information from the remotest corners of the earth, the Victorian archive played its part in shaping worldwide geopolitical relations. In one way or another, the data-hungry museum did much to fulfill the surveillance needs of colonial management.”

And then finally an excellent paragraph on the prominent role scientific racism played in the university (I read about Agassiz in several other books I plumbed as an RA this past semester on the history of race):

“Again, when Alpheus Hyatt was hired as the permanent curator of the public museum in Boston in 1870, he immediately set about us- ing the collection to illustrate the development of species. Thereby he dramatically departed from the creationism of his teacher, Louis Agassiz, who once observed that the “great object of our museums should be to exhibit the whole animal kingdom as a manifestation of the Supreme Intellect.” Hyatt, by contrast, regrouped exhibits into a set of categories that revealed the development of species—mineralogy, botany, paleontology, zoology, geography, and anthropology. Such moves were far from inconsequential, because the museum had by now become a significant teaching venue within American colleges. Agassiz’s own Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, for in- stance, superseded the classroom as his key site of instruction. And later in the 1930s, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the differing views of William King Gregory and Henry Fairfield Osborn on the evolution of primates found expression in their respective exhibition halls. Gregory’s “Hall of the Natural History of Man” stressed the evolutionary continuity between the different human races, whereas Osborn’s “Hall of the Age of Man” sought to undermine the theory of ape ancestry, to stress parallel development, and to portray the different human races as discrete “species.” The displays mounted on the second and fourth floors of the museum thus articulated the different social, political, and religious convictions of the two scientists. In ways like this, the museum voiced the values of its curators and disclosed their mental geographies.”

Onto Chapter 3 on regions and cultures, I was fascinated to find out that Raffles (who is still weirdly championed by the ruling party of Singapore as the ‘founder’ of Singapore) was the founder of the Zoological Society of London:

“When Stamford Raffles, founder of the Zoological Society of London, returned in 1824 from his imperial adventures in the East, he was irked to find that Britain was lagging behind other European nations in mat- ters of zoological display. Despite its glorious global empire, Britain’s facilities for exhibiting exotic animals amounted to little more than fairground sideshows and frivolous entertainments—mere spectacles for titillating the vulgar—not to be compared with the “magnificent institutions” of its Continental neighbors. To relieve this cultural embarrassment in a manner befitting the grandeur of an imperial power, Regent’s Park Zoo opened its gates in 1828. When addressing its landowning constituency, the zoo rationalized its existence by stressing its concern to domesticate exotic species and acclimatize them for English parks—and menus. After all, the anatomist Richard Owen of the British Museum and the London naturalist Frank Buckland, both enthusiastic advocates of acclimatization, later organized “exploratory and adventurous” dinners to support their obsession with domestication.”

A great connection between gastronomy and the zoological and botanical obsessions of empire:

“Either way, the vast array of specimens dis- played in the zoological gardens served to draw attention back to Britain’s ecological imperialism. The zoo, we might say, was a rhetor- ical site of empire, its animals intended to symbolize Britain’s biogeographical dominance of the world. The globe, it seemed, existed to serve Britain—gastronomically as well as scientifically.”

Also great commentary on acclimatization, which was a scientific theory that was very much caught up in the construction of scientific racism:

“The French scientific community had had a long-standing interest in acclimatization, not least because it bore directly on matters of adaptation, inheritance, and evolutionary change. In fact by the mid- nineteenth century the Jardin, which originated as a royal physic garden, was in large measure the public laboratory of the Société Zoologique d’Acclimatation, which had come into being in 1854. Successful long-term adaptation of species to new environmental niches would do much to confirm the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and thus the biological transformism rooted in the earlier ideas of Georges-Louis de Buffon, who had been intendant of the Jardin for nearly fifty years, and Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, zoology professor at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle”

A great little paragraph that surveys a tiny global history of zoos, with a mention of Montezuma (and I walked in the approximate area his zoo would have been when visiting Mexico City this past December, and historians have argues Cortes and his men were brought to Montezuma as a new addition to his zoo):

