Patrick Anthony

This article develops a historical anthropology of craftspeople in the sciences through the story of the family Wunder, who for three generations (from 1771 to 1832) ran a prolific trade in rare plants and large mammal fossils from their workshop in the mountains of Upper Franconia. Studies of scientific homes and families have had an extraordinary impact on the history of science, showing how experiments and museums were so housed as to model highly exclusive scientific publics, and how projects of inquiry were shared among spouses, children, and servants. But this literature has rarely stepped outside of elite, urban homes and country estates. Doing so demonstrates how material flows conventionally oriented around metropolitan institutions could hinge on the spatial logistics of post roads, highland footpaths, inns and taverns – and the families who minded them. Viewed from the village, new university and museum institutions rose in reciprocal action with rural projects, otherwise excluded from the story of a liberal-bourgeois public sphere and the emergence of the modern natural sciences ( Naturwissenschaften ). I argue further for a thick description of science among craftspeople and peasants, suggesting nature’s keepers as a useful social category for actors involved in the everyday production of the economies and spatial logistics of natural inquiry. Across Central and Alpine Europe, inns, workshops, and country lanes composed a substructure of scientific life that materially shaped natural history and its theoretical horizons in “deep time,” directing the movements of earthly objects and educated travelers.

Prispevek na novo osvetljuje raziskovalni program iz 19. stoletja, ki ga je Susan Faye Cannon po pruskem učenjaku Alexandru von Humboldtu (1769–1859) poimenovala »humboldtovska znanost«. Danes standardna interpretacija humboldtovske znanosti, ki jo je v devetdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja razvil Michael Dettelbach, opisuje skupek kvantitativnih, zakonitosti iščočih kartografskih ved, ki so temeljile na obsežnem sodelovanju učenjakov in imperialnih uradnikov na področjih, ki segajo od meteorologije in magnetizma do geologije in botanične geografije. Novi pogledi kolonialnega in globalnega zgodovinopisja »humboldtovski« projekt razkrivajo kot razpršen sistem raziskovanja, ki ga je oblikovala razprostranjena geografija imperijev in ekstrakcije, predvsem globalna rudarska industrija. Kar je Humboldt poimenoval »fizika sveta«, je imelo globoke korenine v pruskem ekspanzionizmu in rudarski dejavnosti v devetdesetih letih 18. stoletja. Nato pa je bila koordinirana med imperiji vzhoda in zahoda, na blagovnih mejah iberske Amerike in ruske Sibirije. V članku se vračamo k Humboldtu, da bi razgrnili prepleteno zgodovino znanosti, ki so bile izvorno v službi agresivnih držav in imperijev v Evropi in zunaj nje.

The insight that scientific theories are “practice-laden” has animated scholarship in the history of science for nearly three decades. This article examines a style of geographical thought that was, I argue, movement-laden. The thought-style in question has been described as a “vertical consciousness that engulfed science in the early nineteenth century,” and is closely associated with the geographical vision of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Humboldt’s science spanned nature’s horizontal and vertical axes, from Saxon mines to Andean summits, and from the currents of the ocean to those of the aerial ocean. In probing the origins of Humboldt’s vertical thinking, this article opens up a broader history about the industrial practices and travel cultures that originally animated it. Humboldt’s “global physics” first emerged within a context of vertical travel, up mountains and into mines and caverns. Rhythms of the body—lethal for some, “sublime” for others—became rhythms of the mind. A view of nature as set of vertically complementary spaces rippled through mining culture, Romantic art, and the geographical sciences. To trace the earliest routes of Humboldt’s science is to acknowledge the many actors—some celebrated, most unsung—who took part in the making of a vertical consciousness.

By resituating Alexander von Humboldt in the “working world” of mining, this essay offers a case study of the way in which industry has shaped practice and theory in the history of science. While Humboldt’s experience as a miner in Saxony and Prussia provided him a venue in which to study fossilized vegetation, revealing a fundamental link between the migrations of plants and of peoples, industrial concerns about miners’ safety inspired a study of the interplay between plants and people that shaped his later articulation of the verticality of plant distribution. Moreover, the cartographic methods Humboldt employed during his American journey depended as much on drawing practices indebted to mining as they did on patterns of vertical mobility above and below the surface of the earth. These arguments ultimately encourage a departure from “Humboldtian Science,” a term that has veiled an originally Prusso-Saxon science beneath a set of Anglo-American connotations.