She moves on to claim that the difference between magic/religious and secular practices do not lies in their content and essence but rather in their form. Magic/religion manifests a unified externalization of belief whereas secular thought is fragmented, a divided externalization of belief into separated modern spaces. Another lengthy discussion is around the notion of economics and how that has influenced the relation between communities and their immaterial belief. An expansive economical relation requires a different social organization which culminates in a more collectively controlled community and the breakdown of symbolical unification of primitive belief. The organic solidarity of the primitive world is not a historical stage behind modern fragmentation, rather they can exist in parallel. It is interesting to see that currently many environmental experts in the wake of global warming and crisis of late globalized late capitalism also argue in favour of such a small scale, self-efficient organic solidarity. This is perhaps the proof of our time on the validity of Douglas’ argument.

On Methodology

Purity and Danger has been viewed as a seminal structuralist study, however, at the same time there is a tension in the construction of argument which post-structuralist thinkers later addressed. The book argues for categorization of social life, for a symbolic order, yet, through the concept of dirt as an out of order, out of place, it challenges its own assumptions. Douglas discusses dirt as a residual category. It is rather contradictory to assume a sign that can be both residual and categorical. In other words, dirt is both inside and outside the structure. This is precisely what deconstruction has discussed extensively in terms of surplus signification, that any stable structure produces its immeasurable, unassimilable excess. And, it is through this surplus that changes occur within a stable structure.

However, dirt as excess is not developed in purity and Danger thus the argument can be challenged on the question of change, time and subjectivity.  It is refreshing that suddenly from the discourse of medical materialism in middle ages, we jump at the secular concept of hygiene. Yet, theoretically how this progression has happened remains unanswered. How, suddenly symbolically unified universe of the primitive shattered into sub-worlds of secular rituals is vague. The synchronised world of structure is never regarded through the angel of time. How time affect it remains unaddressed.

Douglas also makes use of ethnography as a qualitative method to demonstrate empirical data. She applies this method in a rather critical fashion. Ethnography is mainly used by anthropologists to investigate non-western societies and aims at encouraging cultural relativism. Firstly, Douglas uses it to show the specificity of modern western lifestyle. When she argues for the symbolic weight of dirt-avoidance in the west, she describes how for instance bathrooms, kitchens and offices of her friends and acquaintances are designed, kept and organized. This ethnographic description is done in a way that totally defamiliarizes the hegemony of Western lifestyle.  Moreover, she uses ethnography to question cultural relativism. Since, if in doing ethnography “cultural relativism” is considered as observing values and institutions of any given society as having an internal logic of their own, Danger and Purity argues against it. For, it attempts to establish a universal pattern of dirt-avoidance practices and as such it is arguing for structuralism against cultural relativism.

Also, if the task of ethnography is to treat the familiar world of members as anthropologically strange, to expose its social and cultural construction, Douglas shows us what we actually share with this strangeness, or in other words it seems that her task in the book is to structurally familiarize dirt-centred practices.

There is a lot more to say about this fascinating book which even after the burst of post-structuralism in 60s has a lot to say to our 21st century way of thinking. Perhaps this wealth lies in the fact that it was challenging and revolutionary. And it continues to seduce us through its invitation to remain uncompromisingly radical in the field of social research.

What is dirt?

I still remember that I promised to write about the conditions of unions in Iran and my personal experience. That will be posted on this blog soon. Yet, during the course of my readings for PhD, I encountered Purity and Danger (oh yes! It was a tyche, totally devastated me) which was absolutely overwhelming and has left me magically impressed with the power and perspective of the argument. To the extend that I decided from now on I will not repeat my usual idea that anthropology is an orientalist, regressive and out-dated field of scholarly knowledge. This book with its radical claims has had such a powerful political effect beyond the borders of social research that I have decided to be more reflexive.

Well, I know. With the hopeful and promising wave of uprising in the middle east which seems to be destabilizing the hegemony of American allied government in the Arab world, it seems rather irrelevant and apathetic to write about this book which is an analysis of archives on the subject of dirt, but this notion is the link which connects the argument to the modern idea of secularism. This is a book which utterly changes your idea about our sacred distinction between secular and religious lifestyle.

Is Egypt running towards an Islamic catastrophe or would it built a new secular government? Perhaps Purity and Danger smirkingly asks: what is the difference?

Purity and Danger written by Mary Douglas and published in 1966, has been re-printed many times. It is rather surprising that a book which didn’t sell more than 400 in the first five years of publication is still in print and is even regarded as a seminal work of second half of last century. And it is more surprising to know that the revolting culture of sixties did not embrace it. Perhaps, the vicissitude of visibility in the life of this book reveals the true meaning of persistent revolution.

Purity and Danger is an ambitious book. It aims to stretch its claims back to two thousand years ago when Jewish dietary laws were influenced by Hellenistic culture. Bible and the holy books of known and unknown religions are central to its argument. This does not mean that it is ignorant of contemporary conflicts. You can read this book as an outcry to call on holy books, to bring the sacred back to the scenes of social life in general and social studies in particular. However, it is not a missionary imposition of religious thought, rather it is an invitation to re-think the categories of magic, religion and rituals. It aims at re-visiting these out-dated concepts through            what has gone repressed yet it is powerfully ruling our modern lifestyle: dirt.

This book could be a sort of psychoanalytic cure, an attempt to bring back the repressed to the conscious of our modern collective subjectivity through a conversation with archives. It patiently gives space to the forgotten descriptions and details of historical narrative, digs out the filed of comparative religion studies to reveal how much our secular thought is rooted in anthropological studies.

Why dirt? Why not the sacred itself? This book demonstrates to us how the residual of structures, the inconsumable trash of systems is holding the boundaries of social organizations and communities together and as such there is no difference between us and the so-called primitive culture, no difference between strict religious thought and liberal secular belief. They all operate on the same underlying structure. Accordingly, this book is in defence of structuralist argument but at the same time it is unconsciously against it. It reveals its contradictions and shortcomings.

Some of the central themes

The research commences its line of inquiry from the notion of “dirt” across the so-called primitive cultures. It first traces the background of the idea in the available archive through the researches that anthropologists had done and demonstrates that it was through these studies that the relation between dirt and the sacred and unclean was established. The equitation of the sacred and defiled by creditable studies had certain theoretical, cultural and political consequences which for a long time affected the studying of so-called primitive cultures.  This confusing pre-supposition resulted in the idea that primitive cultures did not acquire an exalted understanding of sanctity and divinity. In their view, sacred is only little more than prohibition, “Sacred rules are thus merely rules hedging divinity off, and uncleanness is the two-way danger of contact with divinity” (Douglass, 2002 p9).  Hence, they arrived at the idea that the primitive cultures did not reach to a refined and civilized conception of morality. Also, the confusion between sacred contagion and uncleanness strengthen the assumption that there was a division between magic (primitive belief) and religion (civilized contemporary belief like Christianity). This barrier was drawn by anthropologists from the very start whereby the non-western religions were recognised as operating through mechanical symbols and unfamiliar with the notion of ethics.

The fist chapter of Purity and Danger targets the origin of this belief. Douglas argues that the equitation of sacred and defiled was established by the influential works of social anthropologist James Frazer who recognized the primitive thought as confusing divinity with dirt. This criterion assisted him in developing his main thesis in the ground braking book of Golden Borough whereby he famously divided the human belief into three stages: primitive magic progressing into religion and finally replaced by science.

Douglas does not stop at this point and attempts to demonstrate where this strict barrier between magic and religion emerged by drawing attention to the tradition of thought which influenced Frazer.  She highlights the fact that in the second part of nineteenth century anthropology was interacting significantly with the discourse of theology. Parish ethnologists were closely engaged with the debates of progressionists and degenerationists who were concerned if the so-called savages were capable at all to develop the mental and moral capacities of a civilized man. Robertson Smith the famous theologist and bible scholar, who was a great influence on Frazer, took side as a progressionist and attempted to reconcile theology with the notion of evolution. In his studies of so-called primitive cultures, he sought out the so-called primitive concepts which evolved in Christianity and pollution is amongst the most important. He observed that “the less uncleanness was concerned with physical conditions and the more it signified a spiritual state of unworthiness, so much more decisively could the religion in question be recognised as advanced” (ibid, p14).  Douglas observes the nineteenth century debates on evolution of magic into religion not as an objective and neutral conceptualization of empirical findings. Rather she connects it with the crisis of faith that Christian scholars faced with the development of science. Revealed religion and science seemed contradictory unless a new conceptualization could have defined an evolutionary connection between different stages of human thought. By foregrounding pollution in the split between magic and religion Robertson Smith (reflecting the British circle of Oxford scholars) and Frazer contributed to that debate while Durkheim (reflecting the tradition of French school of sociology) picked up the idea too.  In his book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life he discussed the separation of sacred and profane as the defining quality of religion (in contrast to magic). However, he parted with Robertson Smith when he asserted a total detachment of secular and religious life (thus complete break between sacred and profane).

In this fashion Purity and Danger unfolds the main theoretical battleground of its controversial argument. It highlights the traditions of Western thought which had resulted in the current idea of pollution, namely: Parish anthropology, Oxford circle of biblical scholars, Hegelian dialectics of German thought and French school of sociology. By illumination the fact that their theories were not based on evidences and demonstrating the connection between these thinkers, Douglas sheds light on the fact that the contemporary understanding of primitive cultures, magic thought, religious and secular behaviour were in fact the outcome of internal debates between European scholars and their own changing conception of religion and sacred.  In fact the debate around the notion of dirt illuminates a crisis in Western thought and perhaps the chapter’s title “Ritual Uncleanness” ironically alludes to the rites these thinkers performed to theoretically categorise the emerging hybrid culture of contemporary modernism.

Furthermore, Purity and Danger turns its attention from a textual and archival understanding of dirt to a more tangible observation in primitive culture. As “comparative religions has always been bedevilled by medical materialism” (Ibid, p36), the objective inquiry of dirt finds it’s starting point at the notion of hygiene. The ethnographic observation is obsessed with the hygiene rules of so-called primitive cultures. The meticulous registration of dirt rituals (as Douglass lay it’s numerous examples) has culminated into two opposing views: either the rites are based on a type of fine judgment of hygiene concerns, or they are purely based on erroneous fancies. What Douglas targets in this discussion is what these views actually share which is a hypothetic and baseless assumption that whatever the hygiene rules of primitive cultures are, they are inherently different from our hygiene rules. She argues that in both cases, a barrier has been drawn between our supposedly objective and medical understanding of hygiene and their pre-modern perspective.

