On Edge: Places and Practices in Field Biology

该项目的目标是出版一本关于1890年至1940年间美国野外生物学历史的书，重点关注实验室和野外之间持续的紧张关系。在19世纪90年代和20世纪初，野外生物学家受到最近与生理学家和形态学家相比地位下降的刺激，借用实验室方法并将其应用于野外工作。与此同时，他们重申了自己的信念，即关于植物和动物生命的真正知识只能在自然界中产生。在其方法中，本项目将环境历史学家的工具扩展到科学史。环境历史学家知道如何看待人类居住、利用、改变和理解自然世界的各种方式。它们在历史上还原了自然场所及其对人类行为的影响，但同时又没有忽视“自然”作为一种文化表征。他们研究人们如何认识自然世界，并以此为生。这些方法非常适合于野外生物学的历史。书中将讨论几个具体的主题。首先，生态学家和进化生物学家如何设计出在自然中进行实验的方法，同时又不会失去实验家对真实知识所期望的严谨性和控制力？第二，野外生物学家是如何为他们的研究发明必要的仪器（实验箱、野外站、生物农场）的？最后，这些生物学家的工作是如何受到文化因素的影响的，包括20世纪初的自然运动和田野工作有问题的文化意义（田野工作在干净、光线充足的实验室之外进行，因此显得不科学）。该项目将实验室生命和实验的成熟研究扩展到研究较少的领域科学。它将科学史和环境史结合在一起，丰富了它们。它有助于我们理解作为一种文化和社会活动的领域科学。

The objective of this project is to produce a book on the history of field biology in the United States between 1890 and 1940, focussing on the continuing tensions between laboratory and field. In the 1890s and 1900s, field biologists, spurred by their recent loss of status in comparison with physiologists and morphologists, borrowed laboratory methods and applied them to field work. At the same time they reasserted their belief that authentic knowledge of plant and animal life could only be produced in nature. In its methods this project extends the tools of environmental historians to the history of science. Environmental historians know how to treat the varied ways in which humans inhabit, use, change and understand the natural world. They restore to history a powerful sense of natural places and their effects on human actions, but without losing sight of `Nature` as a cultural representation. They study how people know the natural world by making a living from it. These methods are ideally suited to the history of field biology. Several specific topics will be treated in the book. First, how did ecologists and evolutionary biologists devise ways of experimenting in nature without losing the rigor and control that experimentalists expect of authentic knowledge? Second, how did field biologists invent the instrumentation (vivaria, field stations, biological farms) necessary for their research? Finally, how was the work of these biologists shaped by cultural factors, including the nature movements of the early 1900s and the problematic cultural meaning of field work (which appears unscientific as it takes place outside the clean, well-lighted laboratory). This project extends the well-developed study of laboratory life and experiments to the less-studied field sciences. It enriches the history of science and environmental history by bringing them together. And it contributes to our understanding of the field sciences as a cultural and social activity.