2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
recommended, could not suffice. A first strategy was selection: Bacon for
example recommended thoroughly digesting only a few books, and merely
tasting many others hence the utility of book reviews and critical bibliographies.
Another was to rely on the labor of others, either amanuenses hired to take
notes or printed collections of notes of the kind one might have taken oneself
(e.g. notes by abridgment or by commonplaces offered in encyclopedic
reductions and printed florilegia/commonplace books respectively).
Occasionally authors speak of cutting up a book to save the labor of copying
from it. Extant annotations also reveal the great interest of readers in the devices
that facilitated a punctual consultation of a book, especially the alphabetical
index. Printers responded to reader demand by supplying increasingly
sophisticated indexes, along with apologies and errata to forestall criticism.
Alexia Bloch University of British Columbia
Crisis or Crossroads?:
Museums in the Russian Far East Reinterpreting State Narratives
Museums play an important role around the world today as communities from
the Aleutian Islands to New Zealand to New York to the Russian Far East look
for innovative ways to address legacies of colonialism and reinterpret dominant
paradigms underlying the representation of the “Other” . Many would say that
since the 1980s museums, and especially anthropology or natural history
museums, have been grappling with a “crisis of mission.” The worldwide
crisis of direction for museums is particularly thrown into relief in the context
of Russia, where an entire society was abruptly forced to reexamine its
relationship to government, authority, and local history. This paper draws on
the crisis of knowledge in Russian natural history museums to demonstrate
both broad trends in the museum world, and the unique place of indigenous
Siberians in their growing critique of the Soviet narrative of progress.
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Stephen Bocking Trent University
Science, Politics, and Perceptions of the Arctic Environment
Scientists have contributed much to Canadians’ ideas about their national
territory. If, as Northrop Frye has suggested, the story of humans in the Canadian
landscape has been “the conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not
love it,” then an essential element of this intelligence has been scientific work.
Scientists have been especially significant in shaping Canadians’ attitudes
towards the Arctic. The Arctic has been, for example, represented by geologists
as a resource-rich frontier by ecologists, as a fragile wilderness and by
climatologists and atmospheric chemists as an international commons or