Author: HHS Contributor

Jutta Schickore, About Method: Experimenters, Snake Venom and the History of Writing Scientifically. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 316 pp., US$50.00. ISBN: 978-0-226-44998-2 (hbk).

by Peter Hobbins

If scientists reflect only infrequently on their commitment to experimental method, contends Jutta Schickore, then historians and sociologists have been equally remiss in interrogating this lacuna. In her carefully considered About Method, Schickore interrogates the history of snake venom research to dissect the ‘methods discourse’ promulgated by key practitioners from 1650 to 1950. In historicising her actors’ statements about ‘proper’ experimental practice – over time and across emergent disciplinary boundaries – Schickore proffers a tripartite framework for evaluating their epistemological imperatives. Encompassing ‘protocols’, ‘methodological views’, and ‘commitments to experimentation’, her novel schema is applicable to unpicking disciplinary investment in experimentation across diverse scientific communities.

The author’s focus on snake venom is neither arbitrary nor arcane. At the outset she foregrounds one of the most astonishing scientific projects of eighteenth-century natural history: Felice Fontana’s studies of viper venom. Undertaking literally thousands of experiments, this Tuscan naturalist sought to understand far more than simply the pathophysiology of being injected with venom. In enumerating the quantity, variety, variability and enduring uncertainties attendant upon his observations, Fontana reflected deeply upon the heuristic purpose, design and conduct of experiments.

The sheer scale of his vivisectional program – unsurpassed until well into the twentieth century – was thus paralleled by Fontana’s epistemological legacy. Indeed, this very continuity justifies Schickore’s selective focus in tracking methods discourse across three centuries. ‘For more than 250 years’, she remarks, ‘venom research was imbued with a strong sense of tradition both in terms of techniques and results and in terms of the methodology of experimentation’ (p.4). Moreover – and importantly for scholars working across the human sciences – venom research continues to intersect with multiple biomedical disciplines, including biochemistry, physiology, pathology, bacteriology and immunology. It is indeed an apposite field for asking what experimenters believed they were actually doing.

The result is a coherent and largely consistent unravelling of the dialectic linking programmatic statements about method with pragmatic experimental experience. Eschewing a Foucauldian formulation of ‘discourse’, Schickore instead defines ‘methods discourse’ as the rhetorical framing of good experimental practice. Yet, she insists, ‘methods discourse does not constitute a specific genre of text’ (p.215). Rather, three tiers of elements can be discerned across shifting modes of experimentation and expression. At its most ordinary, methods discourse simply outlines the specifics of experimental or observational design – a ‘protocol’. The next level, ‘methodological views’, articulates the procedures deemed necessary to generate empirically verifiable results. The deepest stratum, ‘commitments to experimentation’, encapsulates ‘the imperative that scientific ideas must be confronted with, or based on, empirical findings’ (p.213).

Just what those findings are, and how they can be validly obtained, lies at the heart of each of Schickore’s close readings in historical context. Commencing in the early modern shadow of Roger Bacon, she turns first to Francesco Redi’s 1664 text, Observations on Vipers. Under the patronage of the Tuscan court, Redi combined animal experiments, dissections and observation of human cases to detail the effects of being injected with venom (or ‘envenomation’). His commitment to the repetition of experiments both challenged prevailing rubrics received from ancient authorities, and delineated the full range of experimental circumstances that might alter the outcome of a given trial. Convinced that he had thereby vindicated his veracity as a natural philosopher, Redi concluded that the toxic agent in snakebite was viper’s venom. Yet neither his experiments nor his epistemology led him to query how it caused death.

In contrast, French apothecary Moyse Charas insisted that the viper’s ‘yellow fluid’ was inert. Rather, it was the serpent’s enraged spirits which were transmitted to its victim during a bite. Charas’s response to Redi’s trials was to assert that uniformity of experimental results – rather than the variability of procedural circumstances – carried the greatest epistemic weight. Charas thus emphasised both the heuristic value of definitive outcomes, and the importance of comparative trials. Unlike Redi, his narrative sought both to explain away inconsistent results, and to interleave his recordings with causal explanations. Rather than testing their respective truth-claims, Schickore teases out how the dispute between Charas and Redi ‘tells us much about how the general commitment to experimentation was fleshed out … [and] how flexible and fluid were the methodological statements employed by early modern experimentalists’ (p.52).

Schickore turns next to physician Richard Mead, a British medical maven whose Mechanical Account of Poisons was reworked over multiple editions from 1702 to 1747. In contrast with many fellow clinicians, Mead recapitulated the necessity for experimentation according to the methodological purity of mechanical philosophy – primarily the works of Isaac Newton. Yet, remarks Schickore, ‘Mead’s treatise does not seem to be informed by any practical challenges he might have encountered in his research’ (p.76). If his commitment to empiricism was overt, his methodological views remained decidedly opaque. Indeed, the most remarkable transition across the various versions of Mead’s work was the incorporation of others’ experimental results. These transformed his mechanical conception of venom, from sharp salts that burst blood ‘globules’ to an agent that vitiated the victim’s nervous fluid.

Mead’s work proved powerful across the Anglophone world, but paled in comparisons with Fontana’s studies, which spanned the final third of the eighteenth century. Indeed Fontana’s oeuvre forms the conceptual and chronological pivot for About Method. The central chapters inspect selected protocols and rhetorical structures drawn from his 700-word opus, Treatise on the Venom of the Viper. Here, Schickore focuses on Fontana’s place in shaping two formative strands of methods discourse: the value and delimitations of repetition, and the heuristic purpose of prolixity, the extravagant use of detailed text that proliferated page after page after page.

Across the biological sciences, Fontana’s fame arose chiefly from his insistence upon conducting repeated experiments, reporting in great detail their minor procedural divergences. ‘In Fontana’s work’, Schickore notes, ‘the leitmotif is the phrase “I varied the experiment in a hundred different ways”. It appears over and over again’ (p.84). In each case the apparatus and protocol were carefully laid out, including dead-ends and failures, in order ultimately to design the simplest trials capable of generating the purest results. As the earlier chapters highlight, there was no novelty to insisting on repetition or comparison. Rather, Schickore contends, Fontana’s fundamental innovation was a thoroughgoing commitment to exploring almost infinite variations in the conduct of his experiments, and their impact upon the outcomes.

Allied with this procedural largesse – including its horrific toll on animal life – was Fontana’s careful documentation of his practices and inferences. The result was a prodigious text configured as a narrative with ‘the flavor of a (very gruesome) scientific adventure story’ (p.82). For Fontana, prolixity not only buttressed his ‘epistemological sovereignty’ – in the words of Ohad Parnes[ref]Parnes, O. (2003) ‘From Agents to Cells: Theodor Schwann’s Research Notes of the Years 1835–1838’, in Frederic L. Holmes, Jürgen Renn and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, eds., Reworking the Bench: Research Notebooks in the History of Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 119–39.[/ref] – but invited readers to share his journey as individual protocols, outcomes and interpretations were concatenated into an exhaustive chain of investigation. It struck me that Fontana’s work predated Alexander von Humboldt’s synoptic insistence on recording every conceivable detail of the physical and biological world. Both men ultimately struggled with aggregating and selectively representing their accumulated data.

This concern, indeed, animates the second half of About Method. The acknowledged heir to Fontana, at least in the Atlantic world, was Philadelphia physician, physiologist and littérateur, Silas Weir Mitchell. Schickore’s discussion of Mitchell broadens the analysis of methods discourse to consider its intersections with nascent if highly contentious definitions of ‘scientific medicine’ across the second half of the nineteenth century. She contends that Mitchell’s experimental and textual strategies resulted from two contemporaneous concerns: the urge to adjudicate upon ‘rational’ therapeutics, and the growing public opprobrium of vivisection. In contrast with my own focus on the epistemology, ontology and ethics of vivisection in venom research, Schickore explores Mitchell’s insistence on comparative experimentation and the abstraction of his results into tabulated data.[ref]Hobbins, P. (2017) Venomous Encounters: Snakes, Vivisection and Scientific Medicine in Colonial Australia. Manchester: Manchester University Press.[/ref]

Mitchell’s insistence on comparison was not animated by a growing concern with experimental variability. Rather, it reflected the inherent diversity of snakebite. Bemoaning the poorly documented natural history of envenomation in humans, Mitchell also conceded that laboratory animals – especially dogs – responded in markedly different ways to nominally consistent toxins. Furthermore, by the late 1860s it was becoming apparent that there was no singular ‘snake venom’; its differentiation by species was followed, from the 1880s, by an appreciation that venoms themselves comprised multiple active constituents. These acknowledgements of biological individuality sat uncomfortably with Mitchell’s commitment to vivisection, and may have prompted his turn to tabulated data to facilitate ‘the synoptic presentation of evidence’ (p.138). Schickore suggests that this drive for concision shaped an evolving methods discourse in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

On the one hand, therefore, Schickore warns against a teleological reading of emergent disciplines. Both experimental protocols and methods discourse crossed multiple fields of practice in the nineteenth century. Not to survey this breadth risks omitting pertinent experimental mentalities and methodologies. On the other hand, there is a certain telos to Schickore’s own rendering of the imperative of the busy reader. The medical publishing transformations from 1850 to 1900, she argues, pushed back against Fontana’s prolixity in favour of brevity and structural regimentation. This is certainly one reading, but Mitchell was as well regarded for his prose as his science; might not an alternative pathway have favoured experimental virtuosity matched by rhetorical verbosity?

The last quarter of the book explores the epistemological implications of the formation of specialised practitioner communities. If this organizational gambit was itself a means of mastering the exponential growth in experimenters and publications, methods discourse also increasingly addressed the twinned problems of control and standardization amid the burgeoning ‘agency of substances that were not directly observable’ (p.175). Textually, Schickore observes, by the 1930s scientific papers had foregone any lingering narrative elements and largely adopted the modular introduction-methods-results-discussion format familiar to current-day biomedicine. ‘This bland list of standardized procedures and methods could hardly be any more different from Fontana’s graphic prose’, she laments (p.212).

The final chapters likewise become more synoptic and feel a little harried, in contrast with the elaborate, close reading that precedes them. Turning to centrifuges, electrophoresis and debates over the degree to which venom consist of protein, these chapters comprise a more contextual sweep across the biomedical literature. This rendering parallels the fate of Schickore’s twentieth-century protagonists who ‘found themselves on shifting grounds [as] theoretical approaches multiplied, concepts changed meanings, and new analytic techniques were being developed’ (p.200). Indeed, proliferating instruments, reagents, procedures and analyses themselves became a barrier to unambiguous empirical interpretation. It now became the place of survey reports and review articles – rather than individual studies – to reflect upon the intent and value of experimental methods. This final section, however, comes to a rather abrupt end, without a clear explanation for why 1950 marks a specific terminus in methods discourse.

