Long-Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge

Configurations

Volumn 6, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 269-303

  Harris, Steven J ^a  

^a WELLESLEY COLLEGE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0006993958     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.1998.0018     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. Francis Bacon, The New Organon and Related Writings, ed. Fulton H. Anderson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), Aphorism 84, p. 81.
2. A favorite phrase of Bacon's was "to command nature in action"; see, for example, Francis Bacon, "Great Instauration," in New Atlantis and the Great Instauration, éd. Jerry Weinberger (Arlington Heights, 111.: Marian Davidson, 1989), p. 21.
3. Francis Bacon, The New Organon (above, M.I), Book 2, Aphorisms 28 and 41, pp. 177-178,215-216.
4. Shapin has cast the interrelated problems of knowledge and narrative, locality and mobility quite succinctly: "It is the localist thrust of recent SSK [the sociology of scientific knowledge] that has generated what is being increasingly recognized as one of the central problems for future work. If, as empirical research securely establishes, science is a local product, how does it travel with what seems to be unique efficiency? One appeal of the modernist great narratives of reason, reality, and method was the tablethumping response they offered to questions about the travel of science. If, however, universality can no longer be accepted as an assumption flowing from the very nature of the knowledge or the 'method' for making it, then what are the mundane means which so powerfully effect the circulation of science?" (Steven Shapin, "Here and Everywhere: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge," Annual Review of Sociology 21 [1995]: 307).
5. Shapin himself points to Bruno Latour's work on long-distance networks as a promising direction (Steven Shapin, Annual Review of Sociology ibid., pp. 307-309). As will become evident, the direction of my own work is indebted to both the problem as posed by Shapin and the partial solution proposed by both Latour and John Law (see n. 8 below).
6. The word "graphics" here includes both written and pictorial representations (e.g., texts, tables, lists, schedula, charts, drawings, plans, graphs), as connoted in the original Greek graphikos.
7. See Svetlana Alpers, "The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art," in Art and Cartography, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 67-69.
8. A typology of thread maps might include, in addition to the geographical extent of the network, the number of gathering sites required; the length of time it takes to gather such information; and the frequency of exchange of information between periphery and center. That is, in analogy with Karl Marx's notion of "density of communication," one might think of the "density of practice" of early modern science as well as the intensity and extensiveness of practice.
9. John Law, "On the Method of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation, and the Portuguese Route to India," Sociological Review Monographs 32 (1986): 234-263;
10. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 219-237.
11. For a discussion of the differences between "corporate" and "charismatic" networks and the problem of morale, see Steven J. Harris, "Confession-Building, Long-Distance Networks, and the Organization of Jesuit Science," Early Science and Medicine 1 (1996): 299-304.
12. Toby Huff, The Rise of Early Modem Science: Islam, China, and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 136-137.
13. On "translation of interests," see Latour, Science in Action (above, n. 8), pp. 108-121.
14. Gareth Morgan, "Creating Social Reality: Organizations as Cultures," in idem, Images of Organizations (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996), pp. 119-152.
15. For a discussion of "forms of life," see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffet, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 22, 77-80.
16. Huff, Rise of Early Modern Science (above, n. 10), pp. 134-136.
17. Much of the following description of the activities of the Cosmographical Department is taken from Edward L Stevenson, "The Geographical Activities of the Casa de la Contrataciôn," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 17 (1927): 39-59.
18. The first holder of this office was Amerigo Vespucci, who himself had sailed much of the eastern coast of South America under the authority of the Casa (but also under the Portuguese flag) some years before. The second piloto mayor, Juan Diaz de Solls, assumed the office upon Vespucci's death in 1512.
19. Stevenson, "Geographical Activities" (above, n. 15), p. 42.
20. See also Gonzalo Menéndez-Pidal, Imogen del mundo hacia 1570: Segun noticias del Consejo de Ind'ias y de los tratadistas espanola (Madrid: Grâficas Ultra, 1944), pp. 4-5.
