2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

contemporary media accounts, this paper concentrates on public debates over
opinion research between 1936—when the sample survey method triumphed
over straw ballot methods—and 1948. In so doing, it hopes to illuminate the
struggles behind opinion polling’s bid for scientific and cultural legitimacy.
Kerri␣ A. Inglis University of Hawaii
The Representation and Commodification of Suffering:
Kalaupapa National Historical Park
HSS Abstracts
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When foreigners came into contact with the Hawaiian Islands, they brought
with them many “foreign” diseases. The result of this biological exchange
was the tragic decline of the Hawaiian population. One disease that not only
took lives, but influenced a great deal of cultural change was leprosy, or
Hansen’s disease. In 1865, King Kamehameha V, signed “An Act to Prevent
the Spread of Leprosy,” through which an isolated peninsula on the island of
Moloka’i was designated as a place of isolation and exile for those who had
contracted the disease. The segregation law would not be terminated until
1969. In 1980, the Kalaupapa National Historical Park was established.
Residents, those who suffered from leprosy and were confined to Kalaupapa
prior to 1969, remain at Kalaupapa. Tourists hike down, fly in, or ride mules
down to the National Park to tour the peninsula and experience the public
history of Kalaupapa. This paper will explore how the history of leprosy in
Hawai’i is represented by the National Park, how Hawaiians (including current
residents) who suffered from the disease are represented (and/or marginalized)
by the Park, and it will examine the role of the “tourist” in these representations.
Kenji Ito Harvard University
“Culture of Calculating”:
Theory and Practice of Theoretical Physics in the 1920s Japan
This paper aims to ascertain what “theoretical physics” meant in Japan from
the late 1910s to the second half of the 1920s, during the time just before
quantum mechanics began to be introduced there. I show that “theoretical
physics” had dual meanings (a normative meaning and a “practiced meaning”
), and how these meanings were rooted in the social and cultural contexts
surrounding Japanese physics. By examining how “theory” and “theoretical
physics” emerged in dictionaries, popular writings, and academic institutions,
I show that the Japanese word for “theory” was strongly connotative of
“philosophy,” and that “theoretical physics” was perceived as a philosophical
pursuit of “deep principles” in nature. On the other hand, examination of the
works of those who were trained as “theoretical physicists” reveals that what
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