The View from Somewhere

In Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge, David Livingstone brings a geographer’s gaze systematically to bear on Western science over the past five centuries. Place matters, he contends. That is the case not simply because human beings do science—dig out fossils, breed fruitflies, and split atoms—in particular sites. This book makes a bolder and more arresting case. The spaces in which human beings practice and produce science have shaped not merely its contexts but also its content. Those seeking to understand science must take space (and geography) as seriously as time (and history). The scientific enterprise is “inescapably spatial.”

Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge

David N. Livingstone (Author)

University of Chicago Press

244 pages

$28.68

This thesis may strike some readers as counterintuitive or even disturbing. Many modern people think of science as universal. Gravity draws apples earthward as surely in Tehran as in Tokyo. Quantum physicists from Vienna to Vancouver debate the latest theories in a common, global scientific language. Science enjoys remarkable cultural authority in the modern world, many scholars have argued, thanks to its capacity to transcend locality. By setting aside prejudice, presupposition, and parochialism, scientists secure the most objective, trustworthy, and universal knowledge human beings can attain. On this view, science constitutes a fundamentally “placeless” enterprise whose workings the geographer can illuminate in only minor, inconsequential ways.

Putting Science in its Place constitutes a lively, lucid, and compelling argument against this view of science. Situating scientific projects in a remarkable variety of spaces—material, social, intellectual, cultural, religious, acoustic, olfactory, and so on— from the 16th through the 20th centuries, Livingstone argues that science bears “the imprint of its location.” We should think of it not as a “transcendent entity that bears no trace of the parochial or contingent” but rather as “a human enterprise, situated in time and space.” Heterogeneous and pluriform, science “is always an ancient Chinese, a medieval Islamic, an early modern English, a Renaissance French, a Jeffersonian American, an Enlightenment Scottish thing—or some other modifying variant.”

Chapter 2 illustrates and advances this argument by focusing in detail on the remarkable range of sites in which Westerners have cultivated science over the last five centuries. These include the laboratory, the botanical and zoological garden, the field, the home, the ship’s deck, the coffeehouse, the cathedral, the observatory, the museum, the hospital, the asylum, the public house, and the human body. Fascinating examples highlight the spatial dimensions of science in ways that I found captivating.

Livingstone begins his geohistory of “laboratory life,” for example, in the home of John Dee, Elizabethan England’s most famous natural philosopher. Strange sounds and foul fumes emanated from Dee’s private workroom, off-limits to his wife, where he communed with angelic forces and engaged in alchemical experiments. By the late 17th century, however, the fact that an experiment “worked” in the privacy of an alchemist’s basement chamber no longer established its credentials as reliable knowledge. Now the eminent English natural philosopher Robert Boyle and his colleagues at the Royal Society of London moved “houses of experiment” up and out into the public sphere. Boyle’s experiments in the laboratory of his London home had to be seen and sanctioned by trustworthy observers—preferably Christian gentlemen of status, means, and reputation—in order to secure credibility. The “experimental public” played a key role in certifying natural knowledge and conveying it from inside the laboratory to the outside world. Examples such as these nicely illustrate the ways in which spatial perspectives illuminate the culture of early modern English science.

Similarly, Livingstone’s geographical gaze illuminates epistemic debates in the field sciences. Georges Cuvier, the famous French comparative anatomist, for example, criticized the field observations made by scientific travelers such as Alexander von Humboldt early in the 19th century. Traveling in South America, the German polymath recorded only “broken and fleeting” observations, complained Cuvier. Metropolitan naturalists such as himself, by contrast, could patiently collate fossil bones from around the world, compare, analyze, and classify his specimens, and formulate sound and comprehensive theories without ever leaving his workbench.

The early 19th-century Edinburgh geologist James David Forbes, by contrast, insisted on direct, first-hand experience of nature in the raw. Only “protracted residence among the Icy Solitudes,” said Forbes, could produce reliable knowledge of Alpine glaciers. Similarly, in the early 20th century, Bronislaw Malinowski, the Anglo-Polish anthropologist, made fieldwork “the central ritual of the tribe” of professional anthropologists. Only those who left home to live as participant-observers among the “natives” could gain ethnographic knowledge worthy of the name, insisted Malinowski. His fieldwork revolution overturned the authority of earlier “armchair anthropologists” such as Edward Tylor and James G. Frazer, who never ventured into the field. These study-bound anthropologists derived their knowledge of indigenous peoples almost entirely from written texts, often produced by Christian missionaries.

