STEP - Science and Technology in the European Periphery

This volume presents papers originating at the fifth Science and Technology in the European Periphey (STEP) meeting held in Minorca in 2006. It includes studies of episodes focussed on a number of ‘peripheral’ countries, although one paper (on the translation of French physics textbooks into English) sneaks in only by shifting the definition of ‘peripheral’ from the geographical— which is surely the main point of STEP—to the cultural. There is an introduction by Jonathan Topham which outlines the by-now familiar complaint of historians about the inadequacy of the so-called ‘dominant view’ of science popularization, which sees it purely as the transmission of an oversimplified version of scientific knowledge to a passive public. Topham argues convincingly that the new approach to the study of science communication, which allows for many inputs into the process, gives us good reasons for looking at the social circumstances which shape how knowledge is projected and received. Uncovering the very different cultural environments of the various peripheral countries in Europe should thus offer case studies that may help with the formulation of general principles through which science popularization can be understood.
For this to work, however, the case studies have to be integrated into a wider perspective, and as a first step this would presumably imply some comment on the long-term situation in the particular nation or culture under review. Some of the papers in this volume do make an effort in this direction, although more clearly needs to be done. Most of these studies relate to specific sets of publications aimed mainly at the middle or educated classes. The exceptions are Martiana González-Silva’s study of human genetics in the Spanish newspaper El País and the only two papers that go beyond the print medium, Rikke Schmidt-Kjaergaard on Danish exhibitions and G´abor Pall´o on Budapest’s Urania Science Theatre. The very specific interests of the middle and professional classes thus form the social context of most of the studies, leaving one to wonder what (if anything) the untutored masses were hearing or thinking about science. Palmira Fontes da Costa’s account of an early 19th-century Portugese aristocratic lady’s botanical poem does raise the question of women’s involvement, but one can hardly imagine this effusion reaching a wide readership among the peasantry.
Most of these papers focus on projects that were inspired by middle-class calls for the modernization of relatively backward societies or for nation-building, with those two aims often being combined. The professional classes saw science as an important symbol of the state emerging as a self-confidant entity in the modern world, with their own involvement in science and medicine playing a key role. These factors are visible in Paola Govani’s account of post-unification Italy, where—in significant contrast to more developed economies—the popular sciencemovement then collapsed toward the end of the 19th century. They can also be seen in Geert Vanpaemel and Brigitte Tiggelen’s study of 1840s Belgium, Stephan Pohl-Valero on late 19th-century Spain, and Enrique Pergigueno et al. on Catalan medical texts in the 1920s and 1930s. The Budapest scientific theatre also had a strongly nationalistic agenda, while El País’s coverage of genetics was different if the studies reported had a local connection or were of international origin. Johan Kärnfeldt’s fascinating archival study of popular astronomy texts written by Swedish scientists showed that they paid only lip service to the modernizing Adult Education Movement but were really concerned to attract enthusiastic amateurs and potential donors (with some success in the latter case).

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As noted above, these case studies often leave us uninformed about what ordinary people might have known or cared about science. But they do lend support to at least one generalization, namely that in cultures peripheral to the leading scientific centres, the particular circumstances of local political and professional interests determined whether and how efforts were made by the elite to enlist wider support among the educated classes for science in the cause of modernization. Because these were cultures marginal to the main centres of scientific activity, support for science popularization tended to be sporadic because the scientific community itself lacked power unless it could enlist the support of other social movements. The image of science projected on these episodes was certainly not value-free, as the dominant view of science popularization assumed. But there was very little involvement from the potential readers in what was presented—this was very much a ‘top-down’ approach to science communication, with the scientific community often (though not invariably) playing a key role in defining the image that the professional elite wanted to project. For all the complaints about the artificiality of the top-down model emanating from students of early 19th-century popular science, that model still has to be taken into account, admittedly in a very nuanced way, in studies of later cultures where there is a strong modernizing or nation-building agenda emanating from a political and/or scientific elite.

Peter J. Bowler
Queen’s University, Belfast