Science in America: History?

Are Republicans at war—on science? The relationship between the GOP and the scientific community is in the news, and certain aspects of the coverage will be of interest to those working on the history of science in America.

Rick Perry (on the "Stump")

Rick Perry's recent entry into the race has raised a number of questions about his party's (and the American people's) relationship to science. Over the past few weeks, Perry has revealed—nay, reveled in—skepticism about both evolution and climate change.

Responding to a question from a New Hampshire child about whether or not he believed in evolution, Perry told the boy that evolution is "a theory that’s out there" that's "got some gaps in it," and that "In Texas, we teach both creationism and evolution."

On climate change, Perry went even further. Asked, the previous day, to defend a claim (from his book Fed Up!) that climate science is "all one contrived phony mess" propagated by "a false prophet of a secular carbon cult" (guess who?), he went on the offensive:

"I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly or even daily scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea..."

These positions don't make Perry an outlier in his party or the candidate pool—far from it. Take Michele Bachmann's famous 2006 assertion that "hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel prizes, believe in intelligent design."

She's been joined, in recent weeks, by candidates previously somewhat immune to this line of questioning. Video from 2007 of Ron Paul disavowing the theory has re-emerged, and Mitt Romney now has his doubts about humanity's role in climate change.

The only Republican candidate standing against this (real or performative) skepticism is Jon Huntsman, who took a pro-science stance in response to Perry's remarks, via Twitter: "I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy."

Though it earned Huntsman some good press, it didn't help him in the polls. He's leagues behind the others—especially Perry, who at this point seems to be running away with the nomination, suggesting his remarks didn't cost him too much with his base.

All these developments caught the eye of Paul Krugman, who devoted his column this week to the issue. His stance is that it's all a part of a "deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right" that, in typical slightly-overdrawn language, "should terrify us."

Should it? On the one hand, our ability to address large-scale problems—financial, climatic, and otherwise—would no doubt be hampered by the ascendence of a president and a party that was, as Krugman puts it, "aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge."

On the other, something tells me that it's the politics that underlay this summer's debt-ceiling debacle (and the infamous AA+ downgrade) that we've got to worry about, not anti-scientism. For the record, the source on that is still George Packer's New Yorker piece.

So what about science (and AmericanScience), then? Well, there's the issue Ron Paul raises at the beginning of the video I linked to above: whether or not evolution is relevant, or if it's appropriate "for the presidency to be decided on a scientific matter."

In a post at The Intersection, this is parsed in a quotation from popular-science author Steven Berlin Johnson, who wrote The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America (2008) and who thinks it does matter – for an interesting reason:

"[W]hen our leaders take these anti-science positions, [...] – they’re not just being anti-intellectual. They’re also being un-American. The people who founded this country were serious science geeks. We should be celebrating this fact, not running away from it."

Why is this interesting? Because it's precisely the sort of argument that appeals to the far right, and especially the Tea Party. From Ron Paul to Rick Perry, GOPers have staked their claim on Originalism and the Founders. Remember Paul Revere, "ringin' those bells"?

Michele Bachmann

So, if Franklin was pro-science, shouldn't Bachmann be? Well, that's the trick. She *is* pro-science, and so are her colleagues—as they understand it. For anyone interested in the cultural authority (and rhetoric) of science, Bachmann's justification of her views is fascinating:

"I support intelligent design," she said in June: "What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don't think it's a good idea for government to come down on one side of scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides."

The question is what constitutes "all science," or what counts as a "scientific issue," or, perhaps most crucially, what distinguishes "reasonable doubt" from ... something else. But check out what *isn't* up for grabs: today, science is good—we just disagree about how to do it.

Today's debates are largely conducted in a shared metascientific language—what's at issue isn't whether or not science can help determine policy (it can!), but whether we're being scientific enough, or whether politics have polluted the assumed purity of the scientific method.

Now, this isn't earth-shattering (or even that original) as a comment on contemporary politics. Still, for someone studying the rise of science's cultural authority in the United States, it's a stark sign that things people disputed a century ago are now unspoken assumptions.

Can that history of earlier debates over the authority of science tell us anything about today's troubles? Not really. In many respects we operate within the framework set by those earlier contests, and so any analogy is muddied by their genealogical relationship.

