Knowledge in Transit: Objects, Narratives, and Visualizations of the Human Depp Time in Early 20th-Century America

Marianne Sommer

Ludwik Fleck has described the communication of scientific knowledge from esoteric to exoteric circles as an integral part of knowledge production. The process of translating knowledge for non-expert audiences (within and outside science) is accompanied by generalization, hardening, and objectification. Hypotheses become facts when a language of uncertainty gives way to established knowledge. Fleck thus presented a new way of thinking about popularization – that nineteenth-century notion of a unilateral communication of knowledge created inside science in the name of progress, and that was accompanied by the specter of vulgarization. Scholars still recognize the communication of scientific methods and contents as an important movens in cultural change. However, our understanding of the diversity of places and institutions, protagonists, media, and forms of representation that have been and are involved in the production, communication, and transformation of knowledge about the natural world is considerably more differentiated. In the course of the increasing attention that non-scientific contexts have gained in the history of science, James Secord has suggested to subsume scientific knowledge production, popular, subaltern, and indigenous knowledge under the concept of ‘knowledge in transit’ in a global history of science.

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Transforming Objects – Being Transformed by Objects

Hans Peter Hahn

The material environment constitutes a frame for everyday action of people in societies worldwide. The relevance of material culture is obvious through the entanglements of people and things. As Ian Hodder has shown in his most recent book, such entanglements may become real traps, having disastrous effect on people.

However there are more narratives of what things do to people. One of the fundamental assumptions in history builds on the idea of the “civilizing mission of things”: The more people own, the less they are inclined to use violence in conflicts. Another one has been among the founding assumptions in anthropology: An ethnic group has a style and a objects with specific forms. While in anthropology in general the equation of object form or style with ethnic identity has come under criticism, in some sub-domains like a Africa Art this is still the dominant mode of explaining things. We could add here more of these narratives.

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Time Displacements, Similarity and Difference in a World of Movement and Migration:  Some Aspects of the Production of Culture and Theory of Culture

Anil Bhatti

Our argument is put forward in a world of general mobilisation under conditions characterised by borders, demarcations, border crossings, social and cultural transformations and transgressions. This is part of the process of globalisation, a term I use here with the nuances conveyed more closely by ‘mondialisation’ and ‘planetarisation’. In spite of an optimistic version of a world without borders, the unsettlement of the world of demarcations and borders has also created illusions about a post-national order. We are however living objectively in a very real world of power relations and structures of dominations which in turn create partially unstable structures of inclusion, exclusion, empowerment and disenfranchisement. These put their stamp on the complex processes of the production of culture, culture theory and of knowledge production in general.

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