However, she asserts that such an assumption is baseless and “our” and “their” rules despite the difference in details are driven by the same logic: symbolic separation. She decentres the core of anthropological argument by shifting the discussion into our modern system of pollution. She dismissed the influence of recent knowledge of pathogenicity stating that modern dirt-avoidance already existed before scientific discoveries. Hence, through subtracting pathogenicity from the notion of dirt she arrives at the core of her argument that is what dirt is: “A matter out of place, dirt is never a unique isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. This idea of dirt takes us straight into the filed of systems of purity”. (Ibid, p44)

This is a point where Purity and Danger lifts up its argument from the level of observation, criticism and opposing to the level of a fresh and authentic theorization. By proposing this shift of angle, it unfolds what it can offer to replace the problematic and controversial ideas. Also, decentering existing arguments occurs through the application of a new methodology. To introduce the new idea, the book is detached from seemingly objective ethnographic arguments to an abstract level of theoretical structuring. To explain how dirt is produced, it emphasises on the way patterns of perception, merging and diverging of objects appear and sustain at a symbolic level. Thus, it seems that the main argument of the book is under the influence of structuralism and it argues for a symbolic structuring of diverse and disparate range of observations.

However, this should not be ignored that despite the focus on structures, dirt is something which remains not-absorbable, it is a residual. In other words, dirt is about an excess of the structure, what which cannot be assimilated. This is a view which connects purity and danger to the post-structuralist discussion as its main concern can be seen as surplus signification of material culture. This line of argument is not developed in the book, perhaps because the theoretical context was not mature at the time to embrace and nourish it. This is probably why the question of how perception of dist changes and the role of subjectivity remain unanswered.

After rejecting a medical notion of dirt, Douglas focuses on ethical justification of dirt-avoidance. Ethical reasoning expressed by biblical scholars attempted to moralize the prohibition of anomalies in Leviticus arguing that because of their body and foot shape these animals were barred from consumption by human. In an old version of book, Douglas argued that the fact that these creatures confuse categories of animals they were abominated. Yet, in 2002 edition she revised her previous view and in an attempt to further deepen the symbolic weight of her theory, she asserts that abominations of Leviticus do not reflect abhorrence, rather they mirror the symbolic agreement between God and believers. Human can consume what can be sacrificed, “the dietary laws intricately model the body and the altar upon one anther”(Ibid, p XVi).

In April I finished up a series of posts on the anthropological concept of “cosmology” (meaning a coherent system of thought), and the relationships historians of the 1980s were able to draw between it and the historical practice and fate of natural philosophy — including scientific cosmology — in the 18th and 19th centuries.  (See especially Simon Schaffer’s clear 1980 argument on this point.)

In my last post in that series, I noted that in seeking to ground Michael Faraday’s (1791-1867) physical convictions in his Sandemanian religious beliefs, Geoffrey Cantor used the term “theology of nature” to distinguish ideas implicit in Faraday’s thought from a contemporaneous, but more explicitly reasoned “natural theology”.  To quote the subtitle to William Paley’s (1743-1805) 1802 book, Natural Theology, natural theology sought “evidence of the existence and attributes of the deity” in the study of nature.  For Faraday, though, only the certain revelation of the Bible could produce knowledge of God, making it necessary for historians to excavate his personal theology of nature.

Some time later, it occurred to me it might not be a bad idea to chase down this “theology of nature” term, which led me directly to Stephen Toulmin’s 1982 essay collection, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature.  Aha.  Since today marks the first anniversary of Toulmin’s death, I thought it might be a good time to try to type something up that helps put Toulmin, a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, into our history of the history of science of the 1980s.

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned Thony C’s post on the place of Galileo’s Dialogo within a whole range of what I intentionally called “astronomical-cosmological” ideas.  Thony presented Galileo as being somewhat disingenuous about the number of competing systems that astronomers were then considering and those systems’ relative status in contemporaneous astronomical thought.  The implication is that the only thing going on in the Dialogo was a sort of popularization of that thought.  What Thony knows but left unsaid was that astronomers were not the sole players in the cosmology game in the early 17th century.  

Religious cosmology — using philosophy and literature to situate heaven, hell, earth, and their respective inhabitants and their physical and moral relation to each other — was intricately developed at that time, answered questions about where all the important stuff fit in, and doubtless held wider interest than astronomy.  In much popular and theological thought, Dante’s cosmology, to take one example, was doubtless seen as of a kind with Copernicus’s, and probably as more intuitive.  As I understand it, Dante was likewise controversial among Church authorities during the Counter-Reformation.  The Church, of course, was centrally concerned with preserving the rectitude of public thinking, and not with splitting hairs between literary, theological, and mathematical genres of cosmology when it came to censoring dangerous ideas available to the literate public.

As Toulmin has it, it was a “historical accident” in Hellenistic thought that combined theological and physical speculation (he calls it “astrophysics”) with Babylonian predictive astronomy — a combination that remained more-or-less quiescent until Renaissance thought opened up the tensions inherent in it. However, the onset of natural philosophical reform did not break the link cleanly.  Toulmin observes that 17th and 18th-century natural philosophers’ reorganization of the cosmos retained earlier religious cosmologists’ requirement that theological and ethical considerations feature in any philosophically satisfactory cosmology.  This marked the rise of “natural religion”.

Thus, the role of God in the cosmos remained an important problem for Newton and later thinkers: “The subtle balance of between inertia and gravitational attraction manifested in the stability of the solar system was only one of the many respects in which, as Newton saw it, the operations of nature testify to the rationality of nature’s Creator.”  Natural religious interest in the ethical order of the cosmos then persisted uninterrupted through the Bridgewater Treatises of the 19th century before finally petering out after Darwin.  (More recent historians would doubtless extend the timeline to many more recent figures.)  Toulmin’s ideas here find dramatic confirmation, for example, in Schaffer’s early analysis of the role of fire in maintaining the ethical acceptability of evolutionary cosmologies like Kant’s.

However, Toulmin’s central concern was not historiographical but philosophical: what were the implications of the final separation of natural thought from natural religion for our own ethical order?  He argued that scientific investigation of the natural world was beset by disciplinary specialization, which sought certainty in closely circumscribed problems, associating science ever more closely with instrumental technologies, and ever less with the integrative criticism of philosophy and ethics (p. 235):

Within a situation in which intellectual efficiency had decreed the subdivision of science into independent disciplines, the instrumental rationality of Max Weber’s bureaucracy simply wiped out the former responsibility that natural theologians had accepted to the common enterprise on which they and the scientists had earlier collaborated….  In short, the disciplinary fragmentation of science during the nineteenth century seemingly made the integrative function of natural theology seem quite unnecessary.

Stephen Toulmin (1922-2009)

Toulmin did not think this was a good thing.  What he felt scientists thought they had achieved through discipline and the rejection of natural theology was “objectivity”, which meant they attained a status as a removed “spectator” to timeless truths — a position he associated with the dualism of Rene Descartes.  “Even today,” Toulmin argued, “[the Cartesian commitment to the intellectual superiority of objective, universalizable knowledge] remains strongly influential: for instance, in Noam Chomsky’s scorn for anthropological linguistics, which he regards as intellectually shallow by comparison with the general theories of transformational grammar, and in those bitter methodological rivalries over the respective claims to ‘scientific objectivity’ and ‘personal understanding’ which split (and sometimes destroy) departments of psychology in American universities” (245).

Toulmin regarded specialization and the attendant pretense to objective knowledge to have enormous consequences.  It created what Francis Bacon called an “Idol”, which, Toulmin thought, had come to govern the modern world — a point he was to develop further in his 1992 book Cosmopolis.

This view sets the stage for a recitation of a well-worn theodicy of modernity: the idea that scientific progress had outstripped moral progress, leading to the incidence and prospect of various evils (p. 252):

Ours is a time when the problems of natural resources and energy utilization, environmental insults and endangered species — all those attentions on which the ecology movement is focusing attention today — have ceased to be merely transient and local, and have become continuing and worldwide problems….  Far from being free to sit in the stands and watch the action with official detachment, like the original theoroi at the classical Greek games, scientists today find themselves in the dust of the arena, deeply involved in the actual proceedings.  They have thought of themselves as spectators; but they have been forced to double, at the very least, as team trainers and physicians.

It was the scale of the evils of the modern world that, for Toulmin, required a “postmodern” re-synthesis of scientists, their epistemology, their social role, the objects of their investigation, and the ethical consequences of their work back into a unified “cosmos”.  He claimed that “some first movement toward a revival of ‘natural religion,’ and a reunion of science with ‘natural theology,’ is already underway, though not necessarily under explicitly theological colors” (261).

He very explicitly understood this movement to be a restoration of the lost traditions of cosmology, albeit in drastically modified form: “No doubt, the new philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were right to condemn the unity of older astrocosmology … as a specious unity; but that did not rule out all possibility of finding some alternative and sounder basis for seeing all things in the world — human, natural, and divine — as related together in some orderly way, that is to say, in a cosmos” (226).

What was ultimately called for was a new criticism that could develop ideas about the physical-ethical cosmos.  Existing gestures (as in ecological and psychoanalytical thought) were incomplete, but they could “give useful pointers toward the issues that will need to be addressed by any future ‘theology of nature,’ and toward the problems that must be analyzed if such a new cosmology is to stand up to criticism, and carry conviction, after three hundred and fifty years in limbo” (265).

**

Reading Toulmin I am struck, first, by the ingenuity of certain points in his historico-criticism, and second, by the banality of his diagnosis and periodization of the source of modern evil.  By placing responsibility for evil in the hands of a Cartesian-instrumental rationality, supposing the marginalization of critical philosophy, and declaring a need for critical philosophers to reintegrate scientific and ethical thought, he followed in a long line of anti-Enlightenment and anti-Vienna Circle thought.

The argument, for example, is central to the World War II and Cold War-era critical theories of totalitarianism of Friedrich Hayek (1899-1922), Karl Popper (1902-1994), and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), as well as to the critical program of the Frankfurt School.  Toulmin’s Guardian obituary even notes his agreement with Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) on just this point.   (Thanks to Chris Donohue for much of this intellectual history; I retain responsibility for its use here.)

Of course, one should also understand Toulmin’s strategy of re-situating “science” within a social and ethical framework as of a piece with many strands of science-studies criticism taking place from the 1970s onward.  One should likewise recognize the influence of anthropologist Mary Douglas’ insistence on the inevitability of cosmology as a crucial spur to science-studies-inspired historical investigations of the “cosmos” surrounding epistemology within times and places where Toulmin’s periodization insists it was absent.