About Method nevertheless remains true to its title. It surveys a three-century span not to tell a comprehensive history of venom research, but to intricately contextualise the shifting ways in which modern scientists have committed publicly and procedurally to experimental method. The focus on Atlantic world investigators necessarily side-lines scholarship on venom research in Asia, India, Australia and Africa, while Schickore’s engagement with the ethics and heuristics of vivisection is restrained rather than foregrounded. The book also treads a fine analytical line between the elaborate specifics of laboratory praxis and the literary technologies and witnessing procedures articulated by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in their seminal work[ref]Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S. (2011/1985) Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.[/ref]. Yet, written in a pleasant and at times jocular style, Schickore’s text sustains an intellectual rigour and precision throughout. In asking fundamental questions about what experimenters believed they were doing, its interpretive value for scholars across the biomedical and human sciences is undoubted.

Peter Hobbins is a historian of science, technology and medicine. A postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney, his work focuses on the epistemology of research and its ontological products. He is the author of Venomous Encounters: Snakes, Vivisection and Scientific Medicine in Colonial Australia.

 

 

 

 

W. Velminski, Homo Sovieticus: Brain Waves, Mind Control, and Telepathic Destiny, trans. by Erik Butler, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017, £14.95 pbk, 128pp, ISBN: 9780262035699

by Hannah Proctor, Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin

‘Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole land’ declared V.I. Lenin in a 1920 speech.[ref]https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/nov/21.htm[/ref] Wladimir Velminski cites this famous phrase in the opening pages of his slim and punchy book, Homo Sovieticus, recently published in English translation by MIT Press. But while Lenin was referring to the electrical infrastructure required for industrialisation in the wake of the October Revolution, Velminski explores how Soviet power harnessed electromagnetic technologies and theories to communise the mind in order to produce ‘uniformity of thought’ and achieve what he bombastically describes as a form of ‘collective brainwashing’ (p. 2, p. 1). Telepathy and hypnosis, or what Velminski calls ‘neural prostheses’, provide the thematic links between chapters. Originally published in German by Merve Verlag – primarily known for their translations of French and Italian philosophy, theory and political thought – Homo Sovieticus is not a work of cultural history or the history of science in any conventional sense. Indeed, at first glance it might seem to have more in common with McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red: Theory of the Anthropocene (which includes discussions of Soviet theories of nature by Alexander Bogdanov and Andrei Platonov), than with scholarly monographs discussing specific Soviet scientific disciplines, discourses, thinkers or schools of thought. Superficial stylistic similarities aside, however, Wark excavates specific strands of early Soviet thought he perceives to have radical potential in order to challenge understandings of nature in the ‘capitalist realist’ present, whereas Velminski treats telepathy as a metaphor for comprehending the oppressive operations of Soviet power in the past.[ref]For a good critical review of Wark’s engagement with Soviet intellectual history see: Maria Chehonadskih, ‘The Anthropocene in 90 Minutes’ Mute Magazine, 23 September 2015 – http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/anthropocene-90-minutes (Accessed 28th March 2017).[/ref]

Homo Sovieticus is comprised of a combined and uneven jumble of vignettes about telepathy plucked from disparate moments across the Soviet period, encompassing descriptions of cybernetic theories, introductions to technological inventions, glosses of science fiction novels, citations of avant garde poetry, and analyses of television broadcasts. Velminksi asserts that these scattered examples all participated in ‘making a New Man endowed with telepathic destiny’ and colluded with the state in ‘steering the psyche’ (note the singular noun) of the Soviet masses (p. 48, p. 83). In Velminski’s account, Soviet power is treated as omnipotent yet dispersed, and is placed in a temporal vacuum – here 1920, 1965 and 1989 are barely distinguishable. The introduction proclaims an interest in exploring ‘how phantasms haunting science were enlisted to steer thinking and manipulate the population,’ which indicates Velminski’s interest in probing the implications of scientific thought beyond the laboratory (p. 6). But this ghostly metaphor, in which the drivers of manipulation remain frustratingly spectral – phantasms from where? enlisted by whom? steered by what? – also foreshadows the elusive manner in which Velminski’s cross-disciplinary arguments proceed.

The book opens with an image entitled ‘The Material Foundations of Telepathy’, reproduced from a 1965 sketch by the obscure cyberniticist Pavel Gulyaev, depicting two men sawing a tree trunk. The figures are connected in a kind of circuit of energy with various (untranslated) labels and waves surrounding them. A star is shown beaming into the eye of the man on the left, which appears reproduced inside his head. An arrow arcs from his head to the head of the man on the right, in which we see another star gleaming: ‘A star is shining where thought occurs. A Soviet star: a neural prosthesis’ (p. 1). According to Velminski, electromagnetic waves, or what Gulyaev called psikhon, enter the mind from the outside world creating and sustaining feedback loops of (mis)information, which reorganise consciousness in the process. For Velminski, the image acts as a metaphor (or metonym) for the entire Soviet project, which, in his characterisation, saw autonomous thought replaced by identikit ideology: ‘The stars where brains should be indicate that mental transfer has been politically instrumentalised through and through; the scene legitimates censorship and control on the basis of established scientific insight and the speculation of research’ (p. 2). However, Velminski’s reading of Gulyaev’s diagram, which introduces and informs the entire book’s argument, requires a few bold hermeneutic leaps: in the first place it is not clear from the diagram that the stars are necessarily emblems of Soviet communism (or what it would mean if they were). It would be just as plausible to argue, for example, that the stars were selected for their radiant properties rather than their political overtones, functioning as visual representations of the emanations of electromagnetic thought waves. And even if we follow Velminski’s reading, it is not therefore self-evident that Gulyaev’s diagram valorises ‘censorship and control’. After all, isn’t all knowledge gained from forms of interchange between humans, their external environments and each other? Velminski introduces the diagram in isolation so it is also difficult to judge where the image fits within Gulyaev’s arguments, where Gulyaev fits within the Soviet scientific community, how widely his ideas circulated, or to what extent his theories differed from or overlapped with those of cyberneticists elsewhere.[ref]For a detailed historical account of Soviet cybernetic theory exploring overlaps and divergences between cybernetics on either side of the iron curtain (and which includes no mention of Gulyaev in its index), see: Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: a History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).[/ref] Perhaps from his extensive studies of Gulyaev’s papers Velminski feels confident in making these politicized assertions but the introductory material he presents does not convincingly corroborate his thesis, which instead juts out like a poorly fitted rhetorical prosthesis.

Homo Sovieticus’s second chapter is dedicated to a discussion of the theoretician of labour Aleksei Gastev who is characterised as a kind of proto-Gulyaev and ‘pioneer of cybernetics’ (p. 29). Velminski introduces Gastev’s Taylor-inspired ideas regarding the Scientific Organisation of Labour [Nauchnaya Organizatsiya Truda – NOT] placing emphasis on the concept of ‘setting’ [ustanovka]. He argues that Gastev conceived of humans as perfectible, self-regulating machines. But despite acknowledging that Gastev did not depict people as passive automatons controlled by an external power, Velminski nonetheless reads ‘setting’ as an insidious form of internalised domination. Velminski highlights ‘self-observation’ as the main link between Gastev and cybernetic theory rather than a concern with labour efficiency. Indeed, absent from Velminski’s discussion of Gastev is any consideration of the political vision underpinning it: Gastev was not interested in organising labour with optimal efficiency for its own sake, but for the sake of the worker performing it who, he hoped, could spend much less time working if the tasks s/he was required to perform were executed as quickly as possible. A reorganisation of human life along mechanical lines might sound cold and calculated but Gastev was concerned with emancipating people from work so they could expend their energy on other activities. The chapters that follow this discussion similarly cover fascinating episodes in Soviet scientific, technological and cultural history. But folding the disparate phenomena under analysis into a narrative concerned primarily with ‘the emergence of immanent strategies of power, apparatuses for influencing, methods of surveillance, and paranoid modes of thought’ (p. 5) risks downplaying the nuances, discontinuities and internal contradictions of Soviet thought.

The logic of the feedback loop that structures Velminski’s argument suggests that Soviet ‘star thoughts’ have an origin somewhere but that on-going processes of telepathic transmission render ideology self-sustaining. In this model there is no master transmitter on the roof of the Kremlin; everything and everyone becomes both signal and receiver. As Velminski states in the book’s conclusion, Gulyaev’s diagram illustrates telepathic forms of power ‘which aim to hold sway over the masses, control them, and install “star thoughts” [Stern-Gedanken] that, once up and running, no longer require direct guidance’ (p. 97). For Velminski the receivers of telepathic messages become indistinguishable from the messages themselves. According to this model of subjectivity the capacity for people to joke cynically about their experiences of Soviet life would be as unthinkable as sincere engagements with communist ideals. Indeed, Velminski’s characterisation of Soviet society and subjectivity as homogenous and monochrome – like the book’s title and invocation of ‘brainwashing’ – seems to belong to the Cold War era.[ref]Homo Sovieticus is also the title of a perestroika era satirical novel by Alexander Zinoviev. For background on the history of the term ‘brainwashing’ see the blog of the Wellcome Trust funded research project at Birkbeck entitled ‘The Cold War: a history of brainwashing and the psychological professions’: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/[/ref] At another point in the book Velminski deploys a biological metaphor of contagion to describe the processes by which he imagines patterns of thought emerge and spread:

Just as physical germs of infection produce massive effects and can prove ruinous, far beyond the individual scale, for entire population groups, so, too, do psychic agents of contagion tend to spread; they are active everywhere and conveyed by words or gestures, through books and newspapers. Psychic “microbes” are all-pervasive and capable of developing under all conditions; wherever we may be, the danger of psychic infection exists (p. 81).

Unlike the metaphors of telepathy that recur throughout the book this scientific analogy is not explicitly anchored to historically and culturally situated discourses. It also implies that the kinds of processes Velminski is describing were not specific to the Soviet context but could occur anywhere. But this sits uneasily within the arc of the broader argument, which seems to insist on the exceptionally ‘ruinous’ qualities of Soviet scientific theories, practices and discourses. Velminski downplays intellectual currents or technological developments that traversed the iron curtain or emerged before the October Revolution. Although he mentions that Soviet scientists were influenced by Michael Faraday, a British theorist of electromagnetism, and acknowledges that radio technologies were developed by Thomas Edison, he does not probe how these cross-pollinations might complicate his conclusions about the inherently authoritarian and internally undifferentiated waves of thought he perceives coursing through Soviet society. He does not discuss how histories of telepathy or hypnosis unfolded in the West nor does he consider exchanges between Soviet and Western scientists or mention that in response to the flurry of interest in telepathy in the Soviet Union the CIA sponsored its own programmes of research into ‘remote viewing’ at the Stanford Research Institute (to cite one prominent example). [ref]For a recent transnational perspective on Cold War-era research in the ‘psy’ disciplines and communications, see: Benno Nietzel, ‘Propaganda, psychological warfare and communication research in the USA and the Soviet Union during the Cold War’, History of the Human Sciences, 29, 4-5 (2016).[/ref] Would Velminski conclude that American citizens had identical thought stars and stripes installed in their heads or would he claim that Western feedback loops were somehow more democratic than their Soviet counterparts?

