Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007)
Sarah
Igo is the winner of the 2004 FHHS Dissertation Award and the 2004 FHHS/JHBS
Early Career Award.
Americans today "know" that a majority of the population supports the death penalty, that half of all marriages end in divorce, and that four out of five prefer a particular brand of toothpaste. Through statistics like these, we feel that we understand our fellow citizens. But remarkably, such data--now woven into our social fabric--became common currency only in the last century. Sarah Igo tells the story, for the first time, of how opinion polls, man-in-the-street interviews, sex surveys, community studies, and consumer research transformed the United States public.
Igo argues that modern surveys, from the Middletown studies to the Gallup Poll and the Kinsey Reports, projected new visions of the nation: authoritative accounts of majorities and minorities, the mainstream and the marginal. They also infiltrated the lives of those who opened their doors to pollsters, or measured their habits and beliefs against statistics culled from strangers. Survey data underwrote categories as abstract as "the average American" and as intimate as the sexual self.
With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans' sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation. Tracing how ordinary people argued about and adapted to a public awash in aggregate data, she reveals how survey techniques and findings became the vocabulary of mass society--and essential to understanding who we, as modern Americans, think we are.
This book received the 2006 President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association.
John Carson, The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
John Carson
is the winner of the 2003 FHHS Article Prize and the 1994 FHHS Dissertation
Prize
How have modern democracies squared their commitment to equality with their fear that disparities in talent and intelligence might be natural, persistent, and consequential? In this wide-ranging account of American and French understandings of merit, talent, and intelligence over the past two centuries, John Carson tells the fascinating story of how two nations wrestled scientifically with human inequalities and their social and political implications.
Surveying a broad array of political tracts, philosophical treatises, scientific works, and journalistic writings, Carson chronicles the gradual embrace of the IQ version of intelligence in the United States, while in France, the birthplace of the modern intelligence test, expert judgment was consistently prized above such quantitative measures. He also reveals the crucial role that determinations of, and contests over, merit have played in both societies--they have helped to organize educational systems, justify racial hierarchies, classify army recruits, and direct individuals onto particular educational and career paths.
A contribution to both the history of science and intellectual history, The Measure of Merit illuminates the shadow languages of inequality that have haunted the American and French republics since their inceptions.
John Carson is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the University of Michigan.
"I know of no book on this topic which equals the scope, sophistication,
and explanatory power of Carson's study. The Measure of Merit,
by comparing the French and American debates over the meaning and measure
of intelligence, underscores the historical accommodations and conflicts
which lie behind that totemic concept."
--Ken Alder, Northwestern University, author of Measure of All Things
"John Carson's wonderful book situates the idea of intelligence
in relation to republican ideals of equality and self-improvement as well
as medical doctrines of abnormality and biological ones of heredity. It
is a fine work of intellectual history that goes beyond ideas to address
measurement tools and clinical practices in France and the United States."
--Theodore Porter, University of California, Los Angeles
Adriana S. Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006).
Since the early seventeenth century, stories of encounters with strange
children in unusual circumstances have been recorded, circulated, and
reproduced in Europe and North America not simply as myths, legends, or
good tabloid copy but as occurrences deserving serious scrutiny by philosophers
and scientists. "Wild children" were seen as privileged objects
of knowledge, believed to hold answers to fundamental questions about
the boundaries of the human, the character and significance of civilization,
and the relation between nature and culture, heredity and environment.
Through detailed readings of a wide variety of accounts, debates, and representations, Encounters with Wild Children explores the many different meanings these children were given and the varied responses they elicited. Adriana Benzaquén explains why wild children continue to haunt and fascinate Western scientists and shows how the knowledge they have generated in different disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, linguistics, and sociology, has contributed to the shaping and reshaping of the modern understanding of "the child" and affected the social and institutional practices directed at all children in schools, welfare, mental health, and the law.
Adriana S. Benzaquén is assistant professor, history, Mount Saint Vincent University.
Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
Rarely
does the world see as versatile a figure as Herbert Simon. A Nobel laureate
in economics, he was an accomplished political scientist, winner of a
lifetime achievement award from the American Psychological Association,
and founder of the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
In all his work in all these fields, he pursued a single goal: to create
a science that could map the bounds of human reason and so enlarge its
role in human affairs.