The entente Schaffer forged between his early studies of cosmology and the critical thought of Joseph Priestley and William Whewell, and his investigations of more exact sciences testifies to this last impetus.  As does Cantor’s search for Faraday’s “theology of nature” in his scientific work.  As do Steven Shapin’s brash periodizations of the moral life of scientists.  As do (what I gather to be) Lorraine Daston’s attempts to rediscover the moral and aesthetic aspects of allegedly rationalist Enlightenment epistemology.  As do many historians’ identifications of technological “enthusiasm” and “skepticism” in 20th-century scientific and engineering practice.  As does a general historiographical preoccupation with locating cultural “ideals” governing day-to-day scientific work in any given time and place.

What unites all of this literature (except perhaps Shapin’s most recent work) is a historical assumption that, somewhere along the line, scientists, and, consequently, historians who followed scientists’ histories, became oblivious to the social and moral cosmos surrounding science.  They trust in the objectivity of scientific methods, and in the self-evident power of these methods to dictate action.  This returns the literature to the theodicy of modernity that grants it cogency.  The ability of science and a science-permeated society to proceed absent a fully integrated and self-conscious realization of their epistemological and moral cosmos is thought to be precarious and fraught with controversy.

Thus, it is understood as incumbent on a new generation of critics and historians to reveal and explicate the invisible assumptions and socio-epistemic structure of scientists’ “cosmos” by establishing a much-enriched portraiture of current and historical scientific work, thought, and, above all, controversy.  By this reasoning, for example, Daston and Peter Galison’s investigation of the aesthetic and moral dimensions of epistemically valid, i.e. “objective” representation is deemed a viable and valuable project.

I find the entire program untenable, because it shares a critical assumption that it is, in fact, objectivity, which modern thought has seen as a crucial source of authority and justification for action.  Lose the assumption that objectivity, discipline, authority, and action are so intimately linked — and introduce an assumption that the legitimacy of actions and institutions is based on the sufficient agreement between vague subjective assessments that institutions and actions are desirable and efficacious — and the cogency of this critical program and the sufficiency of the history it produces become difficult to uphold.

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Behavioural psychologist Dan Ariely’s interesting website has a question about why we seem to care so much about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, when we don’t seem to care as much about other big environmental disasters such as the ongoing destruction of the Amazonian rainforest.

Some good points are raised, including some fairly obvious ones

• the Gulf is nearer to the US,
• there was a definite starting point for the oil spill,
• there are clearly defined bad guys,
• etc.

All of these kinds of explanation lend themselves very well to analysis on the basis of bounded rationality – we make use of cognitive biases to organise ourselves and these biases aren’t very rational, or are rational only in a limited way. For example, it is somewhat rational to be concerned about environmental problems close to home, but it would be more rational (if that’s possible) to be concerned also about distant problems since they may still have a local impact. Indeed, even for a resident of Louisiana it’s possible that the destruction of the Amazon could be more significant than the oil spill – not in terms of column inches perhaps but in many other ways.

But here I want to put concern about the oil spill in anthropological context and suggest it’s about pollution.

What is pollution? It can be defined simply as matter out of place. But though the word pollution has a modern-sounding technical meaning to it that sits quite at home in the terminology of, say, the Environmental Protection Agency, it also has a much older set of meanings. These relate to religious concepts of ritual purity and contamination.

People make sense of the world by categorising it into areas of relative purity and impurity, cleanliness and uncleanliness. The Gulf of Mexico, along with all oceans and seas, is supposed to be clean. Even if it isn’t really clean (in the modern, EPA sense), we still tend to regard large bodies of water as being somehow pristine, pure, safe, wholesome untouched by the contaminating influences of human activity. Cities, on the other hand, are safely unclean. That is to say, few people see them as pure, pristine, safe, untouched by humans, nor do they want them to be. In fact, a big part of the reason we like cities is that they are edgy, risky and dangerous, places where established categories mix and reform in strange combinations. In the city impurity can be deeply attractive (although cities themselves are subdivided into areas of relative purity and impurity – the safe suburbs, the mean streets, the right side and wrong side of the tracks and so on). The great danger faced by pure places is that they will become impure by a process of contamination. Impure places face no such danger since they are already, by definition, impure.

In our dominant worldview, nature can easily become polluted and we need to guard carefully against this (actually we might characterise nature itself as ‘that which can easily become polluted’). However, the city is already polluted and the only real question is how much pollution it is physically and politically possible to put up with. The latter was the inspiration, for example, of Britain’s 1956 Clean Air Act. This was the political response to London’s great smog of 1952, after which the population said ‘enough is enough’.

Now think about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Sure it is a good example of matter out of place, but what would be the proper place for the oil now washing up on beaches and causing pollution? For matter to be out of place, we have to already have an imlicit concept of where the right place would be. What is the right place for BP’s oil?

Well, it was being moved out of the Gulf in order to fuel the automobiles that get people around cities. It was being pumped out of the ground in order to burn it in millions of portable internal combustion engines, their exhausts going straight into the air in and around the places we live. Either way we get pollution in the sense meant by the EPA, but in only one of these cases do we get ritual impurity. The pictures of oil-soaked sea birds are very emotive, but then so too are pictures of young children with asthma. What makes the difference is that an oil spill in the Gulf fits with a religious or ritual understanding of impurity and contamination, whereas the output of a million exhaust pipes in rush hour is just business as usual in the dirty city.

One of the great contributions of modernist anthropology in the mid-Twentieth Century was the recognition that it isn’t just ‘primitive’ societies that persist with these deeply religious categories of social life. It turns out that the most secular, rational, ‘advanced’ societies are just as much caught up with them and driven by them. Unless we take this understanding on board, we haven’t seen the whole picture.

The Gulf oil spill has a wider context, in which established social categories are under pressure.

In her classic work Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas writes:

‘…a challenge to the established classification is brought under control by some theory of attendant harm.’ (Douglas 2002: xi)

This nicely upends received wisdom on pollution. In the received wisdom it is the established harm which needs to be brought under control by some theory of classification. In other words the dangerous oil spill needs to be put right with a big clean-up. On Douglas’s account, though, it is the very concept of clean and dirty that is under assault, and the danger can be reduced by focussing on the harm threatened by this breakdown in categories. Hence the oil spill is seen not as a technical matter for oil engineers and ecologists to sort out between them but as as a social crisis of monumental proportions. No doubt somewhere someone is touting it as the worst spill in American history or the costliest.

Douglas writes:

‘We may well ask why is it necessary to protect the primary distinctions in the universe…?’

She answers her own question by noting that ambiguity can appear threatening, and that it causes ‘cognitive discomfort’.

However I find this answer tantalisingly incomplete. For sure, a beach with breaking waves of oil causes ambiguity leading to cognitive discomfort, but why doesn’t a street with air made out of particulates? And why doesn’t the clearing of the Amazon?

One way forward might be to foreground the nature/culture distinction which seems so important to us. The supposed breakdown of this distinction is what the writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben has focussed on in books like No Nature and more recently Eaarth. He has claimed there is now no part of nature that has not been affected (infected?) by human activity. All nature is now ‘contaminated’ by culture. In McKibben’s writing, a nature/culture ambiguity is ubiquitous.  ‘Behaviour that blurs the great classifications of the universe’, to use Douglas’s phrase, is now what goes on all the time.

The ‘great classifications of the universe’ are themselves contested. Why do some people and institutions worry about the oil spill and others hardly at all? That’s where the four cultures come into play, organising our understanding of which classifications matter or can be threatened and which don’t matter or remain secure.

Related Articles

• BP oil continues to pollute on land (sfgate.com)
• Cleaning Up on the Oil Spill: Who’s Making Money? (time.com)

- une contribution à la sociologie des institutions.

Here’s a good summary of Mary Douglas‘s Cultural Theory written in French (with an English abstract). It was published in SociologieS in 2006.

Marcel Calvez, « L’analyse culturelle de Mary Douglas : une contribution à la sociologie des institutions », SociologieS [En ligne], Théories et recherches, mis en ligne le 22 octobre 2006, Consulté le 07 septembre 2010. URL : http://sociologies.revues.org/index522.html

It has become, in recent years, quite common to equate concepts of waste with ideas of dirt, disgust or contagion. Following the work of Mary Douglas (1966), studies across the humanities and social sciences have taken for granted that ‘filth’ and ‘abjection’ provide a necessary condition for waste. Objects of waste, then, stand in opposition to all that is clean, hygienic or orderly. Of course, it is quite easy to think of situations in which we discard something without disgust or recourse to notions of dirt and abjection; objects that are considered technologically, architecturally or informationally obsolete, for instance, are frequently discarded without reference to the idea of dirt, disgust or repulsion. In what follows, I propose, instead, quite a different approach to the subject of waste that stresses the temporal problems that things of waste present. We contrast times of waste with the way in which use brings things into a contemporary and complicit time, made timely by our projects, our plans and our activities. Use makes objects projective in this way, throwing things towards a functioning future. Waste, on the other hand, describes objects that are no longer commensurable with our action. Objects of waste are therefore things that are no longer felt to be our temporal co-dependents. Cut adrift from the teleology of use, the time of waste is untimely, marked by a sense of temporal dislocation.

There are a number of reasons why I have chosen the work of the British artist Cornelia Parker to discuss the relationship between art, waste and temporality. The first reason is a matter of convenience – her work is full of waste things, stuff that has been discarded or is undergoing a process of disposal. The second reason is more specific to Parker’s method of interrogating things and the meanings that pre-exist her interaction with them. Her work demonstrates how these meanings can undergo change, transformation and translation. Her best known works, Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988–89), Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), Mass: Colder Darker Matter (1997), Avoided Object (1995), and The Negative of Words (1996), operate in a diffuse chorus to reassess how meaning becomes attached to and validated by material; explicating how these attachments can become located, detached and reconfigured. Parker does not so much create as recreate things, taking what pre-exists and manipulating this condition of pre-existence in order to query the time we distribute to things.

One of the temporal effects most commonly associated with Parker’s work is the relationship between object and action. This temporal effect is particularly evident in works where Parker includes, manufactures or engages with objects of waste, with things in which the problematic distinctions between use and non-use, the active and the dormant, the telling and the unintelligible motivate our critical engagement.

