02 Nov 2018 01:30 PM - 03:30 PM(America/Vancouver)
20181102T133020181102T1530America/VancouverCryo-histories: Telling "Other" Stories of Science in Frozen Lands
In the 2017 HSS Distinguished Lecture, Sverker Sörlin described the Northern Turn in the history of science; a wave of recent histories examining knowledge-making in the Arctic. Expanding this Northern Turn, the papers in this session explore ways of telling “other” histories of cold places. Cryo, meaning “cold,” invokes the high latitude and high altitude geographies under consideration, long caricatured as extra- or a-historical spaces. Telling cryo-histories means taking seriously the historicity of such places, telling stories in which cultural geographies and contingent histories meet in the production of knowledge and place. Such stories are timely. 2018 marks the 200th year since Mary Shelley conjured the image of an otherworldly frozen land, banishing Frankenstein’s monster to an arctic imagined outside the natural and political order. 2018 also marks twenty-five years since historians began analyzing the ways that science in frozen lands generates “others,” including work from Lisa Bloom (Gender on Ice, 1993); Trevor Levere (Science and the Canadian Arctic,1993), and Michael Bravo, (“The Accuracy of Ethnoscience…, 1996). These histories examined how frozen landscapes and their denizens were figured as “others” against ideas of Euro-American imperialisms, nationalisms, heroic masculinity, and metropolitanism. This session explores the continuing possibilities and limits in “other" cryo-histories of science a quarter-century later. Playing with familiar categories – wilderness; laboratory-field dichotomy; heroism; Western science; Indigenous knowledge – we consider not just other stories but how we tell them, thinking afresh about the conceptual tools historians deploy in histories of polar and alpine science.
Organized by ...
Medina, Third FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
In the 2017 HSS Distinguished Lecture, Sverker Sörlin described the Northern Turn in the history of science; a wave of recent histories examining knowledge-making in the Arctic. Expanding this Northern Turn, the papers in this session explore ways of telling “other” histories of cold places. Cryo, meaning “cold,” invokes the high latitude and high altitude geographies under consideration, long caricatured as extra- or a-historical spaces. Telling cryo-histories means taking seriously the historicity of such places, telling stories in which cultural geographies and contingent histories meet in the production of knowledge and place. Such stories are timely. 2018 marks the 200th year since Mary Shelley conjured the image of an otherworldly frozen land, banishing Frankenstein’s monster to an arctic imagined outside the natural and political order. 2018 also marks twenty-five years since historians began analyzing the ways that science in frozen lands generates “others,” including work from Lisa Bloom (Gender on Ice, 1993); Trevor Levere (Science and the Canadian Arctic,1993), and Michael Bravo, (“The Accuracy of Ethnoscience…, 1996). These histories examined how frozen landscapes and their denizens were figured as “others” against ideas of Euro-American imperialisms, nationalisms, heroic masculinity, and metropolitanism. This session explores the continuing possibilities and limits in “other" cryo-histories of science a quarter-century later. Playing with familiar categories – wilderness; laboratory-field dichotomy; heroism; Western science; Indigenous knowledge – we consider not just other stories but how we tell them, thinking afresh about the conceptual tools historians deploy in histories of polar and alpine science.
Organized by Dani Inkpen (Harvard University)
Heroism on Ice, 25 YearsView Abstract Part of Organized SessionEnvironmental Sciences01:30 PM - 02:00 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 20:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 21:00:00 UTC
Twenty-five years ago, Lisa Bloom’s "Gender on Ice" (1993) drew historians’ attention to the ideologies of masculinism and nationalism operating in historical discourses of polar exploration and science. Key to Bloom’s intervention was an analysis of the white, masculine heroism performed and embodied by men such as Robert Peary and Frederick Cook. Since "Gender on Ice," critiques of white, male heroics have become common in histories of the field sciences. Historians have analyzed various ways that ideologies of heroism enabled certain knowers and excluded others. This talk examines dominant notions of heroism in the historiography of alpine and polar science. Specifically, the belief that heroism is primarily exclusionary to female scientists and antithetical to feminist science. I ask two critical questions: Have historians unwittingly adopted a definition of heroism specific to a particular set of historical actors and allowed that to stand for heroism in other historical contexts? What might this mean for the stories we tell (and don’t tell) about polar and alpine field science? I explore these questions and alternative possibilities through telling stories of the mountain explorers and botanists Mary Schäffer Warren (1861-1939) and Mary Vaux Walcott (1860-1940). In doing so, I seek a model for a female hero of alpine science, outlining both her laudable and the objectionable traits, and thereby re-examine dominant historiographical accounts of heroism.
