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Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona Incarnations and Contestations
Edited by Kirsti Niskanen · Michael J. Barany
Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona “Being a scholar or scientist has always been a way of being in the world, never just a job. This highly readable collection of essays explores how (and how not) to become the very model of a mathematician or a historian or a naturalist. Forget white lab coats and horn-rimmed glasses: as this book shows in vivid detail, assuming a learned persona can shape bodies as well as minds, characters as well as costumes.” —Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany “This is a book we have been waiting for, especially scholars who are concerned with the historical field of scholarly and scientific persona studies. The spectrum of case studies excavate how scholarly personae are embodied in gendered behaviours and performances on individual and institutional levels, in scholarly practices, academic cultures, self-representations, and in habits of living. With its conceptual coherence, thematic variation, and focus on gender and masculinities, this is a book that we have missed in the international research literature, and it will undoubtedly be a standard reference in the field.” —Mineke Bosch, University of Groningen, The Netherlands “Through its authors’ and editors’ rich, varied and intersecting research, this is a remarkable historical inquiry into scholarly persona. The various case studies in each chapter reveal the often nationalized and gendered embodiment of scholarly and scientific identity and its formation of public display in the nineteenth and twentieth century. It is a valuable contribution to persona studies more widely and scientific persona directly.” —David Marshall, Deakin University, Australia
Kirsti Niskanen · Michael J. Barany Editors
Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona Incarnations and Contestations
Editors Kirsti Niskanen Department of History Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden
Michael J. Barany Science, Technology and Innovation Studies University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-49605-0 ISBN 978-3-030-49606-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: courtesy of Helsinki University Museum This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Foreword: Persona’s Potential
A book by scholars about scholarly identities, past and present, is most welcome. Such a rich project prompts many responses, some autobiographical, others historiographical, but all reflective, and productively so. As the essays in this volume indicate, there are myriad possibilities for deepening our research into knowledge production so as to take account of the complex psychological and cultural factors at play. We have the chance to generate more sophisticated understanding of what it means to produce knowledge, both for those who are makers and all the other groups that have an investment in the process. The potential sources are close to infinite, and, in addition to those contained in libraries and archives, they include portraits, films, medals, clothing and accessories, hairstyles, indeed any phenomenon that is eloquent about the forms of decorum that scholarly environments promote, take for granted and police. Historians will also want to reflect upon the ways in which poetry, plays, and novels express common understandings of scholarly life while actively contributing to such views. All aspects of professional settings are of potential relevance. Just over my own career I have witnessed marked changes in the dress deemed appropriate for academic women from a setting in the early 1980s where I was advised to wear a skirt or dress, especially for meetings, through power dressing to what I take to have been a more laissez-faire mood in the 2010s where jeans are common attire. These are far from trivial matters. As the contributors suggest there
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is much ‘work’ that is being done by modes of self-presentation, forms of sociability, and the defining features of working relationships. But it may be wise to put the brakes on for a moment and consider the many resonances of ‘scholar’ and its cognates. The term can suggest someone who is academic, that is, interested in and committed to the production of reliable knowledge. Scholars, typically, are studious beings, dedicated to learning, often in a bookish sort of way. The very word ‘bookish’ alerts us to the potential for ‘scholar’ to be used in a pejorative way, just as much as it can be a term of description or approbation. As a result of its bookish connotations, ‘scholar’ is often associated with the humanities, more than other domains, and can hint at dryness, seclusion, the worlds of libraries and archives, rather than laboratories, clinics, or the outdoors. These are mobile, historically wrought associations. Isaac Newton was certainly a scholar, those undertaking experimental work in the twenty-first century less obviously so. In practice, knowledge-making takes many forms that defy stereotypes. Charles Lyell, the influential geologist, had worked as a lawyer and undertook extensive fieldwork; he came from a wealthy family, studied classics at Oxford, was well-read and capable of writing eloquently. The notion of fieldwork is important here since it suggests forms of dynamism, adventurousness, and energy that can easily be construed as in tension with scholarly ideals and with gender norms. Some of those who undertook extensive work in the field did not have Lyell’s advantages; they might earn a living from practical activities such as surveying. Hence to probe scholarly identities is to raise questions about changing conceptions and experiences of both class and gender. In a number of settings (public lectures, for instance) such people —privileged men and women, those of both sexes from more humble backgrounds—interacted with one another. As a result, identities were shaped in a dynamic fashion. There is much evidence, especially for the nineteenth century onwards, about the ways in which people managed themselves and others’ perceptions of them. ‘Persona’ is one of the concepts that helps us to think about such matters. As these essays show, there are instances where individuals and groups are fully aware of what they are doing—the fabrication of the mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki is an obvious example (Chapter 2). Choosing a pseudonym or anonymity necessarily demands imaginative effort in creating or effacing an identity. The analogy with playwrights is inescapable since they conjure up dramatis personae, and if using a chorus, they deliberately suppress individuality in favour of a collective voice.