“It would be mistaken to imagine that modern zoos owe their existence exclusively to the post-Enlightenment fascination with acclimatization. For a start, menageries were in existence as long ago as 2500 BC in Egypt; Ptolemy, in the third century BC, founded a zoo in Alexandria; in ancient Rome vivaria—animal holding zones—were available for public scrutiny; and the Aztec emperor Montezuma kept a great aviary and animal enclosure. Moreover, royal households routinely collected and exhibited exotic creatures as a mark of prestige and power, and during the sixteenth century numerous menageries surfaced in the rising urban centers of Europe and North Africa—Prague, Karlsburg, Constantinople, and Cairo—at least in part as a mark of civic pride.”

This is also an important connection Livingstone makes between anti-communist hysteria and eugenic projects of population controls in US colonies like Peurto Rico (which Daniel Immerwahr very compellingly describes in his book “How to Hide an Empire”):

“The long history of colonial population policies that Puerto Rico had already experienced, the fact that contraception was illegal in many states of the United States in the 1950s, and a fear of possible breeding grounds for communism all made the United States’ former colony an ideal space of experimental practice. In this context, contraception was regarded as an essential weapon in a racial struggle for global dominance in a world now believed to be carrying a population time bomb. Here the female body—construed as biologically fecund and ecologically risky—was at once a scientific site and a space of cultural conflict.”

An excellent overview of the various colonial ships that were integral to imperial science (I’m hoping to uncover some of these links as I work through some British Navy archives in the coming years):

“Consider the ships used during voyages of scientific discovery. Many of these have achieved near mythic status in the annals of science— La Pérouse’s Astrolabe, Cook’s Endeavour, Darwin’s Beagle, Huxley’s Rattlesnake, Wyville Thomson’s Challenger. Not only did these carry scientific instruments, they frequently were scientific instruments in their own right. James Cook’s charting of New Zealand is illustrative, on board a ship that incidentally carried botanical equipment, artists, and French-horn players! For it was through his tracking of the Endeavour’s geodetic position that Cook inferred the contour of the coastline. In this way the ship became a surveying instrument that de- livered the lineaments of the coastal fringe without ever touching it. The very computations that permitted Cook to set his course delivered him a cartographic shadow of the coast his vessel left behind. In its capacity as a surveying device, as in its housing instrumental gadgetry, the ship has been an important site of science.” (Shout out to Nuaa of Hawaii though.)

Livingstone also has some stuff on the working-class atheists and Thomas Wakley, but I won’t get into it here, and I think Adrian Desmond is a fun read for anyone who wants to read more about that.

A great comment on Humboldt’s writings on Mexico overshadowing his other work like Cosmos (which draws somewhat on Toronto’s magnetic observatory). I read somewhere that some historians say Humboldt single-handedly provoked the inrush of silver miners into Mexico, an environmental context that haunts Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s excellent novel Mexican Gothic. Anyway:

“Humboldt’s rise to international scientific stardom, then, can be ascribed neither to Kosmos nor even to the highly significant three- volume Relation historique du voyage aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent (1814–31), but to his early contributions as a colonial surveyor. This realization forces us to reconsider the meaning of Humboldt’s significance in his own era. But even at the time, the way Humboldt was interpreted was far from uniform. In different places his work was construed very differently. English-language reviews of his Mexican writings were decidedly more critical than their French or German counterparts and were much more prone to judge the work at the bar of natural theology.”

