Panelists and Commentators:

Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Department of History, SUNY Stony Brook
Angela Creager, Department of History, Princeton University
Linda Marie Fedigan, Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta
Scott Gilbert, Department of Biology, Swarthmore College
Evelynn Hammonds, Program in Science, Technology and Society, MIT
Evelyn Fox Keller, Program in Science, Technology and Society, MIT
Elizabeth Lunbeck, Department of History, Princeton University
Pamela Mack, Department of Anthropology, Clemson University
Michael Mahoney, Department of History, Princeton University
Emily Martin, Department of Anthropology, Princeton University
Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan
Ruth Oldenzeil, Gender, Technology and Representation, University of Amsterdam
Carroll Pursell, Jr., Department of History, Case Western Reserve University
Karen Rader, Division of Humanities and Social Science, California Institute of Technology
Margaret Rossiter, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University
Londa Schiebinger, Department of History, Pennsylvania State University
Arleen Tuchman, Department of History, Vanderbilt University
M. Norton Wise, Department of History, Princeton University
Alison Wylie, Department of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario

Contact noelina@princeton.edu to obtain further information and register.
Sessions will consist of comments and discussion on precirculated papers.

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Program in History of Science of Princeton University, the Department of History of Princeton University, and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies.

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Commentator: Gyan Prakash

Presenters:

James McClellan,
Stevens Institute

"Colonialism & Science in the Old Regime"

This paper presents an overview of French science and French colonialism in the eighteenth century. It sketches some of the institutions and modalities through which contemporary French science facilitated colonial development and, reciprocally, ways in which the colonial experience affected the course of French science prior to 1789. The paper centers on the Academie Royale des Sciences and the work of academicians and correspondents concerning matters colonial; that work pertained to astronomy, terrestrial magnetism, cartography, longitude, navigation, and taxonomic and economic botany. The paper concludes with two close-up colonial 'vignettes' that explore the dynamics of the transmission of knowledge across cultural boundaries in the Old Regime: the advent of Mesmerism in colonial Haiti and the reception in Paris of indigenous knowledge from the Indian Ocean. In both cases the raw power -- political and intellectual -- of French colonial and scientific authority proved decisive in shaping the outcome of events. The paper situates itself in the historiographical context of contemporary science and empire studies', and, given what is not known about science and colonialism in the Old Regime, it essays to be a guide to further research.

Michael Adas,
History Department, Rutgers University

"Recovering the Agency of the Colonizer: Patterns of Scientific and Technology Transfer in British India, c. 1780-1940"

Warwick Anderson,
Centre for the Study of Health and Society and Department of the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne

"The Possession of Kuru: Field and Laboratory in Late Colonialism"