That said—and as I've suggested here before—what historians can contribute is what is precisely that sort of realization: we're trapped (or shaped) by our vocabularies, which have histories too. Taking stock of our terms can, I bet, help us see what's really at issue.

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Dinosaurs and Dime Museums: Exhibiting the Past

Child Looking at Brontosaurus, American Museum of Natural History, 1937.

HANK's posts (here and here) on research methods have got me thinking about the craft aspect of what we do. But I'd like to take the discussion in a slightly different direction and ask what happens if we stop assuming that we historians ought to be primarily in the business or writing texts.

In my research, I think a lot about the different effects that various media have on us as consumers of culture. For example, I have found that fully articulated, free-standing displays of mounted dinosaurs in the late 19th and early 20th century are best thought of as mixed media installations. In addition to fossilized bones, lots of other materials were required to mount a dinosaur, including shellac, gum acacia, paint, plater of Paris, and iron or steel. Moreover, mounted dinosaurs were almost always paired with other ways of representing prehistory, including three dimensional models and paintings of these animals in the flesh.

Brontosaurus displaying characteristically turn-of-the-century amphibious habits in a painting by Charles Knight, under the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn.

There are a number of ways we can go about making sense of mounted dinosaurs as mixed media sculptures. I like to think about the various strengths and weaknesses of each medium. For example, paintings and three dimensional models are a good way to put life into dead bones, to use a phrase of which my historical actors were very fond. They literally helped visitors interpret the fossils on display, showing them how to visualize these animals in the flesh. At the same time, the fossils served as a reminder that these visualizations were not mere, idle speculation. They were grounded in material traces that survived from the actual past.

Mounting Brontosarus at the American Museum, 1904.

In addition to a mixed media sculpture, mounted dinosaurs were a form of publication. Many decisions (often controversial ones!) had to be made when putting a dinosaur on display. For example, when Curators from the American Museum of Natural History mounted a Brontosaurus in 1905, they took a wager that it held its legs erect under its belly, like modern elephants do. This was by no means a foregone conclusion at the time, and several paleontologists, including Oliver Perry Hay from the U.S. National Museum in Washington, D.C., and Gustav Tornier from Berlin, objected. They thought it more likely that dinosaurs held their legs sprawled out at a ninety-degree angle, like modern lizards and crocodiles.

Illustration of sauropod dinosaur Pose by Mary Mason, under the direction of Oliver Perry Hay, Proceedings of the Washington Academy of Sciences, 1910.

In the past two or three decades, we historians have become reasonably used to (and, I hope, good at) analyzing non-textual sources. But, unlike the paleontologists that I study, most of us continue to use words as the principle (if not only) way to communicate the fruits of our research. We historians write a lot of books and deliver even more lectures.  But we rarely curate exhibits or make images. Why should this be the case?

I see no reason it should!  

There are some encouraging signs of things moving in a new direction. Several historians of science I know of, including Peter Galison and Hanna Shell, use documentary film as a form of publication. But what other media might historians use to communicate with one another, and with a broader public?

One thing I've been especially interested to explore in my research is the relationship between elite science and popular culture. So, I have a soft spot for 19th century sites of amusement that blur the boundary between the two, especially those that throw in some humbug for good measure.  

Dime museums, like PT Barnum's museum, which used to be located on Broadway and Anne Street in New York, are a particular favorite of mine. So I was super excited to visit the Spectacularium in Coney Island this weekend. This is a re-creation of a 19th century Dime Museum (of which there were several in Coney Island), that exhibits a number of period photographs, playbills, and guidebooks, in addition to some taxidermy and other exhibits. (Most of the latter were acquired when one of the last Dime Museums, on the Canadian side of the Niagra Falls, finally shuttered its doors a few years ago.)  

I also discovered that Coney Island Museum still runs a sideshow. Here, you can see a snake charmer, a mesmerist, a strong man, and other remnants of the 19th century stage now usually only found in the circus.  

Moreover, there is an excellent website and live gallery exhibit, the Moribund Anatomy, located near the Gowanus canal in Brooklyn, for those of you into 19th century medical museums. Am I alone, or does anyone else see these as a call to arms?