We begin with an explosion; a common garden shed exploded into hundreds of shards, fragments, particles. And, after this explosion, there follows a careful process of arrangement where each fragment is attached to wire and suspended within a gallery space. The shards are gathered around a single light bulb that has been found intact among the debris that the explosion has left in its wake. The creation of Parker’s Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View is a choreographic, almost photographic act, an assisted readymade that speaks of an event by which waste has been created – a waste, a remnant, a remainder of action caught in an unreal time that is neither fabricated nor factual, present nor absent. These objects have been retained and displayed to unfold this weird and wired tableau that, despite its apparent inertia, demands that we follow the course of things through a process of creative destruction. On the gallery wall a small piece of text tells us that Parker had taken a garden shed to the British army and, with the help of some explosives, dispensed with this rather diminutive yet functional piece of garden architecture.  The work’s subtitle, ‘An Exploded View’, helps us to trace the relationship between the artwork that is suspended before us and the creative work of destruction that the art required.  It is a work that seems to make exigent certain conceptual and temporal problems, particularly about the condition of ‘found’ materials and the temporal baggage they might carry. We are asked to juxtapose the rich artifice of Parker’s ‘exploded view’ with the explosion that has been instrumental in its making; each ‘explosion’ needs the other to be known, and yet we come to know both through these lowly and disreputable objects, through objects that come to be by having been.  In rendering the garden shed a porous yet tantalisingly opaque spectacle, our ‘view’ of the shed (both visually and conceptually) is exploded. Parker brings an assembly of objects and suspends them as if they were in flight, as if have they have been and are on their way to a temporal and spatial ‘elsewhere’. Throughout the course of this paper I’d like to argue that it is, in part, a particular quality of waste that gives this elsewhere an ambivalent presence. As objects that signal absent times, we identify things of waste precisely because they no longer do what they once did. I argue that Parker puts this quality of waste to work, showing that waste is not just ‘matter out of place’ (c.f. Mary Douglas) but matter that originates from a multitude of times and places. It is this sense of dispersal that Parker utilises, petrifies and makes mobile.

Although Cornelia Parker assembles her extinct shed into something that looks nothing like a healthy shed full of tools and old bits of rope, Cold Dark Matter is, nonetheless, an enclosure made of tools and old bits of rope. What kind of relationship has been established between shed and ex-shed? Jonathan Watkins has argued that, “by blowing up the shed Parker is taking away such a place, throwing doubt on all that it represents. Its contents are revealed, damaged in the process and yet somehow more eloquent” (Watkins, 1996: 30). For Watkins, the shed’s destruction performs a kind of exorcism, removing both the location of the shed’s meaning and its referential stability.  By erasing the shed’s reclusive, secluded and domestic qualities its conceptual fidelity comes under scrutiny. Parker has said that her work aims to take the clichéd beliefs that objects transport and, by unmaking and refashioning these objects, tries to reconfigure the ideas that are associated with them:

“I like the idea of the material already being loaded, or clichéd. By trying to unpick or dismantle something and remake it, somehow the perimeters get changed. What I’m trying to do is to take very clichéd monumental things, things that everybody knows what they are (or think you know what they are) and then trying to find a flip side to it or the unconscious of it” (Parker, 2000: 24).

Here we might recognise the ecstatic echoes of Heidegger’s notion of the broken tool: the failure of equipment produces a before and an after, a moment that brings to light all that was secret and hidden (1962: 98). But this shed has not failed in the Heideggerian sense; it was knowingly destroyed. Neither are the fragments of the shed taken up for repair or merely discarded as useless. Parker has taken the clichéd time of the shed – as a store of things, a retreat, a place of quiet seclusion – and, through the mediating function of its remains, strung this time up for examination. In what sense has the shed or its contents been removed? Clearly, the remains succeed in making the shed or the trace of the shed visible, but visible in a way that is felt to be somewhat divorced from the time of its ‘materiality’, to a time when it was for something. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the shed and the times and places it evokes have not vanished, but have become visible in a new way: suspended, caught in time.

If “the piece evolves out of the ambiguity of the material” (2000: 24), as Parker once observed, then from this evolutionary process we might narrate the effects of this ambiguity. In presenting these ambiguous and suspended things, Parker affects a lithe and fragile collage of associations between different events, times and places. Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View mediates these events, times and places, issuing us a challenge to reconcile its temporal and spatial locations. Intensifying this challenge is what I term the ‘exigency of waste’, Cold Dark Matter behaves like a red rag to our reconstructive compulsions which have us reconstitute, explain and relocate what a particular waste object is, or was or yet might be.  The narrative exigency of Parker’s work is therefore an effect of the temporal problems we encounter with the material she employs. This emphasis on narrative responses shouldn’t give cause for critical abandon or blind, ‘anything goes’ subjectivism; quite the opposite is the case. Parker’s deliberate gesture of making, unmaking and remaking anew, precludes any sense of absolute plurality. Waste itself establishes estranged relationships within an object, a temporal break between an object’s use and non-use. This process of estrangement neither erases an object’s meaning nor does it make it more meaningful; it simply makes the task of narrating the biography those things a much more risky and compelling task.

In 1997 Parker was working as artist in residence at ArtPace, San Antonio, Texas. She heard that a small church had been struck by lightning and had burnt to the ground. Having gained permission to collect the charred remains, she arranged and displayed the fragments on wire, densely grouped towards the centre and more sparsely distributed towards its periphery. The results had so much in common with her earlier work that she saw fit to make the connection linguistically explicit, naming it Mass (Colder Darker Matter). The difference between this and her earlier work is that the objects that Parker has collected, suspended and displayed to an audience, create a kind of narrative ellipsis or aporia. Whereas in Cold Dark Matter many of the shed’s fragments were recognisable things from a shed, making immediate our narrative transition between shed and ex-shed, time of use and time of waste, the charred remains of the Texan church are less readily apprehended. This obscurity arises, among other things, through the difficulty of locating an event from which the work arose, a reliable narrative source.

“You can’t really tell it’s a church unless you read the label”, Parker observes, “I was reconstituting it. It’s now abstract” (2000: 58). The work is certainly more ‘abstract’ in the sense that our flights of interpretation seem to depend less on familiar ‘useful’ forms as they did in Cold Dark Matter, but, again, Parker is careful to provide a description that locates her source material. The label reads: “Mass (Colder Darker Matter), 1997 / Charcoal retrieved from a church struck by lightening / With thanks to the Baptist Church of Lytle, Texas”. Parker has deliberately assuaged the bafflement of her audience and directed us towards the disjuncture felt between the time of use and the time of waste. Her gratitude to the “Baptist Church of Lytle, Texas” simply underpins the dispersed geography of the work, as well as highlighting the humorous and ambivalent role that the church has played in the work’s composition. With the agency and identity of church and ex-church held in a rich state of temporal suspension, as it was with the shed of Cold Dark Matter, we begin to see how divergent times and places might hang together.

I’d like to suggest that one of the elements that prevents Parker’s work from becoming a pure abstraction, from falling beyond the reach of any sensible or determinate assessment, is the temporal structure drawn between the event that has destroyed the church and the presentation of its charred fragments. The pre-existing meanings of things and the events in which these objects participate provide Parker’s work its narrative energy: “The work really makes itself; you are just rearranging the materials” (ibid). Although it might be tempting to dismiss this comment as false modesty, we should take seriously the claim that her manipulation of waste renders her work in some way autopoietic, generating work that “makes itself”. The invocation of an event of waste, the moment where use has ceased and waste has come into being, can be seen as one way to think through this issue of autopoiesis and the self-generating and autonomous actualisation of an artwork. Mass makes itself because it takes the way in which time is organised around the use and non-use of things as an arbitrary point of narrative departure, it takes the relation between ‘church’ and ‘charcoal’ as a temporal arrangement ready for rearranging.

The last work we’ll consider, Heart of Darkness (2004), is more recent. But, by playing out the powerful marriage between objects, time, and narrative that we have pursued so far, this work reveals itself to be no more or less contemporary than Parker’s other works. It provides a useful conclusion to this paper because it emphasises an aspect of waste that has so far been obscured: repetition. Parker’s repeated use of waste objects in her sculpture insists that waste (and our responses to it) is not rare. Whilst waste always occurs within singular circumstances, the temporal inscription that seems to characterise a thing of waste, the divorce between its working ‘life’ and its ‘living death’, makes the labour of narrating waste much more common than it might at first appear. When we speak of waste we must automatically become time-travelling elegists that navigate the past in order to make sense of the now. Indeed, old shoes in the street or an abandoned ruin mean little without this ability to respond to a time that is both present and absent, cindered and supplemented. In Heart of Darkness, Parker employs a formula that should now be familiar to us, stringing up objects that have spent their existence in one time and yet seem capable of making a noisy demonstration of their non-use, re-use and reassembly.

The gallery description of this work, along with the title’s invocation of Conrad’s novel, sets our attention upon a particular tack. We are told that the Florida Forestry Division was ‘managing’ a woodland area by burning back what was adjudged overgrown, but the fire got out of control and quickly spread, burning large areas of woodland. As in Mass, Parker collects the remains of this event and arranges them in a cube, suspending the fragments on wire. Again, the human and the non-human are tragically interconnected; any attempt to apportion blame, to designate whose ‘heart’ has been darkened or where this heart is said to reside is rendered problematic by a work composed of a multitude of actors, times and places, all of which, through charred remains, are related to one another in subtly different ways. What does become clear is that the gesture of taking these remnants, and stringing them up in order to make those objects speak in new and peculiar ways, must traverse and enact the problem of their manufacture. To interpret Parker’s work is to already engage with how objects carry, mould and are given time through the cessation of their use and functionality. One must, then, respond to the contingent and incomplete termination that waste objects can suggest; these are things neither dead nor alive but perpetuating a spectral and untimely afterlife. Their employment within sculpture is necessarily the result of their redundancy elsewhere, in a time and place that is also felt to be actively redundant. These things neither become useless, nor do they take back the use they once enjoyed, they remain uncanny remnants.

Through the work of Cornelia Parker, I hope I’ve been able to propose a new vocabulary for speaking about artworks that include, manufacture or engage with objects of waste, as relevant to the work of Cornelia Parker as it might be to Duchamp, Tinguely, Schwitters, Beuys, and so on. We should question how a work of art can be made timely or, indeed, untimely by using stuff that has been exhausted, discontinued and cast aside. I think we could generalise here and call objects of waste, and the sculptural works that employs this material, ‘multitemporal things’: stuff that does not seem to belong to any particular time but is the sum of many different and diverging periods. These are not objects with a clear or uniform tense; they are, instead, those things that feel as if past, present and future have tumbled together. It is through this temporal conflict between passing and persisting, transience and endurance, cessation and survival that makes the relationship between art and waste one that is so rich with generative potential. This is untimely art but not through any intrinsic, counter-temporal or atemporal quality of art itself, but an untimeliness that originates out of the type of matter that Parker has puts to work.

Works Cited.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. 1966; London: Routledge, 2002.

Heidegger, Martin. Being in Time. Trans John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.