Velminski is based in Germany and participated in a project directed by the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler in Berlin whose work he also cites in the book. Indeed, Homo Sovieticus could be read as an attempt to imagine, in the style of Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900, a Discourse Network 1917 or Discourse Network USSR with the telepathic feedback loop as the defining technology of that specific time and place. [ref]Velminski refers explicitly to ‘Soviet discourse networks’ and later the ‘discourse network of Soviet telepathy’, p. 48, p. 51.[/ref]But Kittler takes more care to distinguish between scientific or technological metaphors and technologies themselves. He discusses Freud’s ‘Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psychoanalysis’ (1912) in which the psychoanalyst is likened to a telephone receiver adjusted to the transmitting microphone of the analysand. According to Freud, the ideal analyst should be like a telephone, which does not prioritise certain utterances over others or impose any meaning on the sounds being captured by the machine. However, Kittler is quick to point out that Freud’s telephone analogy is an analogy rather than a telephone – ultimately the acoustic data of the consulting room is not recorded by a machine but listened to by a human analyst who transforms the material of the session into written words from memory; unlike the telephone the analyst selects certain significant things to record.[ref]Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 37.[/ref] For Kittler, distinctions between different transcription technologies – be they telephones or pen-wielding psychoanalysts – are crucial because they record, store and transmit information in distinct ways, and the meanings they are capable of conveying are contingent on those processes.

In Velminski’s discussion of the science fiction novel The Ruler of the World by Aleksandr Romanovich Belyaev, on the other hand, he argues that ‘science is directly transposed into literature’ (p. 44)[ref]For a carefully researched analysis of the influence of theoretical debates in evolutionary biology on Belyaev attentive to the differences between science and fiction, see: Muireann Maguire, ‘Post-Lamarckian Prodigies: Evolutionary Biology in Soviet Science Fiction,’New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 43 (2009), 23-53.[/ref] and declares an interest in tracing how ‘traces of electromagnetic faith’ that originated in failed or inconclusive scientific experiments found their way into literature (p. 51). He proposes that ideas regarding electromagnetic thought transmission between biological organisms originally developed in laboratories were ‘reenacted’ in science fiction and thus successfully transmitted ‘thought rays’ to readers. Velminski argues that telepathy was not only represented in fiction but was actually achieved as it entered the ‘social laboratory’ of everyday life (p. 52). He articulates this in a Baudrillardian register (with a dash of Michel Foucault for good measure):

Symbolic practices, once set in motion, operate independently and bring about hyperreality – a second world of active simulation – which, as the sum of ambient dispositives, feeds into (mental) representations, needs, desires, and perception (p. 49).

This conclusion, however, seems to require that analogies be treated literally, as if (to return to Kittler’s example) a psychoanalyst was actually a telephone rather than merely like a telephone. What of the relationships between ‘hyperreality’ and reality? Velminski slips from identifying a scattered interest in telepathy in Soviet culture to arguing that Soviet power was like telepathy to saying that Soviet power was telepathy. However, despite all his genre jumping and technological somersaults, ultimately for Velminski, the medium is not the message; the message is the message.[ref]Velminski cites a similar though less famous phrase of Marshall McLuhan’s as the epigraph to his fourth chapter: ‘The psychic and social disturbance created by the TV image and not the TV programming, occasions daily comment in the press’ (p. 55).[/ref] Homo Sovieticus does not discuss television and radio as specific technologies in a manner consistent with Kittler’s methodologies but claims that they ‘fetter[ed] minds’ (p. 69) in the Soviet context due to state control of broadcasting: ‘Control over media and being controlled by media are linked in a feedback system’ (p. 82). Velminski ends up undermining his thesis by prioritising content over form, implying that the logic of the feedback loop only really applies to phenomena dealing explicitly with telepathy.

The last example Velminski discusses is Anatoly Kashiprovsky’s long and hugely popular television hypnosis sessions, broadcast on state television at the end of the perestroika era, which are interpreted as ‘the last effort of Soviet power to initiate the citizenry into the mysteries of the communist apparatus that was in the course of disappearing’ (p. 87). A recent article exploring the place of Kashiprovsky’s séances and healing sessions in the cultural memory of the perestroika era by Simon Huxtable does not consider the kinds of hypnotic precedents in Soviet culture touched on in Velminski’s book at all.[ref]Simon Huxtable, ‘Remembering a Problematic Past: TV Mystics, Perestroika and the 1990s in Post-Soviet Media and Memory’, European Journal of Cultural Studies (2017), 1–17.[/ref] The examples Velminski assembles do indicate that such precedents exist but Velminski’s grandiose claims regarding the telepathic underpinnings of Soviet society tend to drown out the more subtle forms of continuity his materials gesture towards; he is more interested in telepathy as a master analogy for understanding Soviet culture than in exploring telepathic practices and discourses as cultural phenomena.  Perhaps prioritising his materials over his overarching thesis would have allowed the complexities of those hypnotic histories to come to the fore and a less stereotyped portrait of Soviet power may have emerged in the process.

Homo Sovieticus ends with a curious epilogue in which Velminski discusses the 2003 film Hypnosis by the Russian artist Pavel Pepperstein in which six women are shown gazing at six penises which gradually become slightly, though never fully, erect. For Jacques Lacan, the penis is the physical sexual organ, whereas the phallus is a signifier, which exists in relation to the desire of an Other.[ref]Indeed, according to a Lacanian reading the woman is the phallus in that she is paradoxically defined by that which she lacks. Lacan distinguishes between male and female desire as a distinction between having and being the phallus. See, Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, Écrits, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York, NY: WW Norton, 2006), pp. 575-584.[/ref] But in another strangely literalised reading, Velminski claims that in its transition from flaccidity to erection the penis in the film becomes a phallus – ‘it undergoes transformation into a sign’ (p. 91).  Velminski adds a last metaphor to his already mixed pile claiming that ‘one can draw an analogy between the penis striving to become a phallus and Soviet power’. He likens the ‘gentle stimulation’ of the women’s gazes to the diagram by Gulyaev depicting the material foundations of telepathy with which his book began. Here the ‘beautiful women’s face[s]’ act as ‘an icon of culture’ with which the penises are in ‘dialogue’; the implication is that the women are analogous to the ‘star thoughts’ of Soviet power and the penises analogous to the Soviet masses (or the sawing men in Gulyaev’s diagram). Under hypnosis, Velminski says, established signs make ‘little (active) sense; one simply stands under their influence and “takes it”’ (the flagrantly misogynistic implications of this statement do not really bear unpicking).  In a final liberal coup de théâtre, Velminski asserts that the women’s failure to fully arouse the penises so they ‘solidify-into-a-sign’ indicates that the ‘hypnotic power of the influencing machine does not prevail’. Luckily penises know better than to fall under the spell of manipulative women trying to control them with nonsensical communist thought stars. But the semi-erect penis is not quite an image of the autonomous individual’s resistance to the hypnotic tendencies of ‘Soviet power’ figured as a seductive woman; Velminski’s parting line is more resigned: ‘the parties involved remain floating in the empty, expanding sphere of hypnosis’ (p. 97). Sometimes analogies make little (active) sense; one simply stands under their influence and “takes it,” but Velminski’s conclusion is actively nonsensical in that it cannot account for the collapse of the Soviet Union (or the failure of Kashiprovsky’s television séances to hold sway over the masses indefinitely). He might assert that Soviet ‘star thoughts’ were devoid of meaning but he does not view this as an obstacle to effective hypnosis. In Homo Sovieticus a history of Soviet hypnosis is subordinated to a kind of meta-history of the Soviet Union and thus seems strangely external to history.

Hannah Proctor is a postdoctoral research fellow at the ICI Berlin. She completed a PhD, on the Soviet psychologist and neurologist Alexander Luria, at Birkbeck in 2015. She is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy.

R. Kugelmann, Constructing Pain: Historical, Psychological and Critical Perspectives, London: Routledge, 2017, £34.099 pbk, 158pp, ISBN: 9781138841222

by Lottie Wittingham

In this thorough review, Robert Kugelmann charts how ideas around the polymorphous concept of pain have come about via the influence of academic personalities, and their experiences in the spheres of psychology and medicine. Drawing on the theories of figures such as Benjamin Ward Richardson[ref]Richardson, B.W., 1897, Vita Medica: Chapters of medical life and work, New York: Longman, Green & Sons[/ref], Henry Rutgers Marshall [ref]Marshall, H.M., 1889, ‘The classification of pleasure and pain,’ Mind, 14, 511-536[/ref] and well-known philosophers such as Descartes and Bentham, part 1 of the book describes the dualistic concept of pain and the perceived distinction between ‘real’ and imagined pain. Beginning with the development of anaesthesia and the influence of this on the anatomical image of the body as opposed to the ‘felt’ body, the introductory chapter describes the heralding of the abolition of pain, and the consequence of this on people’s opinions on pain and its utility or otherwise. Is pain a useful signal to signify a physical ailment within the body? If so, where does chronic pain fit into this model? It is posited that the pointlessness of chronic pain perhaps accentuates how much it hurts. The ‘medical gaze’ describes pain as an indicator of bodily dysfunction and this challenges the legitimacy of chronic pain which has no ostensible ‘function’.

The theory of pain as a direct sensation felt by specific pain nerves is contrasted with the theory of pain and pleasure as direct antitheses to one another. The view of pain as a ‘deficit of energy’ is dissected and dismissed as inconsistent with physiology. Similarly, pain as the opposite of pleasure is not a convincing hypothesis, as not all pain is displeasing, and disagreeableness is not equivalent to the experience of pain. This section of the book is somewhat hard to follow, but the systematic dissection of historical concepts of pain is a useful way to challenge our contemporary conceptions of pain and its treatment. This was an insightful read for someone working in a medical field, as it made me question the way I perceive pain and how this may be different to the way in which my patients perceive it. However I wouldn’t suggest that the book on the whole was particularly accessible for clinicians, as it is written in sometimes quite technical language, often from psychological research, and hence is not particularly applicable to routine clinical practice. Indeed, it is a shame that the book is not more accessible to those who are not academics in the field, as a broader concept of historical views of pain (such as that of Joanna Bourke[ref]Bourke, J., 2014, The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers, Oxford: OUP[/ref]) could be a useful tool for those involved in the care of patients with chronic pain conditions. Nonetheless, as an academic text for historians and scholars of the human sciences, the text is thorough and comprehensive and it is likely to be much more appropriate for this audience.

