377OF PERIOD AND PLACE
In one of those grand generalizations for which he remains justly notori-
ous, Michel Foucault once proclaimed that the “great obsession of the
nineteenth century... was history: with its themes of development and
suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever- accumulating past.”
As he read the signs of his own day, however, Foucault divined that the
hegemony of time over space—the triumph of period over place—was be-
ginning to invert. “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch
of space,” he surmised. “We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the
epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side- by- side,
of the dispersed.”^1
No doubt Foucault’s prognostication can be read, at least in part, as a
commentary on what might be termed—no doubt rather sloppily—the
condition of postmodernity. In an age when the particular is taking its
revenge on the universal, when generality recedes before singularity, and
when local stories replace global theory, it is understandable that the eye
of scholarly attention might divert from periodicity to spatiality. Whether
this diagnosis approaches accuracy, or indeed whether the complexities
of Foucault’s hermeneutic undertakings are either persuasive or coher-
ent, are not germane to my basic contention here, namely, that hitherto
history has taken precedence over geography in our understanding of
the scientifi c enterprise. Accounts of that imagined singularity “science”
CHAPTER 14Science and Place
David N. Livingstone