David N. Livingstone

The Spaces of Knowledge: Contributions towards a Historical Geography of Science

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.

Tropical climate and moral hygiene: the anatomy of a Victorian debate

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 Sambons 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.

Neo-Lamarckism and the development of geography in the United States and Great Britain

Since Neo-Lamarckian evolution seemed satisfactorily to avoid many of the difficulties encountered by Darwinian evolutionary theory (even after the rediscovery of Mendels findings), to accord better with developmentalist social thought preand post-1859, to circumvent Darwins challenge to religious orthodoxy, and to confirm late nineteenth century optimism, NeoLamarckism won broad support from contemporary natural and social scientists around the turn of the century. Early modern geography in the United States clearly reflected the influence of a powerful domestic Neo-Lamarckian school of biology, of reform Darwinism in sociology, and of the application of the Teutonic theory to American history. In practice, it was the environmentalist component in Neo-Lamarckism that provided the most coherent theoretical framework for American geographys deterministic interpretation of organic response to environment. Support for Neo-Lamarckism among British geographers sprang in particular from Spencers evolutionism, and was reinforced by a trans-Atlantic transfer of similar ideas. In Great Britain, however, the environmentalist dimension was rather more clearly supplemented by that idealist emphasis on consciousness intrinsic to classical Lamarckism, thereby allowing many British Neo-Lamarckian geographers to merge their thinking with possibilism in the inter-war

Space for religion: A Belfast case study

Abstract In the recent reassertion of the importance of spatiality in the processes of social reproduction, the significance of religious space has been very largely ignored. This omission is nowhere more evident than in Northern Ireland where, despite high levels of religious observance, remarkably little attention has been devoted to the spaces of religious life and practice. Religious space is not uniform: it is multi-dimensional, incorporating both the material and the metaphysical. In this paper we focus attention on the spaces of denominational allegiance and theological conviction, and use these as vehicles for elucidating social, political, and moral attitudes of Catholic and Protestant churchgoers in Belfast. Our findings reveal that, save for issues to do with constitutional identity, the monolithising of the Catholic and Protestant communities conceals the rich variety of religious cultures that profoundly influence everyday life in Northern Ireland. Focusing exclusively on bi-polar constitutional objectives, therefore, tends to deflect attention away from the diversity of underlying motivations.

Landscapes of knowledge

Space is rapidly becoming a central organizing principle for making sense of scientific knowledge. The recently published third volume of The Cambridge History of Science, which deals with “Early Modern Science” (Park & Daston, 2006b), is indicative. Its editors have chosen to devote nine chapters to such subjects as markets, piazzas, and villages; houses and households; libraries and lecture halls; courts and academies; anatomy theaters and botanical gardens; and coffeehouses and print shops. All are interrogated as critical sites of scientific knowledge. This emphasis, standing in marked contrast to earlier heroic narratives of scientific progress and great-name history, enables the editors to speak of the ways in which what they call the “geography of changes in natural knowledge closely tracked that of religious, military, and economic developments” (Park & Daston, 2006a, p. 7). And it raises profound questions that go beyond the mere charting of place-based activities.

Putting Geography in its Place

Work on the history of geographical knowledge and practice frequently draws inspiration from theoretical insights developed elsewhere in the academy. After briefly touching on some of these historiographical matters, I argue that geographers might make some telling interventions into this debate by attending to some of their own key concepts – space, site, location – and disclosing their significance for elucidating the history of intellectual traditions. The fact that historians of science have begun to remark on the role of ‘place’ in knowledge production and consumption further confirms the value of this ‘geographical turn’. Subsequently I dwell on the implications of a spatialised historiography for work on the history of geography itself, and urge that ‘the history of geography’ might profitably be reconceptualised as ‘the historical geography of geography’.

The Polity of Nature: Representation, Virtue, Strategy:

his exploration takes as its starting-point a remark by George Steiner in his arresting volume Real presences. Here he argues that any mature representation, and any attempt to communicate such representation is inescapably ’a moral act’.’ It is this connection between representation and moral value that I want to pursue, by arguing that representations of nature are implicated in moral evaluations which, in turn, have built into them incipient strategies for dealing with what are perceived to be environmental problems. The natural, the cultural, and the moral, I contend, have always been intimately related, indeed mutually constituted, as my title, ’The polity of nature’, is intended to indicate. That this is no latter-day trope, moreover, is evident

Immanuel Kant, subjectivism and human geography: a preliminary investigation

While the influence of Immanuel Kant on the development of geography has long been recognized, the discussion of his impact has been largely restricted to the analysis of his views on the nature and place of geography within the structure of the sciences. The content of Kants physische Geographie has been stressed at the expense of a consideration of the implications of Kantian philosophy for human geographical understanding. Although not explicitly acknowledged, the neo- Kantian resolution of the subject-object dilemma has been paralleled in the work of the predecessors of the subjectivist perspective in human geography. The more recent reassertion of a humanistic geography can also be seen as a perpetuation by its practitioners of the neo-Kantian tradition from which subjectivist philosophies of the turn of the century, upon which they have relied, were born. A re-examination of this form of idealism may provide a more articulate philosophical foundation for

Changing Climate, Human Evolution, and the Revival of Environmental Determinism

The role of climatic change in determining the shape of human evolution, a theme that came to prominence during the early years of the twentieth century, has resurfaced with renewed vigor. The author examines the rise and resurgence of the modern history of the idea that hominid evolutionary pathways have been trigged by climatic causes to illustrate the continuing vitality of environmental determinism and to highlight some continuities between early-twentieth-century and contemporary archaeoanthropology.

Science, religion and the geography of reading: Sir William Whitla and the editorial staging of Isaac Newton's writings on biblical prophecy

The conditions surrounding the re-publication of Isaac Newtons treatise on the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation, under the editorship of Sir William Whitla in 1922, serve as a vehicle for examining how the writings of eminent scientists can be mobilized in the cause of local culture wars. After some reflections on the idea of the ‘geography of reading’, the paper turns to an analysis of Whitlas use of Newtons reputation as an apologetic device, and his staging of Newtons writings on eschatology in order to shore up Protestant values during the early days of the Northern Ireland state. This case study of the textual tactics of Whitla, the distinguished Ulster medical professor, Methodist layman and member of Parliament, draws attention to the significance of location in understanding the historical relations between science and religion.