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Everyone is to some extent such a playwright in their own lives, as well as being choreographer, director, stage manager, costume designer, and so on. Internal voices, much like a dramatic chorus, comment and criticize, praise and denigrate as biographies unfold. These phenomena are general, perhaps universal. The questions posed in this volume are directed at professional or occupational identities, and at knowledge-making workers more particularly. At a time when expertise is widely mocked, with serious consequences, careful reflection upon the ways in which scholars handle themselves and are represented by others is timely. The essays in this volume show it to be an important and valuable undertaking, requiring, it must be stressed, meticulous scholarly skills. We do well to remember how intricate and at times how fragile the sense of self is. These are thoroughly historical issues; by teasing out the contexts in which personae are formed and challenged we can appreciate better broad shifts over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the complexities faced by individuals. Case studies are a powerful way of demonstrating the analytical capacity of the concept ‘persona’, while providing rich historical texture. As many of the chapters reveal, institutions played a key role in the construction of identities and of knowledge. These range from laboratories and funding organizations to academies, medical schools, publishers, and universities. Learned societies, especially those that, through journals, are guardians and censors of knowledge, also collect evidence of achievement and bestow honours and prizes. Institutions, in other words, operate at a number of levels, including at a psychological one. Their Janus-like qualities, facing both outwards towards political, economic, and social stakeholders, and inwards towards members and their conduct, has meant that they play a notably complex role in nurturing scholars and also in disciplining them. ‘Persona’ can thus be used to shed light on organizations, as well as individuals, and vice versa. The current prominence of the term ‘persona’ may be linked with a number of trends. Once seen as vulnerable to hagiographic distortion, biography is coming back into its own as a subtle, demanding historiographical mode. Lives of knowledgemakers have to engage with their manner of working and their modes of self-presentation in historically specific terms. The prominence of psychoanalysis is surely relevant here, regardless of its therapeutic efficacy, since it has offered languages, theories, and cases for interpreting human beings that have been widely disseminated. By virtue of being based on an understanding of human experience and behaviour as dynamically, interactively formed, psychoanalysis is arguably akin to persona studies, as well as one
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of the intellectual frameworks that underlies this relatively new field. It is no coincidence that Sigmund Freud himself offers such meaty materials for historians interested in the ways in which knowledge is generated, in the self-understanding of those who may be termed scholars, and in the ways they negotiate their place in the world. At a time when the media and their audiences are caught up with celebrities and the very phenomenon of celebrity, ‘persona’ resonates strongly with our curiosity about prominent thinkers and their lives. While we recognize that such lives follow no set pattern, certain models of scholarly existence persist and new ones emerge. In Britain, for example, Professor Brian Cox is, quite literally, a rock star scientist, who cultivates a persona that permits him to be humorous and didactic at the same time. Such phenomena encourage us to consider performance styles and to treat them historically. While ‘style’ may seem a long way from ‘persona’, the two concepts can perhaps illuminate each other through detailed case studies. Using the term ‘style’ reminds us how seemingly personal choices—hair, clothes, accessories, and so on—are eloquent not just at an individual level, but at the level of occupations, gender, age, social recognition, and race. As the essays in this volume demonstrate so effectively, ‘persona’ too works on a number of analytical levels, becoming a key element within the historian’s toolkit. Knowledge has always been a tricky phenomenon—dangerous and indispensable, difficult, elusive, and contested—hence those who create, deploy, and disseminate it often tread on shaky ground. ‘Persona’ helps us to comprehend how they navigated such terrain, with what degrees of success, and at what costs to themselves and those around them. Ludmilla Jordanova Durham University Durham, UK
Acknowledgements
