Journal for the History of Knowledge

The Plasticity of Social Knowledge

Jefferson Pooley — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article describes how the Austrian-American sociologist Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his Bureau of Applied Social Research applied a consistent bundle of findings—about the interplay of mass media and personal influence—to sharply different contexts. From the late 1930s through to the early 1950s, Lazarsfeld stressed a stable set of social-psychological conditions that complicate media persuasion, which, however, could still be effective if paired with face-to-face campaigns. He developed the claim, first, with the aim of promoting educational radio. At the outbreak of war in Europe, Lazarsfeld and the Bureau moved to apply the findings to domestic morale and propaganda. In the immediate postwar years, Lazarsfeld redirected the Bureau’s energies towards domestic-facing social problems, retrofitting his personal-influence framework to the promotion of peace and tolerance. With the Cold War, finally, Lazarsfeld reverted to a martial posture, as social progress gave sudden way to psychological warfare. Thus, the paper describes a four-stage seesaw pattern: persuasion for social ends in the first and third periods, succeeded in both cases by war service. The Bureau’s communication research in the century’s middle-third is, the paper argues, a case study in the plasticity of social knowledge—variation around a stable theme. What was pliable was the topical enclosure, dictated in the main by the sponsorship on offer.

Before this article appeared in Volume 4 (2023), it had been published as 'online first' article on the website of Journal for the History of Knowledge on August 17, 2023. The article was not changed when it was published in the annual volume.

Introduction

Hansun Hsiung, Laetitia Lenel, Anna-Maria Meister — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Abstract

Telling Time With Mammoths

Rebecca Woods — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Until recent decades, permafrost-preserved frozen mammoths were among the rarest of scientific specimens: only one was successfully collected between 1806 and 1902. With global warming and increased industrial activity in the circumpolar north, in the twenty-first century discovering these creatures has become a seasonal phenomenon. This article traces this broad trajectory, examining how distinct temporalities—planetary, industrial, and Indigenous—intersect and inform distinct frozen mammoths that surfaced over the last 223 years. Told in four acts, the article considers how frozen mammoths tell time, informing debates over the planet’s past, present, and possible futures according to the moment into which they emerged. Frozen mammoths function as material loci for time and temperature, enabled by the cold of the circumpolar region, and enabling multi-temporal epistemologies to take shape around their remains.

Time and Temporalities in Early Modern Chinese Islam

Dror Weil — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This essay brings to light the intersectionality of Time, Religion and Identity, and the complex relationship with Time and temporality that the history of Islam in China displays. The deeply embedded temporality in Islamic praxis produced expertise in time-making that secured Chinese-Muslims an important place in Chinese society and polity. At the same time, an anxiety arising from the negative effects of the passing of Time prompted Chinese Muslim scholars to come up with methods to negotiate Past, Present and Future and new articulations of Time. This essay focuses on four articulations of Time that materialized throughout the history of Islam in China. The first examines the temporal dimension of Islamic praxis and the inter-fertilization between religion and technologies. The second introduces the philological activities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a panacea for the loss of the authentic knowledge of the past. The third focuses on Liu Zhi, a prominent Chinese Muslim whose conviction that Time is universal - but can be grasped only through its various local and technical articulations - brought him to employ a matrix system that defined Time through conjunction of dates and natural phenomena. The final part will show how Liu further articulated Time as a teleological construct in his effort to present Islam as relevant and significant for readers in China. It does so by assessing the different temporal registers Liu introduced to position Muhammad and the emergence of Islam as the ultimate and decisive stage of universal Time.

Encountering Huberia

Christian Flow — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article implicates the question of what a scholar is with the question of when a scholar is: that is, how a scholar is positioned in time. The act of such positioning—“timing”—involves a wide array of negotiations: it embraces everything from the way a scholarly investigator construes their temporal relationship to their object, to the way they countenance past and future investigators, to the rapidity with which they write. And of course, it demands the efforts of other people. Using the case of the eighteenth-century Göttingen professor Johann Matthias Gesner (1691–1761), this piece explores how one scholar “timed” himself in three very different arenas—his domestic and day-to-day scheduling, his reading, and his projection of his scholarship and reputation into the future. To get at how temporal positioning is a shared enterprise, the article works to excavate the role of his female family members in the process. By amplifying the traces left by Gesner’s granddaughter, the titular Huberia—along with her mother, grandmother, and great aunt—in sources documenting the professor’s life, we are able to encounter, if only fragmentarily, some of those who helped Gesner constitute himself temporally.

