At the Crossroads of the Senses: Human Sciences and Their Material Cultures ca. 1900

Ever since the human mind was constituted as an object of science in the late-nineteenth century, its immateriality has remained an enduring stimulus. Curiously, for most of a century, in most of the world, making the human and the mind susceptible to scientific investigations has required the use of a wide range of materials. New material technologies---aidophones, vowel-tracers, phonoscopes, mechanical recording and time-keeping devices, among others---were paired with new methods to produce scientific knowledge across the human sciences, as they professionalized and institutionalized in Europe and North America. While founding experimental psychology, Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt modified technical devices like the stopwatch and metronome in efforts to more scientifically measure mental operations. Between 1870 and 1914, laboratory and field scientists in anthropology, linguistics, and psychology experimented widely with spools of yarn, color chips, illustrated flip books, naturalia, light reflected through plastic sheets, and other sundry measurements of the senses. This panel explores scientific attempts to produce knowledge about the human, the mind, language, and culture at the intersections of the senses. By attending to the material instruments, techniques, and technologies of human sciences circa 1900, this panel sheds light on scientific attempts to materialize the intractably immaterial human mind. By revisiting human sciences like anthropology, linguistics, and psychology around the turn of the twentieth century, with a focus on the material conditions and substrata of scientific knowledge production, this panel provides historical material with which to reconsider the historiography of the human sciences more broadly.