Morgan, Jessica. ‘Matter and What it Means’ in Cornelia Parker: Second Edition. Ed. The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Boston: Art Data, 2000. 11–44.

Parker, Cornelia. ‘Cornelia Parker interviewed by Bruce Ferguson’ in Cornelia Parker: Second Edition. Ed. The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Boston: Art Data, 2000. 45–65.

Watkins, Jonathan. ‘Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View’ in Avoided Object. Ed. Stuart Cameron Cardiff: Chapter, 1996. 25–38.

The hypothesis of cricket blogger downatthirdman is that as the culture of the English downlands shifted from strong grid – strong group Hierarchy towards a weaker grid- weaker group Individualism in the Eighteenth century, so the game of cricket became an ideal carrier of the new values.

Cricket’s mix of team work, rule formalism and recognition of individual prowess (earned status as opposed to ascribed status) was exactly suited for the times. It’s certainly an interesting idea.

“As the requirements of the social structure changed so the culture responded in the type of rituals (including games) needed to reinforce the system. Cricket with its mixture of team work and individualism exactly met the need. Its time had come.”

You can read more at Chalk and cheese: towards a cultural theory of cricket.

And there’s a second instalment here, with some great pictures: The cradle of cricket was an old fashioned car boot sale.

Given the recent match fixing scandal that has engulfed international cricket in recent weeks I can’t help wondering whether a similar analysis could be made of the current situation.  One way of looking at corruption in professional sport might be to see it as an over-emphasis on competitive Individualism, in which rule-following is a hindrance to financial success and the winners are the ones who get away with it.

Related Articles

• Cricket and corruption: a sport that needs fixing | Editorial (guardian.co.uk)
• Imran Khan on corruption in cricket (bbc.co.uk)
• ‘Cricket’s biggest chance to clean itself’ – Rahul Dravid (cricinfo.com)
• Sorry affair steals a little more light from Pakistanis’ lives (theage.com.au)

In these papers, a historiographical malignancy is identified: an insistence on seeing a rise of reasoned polity and society, and of spaces of free inquiry; this rise is attended by a decline of false belief.  This is considered a malignancy because it ignores the extensive and persistent controversies over various beliefs.  The remedy, thus, is taken to be what I call “insultography”: a charting of commonalities in the polemics used to secure the boundaries of belief about what exists, or at least what is plausible.  Historical “polemical work” consistently references widely acknowledged sources of credit-worthiness and discredit (in Pt. 1 these pervasive opinions are referred to as “grand cultural ideas”): religious piety, superstition, the vulgar crowds, the emotional manipulation and illusion of the theater, courtly society, bourgeois society, investment schemes, the legacy of Isaac Newton…  Historians’ failure to acknowledge the historical importance of this polemical work as they chart the history of knowledge is taken to stem from their own selective credulity toward of these same polemics.

The current goal is to understand why the identified historiographical issue is considered an important malignancy and why the remedy is considered apt.  As suggested in Pt. 2, portraying historiographical issues as malignancies could be used to explain a gnawing problem of historiographical craft: fragmentation.  In his (free, and well worth reading) 2005 Isis article on this fragmentation phenomenon in the historiography of science, David Kaiser traced complaints about it as far back as a 1987 article by Charles Rosenberg in Isis, a 1991 Casper Hakfoort article in History of Science, and a 1993 James Secord article in BJHS.  Kaiser suggested that the fragmentation was akin to specialization that occurred within the natural sciences as they expanded in the 20th century, pointing to similar patterns of growth in the recent history of the history of science discipline. 

In the natural sciences, the key danger of specialization is topical and methodological isolation.  Lacking an overarching understanding of the interconnections between the sciences, it becomes difficult to apply knowledge from one branch of the sciences to another even though natural phenomena often cannot be explained by reference to a single specialty.  Only expressly interdisciplinary efforts can establish new links.

If historiographical fragmentation is related to scientific specialization, this lets us see it as a symptom of unnatural divisions between historians’ efforts.  Some — such as dividing the historical record by place and period — are historians’ own doing.  Others are inherited.  Historians may limit themselves to distinct disciplines: physics, biology, physiology and medicine.  What had not occurred to me is that it could be possible to think of divisions between history of science and cultural history as being a product of this inherited fragmentation as well.  But it follows easily in Schaffer’s arguments: the historical record is divided into science and culture, or knowledge claims and polemics.  The expunging of polemics from the record of science is part of what Schaffer refers to as the “‘amnesia’ of realism”.

As with divisions by period, by region, and by discipline, the answer to fragmentation-as-specialization between the histories of science and culture is interdisciplinary work.  What constitutes a successful interdisciplinary historiography, however, seems not to have been a subject of serious meditation.  The idea seems to have been that you could put an eclectic bunch of scholars together in a room for a few days, and have them find similarities between their work.  The fact that you could find similarities validated the exercise and the notion that unnatural divisions appeared in the historical record, and that interdisciplinarity was the solution.

This is an undiscriminating kind of interdisciplinarity.  In juxtaposing portions of the historical record arbitrarily or semi-arbitrarily, commonalities found will revolve around pervasive historical phenomena, in particular the “grand cultural ideas” that manifest themselves in polemics.  This pervasiveness, combined with the notion that these ideas represented a heretofore hidden cultural content of science gave these ideas a status in the historiography of science as the missing “social” component of epistemology.  Conveniently, these ideas will also find overlap with the subjects treated by social and cultural historians.

Some sympathetic critics had long voiced their suspicions of this sort of exercise.  Notably, in his 1980 Isis review of Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin’s Natural Order (1979) collection, Charles Rosenberg had observed that the observations relating to the cultural content of science were “facile”, lacking the more detailed reference to social, political, and intellectual context that would give them meaning.  Where Barnes and Shapin, inspired by anthropologist Mary Douglas, seemed to want to reconstruct “cosmologies” that linked knowledge with social order in intricate ways, Rosenberg saw more of a kinship to Arthur Lovejoy’s (1873-1962) history of ideas in the tendency of this historiography to satisfy itself with identifying common cultural tropes in the historical record.

The 1980s were to be the proving ground to see which view prevailed.  As Shapin wrote in 1982, it was time to stop doing methodological battle, and to get on with it, to show that the new program for a history of science and culture was both productive, and an augmentation of, rather than a threat to, traditional historiography: “For my part I see no danger of ‘the history of science losing its science’”.  It is my contention that the program, for about ten years, could credibly claim it was on the road to success.  Not only was it connected to striking historiographical successes like Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985), but a productive tension arose between approaches such as Jed Buchwald’s, Smith & Wise’s, Morrell & Thackray’s, Jan Golinski’s, Martin Rudwick’s, and Schaffer’s to major issues like the transformations in the sciences in the decades surrounding 1800.

By the early-to-mid-’90s, claims to programmatic success would be much harder to maintain as warnings such as Rosenberg’s remained apt.  It is possible we can pin this on faulty models of historiographical fragmentation and integration.  If the fact that interdisciplinary history could successfully find overlaps between social history and the history of science validated the exercise, then there was no need to place more stringent bounds on interdisciplinary historiography, despite pleas such as Lorraine Daston’s “Moral Economy of Science” piece (1995).  Further, if the pervasive grand cultural ideas identified came to be seen as a missing key to epistemilogy and as an intentionally effaced fragment of the historical record, pieces could attain value simply by identifying points in the historical record where these ideas manifest themselves (which is what this blog has referred to as the “socio-epistemic problematic”).

Schaffer’s two articles are a microcosm of the resulting historiography: there is no rationale underlying his selection of historical episodes to discuss, nor are the specific connections, or lack of specific connections between them especially important.  Only the most pervasive ideas are taken to be of intellectual value, and thus worthy of historians’ interest.

Perversely, this mode of history-writing exacerbates rather than remedies the phenomenon of historiographical fragmentation.  Aside from any specialization between branches of the historiography, individual works even within specialized branches of historiography become isolated from each other, because the chief concern of historians is not to engage with the details of others’ works, but to share with them an interest in pervasive cultural ideas.  Importantly, though, this historiographical phenomenon is no longer fragmentation-as-specialization, but what this blog refers to as the “new internalism” or the “gallery of practices”.

If the isolation of individual works exacerbates, rather than remedies, the fragmentation of historiography that causes such wide frustration, the question is: why does it persist?  My quite speculative contention is that it is because this mode of historiography had already been identified as possessing the virtue of combating the maladies of fragmentation-as-specialization.  This results in a situation so familiar to political economy: if something does not appear to work, but it has virtue ascribed to it, it must be because it has not been tried strenuously enough.

Schaffer’s pieces must be seen as instrumental (but very far from alone) in instilling this virtue in this mode of historiography.  In identifying a key source of historiographical error and fragmentation, and identifying a key strategy to reverse this malignancy, what was being sold from the hustings, I speculate, was not the history of science to social historians, but the idea of a virtue in a new historiographical culture to historians of science and to social historians alike.

I do not think it was Schaffer’s intention to unify sources of historiographical error, or to unify remedies into a mode of scholarship.  After all, in 1993 he also published the excellent “Comets & Idols”, which had similar arguments about trust and cultural sources of authority, but was much more nuanced in their application (pointing to the function of canonical or “sacred” texts in historical polemics) and addressing the needs of specific branches of historiography (those of cometography and the legacy of Isaac Newton).

Yet, the unifying of sources of error and remedy was precisely what was happening.  Differences between the diversity of perspectives that thrived in the 1980s were slowly ironed out.  In reviewing the Ferment of Knowledge volume (1980) in 1982, Geoffrey Cantor had been optimistic that disparate views of the 18th-century could be productively reconciled, but warned against the language of partisanship that divided historiography into distinctly old and new approaches.  By 1993, amid a rapidly decohering historiography, I speculate that partisan consensus allowed historians to maintain a sense of the virtue and progressiveness in their work.

Necessarily, partisanship papers over differences within parties, and augments the differences between them.  Once the key source of historiographical virtue had been identified, all other tensions hinging on detailed argumentation and synthesis between pieces could be viewed as superfluous.  Technical history was edged to the sides of mainstream history of science; tenuous links to political and business history were severed; philosophy of science was shunned; and strong connections to interested members of the scientific community were allowed to wither.  As I have previously argued, Schaffer’s own approach to the genre of natural philosophy disappeared.  Methodological homogenization and the self-containment of individual pieces followed.

(Note for newer readers of this series: Schaffer’s early work emphasized a systematic relationship between morality, social order, and the contents of knowledge.  See his work in pneumatics and pneumatology for an excellent example; see my post on his “Self Evidence” and my post on what I call the “entente cordiale” between the methodological use of anthropological cosmology and the analysis of historical natural philosophical cosmology for a discussion of the waning of this interest.)