Hunter Crowther-Heyck uses the career of this unique individual to examine the evolution of the social sciences after World War II, particularly Simon's creation of a new field, systems science, which joined together two distinct, powerful approaches to human behavior, the sciences of choice and control. Simon sought to develop methods by which human behavior, specifically human problem-solving, could be modeled and simulated. Regarding mind and machine as synonymous, Simon applied his models of human behavior to many other areas, from public administration and business management to artificial intelligence and the design of complex social and technical systems.
In this informed and discerning study, Crowther-Heyck explores Simon's contributions to science and their influences on modern life and thought. For historians of science, social science, and technology, and for scholars of twentieth-century American intellectual and cultural history, this account of Herbert Simon's life and work provides a rich and valuable perspective.
"This biography is a fitting tribute to those accomplishments and
the person who achieved them."—David J. Pittenger, PsycCRITIQUES
Hunter Crowther-Heyck is an assistant professor of history of science
at the University of Oklahoma and former exhibits curator at the National
Library of Medicine.
Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
2005 David Pinckney Prize, Sponsored by The Society for French Historical
Studies
In the wake of the French Revolution, as attempts to restore political stability to France repeatedly failed, a group of concerned intellectuals identified a likely culprit: the prevalent sensationalist psychology, and especially the flimsy and fragmented self it produced. They proposed a vast, state-run pedagogical project to replace sensationalism with a new psychology that showcased an indivisible and actively willing self, or moi. As conceived and executed by Victor Cousin, a derivative philosopher but an academic entrepreneur of genius, this long-lived project singled out the male bourgeoisie for training in selfhood. Granting everyone a self in principle, Cousin and his disciples deemed workers and women incapable of the introspective finesse necessary to appropriate that self in practice.
Beginning with a fresh consideration of the place of sensationalism in the Old Regime and the French Revolution, Jan Goldstein traces a post-Revolutionary politics of selfhood that reserved the Cousinian moi for the educated elite, outraged Catholics, and consigned socially marginal groups to the ministrations of phrenology. Situating the Cousinian moi between the fragmented selves of eighteenth-century sensationalism and twentieth-century Freudianism, Goldstein suggests that the resolutely unitary self of the nineteenth century was only an interlude tailored to the needs of the post-Revolutionary bourgeois order.
Jan Goldstein is Professor of History at the University of Chicago.
Alice Boardman Smuts, Science in the Service of Children, 1893-1935 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
This book is the first comprehensive history of the development of child
study during the early part of the twentieth century. Most nineteenth-century
scientists deemed children unsuitable subjects for study, and parents
were hostile to the idea. But by 1935, the study of the child was a thriving
scientific and professional field. Here, Alice Boardman Smuts shows how
interrelated movements—social and scientific—combined to transform
the study of the child.
Drawing on nationwide archives and extensive interviews with child study pioneers, Smuts recounts the role of social reformers, philanthropists, and progressive scientists who established new institutions with new ways of studying children. Part history of science and part social history, this book describes a fascinating era when the normal child was studied for the first time, a child guidance movement emerged, and the newly created federal Children’s Bureau conducted pathbreaking sociological studies of children.
ALICE BOARDMAN SMUTS is a founding member of the Society for Research in Child Development’s History Committee, which seeks to promote research and writing in the history of the field of child development. She retired from the faculty at the University of Michigan Bush Center for Child Development and Social Policy.
Theodore M. Porter, Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Karl
Pearson, founder of modern statistics, came to this field by way of passionate
early studies of philosophy and cultural history as well as ether physics
and graphical geometry. His faith in science grew out of a deeply moral
quest, reflected also in his socialism and his efforts to find a new basis
for relations between men and women. This biography recounts Pearson's
extraordinary intellectual adventure and sheds new light on the inner
life of science.
Theodore Porter's intensely personal portrait of Pearson extends from religious crisis and sexual tensions to metaphysical and even mathematical anxieties. Pearson sought to reconcile reason with enthusiasm and to achieve the impersonal perspective of science without sacrificing complex individuality. Even as he longed to experience nature directly and intimately, he identified science with renunciation and positivistic detachment. Porter finds a turning point in Pearson's career, where his humanistic interests gave way to statistical ones, in his Grammar of Science (1892), in which he attempted to establish scientific method as the moral educational basis for a refashioned culture.