We owe thanks to many people and institutions for their encouragement and support during the researching and editing of this volume. The collection is the result of a collaborative international research project, Scientific Personae in Cultural Encounters (SPICE), funded during 2014– 2018 by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation (Sweden) and the co-operating universities, Stockholm University, the University of Groningen, and KU Leuven. The articles derive from a conference supported by the Swedish Research Council and the Wallenberg Foundation in Stockholm in November 2018. They summarize and further develop research from the project and bring the project into conversation with the larger field of historical persona studies in an international context. The authors developed their contributions further in workshops and seminars with colleagues and students, including an August 2019 chapter workshop at Stockholm University, supported by the Swedish Science Council. In the time spent editing this book we as editors have been lucky enough to work in encouraging environments, the Department of History at Stockholm University and the Science Technology and Innovation Studies Subject Group, University of Edinburgh, respectively, where colleagues gave valuable support at different stages of the project. Kirsti Niskanen would also like to thank Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, Stellenbosch University, South Africa, for allowing her time and
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space to undertake the final editorial stages for this book. The corresponding phases of Michael Barany’s editing included time at the Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago. Special thanks are due to Rebecca Ahlfeldt and Sophie Buijsen for their attentive and perceptive work on the index and chapter editing.
Contents
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Introduction: The Scholar Incarnate Kirsti Niskanen and Michael J. Barany
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Part I Personae on the Move 2
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“A Young Man’s Game”: Youth, Gender, Play, and Power in the Personae of Mid-Twentieth-Century Global Mathematics Michael J. Barany Fashioning a Scientific Persona in a Colonial Borderland: The Many Identities of William Smith Clark in 1870s Colonial Hokkaido John L. Hennessey Scholarly Persona Formation and Cultural Ambassadorship: Female Graduate Students Travelling Between Belgium and the United States Kaat Wils and Pieter Huistra
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A Woman in a “Man Made World”: Erzsébet Kol (1897–1980) Anna Cabanel
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Part II Bodies on Display 6
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Cut Out for Medicine: Anatomical Studies and Medical Personae in Fin-de-Siècle Finland Heini Hakosalo
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Gifts of Nature? Inborn Personal Qualities and Their Relation to Personae Julia Dahlberg
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Scientific Persona Performance Through Online Biographies and Their Relationship to Historical Models Kim Barbour, Rachel A. Ankeny, Carolin Plewa, and Jodie Conduit
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Part III 9
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Multiple Masculinities
Immortal Beloved: Virtue, Death, and the Making of the Swedish Nineteenth-Century Pedagogical Scholar Isak Hammar The Whole Man: A Masculine Persona in German Historical Studies Herman Paul Wilhelm Wundt’s Critical Loyalty: Balancing Gendered Virtues Among Early Experimental Psychologists Christiaan Engberts
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The Scholarly Persona Embodied: Seclusion, Love, Academic Battles, and International Exchanges in the Shaping of a Philosophy Career Kirsti Niskanen
Index
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Notes on Contributors
Rachel A. Ankeny, Ph.D. is Professor of History and Philosophy, and Deputy Dean Research in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Adelaide. Her research interests include history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences, and public engagement in science. Michael J. Barany, Ph.D. is Lecturer in the History of Science in the Science Technology and Innovation Studies Subject Group, University of Edinburgh, UK. He studies the history, sociology, and culture of modern mathematical, theoretical, and natural sciences, working primarily on mathematics and globalization. Kim Barbour, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She is the co-founding editor of the Persona Studies journal. Her work focuses on digital and online media, storytelling, online persona, the strategic production of identity through digital media, and the use of social media. Anna Cabanel, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam as a member of the project ‘Spa as a Transnational Public Space and Social Metaphor’. Her dissertation thesis (2019) investigated the role of the International Federation of University Women (IFUW) in the construction and promotion of a scientific persona for women in the course of the twentieth century.