Book Cover for "The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen" by Warwick Anderson

Colonial scientists and the transformative “ritual magic” they perform with their extractive “specimens” is the graphic thread that ties Anderson’s studies of colonial medicine in the Philippines with his other major historical research project in Papua New Guinea (PNG), written up for both a scholarly and a layman readership in his new book The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen. If in the Philippines colonial scientists were collecting shit specimens, in PNG they are collecting brains and other “biologicals.” He gives a compelling account of the decades-long search for the cause of kuru disease among the Fore tribe in the highlands of PNG, once hypothesized as a slow virus, but then eventually shown to be pathogenic protein fragments (prions).  The cast of characters includes doctors, biologists, anthropologists, epidemiologists, geneticists, colonial security agents, the Fore themselves, and a range of local field assistants.  All are drawn in and transformed by the kuru mystery, some to great acclaim including a Nobel prize, others to great shame and scandal, and many more to an abject death. We see how social relations among the Fore and among scientists are defined and extended through networks of asymmetrical exchange. Then we see how a few from each group are able to transect parallel exchange networks, producing new hybrid identities and even more social inequality in the process.

It’s this element of transformation of engaged parties in the contact zone that fascinates me, “making visible the modern primitives and sorcerer scientists.” (7) It’s a theme that animates a lot of the anthropological writing I’ve read ranging from studies of colonialism to subjectivity. It was the concluding thought of a chapter my academic advisors and I wrote about our experiences working in postconflict Aceh. Riffing on Emmanuel Levinas, my advisor wrote: “we are drawn time and again to Aceh and we never return unscathed to our point of origin.” (I will soon return to this recently published chapter in another post) I shouldn’t be surprised then that this too will be a persistent theme in my own dissertation given my own thoughts and feelings about several undeniably scathing engagements during my fieldwork in Aceh.

There isn’t much more I need to add about this book that isn’t already summarized handily on the Johns Hopkins University Press webpage for the book (linked above), which lays out the broad themes, lists two book awards, and quotes a long list of accolades. I’m just glad that I finally got around to reading more of Anderson’s work, and look forward to catching up on his other work in the near-ish future for more dissertation inspiration.

At some point the mountain of the market in Hambledon came to the Mohamed of the sheep-strewn Down with its caring, sharing shepherds in another example of the Clash of Civilizations  that was occurring as England moved from the old established hierarchies with values of reciprocity and order to the market orientated individuality that valued innovation and personal gain – from Chalk to Cheese, from ‘high grid and high group’ to ‘low grid and low group’ to reuse two of Mary Douglas’ categories of Cultural Theory.  

Perhaps the economic activity that we earlier saw developing in Hambledon outgrew the confines of the settlement as this medieval subject-packed painting depicts.

And this period painting of a May Day celebration illustrates.

Certainly there came a point when the Bishopric of Winchester transferred the market up the lane onto a nearby Down in its ownership.

Bord halfpenny or brod halfpenny was an old Saxon term for a fee paid in markets and fairs to the lord or, in Hambledon’s case, to the Bishop for the privilege of having a bord or bench for the sale of articles.

A Broadhalfpenny, as these markets were called, would have looked and felt like a latter day Car Boot Sale with vendors driving miles to a field not far from an economic hub, paying their stall fees on arrival and setting out their goods and wares before the arrival of their patrons.  Others would have set up food and drink ‘outlets’ and ‘rides’ and stalls where customers could test their strength and skills in an expression of this new individuality. 

A permanent structure known as the Hutt was soon built for the sale of ale and punch but the rest would have been a transient, tented stall affair.

The children of stall holders and those of their patrons would soon have grown bored of all this adult ‘stuff’ and looked for their own amusement, drifting away from the main attractions to watch and then mingle with the shepherd boys playing their strange game of whacking a ball with their crooks. 

In a market place it is not just goods that are exchanged.  Stories, ideas, innovations, and games are swapped, tried and developed. No doubt the children would have taken home this new game and played their own versions of it in the back streets of their own villages and towns, as cricket crept west and north from the Weald and the North and South Downs.

One can imagine late in the day the crowd might begin, rather worse for ale and punch, to join in with the craic; swiping and missing, connecting and running, tripping and barging, daring and wagering –  just as when two or three children playing cricket after a picnic on the beach can by sunset have grown to a giant game which has swept up every child and most of the adults along the shore.

Quickly, these town-based newcomers to the game would have imposed their own and differing personalities, temperaments and preferences.  Their values will have been very different to those of the shepherds; more individualistic, more selfish, more competitive, honouring conquest over trials of skill.  The game that bound the shepherd community prepared to divide the communities of its new adherents.  

The Downland qualities of tests of skill and fun and community would mingle with those of domination and winning at any cost; a dichotomy that exists still with the rivalry for our support and appreciation of those who ‘win ugly’ and those who thrill with their dexterity and accomplishment; the scorer of the marathon of the double hundred or the dazzling never to be forgotten seventy; the hammer of pace and the art of spin.

And at least one entrepreneur among them, conceivably the tenant of the Hutt, would have seen the value of organizing a match as part of the attraction of the Broadhalfpenny itself.  After all, he had a ready made market ready for diversification with an arena created by the curving track up from Hambledon.  He had money being made and the thirst to make more.  He had those who wished to compete and wager on the outcome.  And he had others prepared to stake huge amounts on their ability to predict the outcome.

High on the Downs the sheep prepared the wicket.  The springy turf on thin soil above hard chalk made a ball bowled at pace along the ground hop and skip to the frustration of even the best bat.    

On still days you could look from here across the Weald to the North Downs and beyond towards London – that great wen*.  To the south, the onshore breeze brought the taste of salt and the scent of ozone.  The rising wheatfields, prepared last autumn and now in nature’s hand, gave time for leisure. 

It is April and walking with great cheer up the lanes towards these heights, the people of villages, hamlets and farmsteads could come together at this place to play at cricket three hundred years ago and more.  

Sometimes they played against each other, picking sides as people arrived: the old against the young or the shepherds against the rest; those of one hamlet against those of another or the married against the bachelors.  Sometimes they joined together to take on the challenge of a parish further ‘afield’.

But always having fun at this difficult, frustrating game where the darned ball always bobbles just when you are about to smite it, and when even your demon scuttler, having raced across the turf and beaten the batsman darts right on through the stumps without dislodging the bail, passing the despairing long stop, with his right trouser leg tied with a handkerchief (what is he like?) on and on down the slope as the batsmen laugh and run.

In David Underdown’s engrossing Start of Play, the author identifies the original location of the development of cricket as the Downs and the Weald of South East England.

The typical Downland landscape – the chalk country – was sweeping unfenced hillside, a huge close-cropped sheep pasture, like the one in the photograph above. At around 1700 many villages still grazed their sheep in common. 

There was arable farm land on the lower slopes and the Downland villages strung along the nearby valleys were compactly built with clearly defined central cores, a church, a smithy, an alehouse, a cobbler’s, a cartwright’s.

Even then, as farms sizes started to increase, there were remnants of the old common fields in which the inhabitants sowed the same crops and harvested them together collectively.

As Underdown observes, ‘Strong habits of cooperation were ingrained in such places’. Village institutions, ritualised festivities, mores and manners all stressed the values of neighbourliness and unity.

A symbol and facilitator of this unity would often have been a favourite meeting place, a large tree, a small stretch of green, a patch outside blacksmith’s forge, where people gossiped, relaxed and where impromptu games could take place.

On a simple axis of x and y she sought to plot the location of a social system according to how clearly defined an individual's social position is as inside or outside a bounded social group – termed "group" against how clearly defined an individual's social role is within networks of social privileges, claims and obligations – termed “grid”.

The social anthropologist Mary Douglas who did her fieldwork in the Congo in the 1950s developed a way of classifying cultures according to the degree of ‘group’ and ‘grid’ manifest in a social system.  She and her colleague Aaron Wildavsky later referred to it as Cultural Theory.

A “high group” way of life exhibits a high degree of collective control, whereas a “low group” one exhibits a much lower degree and a resulting emphasis on individual self-sufficiency.  

A “high grid” way of life is characterized by conspicuous and durable forms of stratification in roles and authority, whereas a “low grid” one reflects a more egalitarian ordering. 

The old Downland culture is high group and high grid, well suited to activities and games with an emphasis on team work, where the need for defined roles, shared knowledge of rules, assumptions of common practices and implicit codes of behaviour reinforced the sense of belonging and togetherness.

As the 1700s moved ahead there were more individually owned and larger farms which began to produce for the often distant market, and fewer small freeholders and copyholders engaged in subsistence agriculture.  The gap between rich and poor grew.

Individualistic and market-centred behaviour was supplanting the older order of conformity and cooperation.

As the requirements of the social structure changed so the culture responded in the type of rituals (including games) needed to reinforce the system. 

Cricket with its mixture of team work and individualism exactly met the need.  It’s time had come.

Cricket was uniquely placed to respond to a cultural shift as the bonds of group bonds weakened – giving each individual a chance to shine – and the grip of social stratification weakened – requiring the squire to share the crease with the labourer and face the unpleasant fact that fact that the carter was a better batter than he.

* wen – an indolent, encysted tumour of the skin; especially, a sebaceous cyst – adopted by William Cobbett to describe London.

**In a paper here Mary Douglas explains the history of grid and group cultural history.  This is an extract:  “The group dimension measures how much of people’s lives is controlled by the group they live in. An individual needs to accept constraints on his/her behaviour by the mere fact of belonging to a group. For a group to continue to exist at all there will be some collective pressure to signal loyalty. Obviously it varies in strength. At one end of the scale you are a member of a religious group though you only turn up on Sundays, or perhaps annually. At the other end there are groups such as convents and monasteries which demand full-time, life-time, commitment.

“Apart from the external boundary and the requirement to be present, the other important difference between groups is the amount of control their members accept. This is supplied on the other dimension: grid gives a measure of structure. Some peoples live in a social environment where they are equally free of group pressure and of structural constraints. “This is the zero start where everything has to be negotiated ad hoc. Moving along from zero to more comprehensive regulation the groups are likely to be more hierarchical.

“Put the two dimensions together, group and regulation, you get four opposed and incompatible types of social control, and plenty of scope for mixing, modifying or shifting in between the extremes.”

