20190725T090020190725T1145Europe/AmsterdamNatural and Cultural Histories
The writing of "history" traditionally comprised both natural and human history; but, so the story goes, in the course of the eighteenth century the two historiographies parted, and specialists started to focus on one or the other. By the mid-nineteenth century, at the latest, we have professional historians in both fields, neatly separated along the boundaries of the so-called "two cultures" – with the history of nature falling into the realm of science and the history of human culture into the humanities. This panel explores examples and developments that run counter to this standard narrative. We emphasize the persistence of considerable overlap, and trace a continuous process of negotiating and contesting the boundaries between "natural" and "cultural" histories. The first paper (Boom) uses the example of the Brussels naturalist F.X. de Burtin to show how, even in the 1780s, the history of the earth and the history of humanity were seen as shaped by analogous processes. The second paper (Nyhart) enters the nineteenth century, and analyzes the theory of history held by the German botanist and cell theory pioneer M. Schleiden. The third (Krämer) and fourth (Nickelsen) contributions are intimately connected, and investigate how botanists in the late nineteenth century claimed an important role for themselves in the writing of cultural history, culminating in the call for a new concept of "culture" that acknowledged the rising importance of the sciences. The commentary (Müller-Wille) complements the panel's papers and opens the floor for a more general discussion.
Organized by Fabian Kraemer and Kärin Nickelsen
Drift 21, Rm. 005History of Science Society 2019meeting@hssonline.org
The writing of "history" traditionally comprised both natural and human history; but, so the story goes, in the course of the eighteenth century the two historiographies parted, and specialists started to focus on one or the other. By the mid-nineteenth century, at the latest, we have professional historians in both fields, neatly separated along the boundaries of the so-called "two cultures" – with the history of nature falling into the realm of science and the history of human culture into the humanities. This panel explores examples and developments that run counter to this standard narrative. We emphasize the persistence of considerable overlap, and trace a continuous process of negotiating and contesting the boundaries between "natural" and "cultural" histories. The first paper (Boom) uses the example of the Brussels naturalist F.X. de Burtin to show how, even in the 1780s, the history of the earth and the history of humanity were seen as shaped by analogous processes. The second paper (Nyhart) enters the nineteenth century, and analyzes the theory of history held by the German botanist and cell theory pioneer M. Schleiden. The third (Krämer) and fourth (Nickelsen) contributions are intimately connected, and investigate how botanists in the late nineteenth century claimed an important role for themselves in the writing of cultural history, culminating in the call for a new concept of "culture" that acknowledged the rising importance of the sciences. The commentary (Müller-Wille) complements the panel's papers and opens the floor for a more general discussion.
Organized by Fabian Kraemer and Kärin Nickelsen
Nature and Culture in the History of the Earth: F.X. de Burtin’s Catastrophist View of Human Progress, the 1780s View Abstract Organized SessionEarth and Environmental Sciences09:00 AM - 09:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 07:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 07:30:00 UTC
This paper sets out to chart different views of history and progress in the study of the deep past in the late eighteenth century. It focusses on the Brussels naturalist François-Xavier de Burtin (1743-1818) and examines his scholarly network, his letters, a range of published works, and society archives. I argue that Burtin drew on his study of earth history to present a view of human history filled with contingency and catastrophe. In the 1780s, Burtin was among the first to reconstruct the planet’s past from traces in fossils, rocks, and strata—explicitly excluding evidence from historiography, antiquarianism, linguistics, theology, and philology, which up to then had been integral parts of the field. Yet Burtin still saw an intimate connection between the ‘moral’ and the ‘physical’ history of the earth, and explored parallels between natural history and human history. Historians of earth science have noted the use of such parallels before. They point to the influence of antiquarian methods and historical metaphors in the earth sciences, but neglect topics which do not fit the disciplinary trajectories of either natural or cultural history. Burtin's cross-disciplinary thoughts on progress and catastrophe in human and earth history are a case in point. His view of the past illuminates how earth science gave rise to radically new notions of a past shaped by contingency rather than Providence.
