Field Life: Science in the American West during the Railroad Era by Jeremy Vetter (review)

The history of an epistemic rift lies at the center of this account of the field sciences in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains region of the United States between the 1860s and the 1910s. The rift in question separates two forms of knowledge, experiential and cosmopolitan—the one "based on living, working, or playing in a particular place," the other capable of "travel[ing] well between places and enabl[ing] the facts from any one place to be situated in larger taxonomies, categories, and comparisons" (p. 17). In fields such as geology, meteorology, zoology, paleontology, and archaeology Vetter shows how these two ways of knowing related in complex ways to the social organization and envirotechnical conditions of research. At this formative moment in the history of the field sciences, he argues, fieldwork only succeeded when it was able to bridge the rift between experiential and cosmopolitan forms of knowledge. In the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, it was most often local residents who provided experiential knowledge about where to find specimens, how to survive in the field, and other practical matters, while outsiders from the eastern United States provided money, organization, and access to wider circuits of cosmopolitan knowledge. Tensions were common, but each group also provided resources that the other needed. At the same time, the foundations were laid for the devaluation of experiential knowledge that Vetter argues has ultimately undermined the effectiveness and limited the scope of the field sciences. He concludes with a call for a renewed effort of epistemic bridge-building that might enable the field sciences to better address current problems such as global warming.

Rather than organizing the book by scientific discipline, Vetter traces the histories of four modes of practice: lay networks, surveys, quarries, and stations. Each of these modes was shaped by a common envirotechnical landscape consisting of both the physical characteristics of the region (including its aridity, its altitude, and its geological and ecological diversity) and the technological infrastructures that traversed it and connected it to the rest of the world (especially the railroad and telegraph). At the same time, within this shared landscape, each mode of practice had its own distinctive forms of sociality and spatiality and its own specialized technologies of research. Lay networks for collecting zoological specimens or weather observations depended on a careful balance of discipline and trust, maintained in part through the use of paper tools, such as circulars. Over time, however, the management of these networks became increasingly impersonal and bureaucratic, even as their epistemic limits became increasingly apparent. Surveys were closely managed from the beginning, but they too became increasingly systematic and hierarchical over time. Because they involved movement through the landscape on a scale that usually exceeded any individual's experience, their success was particularly dependent on bridging the epistemic rift between experiential and cosmopolitan knowledge. If surveying's spatiality was horizontal and transitory, quarrying, in contrast, was a vertical practice rooted in places where dinosaur fossils, archaeological artifacts, or other specimens could be extracted for processing in distant museums and universities. Not surprisingly, scientific quarrying generated particularly strong tensions between easterners and westerners. Finally, Vetter argues, field stations were hybrid institutions characterized by the construction of laboratory-like conditions in the field and the pursuit of abstract knowledge with immediate economic implications. Their expansion toward the end of this period reflected the region's economic development and its growing (but never complete) independence from eastern centers of wealth, power, and prestige.

Field Life is the product of an enormous amount of archival research and a deep immersion in the region and its history, and it is replete with telling examples and tantalizing accounts of little-known projects and individuals. The book's observations on the social structure of the field sciences raise a number of important questions for further research, it makes a compelling case for the utility of situating knowledge production within particular envirotechnical...