Science and Place 3871864 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
in Bath. The occasion was to have been a public debate between Richard
Burton and John Hanning Speke, both African explorers, about whether
or not the latter had succeeded in fi nding Lake Victoria and the source of
the Nile. England’s favorite missionary- explorer, David Livingstone, had
been invited to adjudicate. The debate never materialized, of course, due
to the untimely death of Speke in a hunting accident. The circumstances
occasioning this controversy, however, are not my concern here. Instead I
want to recount the meeting—no doubt cinematically overdramatized—
between Burton and Livingstone prior to the scheduled public discussion.
“Risky profession we’re in,” observes Livingstone, beginning to open his
shirt when he and Burton are left alone. “You know of course that I was
mauled by a lion. He only chewed my shoulder,” he went on, pointing to
the spot. Burton, not to be outdone, pulls back his shirt and points: “Bul-
let hole. Single bore.” Livingstone now takes to unbuttoning his breeches
to display a scorpion bite. “Cellulitis,” Burton replies, pulling up one trou-
ser leg. And so it continues, a ritual exchange of wounds. What is going on
here is an exercise in the establishment of credibility. Each explorer could
be trusted because they bore in their bodies the authenticating marks of
their expeditions.
Field work, it is clear, raised particularly acute questions about who
could be trusted and about what might be called “the moral economy
of wounds” as the embodied insignia of testimony. As Michael Heffer-
nan has compellingly shown, precisely this species of warrant was at the
heart of the controversy about who should be credited with the distinc-
tion of being the fi rst European to enter the African city of Timbuktu in
the 1820s.^34 In adjudicating the competing claims of a young Frenchman
and a Scottish soldier, John Barrow, permanent secretary to the Admi-
ralty, considered that the lengthy list of wounds that the Scotsman has
sustained—multiple saber slashes to the head, left temple, and right arm;
a variety of fractures; and a musket ball in the hip—bore witness to the
genuineness of the geographical knowledge he had so painfully acquired.
The injuries he had sustained were nothing less than the signs of truth
imprinted in the fl esh.
Field science, it seems, raises rather different epistemological questions
from, say, the laboratory about what is known, how it is known, and
how witnesses secure warrant. Besides, because the fi eld is an inherently
unstable scientifi c site, practical reason is at a premium. Here, the good
scientist is the skilled hand, the resourceful practitioner. Certainly these
aptitudes are crucial in the laboratory too. But in the fi eld, replication
is not so easily effected, the environment is less readily controlled, and