Across the Senses: Human Sciences and their Material Conditions circa 1900

Abstract

Since the human mind was constituted as an object of science in the late-nineteenth century, its immateriality has remained an enduring stimulus. Making the human mind, perception, and the senses susceptible to scientific investigation has perennially required an array of materials. Indeed, contingent pairings of new material technologies and new methods have often proved influential in the professionalization and institutionalization of the human sciences--both in Europe and North America. Between 1870 and 1914, laboratory and field scientists in anthropology and ethnology, psychophysics and psychology, linguistics and zoology, experimented widely with spools of yarn, color chips, illustrated flip books, naturalia, plastic sheets, phonographs, and other sundry materials to stimulate the senses. This panel explores scientific attempts to produce knowledge about the human, the mind, and the senses across disciplines circa 1900. It interrupts conventional accounts of disciplinary consolidation during this period (Staley 2018), and regenerates the history of anthropology (broadly conceived) by attending to technical materializations of perception, the senses, mental and cultural phenomena (Latour and Woolgar 1976; Murphy 2006; Rees 2016; Tresch 2014). In this case, analytic reconsideration and return occasions innovations in studies of sciences whose material conditions straddle analytic divides between labs and fields, nature and culture, the material and the sensory.

Discussant

• Jenny Bangham, University of Cambridge

Individual Presentations

• Sounding Ethnos: Phonography and Composition by Field in the Human Sciences - Gabriel Coren, UC Berkeley, Anthropology

• Tracing the Zigzags of Early Anthropology - Laurel Waycott, Vanderbilt University

• Anthropology and Psychology in the Lab, Field, and Garden - Cameron Brinitzer, History & Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania

• The Use of Sensory Stimuli in Linguistic Fieldwork - Judith Kaplan, University of Pennsylvania, Integrated Studies Program

Session Organizer

• Cameron Brinitzer, History & Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania