TY - JOUR
AU - Vail, David, D.
AB - Scholars have long looked to the American West to understand the policies and politics of the nineteenth century. Very few have explored the intertwined threads of environment, technology, science (in multiple forms and modes), and cultural views of the region. The historian Jeremy Vetter of the University of Arizona offers one of the most comprehensive and innovative histories on science, environment, and technology of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West in the late 1800s. Field Life builds on the anthropologist Bruno Latour's and the sociologist Steve Woolgar's landmark book Laboratory Life (1981) to “provide a window onto the everyday practices involved in the production of scientific facts” (p. 21). Vetter's argument has three parts. First, there are key methods of organizing the production of knowledge in the field—not just one. Second, field life is distinct from laboratory life through its transdisciplinary influences and approaches. Third, field science illuminates how “configurations of work, environment, and technology bridged—selectively, distinctively, and partially—the epistemic rift between cosmopolitan knowledge of science and the knowledge of experience” (ibid.). Field Life begins by offering an envirotechnical model to understand “how a region's scientific practice in the field developed from the mid-nineteenth century to the twentieth century” (p. 5). But as Vetter suggests, Field Life also reconstructs “a world we have lost—a world of field science that existed during the era when railroads dominated long-distance transport” (ibid.). In his attempt to reconstruct these field science relationships—environmental, technological, scientific—in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains during the railroad era, Vetter shows how “the natural environment and human technology were so closely interconnected in scientific practice—especially but not only in the field—that it makes sense to view them as elements of the same system” (p. 12). Subsequent chapters trace these interconnections, retelling the storied American West of famous scientists and explorers by placing local peoples, their expertise, and the complex ecological, geological, and cultural landscapes of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains at its center. Vetter masterfully weaves divergent concepts of cosmopolitan and experiential knowledge by tracing the networks of biological stations, field stations, agricultural experiment farms, and science camps. Although rigor and the laboratory remained the hallmarks of formal scientific inquiry, Vetter convincingly shows how local resident field experts and land grant agricultural scientists challenged long-held conventions. Field Life is an accessible and detailed history of scientific fieldwork in the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains West. Readers of this journal will especially appreciate the care Vetter takes to connect well-trodden narratives around John Wesley Powell, Othniel Charles Marsh, and the Corps of Topographical Engineers with lesser known but just as significant field scientists, local practitioners, and regional surveyors. However, the book does suffer mildly from its expansive scope. Some readers may struggle with the blurred analytical lines of envirotech that get tangled occasionally in Vetter's detailed, multithemed storytelling. Nonetheless, Field Life is a model work for scholars to pursue innovative “science in the field” studies in the future. © The Author 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Field Life: Science in the American West during the Railroad Era
JF - The Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaz596
DA - 2019-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/field-life-science-in-the-american-west-during-the-railroad-era-VOkghEupg0
SP - 784
VL - 106
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -