Practical form’ (p. 45). Rengenier Rittersma’s fine-grained analysis of Ferdinando Marsili’s investigation of the biogeography and ecobiology of truffles in eighteenth-century Italy is just another example of such an early practitioner of fieldwork, whose ‘enquiry in some respects anticipated current hydnological research’ (p. 94). Other essays examine the genealogies of the institutional orderings associated with the practice of science in the field. For example, Daniel Clinkman’s chapter examines the cooperation between the Royal Society of London and the British military during the second half of the eighteenth century.
It highlights the early entanglement of fieldwork with military expeditions, and the role of the military in the professionalization of the Royal Society in relation to field research. Such essays remind us of field sciences’ close relationship with the imperialist project in general and Western expansionism in particular. Not only did field scientists benefit from the infrastructures imperial powers had set up in the remote places where fieldwork took place, but also imperial expansion profited from the work of cartographers, botanists and naturalists in the conquest of unknown territories and the exploitation of their natural resources. Further, with the trophies, artefacts, animals, plants and maps they brought back home, field scientists contributed to the advertisement and legitimization of the imperialist project within populations from the metropolis.
They also, as Jeppe Strandsbjerg’s chapter on early modern cartographers shows, contributed to shaping and defining the national territory. At the other end of the volume’s historical arc, a few essays engage with the recent history of fieldwork, during the first decade of the present century. Kristian Nielsen analyses the Danish Galathea 3 Expedition, whilst Jenny Beckmann concentrates on the Swedish Taxonomy Initiative. Adopting a more sociologically inclined approach to their topic, they foreground the notion that, because of its openness, the field, as a site of scientific enquiry, is a fertile ground for studies of the way knowledge gets deployed in our societies, based on a definition of science ‘as a form of communicative action’ (p. 364).
The volume concludes with two essays. In the first, anthropologists Mikkel Bunkenborg and Morten Axel Pedersen reflect on ‘the strange death of the [ethnographic] expedition’, and make the case for this method of generating ethnographic data based on movement, for ‘one can get a better sense of the size and qualities of very big objects by measuring them against one’s own movements’ (p. 427).
The other, by Matthew Edney, is a reflection on the history of cartography and mapmaking. It concludes with the notion that as much as ‘the field’ encompasses a multiplicity of situations and circumstances, so there is no one single kind of map or mapping practice. These two essays, taken together, stand as an apt parting commentary on the volume as a whole. As a kind of scholarly expedition through time and space, it encourages movement through multiple perspectives on, and approaches to, the history of the practices of science in the field.
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