Using Scrivener: A Brief Overview

After last week's post on the tools of the trade, I got a lot of feedback (mostly offline). I think Lukas is right that there's probably enough helpful material in our collective experience to justify a few more posts on methods.

Most feedback centered on Scrivener, the "content-generation tool" I've switched over to for my first chapter. Some readers had already been using it and chimed in with their favorite features, others picked it up for the first time and are now using it for dissertations.

The web is full of Scrivener reviews – a "Blogs" search on Google yields a dozen in the last couple days. Most reviewers that I've seen are (aspiring) novelists, concerned with character profiles and writer's block. As historians, we share those issues and have a few of our own.

What I thought I'd do in this post is just post a few screen-shots of my own set-up in Scrivener, and use those to suggest a few of the ways it's been most helpful to me as I organize my research notes into a single place and then start to outline and write chapter sections.

As I said last time, folks should adopt methods that suit their style of thinking and the material they've got to work with. Luckily, Scrivener's got a few different "looks" (and features) that match up with different ways of thinking. These are Document, Corkboard, and Outliner.

Here's Document View, Scrivener's main look for content-generation and note-retrieval:

Scrivener: "Document" View

What you're seeing here are the three main work panes. On the left is the "Binder," where notes and drafts are stored. In the center is the "Editor," where you write or read text files. On the right is the "Inspector," which displays meta-data about the document you're working on.

When I want to take notes on a new source, I open a new text file in the appropriate folder under "Research" in the binder (organized by chapter, split into primary and secondary sources) and start typing. Format and view options are arrayed at the top of the Editor.

I've created a blank file for each chapter up at the top, under "DISSERTATION," and that's where I've been outlining and dropping thoughts on my current work. Crucially, Scrivener lets you "split" the Editor to display a notes file and a chapter draft at once. That looks like this:

Scrivener: Splitting the "Editor"

This is (mostly) how I've been using Scrivener: after I've taken a bunch of notes on a source (or imported them from an archive trip), I scan through them with my chapter draft (well, chapter outline right now) open, copy-pasting relevant notes and quotes where I think they'll fit best.

This is just one way to view things, as I said. Another, and one some people might find really helpful, is the "Corkboard" view, which basically displays whatever portion of the binder you select as index card, allowing you to visualize (and shuffle) them in a new way. Check it out:

Scrivener: "Corkboard" View

Each of those little cards represents a (hypothetical) chapter, and the text displayed on them corresponds to a "Synopsis" in which you can summarize each of your documents. The Synopsis box, shaped like an index card, is in the upper-right corner of the first ("Document") image.

One thing to keep in mind is that to take full advantage of the organizational potential of Scrivener, you've still got to be pretty scrupulous about maintaining your meta-data (so that you know which file you want to open when you see it in the Binder, for example...).

Another thing to keep in mind – and this might go without saying as well – is that things can quickly get out of control if you don't keep quotations tethered to data about their provenance, or clearly demarcate your own thoughts from those contained in the notes you've taken.

The Binder comes in two main sections to help with this: "Drafts," which I've renamed "DISSERTATION," and "Research," into which you can import PDFs and images (I'll write more about that function in a future post). But you've still got to keep track of things.

So, is Scrivener worth the $40? It has been for me. I recommend checking out the tutorials and FAQs on their website (they're really good), and snooping around the web for other takes on it. You get a free test-drive, so I'd say it's worth downloading and exploring yourself.

I hope this has at least given a more concrete sense of what Scrivener can do for a dissertator. It's best feature is that it enables you to keep your notes, your musings, and your drafts all in one place, which has already been helping me make connections for my new chapter.

HOS methods, American history questions

I was struck by Hank's conclusion a few posts back:

To put it another way: instead of answering history-of-science questions with American-history answers, we're increasingly answering American-history questions with history-of-science answers. For those of us at the boundary–especially those on a market with more jobs in one than the other–this is a promising path.

Those ideas were floating in the back of my head while I was re-reading Alain Desrosieres' _The Politics of Large Numbers_.