Chapter 3 focuses on regional cultures of science. By region, Livingstone means geographical units such as empire, nation, province, state, or city. These regional cultures of science have “profoundly influenced” not only “the doing of science” but also practitioners’ “knowledge claims.” Livingstone sets the record straight on the so-called “European Scientific Revolution.” The idea that early modern Christian Europe provided a uniquely favorable set of cultural circumstances for the emergence of modern science is something of a Western conceit, he argues. It ignores Europe’s debts to Islamic and Chinese science, and glosses over the diverse regional scientific cultures within Europe, in which religion and politics played formative roles. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, profoundly shaped 17th-century Italian science, for good and for ill, as Galileo found out to his cost in 1633. Yet the Vatican had more power in Rome than in Venice, where “heretics” enjoyed more freedom; early modern Italian science, scarcely monolithic, displayed significant regional diversity.

In early modern England, by contrast, Protestantism shaped science. There, leading natural philosophers such as Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle constructed a holy alliance between natural philosophy and Protestant Christianity designed to confute Catholicism and atheism alike. In Protestant cultures, new ways of reading Scripture facilitated new ways of doing science. Many English natural philosophers rejected the allegorical readings of the Bible and the symbolic readings of natural objects widespread in medieval Catholic cultures for simpler, plainer interpretations of God’s Word and his works. By stripping “allegory out of Scripture” and “symbolism out of nature,” these rationalizing Protestants “helped lay the foundations” for “modern scientific inquiry.”

Chapter 4, “Circulation,” focuses on a set of problems that has engaged considerable attention from students of science in recent years. How does science travel? How do scientific data, theories, instruments, techniques, and practices, produced in particular localities, move from place to place to generate findings that win rapid acceptance around the world? Scholars once argued that the universality of science reflected the uniformity of the laws of nature, the reliability of scientific method, and the systematic error-eradicating procedures followed by scientific communities. Livingstone complicates this story. The scientist’s ability to reproduce experimental results in widely separated sites, he shows, depends also on transferring equipment, skills, and “craft knowledge” from one locality to another. Laboratory knowledge, in other words, constitutes local knowledge in a significant sense.

A second set of issues concerns the credibility of natural knowledge generated in distant places. How did 19th-century scientists in London or Los Angeles assess the reliability of knowledge generated by scientific travelers—naturalists, geographers, and ethnographers—in far-off Alaska or Abeokuta? How could scientists bridge the geographical and cognitive distance between “here” and “there”? Metropolitan experts in “centers of calculation” such as Kew Gardens or the Smithsonian hit upon several solutions, including carefully training field observers, standardizing data collection by using maps, pictures, and photographs, and standardizing instruments and measurement procedures. Yet none of these techniques, designed to secure stainless, objective, and impersonal knowledge, could entirely banish distance, distrust, and doubt. Scientific knowing, concludes Livingstone, remained “an inescapably social phenomenon involving judgments about the integrity of people and their practices.”

Engaging examples and arguments such as these, appearing in chapter after chapter, cumulatively construct a formidable case. The quality of Livingstone’s prose makes the book easy to follow and entertaining to read. In a section titled “Spaces of Diagnosis,” for example, we read that “Victorian surgeons operated on sawdust-covered tables in old, blood-encrusted garments and generally washed their pus-smeared hands only after surgery.” In a single, stomach-churning sentence, Livingstone earths Victorian medicine firmly in space and time, and explains why Britons avoided hospitals like the plague.

This book is accessible and attractive not only to academic specialists in many disciplines but also to the general reader. Livingstone has crafted into a clear, coherent, and captivating whole much of the most sophisticated recent scholarship in the history, geography, anthropology, and sociology of science. He has systematically reinterpreted this work to highlight geographical dimensions and perspectives that remained hidden or largely implicit. Unlike some science studies scholars, he sees religion as an important dimension of the stories he tells, and treats it seriously, empathetically, and without condescension.

In putting science in its place in a metaphorical as well as a literal sense, Livingstone is not attempting to “unmask” or debunk science as “nothing but” a social construct. He takes the enormous achievements of science for granted—achievements that give us ever-more intricate knowledge of the world—but he insists that science is always grounded in particular times and places. It is a brilliant achievement, which I recommend to readers of Books & Culture without hesitation. Mark Noll observed not long ago that evangelical Protestants have long been better at criticizing modern scientism than at understanding how the sciences have actually worked. If David Livingstone is any indication, things are looking up.

John Stenhouse is senior lecturer in history at the University of Otago. With Rex Adhar, he is the editor of God and Government: The New Zealand Experience (Univ. of Otago Press); with Ronald Numbers, he is the editor of Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender (Cambridge Univ. Press).