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- Convenor:
-
Emily Hayes
(Oxford Brookes University)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
John Tresch
(University of London)
- Stream:
- History of Anthropology and Geography
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 15 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This session explores the history, distribution, and significance of multi-scalar relativising practices of perception, interpretation and valuation around 1900. Our guiding assumption is that anthropological and physical concepts of relativity have strong links to wider understandings of geography.
Long Abstract:
Relativity was hotly discussed around 1900, particularly in relation to developments in anthropology and physics. But it was neither new nor limited to those fields and figures to whom the term has been attached. Being able to recognize that one’s spatial perceptions, linguistic expressions, affective understandings and sense of place are relative to one’s location, history, body, and group is part of being human. The session asks the following questions: How widely distributed were relativistic conceptions before the celebrated arrival of Franz Boas in anthropology and Albert Einstein in physics? How might we identify and define a “commonplace” language or toolkit of relativism? How did popular, institutional and increasingly academic historical geographical practices perform and practice relativity before the better-known relativist approaches of Boas and Einstein? How was a “commonplace relativism” instrumental in bringing Boas and Einstein to, and authorizing, their conclusions about relations between human beings, and time and space? How did strongly relativist geographical understandings shape peoples apprehension of special relativity’s philosophical consequences?
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The session will explore the common and diverging concerns and relations between discourses in anthropology, geography and physics, in associated institutions and emergent academic disciplines in Britain, Germany, France, and beyond. Papers will trace the performance and reception of historical relativist knowledges and practices through publications, exhibitions, performances, and images mobilized in diverse knowledge-making spaces with international audiences. We will consider fin de siècle practitioners from geography, anthropology, physics, and related disciplines, including Ernst Mach, Halford Mackinder, Ellen Churchill Semple and Richard Andree.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 15 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Boas was influenced by both the geoscience of Alexander von Humboldt and the linguistics of his brother Wilhelm. The Humboldts understood language and nature as unfolding within a cosmos that was essentially incomplete. This paper follows these ideas to 1900, and to recent discussions of "Gaia."
Paper long abstract:
The impact of the "Humboldtian Tradition" on Franz Boas has been documented by George Stocking and Matti Bunzl. Both the geophysics of Alexander von Humboldt and the comparative linguistics of his brother Wilhelm contributed to Boas's version of cultural anthropology. Inspired by renewed attention to Alexander's mutlifarious legacy at the 250th anniversary of his birth-- and by his rediscovery by ecological thinkers today-- this paper reconsiders connections between the earth science and the linguistic science of the Humboldt brothers. It connects both to post-Kantian philosophy, including aesthetics and Naturphilosophie, to argue that each set his object within a cosmos that was essentially incomplete. The notion of "nature as a free domain" was central to their views on the relativity of both knowledge and natural entities; both language and every domain of nature unfolded unpredictably, driven by obscure but undeniable living forces. The paper considers these ideas' influence around 1900, on Boas and the anarchist geographer, Elisee Reclus. Finally, it considers their relevance for current attempts, including Latour's take on "Gaia," to think human life and thought and its terrestrial supports on a basis of "relativity"-- as both determined and free.
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces how approaches to auditory and visual sensations in physics at the turn of the century developed out of Neo-Kantian reflections on epistemological foundations of scientific knowledge, and further explores this influence from philosophy and physics to Boasian anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
Toward the turn of the century, the study of sensation and observation as epistemological foundations for scientific knowledge gained increasingly significance. Famous natural scientists such as Helmholtz, Hering, Mach and Planck participated in debates about the nature of visual and auditory sensations and their processing and interpretation. Franz Boas, who was influenced and supported by Helmholtz, focused on visual sensations and observation in his doctoral dissertation. However, Boas was not satisfied with the prospect of psychophysics and could not settle with the trend in geography at the time in the United States, either.
This paper traces how approaches to auditory and visual sensations in controversies of physics stimulated and were simultaneously influenced by Neo-Kantian reflections on scientific knowledge, and further contributed to the developing distinction between Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften. I shall argue that Boas's empirical positivism has its roots in this Neo-Kantian debates on sensations in the philosophically informed natural sciences. Although his cultural relativism combining the plasticity of bodily types, the psychic unity of mankind, and diversity of cultures has to be understood in the same context, the deeper implications of this position was not the same as that of relativity in physics, which confirmed the universality and validity physics theory and methods. On the contrary, Boas's positivism led to a particularistic outlook, seemingly lacking theoretical or methodological coherence. It is his insistence on the analysis of secondary explanations about cultural phenomena which forms the key to a conversational model of culture, epistemology, and scientific knowledge.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the role of the deliberately commonplace in Ernst Mach's critical approach to the geographies/cosmographies of mass and self, showing how his methodological commitments to psychophysics underwrote his much better known treatment of the relativities of time and space.
Paper long abstract:
Ernst Mach's work was foundational for the development of relativistic approaches to space and time from Einstein and other physicists, and this is usually related to his positivist insistence on measurable relations and seen as an attack on Newtonian absolutes. Returning to Mach's early work in the 1860s and 70s to better understand his famous 1880s books on mechanics and sensations, this paper explores the significance of two other aspects that Mach drew from the psychophysical endeavour to relate the inner and the outer that had been pioneered by Gustav Fechner. The first was Mach's deliberate pursuit of methodological inversions of perspective, which meant that his lectures on the critical problems of physics began with the poetry of Schiller, and that he questioned the significance of boundaries to the soul (relating self and environment) as well as to mass (relating the inertial motion of the earth to the presence of the stars). The second was his systematic attempt to relate commonplace thought and the sciences in an epistemological approach that denied mechanistic foundations in favour of economic description, and sought evidence in the insights of mothers and home economics as well as in the experimental apparatus of the laboratory sciences. Understanding Mach's work better will help show how relativity could be deliberately commonplace philosophically as well as sharply critical of everyday assumptions about the nature of mass, time, space and self. It also suggests fruitful relations between physics and anthropology mediated by psychophysics and descriptive explanatory economies of the sciences.
Paper short abstract:
This paper asks whether fin de siècle British geography both fostered and evidenced a wider intellectual climate of relativistic thinking in the physical and human scientific circles and beyond in non-academic communities.
Paper long abstract:
The historians and philosophers of geography Jonathan Raper David Livingstone, Doreen Massey, Charles Withers and Keith Richards, Mike Bithell and Michael Bravo have begun to ponder the significance of geography to histories of relativity. This paper seeks to expand their scholarship by asking whether and how fin de siècle British geography both fostered and evidenced a wider intellectual climate of relativistic thinking in public and academic communities of physical and human scientific practice. This paper maps the locations of late nineteenth-century popular geographical knowledge performances as well as those of an emergent professionalizing academic discipline of geography. It positions the latter in relation to broader patterns of scientific performance in a rapidly shifting landscape of scientific knowledge-making by presenting several case studies about the British Society for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) and geographers at the University of Oxford. The paper assesses how geographical methods developed across these sites which saw the harnessing of visual technologies, images, linguistic idioms and imaginative techniques employed by a number of individuals active in these sites, including Halford Mackinder, J.F. Heyes and Francis Galton. In the 1880s such sites saw the emergence of concepts of special and general geography which explored, defined and disseminated a geographical relativity concerning space and time. The implications of the latter pertain as much to transdisciplinary understandings of relativity in the emergent fields of anthropology and modern physics in the early twentieth century as to contemporary planetary concerns addressed by Bruno Latour.