Book Review: Race, nature, and the politics of difference

popular conceptions of the scientist-as-recluse or with the drama associated with novel experimentation and high-profile public debate. Geography has not been anywhere near as prominent in critical explorations of science. As David Livingstone illustrates in his wonderfully written Putting science in its place, geography challenges scientific culture by concentrating on the particularities of what turns out to be a highly localized and regionally distinctive social practice. Livingstone deftly uses three simple spatial concepts – site, region and circulation – to deconstruct science’s claims to universality and thereby reveal an intriguing set of relationships that begin to characterize the social geography of scientific endeavor. Livingstone’s account is ambitious in scope, ranging from the spatial politics of laboratory investigation and medical examination to the ways museums and gardens interacted with popular perceptions of far-flung regions and peoples. By design, he rejects a chronological ordering of events and opts instead to juxtapose temporally disparate episodes in an effort to discover science’s site-specific and regional qualities. The relative lack of historical analysis, however, ends up concealing what might be some insightful connections between science and society. This deficiency is perhaps most evident in the third chapter, which concerns the regional cultures of science. Livingstone demonstrates how the political-economic pressures of various regional contexts (for instance, Victorian Manchester) shaped the type of science that was accepted and supported there (utilitarianism, in this case). Yet, beyond the point of identifying a basic interaction between regional culture and scientific practice, broader socioeconomic connections and trends remain undeveloped and unexplored. It would be fascinating, for instance, to undertake a systematic investigation of the relationships between science’s spatiality and the political economies and cultural formations evolving in different parts of Europe, Such an analysis is most certainly beyond the scope of Livingstone’s current book, which serves as a highly accessible and introductory typology of science’s social geography. But the point remains that space and time have factored equally in the production of science as an intellectual division of labour, and that both have been manipulated and erased to create the unfortunate illusion of a placeless social project.