This is an interesting political interpretation of Newton and Descartes and their relations to various political movements, like the Diggers and Levellers:

“As the century wore on, England found itself host to a medley of radical reformers and sectarians pushing for the redistribution of wealth, the licensing of women preachers, wider democratic representation, the reallocation of property, and the like. Many of them drew support from the idea of nature as spiritually animated and possessing inherent forces. In this environment, moderate reformers turned to the Newtonian mechanical philosophy as a means of curbing radical dissent. Why? In a world where natural philosophy, religious creed, and political authority were intimately interwoven, ideas about matter really mattered. Newton’s universe was promoted as an alternative to two extremes. On the one side there was the philosophy of those like René Descartes, who conceived of matter as composed of nothing but an infinitude of tiny particles or corpuscles. That view just seemed to banish the Creator from his creation…
Matter conceived of in this way could not be called on to support the pantheistic and revolutionary inclinations among some Ranters, Diggers, Levellers, and other red-hot Protestants attacking traditional ecclesiastical and political authorities. Still less could it justify the seditious politics of atheists and materialists that Newton himself abominated. On the contrary, Newton’s universe, providentially directed, restored rational order to nature. Precisely the same principles should also govern church and polity.”

Also a little mention of Lysenko (there are weird very online communists on twitter that are still Lysenkoists, which is so funny to me):

“Again in the Soviet Union, the official communist adoption of the evolutionary thinking of the agronomist T. D. Lysenko in the 1930s is notable. His ardent advocacy of the idea that acquired characteristics could be inherited proved ideologically irresistible, especially when he claimed it could be successfully applied to remedy Russia’s chronic wheat shortages… For apart from the idea’s promised agricultural benefits, which never materialized, it resonated with Marxist hostility to the seemingly heartless capitalism of natural selection. Under Stalin’s regime, Lysenko became director of the Soviet Academy’s genetics institute, and from that position he banished many scientists who did not share his views. Here state creed and identity received the support of, and in turn conferred official approval on, a highly idiosyncratic version of evolutionary biology.”

Finally in Chapter 4, we get more detail on movements and the way science circulates geographically. I’ve mentioned the Silurian strata a few times before but never actually knew the story behind its naming (it was named by an imperialist geologist:

“…the Victorian geologist Roderick Murchison brought unknown lands in Africa under the sway of geological terminology. He had elucidated the Silurian strata and was determined to extend its jurisdiction across the face of the earth.
…And as he enlarged his terminological kingdom, through orchestrating the Royal Geographical Society’s expeditions to the “dark continent” for twenty years or more, he resorted to imperial language to describe how his taxonomy “invaded” continents, “enlisted recruits,” and engaged in “the field of battle” much like the ancient Romano-British tribe for which the Silurian strata were named. Not surprisingly, he was every bit as concerned to advance Britain’s imperial interests as he was to extend the empire of Siluria. His terms circled the globe like the tentacles of British imperialism.”

Also a little bit about the emerging scientific practice of cartography and related sorts of knowledge spaces:

“On paper, in cabinets, and on tables, articles from different locations and times come together to share a common space. Objects collected years and miles apart find themselves united in new combinations. Here samples become signs, entities become numbers, physical features become cartographic lines. Perhaps the earliest of these compilation sites was the Casa de la Contratación in early sixteenth-century Seville. This bureaucratic “knowledge space” was essentially a board of trade charged with the task of managing Spanish commerce with the East Indies and the New World. Hydrographic control was vital to the enterprise. And so the Casa’s twin-pronged mission was to retain a monopoly on cartographic knowledge and to regularize the information that seafarers brought home.”

Also some interesting commentary on photography which my friend raised when we were travelling in Mexico for a conference, just in terms of how the tourist camera relates to the colonial gaze and things like that:

“Adopted as a sure-shot means of overcoming distance and guaranteeing trust, photography only served to rerun these selfsame problems through a different medium. At the same time, the very fact that photographs were exploited in radically different sorts of ideological campaign— for imperial surveillance by administrators to promote the interests of empire, for social critique by radical reformers, for anticolonial resistance by missionaries who recorded the aftermath of military brutality, for surrogate voyaging—recalls attention to the rhetorical character of the photograph and to the artful nature of its seeming objectivity and neutrality.”

[hillary · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pure torture.
Maybe it could have been a relatively good essay if it were just 10 pages long. Or perhaps if the author could have stopped repeating the same things again and again and taken into consideration examples from present science (why is everyone obsessed with the 16-17-18th centuries???).
And the style: painfully slow.

