Simon Naylor

Practising geographical knowledge: fields, bodies and dissemination

In this article we make a case for a renewed emphasis upon some of the generic, albeit often tacit, spaces of practice that we share across our sub–disciplinary boundaries. In this we seek to emphasize the ways in which everyday actions make up the grander facades of institutional agendas, empirical projects and disciplinary schools of thought. To achieve this we trace the performance of disciplinary contours and identities across three important sites: the field, the body and the act of dissemination. There are, we will argue, significant commonalities that bind us as disciplinary practitioners in terms of how we perform within and across these sites, and indeed, how we join them up through our practices.

The field, the museum and the lecture hall: the spaces of natural history in Victorian Cornwall

This paper contributes to our understandings of the geographies of science through an analysis of nineteenth–century natural history and, in particular, of the provincial natural history society. Focusing on nineteenth–century Cornwall and one of the main natural history societies operating in the county at that time – the Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society – it is argued that a set of key spaces were integral to the operations and outputs of such societies. The paper details the significance of the Penzance Society’s museum, field sites and lecture hall as sites for communal work of local natural historians. They were also important, it is argued, in their construction of West Cornwall as a site of national natural scientific importance. Lastly, these spaces defined an agenda for regional scientific study. In particular, they promoted a taxonomic method that would transform local people into rigorous scientists and the local region into a ‘book of nature’.

Nationalizing provincial weather: meteorology in nineteenth-century Cornwall

This paper examines the development of a quantified, standardized and institutionalized meteorological science in nineteenth-century Britain, one that relied on sophisticated instrumentation and highly regulated observers and techniques of observation in its attempt to produce an accurate picture of the national weather. The story is told from one of the numerous points in British meteorologys extensive collection network: from Cornwall, in the far southwest of England. Although the county had been an acknowledged centre of meteorological labour since the eighteenth century, it came increasingly under the influence of various London-based meteorological institutions in the 1830s and in 1868 was chosen as the site of one of the Royal Society of Londons few prestigious ‘first-order’ meteorological observatories. This case study presents us with the opportunity to witness the ways in which a national scientific enterprise was assimilated and interpreted in a particular local context. It gives us a chance to see how regulated forms of instrumentation and quantified measurement were translated in a particular place and, of course, how the non-place-bound ideals of metropolitan science occasionally faltered in the face of local values and preoccupations.

Spacing the Can: Empire, Modernity, and the Globalisation of Food

The author outlines the multivalent geographies of a particular food-preservation technology: the tin can. As well as detailing the technological evolution of the can, he pays particular attention to the integral role that it played in the expansion and maintenance of Europes empires in the Victorian era. Beginning with the demonstration of the can as part of the United Kingdom, Colonies, and Dominions exhibition at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the author examines its significance in several key events in the British imperial endeavour, including the Boer War and the marketing of the British Empire in the 1920s. The author also demonstrates the involvement of the can in the construction of new experiences of global space, as it both reduced the distance between sites of food production and consumption and perpetuated those distances by fetishising the geographies of the origins of foodstuffs. Although it is now one of the most mundane of artifacts in the burgeoning world of material culture, the author argues that the can was responsible for lengthening the networks of imperialism and globalisation, and that a retelling of its story can help us reconceptualise the ways in which such networks were built and do work.

Accidents and opportunities: a history of the radio echo-sounding of Antarctica, 1958-79

This paper explores the history of radio echo-sounding (RES), a technique of glaciological surveying that from the late 1960s has been used to examine Antarcticas sub-glacial morphology. Although the origins of RES can be traced back to two accidental findings, its development relied upon the establishment of new geopolitical conditions, which in the 1960s typified Antarctica as a continent devoted to scientific exploration. These conditions extended the influence of prominent glaciologists promoting RES and helped them gather sufficient support to test its efficiency. The organization and implementation of a large-scale research programme of RES in Antarctica followed these developments. The paper also examines the deployment of RES in Antarctic explorations, showing that its completion depended on the availability of technological systems of which RES was an integral part.

On thick ice: scientific internationalism and Antarctic affairs, 1957?1980

This paper focuses on the role played by scientific internationalism in Antarctica during the two decades that followed the signing and ratification of the Antarctic Treaty in 1961. The paper shows that the Treaty was a response to the threat to the ‘free world’ represented by the installation of Soviet bases in Antarctica. Scientific internationalism was used as a diplomatic weapon to respond to that threat. In the 1960s, the development of international cooperative research allowed the USA, the largest logistic operator in Antarctica, to gain control of local affairs by penetrating into strategic areas, influencing the policies of other nations, and defusing existing tensions between them. This was the case with the International Antarctic Glaciological Project, a multilateral glaciological and geological research effort in East Antarctica. In the 1970s a far more complex political situation developed, defined by changes in the US Antarctic policy and the rise of military regimes in South American countries.

Collecting quoits: field cultures in the history of Cornish antiquarianism:

This paper traces a historical geography of antiquarianism in the English county of Cornwall, paying particular attention to the period from 1750 to 1900 and to research conducted into the region’s ancient stone monuments. The paper argues that from the mid-eighteenth century onwards Cornish antiquarianism was largely a field-based activity. After a short discussion of the work of notable eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antiquarians the paper focuses on the labours of those in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Differences between the two periods are discussed - these, it is argued, centred around different valuations of place and method - before the anatomy of Victorian antiquarianism’s field culture is mapped out. The paper concludes with a discussion of the place of Cornish antiquarianism in wider networks of intellectual exchange.

Historical geography: natures, landscapes, environments

© 2006 SAGE Publications 10.1177/0309132506071529

Writing Orderly Geographies of Distant Places: the Regional Survey Movement and Latin America:

Surveys of the boundaries, rivers and railways of Argentina have during the past cen tury extended a network of measurements around and over the country, covering it with a finer and larger mesh of surveyed lines and affording a general knowledge of the principal geographical features. 1

Data in Antarctic science and politics

The internationalization of Antarctica as a continent for science with the Antarctic Treaty (1961) was heralded as bringing about international cooperation and the free exchange of data. However, both national rivalry and proprietorship of data, in varying degrees, remained integral to Antarctic science and politics throughout the 20th century. This paper considers two large field-surveys in Antarctica: first, an aerial photographic survey carried out by the Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition of 1946—8; and second, the Scott Polar Research Institutes radio-echo sounding survey of 1967—79. Both surveys involved geoscientific data but the context in which the investigations and the exchanges of their results took place changed. We argue that the issue of control of data remained paramount across both cases despite shifting international political contexts. The control of data on Antarctic territory, once framed in terms of geopolitics and negotiated between governments, became a matter of science policy and credit to be negotiated among scientific institutions. Whereas the Ronne data were of potential strategic value for reinforcing national territorial claims, the radio-echo sounding data contained information of potential economic and environmental value.