Space and Science: Power, Networks and the Circulation of Knowledge in the 16th-19th Centuries (European and Global Perspectives)
Level:
Master's CEU credits:
2 ECTS credits:
4 Academic year:
2009/2010 Semester:
Winter Start and end dates:
9 Oct 2009 Co-hosting Unit(s) [if applicable]:
Department of History CEU Instructor(s):
Laszlo Kontler Additional information:
In terms of perceived marginalities, we shall inquire into the production of knowledge, the processing of locally collected pieces of information as system of knowledge to be disseminated for universal consumption, by keeping our focus on the European/colonial divide as well as the internal cleavages of the European continent. The course thus:
- develops a comprehensive and critical understanding of the differentials of knowledge production in regional and global contexts over a long period crucial to the establishment of the importance of such differentials
- provides familiarity with current research in the field, elaborating a range of historical and interdisciplinary approaches with a view also to developing a new research agenda
- through the involvement of visiting scholars in the forefront of the field, it enhances the internationalization of work done at CEU
Based on recent scholarship that contests simplistic assumptions about the ‘uniqueness’ and ‘universality’ of ‘Western’ science/knowledge, we approach the putative ‘superiority,’ ‘primacy,’ and ‘centrality’ of a part of Europe as an uneven and contingent process, whose shifting criteria over the centuries have yet to be defined. Inspired by the history and anthropology of encounter, we acknowledge the dual nature of the theme: the self-understanding and self-representation of every culture is shaped in contrast to others, should these ‘others’ be located outside or inside the continent. There is significant scholarship on the European colonies, regarded as Europe’s most significant external counterparts. Much less is known about the intra-European regions. To what extent can they be included in ‘Europe,’ and to what degree did they constitute Europe’s exotic ‘other’?
We would like to test the possibility of a dynamic approach to “European centrality” from these relative peripheries. We take due account of the importance of the optics through which this phenomenon was viewed and represented in several angles of 16-19th century Europe itself by contemporaries. The latter conceived of their civilization as a system which was coherent, but at the same time, highly emulative in many senses, and was formed in a dialogue with and dialectical contestation of perceived core zones in Europe. Such emulation would include the increasing acceptance of scientific achievement as a token of excellence at local, national, continental and other levels.
If intercultural encounter denies simplistic and mechanistic models of transfer, we would like to analyze the nature of knowledge circulation in the borderlands of Europe. To what extent did hey perceive themselves as participants in and contributors to the European claims of superiority? If one rejects models of simple diffusion and acceptance, what was the nature of reception and reconfiguration of knowledge in these regions? What was their relationship with the metropolitan counterpart(s)? What kind of knowledge was (or was not) relevant, and how was it adopted to the local circumstances?
Drawing on revisionist historiographies within recent imperial, colonial and science studies, we shall attempt to produce a dynamic vision of European knowledge, where the spaces of command (to use of a term borrowed from geography) were constantly changing, and defined the shifting borders of Europe accordingly. Assessment :
Each participant will be required to give at least one “position paper” (a ca. 10 minute statement proposing issues to be discussed in the particular class meeting as gleaned from the weekly readings), to contribute actively to class discussion, and to write a ca. 3,000 word seminar paper. The topic for the seminar paper must be developed, in consultation by the instructors, by Week 6, a draft version presented in the final course workshop, and submitted two weeks after the end of the term. The grade will emerge from the combination of the position paper (10%), class activity (40%) and the seminar paper (50%). Full description:
COURSE SCHEDULE AND READINGS
1. Introduction: from a paradigm of deficit to a paradigm of difference in the study of knowledge production
Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science. Circulation and the Construction of Scientific Knowledge in South Asia and Europe (Permanent Black, 2006), 2-26; [pdf]
Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Modern Science. Islam, China, and the West. Second edition (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 2003), 1-46; [
pdf]
Recommended:
Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China. Volume I. Introductory Orientations (Cambridge, Cambrideg University Press, 1954), 1-27, 190-248; [pdf]
Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), 112-136, 208-238. [pdf]
(January 13: No class meeting -- complete readings from first session.)
2. Locality, knowledge and circulation: cities, regions and the global space
David Wade Chambers and Richard Gillespie, “Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigeneous Knowledge”, in Roy MacLeod (ed.), Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, Osiris, vol. 15 (2000), 221-240; [pdf]
Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge. From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 53-83; [ pdf ]
Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge. Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 79-102. [ pdf ]
Recommended (for readers of French):
Antonella Romano and Stéphane Van Damme, “Sciences et villes-mondes : penser les savoirs au large (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle)” Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (2008) nr.2, optional, for French speakers [ pdf ]
3. Data and knowledge: collecting, arranging, system and synthesis
Martin Gierl, “Compilation and the Production of Knowledge in the Early German Enlightenment”, in Hans Erich Bödeker, Peter Hanns Reill and Jürgen Schlumbohm (eds.), Wissenschaft als kulturelle Praxis 1750-1900 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 69-103; [ pdf ]
Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1-32; [ pdf ]
Recommended:
Peter Becker, Objective Distance and Intimate Knowledge: On the Structure of Criminalistic Observation and Description,” in: Peter Becker and William Clark eds., Little Tools of Knowledge. Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices (Ann Arbor, Mich.: the University of Michigan Press, 2001), 197-236.