[Marinho Lopes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gostei de ler a História da Ciência referida ao longo do livro, contudo creio que o autor falha na defesa da sua opinião de que a Ciência não é universal. De certo que a Ciência é função do local, do momento, de quem a faz, de quem a transmite e de quem a apreende, no entanto isso é apenas uma limitação e não uma característica intrínseca da Ciência. Como creio ser evidente, a Ciência moderna tem caminhado para a universalidade imaginada no passado, e o autor não oferece qualquer argumento que coloque isso em causa. Deu-me a impressão que o autor quis defender uma opinião algo controversa para obter protagonismo. Em contraste, concordaria em absoluto com Livingstone se este tivesse antes defendido que para compreender a História da Ciência é necessário ter em consideração os locais onde esta foi construída, como é evidente. À parte do irritante argumento, o livro está bastante bem escrito, com um bom ritmo e uma excelente colectânea de pequenas passagens da História da Ciência. 

[Leo Abrantes · Rating 3 out of 5]

O livro é uma das leituras obrigatórias para uma nova cadeira no Mestrado em História e Filosofia das ciências. A cadeira chama-se Cidade e Ciência e centra-se nas ligações entre a prática da ciência e a vivência nas cidades.

A premissa do livro toma como ponto de partida as ideias que associamos à Ciência - universal, sem lugar, que existe isoladamente, separada das crenças, convicções e sentimentos subjectivos - esta premissa serve apenas de mote para a desconstrução dessa ciência sem lugar. O autor pretende, antes de mais, de fazer assentar a ciência na terra. Em particular no espaço e tempo e que a ciência está indissociavelmente relacionada com aqueles que a praticam, com o espaço geográfico, com a sua circulação, transmissão e transformação. Mais importante que a geografia física, são as relações entre a geografia humana e em particular as suas associações com o aspecto social.

Desde o laboratório, os jardins, os gabinetes de curiosidades, a recolha de elementos de locais longínquos, da sua aplicação como forma de controlo de povos em locais remotos, os instrumentos que utiliza, as medidas tornadas universais em detrimento de outras, o autor faz uma longa enumeração histórica, geográfica, temporal de como a ciência está invariavelmente relacionada com um tempo e um local. E a sensação que tenho ao ler as páginas que enumeram esses episódios, é que é uma longa lista quase feita de rajada, com o único propósito de repetir a premissa: a ciência está associada ao local em que é produzida.

Não que discorde do autor quando faz uma alusão ao laboratório e à recolha de espécimens botânicos, ou em relação às óbvias formas de homogeneizar, sistematizar e medir a natureza como um longo processo que culmina na opção de um sistema em detrimento de outro. Nem tão pouco da forma como a classe social influenciou a recepção de “descobertas” científicas de um grupo específico.

No entanto, uma das alusões que Livingstone faz é conceber uma ciência com um adjectivo nacional e não apenas regional e cuja explicação nunca é totalmente esclarecida, nem tão pouco sustentada com os episódios que ilustram o livro. Na introdução, o autor refere:

My suspicion is that along the spectrum of scales from particular sites through regional settings to national environments, the “where?” of scientific activity matters a good deal.” p. 3

Para justificar esta ideia e ainda na introdução, o autor refere a recepção da obra de Darwin na Nova Zelândia como um veículo para afirmar a posição imperialista da elite colonial e para diminuir a população nativa. Por outro lado, no sul dos Estados Unidos, a obra de Darwin é repudiada porque ia contra as ideias religiosas da criação divina das diferentes raças. Não obstante, a importância da recepção da ciência em diferentes pontos do globo, o autor parece confundir a percepção ou o uso político de uma teoria científica com a própria teoria.

