The ideals and realities of field research have shaped the development of behavioural primatology over the latter half of the twentieth century. This paper draws on interviews with primatologists as well as a survey of the scientific literature to examine the idealized notion of the field site as a natural place and the physical environment of the field as a research space. It shows that what became standard field practice emerged in the course of wide ranging debate about the techniques, (...) personal qualities and site conditions best suited to the scientific study of the natural behaviour of apes and monkeys. Although the laboratory was a constant presence in this debate, the export of techniques from the laboratory to the field was limited, due to concerns that experimental manipulation would destroy the naturalness of the behaviour. The paper goes on to demonstrate the central significance given by primatologists to the unique social, historical and ecological circumstances of particular field sites, and to sketch some of the complexities that fieldworkers contend with in trying to realize their ideals. Primatologists seek field sites that answer their questions; but once their studies become long term, they also need to find questions that answer to ever changing conditions at those sites. (shrink)

In 1937 Joseph Grinnell founded the University of California's (U.C.) first biological field station, the Hastings Natural History Reservation. Hastings became a center for field biology on the West Coast, and by 1960 it was serving as a model for the creation of additional U.C. reserves. Today, the U.C. Natural Reserve System (NRS) is the largest and most diverse network of university-based biological field stations in the world, with 36 sites covering more than 135,000 acres. This essay examines the founding (...) of the Hastings Reservation, and asks how it managed to grow and develop, in the 1940s and 1950s, during a time of declining support for natural history research. It shows how faculty and staff courted the support of key institutional allies, presented themselves as the guardians of a venerable tradition in nature study, and emphasized the station's capacity to document ecological change and inform environmental policy and management. In the years since, Hastings and other U.C. reserves have played crucial roles in California environmental politics. Biological field stations in the post-war era deserve more attention not only from historians of biology, but also from environmental historians and other scholars interested in the role of science in society. (shrink)

In 1937 Joseph Grinnell founded the University of California’s first biological field station, the Hastings Natural History Reservation. Hastings became a center for field biology on the West Coast, and by 1960 it was serving as a model for the creation of additional U.C. reserves. Today, the U.C. Natural Reserve System is the largest and most diverse network of university-based biological field stations in the world, with 36 sites covering more than 135,000 acres. This essay examines the founding of the (...) Hastings Reservation, and asks how it managed to grow and develop, in the 1940s and 1950s, during a time of declining support for natural history research. It shows how faculty and staff courted the support of key institutional allies, presented themselves as the guardians of a venerable tradition in nature study, and emphasized the station’s capacity to document ecological change and inform environmental policy and management. In the years since, Hastings and other U.C. reserves have played crucial roles in California environmental politics. Biological field stations in the post-war era deserve more attention not only from historians of biology, but also from environmental historians and other scholars interested in the role of science in society. (shrink)

Expanding upon the model of vessels of exploration as scientific instruments first proposed by Richard Sorrenson, this essay examines the changing nature of the ship as scientific space on expedition vessels during the late nineteenth century. Particular attention is paid to the expedition of H.M.S. Challenger as a turning point in the design of shipboard spaces that established a place for scientists at sea and gave scientific legitimacy to the new science of oceanography. There was a progressive development in research (...) vessel design from “ship as instrument” to “ship as laboratory” and changing spatial practices aboard these vessels were paralleled by changes in shipboard culture. I suggest that the “ship as laboratory” has now in turn been supplanted by a new model, the “ship as invisible technician”, as oceanographic research vessels deploy remote-sensing equipment and gather data that are no longer analyzed on board. (shrink)

The phenomenon of the Giant's Causeway in the north of Ireland has attracted much attention over five centuries. This essay recounts the formative years between 1688 and 1708 of the Giant's Causeway as a field site and ‘philosophical landscape’ in the light of recent research on the historical geographies of scientific knowledge. This research has provided new perspectives on field science, emphasizing the spatial character of the field and its discursive formation in different spaces. A view of the field as (...) a self-contained unit in which science is practised is rendered problematic. Instead, it is seen as part of a network of intersecting locales within which scientists and science circulate. This essay draws upon this work, exploring and mapping the spaces and techniques used by late seventeenth-century natural philosophers in London and Dublin to generate observational and conceptual knowledge of the Giant's Causeway. In doing so, the paper contributes to an understanding of the spaces of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, of the knowledge networks within which the virtuosi operated and of the earth science field site. (shrink)