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Jodie Conduit, Ph.D. is a Professor of Marketing in the Business School at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Her research interests lie in understanding how to engage individuals to achieve meaningful and relevant outcomes, particularly in research areas of customer engagement, value co-creation, and more broadly in service research. Julia Dahlberg, Ph.D. Department of History, University of Oulu, Finland, is a postdoctoral fellow of the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland. Her dissertation thesis (2018) deals with artistic and intellectual personae. Her latest project focuses on the concept of evolution in scientific and popular discourses in a Nordic context. Christiaan Engberts, Ph.D. is Lecturer in Cultural History at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His thesis (2019) deals with the culture of evaluation amongst German scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Heini Hakosalo, Ph.D. is a historian of sciences and ideas, Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of History, University of Oulu, Finland. Her expertise is history of medicine and health and history of science. Isak Hammar, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of History, Stockholm University. His research interests are the history of the humanities and classical reception studies. In his current project, he analyses the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences during the first half of the nineteenth century in Scandinavia. John L. Hennessey, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellow at the Hugo Valentin Centre, Uppsala University, Sweden. His research interests include modern colonial history, transnational/trans-imperial history, Japanese history, nationalism, and propaganda. Pieter Huistra, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Theory of History at the Department of History and Art History of Utrecht University, Netherlands. His research covers the history of science in its broadest meaning, ranging from the humanities to the biomedical and natural sciences. Kirsti Niskanen, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus of History at Stockholm University, Sweden, with focus on gender history. Her current research interests fall in the broad area of history of science and university history, in a feminist perspective.
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Herman Paul, Ph.D. is Professor of the History of the Humanities at Leiden University and director of the NWO-funded (Vici) project “Scholarly Vices: A Longue Durée History”. Carolin Plewa, Ph.D. is Deputy Dean (Research) of the Faculty of the Professions and Professor of Marketing and Stakeholder Engagement at the University of Adelaide. Her research examines interaction and value co-creation across organizations and individuals, with a particular emphasis on university-business collaboration, service, and social contexts. Kaat Wils, Ph.D. is Professor and leader of the Research Group Cultural History since 1750 at KU Leuven, Belgium. Her research deals with the modern history of the humanities and the biomedical sciences, gender history, the history of education, and the teaching and learning of history.
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1
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Fig. 3.3
Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3
William Smith Clark (Photo courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) The Clark Family, c. 1875 (Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) “Dr. Clark and Karahuto Ainu Women.” Artist in Japan, photograph 1875–1877, 4 × 6 ¼ inches (10.16 × 15.875 cm). Gift of Mrs. Russell Robb, 1918. TR 2017.2 (Courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts) Erzsébet Kol’s route throughout Alaska, 1936 (AAUW, “Kol”) Portrait of Erzsébet Kol on the Mount Rainier, 1936 (Kol, Tiszaparttól, 273) Erzsébet Kol in her biological laboratory, university of Szeged, Hungary, circa 1937 (AAUW, “Kol.”) Erzsébet Kol during fieldwork (AAUW, AAUW Fellows, 41.) Three dimensions of historical persona studies Dissecting room group portrait, Helsinki 1914 (Helsinki University Museum) An album snapshot of a medical student with a severed head (Helsinki University Museum)
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Fig. 6.4
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Fig. 12.1 Fig. 12.2
Kaarina Kari (1888–1982), a medical student, photographed in the late 1910s or early 1920s (Photograph Finnish Sports Museum, Helsinki) A group of female medical and dental students, Helsinki, c. 1902 (Photographer unknown. Kuvassa—valokuvia suomalaisista ry.) Einar Tegen in his study, Lund 1931. University Library, Lund The Tegen family in their living room in their new apartment in Lund, 1931. University Library, Lund
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Scholar Incarnate Kirsti Niskanen and Michael J. Barany
Incarnating Scholarship That scholars are people and ‘scholar’ is an identity rank among the most simultaneously banal and profound observations one can make about modern scholarship. Large, resource-intensive, multi-layered systems of national and international education and accreditation have combined across modern history to fashion particular kinds of people for scholarship’s particular activities and roles. Making a scholar is both an individual project, entailing training and discipline, and a cultural and institutional project shaping a field of behaviours and socialities that define the conditions of knowledge production and the reach, credibility, and meaning of the knowledge so produced. The personal and sociocultural embedding of scholarship become, in this view, elements of a theory of knowledge and
K. Niskanen (B) Department of History, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] M. J. Barany Science, Technology & Innovation Studies, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 K. Niskanen and M. J. Barany (eds.), Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7_1
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society, connecting who one is to what and how one knows in intricate and far-reaching configurations. Several decades into the so-called cultural turn, attention to the imbrication of social and scientific contexts and associated questions about identity formation, scholarly communities, public engagements, and research practices continue to repay the attention of historians of science and knowledge. Gender, race, class, and other signifiers of identity and social order have been shown indispensable to accounts of the production, acceptance, and mobilization of knowledge claims in and beyond traditional settings of scholarship.1 Historians have both particularized the operation of identity and culture in scholarship through concrete studies of specific contexts and traced such operations across contexts to understand broader patterns and structures in the social production of knowledge. Such research operates in the maw of an apparent paradox, that scholarship and knowledge production are precisely processes of systematic disembodiment, depersonification, and universalization of locally and personally produced articulations. Scholars work deliberately and persistently to develop understandings that add to an edifice of knowledge that in principle stands on its own. Reading personae back into knowledge would seem, therefore, to deny the very essence of what scholarship is, even to deny the possibility of scholarly (as opposed to situated, personal) knowledge. This volume takes that challenge to heart, finding in the embodied and gendered cultural matrix of scholarship not its immanent undoing but its very conditions of possibility, in all their paradoxical richness. Here, we join a rich tradition of feminist scholarship that locates critical potential in the situated identities of knowledge producers.2 We take special heed of the multifarious mediation of personae between individual lives and scholarly and scientific institutions. Personae are performed, lived, felt, and validated in such interstices, expressed in identities like ‘scientist’, ‘historian’, ‘mathematician’, ‘doctor’, ‘mentor’, or ‘student’. This bond between personae and identification underwrites Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum’s 2003 definition of a scientific (or scholarly) persona as “a cultural identity that simultaneously shapes the individual in body and mind and creates a collective with a shared and recognizable physiognomy”.3 Daston and Sibum resisted a comprehensive conceptualization of the term but emphasized that a persona—even when it is studied on an individual level—is something distinct from an individual biography, occupying social scales and connecting people
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far beyond the individual under inquiry. They compared the study of the personal element in science with the work of botanists, as “piecing together a type specimen that represents a class rather than any particular individual”.4 Such typification and its recognition, crucially, happens both in contexts of personification themselves and in analytic settings such as Daston’s, Sibum’s, and ours where they are studied. Persona studies, like persona constructions, are acts of situated (critical) reproduction. To produce scholarship is necessarily to be, in some fashion, a scholar. Conversely, scholarly productions hinge on the production of scholarly selves. Building on Steven Shapin’s discussions linking researchers’ identity and the social credit accorded to their scientific claims, Mineke Bosch has defined the scholarly persona as the creation of a credible and reliable scholarly identity based on existing repertoires and discourses of knowledge production.5 In A Social History of Truth, Shapin analysed conditions that lead a society to accept statements as truths and showed how constructions of scientific truths irreducibly depend on systems of trust embedded in prevailing social structures and the individual identities they make possible and meaningful. For Shapin, the identity of ‘gentleman’ crucially underwrote the truth claims of early members of the Royal Society of London, positioning them as neutral and objective arbiters of universal facts from within the tightly controlled, exclusive, and socially regimented sphere of upper-class English sociability.6 Based on Shapin’s analysis of Robert Boyle’s biography and literary scholar Elisabeth Wesseling´s discussion of the American psychologist Judith Rich Harris’s scientific persona, Bosch asked: What is the relationship between the creation of scientific knowledge and the bearer of knowledge, and how is recognition as a legitimate and credible scholar embedded in social categories such as gender, class, ethnicity, and religious affiliation?7 Since knowledge is borne by people of flesh and blood, the credibility of scientific statements depends on the credibility that the individual manages to incorporate into his or her person, situated in time and space. To acquire and inhabit a persona is a performative act, Bosch notes, invoking the microsociological framings of Erving Goffman and critical gender studies of Judith Butler.8 Bodies are necessary to such performance, both constraining and opening possibilities, but they do not determine the performance in themselves. In order to gain and retain recognition, the individual scholar must repeatedly present him- or herself as a credible and reliable member of the scholarly community.9 It is not enough to be a knowing body, one must make oneself legible as
