ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Fishing Coral, Mining Fossils: Laboring Knowledge of Nature in Eighteenth-Century France

• In Event: Other Voices in Early Modern Science

English Abstract

This paper puts into comparison two natural history projects in eighteenth-century France that depended on local knowledge of nature held by laboring communities. The Italian naturalist Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli and the French naturalist René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur conducted studies in and of peasant communities in the 1710s and 20s, concurrently but independently, documenting their laboring practices and the local ecological knowledge they gained through habitual labor on both land and sea.
Marsigli spent considerable time in communities of fishermen who dredged coral from the Mediterranean seafloor. What he learned from them about coral, wind, weather, and tides furnished much of the empirical basis of his most famous work, Histoire physique de la mer (1724). Réaumur meanwhile reported to the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1720 that several agricultural communities in the Touraine ingeniously mined a substance they called falun–a calciferous deposit of fossilized marine shells–which they plowed back underground into their fields as agricultural fertilizer.
By putting these two case studies into comparison, this paper poses several interrelated questions about the role of marginalized or hidden contributors to early modern European science. Why and how did elite naturalists extract natural knowledge from laboring communities in eighteenth-century France and Europe? How did these processes of knowledge-extraction within mainland Europe overlap with and depart from the concurrent practices of knowledge-extraction by European and Euro-American naturalists in colonial settings overseas? What marginalized voices, or what collective beliefs and knowledge systems, might we recover from these sources?

Author

• Lydia Barnett, Northwestern University