Raf de Bont

The creation of prehistoric man: Aimé Rutot and the Eolith Controversy, 1900 - 1920

Although he died in obscurity, the Belgian museum conservator Aimé Rutot (1847–1933) was one of the most famous European archaeologists between 1900 and 1920. The focus of his scientific interest was stone flints, which he claimed to be the oldest known human tools, so‐called eoliths. Skeptics maintained that the flints showed no marks of human workmanship, but Rutot nevertheless managed to spread his “Eolithic theory” in an important part of the scientific community. This essay demonstrates how material objects—series of stone flints and sets of statues that purported to reconstruct prehistoric “races”—were given scientific meaning by Rutot. Rutot diffused his ideas by disseminating his stones and statues, thus enlarging his networks of influence. For a time he managed to be at the material center of a trade network as well as at the intellectual center of archaeological debate. The essay shows how Rutot achieved this status and how he eventually fell from favor among serious scientists.

Organisms in Their Milieu: Alfred Giard, His Pupils, and Early Ethology, 1870–1930

ABSTRACT This essay tells the story of early French ethology—“the science dealing with the habits of living beings and their relations, both with each other and with the cosmic environment.” The driving force behind this “ethological movement” was the biologist Alfred Giard (1846–1908). The essay discusses how the ethological viewpoint of Giard and his pupils developed in a period in which the current disciplines of field biology were not yet crystallized. It also shows how concepts and research interests could travel within Giards network from one working context to another, even from one discipline to another. By studying this traveling process, the essay reveals that, unlike the modern ethology of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, Giards ethology was not a discipline at all but, rather, a scientific attitude. This scientific attitude triggered a reappraisal of fieldwork, but at the same time Giards ethology was never limited to the field alone. It also found its way to the laboratory, the museum, an...This essay tells the story of early French ethology—“the science dealing with the habits of living beings and their relations, both with each other and with the cosmic environment.” The driving force behind this “ethological movement” was the biologist Alfred Giard (1846–1908). The essay discusses how the ethological viewpoint of Giard and his pupils developed in a period in which the current disciplines of field biology were not yet crystallized. It also shows how concepts and research interests could travel within Giards network from one working context to another, even from one discipline to another. By studying this traveling process, the essay reveals that, unlike the modern ethology of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, Giards ethology was not a discipline at all but, rather, a scientific attitude. This scientific attitude triggered a reappraisal of fieldwork, but at the same time Giards ethology was never limited to the field alone. It also found its way to the laboratory, the museum, and the zoo.

Primitives and Protected Areas: International Conservation and the "Naturalization" of Indigenous People, ca. 1910–1975

This article explores a long-standing discursive tradition within international nature conservation. In this tradition the argument is made that “primitive” people should be allowed to live in the areas the conservationists deem as “pristine” or “natural.” The article explores the (changing) relative importance of this tradition in the conservation discourse as a whole, and analyzes the shifting composition of its argumentative arsenal from the 1910s to the 1970s. Particular attention goes to the uneasy combination of two types of argument: one in which indigenous people are presented as part of nature, another in which their customary rights are stressed.

Schizophrenia, evolution and the borders of biology: on Huxley et al.’s 1964 paper in Nature

In October 1964, Julian Huxley, Ernst Mayr, Humphrey Osmond and Abram Hoffer co-published a controversial paper in Nature, in which they tried to explain the persistence of schizophrenia from an evolutionary perspective. This article will elucidate how the reputed authors composed this paper to make it a strong argument for biological psychiatry. Through a close reading of their correspondence, it will furthermore clarify the elements which remained unspoken in the paper, but which were elementary in its genesis.The first was the dominance of psychoanalytical theory in (American) psychiatry — a dominance which the authors wanted to break. The second was the ongoing discussion on the boundaries of biological determinism and the desirability of a new kind of eugenics. As such, the Huxley et al. paper can be used to study the central issues of psychiatry in a pivotal era of its history.In October 1964, Julian Huxley, Ernst Mayr, Humphrey Osmond and Abram Hoffer co-published a controversial paper in Nature, in which they tried to explain the persistence of schizophrenia from an evolutionary perspective. This article will elucidate how the reputed authors composed this paper to make it a strong argument for biological psychiatry. Through a close reading of their correspondence, it will furthermore clarify the elements which remained unspoken in the paper, but which were elementary in its genesis.The first was the dominance of psychoanalytical theory in (American) psychiatry — a dominance which the authors wanted to break. The second was the ongoing discussion on the boundaries of biological determinism and the desirability of a new kind of eugenics. As such, the Huxley et al. paper can be used to study the central issues of psychiatry in a pivotal era of its history.

Writing in Letters of Blood: Manners in Scientific Dispute in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the German Lands

The essence of the scientific spirit, the British morphologist Thomas Huxley claimed in 1880, is criticism. He continued: It tells us that to whatever doctrine claiming our assent we should reply: take it if you can compel it. The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.2 The image Huxley evokes here is a familiar one. It is the image of a science driven by the clash of ideas - a science getting ever closer to uncovering the truth by exploring conflicting arguments to the fullest.The importance of (intellectual) conflict for the scientific process, stressed by Huxley, has often been endorsed by philosophers of science, particularly since the Second World War. Intellectual confrontations have been central in philosophies of science ranging from Karl Poppers Conjectures and refutations to Marcelo Dascals inquiries into the role of controversy for the shaping of knowledge.3 At the same time, it is clear that the idea of an inherent conflict in science has not always and universally been acknowledged. Historically, discussion, dispute and controversy have received negative as well as positive associations among scientists, and the way in which men of science have actually dealt with disagreements has been regulated by historically and geographically contingent values.The rise of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) in the 1970s and 1980s has sharpened our eye for the question of how the social embedment of science has epistemological consequences, or, to paraphrase David Bloor, how ideas of knowledge interact with social images. The focus of SSK has triggered a strong historical interest in scientific controversies, and, at least for some time, also in the cultural rules that have moderated these.4 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have famously addressed the latter question in Leviathan and the air-pump. There, they have shown that, in the 1660s, Robert Boyle developed a set of rules - or in their words: manners in dispute - that regulated how natural philosophers should deal with scientific disagreement. Although several of Boyles rules of conduct would reappear in one form or the other in the following centuries, Shapin and Schaffer make clear that they also bore the mark of the time and place in which they were developed. Boyle, so they indicate, tried to create a calm public space that would earn the experimental philosophers credit in a society torn apart by the violence of the Civil War.5 Since the publication of Leviathan and the air-pump, the changing cultures of scientific dispute of other seventeenth-century contexts have received detailed scholarly attention. This research has, amongst others, focused on the courtly etiquette that moderated scientific discussion in the Italian states, and the courtesy rules that shaped the correspondence of French mathematicians.6 Overall, these studies have emphasized the importance of virtue (whether of gentlemen or courtiers) in discussions on natural philosophy.7In this article I will shift attention to the nineteenth century - a period described by the contemporary mathematician Charles Babbage as the age of discussion.8 The rise of new disciplines, the advent of science as a career, the development of a secular culture, and the infusion of liberal values in science are only a few of the characteristics which are generally cited to discern the social context of nineteenthcentury science from that of the scientific revolution.9 It might be fair to say with John Pickstone that Science in the nineteenth-century sense was a game with rules that were radically different from natural philosophy in the previous centuries.10 In this article it will be explored how this shift in rules left its traces in the etiquette of disagreement.The topic of nineteenth-century manners in dispute has not been without its historians. …

Material Rhetoric: Spreading Stones and Showing Bones in the Study of Prehistory

Since the linguistic turn, the role of rhetoric in the circulation and the popular representation of knowledge has been widely accepted in science studies. This article aims to analyze not a textual form of scientific rhetoric, but the crucial role of materiality in scientific debates. It introduces the concept of material rhetoric to understand the promotional regimes in which material objects play an essential argumentative role. It analyzes the phenomenon by looking at two students of prehistory from nineteenth-century Belgium. In the study of human prehistory and evolution, material data are either fairly abundant stone tools or very scarce fossil bones. These two types of material data stand for two different strategies in material rhetoric. In this article, the first strategy is exemplified by Aimé Rutot, who gathered great masses of eoliths (crudely chipped stones which he believed to be prehistoric tools). The second strategy is typified by the example of Julien Fraipont, who based his scientific career on only two Neanderthal skeletons. Rutot sent his artifacts to a very wide audience, while Fraipont showed his skeletons to only a few selected scholars. Unlike Rutot, however, Fraipont was able to monitor his audiences interpretation of the finds by means of personal contacts. What an archaeologist gains in reach, he or she apparently loses in control. In this article we argue that only those scholars who find the right balance between the extremes of reach and control will prove to be successful.

Conservation Conferences and Expert Networks in the Short Twentieth Century

The twentieth century witnessed the rise of a conservation movement that presented itself as international and science-based. This article analyses the changing transnational networks of experts mobilised by this movement. It does so by studying the participant lists of 21 influential international conservation conferences held between 1913 and 1990. On the basis of a database we were able to trace changes in the national background, disciplinary allegiance and gender balance of conference attendants. Furthermore, we singled out a so-called congress elite of often returning participants, whose background we analyse more in depth. The overall composition of the congress network as well as that of its elite, we show, changed only through a slow and laborious process. This process accounts for both the continuity in the sensibilities of international conservation experts and the gradual changes in their approach.

Berhard C. Schär, Tropenliebe: Schweizer Naturforscher und niederländischer Imperialismus in Südostasien um 1900

Berhard C. Schar, Tropenliebe: Schweizer Naturforscher und niederlandischer Imperialismus in Sudostasien um 1900 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2016, 374 pp., isbn 978 3 593 50287 8).

Bernhard C. Schär, Tropenliebe: Schweizer Naturforscher und niederländischer Imperialismus in Südostasien um 1900

Berhard C. Schar, Tropenliebe: Schweizer Naturforscher und niederlandischer Imperialismus in Sudostasien um 1900 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2016, 374 pp., isbn 978 3 593 50287 8).

Tropenliebe: Schweizer Naturforscher und niederländischer Imperialismus in Südostasien um 1900

Berhard C. Schar, Tropenliebe: Schweizer Naturforscher und niederlandischer Imperialismus in Sudostasien um 1900 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2016, 374 pp., isbn 978 3 593 50287 8).