The demarcation of science from other intellectual activities-long an analytic problem for philosophers and sociologists-is here examined as a practical problem for scientists. Construction of a boundary between science and varieties of non-science is useful for scientists' pursuit of professional goals: acquisition of intellectual authority and career opportunities; denial of these resources to "pseudoscientists"; and protection of the autonomy of scientific research from political interference. "Boundary-work" describes an ideological style found in scientists' attempts to create a public image for science (...) by contrasting it favorably to non-scientific intellectual or technical activities. Alternative sets of characteristics available for ideological attribution to science reflect ambivalences or strains within the institution: science can be made to look empirical or theoretical, pure or applied. However, selection of one or another description depends on which characteristics best achieve the demarcation in a way that justifies scientists' claims to authority or resources. Thus, "science" is no single thing: its boundaries are drawn and redrawn inflexible, historically changing and sometimes ambiguous ways. (shrink)

What big questions and large‐scale narratives give coherence to the history of science? From the late 1970s onward, the field has been transformed through a stress on practice and fresh perspectives from gender studies, the sociology of knowledge, and work on a greatly expanded range of practitioners and cultures. Yet these developments, although long overdue and clearly beneficial, have been accompanied by fragmentation and loss of direction. This essay suggests that the narrative frameworks used by historians of science need to (...) come to terms with diversity by understanding science as a form of communication. The centrality of processes of movement, translation, and transmission is already emerging in studies of topics ranging from ethnographic encounters to the history of reading. Not only does this approach offer opportunities for crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline that are all too easily taken for granted; it also has the potential for creating a more effective dialogue with other historians and the wider public. (shrink)

The history of microcinematography is explored here as an example of the possible historiographical directions for work on science and film in the twentieth century. Topics discussed include investigations of the role of time in experiment, and the constant interplay between static and dynamic modes of imaging in scientific research; the role of films as depictions of both the objects of science and the process of scientific looking itself; and the possibility for telling a social history of science through investigation (...) of the production and reception of cinema. (shrink)

Solly Zuckerman’s work has been largely dismissed or marginalized by both historians of primatology and primatologists. This paper, using archival and published materials, re-examines both his life and his research into primate sexuality and sociology in the 1920s, endocrinology in the 1930s, and the effects of bomb blast in the 1940s. Despite the many flaws in his work, which is now largely outdated, his career reveals a great deal about the audiences for primatological knowledge in pre-war and wartime Britain; the (...) interlocking circles of the scientific community that impinged on primatology; and competing ideas of what constituted a scientifically correct methodology for the observation of primate behaviour. Also noted is the gap between Zuckerman’s self-presentation as the scourge of anthropomorphism and the anthropomorphism of his remarks in private notebooks. Although his work well illustrates familiar themes of patriarchy, military and colonialism in the history of primatology, it also suggests another, underexplored dimension of that science: primatology as an example of cross-species social interaction. (shrink)

ABSTRACT An overview of some of the main modes of making images of natural objects and processes, as they have appeared in the history of science, leads to two main conclusions. First, the dichotomies that have traditionally distinguished, for example, art from science, museums from laboratories, and geometrical from algebraic methods have produced a poverty of understanding of visualization. It is at the intersections of these dichotomies where much of the creative work of science occurs, and it is into those (...) intersections that this Focus section leads us. Second, the section suggests that we need to understand images as arguments. Generalizing, we need to develop a “materialized epistemology” that reunites sensual with ideational knowing. Recent work in the history of science is already pointing the way and producing a dramatically new historiography. (shrink)

Early nineteenth-century natural history books reveal that British naturalists depended heavily on correspondence as a means for gathering information and specimens. Edward Newman commented in hisHistory of British Ferns: ‘Were I to make out a list ofallthe correspondents who have assisted me it would be wearisome from its length.’ Works such as William Withering'sBotanical Arrangementshow that artisans numbered among his correspondents. However, the literary products of scientific practice reveal little of the workings or such correspondences and how or why they (...) were sustained. An exchange or letters is maintained if the interests of both recipient and writer are satisfied. Withering's book tells us only that his interests were served by his correspondents; it allows us to say nothing with certainty about the interests of those who wrote to him. Published texts effectively hide the means by which the author determined the veracity of distant correspondents and also the way these informants demonstrated their credibility. (shrink)