In his first chapter, Desrosieres does for France what Hank talks about us doing for the United States. An earlier generation of social historians, he explained, had been frustrated in their attempts to construct statistical models from the data left in departmental prefects' statistical memoirs, instituted and published in post-revolutionary France up to 1830. Desrosieres' gloss: "Historians long considered them to be heteroclitic, incomplete documents, unserviceable as a source of numerical data." (40) 

But Desrosieres sees an opportunity. Rather than attempt to construct statistical series---which effort was indeed doomed to fail---why not shift one's gaze to the "process of adunation," to the means by which the revolutionary state went about remaking France. "Not only does the prefects' view of their departments offer precise information on the actual departments," he wrote, "it also and above all shows how the protagonists in this venture portrayed themselves, how they perceived the diversity of France, and the possible obstacles to this political and cognitive undertaking."(41)

There's something subtle going on in the first clause of that sentence I just quoted. Desrosieres does not simply abandon social substance for cultural interpretation. He offers an "and," instead of an "or." The careful reader can learn and convey a great deal of valuable information about the people of France, as read through these elite observers, he suggests. At the same time, that reader gains new insights into the cultural transformation of the French nation, with all its fits, starts, set-backs, and inconsistencies.


Of course, HOSers have already used their unique approach to offer revisions of standard American stories---Phil Pauly's take on immigration restriction and cherry trees springs to mind from a much longer list. But Desrosieres struck me because he took an apparent limitation (the muckiness and diversity of statistical memoirs) and turned it into a decided advantage. As the old programmer's adage goes (okay, so it can't be *that* old): it not a bug, it's a feature!

Hank is right. Historians of science have developed some extraordinary techniques for wringing meaning and significance out of the dryest and barest of facts. Why not turn those techniques back to problems that pester our fellow craftsmen?


But I'm even more intrigued and challenged by the idea that in the process of wringing meaning from limited facts, we can also bring those facts back into fruitful historical conversation.

History of Science in America . . .and Zombies

Inspired by the recent trend of adding the phrase “and zombies” to great works of literature, I want to use this post as an experiment in pedagogy. For a while now I’ve been thinking
about the potential examine changes in 20^th century ideas about political economy, technical knowledge, and the body through the concept of the zombie. I imagine an undergraduate course in science and popular culture that draws upon shifting depictions of the undead in American life. We would think about how the figure of the zombie has been mobilized to express anxieties about technoscience and describe the loss of personhood in our late capitalist -- increasingly interconnected -- society. Here is an initial take on the trajectory of the course with a few choice selections. I’m interested to see what people think and if we can flesh this out (pun intended) together.

I. Theorizing the Zombie

Let's start with some theory:

- Marx & Engels, “The Communist Manifesto”

- Sarah Lauro and Karen Embry. (2008) “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism” in Boundary 2, 35(1): 86-108

- Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff. “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millenial Capitalism” South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(4), 779-805

- Henry A. Giroux Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism. Peter Lang

- Kirk et al, “Zombies” In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/zombies/

II. Voodoo Roots

Unlike the European vampire or werewolf, the zombie has its roots in West Africa and was articulated early on in circumstance of slavery in the Caribbean. Divorced from their persons, and alienated from the products of their labor, the zombies worked for voodoo masters in sugar plantations without needing food or rest. In this sense, they are an “ideal” labor force . . .

Journalist William Seabrook’s 1929 The Magic Island was one of the first books to bring the zombie concept to a broad Western audience.

The 1932 film White Zombie, depicts the undead as exploited sugar plantation laborers.

Another important glimpse into the relation between ‘voodoo’, science, and capitalism is anthropologist Wade Davis’ 1985 The Serpent and the Rainbow (also a fantastic movie staring Bill Pullman). Though it relates to a later time period, the trope of ethnobotanical prospecting is of a piece with early articulations of the zombie.

III. Atomic Zombies

The atom bomb and the postwar threat of nuclear holocaust lead to a mutation in the zombie concept in the 1960s. The relationship between technical knowledge and its byproducts posed new kinds of threats. Now, one became a zombie not through voodoo, but via contact with radioactivity. The paranoia of the Cold War period is perhaps best captured

in the 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead. In this film, zombie sickness is linked to radiation from a fallen space satellite.

Another film which, through the use of high camp, mocks secret government experiments is Astrozombies, also from 1968. In this film, it’s not radiation that creates zombies; it’s the government that seeks to build a super-human astronaut from bits of criminals whose brain can be controlled from earth.

