382 Livingstone
considerable. For example, if we substitute “laboratory,” say, for “room,”
or “museum” for “street corner,” or “fi eld station” for “marketplace” in
the gobbet above and ask what kind of spatial practices and social forma-
tions are constituted in these venues, we can begin to appreciate that dif-
ferent sorts of inquiry—different forms of scientifi c life—fi nd expression
in each. Moreover, the relevance of the idea of spatial practice to scientifi c
engagement is not diffi cult to discern. For science is about performances
as well as principles, about practices as well as theories, about institutions
as well as ideas. Science thus understood is a “spatial practice.” Recall
Clifford Geertz’s quip: “If you want to understand what a science is, you
should look in the fi rst instance not at its theories or its fi ndings, and
certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what
the practitioners of it do.”^16
To Lefebvre, then, places are not simple slabs of earth stuff. Rather
they are a multilayered mosaic of social spaces which are both cause and
consequence of human agency. Spaces, produced and reproduced by so-
cial actors, are an elision of the material and the mental. And for this
very reason, certain spaces are privileged sites because from them emanate
discourses that exercise immense power in society. I do not think that
one has to endorse the entire outlook of fi gures like Michel Foucault and
Edward Said to see their relevance here.^17 From the church, the courtroom,
the hospital, the asylum, and so on fl ow utterances that authorize the la-
beling of people in all sorts of powerful ways. Saint and sinner, innocent
and guilty, healthy and sick, sane and insane, rational and irrational—just
a few of the bipolar categories that have shaped our culture—have all
been named and brought into cultural circulation from particular sites. In
such spaces, people are brought under the authority of medical, religious,
and legal knowledge for different purposes. To understand the history of
medicine, or religion, or law, or science, then, necessarily requires us to
grasp the geography of medical, religious, legal, or scientifi c discourses. It
is critically important, then, to attend to those sites that have generated
knowledge claims and then wielded them in different ways. No less is this
the case on the reception side of the equation. Where ideas and theories
are encountered conditions how they are received. Like objects and com-
modities, as Said has noted, “ideas and theories travel—from person to
person, from situation to situation, from one period to another.”^18 But this
migration process is never mere replication; traveling involves translation,
and translation is transforming. Precisely because arguments are the prod-
uct of time and place, for that very reason they are always appropriated
in time and place. At every scale, knowledge, space, and power are tightly
interwoven.