21. The mappa tnundi of Juan de la Cosa, dated to 1500, appears to be a copy of a lost original. It includes all of the major discoveries of Spanish exploration and at least a sense of John Cabot's discovery of the east coast of North America: see Michel Mollat du Jourdin et al.. Sea Charts oftlie Early Explorers, Tliirteenth to Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984), pi. 22, pp. 212-213.
22. Both the Cantino (1502) and Caniero (ca. 1502) world maps indicate access to Spanish information, though they are of Portuguese provenance: see ibid., Sea Charts Oftlie Early Explorers, Tliirteenth to Seventeenth Centuries pi. 25, pp. 214-216;
23. Stevenson, "Geographical Activities," p. 43.
24. The anonymous "Kunstmann II" (ca. 1504) world map records information at a very early date that could only have been obtained from the Spanish voyages of Miguel Cortes-Real to the northeast coast of North America and of Amerigo Vespucci along the east coast of South America: see Hans Wolff, America: Early Maps of the Ne\v World (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1992), fig. 5, pp. 134-135.
25. Stevenson, "Geographical Activities," p. 44.
26. Juan Vespucci, nephew of Amerigo and assistant to the new piloto mayor, was given oversight of the making of copies and their public sale.
27. Del Cano was one of the few surviving members of the voyage commenced under Magellan in 1519.
28. Menéndez-Pidal, Imagen del mundo (above, n. 17), pp. 4-7.
29. Clinton R. Edwards, "Mapping by Questionnaire: An Early Spanish Attempt to Determine New World Geographical Positions," Imago Mundi 23 (1969): 17-28.
30. See also Barbara E. Mundy, Tlie Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 18-19.
31. Additional instructions were sent from Seville to Crown officials in Peru and New Spain in advance of the lunar eclipses of 1581 and 1582, though neither the quality nor the quantity of responses improved: Edwards, "Mapping by Questionnaire," pp. 18-19 (the text of the Instruction for 1582 is given on pp. 20-21).
32. See Mundy, Mapping of New Spain (above, n. 23), pp. 32-33, for a discussion of the respondents. For discussion of the entire series of questionnaires, see Howard F. Cline,
33. Lôpez de Velasco completed his Geografia y description universal de las Indios in 1574 (though it was not published until the nineteenth century), and his successor (as cronista mayor) Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas published the official multivolume chronicle of the Indies, Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las Islas de Tierra Firme del marocéano, in Madrid between 1601 and 1615. Moreover, it appears likely that José de Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Seville, 1590) benefitted from the circulation of information set in motion by the questionnaires of the 1570s and 1580s: see Menéndez-Pidal, Imagen delmundo (above, n. 17), pp. 15-16.
34. C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800 (London: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 82-88.
35. Ibid., The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800 p. 87.
36. Ibid.,The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800 pp. 83-84, 279-280, 285.
37. See, for example, Cornells Herls, Examen der Chyrii&ie (Amsterdam, 1625), with later editions in 1645, 1660, and 1672, as well as the much-augmented edition by Johannes Verbrugge in 1680: Peter van der Krogt, ed., VOC: A Bibliography of Publications Relating to the Dutch East India Company, 1602-1800 (Utrecht: HES, 1991), pp. 473-475.
38. A number of printed lists of medicines prepared by the chief surgeon of the VOC have survived from the eighteenth century (see, for example, Lyste van de Medicamenten... die deScheperi van heir na Oost-Indien vertrekkende, zullen werden inede gfgeven, en dal voor een Schip von 200 Man [Amsterdam, 1705], with similar printed lists from 1739, 1771, 1786, and 1792), and presumably handwritten representatives of this genre existed in the seventeenth century: see van der Krogt, VOC, pp. 497-498.
