In recent times there has been a remarkable spatial turn within a variety of academic discourses. Historians, social theorists, anthropologists, and philosophers have all redrawn attention to the constitutive significance of place and space, site and situation, locality and territoriality. After briefly sketching some of the major features of this ‘geographical recovery’, I examine some of its implications for the study of the scientific enterprise. Such issues as the regionalisation of scientific style, the political topography of scientific commitment, and the social and material spaces of laboratories and scientific societies are considered, These materials provide both a framework and a suite of case studies for the elaboration of a historical geography of science. Last, I briefly draw attention to some implications that a spatialised historiography has for understanding the history of the geographical tradition itself.
This absorbing narrative by the world famous explorer and Christian missionary, David Livingstone, (1813–1873) was first published in 1857 after the President of the Royal Geographical Society asked Livingstone to give a series of public lectures on his travels in Africa. The book was a great success, but Livingstone reportedly said 'I think I would rather cross the African continent again than undertake to write another book'. Livingstone's book describes in careful detail his travels and work in parts of southern and central Africa previously unknown to Europeans. It distils the experiences and observations of sixteen years during which Livingstone bravely faced the challenges of climate, terrain and tropical disease, travelling in a small group and adopting a non-confrontational approach to the local populations. The book makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in Africa's indigenous peoples, their customs and languages, animal and plant life, geology, and mineralogy.
The idea of a ‘geography of reading’ provides a potential point of conversation between the cultural and scientific wings of our profession. Here I explore some dimensions of the geography of reading scientific texts. Drawing on a number of theoretical pronouncements – Gadamer's ‘fusion of horizons’, Said's ‘travelling theory’, Secord's ‘geographies of reading’, Beer's ‘miscegenation of texts’, Fish's ‘interpretive communities’ and Rupke's ‘geographies of reception’– I focus on the spaces where scientific theories are encountered. The argument is that where scientific texts are read has an important bearing on how they are read. This realization points to a fundamental instability in scientific meaning and to the crucial significance of what might be called located hermeneutics. As a case study in the development of a cartographics of scientific meaning, I explore the different ways in which Darwin's fundamentally biogeographical theory of evolution by natural selection was construed in a number of different settings. The sites I have chosen to illustrate this are the scientific communities which congregated around the Charleston Museum of Natural History in South Carolina, the Wellington Philosophical Society and New Zealand Institute, and the St Petersburg Society of Naturalists in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century. In each case the encounter with evolution theory, and the ways it was interpreted, are shown to have been shaped by local cultural politics, thereby disclosing the critical role that space plays in the production of scientific meaning.
On Wednesday 27 April 1898, Dr Luigi [Louis] Westenra Sambon (1865–1931) addressed the Royal Geographical Society in London on a topic of much interest to the Victorian public. An Anglo-French medical graduate of the University of Naples, a Fellow of the London Zoological Society and a recent visitor to Central Africa, he was well equipped to tackle the subject of the ‘Acclimatization of Europeans in Tropical Lands’. The ‘problem of tropical colonization’, he began, ‘is one of the most important and pressing with which European states have to deal. Civilization has favoured unlimited multiplication, and thereby intensified that struggle for existence the limitation of which seemed to be its very object…I know full well that the question of emigration is beset with a variety of moral, social, political, and economic difficulties; but it is the law of nature, and civilization has no better remedy for the evils caused by overcrowding.’Even from these introductory remarks, it is already plain that Sambon's project was a compound product of medical diagnosis, colonial imperative, Darwinian demography and moral evaluation. And it is the rhetorical zone roughly marked out by this quadrilateral of disease, empire, struggle and virtue that I want to explore here. First, however, it will be instructive to return to that afternoon a century ago and spend a little more time listening in on the deliberations.
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