If the discourse of manners and customs aspires to a stable fixing of subjects and systems of differences, however, its project is not and never can be complete. This is true if only for the seemingly trivial reason that manners-and-customs descriptions seldom occur on their own as discrete texts. They usually appear embedded in or appended to a superordinate genre, whether a narrative, as in travel books and much ethnography, or an assemblage, as in anthologies and magazines.6 In the case (...) of travel writing, which is the main focus of this essay, manners-and-customs description is always in play with other sorts of representation that also bespeak difference and position subjects in their own ways. Sometimes these other positioning complement the ideological project of normalizing description, and sometime they do not.In what follows, I propose to examine this interplay of discourses in some nineteenth-century travel writing chiefly about Africa. While Barrow’s work is not prominent on anybody’s mental bookshelves these days, readers will recognize such names as David Livingstone, John Speke, James Grant, Richard Burton, Mungo Park, or Paul Du Chaillu. During the co-called opening up of central and southern Africa to European capitalism in the first half of the nineteenth century, such explorer-writers were the principal producers of Africa for European imaginations—producers, that is, of ideology in connection with the European expansionist project there. What I hope to underscore in these writings is not their tendency towards single, fixed subject positions or single, fixed systems of difference. Rather, I wish to emphasize the multiplicity of ways of codifying the Other, the variety of fixed positions and the variety of given sets of differences that they posit. European penetration and appropriation is semanticized in numerous ways that can be quite distinct, even mutually contradictory. In the course of examining discursive polyphony in these travel writings, I hope to stress the need to consider ideology not only in terms of reductive simplification but also in terms of the proliferation of meanings. 6. Ethnographies would seem to be a counterexample to this claim, but in fact one can fairly easily show that ethnographic writing is inextricably tied to personal narrative. Indeed this tie is a symptom of a serious contradiction between ethnographic methods and ethnographic discourse. See my “Fieldwork in Common Places,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus . Mary Louise Pratt is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She is author of Toward a Speech-Act Theory of Literary Discourse and is a member of the editorial boards of Poetics, Signs Tabloid, and Cultural Anthropology. (shrink)

Rosenbaum presents The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group, a subtle and powerful picture of the Bloomsbury Group, showing clearly what has been vague--their beginnings in the Victorian era, before 'human character changed' (as Virginia Woolf said). Rosenbaum is an unparalleled interpreter of the philosophical as well as the literary traditions absorbed by this group.--Richard Ellman.... thorough and knowledgeable... --Library Journal.

Early in 1826, at the age of 28, Charles Lyell began writing the first of a series of articles for J. G. Lockhart, the new editor of theQuarterly review. These articles gave him his first opportunity to express to the educated public his views on the state of science in general, and of geology in particular, in English society. According to the convention of theQuarterly, each article was nominally a review of one or more recently published works, but like other (...) reviewers Lyell clearly chose them as ‘pegs’ on which to hang his own arguments. In content, the articles form a kind of ‘gradualistic’ series, rather like his own later interpretations of geological phenomena. At one end of the series (though published third) was an essay on the place of science in general in English university education. Another article (the first to appear in print) focused on some of the English institutions specifically devoted to science. Here there was a hint that the need for reform in the place of science in English society was not unrelated to a similar need for reform in Lyell's chosen branch of science. The next article enlarged on this hint by examining the publications of the Geological Society of London, on which Lyell had recently served as Secretary. This essay expressed for the first time in a general context Lyell's characteristic emphasis on the need for actualistic comparison between present and past. Finally, what he needed to complete the series was an article in which he could show in detail the positive explanatory advantages of following this method in geology. The ‘peg’ which he chose for this purpose was a single work, George Poulett Scrope'sMemoir on the geology of central France. (shrink)

The ArgumentWhile there has been muchattention given to experiment in modern science studies, there has been astoundingly little concern spared over the practice ofquanitataivemeasurment.Thus myths about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematice in science still abound. This paper presents: An explicit mathematical model of the stabilization of quantitative constants in a mathematical science to rival older Bayesian and classical accounts;a framework for writing a history of pracitces with regard to treatment of quantitative measurement erroe; resourece for the comparative sociology of differing (...) discipliness in this regard;and a prolegonmena to a critique of orthodox economics and accounting theories. The key to all these diverse themes is the realization that no one individual alone is capable of fixing the magnitude of a quantitative error estimate, and therefore the social construction of error must be given a more precise meaning, an therefore the social construction of error must be given a more precise menaing, and that this occurs through the istrumentality of meta-analysis. (shrink)