ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Minescapes 3: Religion as Knowledge Matrix between Earth Science and Resource Management

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel is harnessing the history of science to better understand religious symbols in the context of extraction. Classic and recent accounts of the history of geology have shown that biblical references were conducive to the emergence of modern geohistory, and that scientific knowledge continued to interact with religious audiences in complex processes of secularisation and desecularisation. Moving from science to the administration of resources, the panel explores how religious and cosmological belief systems served as a knowledge matrix when workers, experts, scholars, and administrators surveyed landscapes for precious materials, justified technical solutions, and devised theories about the genesis and end of deposits.
The panel brings together research on minescapes in the early modern Netherlands, 19th-century Germany, and Late Qing China to explore complex interactions among science, technology, and belief systems, or, more concretely, between fengshui masters and engineers, Pietists and technical experts, and Calvinists and peat-cutters. Taken together, they highlight the ambiguous role of religion and cosmology as both a cultural constraint on unbridled exploitation of natural resources and a catalyst for settlement, development, and displacement.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Tina Asmussen, Ruhr University Bochum / German Mining Museum Bochum

Commentator

• Adam Bobbette, University of Glasgow

Individual Presentations

• Peat Cutting in the Diluvial Landscape of the Dutch Republic - Mathijs Boom, International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam

• Epistemic Virtues and Narratives of Sustainability in 19th-Century German Mining - Sebastian Felten, Universität Wien, Institut für Geschichte

• Cosmologies in the Field: Epistemological Conflicts over Opening the Earth in Late Qing Mining - Hailian Chen, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Session Organizer

• Sebastian Felten, Universität Wien, Institut für Geschichte