Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science by Jan GolinskiReview by: Londa SchiebingerThe American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 5 (Dec., 1998), pp. 1554-1555Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2649973 .

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1554 Reviews of Books

ing about an element of historical accounts all too often mistakenly considered to be technical and minor.

ERNST A. BREISACH Western Michigan University

SHELDON WATTS. Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1997. Pp. xvi, 400.

In this book, Sheldon Watts tackles the challenging task of assembling a comparative history of the rela- tionship between disease and power from the Euro- pean Middle Ages to the present. The scope of this work is truly impressive, as is Watt's familiarity with the vast literature, both medical and historical, that informs this study. The book's first five chapters are organized around particular diseases-plague, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, and cholera-while the sixth chap- ter focuses on yellow fever and malaria. In each case, Watts compares the impact of a particular disease in Europe to its impact in a region experiencing Euro- pean colonization such as India, Africa, or the Amer- icas. Ultimately these comparisons are extremely use- ful in revealing the nature and extent of power relations between imperial nations and those they colonize.

At the core of each chapter are what Watts terms the "constructs" of a particular disease: that is, the misconceptions and delusions that a society creates surrounding a specific illness, always with harmful consequences for persons considered outsiders or "other." For example, in the chapter on leprosy in medieval Europe and in the nineteenth-century trop- ics, Watts argues convincingly, as have others before him, that in addition to being a physical disease, medieval elites and later European colonialists suc- cessfully employed the construct of leprosy as a dehu- manizing form of social control. In Europe between 1090 and 1363, the search for and persecution of individuals labeled as "lepers" was a way to punish and ostracize troublesome persons. Five centuries later, the stigma of leprosy reappeared in conjunction with European colonization of the Pacific Islands, India, the Middle East, and Africa. Given the economics of imperialism, Europeans, and later North Americans, were not interested in investing capital on public health measures designed to benefit the native popu- lation, so individuals diagnosed with leprosy were hidden away in detention camps, such as the one on the island of Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands. In a similar way, European and American elites propagated the erroneous notion that Africans were immune to yellow fever and malaria in order to justify their continued economic exploitation, especially in regions that proved unhealthy for European and Asian labor- ers. And because whites believed that Africans were the primary carriers of these infections-yet another erroneous assumption-blacks were blamed for major outbreaks.

One of the chief achievements of this book is that its

analysis integrates much of the most recent literature, and a lot of the not-so-recent literature, on the history of disease, epidemics, public health, the medical pro- fession, and imperialism. The bibliography and notes are excellent and should prove useful to historians working in any of these fields. In addition, Watts writes clearly and succinctly, even when laying out complex, abstract ideas about the social constructs of various diseases. In a work such as this that builds its argument around the centrality of one agent-in this case dis- ease as it relates to power and imperialism-it is difficult to avoid a tone of determinism, and Watts sometimes succumbs to this pitfall. Occasionally he gets carried away with his own rhetoric, producing perplexing, unsubstantiated statements such as this description of the newly independent population of Haiti: "Content with what they had, Haitians [after 1804] felt there was no need for foreign trade" (p. 239).

In spite of such minor flaws, Watts does an admira- ble job of integrating vast amounts of disparate social, political, and economic data into the story he tells. This book is an important contribution to our under- standing of the history of disease, public health, and imperialism, and as such it should be read by histori- ans, students, and the general public. In addition, I would recommend this book as required reading to medical and public health professionals, who all too often operate in an ahistorical vacuum.

SUZANNE AUSTIN ALCHON University of Delaware

JAN GOLINSKI. Making Natural Knowledge: Constructiv- ism and the History of Science. (Cambridge History of Science.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xiv, 236. Cloth $54.95, paper $16.95.

The place of the history of science in the academy (in the United States as well as elsewhere, save perhaps for Holland) is appalling. Only a few universities have free-standing departments; where these are lacking, history departments may employ one or two professors in this area. Historians, by trade, know "nothing about science." Thus, although we have learned quite a lot about women and workers, wars, political movements, and other important aspects of ordinary life, science- the muscle of twentieth-century North America-has been understudied and poorly understood.

And for a number of reasons. Chief among them is a prevailing epistemology that has lent privileged status to science as pure and objective, largely unsul- lied by the mess of human subjectivities. Jan Golinski explains how constructivism, which he defines as a methodology that "directs attention to the role of human beings, as social actors, in the making of scientific knowledge" (p. 6), has exploded this founda- tional belief. Constructivism has historicized science and in so doing has called for analysis of all its associated categories: discovery, evidence, argument, experiment, expert, laboratory, instrument, image,

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1998

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General 1555

replication, and law. The heat of the current "science wars"-those unproductive tussles between scientists and their critics-reflects perhaps the success of the last thirty years of science studies.

