378 Livingstone
have conventionally been cast in terms of historical epochs and temporal
change, frequently—though not invariably—touched with a progressivist
brush. Such readings, moreover, have routinely been placed at the service
of philosophical argument or social policy in order to provide grounds for
investment in such cultural capital as intellectual advancement, techni-
cal control, and instrumental progress. Both cognitively and socially, the
study of science as a human enterprise has fi tted comfortably into a linear
eschatological schema.
In this environment, the idea of a geography of science runs against
the grain. That science has a history and a philosophy makes sense. But
the suggestion that scientifi c inquiry has been infl uenced in any signifi -
cant way by location seems counterintuitive. Science, we have long been
told, is an enterprise untouched by the particularities of place; it is a tran-
scendental undertaking, not a provincial practice. Of all the human proj-
ects devoted to getting at the truth of how things are, that venture we call
science has surely been among the most industrious in its efforts to tran-
scend the parochial. To bring science within the domain of geographical
scrutiny disturbs settled assumptions about the kind of enterprise science
is supposed to be and calls into question received wisdom about how sci-
entifi c knowledge is acquired and stabilized.
And yet if we want to take seriously the geographical adjectives in such
standard designations as “Chinese science” under the Sung emperors, or
“Arabic science” under the patronage of Abassid Caliph al- Mansur, or
“American science” in the age of Jackson, or “French science” in the late
Enlightenment, we will have to attend to the signifi cance of locational
coordinates. Equally, urban particularities will have to be registered if we
are plausibly to refer to “Edinburgh science” in Enlightenment Scotland,
“London science” in the early Victorian period, or “Charleston science” in
antebellum America. At one scale of operations, then, “science” is always
a Renaissance French, a Jeffersonian American, an Enlightenment Scottish
thing—or some other modifying variant. At another, it is always labora-
tory science, or fi eld science, or museum science.
In many ways the attempt to cultivate a greater awareness of spatial
sensibilities resonates with some observations on de- essentializing the
term “science” that Dave Lindberg makes in the early pages of The Begin-
nings of Western Science. Language, he reminds us, “is not a set of rules
grounded in the nature of the universe, but a set of conventions adopted
by a group of people; and every meaning of the term ‘science’... is a
convention accepted by a sizeable community... Or to put the point in
a slightly different way, lexicography must be pursued as a descriptive,
rather than a prescriptive, art. We must acknowledge, therefore, that the