4. Mapping: the geography of knowledge and the knowledge of geography
Michael T. Bravo, “Precision and Curiosity in Scientific Travel: James Rennell and the Orientalist Geography of the New Imperial Sage (1760-1830)”, in Jas Elsner and Joao-Paul Rubiés (eds.), Voyages and Visions. Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London : Reaktion Books, 1999), 162-183, 310-313 (notes); [pdf]
Justin Stagl, A history of curiosity: the theory of travel, 1550-1800 (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 155-170, 209-231. [pdf]
Recommended:
David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Published Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993), 63-138; [pdf]
5. Natures and cultures
Alan Bewell, ““On the Banks of the South Sea”: Botany and Sexual Controversy in the Late Eighteenth Century”, in David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (eds.), Visions of Empire. Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 173-193; [pdf]
E. C. Spary, “The ‘Nature’ of the Enlightenment”, in William Clark, Jan Golinski and Simon Schaffer (eds.), The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 272-304; [pdf]
Timothy Lenoir and Cheryl Lynn Ross, “The Naturalized History Museum”, in Peter Galison and David J. Stump (eds.), The Disunity of Science. Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 370-397. [pdf]
6. Institutions: material aspects of knowledge (collections, libraries, laboratories, museums)
Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature. Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994), 96-150; [pdf]
Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge. Alchemy, Chemistry and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), 99-131 [pdf]
Recommended:
M. Frasca-Spada and N. Jardine eds, Books and the Sciences in History, Cambridge, CUP, 2000, p. 1-12, 190-226, 225-238;
Laurence Brockliss, “Science, the Universities, and other Public Spaces. Teaching Science in Europe and the Americas,” in Roy Porter, ed. Eighteenth-Century Science, vol. 4 of The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 44-86.
7. Carriers: missionaries, merchants and bureaucrats
Paula Findlen, “A Jesuit’s books in the New World: Athanasius Kircher and his American Readers”, in Paula Finden (ed.), Athanasius Kircher. The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 329-364; [pdf ]
Antonella Romano, “Mathematics and Philosophy at Trinità dei Monti: Emmanuel Maignan and his Legacy between Rome and France,” in: In M.P. Donato, Conflicting duties. Science, medicine and religion in Rome, 1550-1750 (London: Warburg Institute, in print); [pdf]
Harold Cook, “Amsterdam et Leiden. Enrepôts des savoirs,” (in English), Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine nr.2 (2008); [pdf]
Recommended:
Steven J. Harris, “Confession-Building, Long-Distance Networks, and the organization of Jesuit Science,” Early Science and Medicine. A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-Modern Period, vol. 1, nr. 3 (1996), 287-318.
8. The politics of knowledge I: colonization (exploration, appropriation, domination, exploitation)
Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 100-148;
Raj, Relocating Modern Science, 27-59. [pdf]
9. The politics of knowledge II: patriotic research (emulation, emancipation, elevation)
Lisbet Koerner, “Daedalus Hyperboreus: Baltic Natural History and Mineralogy in the Enlightenment”, in Clark, Golinski and Schaffer (eds.), The Sciences, 389-422; [pdf]
Sverker Sörlin, “Ordering the World for Europe: Science As Intelligence and Information As Seen from the Northern Periphery”, in MacLeod (ed.), Nature and Empire, 51-69; [pdf]
Henry E. Lowood, Patriotism, Profit, and the Promotion of Science in the German Enlightenment (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), 205-261, 408-426 (notes). [pdf]
10. The politics of knowledge III: othering and orientalization
Anthony Pagden, The fall of natural man: the American Indian and the origins of comparative ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1-9 (Introduction), 27-56 (Chapter 3: The Theory of Natural Slavery), 210, 213-220 (notes); [pdf]
Jorge Cañizares-Esquerra, How to Write the History of the new World. Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 1-10, 60-129 (Introduction, Chapter 2: Changing European Interpretations of the reliability of Indigenous Sources), 349-350 [pdf]
Recommended:
Silvia Sebastiani, “Conjectural history vs. the Bible: eighteenth-century Scottish historians and the idea of history in the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” Cromohs 6 (2001): 1-6, <URL: http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/6_2001/sebastiani.html>
11. Workshop of seminar papers