‘My own preference has emerged as an idealized form of hierarchy. This has always given me to some degree the professional advantage of feeling out of kilter with the times. It gives me a standpoint from which to see that in this 300-year expansionary trend of Western civilization two kinds of cultures have come to dominate, two that are opposed to hierarchy. Today I am arguing that unless we learn to control our cultivated gut response against the idea of hierarchy we will have no choice among models of the good society to counter our long-established predatory, expansionist trend. By sheer default, among cultural forms hierarchy is the rejected Other. We take it for granted that hierarchy will always fall into traps of routinization and censorship; we see its dangers but have no clear model of how it would be if it worked well. Yet hierarchy is the social form that can impose economies, and make constraints acceptable.’ (Douglas 1994:266).

This use of Cultural Theory as a tool for reflexivity is laudable. How does this particular passage make the reader feel – comfortable, or uncomfortable? Perhaps that’s a measure of how far one agrees or disagrees with a hierarchical world view or cultural bias.

Myself, I’m squirming. Especially when Douglas speaks of ‘imposing economies’ and ‘making constraints acceptable’. If these are hierarchy’s trump cards, I’m playing the wrong game. It is not ‘by sheer default’ that the shortcomings of hierarchies have been highlighted. There really are some serious shortcomings.

For the targets of Douglas’s criticism, Egalitarianism and Individualism, it can hardly be said we need more hierarchy, greater bureaucratization, more red tape, a renewed emphasis on distinctions between races, genders and classes, stronger, more ordered leadership. The idea that Egalitarianism is one of the two kinds of cultures that have come to dominate is laughable. If only that were true!

But looking through the four-faceted prism of cultural theory, instead of through the Egalitarian face alone, enables a wider view. This fourfold vision (to quote William Blake, quite out of context) enables an understanding that:

• the opinions I tend to express are just the sorts of thing I would say, as though they had been scripted in advance;
• my own cultural preferences have  indeed made great and lasting inroads into Western society, many of which I simply take for granted;
• if I want to convince people, or connect with them, I need to recognize the seriousness of other perspectives. Other people aren’t stupid or wilfully unobservant. But they may have a different cultural preference with its concomitant axioms and norms.
• Douglas does have a point about Hierarchy – as we set about destroying the bastions of unearned privilege and discrimination in the name of freedom (the Individualist slogan) and equality (the Egalitarian mantra), we do indeed hardly pause to consider what Hierarchy might look like ‘if it worked well’. Perhaps we should. There’s a warning in Douglas’s work that we may be ‘throwing out the baby with the bathwater’. Well, maybe, just maybe, we are.

But…

The passage begs a few questions. It’s interesting that Douglas uses her Cultural Theory to characterise an historical trajectory. She is telling a story here about the sweep of centuries. ‘in this 300-year expansionary trend of Western civilization two kinds of cultures have come to dominate, two that are opposed to hierarchy’. It’s highly suggestive, a bit like Habermas’s tale of the detachment of the Lifeworld from the System, or like one of Foucauld’s genealogies. But there’s a need to be careful with such sweeping historical retellings. If the theory offers a perspective to help explain the temporal trajectory of a civilization, one cannot then also work the other way around and use the history to ‘prove’ or ‘demonstrate’ the theory…

Then there’s the question of balance. Durkheim and the founders of modern Sociology imagined society to be in equilibrium. Many economists still do. They worried about the forces that threatened to unsettle this eirenic scene. Underlying Douglas’s conception of society too is a concern that things have become unbalanced somehow. With Hierarchy in retreat, what could possibly counterbalance ‘our long-established predatory, expansionist trend’? Well, one answer would be: nothing! We’re all going to hell in a handbasket! But who says society actually is a balanced system? It’s all just a metaphor. So we could as well say, as some now do, that the social world can be better characterised as being in dynamic disequilibrium, that tension and unbalance is the order of the day. If this were the case, the demise of Hierarchy, or one of the other cultural biases, is just the kind of thing we might expect to happen from time to time, and yes, it would be unsettling, but not necessarily disastrous. It’s hard to think about this, since our cultural biases predispose us to privilege different trajectories. Hierarchy would of course prefer an equilibrium that required careful management, while Individualism might be more enthused by a bit, or even a lot, of creative destruction.

Mary Douglas may have been ‘wrong’ in the sense that her position in favour of an ‘idealised form of hierarchy’ may be critiqued by those who don’t share it. But she was surely very right to recognise that we do have cultural biases, and that recognising them and owning them is the first step to transcending them.

Now read:

some recent applications of Mary Douglas’s theories to contemporary concerns.

Interview with Mary Douglas.

“There are no items of clothing or of food or of other practical use which we do not seize upon as theatrical props to dramatise the way we want to present our roles and the scene we are playing in. Everything we do is significant, nothing is without its conscious symbolic load. Moreover, nothing is lost on the audience.” — Mary Douglas

What were those natural philosophers thinking?

The natural philosophy problem appears to have remained a topic of serious historiographical conversation through the course of the 1980s.  One big problem is that natural philosophy is a vague term: it applied to aspects of Peripatetic philosophy, but in the twentieth century Harvard physicist Percy Bridgman (1882-1961) still held a chair in mathematics and natural philosophy and was in fact a well-known writer in the philosophy of science.  Some natural philosophy chairs even still exist today (Bertrand Halperin now holds Bridgman’s old chair, and they apparently still officially spell “mathematicks” with a “k”!).

Obviously, all these “natural philosophers” are doing rather different things, so historians would be ill-advised to try and look for a single definition of natural philosophy, even within delimited time periods, or to try and locate a “real” natural philosophy.  One promising tactic is to apply ahistorical analytical criteria to different aspects of natural philosophical work, while allowing that natural philosophers might not have perceived the distinctions between these “aspects”.

As we have seen for the eighteenth-century heyday of natural philosophy, Simon Schaffer was keen to analyze natural philosophy in terms of a fully fleshed-out “cosmology” of ideas.  Analyzing these universalizing aspects of natural philosophy makes a lot of sense: in many venues natural philosophers (being philosophers) would have been expected to draw upon their general store of learning to discourse on topics ranging from astronomy to epistemology to ethics, and to articulate the connections between these subjects.  Through the 1980s, Schaffer argued (especially early on) for embracing the sincerity and importance of the particular questions posed within systems of thought, rather than seeing the cosmology or system as simply some extension of an underlying fundamental commitment or accommodation to a partisan religious, political, or intellectual program, such as atheism, royalism, or “Newtonianism”.  Looking at systems of arguments in this way, one could query the underlying intellectual assumptions that governed what made particular features of these systems into coherent arguments, and thus better understand why they were formulated and argued in the particular ways that they were.  As in his discussions of early Kant or William Herschel, one could also query what constituted an actual innovation within natural philosophical systematizing without whiggishly relying on later acceptance as a category of analysis.

One thing I really like about Schaffer’s analytical tactic here is how nicely it blends historical thought with historical polemic.  One need not waste energy, for example, trying to discern whether a particular argument showed an actor’s underlying commitment to atheism; rather one could examine what sorts of arguments were likely to  have invited charges of atheism, why actors had intellectual (rather than political) reasons to avoid arguments with atheistic implications, why (or in what circumstances) it was considered socially necessary to politically censor atheistic philosophies, and, for that matter, how natural philosophical arguments could be thought to have theological implications in the first place.

The analytical appeal of an anthropological cosmology should be obvious since all features of totem and taboo, maintenance of social cohesion, and symbolic importance of natural orders are to be found in such a universalizing natural philosophy.  However, there are certain difficulties with this picture.  First, it does not suitably describe aspects of natural philosophical practice that did not have such wide-ranging implications.  As Geoffrey Cantor pointed out in his “Eighteenth Century Problem”, many aspects of  natural philosophy seem to have had more in common with more recent scientific practice than with totalizing philosophy, which is a point that needs to be worked out explicitly.

But there are also problems with simply dividing up natural philosophy into universalizing and “scientific” aspects.

First, even in esoteric “scientific” debates that apparently had no such grand implications, the terms of the debate might still be rendered in a locally-applied anthropo-cosmological language.  For a superb example: Chris Donohue recently directed my attention to David Bloor’s “Polyhedra and the Abominations of Leviticus” British Journal for the History of Science 11 (1978): 245-272, which rendered some of Imre Lakatos’ thinking about the proof of mathematical theorems in the lexicon of Mary Douglas.  Indeed, between the late ’70s and mid-’90s, science studies seems to have turned into a kind of contest to see who can be the first to develop a universal language of socio-epistemic description, featuring such competing programs as anthropo-cosmology, socio-epistemic relativism, actor-network theory, discourse analysis, and the “mangle”.  Historians have mainly been indifferent to the contest itself, but have been eager to explicitly deploy many of the competing programs’ tools, perhaps because the tools were genuinely useful, but likely also because those tools signaled that you were on the right side of the incipient historiographical revolution that the contestants assured was afoot.

The second problem was that, even if one historical actor asserted no broader implications of their own work, other historical actors could always charge that the argument had sub rosa political content.  As we learn in Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985) and in Schaffer’s “Wallification” (1988), part of what Hobbes objected to in the Royal Society’s experimental philosophy was the denial that its proclamations about the qualities of matter (e.g, the “spring” of the air) had theological-political implications, when, after all, this was precisely what contemporary theological-philosophical-political disputes over body-and-soul or Christ-and-Eucharist were about.  Rendering arguments politically “safe” meant rendering political objections ignorable, which itself might well have to be a political accomplishment.

Indeed, most the above-mentioned programs of universal socio-epistemic description were explicitly designed to take into account the possibility of political-intellectual work.  But, for historians, it was also possible to take this line of argument further than necessary.  Sometimes scientific work is safe from political objection not because political opposition is rendered ignorable, but because the work simply never had any outstandingly interesting political implications to begin with.  As Barnes and Shapin themselves noted in 1979, historians were doubtless best advised to selectively use whatever tools most illuminated various facets of the historical record.

Ultimately, little effort seems to have been put into delineating the power of different methods of analysis, or into theorizing about what tools were most suitable for analyzing what aspects of the historical record.  For instance, socio-epistemic languages, I think, best served histories of intractable conflict.  Comparatively little emphasis seems to have been placed on good-old-fashioned philosophy of science’s ability to describe things like being legitimately converted from one position to another by evidence and logic, which, we must presume, has indeed happened from time to time in the history of science.  (I argued here last year that philosophy of science became more-or-less historiographical taboo in the 1980s, which had definite historiographical implications.)

There was at least some theorization, though.  In 1980, Simon Schaffer claimed that Barnes and Shapin claimed anthropo-cosmology was “applicable to all periods and all social formations”, but, for his part, Schaffer picked out its particular suitability to what he argued (correctly, but probably, per Cantor, over-ambitiously) was the special “grammar” of natural philosophy.  Within this conception of natural philosophy, the historiographical objective became to delimit its historical bounds, and to theorize about what happened at those bounds.  We turn to this issue in (probably) the final post of this series.