ABSTRACT After a productive start in the 1980s, laboratory history is now surprisingly neglected—not lab science, but the lab as social institution. To restart interest, I suggest that we see labs as period specific (early modern, modern, postmodern) and of a piece with each era's dominant social institutions and practices. In the modern era, for example, labs have become powerful and ubiquitous because their operating principles are those of the nation-state and its consumerist political economy. Their educational function is crucial: (...) labs have authority because they are an effective vehicle for educating en masse for life in modern states; they provide general entry to careers in scores of disciplines and a thousand occupations; and they embody prevailing ideals of a meritocracy of competence, transparency (through publication), and a universalistic logic of objectivity. An older microhistory of laboratory practices may thus be reborn as a systematic, macrosocial history of the lab. (shrink)

This paper examines how the 19th-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace used biogeographical mapping practices to draw a boundary line between Malay and Papuan groups in the colonial East Indies in the 1850s. Instead of looking for a continuous gradient of variation between Malays and Papuans, Wallace chose to look for a sharp discontinuity between them. While Wallace's "human biogeography" paralleled his similar project to map plant and animal distributions in the same region, he invoked distinctive "mental and moral" features (...) as more decisive than physical ones. By following Wallace in the field, we can see his field mapping practices in action -- how he conquered the problem of local particularity in the case of human variation. His experiences on the periphery of expanding European empires, far from metropolitan centers, shaped Wallace's observations in the field. Taking his cues from colonial racial categories and his experiences collaborating with local people in the field, Wallace constructed the boundary line between the Malay and Papuan races during several years of work in the field criss-crossing the archipelago as a scientific collector. This effort to map a boundary line in the field was a bold example of using the practices of survey science to raise the status of field work by combining fact gathering with higher-level generalizing, although the response back in the metropole was less than enthusiastic. Upon his return to Britain in the 1860s, Wallace found that appreciation for observational facts he had gathered in the field was not accompanied by agreement with his theoretical interpretations and methods for doing human biogeography. (shrink)

This paper examines how the 19th-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace used biogeographical mapping practices to draw a boundary line between Malay and Papuan groups in the colonial East Indies in the 1850s. Instead of looking for a continuous gradient of variation between Malays and Papuans, Wallace chose to look for a sharp discontinuity between them. While Wallace's "human biogeography" paralleled his similar project to map plant and animal distributions in the same region, he invoked distinctive "mental and moral" features (...) as more decisive than physical ones. By following Wallace in the field, we can see his field mapping practices in action -- how he conquered the problem of local particularity in the case of human variation. His experiences on the periphery of expanding European empires, far from metropolitan centers, shaped Wallace's observations in the field. Taking his cues from colonial racial categories and his experiences collaborating with local people in the field, Wallace constructed the boundary line between the Malay and Papuan races during several years of work in the field criss-crossing the archipelago as a scientific collector. This effort to map a boundary line in the field was a bold example of using the practices of survey science to raise the status of field work by combining fact gathering with higher-level generalizing, although the response back in the metropole was less than enthusiastic. Upon his return to Britain in the 1860s, Wallace found that appreciation for observational facts he had gathered in the field was not accompanied by agreement with his theoretical interpretations and methods for doing human biogeography. (shrink)

Biological field stations proliferated in the Rocky Mountains region of the western United States during the early decades of the twentieth century. This essay examines these Rocky Mountain field stations as hybrid lab-field sites from the perspective of the field side of the dichotomy: as field sites with raised walls rather than as laboratories whose walls with the natural world have been lowered. Not only were these field stations transformed to be more like laboratories, but they were also embedded within (...) the particular regional environmental and institutional context of the Rocky Mountains. Using the University of Colorado’s Mountain Laboratory at Tolland and other contemporaneous sites as examples, this essay analyzes key features of these sites, including their location within transportation networks, buildings, equipment, personnel, scheduling, recreational and social activities, and other material and social practices on the ground. Considering both the distinctive and shared characteristics of the Rocky Mountain field stations in comparison to other types of field stations provides a more complete picture of the diversity and range of lab-field hybrid sites in the biological sciences in the early twentieth-century United States. (shrink)