I intend to explore some of the political, anthropological and medical studies that were organized around the phenomenon of kuru in the highlands of New Guinea in the 1950s and 1960s. This will not be the definitive history of kuru, or of the Fore (the people afflicted), or of the various scientists involved in these studies; nor will I provide a genealogy for "slow viruses" or prions; rather, I hope to give an account of kuru as an object entangled in local concerns and global science, as a commodity extracted from New Guinea and refined in Australian universities and in the National Institutes of Health, and then given back, much changed. How did a cause of personal and social suffering among the Fore get turned into at least one Nobel prize? What, if anything, did this mean to the Fore? When Europeans first encountered the Fore people of the eastern highlands of New Guinea in the 1940s and 1950s, they found a large number of people with strange tremors, shaking, shivering, muscle weakness, and a general lack of control of the limbs, leading eventually to death. Called kuru, the phenomenon became the focus of political, anthropological and medical investigations. Ronald and Catherine Berndt, social anthropologists (from Sydney) who entered the region in 1952, explained kuru in terms of spirit possession and trance; they related it to earlier expressions of emotional insecurity attendant on culture contact, such as the Vailala madness. But as soon as Carleton Gajdusek (from Harvard via the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne) entered the Fore territory in 1957, he began to translate kuru sorcery into a medical vocabulary. The field practices of the cultural anthropologists and the medical scientist gave quite different meanings to kuru. Gajdusek attempted to standardize the clinical and pathological features of the "disease" of kuru, and through traffic of specimens to distant laboratories he sought the biological cause of the ailment. In 1963, Gajdusek announced the discovery of the first human slow virus infection, research for which he later won a Nobel Prize. But the evolving medical understanding of kuru required a renewed attention to ethnography -- not the cultural anthropology of the Berndts, but the medical anthropology that emerged in the 1950s and 60s. Though yet another set of field practices, the virology of kuru was linked by Lindebaum, Glasse and Matthews to Fore mourning rites, including cannibalism. Through all of this, it seems that the Fore continued to attribute kuru to sorcery, though they later conceded that the sorcery poison might be called a slow virus. The various explanations made little difference to the course of kuru; the disease had almost disappeared before it was designated as such; cannibalism was already suppressed for reasons of civility, not science; no treatments were ever developed. Few scientists now would ever refer to a slow virus; but Gajdusek's research contributed to ideas about prions and provided models to explain AIDS and Alzheimer's Disease. The investigations of kuru became exemplars for medical fieldwork and medical anthropology, even though ethical objections were raised to some of Gajdusek's practices (such as the forced autospies which Gajdusek referred to as "medical cannibalism"), and a number of scholars have doubted the role of cannibalism in the transmission of kuru. Kuru fieldwork has produced a site in which we can study the traffic between a "traditional culture" and the global institutions of science in the late twentieth century; it provides us with an opportunity to think again about the framing of "first contact"; it makes us take stock of notions of center and periphery in science; it challenges older anthropological notions of reciprocity and the gift; and it gives both real and metaphoric meaning to the terms "contamination" and "molecularization" as used in modern science and in social theory. Moreover, kuru fieldwork makes it clear that to study multi-sited global science we need to develop a multi-sited history.

"Ordering the Social: Toward a Historiography of Social Science in the Nineteenth Century"

10:-00am, Logan Hall 392, 249 S. 36th Street, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

"Defense Intellectual or Public Intellectual? Heinsenberg on the West German Public Stage"

3:30pm, 230 Dickinson Hall

Stuart McCook, The College of New Jersey, Commentary

Presenters:

Marcos Cueto, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos

"Visions of the Global and the Local Dimensions of Science in the Andes"

Sharon Traweek, UCLA

"How Physics Made in Japan Became Local, Global, and Universal"

Stuart W. Leslie, Johns Hopkins University

"Winning Markets or Winning Nobel Prizes? KAIST and the Challenges of Late Industrialization"

10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. 211 Dickinson Hall

Darwin used the development of language as a model for species development. He also argued that language was responsible for distinctly human mind. Charles Lyell, the great geologist and Darwin's friend, further explored the model, showing how Darwin's devices could be applied to language. Lyell, however, could not go the whole orang: he thought that language was that barrier the distinguished man from the animals, and that no animal of itself could cross that Rubicon. August Schleicher, the great German linguist and friend of Ernst Haeckel, fully endorsed Darwin's theory and showed how it could explain the descent of language from primitive animal sounds. Schleicher solved two critical problems for Haeckel's theory of human evolution: Haeckel argued, of course, that man came up from ape-like ancestors. But he had no theory of the transition from ape-like intelligence to human reason. Further he believed that human beings formed several species, some being more advanced than others--the Germans and English leading the pack. But he had no good theory of the traits that provided the superiority. He found the solutions to his problems in Schleicher's conception of the evolution of language: some languages, Schleicher held, were superior to others, more perfect, and these led to the differential evolution of mind. What Haeckel didn't realize was that the essential structure of Schleicher's theory was not due to Darwinian evolutionary considerations but to Hegelian romantic considerations. Thus the missing link in 19th- century evolutionary thought was Hegel.

3:30 pm, 230 Dickinson Hall

3:30 pm, 230 Dickinson Hall

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