Three challenges to the so-called ‘Cartesian dualism’ theory of pain, which distinguishes ‘real’ organic pain and ‘imaginary’ nonorganic pain, are elucidated in Chapter 3. The most persuasive and widely accepted of these is the gate control theory, in which the organic and psychological aspects of pain experience are integrated in the felt sensation of pain. This theory is consistent with the physiological findings of specific nociceptive neurons (i.e. nerves specifically for sensing pain) and also explains the observation that a felt response to a painful stimulus varies according to the situation and to psychological variables. Behavioural and psychosomatic approaches to pain are also put forward as potential challenges to dualism, although these are less convincing and, in fact, the gate control theory is the one currently taught in medical school and so is perhaps more pervasive at least in the medical sphere.

The second part of the book claims to ‘temporarily suspend belief in the anatomical image of the body’ by taking a phenomenological approach, i.e. an attempt to derive general principles and conclusions from the subjective experiences of individuals. While this is interesting as an insight into personal experiences of pain, I was left unconvinced of it as a method to verify the broader claims. Narratives are naturally a good resource to learn about subjective experiences. From an analytical and scientific perspective, the book could benefit from reference to a wider sample of narratives, including those from literature and throughout history: the limited number of samples quoted here is perhaps of restricted value, in the sense of drawing reliable conclusions. That said, the experiences which are quoted and dissected are a valuable addition to the scholarly research which forms the bulk of the book, making these observations personal and pertinent, and adding texture and depth to the discussion. The scope of the book is incredibly wide-ranging and the inclusion of personal narratives puts the whole spectrum of theories mentioned into context.

The second part of the book touches on a wide variety of topics including, but not limited to: chronic pain; pain management programmes; moral pain; and pain as attunement, as a threshold, as punishment or as a sign. Enlightening comments are made about the political and economic elements of the pain experience which are not immediately obvious to an outsider. However, I found the writing sometime nebulous and complex, which was frustrating as it detracted from the insightful points being made. In the final chapter, Kugelmann discusses moral pain, and draws upon a wealth of research to make astute parallels and distinctions between physical pain and moral pain in the form of guilt, melancholia, existential distress and a kind of weltschmerz. Reference is made to ‘feelings that the patient interpreted as the moral pain of guilt’, recalling the unfounded guilt often felt in clinical depression. This chapter may benefit from further reference and comparison to psychiatry, both historical and current – which may also function to make the findings and discussion more applicable to clinical practice.

The parts of the book which fascinated me most were the attempts to extract what our concepts of pain are, and the discussion of how our experience of them may say something about human nature. Pain itself is an incredibly slippery concept to attempt to define, and the account of our attempts to do so throughout history is revealing. The book considerably deepens understanding of the concept of pain and all its vagaries.

Lottie Whittingham is a final year medical student at Imperial College London with a degree in Neuroscience and Mental Health. She is an aspiring medical historian and her research is primarily in the history of psychiatry and gender. She blogs at https://medicalmuseumblog.wordpress.com/

Ilonka Venier Alexander: The life and times of Franz Alexander. From Budapest to California. London: Karnac, £22.99 pbk, 2015, xxxii + 154 pp. ISBN:  9781782202509

by Csaba Pléh

Written by the granddaughter of the famous Hungarian-born and educated psychoanalyst (Franz) Ferenc Alexander, Ilonka Venier Alexander’s book is a peculiar work on the life and work of her grandfather in several regards. The peculiarity of the book is shown in two ways. Regarding its central figure, Franz Alexander, the reader sees a constant shifting of perspective between the personal/familiar and the professional perspective, the latter mainly dealing with the history of American psychoanalysis. On the other hand, sometimes we have to deal not with Franz Alexander, but with the grandchild, the vicissitudes of the divorce of her parents, and the central role of the grandfather.

This is not necessarily intended to be a criticism. The book is an excellent resource and a fascinating read. But the constant shifts of perspective make for a hard time for the reader. As a history of a professional psychoanalyst, the monograph is certainly timely. Alexander has been unduly forgotten. The editor of Karnac’s ‘History of Psychoanalysis’ series, Brett Klahr, points out in the preface that Franz Alexander is an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis; Alexander’s proposal for short therapy was a provocative intervention. Even more provocative was his glittering life in California. The author argues that Franz Alexander’s copious honoraria – which allowed for this luxurious standard of life – made many of his colleagues jealous. At the same time, the fact that Alexander continued his practice for over a decade in Hollywood had an important role in psychoanalysis becoming part of American everyday life, thought and pop culture.

The first third of the book is a family chronicle. It presents the Alexander clan with family trees, family photos, and gossip. Franz Alexander’s Father, Bernat (Bernhard) Alexander (1850–1927) – whom the writer spells as Bernard – was a very influential philosopher in turn of the century Budapest. He launched an important series of translations of modern philosophy, from Kant and Leibniz, to Schopenhauer and Hartmann; he was was a central literary and theater critic, and led an intellectual salon.[ref]Gábor, É. (1986). Alexander Bernát. Budapest: Akadémiai In Hungarian[/ref] The book provides a rich and detailed account of life in the New York Palace, a new art nouveau building full of rich bourgeois homes, which was the home of the Alexander family, and at the same time a center for coffeehouse life and journalism. The book also provides a detailed picture of all the in-laws, including the mathematical genius Alfréd ‘Buba’ Rényi (1921-1970), who had a large role in modern probability and information theory.[ref]Rényi, A. (1970).  Probability Theory. New York: American Elsevier[/ref] The presentation is personal and it is full of moving moments. There was a similar account from the same family written by Franz Alexander when he was approximately the same age as the present author is now.[ref]Alexander, F. (1960). The Western mind in transition: An eyewitness story. New York: Random House[/ref] This latter account was rather more interesting when discussing social details, and regarding the birth of psychoanalysis as well.  In the book of Ilonka Venier Alexander, there is too much assumed intimacy, and the reader sometimes has a hard time deciphering whether the author is speaking about the philosopher, Bernat, or his son, Franz. It is nonetheless a rich resource for future historians of ideas and family network researchers.

The section dealing with the history of psychoanalysis has two especially interesting moments. The first is the detailed account of the life of Franz Alexander as a military soldier. The second relates to Ilonka Venier Alexander, the author of the present book. For her, the reconstruction of the assimilated Jewish way of life of the Alexander family in Budapest was a striking novelty. This status had its own ghosts, even in America. Ilonka Venier Alexander, the granddaughter, was initially ignorant of her Jewish background, and she gradually realized this only during family gatherings. The book is full of wondering about this past that is repressed in the interpretation of the author.  However, from the perspective of turn of century Budapest, these moments show the importance of assimilation and secularization at the time, and later, the role of the Franz Alexander’s Italian artist wife in his life. Indeed, Ilonka Venier Alexander herself notes the complexities of these factors: ‘in marrying an Italian Catholic woman of noble heritage, Alexander had certainly “married up” and thus, unwittingly, began his own metamorphosis into something other than an Eastern European Jew. Her aristocratic ancestry, as well as his denial of his Jewish heritage, no doubt allowed them to ultimately move about Chicago’s high society with ease’ (p. 28).

The book has around one hundred pages on the psychoanalytic career of Franz Alexander. The account of the Berlin training years of Franz Alexander is well documented. The saga of the Chicago decades is fascinating. The reader learns not merely about the external history of the work of Alexander, his successes in criminal psychology[ref]Alexander, F. and Staub, H. (1956). The Criminal, the Judge and the Public. Glencoe, IL: Free Press[ref] and psychosomatic medicine,[ref]Alexander, F.G. (1950). Psychosomatic medicine. New York: Norton[/ref] but we also learn about his professional tensions, and debates over short therapy, as well as over the issue of psychoanalysis becoming part of residential training of psychiatrists. In his granddaughter’s account we learn much about an all-round scholar and clinician, who, as his book on the history of psychiatry also showed, was not an either/or thinker regarding relations between body, brain, and the mind.[ref]Alexander,F. G. and Selesnick, S. T. (1966): The history of psychiatry. New York: Harper[/ref] We also learn about a caring European-style pater familias. We learn with the eyes of the respectful granddaughter about a family style that always combined love and commitment with decisiveness. Franz Alexander did not hesitate to intervene into the life of his child and of the youngster navigating through the troubled water of divorced parents.

Overall, the book has two special points of interest: it is a good source for the reconstruction of the role of Franz Alexander in psychoanalysis. At the same time it is a rich starting point for those who are interested in the details of the family socialization  of talented Central European Jews in early and mid 20^th Century.

Csaba Pléh is a cognitive psychologist with a strong interest in the history of psychology. Recently he has been a visiting professor at the Dept of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Budapest. Many of his papers are accessible at his website: plehcsaba.eu 

 

Heike Bauer (ed.), Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2015, $34.95 pbk, 284 pages, ISBN: 978-1-43991-249-2

by Ivan Crozier, with responses from Heike Bauer

Editor’s note: we are very happy to here present Ivan Crozier’s review of ‘Sexology and Translation.’ The review is followed by a response from  the editor of that volume, Heike Bauer; then a response to the response; and then a response to the response to the response. We are grateful to both scholars for this lively and interesting exchange, which foregrounds crucial issues about historiography and field-making, which are central to work on sexology, but that span the human sciences much more widely too.

Sexology was a trans-European, transatlantic discipline, with important sexological works appearing in Italian, French, English and especially German before Havelock Ellis’s synthesis of the field in his Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1928). As suggested by their footnotes, most of the main players read each other’s languages. They also read widely outside of the field, and rearticulated non-sexological views of sex from other fields, such as history, literature, law and anthropology. Understanding how they read and used the works of other sexologists and those of other sexperts who were not in the same field is a significant way to map out the intellectual history of one of the most important disciplines that framed many attitudes towards sexuality in the twentieth century. How authors in other fields interpreted and disseminated these sexological discourses is a useful way of assessing the impact that sexologists had.  These are not the same problem, but they both require an understanding of how knowledge is generated within a field.

It is obvious to students of sexological texts that translation is a key issue for understanding the field – both the translation of texts between languages and cultures, but particularly the translation of concepts and evidence between fields. This book attends to both types, but with varying degrees of success. Attending to translation is a potentially fruitful way for understanding topics such as how the field of sexology formed, whose work was considered significant, what effects these works had, where concepts were developed, etc. To do so, a theoretical framework is needed that can explain how the field developed in specific contexts; how it related to other fields in the human sciences, the law, literature and the arts; and how it produced specific sexological objects of inquiry and developed sexological concepts that appear similar to but are not identical to other conceptualisations of sex. Translation is a part of the key for understanding this process, but the archaeological insights into the history of sexology that derive from Michel Foucault and the historical epistemologists who have followed him are still necessary if we are to understand how sexology functioned as a field. Not all of the chapters collected in this volume together satisfy this requirement equally.