IV. Pandemic Zombies

With the end of the

Cold War came a new set of fears as well as a new paradigm of zombie transmission. Emerging infectious diseases such as AIDS, Ebola, SARS, and Bird Flu brought forth zombie tropes which reflected a new view of apocalypse. Recent years have brought us Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie. Films like 28 Days Later depict a zombie epidemic and the bleak struggle for survival that ensues.

V. Neuro Zombies

Zombie survival clubs have popped up around the country and even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has embraced the paradigm, issuing in May 2011, a Zombie Preparedness Guide.

Increasingly, the zombie is being mobilized to make sense of problems of mind and personhood being raised through contemporary sciences of the brain. Zombies have been used to pose philosophical questions about the theory of mind and, most recently, to hold a critical lens to neuroscience.

Take for example, as a bridge between infectious and neurological conceptions of the zombie, the novel: The Neuropathology of Zombies, recently published by Peter Cummings, a Boston-based forensic neuropathologist.

On a similar tip, we’ve also got Harvard psychiatrist Stephen Schlozman on “Zombie Neurobiology.”

***And we’re off and running . . . Let’s hear suggestions about additional potential readings/movies/graphic novels/scientific papers, creative assignments, discussion questions, and projects!***

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Tools of the Trade: How Historians Work

We're a long way from the index card. Or are we?

It used to start here (or so I'm told..)

Historians work a lot of different ways, and probably always have. Right at the beginning of my dissertation, I had a series of how-to conversations with other grad students: how to take notes in the archives, how to organize research material and your own thoughts, how to start (and finish) the writing process. That kind of thing.

I got a diverse set of responses; big surprise, right? Methods reflect the people who use them. Of course it matters what kind of project and sources you've got, but even more important is how you think – how patient and organized and efficient you are (or would like to be). I learned more about my friends than about their tools.

Still, some common themes did emerge, pertaining to every stage of the process. From what to do in the beginning to how to wrap it all up at the end, there seemed to be enough overlap to justify pursuing the question further. So, in the past few weeks, I asked a dozen colleagues to summarize how they do history today.

Sifting through those summaries, I pulled out a few repeating strands – problems everyone encounters, issues presenting clear choices between tools or approaches. In what follows, I'll share some of the most useful tips I received, broken down into the historian's "3 Rs": Researching, Reasoning, and (W)Riting.

Caveat auctor: As I said before, the methods you choose depend on the project you've got as well as the kind of thinker you are. It's an important warning, since things mentioned below – from software options to archive behavior – could save some folks and derail others. This is a precis, not a prescription. Here goes:

Researching

Ah, the archive. Some people hate it, some people love it, and everyone's got their own set of tools – material and conceptual – that they carry in to make the most of it. A lot of the same things (except photography) apply to reading published and digital sources, so I'll let archival methods stand in for both here.

Taking Pictures

We're divided on photography. Some of my respondents take pictures of everything they see in the archive; others don't even take a camera with them. Keeping track of (and revisiting) photos spurs certain behaviors: some people keep a handwritten or Excel table with data – including image numbers – for each picture taken. Others simply note that they took a picture of something and then snap away. The big lessons here are (1) Have a way to relate notes to pictures and (2) Go back over photos as soon as possible after you take them. (1) can be a table or spreadsheet, or it can be part of the "filing" process – renaming image and folder names to reflect archival data. As for (2), it turns out that if you don't go back over photos ASAP, they disappear into the ether of your hard drive. Taking pictures doesn't substitute for taking notes, so you either have to do both while you've got the material in front of you, or else take notes off the photos as soon as you possibly can.

Taking Notes

Everyone takes notes, but everyone does it differently. Some people still do a lot of it by hand – from noting keywords before you take pictures to full-on transcription, handwriting advocates say they process things better that way. Others take archival notes in .doc or .rtf, taking care to differentiate their own thoughts from those of the sources. These are then organized into a folder hierarchy and, more often than I would've thought, annotated or compiled around themes, like a commonplace book. The key point seems to be developing a "tagging" system so that related notes and quotations can be brought together during the writing process for perusal and cut-and-pasting into drafts. Some accomplish this with special software, a couple examples of which I'll touch on in a minute. Whether analog or digital, however, the big move as research transitions toward writing is the conversion of primary documents into keyword-searchable text that can be arranged and re-arranged at will.

Reasoning

Reading and Re-reading

Once you're done in the archives – for the day or for the semester – the reading process really begins. Part of this is simply going over material again (and again and again), digesting it with a little remove from boxes and dust, taking synthetic notes as things occur to you. Another part, though, is the actual rearrangement of material. Those pulling from lots of collections in lots of archives often reorganize everything into, for example, a single, chronologically-ordered document. This is a great solution for long correspondence or for the (unpublished) work of a single actor to try to access thought processes. New files get written and saved (keeping the original notes separate, copied, and back-up, of course), organized either around particular content (an actor, or a debate, or a theme), or else around the writing process itself (reshuffling notes and quotations into files for particular chapters). This leads to new questions which can lead to new sources (or archives).

Software (Organization)

Certain digital tools popped up in people's summaries of their research methods, so I thought I'd touch for a minute on a few that work for people. The majority of people simply store searchable text in .doc or .rtf files, which they organize in folders on their hard-drive. A way to tweak this system is to buy (or build!) a front-end for that writing and organization, which can streamline linking between notes and help with synthetic thinking and the writing process. The most popular option for this sort of thing is Scrivener ($40), which I've taken to using myself. It organizes your notes in a hierarchical "binder" on the left, with a lot of options for cross-referencing and re-combining. An alternative organizational system is the significantly-more-expensive Filemaker Pro ($180), which is a database manager with which you create entries for specific quotations or sources that sync with Word to make citations a breeze.

Software (Bibliography)

Speaking of citations: of the options for bibliography (and note-taking), Zotero seems to be king. Endnote is still a legitimate contender – people seem to like it for its integration with the writing process – but most people seem to prefer Zotero for keeping track of published sources (primary and secondary), especially for its web integration. All of these tools (and more!) are worth a look early on, but a final piece of advice from a number of folks was that, whatever you decide, you pick early and you stick with it. That is, it seems to be worth the commitment to integrating all of your notes and citations into a single software solution (backing it up, of course) as early as possible, since once you get to writing and (God-willing) to finalizing and publishing your writing, you'll thank yourself if your notes are all recoverable, searchable, and citable without the hassle of searching across machines or online storage sites.

(W)Riting

Writing is the most individual process of the lot – the final section of everyone's summaries is where commonalities across approaches breaks down. Some people print out all of their notes to have at hand for writing; others use multiple computer or monitors to maintain separation (or visibility) of notes and writing work; others write individual sections that they cut-up and re-combine ad infinitum until a chapter is due. Of course, a lot of this (as with the rest) depends on what your project looks like. Diachronic or episodic dissertations with discrete archival caches for each chapter require one kind of approach; synchronic projects with overlapping characters and sources in each chapter demand something different. One big lesson from what I've read is that writing early and often is worth the trauma of feeling like you don't know what to say yet: even pounding out a paragraph a night related to what you read in the archive that day can prove instrumental once you transition to full-time writing.

Conclusions

So, what are the lessons from all of this? First, there seems to still be a place (for many) for good-old pen and paper methods – it requires a different kind of thinking, but many find they can visualize their material better that way. Second, we seem to be in a period of foment as far as software approaches are concerned: my respondents were divided between writing programs like Scrivener, database programs like Filemaker, and alternatives (including organizing manually into nested folders). Third, and finally, everyone emphasized in different ways the importance of going over and over and over all the material of the trade: looking at photos as soon as possible, tagging and re-tagging notes, cutting and pasting into new documents according to whatever organizational scheme suits you best. Keeping the material fresh – reading and re-reading, reasoning through repetition – is still how historians maintain momentum. No one seems to scribble on index cards and shuffle them around the floor anymore – we just do it digitally, each in our own way.

Biology and the Public (Bonus Image!)

Darwin loomed large in Ischia and elsewhere.
This apparition spotted on the streets of Kreuzberg, Berlin.

Publics *As* Biology? (Part 3 of 3)

I like how this conversation is taking shape. It might be possible to see my contribution as taking up Lukas’ second methodological point – about the ongoing negotiation of the epistemic boundaries of scientific disciplines.