Presenters Mathijs Boom Universiteit Van Amsterdam
Matthias Schleiden’s Theory of History View Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science09:30 AM - 10:00 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 07:30:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 08:00:00 UTC
In 1851, the botanist and cell-theorist Matthias Schleiden wrote a remarkable essay. In part a book review of Karl Vogt’s German translation of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, it ranged much further, to present an explanation of the contemporary vogue for popular science. Schleiden’s explanation was historical. From this essay and others, I piece together Schleiden’s theory of history, which viewed cultural change as the result of a very few, very great men whose ideas would take centuries to filter out into the broader public. I argue that this theory of history, which included the history of natural science and its popularization, helps us to see how he viewed his own role in the historical process and, by implication, the role he saw for his own works of botanical popularization. Ultimately, I suggest, understanding Schleiden’s view of history allows us to interpret his larger body of work in a new and more integrated way.
Botany and the Science of History I (ca. 1800-1900)View Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science10:15 AM - 10:45 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 08:15:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 08:45:00 UTC
The boundaries between the humanities and the sciences have traditionally been seen as solid and more or less impenetrable; however, in view of the closely entangled developments of the history of (non-human) nature and the history of (human) culture they may not be as unproblematic as first thought. This paper, together with the following (by Nickelsen), traces this debate with a focus on the tradition of writing the history of culture and civilization in the nineteenth century. For the most part of the century, cultural history centered on the texts and objects studied by historians, philologists, and archaeologists. However, botanists were increasingly eager to bring their knowledge of seeds and plants into the discussion and to claim a place for these objects as key sources in the study of cultural history. They thus called into question the historical disciplines’ exclusive authority over human history. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates on “cultural history” were a hotbed of discussion on the epistemic value of different types of sources and the disciplines that were best equipped to interpret them. The paper examines in particular the attempts made by a group of Berlin-based botanists around Georg Schweinfurth (1836–1925). When this group claimed, in 1906, to have found the progenitor of cultivated wheat (Urweizen) in Palestine, Schweinfurth declared this the most important discovery of his lifetime. I argue that this cannot be understood without recourse to of the period’s burgeoning discourse on the origins of human civilization.
Presenters Fabian Kraemer Assistant Professor For The History Of Science, Ludwig-Maximilians-Univestität München, Germany
Botany and the Science of History II (ca. 1800-1900)View Abstract Organized SessionBiology10:45 AM - 11:15 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 08:45:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 09:15:00 UTC
In close alignment to the preceding paper of the panel (Krämer), this paper explores the entanglement of nineteenth-century natural and cultural histories further. Specifically, it traces how and why nineteenth-century botanists claimed a role for themselves in the writing of cultural history. Most importantly, botanists pointed to the fact that the history of human culture was intimately connected to the history of “agriculture” and the cultivation of plants. The beginning of culture in the sense of civilization was commonly linked to the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture. The history of cultivated plants, such as wheat, hence, was at the center of cultural history in this broader sense (which historians of science have so far ignored). This history was then mostly written based on philological methods; but this, botanists claimed, was insufficient. One had to study the actual object sources not only their names. The botanical study of plant geography, including the migration of plants over time and the search for their sites of origin – as in the case of the Urweizen – , was therefore of utmost importance to the history of human culture, so the argument went. The paper shows how, drawing on this tradition, botanists were eventually able to claim that without botanical expertise the study of cultural history was incomplete. Moreover, Schweinfurth even called for a radically altered understanding of “culture” that was no longer exclusively focused on written scholarship but acknowledged the growing importance of the sciences.
Commentary: Natural and Cultural HistoriesView Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science11:15 AM - 11:45 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 09:15:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 09:45:00 UTC
The commentary complements the panel's papers and opens the floor for a more general discussion.
Mathijs Boom
Fabian Kraemer
Kärin Nickelsen