This book gathers twelve chapters that addressed both the translation between languages/cultures and between fields. On the whole, the problem of language and context translation is done significantly better.  Drawing on contemporary translation studies, many of the chapters explain how sexological works were turned into texts in other languages, attending to the differences in cultural context, and exploring the political issues that framed these translation efforts. An exemplary such chapter was Brian James Baer on Russia, but other fascinating essays addressed the translation of European sexological discourses into Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese. Cultural contexts also changed, with pieces following the influence of sexological texts as far as Peru, Palestine, Egypt and the Far East. And the translation of specific words over a longue durée timescale is seen in Peter Cryle’s scholarly attention to the concept of frigidity from ancient Latin and Greek into nineteenth-century German and French medicine before the psychoanalysts turned away from medical expertise to explain a lack of desire. Liat Kozma‘s chapter on the Middle East also explores the translation of professional texts into practical lay sexual advice, not as a history from below, as those following Roy Porter have emphasized, but as sexual advice by doctors trying to shape the sexual politics of their context by importing some European sexological concepts. In these ways this book adds importantly to our understanding of the spread of sexology outside of the much more commonly studied European texts.

Translation between fields is where many more scholars had more trouble, and it is with this problem that a solid introduction that conceptualised what was at stake when concepts are rearticulated between fields would have helped (the rather busy one-page editorial interjections between the three sections of the book didn’t offer this, either).  “Literary sexology”, a term used by the editor elsewhere to describe how sexological knowledge made its way into literary texts, shows some of the problems with treating the objects (sex) within the different fields as equivalent, and forgets the fact that they are produced differently (relying on different practices, different styles of reasoning, different forms of evidence). Reading the surfaces of texts elides knowledges with very different epistemological values, which is not to say that some fields are more important, only that they produce different things and rely on different networks of power. We see this all of the time in the primary sources when sexologists qualify their uses of non-sexological texts, but many scholars have trouble with these differences.

Rather than arguing that sexology is bigger than the field actually was, so as to include literary and other texts where sex is addressed in that earnest late-nineteenth century way, it is better to understand some manifestations of sexological knowledge as formed by the rearticulation of sexual knowledge into and out of the field of sexology. A text purporting to be factually engaging with sex is not necessarily sexological. Proceeding along these lines depends on the kind of historiographical framework being used, but with decades of historical epistemological engagement with these issues since Michel Foucault, Arnold Davidson and others, there is no excuse to mash texts together looking for, in Foucault’s terms, points of equivalence.’ Different strategic choices are made when a historian accentuates either discontinuity or continuity.

Failure to conceptualise the field was also a problem in Jana Funke and Kate Fisher’s chapter that argued for the inclusion of Edward Carpenter’s contributions within the sexological field, which I have argued against because of the difference in style of reasoning (his is much more literary/historical, and romantic not psychopathological), the differences in evidence used (he did not include case histories, but appeared as one in Ellis’ Sexual Inversion), and the fact that – despite interesting archival evidence that Albert Moll corresponded with him – most sexological texts after his publication did not refer to his work in any significant way (unlike that of Ellis, Moll, Krafft-Ebing, etc.).  He remained an outsider, conceptually, which is not to undervalue his contributions – but rather to see them for what they were: ground-breaking homosexual rights activism rather than sexology. Carpenter does not need to be made into a sexologist to be important. If the field of sexology had been conceptualized more thoroughly, this kind of archival slavery could be avoided.

There is no need to end on a critical note. Katie Sutton’s consistently-strong work shows that a more sophisticated approach to sexological knowledge and its vicissitudes outside the field is possible. She maps effectively how transgendered people interacted with sexological categories, and shows how these interactions were rearticulated in non-sexological fields, such as in novels, films and magazine columns with a transgendered theme from the Weimar Republic. This was the strongest essay in the collection. Overall, this book will not satisfy those with a need for rigorous conceptual analysis as much as those who require specific engagement with translation of sexology into other cultural contexts.

 

Heike Bauer’s response to the review:

Following in the vein of influential scholars such as Gillian Beer, who in the early 1980s pointed out that nineteenth-century science and literature shared a common language, recent research on sexology by Veronika Fuechtner, Anna Katharina Schaffner and Robert Deam Tobin, among others, has shown that the science of sex was a porous field. The main point of Crozier’s critique – that sexology should be located within an idealized, tightly bound domain of science proper, and most definitely not in the literary realm – is both historically inaccurate and critically outdated. Sexology was constituted from the contributions of medical professionals, legal and social scientists, anthropologists, social reformers as well as authors, literary critics and all kinds of cultural commentators who individually and collectively turned their attention to questions of sex. As sexual bodies and behaviours came under scrutiny in the clinic and courtroom, literary and cultural commentators explored the vagaries of desire and the implications of gender norms. Sexual debates as we known them today emerged on the intersections between these different fields rather than just within a distinct, clearly disciplined sexual science. In the collection I therefore use the term ‘sexology’, alongside sexual science, in line with other critics to give a name to the discursive force that gathered momentum around the sustained attention paid to questions of sex in different contexts and countries from around the 1880s to the 1930s. The deliberately loose definition not only captures the historical permeability of the field of sexual research. It also drives a key aim of the collection: to examine the coeval emergence of similar sexual debates in different parts of Europe, Asia, South America and the Middle East.

By policing the boundaries of European sexology, Crozier simply looks for evidence of an assumed one-way traffic of sexological ideas from the West into other parts of the world. He attacks Kate Fisher and Jana Funke’s essay, which argues that the English sexual science around 1900 was ‘a cross-disciplinary field that did not erect exclusionary credentials around its practice’ for including the poet and reformer Edward Carpenter in a discussion of sexual science. At the same time Crozier praises the essays that explore the translations of European sexology into other contexts, including Japan. Yet Michiko Suzuki’s chapter, which examines the reception of Carpenter in Japanese feminist circles, explicitly reads Carpenter’s work as a contribution to sexological and broader sexual debates both in Europe and Japan. For Crozier, then, Carpenter only counts as a sexologist when he can be figured as the harbinger of European knowledge into the East.

Jack Halberstam has pointed out that the problem with disciplinary correctness is that it all too often ‘confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing’ (2011: 186). Ivan Crozier’s review of Sexology and Translation shows how methodological rigidity and the guarding of disciplinary boundaries obscures the insights gained from interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. Insisting on a narrowly defined approach to sexology, his claims support the critically outdated yet perniciously resilient view that modern debates about sexuality originate in Western science from where they were transmitted into a sexually undisciplined Orient. Rather than engaging with the insights and findings presented, the review merely demonstrates how gendered and racialized assumptions about the production of knowledge shape readings of research that pushes against them.

 

Crozier, responding to Bauer:

It appears that many specialists in literary studies have trouble with the idea that discursive fields have boundaries.  Apart from Michel Foucault describing how to approach such fields in his Archaeology of Knowledge, the disciplines of History and Philosophy of Science and Science Studies have developed this well-established concept in historical and sociological terms (especially since Gieryn, 1983), but occasionally when someone studying literature looks at a scientific field, they seem to see a porous mess of texts that anything can seep into and out of like a poorly-squeezed sponge (possibly because literature is a porous field in different ways to the sciences?). By looking at scientific discourses in this way, these cultural approaches remove the discourses from the social contexts in which they were produced. Perhaps they are so over-whelmed by the shared common language which Gillian Beer taught them to see that they do not realise that the concepts, styles of reasoning, uses of data, statuses of the authors, and other social-epistemic factors are not shared between fields? There is, as we have known since Gaston Bachelard, an epistemological rupture, which means that sexology and other disciplines (such as the law) construct sex differently. The original authors of these texts were aware of these different fields, probably because so many of them spent a long time in medical school learning how to look at the world in a particular way; likewise the historians of science who discuss their work. But apparently Heike Bauer has trouble with the idea that we should look at sexological texts as belonging to a specific field if we are to understand their production – not everything can be crammed into this field, and other texts will need to be positioned in their respective discursive fields.  So a line needs to be drawn: those who believe that the human sciences have a status deriving from specific practices; and those who think that there is no demarcation between scientific and non-scientific forms of knowledge… tl;dr: I’m a splitter, she’s a lumper.

Bauer makes a grand statement about sexology being a ‘porous field,’ but what does she mean by this?  Without simply relying on a metaphor that some things (she doesn’t specify in her response, but we might assume she means concepts, words, politics, what else?) somehow seep in and out of the leaky vessel of sexology, it is important for the historian of ideas to understand the social processes by which this happens (no one is denying that it happens; but some of us want to know how). It is through a process of rearticulation, as anyone versed in post-foucaultien historical epistemology knows. And as such, these discourses are not found ‘within an idealized, tightly bound domain of science proper,’ as Bauer incorrectly supposes I think, but rather in a sui generis scientific field that emerged in specific ways, relates to other (scientific and non-scientific) discursive fields through particular socially-acceptable mechanisms, and produces knowledge for this specific field. Sure, these discourses are not bound forever to remain in the field, and occasionally novelists, lawyers and others pick up on these discourses and turn them into something else for their own ends, just as sexologists can draw on these other fields – but without a solid understanding of what is happening in the production of discourses within the human sciences, the work that follows can be pretty flakey.  There is nothing new here – following Michel Foucault, Arnold Davidson, Ian Hacking, and the Edinburgh School in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, I have been saying versions of this for almost 20 years, as Bauer knows from my work that she cites in her book. None of us think that there is a unified field of ‘science proper,’ just different competing fields. Framing the translation between these fields is what could have made Bauer’s book interesting, as some of the chapters show, but which eludes her introduction.

In her response, Bauer relies on Jack Halberstam to suggest that I am enrolling gendered and racialized assumptions because she imagines that I am talking about ‘modern debates about sexuality originat[ing] in Western science’ and oozing out across the world, but I am not.  I am simply saying that discourses produced within fields of the human sciences have specific rules of construction that make them different to literary texts, and to fail to look at these texts in their original social context is to miss a lot of important detail.  To put it another way, there is no literary sexology – there is sexology that rearticulates ideas presented in literary and other non-scientific sources when speaking to other members of the same field, for example when Havelock Ellis writes about Baron von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs when discussing masochism, enrolling it as evidence (rearticulating it to make it sexological). When people outside this field use these sexological ideas, they are no longer doing sexology, which is fine.  To try to make everything a form of sexology just because it speaks about sex is to give the science an inflated status. I think we can do better than this.

Ultimately, I thought Sexology in Translation was an average book whose editor was unable to introduce a historiography properly equipped to deal with the construction of sexological knowledge, which is a shame as it was surely her most pressing task so that she could help her readers understand the translation of objects and concepts between fields.  Some of the better contributions do this (especially Katie Sutton’s), as do other historians of sexology, but many of Bauer’s contributors are happy to wallow around in the common language of sex.  All writing about sex is not sexological, and when it is, it follows a ‘grammar’ specific to that discursive field.  That doesn’t mean that other (literary) writing can’t speak about sex; it just means that these literary sources are not found among the human sciences.

 

Bauer’s response to Crozier, and the final word:

That Crozier wants this collection to be a different book – one that engages specifically with the methodologies and concerns of his own research – is clear, not least because he mistitles it Sexology in Translation. But this book takes a different approach. It examines the coeval emergence of sexology in different parts of the world in terms of a dynamic exchange between distinct discourses and disciplines. Understanding disciplinary porosity in this context is not a denial of the discrete practices, conventions and genealogies that forged a modern sexual science. Instead it focuses on the intersections as well as the differences between discursive fields to gain deeper insights into how modern ideas about sex were formed, disciplined and transmitted, and to what effect.  Such an approach does not dismiss the significance of social context. On the contrary, the essays in the collection show that attention to social context is fundamental to understanding whose existence was on the line in sexological discourse formation.

In many ways talking about sexology in the nineteenth-century is anachronistic. While according to current scholarship the term was first used in English in 1867 in relation to social philosophy, the profession of ‘sexologist’ only took shape in the West in the way in which it is still practiced today when the centres of sexual research shifted from Europe to North America after World War II. Many of the people we today associate with the emergence of European sexology – such as the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, author of the influential medico-forensic study Psychopathia Sexualis – did not self-identify as ‘sexologists’ even as they staked out a specialism in sexual matters. The work of some male non-scientists such as the literary critic John Addington Symonds was readily accepted as, and widely cited by, the emerging sexological literature. The contributions of women in contrast was often overlooked or dismissed. Edith Ellis, for instance, a feminist reformer who was married to Havelock Ellis, entered sexological literature as a case study (she was in a relationship with another woman) rather than being cited for her radical critique of the institutionalisation of ‘love’. Framing these developments solely in terms of epistemic ruptures, competition between different fields and definitional struggles over what should count as sexology proper not only reduces the complexity of this history. It also fails to consider whose contributions were obscured or excluded in the scientification of sex.

Sara Ahmed has pointed out that citation practices are ‘a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies.’ Crozier’s alignment with an all white male line-up of influential thinkers in the history and philosophy of science illustrates this point. Rather than engaging with the most recent scholarship on the histories of sexuality and sexology, he turns backward. As he says, ‘there is nothing new’ in his critique.

Heike Bauer is a Senior Lecturer in English and Gender Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Ivan Crozier is currently an historian of psychiatry at Sydney University.

 

Sarah Chaney, Psyche on the Skin, Reaktion Books, London, 2017, £20.00, 320pp. ISBN 9781780237503;

Chris Millard, A History of Self-Harm in Britain: a genealogy of cutting and overdosing, Palgrave, London, 2015, £15.99 and available open access. ISBN  9781137547736.

by Ivan Crozier

People have always changed their bodies in permanent ways – whether with tattoos, scars, tongue splits, brands, piercings, genital modifications (from religious circumcision to self-bifurcation), or through cosmetic surgery. These changes give the body a particular meaning that is entirely dependent on the social context. Sometimes, scarification is done to show belonging to a particular ethnic group (a Mossi man from Burkina Faso was traditionally initiated with specific facial scars made with a hot knife), while other scars might be consensually produced as a part of a heavy sadomasochistic scene, and yet others – as these two books show – might be the result of a distressed teenager engaging in a self-harming practice which increasingly became viewed as a ‘cry for help’ within psychiatric discourses, and which necessitated the intervention of mental health professionals. These acts of body modification only take on their meanings within certain social groups. In some cases, self-injury is framed as resulting from a disturbed mind. Psychiatry is the dominant current way of understanding deliberate self-inflicted injuries in the west, but this was not always the framework, and, as these two books show, there is much to suggest that psychiatric power is being resisted in current corporeal practices.

The abhorrence that has framed self-injuring is partly tied up in ideas about pain as a wholly negative experience, with those willing to engage in it consciously believed to be mentally disturbed and requiring psychiatric attention. This is the main reason that sadomasochistic practices come under the scrutiny of psychiatrists. Another important framework for considering self-harm is the social and legal status granted to suicide. Self-harm was developed as a category within psychiatry, firstly believed to be ‘failed suicide,’ and then ‘para-suicide,’ before becoming a different category altogether (Non-Suicidal Self-Injury, as it is in the  of fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), where it made its first appearance as a self-contained condition in 2013). The links between the legal and medical status of self-harm created the conditions whereby psychiatry could develop a theoretical apparatus for constructing a new category, although other social factors also shaped the way psychiatrists’ thought about self-harm. For example, self harm was increasingly gendered as feminine. This was because it was seen to be the result of domestic distress, where sometimes women hurt themselves to guilt their partners into not leaving them. This gendered conception of self-harm is still seen today, with American psychiatric research showing that adolescent females are the most typical group to cut themselves. What acts of self-injury mean depends very much on how they are understood by the different psychiatric discourses that have attended to them, as well as by the people who commit them.

Sarah Chaney and Chris Millard, in their respective volumes, ally themselves to a view of psychiatric knowledge that derives from historical epistemology. They both use Ian Hacking’s concept of ‘making up people’ to develop the ways that psychiatry produces specific objects of knowledge which are then transported to society through the expansion of psychiatric power – via psychiatric social workers, structures like the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, and education programmes. The increased prevalence of the self-harmer is in part produced by the sustained and expanding psychiatric attention. By adopting this historical-epistemological standpoint, both books show that self-harm is ‘transient’ in Hacking’s sense; that it is not a stable category, but one which changes over the course of the history of psychiatry: the teenage girls who cut themselves, and discuss what this means to them, on the internet today are not the same as the women in the 1960s who poisoned themselves so their boyfriends wouldn’t leave, even though psychiatry has placed them both in the category of self-harm. How Chaney and Millard develop this analytic framework is not identical, but rather illustrates two different modes of medical historiography: (1) a macro, longue durée approach with an engaging narrative that bears some of the hallmarks of Roy Porter’s influence (Chaney); (2) an extremely detailed micro-history of the development of the concepts of self-harm within the context of British psychiatry, but with close attention to the sites where new psychiatric practices developed (such as the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and the Institute of Psychiatry in London) and which owes much more to the historical Sociology of Scientific Knowledge as applied to medical practices (Millard). Both books problematize psychiatric knowledge, and seek explanations for the shape that it took by looking at the social and conceptual frameworks in which this knowledge was developed, with the resulting works being very different, yet complimentary.

Sarah Chaney’s fantastically illustrated Psyche on the Skin is written for a popular audience and anyone with a personal or professional interest in the subject will be well-rewarded by her book. Chaney uses history to refute the idea that self-inflicted injuries have a universal meaning by showing a variety of episodes where individuals hurt themselves, but were not considered to be episodes of self-harm in a modern psychiatric sense. She discusses practices such as blood-letting, where cutting the self was considered to yield positive results, and castration, which some believed to be beneficial (in particular members of the Skoptsy sect in Russia). Such practices have existed since the ancient world, without any speculation about the individual’s mental health. Chaney’s main focus, and her best research, is on the Victorian period. Using hospital records from Bethlem, as well as a thorough examination of existing medical literature, Chaney shows that self-mutilation was relatively common among the mentally ill in the Victorian period (with 11% of the Bethlem patient population hurting themselves between 1880-1900, employing methods such as burning, biting, plucking, cutting, castration and ocular enucleation). In these instances, self-harming was considered to exemplify the ‘morbid instinct’ that characterised insanity in this period. Self-harm was not a psychiatric object in itself, but was a manifestation of insanity. Self-mutilation, like suicide, was considered an unnatural practice by Victorian psychiatrists (or alienists, as they were typically known in this period) because it was not perceived to benefit the patient. Sexual self-mutilation was addressed as a part of the increased attention to sexuality seen in Victorian and Edwardian medicine.  Practices such as masturbation were seen as self-harming, because of the assumed deleterious effects, and a number of the patients whose records Chaney examined spoke of wishing to be castrated in order to prevent this vice (interestingly, some others wished for castration as a form of gender reassignment).

Other instances of self-harm were associated with hysteria, including the practice of piercing oneself with sewing needles (by 1897 there were enough cases of this practice reported in the medical literature for the women who regularly pierced themselves to be given the name of ‘needle girls’). Particular traits, such as deceit, came to be associated with self-harm, because efforts were made to conceal self-injury and the motivations behind it – and this association apparently remains today. Sometimes the reported self-harm practices were of a sexual nature, such as the insertion of hairpins into the urethra – which, although considered to be a form of self-mutilation by physicians at the time, may have been the result of poorly executed urethral masturbation (urethral sounding).  Chaney’s survey of the literature on self-harm attends to the psychoanalytic writing on the topic, including a long discussion of Karl Menninger’s Man Against Himself (1938) She also discusses the changes in later psychiatric theories of self-harm, from re-writing it as a practice associated with Borderline Personality Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, to an analysis of Armando Favazza’s Bodies Under Seige (1987). The latter utilised cultural-psychiatric approaches to looking at self-harm relativistically, and suggested that – contrary to much preceding psychiatry – self-harm was often an attempt at self-healing, by taking control of the body in a deliberate way, focusing, and submitting to the pain and then the relaxed feelings that followed such activity. Pain is typically considered negative in the Western imagination, but there are many instances where submitting to pain can bring positive results.

Chaney does not limit her work to psychiatric discourses alone, but provides a welcome analysis of some literary and other artistic depictions of self-harm, giving non-psychiatric voices a legitimate place in her study. Finally, and very importantly, Chaney examines the role played by the popular press and especially the internet in the culture of self-harm – both as a place where information about self-harm could circulate, both from ‘official’ health-care sources, and in patient-led ‘survivor group’ discussions. These non-psychiatric sources are an important part of the ‘making up’ of self-harm. Chaney’s work is both broad and rich and is written in an engaging way that will make this book a valuable resource for anyone trying to understand self-harm practices outside of the narrow confines of psychiatric discourses.

Chris Millard’s A History of Self-Harm in Britain is exhaustive in its genealogical approach to the concepts of self-harm in Britain, and as such is an exemplary case study in the sociological reconstruction of psychiatric knowledge. Most importantly, although he relies heavily on published British medical sources and theses (and it appears that he did not miss a single work), Millard does not fail to examine the practices that allowed for the development of these concepts. He shows how self-harm first emerged as a psychiatric problem by looking at how ‘failed suicide’ attempts (through traumatic injury as well as self-poisoning) in the 1910s and 1920s led to the injured person being taken to voluntary hospitals and workhouse infirmaries, in order to deal with the self-inflicted harm; after the 1930 Mental Treatment Act, which saw mental health becoming more integrated into general medical practices, these ‘failed suicides’ were able to be assessed more readily by psychiatrists. This situation was further stimulated by changes in the law regarding suicide (it was decriminalised in the UK in 1961), which Millard shows led to the integration of therapeutic regimes, joining the somatic approach of casualty departments to acute psychiatric care for the damaged person. The NHS further expanded the remit of psychiatry (especially via psychiatric social workers) into the homes of self-harmers, where a detailed picture began to emerge about the kinds of people who hurt themselves and their motivations for so doing. These practices of observation, which Millard examines in particular detail by assessing the role of the Observation Ward at Edinburgh, led to a psychiatric intervention into what had been a problem within physical medicine (the ‘failed suicide’ became a psychiatric category that could be followed home once their health returned for further investigation). Psychiatric explanations began to be offered to explain why the person had done such violence to themselves. A complex picture emerged whereby self-harm (especially overdosing) was considered to be a cry for help rather than a genuine attempt to end a life. By focusing on the changing practices within psychiatric care, Millard offers a compelling explanation for the development of this new psychiatric category, rather than just following its emergence through the pages of the Journal of Mental Science. Although in Britain the main focus for this argument was on self-poisoning (which makes up the largest number of hospitalizations for self-harm), increasingly under the influence of American psychiatry, it is self-cutting that has come to embody the exemplar of the contemporary self-harmer.