In this original and engaging book, a leading historian of modern science investigates the interior experience of one man's scientific life while placing it in a rich tapestry of social, political, and intellectual movements.
Theodore Porter is Professor of History at UCLA and author of The Rise of Statistical Thinking and Trust in Numbers (both Princeton)
"Theodore Porter's book on Pearson is not a biography in the conventional
sense. It focuses on the early part of his career in an effort to show
how he was drawn to the study of statistics and eventually conceived it
as the key to a new philosophy of nature, which was to become his life's
work. . . . The great value of Porter's book is that this focus on the
early phase of Pearson's career highlights the complex route by which
his quest for emotional and intellectual satisfaction led him towards
the project that would, in effect, create modern statistics."
--Peter J. Bowler, Nature
"[A] brilliant biography, one can hardly imagine a better summary
of Karl Pearson's fascinating life and complicated persona. . . . [Porter]
reveals more about the origins, aspirations, and consequences of modern
statistics than any technical treatise of the same length could possibly
accomplish. As Porter emphasizes, Pearson's life was a tour de force [and]
extremely fascinating to the reader."
--Manfred D. Laubichler, Science
"Porter's biography of the young Pearson, the statistician in embryo,
exceeds all expectations in recreating the intellectual worlds in which
Pearson tried to find a home. The breadth of the reading and the depth
of interpretation are impressive. . . . Porter shows us a young Pearson,
clever and brave, who has a burning passion to understand things."
--John Aldrich, American Scientist
"This book is a remarkable achievement."
--Jenny Marie, Journal of the History of Biology
Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross, eds., The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 7, The Modern Social Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
This
volume provides a history of the concepts, practices, institutions, and
ideologies of social sciences (including behavioural and economic sciences)
since the eighteenth century. It offers original, synthetic accounts of
the historical development of social knowledge, including its philosophical
assumptions, its social and intellectual organization, and its relations
to science, medicine, politics, bureaucracy, philosophy, religion, and
the professions. Its forty-two chapters include inquiries into the genres
and traditions that formed social science, the careers of the main social
disciplines (psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, political
science, geography, history, and statistics), and international essays
on social science in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
It also includes essays that examine the involvement of the social sciences
in government, business, education, culture, and social policy. This is
a broad cultural history of social science, which analyzes from a variety
of perspectives its participation in the making of the modern world.
Contributors: Theodore M. Porter, Dorothy Ross, Johan Heilbron, Stephen Turner, Antoine Picon, Eileen Yeo, Harry Liebersohn, Johnson Kent Wright, Jan Goldstein, Keith Tribe, Margaret Schabas, Terrell Carver, Mitchell Ash, Mary Morgan, James Farr, Robert Bannister, Adam Kuper, Marie-Claire Robic, Jacques Revel, Andrew Barshay, Jorge Balan, Jaromir Janousek, Irina Sirotkina, Alain Roussillon, Owen Sichone, Partha Chatterjee, Bettina Gransow, Peter Wagner, Alain Desrosieres, Peter Miller, Susan Herbst, Ellen Fitzpatrick, Julie Reuben, John Carson, Ellen Herman, Elizabeth Lunbeck, Rosalind Rosenberg, Elazar Barkan, David Hollinger, Michael Latham
Andrew S. Winston, ed., Defining Difference: Race and Racism in the History of Psychology (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003).
Defining
Difference is the first book to bring together recent scholarship
on the history of psychology and race. Throughout the history of the field,
psychological discourse has been shaped by social concerns, and its discourse
on race is no exception. Psychologists have both promoted and fought against
racism, and a nuanced historical account requires analysis of both dimensions.
The contributors seek to understand the relationship between the changes
in the field and broader social change by mapping the changing discourse
for "defining difference" through race.
Topics covered include essentialism and the history of the concept of race, ideas of race in the work of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century psychologists, psychological discourse on topics such as "mixed-race" people, political uses of racial research, changes in textbook presentations of race and intelligence, and international perspectives on psychology and race. Contributors also examine the prominence and persistence of American research on racial differences in intelligence as well as the work of Kenneth Clark and Horace Mann Bond in combating racism in science and society. This important volume increases readers' understanding of the link between racial studies and social attitudes in our time and, at the same time, provides a comprehensive examination of that link throughout history.