“(...) There was a distinctly regional pattern to the rise of scientific Europe, and our task will be to determine why certain forms of scientific activity emerged in certain regions and at certain points in time. These reflections will confirm the salience of the geographical adjectives in “English science”, “French science” and “Russian science”; (...)”. p 15

Esta premissa, feita durante a introdução, de uma ciência nacional em oposição a uma ciência feita no país X, nunca é cabalmente justificada ao longo do livro. Porque razão certas formas de actividade científica emergiram em certas regiões, e em particular para lhe dar o atributo nacional, é necessário encontrar razões porque essas formas não aconteceram noutro lugar ou noutra nação, mas esta linha de pensamento está totalmente ausente da obra. Na descrição das actividades científicas associadas ao mapeamento geográfico dos mares, de territórios coloniais, por exemplo, não encontramos elementos que caracterizem uma ciência inglesa (espaço onde certamente o autor está mais à vontade) ou uma ciência portuguesa para que se justifique o adjectivo. Aquilo que é dito sobre o território sob domínio inglês bem que poderia ser dito sob aquele sob o domínio português, sem que houvesse necessidade de falar de ciência portuguesa.

De uma maneira geral, o livro é acessível, disposto em cinco longos capítulos e com um ensaio bibliográfico.

É provável que a minha opinião do livro derive da particularidade da minha leitura. Sendo um livro obrigatório, procurei lê-lo de imediato. Infelizmente, não consegui encontrar uma versão para kindle e por isso acabei por ler no Scribd - uma plataforma para tablets acessível por subscrição.

A leitura no Scribd representa alguns problemas:

Primeiro a leitura foi feita no iPad, o que não ajuda na leitura à noite, nem na rua, ao contrário do Kindle. Em segundo lugar, tenho a sensação que esta é uma leitura efémera, já que não fico com um ficheiro. Terminada a leitura, tenho de abrir o scribd e sem subscrição, não posso voltar à leitura.

Mas para complicar ainda mais, esta edição não permitiu sublinhar o texto ou fazer comentários. As leituras feitas assim, tal como nos livros da biblioteca, são sempre algo superficiais. O acto de sublinhar aquilo que é importante, por vezes, saltando as partes supérfluas, ajudam-me a cristalizar as ideias e facilita a consulta posterior. Sem sublinhar, parece que não o li.

[Floris · Rating 3 out of 5]

A relatively short book for what it tries to achieve, Putting Science in Its Place tries to make the case for paying more attention to the location of science, both now but mainly looking back at the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. This entails understanding the importance of sites (the laboratory, the museum, the field, the garden, the hospital, etc. etc.), regions (nations, provinces), and the circulation of scientific knowledge between them (ways of gathering knowledge obtained far away). Though entirely justified in arguing for the importance of these factors, Livingstone is perhaps creating a bit of a strawman by stating that science 'has been and continues to be' seen as a universal endeavour (i.e. not tied to locality). Such a sweeping assertion feels like it needs at least some form of clarification. Especially since this book appeared a full two decades after the rapid growth of the socio-cultural (or constructivist) view of science, which also privileges local context and networks of circulation. Even for 2003, this argument isn't entirely new. The lack of examples from outside the Anglophone sphere can be explained by the author's self-awarene British perspective, although it would have been nice to see a wider variety of examples from around the world in an ambitious book with "geographies" in its title. All that being said, Livingstone does a pretty good job of covering a wide variety of topics in a concise (but sometimes arbitrary) manner. His overall argument (or at least the one I picked up) - that science is a fundamentally local activity - is, also, one I'd agree with.

[Davide Calò · Rating 4 out of 5]

Livingstone's work put our mind in a new perspective: science is not seen anymore as an universal and impartial but its location is vital for its process. Science is an human act and as an human act it must be seen coherent with the rest of the human activity. Science has an evolutiom and points of view who can differ in an extremely huge manner and understanding it it's like the salt in your life: it makes you more critical and more sharp-minded.

[Chunran Xu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book, finished it in one sitting! Many interesting insights and links to where science was practised in the Renaissance and Victorian eras. Really enjoyed it!

[Nicola · Rating 3 out of 5]

La teoria dalla quale si sviluppano le considerazioni di questo libro è interessante... peccato che l'autore sia fin troppo ripetitivo.