39. The German physician Hermann Grimm compiled "animal, vegetable, and mineral preparations" using both European and Asian ingredients and published them in what was the first pharmacopoeia printed in Batavia, Laboratoriin cliyinictim: Gelwuden op het voortreffelycke Eylandt Ceylon (Batavia, 1677); his medical manual appeared two years later and from the same press, Chirgurgi et medicin practici compendium medicochimiaun: see van der Krogt, VOC, pp. 494-495.
40. Rumphius joined the VOC in 1649 and lived in Ambonia from 1653 onward. He was a member of the Academiae Naturae Curiosorum and his most popular work was D'amboinsche Ranteitkamer (Amsterdam, 1705), a well-illustrated treatment of exotic shellfish, snails, and mollusks:
41. see Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire (above, n. 27), pp. 202-204;
42. van der Krogt, VOC, pp. 364,379-380.
43. In 1687 Hermann published a catalog of the Garden, Horti Academici Lugdunobatavi catalogus exhibens plantamm, in which he described in detail plants that he and other VOC botanists had sent to the "Hortus Academicus":
44. see van der Krogt, VOC, pp. 370-371.
45. Both Commelins were affiliated with the Medical Garden of Amsterdam; see Caspar Commelin's Flora Malabarica sive Horti Malabarid catalogus (Leiden, 1696)
46. and his Plantae ranores et exoticae (Leiden, 1715-16),
47. and Joannis Commelin's Horti mediciAmstelodamensis ranontm (Amsterdam, 1697).
48. Here we might note in passing that the Society of Jesus also enjoyed the benefit of having full corporate control over both an overseas network (in the form of its missions) and an academic network (in the form of its many colleges and universities), an aspect of its organization that accounts in large part for its remarkable record of knowledge production.
49. A. Lynn Martin, Plague? Jesuit Accounts of Epidemic Disease in the Sixteenth Century (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth-Century Journal Publishers, 1996), pp. 59-61.
50. For a general discussion of German missionary-apothecaries, see Renée Gicklhorn, Missionapotheker: Deutsche Pharmazeuten in Latinamerika des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderten (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlaggesellschaft, 1973);
51. Joseph and Renée Gicklhorn, Georg Joseph Käme], S.J. (1661-1706): Apotheker, Botaniker, Artz und Naturforscher der Philipineninseln (Eutin: Holstein, 1954).
52. Emil Bretschneider, "Early European Researches into the Flora of China," Journal of the North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, November 1880:1-195.
53. Saul Jarcho, Quinine's Predecessor: Francesco Torti and the Early History of Cinchona (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 4-5.
54. Quinine's Predecessor: Francesco Torti and the Early History of Cinchona Ibid., pp. 14-17. In Rome the earliest names for cinchona were pu/vis cardinaiis and pu/vis de Lugo.
55. The Scliedula was first published in 1649 and appears to be the earliest printed reference to cinchona. For detailed discussions of the early history of cinchona, see, in addition to Jarcho, Josef Rompel, "Kritische Studien zur ältesten Geschichte der Chinarinde," Jahresbericht des öffentlichen Privatgymnasiwns an der Stella Matutina zu Feldkirck (1905): 3-64;
56. Jaime Jaramillo-Arango, "A Critical Review of the Basic Facts in the History of Cinchona," Journal of the Linnean Society (London) 53 (1949): 272-309.
57. Jarcho, Quinine's Predecessor (above, n. 40), pp. 22, 40, 45, 63.
58. Quinine's Predecessor Ibid., pp. 34, 69.
59. For a discussion of the literary exchange between Jean-Jacque Chiflet, Honoré Fabri, and several other authors, see Quinine's Predecessor ibid., pp. 29-40.
60. From Bouvet's Portrait historique de l'Empereur de la Chine (Paris, 1697), pp. 160-161,
61. quoted in Jarcho, Quinine's Predecessor, p. 102. On the cure of Louis,
62. see Quinine's Predecessor ibid., pp. 65-66.
63. See, for example, Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: Wie Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993);
64. Rivka Feldhay, Galileo and the Church: Political Inquisition or Critical Dialogue? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
65. Simon Schaffer, "Glass Works: Newton's Prisms and the Uses of Experiment," in The Uses of Experiment, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 67-104;
66. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviatlian and tlie Air Pump (above, n. 13).