Andrew S. Winston is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Guelph
in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, and a Fellow of the History of Psychology
Division of the American Psychological Association.
Ian A. M. Nicholson, Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2002).
Inventing
Personality examines the early career of Gordon Allport (1897–1967)
to reveal the history of the personality category he championed. Drawing
on an extensive array of previously unpublished biographical materials,
Nicholson masterfully combines biography with intellectual history to
reveal the ways in which Allport’s science was embedded in the cultural
politics of America in the 1920s and the 1930s. He argues that personality’s
emergence as an object of science was linked to the gradual demise of
character and the self-sacrificing, morally grounded self that it supported.
Carefully highlighting Allport’s complex commitments to both science and spirituality, Nicholson examines the rich cultural and historical contexts that framed the emergence of personality as a discipline, revealing multiple (even contradictory) meanings of “personality” in the language of American selfhood. He asserts that “personality’s” appeal lay in its ability to integrate and obscure the complex polarities of material and spiritual; old and new; masculine and feminine; and freedom and control—categories rendered unstable in a new and distinctively modern age. This book will be invaluable to scholars and practitioners interested in personality, and it will serve as a model of scientific biography.
Nicholson has written an intriguing, poignant, and well-paced portrayal
of Gordon Allport. Part biography and part history of the field of personality
psychology, the book provides a fascinating look at Allport's dominant
influence and of this formidable work in the discipline. Summing Up: Highly
recommended.
—Choice Magazine
Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 2002).
A
very impressive work, providing a clear, fresh and cogent account of some
of the major themes of Australian history: settlement in a new land, adaptation
to novel conditions, the emergence of a new 'type', the development of nationalism,
the fate of Aboriginal people, and the significance of scientific racism.
Importantly, it makes specialized material accessible to the general reader.Henry Reynolds
In this lucid and original book, Warwick Anderson offers the first comprehensive history of Australian medical and scientific ideas about race and place.
In nineteenth-century Australia, the main commentators on race and biological differences were doctors. The medical profession entertained serious anxieties about 'racial degeneration' of the white population in the new land. They feared non-white races as reservoirs of disease, and they held firm beliefs on the baneful influence of the tropics on the health of Europeans.
Gradually these matters became the province of public health and biological science. In the 1930s anthropologists claimed 'race' as their special interest, until eventually the edifice of racial classification collapsed under its own proliferating contradictions.
The Cultivation of Whiteness examines the notion of 'whiteness' as a flexible category in scientific and public debates. This is the first time such an analytic framework has been used anywhere in the history of medicine or of science. Anderson also provides the first full account of experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s on Aboriginal people in the central deserts.
This very readable book draws on European and American work on the development of racial thought and on the history of representations of the body. As the first extensive (and entertaining) historical survey of ideas about the peopling of Australia, it will help to reshape debate on race, ethnicity, citizenship and environment.
About the author: Warwick Anderson, a medical doctor and historian of science, was founder of the Centre for the Study of Health and Society at the University of Melbourne. He now teaches at the University of California at San Francisco and Berkeley. At UCSF he directs the program in the history of the health sciences and the campus humanities centre.
Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Peder Anker is the winner of 2000 FHHS Dissertation Award
From 1895 to the founding of the United Nations in 1945, the promising new science of ecology flourished in the British Empire. Peder Anker asks why ecology expanded so rapidly and how a handful of influential scientists and politicians established a tripartite ecology of nature, knowledge, and society. Patrons in the northern and southern extremes of the Empire, he argues, urgently needed tools for understanding environmental history as well as human relations to nature and society in order to set policies for the management of natural resources and to effect social control of natives and white settlement. Holists such as Jan Christian Smuts and mechanists such as Arthur George Tansley vied for the right to control and carry out ecological research throughout the British Empire and to lay a foundation of economic and social policy that extended from Spitsbergen to Cape Town. The enlargement of the field from botany to human ecology required a broader methodological base, and ecologists drew especially on psychology and economy. They incorporated those methodologies and created a new ecological order for environmental, economic, and social management of the Empire.