Tobacco mosaic virus has served as a model organism for pathbreaking work in plant pathology, virology, biochemistry and applied genetics for more than a century. We were intrigued by a photograph published in Phytopathology in 1934 showing that Tabasco pepper plants responded to TMV infection with localized necrotic lesions, followed by abscission of the inoculated leaves. This dramatic outcome of a biological response to infection observed by Francis O. Holmes, a virologist at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, was used (...) to score plants for resistance to TMV infection. Our objective was to gain a better understanding of early to mid-twentieth century ideas of genetic resistance to viruses in crop plants. We investigated Holmes’ observation as a practical exercise in reworking an experiment, having been inspired by Pamela Smith’s innovative Making and Knowing Project. We had a great deal of difficulty replicating Holmes’ experiment, finding that biological materials and experimental customs change over time, in ways that ideas do not. Using complementary tools plus careful study and interpretation of the original text and figures, we were able to rework, yet only partially replicate, this experiment. Reading peer-reviewed manuscripts that cited Holmes’ 1934 report provided an additional level of insight into the interpretation and replication of this work in the decades that followed. From this, we touch on how experimental reworking can inform our strategies to address the reproducibility “crisis” in twenty-first century science. (shrink)

This article engages with notions of conservation in the Anthropocene from a history-of-science perspective. It does so by looking at an iconic case of infrastructure development that since the 1970s continues to cause controversies amongst wildlife experts: the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). I examine how, from the 1970s onwards, the TAPS functioned as an experimental device for ecologists to test the adaptability of migratory caribou to changed environments and their dependency on unaltered ranges. Based on archival research, published reports and (...) interviews, I show that arguments about animal learning, despite assigning a more active role to caribou in the conservation process, did not result in more inclusive forms of development that respected ecological processes and the various stakes of the caribou. In fact, a focus on caribou crossings as an easily observable, yet sole, indicator of the pipeline's impact resulted in a simplified representation of environmental relationships, that was used by the oil industry to argue for additional extraction projects. Arguments based on the material interdependencies of caribou with their environment, though seemingly similar to traditional arguments about range preservation, emerged as part of conservationists’ attempts to account for the ecological stakes of caribou, other animals and people. (shrink)

This paper outlines the contours of a historical geography of science. It begins by arguing for the relevance of spatially oriented histories of scientific thought and practice. The paper then considers three different historical geographies of science: those concerned with the places and spaces of science, those that detail the spatial contexts of scientific endeavour, and those that analyse the internal ‘cartographies’ of scientific theories and methods. The paper concludes with a discussion of other possible avenues of investigation in this (...) field.Scientific knowledge is made in a lot of different places. Does it matter where? Can the location of scientific endeavour 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. (shrink)

What is the adequate terminology to talk about animal behaviour? Is terminology referring to mental or emotional states anthropomorphic and should therefore be prohibited or is it a necessary means to provide for an adequate description and should be encouraged? This question was vehemently discussed in the founding phase of Ethology as a scientific discipline and still is. This multi-layered problem can be grasped by using the concept of methodological signatures, developed by Köchy et al.. It is designed to analyse (...) and systematically compare animal research approaches by examining their common parameters. By examining the works of Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, this paper offers new insights both on a methodological and theoretical level. Methodologically, the application of the concept of methodological signatures is illustrated; theoretically, the principles of Classic Ethology are analysed. My aim is to illustrate how the problem of scientific access to animal subjectivity was addressed in the history of Ethology by analysing statements about animal sentience. For this purpose, I will first outline the general discussion about animal subjectivity and the tension between anthropomorphism and empirical adequacy. I introduce my own theoretical and methodological framework before presenting an analysis of Lorenz’ and Tinbergen’s methodological signatures. Thereby, I show how the question of terminology is deeply embedded in a network of epistemological, methodological and ontological concepts and establish key characteristics in regard to ethological approaches to animal subjectivity. Finally, I shed light on the possibility of using this typology to examine current frameworks of animal welfare research. (shrink)

