Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge (review)

Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge. By David Turnbull. London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999. Pp. x+263. £35.

The "masons" in the title of this book of essays by David Turnbull are not adepts of occult and ritualized practice. They are, rather, artisans of an eminently pragmatic sort: the stone workers of the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, who appear to have constructed these remarkable buildings without standardized measures or comprehensive architectural plans. Instead, they relied on (what seems to modern eyes) unsystematic collections of line drawings called model books; crude, often full-scale templates for stonecutting and positioning; and ad hoc eyesight geometry, using compasses, straightedges, and string. These methods, Turnbull argues, define the cathedral as a laboratory in a sense familiar to the sociologist of science: a "knowledge space," oriented by technical devices and processes of "contingent assemblage."

Turnbull borrows this use of "assemblage" from Deleuze and Guattari, preferring it to other terms for "the amalgam of places, bodies, voices, skills, practices, technical devices, theories, social strategies and collective work" (pp. 43-44) that constitute knowledge spaces because of its suggestion of contingency and evolving method. This local and variable quality of technological practice is central to Turnbull's argument. Each chapter of his book is a case study of complex systems of knowledge supported by and disseminated through social practices and exemplary technical devices rather than by comprehensive and consistent worldviews.

Implicit in this is a core assertion of modern sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK): systems of knowledge are made, not found. But Turnbull's emphasis on the role of concrete tools—Hopi and Inca buildings, Australian Aboriginal song lines, the templates of the medieval stonemason, the dead-reckoning navigation of the Micronesian fisher, the surveying methods of the early modern cartographer, the laboratory techniques of vaccine researchers and chaos theorists—foregrounds a sense of the Kuhnian paradigm often neglected in contemporary SSK.

The paradigm, Turnbull points out, is not just a manner of thinking about the experiences of the laboratory, the classroom, and the field; it is also sustained materially, in the instruments and mundane practices that knowledge workers use in their daily work. These objects encode relations of direct experience and tradition; through them, the scientist, the builder, the mapmaker, and the hunter and fisher transmit subtle expertise to others. Knowledge systems are in this way paradoxically unsystematic, in that they may be promulgated implicitly and by varying devices, without any requirement that the user embrace a totalizing method or theory.

Not surprisingly, Turnbull identifies a failure to acknowledge evidence of contingent and concrete methods as a defining trait of modern technoscience, and a primary object of investigation for SSK. (Throughout the book, the term "technoscience" is reserved for modern and Western forms of technical practice shaped by this elision of the conditions of their production.) Turnbull cites several examples of this strategic erasure of method in early modern European practices of land survey and cartography. Maps are quintessentially contingent artifacts, but they may also serve as props for the subsequent reification and homogenization of the diverse practices that produced them. Their integration with state and scientific knowledge in the modern era depended on the concurrent emergence of bureaucratic techniques of spatial discipline. Turnbull shows that the surveying methods used to produce early modern maps were ad hoc, local, and resolutely contingent, but the finished products appeared to be uniform and objective because it was in the interest of a nascent imperial consciousness—and a "scientific" worldview emerging at the same time—that they appear so.

Turnbull contrasts these strategies of objectification and erasure with spatial practices of Micronesian sailors. Between 4000 B.C.E. and 1200 A.D., Micronesian ocean navigators colonized much of the Pacific in wooden and coconut rope canoes, without "modern" tools or methods. Western historians long assumed that they managed...