Article ID: CBB103245872

The History of Science and the History of Bureaucratic Knowledge: Saxon Mining, Circa 1770 (2018)

unapi

This article looks into mining in central Germany in the late eighteenth century as one area of highly charged exchange between (specific manifestations of early modern) science and the (early modern) state. It describes bureaucratic knowledge as socially distributed cognition by following the steps of a high-ranking official that led him to discover a rich silver ore deposit. Although this involved hybridization of practical/artisanal and theoretical/scientific knowledge, and knowers, the focus of this article is on purification or boundary work that took place when actors in and around the mines consciously contributed to different circuits of knowledge production. For the sake of analysis, the article suggests a way of opposing bureaucratic versus scientific knowledge production, even when the sites, actors involved in, and practices of that knowledge production were the same or similar. Whereas the science of the time invoked consensus among equals to conflate competing knowledge claims, bureaucracies did so by applying a hierarchy among ranked individuals.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB103245872/

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Authors & Contributors
Felten, Sebastian
Klein, Ursula
Dym, Warren Alexander
Friedrich Frhr. Waitz von Eschen
Parak, Gisela
Burghardt, Ivonne
Concepts
Mines and mining
Science and government
Earth sciences
Science and politics
Authorities; experts
Engineering
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
17th century
16th century
15th century
Early modern
Places
Germany
Saxony
Freiberg (Germany)
Netherlands
Russia
France
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