One of the first sessions of our Summer School dealt with research whereby members of various human communities were asked to “donate” genetic material. We read about a multi-faceted anthropological study in Brazil that attempted to discredit particular ideas about race in the service of taking a stand regarding the State’s position on affirmative action.(1) In this particular project, high school students were asked to assess their own racial makeup and to reflect on culturally held ideas about race. Then, they submitted genetic material to be analyzed for ancestry informative markers. There is much to be said about the merits and limitations of this project (including science in the service of politics). For the purposes of this conversation, however, I want only to make one basic point: in providing the material bases for genetic research, this public – Brazilian high school students – became biological.

Human population genetic research has been taking place in America for decades and, as it has merged with parts of anthropology, has intensified with the rise of genomics. In addition to those instances when they are actively enrolled by scientists in biological research, Americans can now also purchase any number of genetic tests that offer insights into their heritage and makeup.

From the case of human population genetic research, historians of science are finding themselves reassessing what kinds of actors might be found in the lab – too often understood as a closed site of inquiry and knowledge production. However, when humans become objects and, pieces of their bodies, subjects of biological inquiry the lab takes on a new analytic significance for historians concerned with thinking about “biology and the public.” Not least of all because – following Latour – a lab can raise the world.

I’ll stop here with a “public” image that I find particularly illustrative. It is from an April 22, 2010 New York Times article that covered a lawsuit in which members of the Havasupai successfully sued Arizona State University for misuse of their genetic material.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/04/21/us/0421DNA_13.html

(1) Ricardo Ventura Santos, Peter H. Fry, Simone Monteiro, Marcos Chor Maio, Jose´ Carlos Rodrigues, Luciana Bastos-Rodrigues, and Sergio D. J. Pena. Color, Race, and Genomic Ancestry in Brazil Dialogues between Anthropology and Genetics by Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, 2009

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Biology & the Public: Actor's and Analyst's Categories (Part 2 of 3)

One thing I like about HANK's post is that it questions the utility of both categories -- biology & the public -- by suggesting that their application to 16th century exploration, say, is anachronistic.  There was no such thing as a unified discipline of biology at the time.  Moreover, the relationship between natural history and its various publics were nothing like that between biomedicine and modern citizens.  So is it foolhardy to attempt a relatively longue durée history of biology and the public?

I'm not sure that it is.  It is indeed tricky -- risky even -- but I think the potential payoff of such a project outweighs its considerable pitfalls.

I'll restrict myself to two points, one methodological and the other more substantive.  First, a point on historical method:

I grant it is very important not to confuse actor's and analyst's categories when doing history.  It would be a grave error to import our modern notions about the relationship between biology and the public into a discussion about 16th century natural history, thinking they apply in roughly the same way.  However, that does not mean we cannot use modern concepts as a useful analytic jumping off point for a historically sophisticated conversation.

One way we might do so would be to trace a constellation of modern categories backwards in time, watching them coalesce into older concepts, disciplines, and ways of life.  Having done so, in our case it it would then be important to realize that early modern natural history has a number of descendants besides contemporary biology.  (Including popular institutions like zoos, acquaria, nature documentaries, etc.)  Moreover, as we trace the path of natural history to modern biology forwards in time again, it's equally important to take note of the many cultural and intellectual influences that creep in laterally, as it were.  (One obvious source would be medicine, but there are many others.)

Historical genealogy is difficult, to be sure, but that does not mean we should shy away from it at the get go!

The second point I want to make is more substantive.  Tracing the historical relationship between biology (or science more generally) and the public is extremely important.  One reason is precisely because in so doing we learn how difficult it is to make this distinction before the late 18th or early 19th century.  However, we also learn that issues of community membership are always being negotiated along some register or another.  Moreover, I do think we can say that an important shift took place around the turn of the 19th century.  As disciplines like biology coalesced into coherent and powerful social institutions, their practitioners deliberately went about setting themselves apart from other sectors of society.  I would argue that it is certainly worthwhile to investigate their reasons for doing so, as well as the mechanisms by which they succeeded in policing the epistemic boundaries that signal their status as holders of expertise.