The Dutch historiography of the middle of the 19thcentury was a culture of honour. Disputes over the reputations of historical figures were manifold. This article focuses on one controversy specifically that took place in the 1840s. The subject of debate was the 16th-century nobleman Henry of Brederode, his deeds, his character and his morals. The controversy was not only about content, however. Many suppositions about doing history and being a historian that otherwise remain tacit, were made explicit in the controversy (...) – especially concerning archive-based history. First, the participating historians themselves were judged – somewhat like Brederode himself – on the virtuousness, including the epistemic virtuousness, of their behaviour. Second, it was discussed whether archival documents were fit for use in historiography. To some, the use of these personal letters was ethically unjustifiable. Third, the location from which historical knowledge originated, mainly the archive, came under scrutiny. The singularity of the archive made historians relying on archival material prone to attacks on their trustworthiness. (shrink)

From 1827 to 1831 the German historian Leopold von Ranke travelled through Germany, Austria, and Italy, hunting for documents and archives. During this journey Ranke developed a new model for historical research that transformed the archive into the most important site for the production of historical knowledge. Within the archive, Ranke claimed, the trained historian could forget his personal predispositions and political loyalties, and write objective history. This essay critically examines Ranke's model for historical research through a study of the (...) obstacles, frustrations, and joys that he encountered on his journey. It shows how Ranke's archival experiences inspired him to re-evaluate his own identity as a historian and as a human being, and investigates some of the affiliations between his model for historical research and the political realities of Prince Metternich's European order. Finally, the essay compares Ranke's historical discipline to other nineteenth-century disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology. (shrink)

I take up the question of how models of extended cognition might redirect the academic study of religion. Entering into a conversation of sorts with Emile Durkheim and Bruno Latour regarding the "overtakenness" of social agency, I argue that a robust portrait of extended cognition must redirect our interest in explaining religion in two key ways. First, religious studies should take up the methodological principle of symmetry that informs contemporary histories of science and begin theorizing the efficacy of gods as (...) social actors. Second, theorists of religion should begin noting how the work required to construct spaces in which the gods appear depends on the construction of disciplined and capable subjects. (shrink)

This article examines how geologists, botanists, and ecologists used pollen as a proxy for past climates in the first half of the twentieth century. It focuses on a particular challenge of measuring climate with pollen: pollen’s mobility. As scientists came to learn, pollen from some vegetation is more mobile than others. Pollen’s differential mobility challenged regional climatic conclusions because of the potential mixing of pollen from various locations. To minimize the effects of this problem, pollen analysts sought to decrease the (...) noise produced by highly local or foreign pollen. Yet, many ground-truthing and calibration methods were not available to pollen analysts because of the temporal separation between the observer and the object of interest. Instead, pollen analysts had to make spatial meaning out of fossil pollen using empirical studies of modern pollen, inferences from macrofossils and successional history, and applying statistical theories to fossil pollen data. Many of these corrections factors relied on pollen analysts’ knowledge of place, including elements like the location’s topography, prevailing winds, and plant cover. These elements were a natural part of vegetation-pollen-climate interactions. Scientists needed to account for them to turn pollen into a proxy for climate. Pollen’s movement was equally natural, but scientists decided to eliminate some pollen to augment the regional climate signal. These selective eliminations of place suggest that not all elements of place are equally important. Scientists had to omit some elements of place to make sense of the complexities of the natural world. (shrink)

At the present time, there is considerable interest for the physical setting of science, that is, its actual ‘place’ of practice. Among historians of biology, place has been considered to be a crucial component for the study of ecology. Other historians have noted the ‘built’ environments for the study of biology along the seashore, even referring to these places in terms more applicable to vacation sites. In this paper, I examine the place of intertidal ecology investigations, both in terms of (...) the physical space and the built space. Part of the examination will investigate the aesthetic aspect of the Pacific Coast, part will evaluate the unique character of the intertidal zone, and part will consider the construction of natural laboratories and built laboratories as characteristic places for biology. (shrink)