By David N. Livingstone
We're familiar with considering technological know-how and its findings as common. in the end, one atom of carbon plus of oxygen yields carbon dioxide in Amazonia in addition to in Alaska; a scientist in Bombay can use an identical fabrics and strategies to problem the paintings of a scientist in ny; and naturally the legislation of gravity observe world wide. Why, then, may still the areas the place technology is completed subject in any respect? David N. Livingstone the following places that query to the try out along with his attention-grabbing learn of the way technological know-how bears the marks of its position of production.
Putting technological know-how in Its Place establishes the basic significance of geography in either the iteration and the intake of medical wisdom, utilizing old examples of the numerous areas the place technology has been practiced. Livingstone first turns his awareness to a few of the explicit websites the place technology has been made—the laboratory, museum, and botanical backyard, to call many of the extra traditional locales, but in addition areas just like the coffeehouse and cathedral, ship's deck and asylum, even the human physique itself. In each one case, he unearths simply how the distance of inquiry has conditioned the investigations conducted there. He then describes how, on a nearby scale, provincial cultures have formed clinical activity and the way, in flip, medical practices were instrumental in forming neighborhood identities. Widening his inquiry, Livingstone issues lightly to the elemental instability of medical which means, in line with case stories of ways medical theories were got in numerous locales. Putting technological know-how in Its Place powerfully concludes through reading the impressive mobility of technological know-how and the likely easy method it strikes round the globe.
From the reception of Darwin within the land of the Maori to the giraffe that walked from Marseilles to Paris, Livingstone indicates that position does topic, even on the earth of science.
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Additional resources for Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge
Example text
The Pitt-Rivers museum was thus a tract for the times on the benefits of moderation and the value of education. ” One of the most conspicuous expressions of how its exhibits were structured according to the museum’s internal geography was the remarkable “sociological laboratory” spearheaded by Patrick Geddes in 1892 at his Outlook Tower in Edinburgh (fig. 8). This construction was intended to be a novel type of museum in which the study of civics and regional survey was encouraged through a synthetic integration of landscape, history, and sociology.
Whether breaking down gender roles, encouraging the transgression of social conventions, blurring the line between amateur and professional, or furthering the mythology of hardy hero- site: venues of science 45 ism, the field regularly exhibited a borderland sociology and a frontier mentality. While these arose in some measure from the human geography of the field’s occupants, its physical geography has also played its part. The field is an inherently unstable scientific site, and for that very reason practical rationality and functional imagination are at a premium there.
It was always so. Wasn’t God the first gardener when he planted the Garden of Eden? It was a spiritual site in which its human inhabitants walked with their Creator. But once sin entered their lives they were expelled from its pleasures and perfections. Since then, in the Christian tradition at least, every gardener’s battle against the encroachments of the wilderness has been an attempt to reflect, if not retrieve, primordial paradise (fig. 11). From earliest times, the garden has been seen as a place of retreat and renewal, an outdoor temple of contemplation and meditation in which spiritual well-being could be maintained.