ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

What Are Protocols For? Strategies for Knowing More-Than-Humans in History and Science

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel examines the notion of protocol as important material and immaterial manifestations of obligations that factor into epistemic processes historically. Looking into how protocols have been created and maintained in different cultural spaces illuminates a spectrum of human and more-than-human ties at work. It follows that in order to comprehend protocols in action, one must examine their operation among social groups, communities, and institutions. As scholars have aptly noted, the formation of protocols depend on prior knowledges as part of their facilitation of knowledge-making processes, whether for instructing “ways of being” among kin or guiding laboratory procedures (Sullivan-Clarke 2024; Creager, Grote, Leong 2020). An expanded view of protocol in the history of science offers an analytical strategy for clarifying how people have striven to reconstruct pasts or work with matters of contestation, whether concerning indigenous scientific systems, habitat conservation laws, religious practices, or collection practices. The papers in the panel will focus on collaborative research in the emergence of research and social protocols in the contexts of studying oracle bone divination in late Shang China; understanding human-horse relations with Lakota science and guided by indigenous elders; discerning the limits of quantification in marine habitat conservation laws in the Lakshadweep Islands; and comparing sacred and secular protocols in turtle conservation in South India. Our panelists will together explore questions such as: (1) How do people use protocols beyond boundary objects as bridges between cosmologies? (2) What are the synergies between ways of being in the world and ways of knowing the world that produce intergenerational protocols? (3) What are the histories of protocols that have ordered and guided human and more-than-human relations, and how have these protocols been contested over time?

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Chanelle Adams, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte

Individual Presentations

• From Living Turtle to Ancestral Medium: Protocols of Material Handling and Knowledge Keeping in the Shang Oracle Bone Divination - Peichao Qin, Graduate Student, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

• Counting and Co-existing in a coral habitat: Situating conservation dilemmas in the Lakshadweep Islands of India since the 18th century - Lakshmi Pradeep Rajeswary, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

• The Importance of Protocols: Unlocking the Key to our Scientific Future with our Lakota and Horse Nation Relatives - Yvette Running Horse Collin, Taku Skan Skan Wasakliyapi: Global Institute for Traditional Sciences (GIFTS)

• The Tales That Turn Upon Turtles - John Mathew, Asian University for Women

Session Organizers

• Lakshmi Pradeep Rajeswary, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

• Lisa Onaga, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science