Millard is at his most remarkable in his conclusion, where he expands his argument in brilliant fashion to discuss the movement of self-harm from a communicative indication of internal suffering to an individualised, neurological issue by mapping these changes in psychiatry onto the ideological changes that followed the demise of social ideals to an embrace of neoliberal ideologies. He writes:

‘This political shift broadly coincides and intimately corresponds to the much more individualistic reading of self-damage, based on emotional self-regulation.  Indeed, neo-liberalism’s stress on individual actor’s radical freedom to make choices for their own benefit fits well with a model of self-harm that emphasises the individualistic, private feelings of tension, and the regulation of these through cutting. The coincidence of neo-liberal political ascendency from the early 1980s in the United States and United Kingdom, and the displacement of the social setting from understandings of self-damage are not chance occurrences.’ (205)

Self-harm is one of many examples where psychiatric care has moved to emphasise individuals, who can be put on medication regimes, rather than the more communal view of mental health and community therapy that flourished between the 1950s and 1970s.

Sometimes the detail in both books could have been significantly lessened.  To pick two examples, Chaney’s discussion of Freud’s Wolfman, and Millard’s 6 page exegesis of Samuel Waldenberg’s MPhil thesis on wrist-cutting, could have both have been much shorter without losing any significance to the respective books; this is probably an artefact of the two books having been converted out of PhDs. Furthermore given the foucaultien framework that was developed by Ian Hacking and which has influenced these two authors, it was a little surprising that more was not said about resistance. Sarah Chaney does end her book by looking at the ways that some self-harmers have responded to their condition, by taking back their lives from the medical practices in which they were framed as self-harming, through the production of literary, artistic and even historical works. On the other hand, Millard’s book gives little sense that any of the sufferers were anything other than passive actors in a complex medical system – which sits a little uncomfortably with his critique of neo-liberalism, which may even encourage such radical self-determination. It would have been very interesting to think even more broadly about the ways that self-harmers actively resist these medical discourses – as can be seen, for example, on the kinds of internet discussion forums on self-harm (as examined by Helena Mattingley’s 2009 Edinburgh University MSc thesis on self-harm). The making up of people is – as Hacking realised – not simply a top-down process. Individuals sometimes respond directly to these psychiatric regimes, and have otherwise developed their own strategies to cope with their struggles.  Often, taking control of their own body –by cutting it, or via some of the many other bodily practices that are increasingly prevalent, such as tattooing, sadomasochism, or other extreme bodily practices – is often seen to give a sense of asserted autonomy in a world where people increasingly are regulated. Placing the self-harmers in relation to these other bodily practices would help break them out of the psychiatric framework in which they have been confined.  The body can be a site for resistance, as well as a frame for the deployment of power.

I strongly recommend these two books for anyone interested in the topic of self-harm. They show two faces of the history of psychiatry as it is currently emerging from the University of London, and should be widely read.

Ivan Crozier is an Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow in the History Department, of The University of Sydney, Australia

 

Han F. Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015, $75.00. xxiii + 718 pages, ISBN: 978-0-8032-5542-5

by

Hilary Howes

The central argument of Han F. Vermeulen’s Before Boas, which checks in at an impressive – indeed, somewhat daunting – 718 pages, is presented with admirable conciseness at the very beginning of the first chapter.  Both ethnography, ‘conceived as a program for describing peoples and nations in Russian Asia and carried out by German-speaking explorers and historians’, and ethnology, developed by ‘historians in European academic centers dealing with a comprehensive and critical study of peoples’, ‘originated in the work of eighteenth-century German or German-speaking scholars associated with the Russian Academy of Sciences, the University of Göttingen, and the Imperial Library in Vienna’ (pp.1-2).  The formation of these studies, Vermeulen adds, ‘took place in three stages: (1) as Völker-Beschreibung or ethnography in the work of the German historian and Siberia explorer Gerhard Friedrich Müller during the first half of the eighteenth century, (2) as Völkerkunde and ethnologia in the work of the German or German-speaking historians August Ludwig Schlözer, Johann Christoph Gatterer, and Adam František Kollár during the second half of the eighteenth century, and (3) as ethnography or ethnology by scholars in other centers of learning in Europe and the United States during the final decades of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century’ (pp.1-2).  Building particularly on existing research by Hans Fischer and Justin Stagl into the importance of Göttingen as a locus of early ethnographic work, Vermeulen pushes the earliest uses of the German terms Völkerkunde, Ethnographie, ethnographisch, and Ethnograph back by several years, and the concept, as Völker-Beschreibung (description of peoples), by several decades.  In the process, he also raises several significant overarching points, including the interconnectedness of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science in Western Europe and in Russia; the need to distinguish between ‘colonial anthropology’ and ‘anthropology developed in colonial contexts’; and the emergence of the ethnological sciences as part of global history (dealing with peoples and nations, defined primarily by their languages), rather than as part of anthropology (dealing with human varieties or ‘races’, defined primarily by their physical features).

Before Boas is divided into eight substantial chapters.  Chapter One, ‘History and Theory of Anthropology and Ethnology: Introduction’, and Chapter Eight, ‘Epilogue: Reception of the German Ethnographic Tradition’, usefully contextualise the real ‘meat’ of this study, namely Vermeulen’s exhaustive examination of little-known primary sources.  I particularly enjoyed Chapter Two, ‘Theory and Practice: G.W. Leibniz and the Advancement of Science in Russia’; Chapter Three, ‘Enlightenment and Pietism: D.G. Messerschmidt and the Early Exploration of Siberia’; and Chapter Four, ‘Ethnography and Empire: G.F. Müller and the Description of Siberian Peoples’.  As their titles suggest, these three interlinked chapters examine, respectively, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1646-1716) development of a strict methodology in what would now be called comparative or historical linguistics; the itinerary, methods, and results of Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt (1685-1735), ‘the first scientifically trained explorer of Siberia’ and the first to ‘systematically conduct ethnographic research’ there (115); and the inauguration of ‘ethnography as a descriptive study of peoples’ by the historian Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705-1783).  In all three cases, Vermeulen points out, the general neglect by historians of these individuals’ contributions to the development of ethnography can largely be attributed to the ‘lack of published works’ (p.131).  An accurate assessment of Müller’s ethnographic work, for example, has only become possible with the very recent publication (in 2003, 2009, and 2010) of German and Russian editions of two of his manuscripts.

In addition to examining the published and unpublished writings of these three individuals – their correspondence, memoirs, reports, manuscripts, and maps – Vermeulen pays careful attention to their education and training, employment, contacts, and scholarly networks.  This approach emphatically underscores the remarkable mobility of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century savants, as well as the resulting interconnectedness of Western European and Russian science.  Vermeulen’s in-depth discussions of particular individuals and specific expeditions add valuable detail and nuance to existing scholarly work on Tsar Peter the Great’s ‘Petrine reforms’; the lower-level interactions he traces help flesh out contacts between figures at the top of the food chain.  For example, the establishment of an academy of sciences in Russia, which resulted in a significant influx of foreign scholars, is not described simply as a result of Leibniz’s meetings and correspondence with Tsar Peter the Great; rather, Vermeulen presents it as a multi-player process facilitated in large part by the Scottish head of the Apothecary Chancellery in Moscow, Robert Areskine (Erskine), and the Tsar’s main science adviser, Yakov Vilimovich Brius (Jacob Daniel Bruce).

In contrast to Chapters Two, Three, and Four, which blend seamlessly into one another, Chapter Five, ‘Anthropology and the Orient: C. Niebuhr and the Danish-German Arabia Expedition’, seemed to me to sit rather awkwardly within the structure of the book as a whole. Vermeulen introduces it by explaining that its ‘apparent lack of a colonial context … will give us occasion to further comment on the relation between ethnography and empire’, and that its ‘contributions to ethnological discourse were much less pronounced than Müller’s Siberian venture’, this being ‘a contrast that requires elucidation’ (p.218).  Perhaps it does, but 48 pages of elucidation struck me as excessive, particularly since Vermeulen’s main conclusion is essentially negative: the ‘new, “ethnic” principle’ introduced by German-speaking scholars in the Russian Empire, their ‘classification of “peoples” according to their languages’, was ‘not found in Niebuhr’s work’ (p.266).  As for Vermeulen’s insistence on the distinction ‘between “colonial anthropology” and “anthropology developed in colonial contexts”’ (p.28), I felt that this point, although undeniably important, was adequately made in Chapter Four.

Chapter Six, ‘From the Field to the Study: A.L. Schlözer and the Invention of Ethnology’, picks up where Chapter Four left off.  Having traced the concept of ethnography, in the form Völker-Beschreibung, to Müller’s research in Siberia (1740), Vermeulen concedes that the historian August Ludwig Schlözer (1735-1809) was ‘probably the man who invented the term Völkerkunde’ (270).  More importantly, Schlözer ‘was the first to initiate an “ethnographic method” into the study of history”; he employed the concepts Völkerkunde, Ethnographie, ethnographisch, and Ethnograph ‘in strategic passages that were central to his argument’, and ‘held a key position in the international network of scholars first applying the ethnos terms to designate a study of peoples’ (pp.270-271).  While I share James Urry’s (2016: 1) concern that the search for ‘points of origin for ideas and concepts … too often resembles that for the Holy Grail’, I could not help but be impressed by Vermeulen’s meticulously compiled table tracing the history of ‘Ethnological discourse in Asia, Europe, and the United States, 1710-1815’, from Leibniz’s historia etymologica in 1711-12 to B.G. Niebuhr’s Völker- und Länderkunde in 1815 (354-355).  A further valuable aspect of Chapter Six is the attention Vermeulen pays to the proliferation, in the final decades of the eighteenth century, of journals with Völkerkunde in their titles.  These were, in a sense, the first ethnological journals, but the phenomenon has largely been neglected by modern scholars.

