ABSTRACT

This chapter is about the reflexive relationships between objects, institutions and practices, and what these tell us about change in the production and control of knowledge. In the first half of the nineteenth century a pattern of scientific engagement based on private cabinets was replaced by one centred on private learned society museums, and this in turn was replaced by the system of publicly funded institutions we still see today. In Britain, the birth of the modern science of geology was strongly associated with these changes. It was, moreover, a science that reached the heights of fashion in the 1820s and 1830s and which privileged the fossil as its central resource. But, as shall be suggested in this chapter, this fashionability – of which museums were an important part – necessitated a political revolution in the new discipline. This revolution paralleled that then taking place in wider society, as the country underwent social and political reform. Geology experienced a similar struggle in the late 1830s, which shifted power out of the hands of a social hegemony and into the control of the employed middle-class bureaucrat. To effect this change the infrastructure of the science had to be changed: museums and fossils – the forums and fuel of the old economy – were fundamentally altered. They thus become indicative of the political progress of a ‘cultural revolution’. This chapter charts that revolution through those museums and their fossils. It is stressed that the kind of revolution described here is not that concerned with the replacement of essential intellectual paradigms. These have had the full attention of the scholars of the history and philosophy of science (Cohen 1985). A cultural revolution is something different, which results in a reshaping of a science’s constitution and institutions and relationships between actors. Certainly this can happen as a result of intellectual change, but it can also result from tensions in the politics of participation.