Research Colloquium

Abstract

Artisans in the Mountains: Topographies of Science and Work

This talk traces out the world of the 'pathfinders' who guided natural-historical travel into the mountains of central Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It focuses on the Wunder family of the Fränkische Schweiz, a line of wainwrights who, like other artisan families in the Harz Mountains or the Bernese Oberland, established a dynastic mountainguiding and naturalia-collecting enterprise. I am interested in using the case of the family Wunder to begin conceptualizing a labor history of knowledge alive to the social and physical topography of scientific practice. Rural craftspeople of the Wunders’ station were frequently derided and exploited by urban savants, who profited from their geographical knowledge and cheaply-sold collections of plants, minerals, and fossils. Yet the precarious highland terrain through which these artisan families guided social elites occasionally subverted the rigid social order that governed lowland science. The Wunders were not alone in challenging the wellpoliced boundaries of Enlightenment science - by trading fossils for lessons in Latin taxonomy, for instance, or by gaining state-sanctioned titles as natural 'inspectors', or employing women as guides. This talk thus probes the politics of participation in the natural sciences from the littleknown perspective of artisan families in highland environments.