388 Livingstone
impromptu ingenuity is in correspondingly greater demand. Yet however
innovative in situ practices may be, the techniques deployed in the fi eld
are typically acquired at home. Encounters with the extraordinary are rou-
tinely construed in customary ways, for fi eld scientists “travel with their
domestic habits of mind and behaviour.”^35 To this extent the homeland is
always present with the scientifi c traveler.
Like the laboratory, the fi eld is a produced space. On the surface this
seems a strange way to put it. Surely the fi eld is just there in a taken- for-
granted kind of way. Not so. It is constituted as the fi eld by the activities
of scientifi c investigators. In fact in some academic disciplines, notably
anthropology, the place of the fi eld has been crucial to the normaliza-
tion of the discipline’s inquiries, empowering some, impeding others.
Malinowski’s role was crucial here; by installing fi eldwork as central to
the institutionalization of the discipline he effected a move away from
the worldview of Victorian gentlemen- scholars who considered going
to the fi eld to be beneath their dignity.^36 The fi eld methods Malinowski
had deployed in the Trobriand Islands rapidly became the legitimating
insignia of the profession—“the central ritual of the tribe.”^37 The place
of anthropological practice was thus crucial to its own sense of identity.
Moreover, anthropological investigators have the power to group indi-
viduals into some abstract collective, name them, and bring them into
scholarly circulation. By categorizing human subjects as slum dwellers,
primitive peoples, middle- class fundamentalists, or some such, social sci-
entists delineate boundaries and defi ne who is in and who is out of the
empirical circle.
The fi eld, as a place of scientifi c investigation, turns out to be anything
but the obvious site it might initially seem. Not only is it constructed
by the activities of the academy, but it has provided—at least for some
scientifi c traditions—an operational answer to questions about appropri-
ate ways of knowing. Absence from home and presence in the fi eld as
the necessary precondition of genuine knowledge was the outcome of an
historical settlement that gave the fi eld sciences their characteristic place
in the scientifi c division of labor. Here, epistemological warrant was built
upon the foundations of spatial practices.SPACES OF EXHIBITION
In the production of scientifi c knowledge, spaces of exhibition take their
place alongside sites of experimentation and expedition. Whether in
botanical gardens, museums, or zoos, scientifi c knowledge is intimately