Wade E. Pickren and Donald A. Dewsbury, eds. Evolving Perspectives on the History of Psychology (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2002).
Evolving Perspectives on the History of Psychology presents a collection of some of the best historical scholarship that has appeared in APA journals over the last three decades. In articles that explore important milestones, controversies, and transitions in the history of psychology, contributors discuss a wide range of psychological developments from Yerke's experiments to feminist methodology. This reader effectively places a wide variety of ideologies, prominent figures, and psychological concepts in a larger historical context, making complex historical and social perspectives simultaneously accessible and challenging to students. Rather than merely celebrating great men and historical events, as many histories of psychology have done, this "new history" of psychology places people and events in social and temporal perspective. What emerges is the humanness of psychology, its human successes, failings, and compromises. Every reader who cares about psychology will find their understanding enriched by this collection.
John P. Jackson Jr., Social Scientists for Social Justice: Making the Case against Segregation (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
Kenneth Clark's famous "doll tests" shocked the nation in the 1950s when he was able to demonstrate that when given a choice, Black children preferred white dolls to black dolls. Few remember that these tests were performed within the context of the Brown vs. Board of education hearings to show the debilitating psychological effects of racism and segregation. This study and others like it had a powerful influence on the Supreme Court justices and were cited in the historic Brown decision. In many ways, Kenneth Clark and other social scientists helped break the back of Southern segregation.Jackson discusses this most famous of the social scientific studies in support of Brown but he also focuses on the decades of social science research on race leading up to it to show how social scientists struggled to impact American law and policy on race and poverty. He demonstrates that without these academics, who brought their talents to bear on the most pressing issues of the day, we wouldn't enjoy the legal protections against discrimination we take for granted.
Irina Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
The
vital place of literature and the figure of the writer in Russian society
and history have been extensively studied, but their role in the evolution
of psychiatry is less well known. In Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural
History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930, Irina Sirotkina explores the
transformations of Russian psychiatric practice through its relationship
to literature. During this period, psychiatrists began to view literature
as both an indicator of the nation's mental health and an integral part
of its well-being. By aligning themselves with writers, psychiatrists argued
that the aim of their science was not dissimilar to the literary project
of exploring the human soul and reflecting on the psychological ailments
of the age. Through the writing of pathographies (medical biographies), psychiatrists strengthened their social standing, debated political issues under the guise of literary criticism, and asserted moral as well as professional claims. By examining the psychiatric engagement with the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, and the decadents and revolutionaries, Sirotkina provides a rich account of Russia's medical and literary history during this turbulent revolutionary period.
Irina Sirotkina is a research fellow at the Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.
David K. Robinson & Robert W. Rieber, eds., Wilhelm Wundt in History: The Making of a Scientific Psychology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).
Wilhelm Wundt is widely recognized as a founder of modern experimental
psychology. One of his many contributions was to help establish the Leipzig
Institute for Experimental Psychology -- the first graduate program in
the field -- in 1879, the centennial celebration of which resulted in
a number of studies including Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific
Psychology. In an extensive revision of this important book, first published
by Plenum in 1980, a distinguished roster of contributors reconsider this
much heralded `founding father' of modern psychology.
Table of Contents:
1. Wundt before Leipzig; S. Diamond.
2. Wundt and the Temptations of Psychology; K. Danziger.
3. The Unknown Wundt: Drive, Apperception, and Volition; K. Danziger.
4. A Wundt Primer: The Operating Characteristics of Consciousness; A.L.
Blumenthal.
5. Wundt and the Americans: From Flirtation to Abandonment; R.W. Rieber.
6. Reaction-time Experiments in Wundt's Institute and Beyond; D.K. Robinson.
7. Laboratories for Experimental Psychology: Gottingen's Ascendancy over
Leipzig in the 1890s; E.J. Haupt.
8. The Wundt Collection in Japan; M. Takasuna.
Bibliography of Wilhelm Wundt's Writings, as Compiled by Eleonore Wundt;
D.K. Robinson. Writings of Wilhelm Wundt, by Year.
Mark S. Micale & Paul F. Lerner, eds., Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930, Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Paul Lerner is the winner of the 1998 FHHS Dissertation Award.