Chapter Seven, ‘Anthropology in the German Enlightenment: Plural Approaches to Human Diversity’, offers an overview of anthropological studies in the German Enlightenment.  From a survey of major publications with the word ‘anthropology’ (or its French, German, Italian, and Latin equivalents) in their titles, Vermeulen concludes that anthropology was in fact a ‘polyvalent’ term, used not only for physical and biological approaches but for medical, theological, and philosophical ones (p.393).  He adds that anthropology ‘up until the eighteenth century … was very different from ethnology’; while the former ‘focused on human beings as individuals or as members of the human species’, the latter ‘dealt with particular kinds of human groupings, that is, peoples and nations’ (p.393).  This chapter, unlike the previous ones, is a summary rather than an in-depth study, and doubtless some historians of racial thought will feel that certain aspects or individuals should have been dealt with in more detail.  However, Vermeulen’s focus is on anthropology as an alternative approach to human diversity, and his main point – that ‘anthropology and ethnology developed in separate domains of learning’, and that ‘the distinction between civil (political) history and natural history remained very much alive in the eighteenth century’ (pp.392-393), despite various attempts to relate them – is an important one.

It is scarcely possible, in a book of this scope, to avoid a few minor errors and omissions.  For instance, Vermeulen states that the remains of the ‘main ship, commanded by [Jean-François de Galaup de] La Pérouse’ during his 1785-88 expedition to the Pacific, ‘have never been retrieved’ (p.343).  In fact the wreck of the Boussole was located by Reece Discombe at Vanikoro, Solomon Islands, in the 1960s, while the final resting place of its companion ship, the Astrolabe, has been known since at least the 1950s (Coleman, 1987; Tryon, 2008).  Investigations conducted in 1986 and 1990 by the Maritime Archaeological Section of the Queensland Museum recovered substantial amounts of material from both wrecks (Stanbury and Green, 2004).  Nor is Vermeulen correct to describe it as ‘a mystery why Blumenbach labelled [his] fifth [human] variety “Malayan”’ (p.373); as Bronwen Douglas has pointed out, in the third (1795) edition of his De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa, Blumenbach explicitly justified his use of the name ‘Malay’ ‘on the linguistic grounds that this “variety of men” mostly spoke Malay’ (Douglas, 2008: 107).

These, of course, are mere quibbles.  I was rather more startled to find, in so thoroughly researched a monograph as Vermeulen’s, a passing reference to Gavin Menzies’ widely critiqued (if not debunked) 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (see Goodman, 2006; Henige, 2008; Melleuish et al., 2009; Rivers, 2004).  Any of the numerous credible studies outlined by Finlay (2004) could more effectively have been used to support Vermeulen’s essentially uncontroversial claim that ‘the Chinese sea voyages of Zheng He’, like ‘the Russian conquest of Siberia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, have ‘rarely been included in the canon of Western exploration’ (p.87).

Vermeulen’s close reading and careful analysis of little-known primary sources far outweigh these few flaws.  Before Boas is a substantial piece of scholarly work on a topic of ongoing interest.  It valuably complements the existing bodies of work dealing, on the one hand, with German-language contributions to the development of physical anthropology, and, on the other, with the history of British and American ethnology.  Historians of science, scholars of Enlightenment thought, and those interested in the peoples of Siberia are the obvious target audience, but I believe Before Boas also has much to offer to anthropologists, ethnologists, geographers, and historians, each of whom will learn a great deal about the history of their own discipline.

Hilary Howes is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at The Australian National University, working on Professor Matthew Spriggs’ Laureate Fellowship project ‘The Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific: A Hidden History’ (CBAP).  Her current research, which addresses the German-speaking tradition within Pacific archaeology and ethnology, builds on her PhD dissertation, published in 2013 as The Race Question in Oceania: A.B. Meyer and Otto Finsch between metropolitan theory and field experience, 1865-1914.  Following various stints as a research assistant, tutor, co-lecturer, guest lecturer, and associate course co-ordinator, she was employed most recently as Executive Assistant to the Ambassador at the Australian Embassy in Berlin, where her responsibilities included facilitating the repatriation of Australian Indigenous ancestral remains from German collecting institutions.

 

References

Coleman, R. (1987) ‘Missing: Explorer’s Disappearance Creates a 200-year-old Puzzle’, Australian Geographic 8: 86-99.

Douglas, B. (2008) ‘“Novus Orbis Australis”: Oceania in the Science of Race, 1750-1850’, in B. Douglas and C. Ballard (eds) Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750-1940. Canberra, ACT: ANU E Press, pp. 99-155.

Goodman, D.S.G. (2006) ‘Mao and the Da Vinci Code: Conspiracy, Narrative and History’, The Pacific Review 19(3): 359-384.

Finlay, R. (2004) ‘How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of  America’, Journal of World History 15(2): 229-242.

Henige, D. (2008) ‘The Alchemy of Turning Fiction into Truth’, Journal of Scholarly Publishing 39(4): 354-372.

Melleuish, G., Sheiko, K. and Brown, S. (2009) ‘Pseudo History/Weird History: Nationalism and the Internet’, History Compass 7(6): 1484-1495.

Rivers, P.J. (2004) 1421 Voyages: Fact and Fantasy. Ipoh: Perak Academy.

Stanbury, M. and Green, J. (eds) (2004) Lapérouse and the Loss of the Astrolabe and the Boussole (1788): Reports of the 1986 and 1990 Investigations of the Two Shipwrecks of the French              Explorer at Vanikoro, Solomon Islands. Fremantle, W.A.: Australasian Institute for Maritime   Archaeology.

Tryon, D. (2008) ‘Vale Reece Discombe (1919-2007)’, Pambu: Pacific Manuscripts Bureau Newsletter 24: 10-11.

Urry, J. (2016) ‘Book Review: Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment’, TAJA: The Australian Journal of Anthropology 0 (Early View): 1-2, accessed 2     December 2016, accessible @: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/taja.12217/full

 

 

Marianne Sommer, History Within: The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules, London and Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2016, 544 pages, cloth $50.00 ISBN 9780226347325.

by Chris Renwick

UNESCO – the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation – is probably best known to the public for the “world heritage site” status it has awarded to buildings, structures, and places including the Acropolis, the Galapagos Islands, and the Taj Mahal since it was founded in 1945. Given this role as a guardian of the globe’s heritage, it might surprise some people that UNESCO’s first director – and the man who insisted it include science as well as education and culture in its remit – was Julian Huxley (1887-1975). Grandson of “Darwin’s Bulldog”, Thomas Henry Huxley, Julian was a distinguished biologist in his own right and a public intellectual who had written numerous best-sellers, including Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942), been Secretary of the Zoological Society of London, and even won an Oscar for his documentary film, The Private Life of Gannets (1934). Julian Huxley’s connection with UNESCO made perfect sense. A campaigner for what he called “evolutionary” or “scientific” humanism, he believed there was no good reason to exclude the stuff of which we are made from our concept of heritage.

Huxley’s vision is one of the three overlapping evolutionary programmes – the others belonging to the American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935) and the Italian geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (b. 1922) – that Marianne Sommer has weaved into the compelling History Within. Charting almost 100 years across 15 deeply researched and packed chapters, Sommer tells a story about the efforts to come to terms with the biological, social, and cultural meaning of evolution during the twentieth century. Focusing on an evolving understanding of heritage, through which thinkers fused biology, society, and culture whilst avoiding reductionism, History Within documents a complex intergenerational project to provide us with a scientifically-informed account of what it is to be human. In so doing, Sommer takes us from the early twentieth-century world of what historians have called “mainline” eugenics, in which categories like race had essentialist properties, to the triumph of diversity, in both politics and biology, 70 years later.

Central to Sommer’s argument about those developments is the idea that they were both made possible by and a direct consequence of networks that included not only scientific and political ideas but also technology and modes of communication. Whilst Huxley went so far as resigning his university chair to devote more time to communicating his ideas to a wider public, Osborn worked as both a professor of biology at Columbia University and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History. Cavalli-Sforza, a former student of the British population geneticist R. A. Fisher, integrated his work at Stanford with the latest advances in computing, helping to lay foundations for both the Human Genome Diversity Project and the National Geographic-funded Genographic Project. Immersing ourselves in each of these thinkers’ worlds takes us from an effort to illustrate and encourage people to engage with human evolution through dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History to electronic maps showing the migration of genes across the globe. At each stage, new research techniques made it possible to look deeper into ourselves and increased the amount of information that accounts of human history could include. But they also furnished people like Osborn, Huxley and Cavalli-Sforza with new ways of thinking about humans and opened up new possibilities for people to engage with them.

As Sommer shows, these developments, which have created businesses that will decode genomes for a fee and the idea that heritage can be identified with our genetic makeup, have always existed within a complex and precarious set of political and cultural relationships. Indeed, History Within is most thought-provoking and insightful when it comes to the twentieth-century struggle to fashion a biology that worked productively with left and liberal politics. When allied with his science, Osborn’s somewhat unforgiving eugenics generated a story about humanity that was hierarchical and excluded races and groups. Huxley, however, saw eugenics as having more to do with equality of opportunity – an idea that provided the foundation for his later and more famous work on the UN Statements on Race, which declared race a social, not biological, category. Yet in a post-war world where Huxley’s once-progressive beliefs about eugenics suddenly sounded old-fashioned, Cavalli-Sforza transformed apparently empty biological categories into positive political statements. Genetic geography, with arrows and maps showing the global movement of people, told us about that a common humanity that stretched deep into the past and could be discovered within us.

As Sommer argues, though, problems have persisted, even with this apparent resolution to the challenge set by mid-twentieth-century biosocial progressives. One is the tendency to treat some communities as living fossils – reminders of some geographic and cultural staging post on the way to our own current state. Given that the science involves choices about which groups to sample, stories about genetic and cultural development map historical change in complex and politically fraught ways; for example, by making some people and places part of others’ pasts. At the same time, however, the constant pursuit of diversity in the biosocial sphere threatens to overload us with information, making it difficult to support a story about human heritage that is as coherent as it was when Cavalli-Sforza first started work – a scenario that will be familiar to anyone engaged with the politics of “big data”. Indeed, there is another order of questions that History Within alludes to, namely what all these developments in understanding our past might mean for our future. In the decades after the Second World War, when he was forced to drop eugenics as a frontline concern, Huxley wrote about something he called “transhumanism” – how our knowledge of biological and psychological science might be used to overcome our physical limitations. Diversity was an important part of this project because Huxley had come to believe that, given it was essential for evolutionary progress, society’s role was to compensate for its costs, such as disability. This was a very different answer, of course, to the one offered by earlier mainline eugenicists, who believed in the purity of races. In this respect, progressive social and political ideals have been integral to biology and our understanding of the human during the past 70 years. But with private companies becoming significant actors in the development and communication of these ideas, there are profoundly important questions about the ownership of human heritage, not to mention inequalities in participating in it and accessing any of its future benefits. Sommer offers us a profoundly important historical frame for thinking about this problem, not to mention the others that will emerge in future.

Chris Renwick is senior lecturer in modern history at the University of York and an editor of History of the Human Sciences. He works on the relationship between biology, social science, and politics, and is the author of British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots: A History of Futures Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).