Since Bruno Latour's discussion of a Sakhalin island map used by La Pérouse as part of a global network of “immutable mobiles,” the commensurability of European and non-European knowledge has become an important issue for historians of science. But recent studies have challenged these dichotomous categories as reductive and inadequate for understanding the fluid nature of identities, their relational origins, and their historically constituted character. Itineraries of knowledge transfer, traced in the wake of objects and individuals, offer a powerful heuristic (...) alternative, bypassing artificial epistemological divides and avoiding the limited scale of national or monolingual frames. Approaches that place undue emphasis either on the omnipotence of the imperial center or the centrality of the colonial periphery see only half the picture. Instead, practices of knowledge collection, codification, elaboration, and dissemination—in European, indigenous, and mixed or hybrid contexts—can be better understood by following their moveable parts, with a keen sensitivity toward non-normative epistemologies and more profound temporal frameworks. -/- . (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)

This article analyzes the network of transactions knitted around documents and testimonies of the past. Indispensable to write the history of the Americas, the latter became an essential resource for the survival of the sages in the Río de la Plata area in the 1830s and 1840s. This article, focusing on the circulation and publication of objects originating in the older Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata, is structured around the work of three characters who made a lifestyle out of (...) the trade on papers, antiquities and fossil bones, i.e. the enterprises of Oriental Teodoro Miguel Vilardebó, Neapolitan polygraph Pietro de Angelis and engineer-architect Carlo Zucchi. Such transactions define the practice of history and the sciences in the Americas and they open the door to an immense network of trader of the past that still deserves more thorough studies. This paper is grounded on the analysis of the correspondence between de Angelis and Zucchi, kept at Archivio di Stato di Reggio Emilia and edited by its former director Gino Badini, other primary sources and secondary literature. As a phenomenon transcending the Río de la Plata area, this study is also an essay on the constitution of knowledge in the Americas. (shrink)