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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.

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Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge

By David N. Livingstone

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2003 David N. Livingstone
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226487229
1 - A Geography of Science?

Scientific knowledge is made in a lot of different places. Does it matter where? Can the location of scientific endeavor make any difference to the conduct of science? And even more important, can it affect the content of science? In my view the answer to these questions is yes.

The suggestion that science has a geography goes against the grain. We can readily understand that there is a philosophy of science and a history of science, even a sociology of science. But the idea of a geography of science runs counter to our intuition. Science, we have long been told, is an enterprise untouched by local conditions. It is a universal undertaking, not a provincial practice. Of all the human projects devoted to getting at the truth of how things are, that venture we call science has surely been among the most assiduous in its efforts to transcend the parochial. It has been extraordinarily diligent in deploying mechanisms to lay aside prejudices and presuppositions and to guarantee objectivity by leaving the local behind. Credible knowledge, we assume, does not bear the marks of the provincial, and science that is local has something wrong with it. As one observer has put it, It was the end for cold fusion when people decided that it only happened in Salt Lake City. Genuine science, after all, is carried on in much the same way everywhere from Boston to Beijing; experimentalists replicate each others results in Moscow and Melbourne; conference delegates from Paris and Prague can engage in scientific conversation.

The places where science is conducted, then, seem to be of little or no consequence. Even geographers, despite their professional stake in matters of place and location, have been inclined to exempt science from the imperatives of spatial significance. To be sure, they have acknowledged from time to time that a geography of, say, astronomy could be written. But beyond such trivial circumstances as the fact that observatories are not erected in foggy valley floors or that the Pole Star is not visible in the Southern Hemisphere, there was really nothing more to say. To suggest that the methods of astronomy, or the theories astronomers devised, might be influenced by their spatial settings was little short of absurd. Of course geographers like everyone elsereadily conceded that the diffusion of scientific discoveries and technical innovations could be charted over space and time. The paths by which a new agricultural technique or medical serum spread from its point of origin, for example, could be presented in map form. But beyond such platitudinous concessions, geography seemed to have little bearing on science.

In adopting this hands-off attitude toward science, geographers have certainly not been alone. While sociologistsfor long enough were only too happy to socialize most everything from families and fiestas to rituals and religions, they drew back from looking at science in sociological terms. Whereas religion, for example, was supposed to reflect the character of the soil in which it had grown, science generated knowledge free from the imprint of the local. To be sure, certain aspects of science did seem open to sociological analysis. When scientists went off the methodological rails, allowed political prejudices to influence their research, fudged the data, read religious meaning into their findings, or came to erroneous conclusions, such deviations could be, and were, explained by reference to parochial factors. A sociology of what we might call pathological science was permissible. Or again, national and international patterns of funding and levels of state support for research were acknowledged as influencing the direction of scientific progress. But beyond either the deviant or the fiscal, there was little to say about how local circumstances might bear on the scientific enterprise. It seemed that any more comprehensive effort to situate science in the places of its making would be taken as an assault on the integrity and authenticity of scientific knowing. Indeed, the modern invention of the laboratory can be interpreted as a conscious effort to create a placeless place to do science, a universal site where the influence of locality is eliminated. Securing credibility and achieving objectivity required placelessness, and the triumph of the laboratory as the site par excellence of scientific plausibility since the middle of the nineteenth century bears witness to this prevailing conviction.

This book questions such assumptions. While monumental efforts have gone into constructing placeless places for the pursuit of science, spaces that aspire to ubiquity, I believe there are questions of fundamental importance to be asked about all the spaces of scientific inquiry. What excites my interest, therefore, is the attempt to determine the significance for science of the sites where experiments are conducted, the places where knowledge is generated, the localities where investigation is carried out. The range of spatial questions we might pose is considerable. Does the space where scientific inquiry is engaged, for example, have any bearing on whether a claim is accepted or rejected? What weight is to be attached to the locations where scientific theories are encountered? In what ways has the circulation of ideas been dependent on the replication of instruments and the standardizing of methods? What strategies have been devised to acquire knowledge of things far away from direct observation? 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.

In anticipation of what is to follow, an illustration or two of how places matter in scientific enterprises will help to show why it is valuable to think geographically about science. During the first year of its existence in 1863, readers of Aucklands Southern Monthly Magazine heard the praises of Darwins theory of evolution sung long and loud. Darwinism, they were assured, had shed new light on the settling of New Zealand by conclusively demonstrating how a weak and ill-furnished race inevitably had to give way before one which is strong. Here Darwinism was welcomed because it perfectly suited the needs of New Zealand imperialists. It enabled the Maori to be portrayed in the language of barbarism and thereby provided legitimacy for land-hungry colonists longing for their extinction. At the same time, things were dramatically different in the American South. Here Darwins theory was resisted by proponents of racial politics. Why? Because it threatened traditional beliefs about the separate creation of the different races and the idea that they had been endowed by the Creator with different capacities for cultural and intellectual excellence. For racial reasons, Darwins theory enjoyed markedly different fortunes in Auckland and Charleston. In these two places Darwinism meant something different. In one place it supported racial ideology; in another it imperiled it.

This case could be vastly extended, as we will later see. Darwinism meant different things in Russia and Canada; it meant different things in Belfast and Edinburgh; it meant different things in work-ingmens clubs and church halls. And much the same was true of Newtons mechanical philosophy, of Humboldts global physics, and of Einsteins theory of relativity. Their...