Microstudies and big picture accounts are often counterposed. This paper investigates the supposed dichotomy between the two historiographical approaches. In particular it investigates how the discussions are reflected in the historiography of molecular biology and the special questions posed by the disciplinary context. Taking inspiration from the microhistory tradition as exemplified by the works of Carlo Ginzburg, Jacques Revel, and David Sabean among others, the paper highlights the heuristic value of microstudies to reconstruct the multiple contexts that link apparently small (...) events with broader structures. In a parallel fashion, the paper argues for using microstudies to open up the history of molecular biology to other fields of study and thus moving beyond the confines of the disciplinary framework. Such an approach does not dismiss the search for big pictures. Yet rather than opposing big pictures to microstudies, it sees microstudies as a valid way to gain new and broad vistas. (shrink)

This article focuses on the ethno-biological expedition to the Amazon headed by Ettore Biocca between November 1962 and July 1963. Biocca, a parasitologist by training, assembled a multidisciplinary team to carry out an ethno-biological study of Amazon natives. The expedition work covered the natives' customs, myths, chants, diseases and the hallucinogenic compounds and curare they used, and took into account plants and animals common to the Amazon environment. This article aims to contribute to the understanding of the 20th-century Western approach (...) to the Amazon people and its cultural importance. It sets out to show how Biocca's encyclopaedic work related to the centrality of Amazonia and its peoples in scientific and cultural debates on modernity and Western culture in the 1960s, and how it connects to Cold War anxieties about the disappearance of ‘uncorrupted’ peoples. (shrink)