Before this article appeared in Volume 4 (2023), it had been published as 'online first' article on the website of Journal for the History of Knowledge on July 10, 2023. The article was not changed when it was published in the annual volume.

Periodical Cicadas and the Abundance of Time

Erika Lorraine Milam — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The life cycle of periodical cicadas, like the scientists who have studied them, is characterized by periods of long waiting punctuated with spectacular bouts of activity. In remarkable synchrony, every thirteen or seventeen years—depending on the species and the locatio —billions of nymphs crawl from the ground and embark on a relatively short adult life span of three to four weeks. This paper traces three pulses in the scientific study of periodical cicadas, as researchers sought to determine the geographical range of the broods, the number and biological identity of the species found in each brood, and the relationship between the individual and the swarm. Together these threads of research highlight the historical significance of mass collaboration in the scientific study of these charismatic animals and the surprisingly entangled affective relations between human and insect.

Complete, Accessible, Now

Hansun Hsiung — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The history of the research library represents a series of negotiations over the spatio-temporalities of knowledge. This article focuses on debates over the nature and organization of university research libraries triggered by Harvard president Charles W. Eliot’s 1902 proposal to partition “living” and “dead” books based on usage statistics, relocating “dead” books to offsite storage inaccessible for browsing. I use the Eliot debate to explore attempts to reconcile shifting ideals, institutions, and practices of research itself at the dawn of the twentieth century. Two intertwined ideals lie at the heart of my analysis: completeness and access. At the start of the debate, Eliot’s opponents associated research with an ideal of accumulative completeness that was generative of access, then understood as the browsing of physical stacks. By growing indefinitely under one roof, research collections would remain physically accessible to browsers. Over the course of the next decade, however, as storage pressures mounted, ideas of access came to be detached from onsite browsing and attached to logistical concerns over communications and transport infrastructures. An accumulative ideal of completeness thus came to be replaced by what I call communicative completeness, wherein scattered, partial collections physically inaccessible were made virtually accessible by central bureaus of information. This redefinition of the relationship between access and completeness, I argue, is foundational for contemporary attempts to revive the dream of the universal library, e.g., the Internet Archive.

Before this article appeared in Volume 4 (2023), it had been published as 'online first' article on the website of Journal for the History of Knowledge on May 31, 2023. The article was not changed when it was published in the annual volume.

When Is Medicine?

Eric Moses Gurevitch — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Time was a problem in medieval South Asia. It was – among other things – a medical problem that philosophers and physicians set out to solve. The complexities of medical practice – which entailed considering an almost infinite set of variables and combinations – meant that no normal person could possibly derive the principles of medicine in a single lifetime. There was too much to know and too little time. This meant that medical practitioners had to rely on the words of other people to carry out their cures. Practicing medicine depended on trusting the proper authorities. This article follows the arguments of two philosophers employed in royal courts in the 9^th century – Jayanta Bhaṭṭa and Ugrāditya – who constructed arguments about how to relate to the textualized past of medicine in Sanskrit. Both scholars accepted that the temporalities of knowledge necessitated that medicine was originally propounded by an omniscient individual. But they disagreed on who counted as an authority and on the value of the Sanskrit medical classics. The article uses these scholars to show the temporalities of medicine in pre-colonial South Asia as multiple, shifting and contested. Moving beyond binaries of historical and mythic time in colonial and pre-colonial South Asia, this article attends to the work of medieval scholars to explicate the multiple rhythms of time that existed side-by-side prior to the epistemic violence of colonialism and the rise of modern Ayurveda.

Before this article appeared in Volume 4 (2023), it had been published as 'online first' article on the website of Journal for the History of Knowledge on May 16, 2023. The article was not changed when it was published in the annual volume.

Chernobyl's Palimpsestic Shelters

Anna-Maria Meister — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The more than 400,000 cubic-meters of concrete meant to contain the deadly debris of the largest nuclear accident of the 20th century in Chernobyl in the Ukraine were named “Sarcophagus” in the Western world— an architectural term describing the stone enclosure of a dead body. It would not remain the only structure built to contain the catastrophic fallout. After 1986, the supposedly ever-durable material of modern architecture started to crumble under the radiation. A new enclosure needed to take shape. In an international architecture competition held in 1992 by the Ukrainian government, an arch was chosen as “New Safe Confinement” (NSC) to keep the toxic matter sealed inside. Built from steel this time, this new shell was completed after lengthy delays in July 2019—a monument containing a brutalist radioactive ruin. Its building technology, implemented to delay leakage to protect future human generations, in turn needs those very generations precisely for its own maintenance. This article poses the many hulls of Chernobyl as architectural palimpsest: a deathly bind of matter and time, of decay, ruin, and construction in the fall-out’s ongoing aftermath. Written as history of architectural knowledge, the making space for a destructive non-human occupant (under human care) turns a seemingly straightforward architectural narrative into the story of a structure built too late to keep the world around it inhabitable.

Survivor Testimonies and the Problem of Time

Laetitia Lenel — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Testimonies of Holocaust survivors have had an essential influence on public engagement with the Shoah in recent decades. Given this importance, the imminent end of the “era of the witness” has sparked fears that the history of the Holocaust could soon be forgotten. The past decades have therefore seen unprecedented efforts to record the testimonies of Holocaust survivors in order to safeguard the immediacy of their accounts. In this essay, I trace how different temporal entanglements have affected the narrated memory of Holocaust survivors and thus also shaped the knowledge of those born later. Focusing on four interviews conducted with a Jewish Holocaust survivor in 1946, 1995, 1998, and 2004 respectively, I explore how biological time, historical time, recording time, and the temporality of narrative have shaped the narrated memories. As I argue, the different temporal entanglements have allowed for starkly different reconfigurations and reconstructions of the past. This renders the study of the epistemic constitutive nature of entangled temporalities important not only for Holocaust studies, but also for the history of knowledge, a field which has recently turned to processes of forgetting and ignorance.

Before this article appeared in Volume 4 (2023), it had been published as 'online first' article on the website of Journal for the History of Knowledge on August 9, 2023. The article was not changed when it was published in the annual volume.

Patents of Persuasion

Eva Hemmungs Wirtén — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The “Million Milestone” chart found on the website of The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is a timeline of the eleven million patents that the office has granted since 1836: a visual depiction of patenting as accelarion and speed. With the chart as the backdrop, the narrative focus of this essay is on the third marker on the timeline, patent 3 million, granted to Kenneth R. Eldredge for “Automatic Reading System” on September 12,1961. Two overlapping lines of inquiry are pursued. First, looking behind the chart in order to locate the history of patent three million as it happened, which is in conjunction with the 125th anniversary of the 1836 Patent Act, the moment when the “Million Milestone” begins. Second, looking at the chart to unpack how “Automatic Reading System” became part of an evidentiary chain that in 2023 seeks to convince us that accumulation and quantification stand as proof of technological progress. The over allobjective of this essay is to show how the patent system synchronizes time and numbers in order to create knowledge about itself as a system, introducing the term "tempo-metrics" in order to account for the specific intersection of calculation and commemoration where such self-fashioning gains specific momentum.

Before this article appeared in Volume 4 (2023), it had been published as 'online first' article on the website of Journal for the History of Knowledge on July 5, 2023. The article was not changed when it was published in the annual volume.

No Time for Empathy

Projit Bihari Mukharji — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Between 1956 and 1964, in Calcutta, India, at least seven young children with congenital hemoglobinopathies, perhaps more, were injected with various strains of malaria to test their possible immunity. Some of the children were tested on repeatedly. The experiments exposed the already sick children to additional risks and suffering. Strikingly, these experiments started less than a decade after decolonization and were conducted by Indian doctors, rather than colonial doctors. In this article I argue that such tragic practices can only be understood with reference to a set of entangled temporalities. Specifically, the temporal urgency of the postcolonial moment, the absent time of ethical regulations, and the familial tempo of caring for congenitally sick children. The entangled temporalities that authorized the pediatric experimentation, however, would not be visible without the reflexive hermeneutics developed by the Subaltern Studies scholars and nourished by the experiences of academic immigration.

Afterword

Shane Butler — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Afterword to the Journal for the History of Knowledge 2023 special issue "Entangled Temporalities"