In exploring the implications of constructivism for historical studies, Golinski critically analyzes some of the main currents in science studies within thematic chapters. He begins with the self-fashioning of early modern natural philosophers, looking at how these early scientists carved out for themselves identities that allowed for a range of action within particular social configurations. The astronomer Galileo Galilei, for example, became the ultimate courtier, with one eye trained on the heavens and the other on his powerful patron, Cosimo II de' Medici. Robert Boyle, by contrast, a gentleman of means in seventeenth- century Britain, billed himself as nature's "modest witness," a faithful and unobtrusive scribe whose truth- fulness was guaranteed by his standing within a partic- ular economy of civility.

Golinski also highlights the importance of "place" to the production of science. He describes how the quiet chambers isolating men like Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin gave shape to their science and how modern laboratories structure elaborate negotiations of knowl- edge and power among research scientists, technicians, administrators, secretaries, and ancillary staff. Golin- ski also traces the very influential studies in the rhetoric of science (describing how rhetorical devices can have both hypothesis-creating and proof-making functions), the role of images and representations in science, and how the choice and peculiarities of scien- tific equipment mediate human knowledge of nature.

In a work of this magnitude, there is much room for objection. One might shudder at the wooden portrayal of gender studies of science and gasp at the absence of any mention of global science. Environmental history 'a la Alfred Crosby and the rich stories of negotiation between European science traditions and those of the peoples they encountered, first during the voyages of discovery and later during the more sustained decades of colonialization, call out for discussion. More impor- tant, however, than gaps or misportrayals (of which there are relatively few) is the methodology that Golinski uses in "constructing" his own account. He often calls his method a "filiation" or a "genealogy," and it is just that: a disembodied history of ideas of the old school. One would have reveled in a constructivist history of constructivism. Rather than portraying the cultural roots of the 1960s ferment in knowledge-the Vietnam War, the advent of social history, the stirrings of the civil rights movement and feminism-Golinski locates the origins of constructivism canonically in the work of Thomas Kuhn. The scholars whose work he reviews, from David Bloor to Sharon Traweek, remain disembodied actors, detached minds passively contem- plating the historical world. We learn nothing about their work spaces, political commitments, systems of patronage, rhetorical tools, or notions of disciplinarity; in this history, Golinski rarely employs those fabulous

points of view that he celebrates as the successes of constructivism.

This book is nonetheless a timely and cogent por- trayal of methods in the history and sociology of science. Golinski puts on display the multifaceted scholarship that has comprised science studies over the past three decades. Unlike some of the scholarship in this area that is laden with unnecessary jargon serving only to deepen the divide between C. P. Snow's two cultures, Golinski employs straightforward, readable prose appropriate to his intended audiences of ad- vanced undergraduate and graduate students (I have already recommended it to several) and scholars from other disciplines.

LONDA SCHIEBINGER Pennsylvania State University

YAACOV SHAVIT. Athens in Jerutsalem: Classical Antiq- uity and Hellenism in the Making of the Modern Secuilar Jew. Translated by CHAYA MAOR and NIKI WERNER.

(Littman Library of Jewish Civilization.) London: Val- entine Mitchell; distributed by ISBS, Portland, Oreg. 1997. Pp. xv, 560. $59.50.

In this well-translated book, Yaacov Shavit extends to secular Jews the commonplace proposition that classi- cal antiquity nourished the Enlightenment. To present as monumental and new what is an entirely familiar notion-everybody knows about Hebrew poet S. G. Tchernichowsky's Hellenism, for example-Shavit gus- sies up his hypothesis with massive exercises of irrele- vant research. On the racist premise that "Athens and Jerusalem, Greeks and Jews, represent two distinct and different human entities," he asks: "Did Athens have any impact on the shaping of modern Jewish culture?" To pursue the problem he has fabricated for himself, Shavit has to frame an account of "the Greek soul" and "the Jewish soul," yielding such constructs as "the modern Jewish historical consciousness" (p. 375).

Silly talk of souls and collective consciousness should not obscure that Shavit pursues a serious program: "the purpose of this survey is to present the structural similarity between the complex intercultural relations that existed between Judaism and the Helle- nistic civilization in the ancient world and those that exist between Jews and Western culture in the modern age" (p. 299). He argues that, "from the late eigh- teenth century onwards two modes of historical com- prehension and insight were created. The first was an idealistic mode, the fruit of a confrontation between two abstract entities-Judaism versus classical Greece ... the second was an empirical historical mode, in which Hellenism was perceived as a historical cultural reality, syncretistic and diversified. Historical research addressed the complex relationship and cultural inter- ferences between the cultural . . . reality in the Helle- nistic era ... This led to a new understanding of Jewish history and Judaism; Judaism was perceived as a pluralistic, dynamic, even syncretistic entity" (p. 11). Shavit intends this book to shed light on "intellectual

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1998

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