ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Material Culture Across Time, Place, and Disciplines: Brander’s Hydrostatic Balance and Zoological Lantern Slides

• In Event: Shifting Perspectives: Hands on Instruments Approaches (with Gloves) to Writing a History of Scientific Practices I

English Abstract

Material culture defends that one can learn information about a community’s culture through the objects they made, the same way they would if they read documents written by them. By using the tools provided at the VI International Seminar on the Material Culture of Physics, I analyse and contextualise an object from the Deutsches Museum’s collection, where it is catalogued as a Hydrostatische Waage – a hydrostatic balance made by the German instrument-maker Georg Friedrich Brander in Augsburg in the 1700s. My argument is that one of the instrument’s main strong points is its versatility and that its history has turned it into an emblematic piece within the Deutsches Museum’s collection.
To showcase material culture’s own versatility, I will also move across disciplines, time and space to the early 20th century and to the lantern slide teaching collection from the Department of Evolutionary Biology of the University of Vienna, which encompasses over 2000 hand-made lantern slides that were used at the II. Zoologisches Institut for teaching purposes. I will share the questions raised by an approach which focuses on them as full-right historical sources that have driven my research for the past year.

Author

• Júlia Garcia de la Torre, Universität Wien