Listing of Sessions and Abstracts of Papers - History of Science ...

edge to the creation of international scientific statements on race and the universal rights of man. Yet
postwar anthropology was itself rife with internal conflict for much of the twentieth century, physical
and cultural anthropologists remained divided over the relationship between culture and biology, diffusion
and evolution, dynamic societies and static races. Informed by the 42 and gripped by the postwar
drive for tolerance and equality, these two antagonistic camps sought to reintegrate their disciplines in
the name of global human welfare. Physical and cultural anthropologists proposed definitions of culture
that would remove the boundary separating the fields and concurrently shape the future of the discipline
to meet the needs of a postwar world. This paper will examine the ways in which physical and cultural
anthropologists reformulated the notion of culture and negotiated its complicated relationships with
biology and evolution in an unsuccessful attempt to forge consensus within and beyond the discipline.
Rothenberg,Marc
E-mail Address:
Rozwadowski, Helen
E-mail Address: helenroz@mac.com
"We must not forget the women": Involvement of women in Victorian marine science
The entry of women into the ocean sciences has been recent and hard-won. Oceanographers, and
most historians until recently, have believed that this very male-dominated field had been so since its
inception, usually taken to be the famous four-year circumnavigation of HMS Challenger in the 1870s.
Investigation of marine fauna during the Victorian era, however, was hardly limited to the naval and
exploratory expeditions which circled the globe demonstrating imperial might. While such cruises
represented one progenitor of oceanography, others provided much wider social access to the sea. As
the vogue of sea bathing for health reasons broadened into the seaside holiday, marine natural history
offered an uplifting excuse for men, women, and children alike to indulge in the pleasures of beach
combing. Marine zoology proved popular to women, as did certain other fields such as botany and
entomology, because collecting provided healthy outdoor activity yet did not necessitate shooting or
skinning animals. The youthful sport of yachting provided them access to a genteel version of the
maritime world through which they could collect and study marine fauna and flora. The exit of women
from ocean science was, as in other fields, in part forced by professional marine scientists, especially as
governments began to hire biologists to study declines in commercial fisheries. This trend coincided
with the decreasing use yachts and private patrons for ocean science, leaving women stranded on shore.
Ruehl, Martin
E-mail Address: mar23@cam.ac.uk
The Use and Disadvantage of Theory: Dilthey, Rickert and the Crisis of Historicism in Fin-de-
Siècle Germany
This paper examines a 'theory construction' in Imperial Germany that has been largely neglected so
far by historians of science: the attempt of hermeneutic and neo-Kantian philosophers, at the end of the
nineteenth century, to provide historicism (Historismus) with a new theoretical foundation. By the
1880s, the idealistic bases of historicism had all but crumbled under the onslaught of positivism. According
to most recent scholars in the field of German Geschichtswissenschaft, the theoretical writings
of Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert in the 1890s effectively helped historicism to overcome its finde-siècle
crisis and gave it a new lease on life which only ran out in the 1960s. This paper, by contrast,
argues that the historiographical theories developed by Dilthey and Rickert transformed the very essence