Trauma--the psychological consequences of wars, accidents and abuse--has become the subject of heated debate among doctors, psychologists, and lay critics (and activists) in recent years. The essays in this book trace the origins of these debates in medicine and culture in modern Europe and America. They cover medical and cultural aspects of experiences understood to be "traumatic" from rail and factory accidents in the later nineteenth century through the First World War and its aftermath.Christopher D. Green, Marlene Shore, & Thomas Teo, eds., The Transformation of Psychology: Influences of 19th-Century Philosophy, Technology, and Natural Science ( Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001).
Eleven chapters consider the elevation of psychology to the status of a
natural science, identifying the intellectual, social, technological, and
institutional currents influencing this development. Individual chapters
examine the place of numerous tendencies within psychology, including eugenics,
phrenology, the study of memory, the psychology of mathematical beauty,
cognitive science, and genetics and embryology. The contributions of key
individuals are also discussed, among them Wundt, Mach, Babbage, Marx, and
Dilthey. The authors are professors of psychology, history, technology,
religion, and the humanities.
Table of Contents:
1. Eugenics and Other Victorian "Secular Religions," Raymond E. Fancher2. Practical Phrenology and Psychological Counseling in the 19th United States, Michael M. Sokal
3. Sealing Off the Discipline: William Wundt and the Psychology of Memory, Kurt Danziger
4. Psychology and Memory in the Midst of Change: The Social Concerns of Late-19th-Century North American Psychologists, Marlene Shore
5. The Psychology of Mathematical Beauty in the Nineteenth Century: The Golden Section, John G. Benjafield
6. Cause Into Function: Ernst Mach and Reconstructing Explanation in Psychology, Andrew S. Winston
7. Charles Babbage, the Analytical Engine, and the Possibility of a 19th-Century Cognitive Science, Christopher D. Green
8. Instincts and Instruments, Katharine Anderson
9. Philosophic Doubts About Psychology as a Natural Science, Charles W. Tolman
10. Karl Marx and Wilhelm Dilthey on the Socio-Historical Conceptualization of the Mind, Thomas Teo
11. Early Development and Psychology: Genetic and Embryological Influences, 1880-1920, Fredric Weizmann
Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology : Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
Lyn Schumaker won the 1995 FHHS Dissertation Award
Africanizing Anthropology tells the story of the anthropological fieldwork centered at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) during the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on collaborative processes rather than on the activity of individual researchers, Lyn Schumaker gives the assistants and informants of anthropologists a central role in the making of anthropological knowledge.Schumaker shows how local conditions and local ideas about culture and history, as well as previous experience of outsiders’ interest, shape local people’s responses to anthropological fieldwork and help them, in turn, to influence the construction of knowledge about their societies and lives. Bringing to the fore a wide range of actors—missionaries, administrators, settlers, the families of anthropologists—Schumaker emphasizes the daily practices of researchers, demonstrating how these are as centrally implicated in the making of anthropological knowlege as the discipline’s methods. Selecting a prominent group of anthropologists—The Manchester School—she reveals how they achieved the advances in theory and method that made them famous in the 1950s and 1960s.
This book makes important contributions to anthropology, African history, and the history of science.
Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
Jorge Canizares-Esguerra is the winner of the 2001 FHHS Article Award
In the mid-eighteenth century, the French naturalist Buffon contended that the New World was in fact geologically new-that it had recently emerged from the waters-and that dangerous miasmas had caused all organic life on the continents to degenerate. In the "dispute of the New World" many historians, naturalists, and moral philosophers from Europe and the Americas (including Thomas Jefferson) sought either to confirm or refute Buffon's views. This book maintains that the "dispute" was also a debate over historical authority: upon whose sources and facts should naturalists and historians reconstruct the history of the continent and its peoples?The author traces the cultural processes that led early-modern intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic to question primary sources that had long been considered authoritative: Mesoamerican codices, early colonial Spanish chronicles, and travel accounts. In the process, he demonstrates how the writings of these critics led to the rise of the genre of conjectural history. The book also adds to the literature on nation formation by exploring the creation of specific identities in Spain and Spanish America by means of particular historical narratives and institutions. Finally, it demonstrates that colonial intellectuals went beyond mirroring or contesting European ideas and put forth daring and original critiques of European epistemologies that resulted in substantially new historiographical concepts.
