Field station as stage: Re-enacting scientific work and life in Amani, Tanzania (December 2016)
Geissler, P. Wenzel (Author)
Ann H. Kelly (Author)
Social Studies of Science
Volume: 46
Issue: 6
Pages: 912-937
Edition Details: Guest edited issue on the Field Station, edited by P. Wenzel Geissler, Ann H. Kelly, and Sergio Sismondo
Language: English
Located high in Tanzania’s Usambara Mountains, Amani Hill Station has been a site of progressive scientific endeavours for over a century, pushing the boundaries of botanical, zoological and medical knowledge, and providing expertise for imperial expansion, colonial welfare, national progress and international development efforts. The station’s heyday was from the 1950s to the 1970s, a period of global disease eradication campaigns and the ‘Africanization’ of science. Today, Amani lies in a state of suspended motion. Officially part of a national network of medical research stations, its buildings and vegetation are only minimally maintained, and although some staff report for duty, scientific work has ceased. Neither ruin nor time capsule, Amani has become a quiet site of remains and material traces. This article examines the methodological potentials of re-enactment – on-site performances of past research practices – to engage ethnographically with the distinct temporalities and affective registers of life at the station. The heuristic power of re-enactment resides in its anachronicity, the tensions it introduces between immediacy and theatricality, authenticity and artifice, fidelity and futility. We suggest that re-enacting early post-colonial science as events unfolding in the present disrupts straightforward narratives about the promises and shortfalls of scientific progress, raising provocative questions about the sentiments and stakes of research in ‘the tropics’.
...MoreArticle P. Wenzel Geissler; Ann H. Kelly (December 2016) A home for science: The life and times of Tropical and Polar field stations. Social Studies of Science (pp. 797-808).
Similar Citations
Article
Guillaume Lachenal;
(December 2016)
At home in the postcolony: Ecology, empire and domesticity at the Lamto field station, Ivory Coast
(/isis/citation/CBB131341778/)
Book
Paul Wenzel Geissler;
Guillaume Lachenal;
John Manton;
Noémi Tousignant;
(2017)
Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB019390551/)
Book
Joshua Grace;
(2021)
African Motors: Technology, Gender, and the History of Development
(/isis/citation/CBB668478842/)
Article
P. Wenzel Geissler;
Ann H. Kelly;
(December 2016)
A home for science: The life and times of Tropical and Polar field stations
(/isis/citation/CBB811366920/)
Article
Tousignant, Noemi;
(October 2013)
Broken tempos: Of means and memory in a Senegalese university laboratory
(/isis/citation/CBB036851501/)
Chapter
Sibeud, Emmanuelle;
(2005)
A Crucial Experiment: Ethnographic Fieldwork in French Africa, c. 1900--1930
(/isis/citation/CBB000774978/)
Article
Morgan J. Robinson;
(2023)
When a Wonder Is Not a Wonder: Swahili, Translation, and the Communication of Knowledge
(/isis/citation/CBB737008309/)
Article
Marsland, Rebecca;
(2007)
The Modern Traditional Healer: Locating “Hybridity” in Modern Traditional Medicine, Southern Tanzania
(/isis/citation/CBB001031042/)
Book
Emily Brownell;
(2020)
Gone to ground : A history of environment and infrastructure in Dar es Salaam
(/isis/citation/CBB674765682/)
Book
Matthew V. Bender;
(2019)
Water brings no harm : management knowledge and the struggle for the waters of Kilimanjaro
(/isis/citation/CBB806270320/)
Article
Emily Brownell;
(2022)
Reterritorializing the Future: Writing Environmental Histories of the Oil Crisis from Tanzania
(/isis/citation/CBB757796792/)
Book
Maier, Gerhard;
(2003)
African Dinosaurs Unearthed: The Tendaguru Expeditions
(/isis/citation/CBB000740901/)
Book
Brian Hochman;
(2014)
Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology
(/isis/citation/CBB910322068/)
Book
Till Mostowlansky;
(2017)
Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan's Pamir Highway
(/isis/citation/CBB178255256/)
Article
Bonneuil, Christophe;
(2000)
Development as Experiment: Science and State Building in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, 1930--1970
(/isis/citation/CBB000671226/)
Book
Schumaker, Lyn;
(2001)
Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB000102054/)
Book
Pierre-Philippe Fraiture;
(2021)
Past Imperfect: Time and African Decolonization, 1945-1960
(/isis/citation/CBB801245499/)
Thesis
Marissa Anne Mika;
(2015)
Research Is Our Resource: Surviving Experiments and Politics at an African Cancer Institute, 1950 to the Present
(/isis/citation/CBB954339362/)
Article
Kohler, Robert E.;
(2012)
Practice and Place in Twentieth-Century Field Biology: A Comment
(/isis/citation/CBB001320030/)
Article
Samuël Coghe;
(2022)
A New Pastoral Frontier: Colonial Development, Environmental Knowledge, and the Introduction of Trypanotolerant Cattle in French Equatorial Africa, 1945–1960
(/isis/citation/CBB599877246/)
Be the first to comment!