Principles of the Ice Age: Calculating Cosmological InfluenceView Abstract Part of Organized SessionEnvironmental Sciences02:00 PM - 02:30 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 21:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 21:30:00 UTC
This paper explores the work of Scottish scientist James Croll (1821-1890), whose interest lay in explaining the underlying principles—not just the physical, geologic remains—of the Ice Ages. In 1875, Croll published Climate and Time in their Geologic Relations: A Theory of the Secular Changes of the Earth’s Climate, a work in which he calculated the variation in eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit over a four-million-year period. Agreeing with astronomers before him, Croll argued that the orbital variation alone could not induce an Ice Age. Crucially, however, Croll suggested that they could trigger positive feedback loops in global environmental systems, specifically ice coverage (the albedo effect) and ocean circulation, that would induce such a dramatic, planetary change. Through a deductive approach based on mathematical calculations and physical laws, Croll both posited a fluctuation in ice coverage over time (glacial and interglacial periods), and emphasized how ice is an essential part of the Earth system as a whole. Croll’s methodology was entirely distinct from the induction and observation of his geologist contemporaries, and offers insight into the important role of physicists in conceptualizing deep time in the nineteenth century.
Presenters Alexis Rider University Of Pennsylvania
"A Totally Unqualified Woman": Gender and the Policing of Science in the IGY Expedition to South GeorgiaView Abstract Part of Organized SessionEnvironmental Sciences02:30 PM - 03:00 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 21:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 22:00:00 UTC
In 1956, the Royal Society and the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey collaborated to send a small expedition to make glaciological observations on the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia during the International Geophysical Year. Jeremy Smith thought his partner, Richard Brown, to be lazy and unqualified for the work. Brown considered Smith to be fanatical, misogynistic, and incapable of social propriety. The two scientists fought incessantly. At the center of much of their discord was Brown’s wife, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Brown’s inclusion on this expedition places her in an anomalous position, as Britain forbade women full access to Antarctica until 1996. Smith found her presence intolerable and after months of complaining, managed to have Brown dismissed and the couple returned to London. Smith’s results were never published. This expedition can tell us a lot about the state of British glaciology in the 1950s, including its low priority for the British government, the lack of qualified geologists willing to go to Antarctica, and the dwindling relevance of small scale glaciological surveys to the greater field. Most importantly it shows how the social boundaries of science were drawn by those practicing it. Smith constantly dwells on what rights should be extended to him, as well as policing the behavior of those like Richard and Elizabeth Brown, who as non-formally trained scientists, should not be on a Royal Society Expedition. Through illegitimating their presence, essentially erasing the couple from official histories of the expedition, Smith validated his own self-estimation as a true scientist.
Self-Fashioning: Clothing Technology, Ethnoscience, and the Arctic Expertise of Vilhjálmur StefánssonView Abstract Part of Organized SessionEnvironmental Sciences03:00 PM - 03:30 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 22:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 22:30:00 UTC
In his pathbreaking 1996 article, Michael Bravo called for greater attention to non-Western knowledge systems and how Western actors have tried to render these systems commensurate with Western science. This paper heeds Bravo’s call by examining this process of creating commensurability in the career of twentieth-century Arctic explorer, ethnographer, and former HSS president (1945-46), Vilhjálmur Stefánsson.
Having lived with Inuit communities, Stefánsson was an advocate for the superiority of Inuit technology, especially clothing, for Arctic life, and a critic of Canadian and U.S. government treatment of native Arctic peoples. But during the Cold War, he championed American military intervention in the Arctic and promoted Inuit-style dress for soldiers. He positioned himself as a clothing consultant for the military and military contractors, collaborating with the DuPont corporation to replicate Inuit garb in Western-style fabrics that could be mass-produced for troops. Stefánsson’s seemingly contradictory projects were as much about respect for indigenous knowledge as they were about positioning himself as the consummate expert on Arctic life in a changing technocratic America: keeping his own expertise, made during an earlier era of science, relevant for the modern world. Drawing on materials from Stefánsson’s archives, this paper will demonstrate the importance of understanding the specific ways in which indigenous knowledge has been appropriated and made commensurate via twentieth-century science, including as part of scientific self-fashioning, and argue that notions of “bioprospecting” should be applied to a greater range of activities than just the development of contemporary pharmaceuticals.
Alexis Rider
Sarah Pickman