67. To take but one example, there is no mention whatsoever of either geography or cartography, which may be viewed as "paradigmatic" of the big sciences, either in the "classics" that have denned the field (like those by Marie Boas, Herbert Butterneid, Allen Debus, E. J. Dijksterhuis, A. Rupert Hall, and Richard S. Westfall), or in the recent "challenges" and "reappraisals" that have appeared by Peter Barker and Roger Ariew, David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, Roy Porter and Mikulâs Teich, or Steven Shapin. The story of geography has of course been well told; it simple has had no place in the telling of the Scientific Revolution.
68. See Owen Gingerich, "'Crisis' versus Aesthetic in the Copernican Revolution," in idem, The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1993), pp. 193-204.
69. lan Hacking, "Was There a Probabilistic Revolution 1800-1930?" in Tlie Probabilistic Revolution, ed. Lorenz Krüger, Lorraine Daston, and Michael Heidelberger (Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld and B. Kleine Verlag, 1983), pp. 45-55.
70. Stephen Fuchs, "Positivism Is the Organizational Myth of Science," Science in Perspective I (1993): llnlo.
71. From the frontispiece of Bacon's Instauratio magna (London, 1620), which was taken from Dan., 12: 4.
72. For a review of the goals and accomplishments of the Annales school, see Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution : The Annales School, 1929-89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
73. For a specific example of a big picture built up from smaller studies, see Fernand Braudel and Frank Spooner, "Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750," in Cambridge Economic History, ed. M. M. Postan and H. J. Habakkuk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), vol. 4, pp. 374-486.
74. A standard device used in other fields to build up bigger pictures from smaller projects is the survey review article; see, e.g., L. R. Poos, "The Historical Demography of Renaissance Europe: Recent Research and Current Issues," Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 794-811.
75. For an example of large-scale demographics, see E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981,1989).
76. See Stephen Jay Gould, "The Ladder and the Cone: Iconographies of Progress," in idem. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: Norton, 1989), pp. 27-44.
77. For a discussion of the problems of narration that macroevolutionists confront, see Robert J. O'Hara, "Homage to Clio, or. Toward an Historical Philosophy for Evolutionary Biology," Systematic Zoology 37 (1988): 142-155.
78. And for the strategies currently used to circumvent simple narrative formulae, see idem, "Telling the Tree: Narrative Representation and the Study of Evolutionary History," Biology and Philosophy 7 (1992): 135-160.
79. For the most recent discussion of actor-network theory, see the collection of papers from the workshop held at the University of Keele, July 10-11,1997,
80. in John Law, ed., Actor Nehvork and After (forthcoming).
81. For an introduction and bibliography, see Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio, eds.. The Ne\v Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
82. W. Richard Scott, Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981).
83. See Bruno Latour, "On Recalling ANT," paper read at the workshop "ANT and After," and available on the Web site of the Centre for Social Theory and Technology, University of Keele (http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/stt/cstt2/ant/latour.htm).
84. See also John Law, "Topology and the Naming of Complexity," On Recalling ANT ibid, (http://www.keele.ac.uk/ depts/so/staff/jl/pubs-JL3.htm).
85. For an overview, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, "From Reduction to Linkage: The Long View of the Micro-Macro Debate," in The Micro-Macro Link, ed. J. C. Alexander, B. Giesen, Richard Muench, and N. J. Smelser (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 1-42;
86. Randall Collins, "The Microfoundations of Macrosociology," American Journal of Sociology 86 (1981): 984-1014;
87. Paul DiMaggio, "The Micro-Macro Dilemma in Organizational Research: Implications of Role-System Theory," in Macro-Micro Linkages in Sociology, ed. Joan Huber (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1991), pp. 76-98.
88. DiMaggio, "Micro-Macro Dilemma," pp. 88-93.