‘If uncleanliness is matter out of place, we must approach it through order. Uncleanliness or dirt is that which must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained. The same principle applies throughout. Furthermore, it involves no special distinction between primitives and moderns: we are all subject to the same rules.’ (Purity and Danger 1966: 53)

‘In the primitive culture the rule of patterning works with greater force and more total comprehensiveness. With the moderns it applies to disjointed, separate areas of existence.’ (Ibid.)

Interview with Mary Douglas.

Historiographical totem?

In the late-1970s, the applicability of anthropological notions of cosmology to issues in the historiography of science could be understood as evidence of the need for an epistemology that extended into the domain of social relations.  This extension entailed the notion that scientific work existed in a cultural and intellectual continuum with the society around it, and thus that attempts to demarcate scientific work and ideas were ill-founded.  Society was not simply something to be scrubbed from science; legitimate scientific work was made possible through its establishment in legitimate places within society, and through the selective borrowing from society of cultural and political means of establishing legitimate claims.  This, I think, was a good idea, but was it methodologically revolutionary?

The test of the validity of any idea is whether it can change the outcome of a process in some specific way.  A scientific idea can help create a successful experiment or an improved technology.  The idea of social epistemology could be tested as could much sociology and philosophy of science by running it through the historical record and seeing if it rendered it more coherent.  In other words (to use a Latourian formulation), the success of social epistemology was bound up with its ability to forge an alliance with historiography.

The socio-epistemology advocates took no chances on getting lost in the shuffle, and apparently decided to tie the success of their program to a beneficial historiographical sea change.  In a 1983 article discussing possible implications for science education, Steven Shapin and Harry Collins even used the title “Experiment, Science Teaching, and the New History and Sociology of Science” (my emphasis; reprinted in Teaching the History of Science (1989), eds. Michael Shortland and Andrew Warwick).  However, the existence of this shift as a coherent entity, and the placement of socio-epistemology within it, should not be taken for granted.  The idea took years to successfully engineer.

Reading the back literature, I am increasingly floored by just how frequently some variation on the phrase “over the last X-number years” appears, indicating the existence of some ineffable trend leading away from false visions of history and “increasingly” toward correct ones. The making of this very general observation was by no means limited to those who identified a grand historiographical shift, though they certainly embraced the idea.

Far from being any clearly-valid periodization (the period in question seems to move arbitrarily), it seems to have been a powerful rhetorical device that lends cogency to the claims of whoever purports to have the ability to ride the new wave.  Indeed, it is still used in much this way.  Conversely, it can also function as a critique of opponents.  “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?“  As a cliché, it is probably better thought of as a tic produced by historiographical argumentation than as a consciously-used device.

The manufacture of a coherent shift from an amorphous sense of change seems to have been accomplished through a two-pronged strategy: disavowing credit for the change while predicating the successful continuation or even culmination of that change on the acceptance of socio-epistemology as an articulation of the essential insights governing it.  In “Where is the Edge of Objectivity?” Shapin and Barry Barnes identified a number of historians whose works, in varying ways, clearly embraced an acceptance of socio-epistemology, whether they themselves would say so or not: definitely Ruth Cowan (on Galton), but also Paul Forman (on Weimar physicists), Martin Rudwick (on fossils), Piyo Rattansi (on the Helmontian-Galenist controversy), Robert Young (on Malthus and evolution), Margaret Jacob (on Newtonian ideology), Christopher Hill (on William Harvey), and Jonathan Miller (on 19th-century studies of the nervous system).  Shapin would influentially repeat and augment the strategy is his 1982 article, “History of Science and Its Sociological Reconstructions”.

In this way, historiography became a wedge in this period, cleaving the community of historians into vestiges of an older era doomed to be left behind against those open to progressive approaches, who could be identified through their acceptance of socio-epistemology as the central foundation of proper historiography.

Barnes and Shapin’s edited volume Natural Order (1979)  is a key moment in this effort.  They make clear in their introduction that a change is afoot, and that this change is self-manifesting, i.e. the authors did not create it: “Without any great proclamation or catastrophic upheaval in method, scholars have been increasingly willing to accept accounts of scientific change simply as the techniques of their discipline reveal it to them…” (9).  But, crucially, Barnes and Shapin do claim to understand what is going on, and their formulation must be embraced, because it can explain and create historiographical success and prevent future historiographical failure.

For instance, in their joint piece, “Darwin and Social Darwinism: Purity and History”, Barnes and Shapin portray some of the preoccupations of the prodigious and (they stress) mainly successful Darwin Industry as manifestations of systematic historiographical failure.  Social Darwinism, they note, had been, by comparison, a poorly studied subject, though effort had been expended on downplaying Darwin’s personal responsibility for it.  Similarly, historians had been eager to probe the nature of Thomas Malthus’ influence on Darwin attempting to ensure that Darwin took no ‘unscientific’ notions from it.

Barnes and Shapin deploy Mary Douglas (correctly, I think) to note the literature’s strong interest in defending the purity of Darwin’s scientific contributions against the possibility of “taint” that might accrue to them through the association of the figure of Darwin with intellectual and social pollution.  Darwin must be defended from efforts to make a taboo of him and his ideas.  (As we have seen, Schaffer returned to the Malthus-Darwin issue in 1989 in discussing the nebular hypothesis.)  Barnes and Shapin do not believe the literature’s conclusions wrong, but argue that the historiographical portrait that emerges takes on certain contours that do not necessarily well-reflect the life and work of Darwin or the development of natural science in the period.

The take-away point that Barnes and Shapin stress is that social epistemology may seem frightening, because it abandons the moral comfort of demarcationism.  However, unlike the Marxist anti-demarcationist effort to “expose” science as a tool of social interest, social epistemology can uncover sources of scientific strength as well as weakness.  Further, it promises freedom from the neuroses surrounding the assessment of the intellectual purity of science in history through the process of “more relaxed and naturalistic” description.  By this path the violence of internalist-externalist debates can be alleviated.  The only choice that need be made is between history and advocacy, whether philosophical or political.  One cannot conscientiously do both:

Naturalism closes no evaluative or political options; it merely ejects them from historical practice.  It may be, indeed, that the main impetus to naturalism stems from professional, disciplinary considerations on the part of historians and others engaged in the study of science.  A recognition that explicit evaluative concerns and commitments are not conducive to good history may be the major factor.  If one aspires to do history in a properly ‘disinterested’ way, it is difficult simultaneously to act as an apologist for science, making out its past as a disembodied interaction between rational minds and reality.

Importantly, this new path was intellectually amorphous; the history and terms of social epistemology have not yet been articulated.  Rather, shunning bad methodology promised methodological freedom: “those who study natural knowledge will feel free to experiment with any of the general methods and theories of the social sciences.  Insofar as such methods and theories appear to have merit in the context of art or religion, or the cosmologies of preliterate societies, or any other setting, they may prove useful in the study of science also.  As a typical form of culture, science should be amenable to whatever methods advance our understanding of culture more generally.”

There is much that is appealing in the Barnes-Shapin critique, because it does describe a number of older historiographical preoccupations.  Nevertheless, its promised methodological eclecticism seems to have served it poorly.  It certainly did not eject “evaluative or political options” from historiography.  In fact, the reduction of historiographical—and historical—failures to a central pathology resulting from a naive and neurotic demarcationism could make writing an accurate and penetrating history of science into an act of socio-political consequence.  Where Shapin (in his piece in this volume on phrenology and again in ’82) would insist that the articulation of  the requirement of social epistemology rendered the “mere assertion that scientific knowledge ‘has to do’ with the social order or that it is ‘not autonomous’ [...] no longer interesting,” the setting up of demarcationism as a pathology made the continual re-illustration of this key insight all the more appealing.

Further, the establishment of a “new” and “relaxed” historiography, and the reduction of historiographical failures to symptoms of a central intellectual pathology, would make it easier for anyone espousing a “new” historiography to cast opponents as antiquated and their protests as evidence of their high-strung antiquity, without needing to consider the deeper contours of the dispute.  This, in turn, made it easier to abandon the responsibility to make historical or historiographical arguments clearly.

This wedging of the historiography into two distinct groups could make for strange bedfellows, allying historiographical moderates with radicals on the “new” side of things, while stranding historiographically innovative and inclusive figures interested in “old” issues on the wrong side of history.  Ironically, it would also make those who articulated the new-old divide most clearly—e.g. Bruno Latour, SSK’ers, etc.—the target of frustration over historiographical trends that were older than their articulations, and which individuals within this group might not have even personally supported.

That’s the historiographical theory at this stage of the game anyway.  For some thin evidence I’ll leave the (extended) last word here to Geoffrey Cantor.  In his 1982 essay review of The Ferment of Knowledge edited collection (1980), called “The Eighteenth Century Problem”, he captured some of the historiographical tension created—or at least exacerbated—by the anti-demarcationist wedge:

One final general point about this volume is its marked historiographical partiality.  In requesting contributors to concentrate on the social aspects of science the editors have given the impression that this alone is the major feature of modern historical interpretation.  Indeed there is a certain amount of flag-waving on behalf of ‘externalists’ against ‘internalists’ ([G. S.] Rousseau, pp. 209-10), and ‘contextualists’ against ‘intellectualists’ (Shapin, pp. 105-11).  The unwary reader taking this rhetoric at face value would fail to appreciate that many of the major new perspectives have come from the ‘internalists’ or ‘intellectualists’ who in almost every branch of eighteenth century scholarship have altered our understanding of the period in very significant ways.  As [Jacques] Roger states (pp. 255-8), the history of science has undergone a major revolution in the last twenty-five years [i.e., 1955-1980] during which time all the old historical certainties have had to be suspended if not abandoned.  In the field of the biological sciences it would be difficult to find anyone who has changed the historian’s perception as much as Roger, and yet Roger is primarily a textual exegete and would, therefore, be an example of those criticized by Shapin and Rousseau.  Again, as [Henk] Bos shows (pp. 334-41), [Clifford] Truesdell has radically changed the history of mechanics; however, he has achieved this without enveloping mechanics in ‘a large cultural perspective’ (Rousseau and [Roy] Porter, p. 5).  Indeed, in almost every field of eighteenth century studies, major reinterpretations have been produced by craftsmen-like researchers who have redefined how their sciences developed, what problems were important and which scientists made significant contributions.  My purpose in making the above comments is not to side with the ‘internalists’ or any other political party but to counteract such fashionable and dogmatic utterances as ‘there is every reason to believe that the internalist camp is beginning to lose ground’ and ‘what remains to be charted by future students then, is the course of externalism’ (Rouseau, pp. 209-10).