Golinski, Jan V.

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University of New HampshireUniversity of New Hampshire Scholars' RepositoryHistory Scholarship History6-1-2010Review of: Neil Safier, Measuring the New WorldJan V. GolinskiUniversity of New Hampshire, Durham, jan.golinski@unh.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/history_facpubThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the History at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been acceptedfor inclusion in History Scholarship by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information,please contact nicole.hentz@unh.edu.Recommended CitationGolinski, J.V. Review of: Neil Safier, Measuring the New World. In Journal of Modern History 82 (2010), 438-439.Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America.By Neil Safier.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. xviii387. $45.00.It has often been said that the discovery of the Americas transformed Europeanconceptions of the natural world. America was so prolific in new plants, animals, andpeople that the encounter with its natural wonders ushered in an age of dramaticallyexpanded scientific knowledge. As recent scholarship has shown, however, earlymodern Europeans did not confront these new natural riches with completely openminds. They voyaged to the New World with considerable cultural baggage; literallyso, as they shipped trunk loads of books across the Atlantic. At first, they interpretedwhat they saw in the familiar terms of scriptural tradition and classical philosophy. Inthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as European scientific institutions set aboutthe systematic study of American nature, they again subjected it to their own categoriesof understanding, through collection, classification, and ethnographic description.Given all this, one might ask: Where was the new scientific knowledge made? Byexplorers, surveyors, naturalists, merchants, and Creoles in the Americas? Or bysavants, philosophers, and scholars in the libraries and academies of Europe? NeilSafier proposes a new way to answer these questions, one that owes a good deal torecent work on the sociology and anthropology of science. In his remarkably accom-plished book, he sets out to follow the routes along which people, artifacts, texts, andspecimens traveled from the New World to the Old. Following things in motion, heaims to capture scientific knowledge in the making, as naive inquirers became skilledobservers, as the objects they collected were decontextualized and then recontextual-ized elsewhere, and as their narrative reports were transformed into information. Thiskind of historical research is very demanding, calling for extensive travel and consid-erable linguistic versatility. Safier has followed his trails into the archives of at leasthalf a dozen countries in Europe and the Americas; he cites primary and secondarysources in almost as many languages. He insists that historians must break with thehabit of dependence on a single national archive if they are to grasp how theinternational networks of early modern science operated. Only by matching our effortsto those of early modern inquirers themselves can we uncover “the interconnecting andcontingent pathways that link . . . between institutions and across empires” (14).The book takes as its starting point the expedition to the Spanish province of Quito(now Ecuador) sent by the Paris Acade´mie des Sciences in 1735. The primary purposewas to measure a three-degree arc of the meridian close to the equator, in order tocompare the results with those of an expedition sent to Lapland at the same time andthereby determine the shape of the earth. The party was led by the French savantsCharles-Marie de La Condamine, Louis Godin, and Pierre Bouguer, accompanied bytwo Spanish officers, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa. The meticulous trigonometricand astronomical measurements made by this team are not Safier’s prime concern.Rather, he considers how the textual legacy of the expedition was constituted, trans-mitted, and reinterpreted to form European knowledge of this region of South Americaand its inhabitants. In one chapter, he examines La Condamine’s narrative of hisdescent of the Amazon river, published after his return to Europe in 1745. LaCondamine was able to establish himself as an authority on the territory by means ofthis text, notwithstanding his unacknowledged plagiarism of earlier writings. Hedisparaged previous cartographers and travelers, even while relying on uncreditednative informants and indulging in traditional fantasies about the city of El Dorado andfemale Amazon warriors.438 Book ReviewsThis content downloaded from 132.177.229.130 on November 03, 2017 06:34:45 AMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).In the next chapter, Safier passes to the criticisms directed at La Condamine’sjournal, especially those that emerged after its publication in an abbreviated Spanishtranslation. The critics, who included Creole writers from the Spanish and Portuguesecolonies, contradicted La Condamine’s negative portrayal of the South Americannatives. A similar fate befell the Spanish narrative published by Juan and Ulloa in1748, of which Safier has located an unpublished and anonymous critique that againdefends the native peoples of the region. Notwithstanding these ripostes, the stereo-typed picture of American natives as lazy and weak passed into common currencyamong European writers. As Safier shows, it featured in the Encyclope´die; in themassive Histoire naturelle of Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon; and in the workof the Scottish historian William Robertson. At each stage, the passage of informationwas, as Safier notes, “partial and contingent” (9), the outcome of local negotiations thatresulted in quite unfaithful transmission. Even the appearance of supposed facts inprint did not ensure their fixation once and for all. On the contrary, Safier sides withother recent historians of print culture in showing that published texts and maps werethe result of complex negotiations that continued even after the type was set and thepages impressed. He analyzes the 1751 map of the Quito region, supposedly authoredby La Condamine, the proofs of which reveal the important role played in its produc-tion by Pedro Vicente Maldonado, a Spanish Creole from Amazonia. In anotherchapter, he discusses the republication in Paris in 1744 of a description of the Incaempire originally written in the previous century by a mestizo Spanish American. Theeighteenth-century edition was a printed palimpsest, with multiple layers of translationand commentary, which juxtaposed the original text with descriptions of the SouthAmerican plants then being cultivated in the king’s garden.Safier’s meticulous narratives create an impression of the fragility of the networksby which natural knowledge was built in the early modern period. The Atlantic waswide. Specimens and artifacts often suffered damage in their passage and werefrequently misinterpreted when they arrived. Texts were altered and misunderstood byreaders who had agendas of their own. Safier’s book calls into question the notion thatthe sciences worked through rigid and efficient systems integrated with the structuresof imperial power—a view that might arise from privileging the archives of themetropolitan centers. He shows how—when we follow objects, people, and texts intheir unpredictable peregrinations—we can tell a much more interesting story.JAN GOLINSKIUniversity of New HampshireSara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography. ByClifton Crais and Pamela Scully.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi232. $29.95.From 1810 to 1815 a Scottish military surgeon, Alexander Dunlop, and three Europeanand South African merchants and showmen displayed the Khoekhoe (more commonlyKhoikhoi) domestic servant Sara Baartman in Britain, Ireland, and France as the“Hottentot Venus” in circumstances combining theatrical performance and the aura ofa menagerie. After Baartman’s death in Paris in 1815, the noted comparative anatomistGeorges Cuvier and his assistant Henri de Blainville published elaborate reports on thedissection of her body. Europeans were fascinated with the remarkable physicalappearance of some Khoekhoe women, particularly their large buttocks and unusualextended genital labia. European scholars could thus portray the Khoekhoe as primi-Book Reviews 439This content downloaded from 132.177.229.130 on November 03, 2017 06:34:45 AMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).

Review of:  Neil Safier, Measuring the New World

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Review of: Neil Safier, Measuring the New World

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