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such, often changing in the process the terms of one’s own embodiment and corporeal experience. This view of persona and performance can be turned back outward to the stage of institutions, with collective cultural images and situated personal legibilities granting analytic purchase on the co-construction of institutions and personae.10 If one instead emphasizes identity in the contexts of disciplinarity and historical epistemology, a related but distinct orientation to scholarly personae connects practices of disciplined scholarly selves to scholarly validation and contestation. Herman Paul has, thus, asked “what does it take to be scholar”—in his case a historian—and developed a more specific understanding of the concept ‘scholarly persona’ or ‘scholarly self’ as a set of discipline-specific virtues and skills that disciplinary formations enact as necessary for one to work and to be recognized as an academic historian.11 In a recent publication, Paul conceptualizes the persona on three levels: at an individual level (as a performance), a collective level (as shared templates), and an intermediate level linking the two.12 This “middle-range position between the biographical and the social” permits Paul to treat the persona as a hermeneutic concept to ask what a scholar should be, in specific disciplinary contexts, to produce reliable knowledge.13 Besides epistemic virtues and skills, the persona in this light includes the scholar’s behaviour, habits, talents, and character. Different persona models have been created in varying scholarly and disciplinary contexts, and these models have been challenged, modified, and adopted, with different ideological and sociocultural factors influencing the shaping of scholarly personae. Within a wide field of research on historical identities and the history of knowledge and practice, in conversation with contemporary cultural studies of science, we see the history of scholarly personae as occupying a vital space in cultural theories of science and scholarship. To understand scholarship as a distinctive human product achieved through distinctive social forms, we find it necessary and instructive to trace the embedded and embodied identities that make scholarship possible and powerful as such. Scientific and scholarly personae demand our attention as regulatory ideals, models, performances, and regimes of action by mediating practices of knowledge that suppress or deny their intrinsic dependence on both personal selves and collective organizations. These characteristic specimens of modernity show us what it means to be and to know.
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Placing Gender and Bodies This volume examines persona formation and its effects by interrogating contexts and conditions that call gender and embodiment into view and even into question. Contributors thereby demonstrate how personae as frames and foci can illuminate vital features of scholarly self-conceptions, professional identities, and the labour and institutions in which these are embedded. Deriving from original historical research and drawing on multiple current research programmes related to our core inquiry, these chapters offer models, principles, and foundations for personacentred studies of scholarship. Developing these chapters collaboratively through workshops and exchanges, we have aimed collectively to exemplify the fruitful interplay and unifying principles and concerns of this historiographical nexus. Contributors interrogate how scientific personae are embodied in gendered behaviours and performances on individual and institutional levels, in scholarly practice and academic cultures, in self representations, in habits of living, in appearance and clothing, among other markers. They excavate corporeal and incorporeal (perhaps even anticorporeal) practices and identities, detailing how bodies matter and are incorporated—literally and figuratively—into scholarly institutions and ideals. They examine what kinds of academic femininities and masculinities are associated with the creation of scholarly and scientific personae in specific academic settings, how those personae move and transform between settings, and what kinds of disciplinary specificities and changes over time can be discerned in these processes. The book’s three parts concentrate on three kinds of contextual conditions for the historical production and historiographical elucidation of scholarly personae. Respectively, these are conditions of travel, conditions that conspicuously produce or hide bodies, and conditions of masculine homosociality. Each part highlights a different source of tension or destabilization in scholarly performance, using different approaches to unpack those tensions and explore their implications. Situating the work of gendering and embodying in and across scholarly contexts in their respective ways, they define an approach to historicizing scholarly personae with much to offer those concerned with people, knowledge, and their situated co-construction.
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Part I: Personae on the Move Part I examines how personal travel and collective transfers of knowledge and methods across countries and continents contribute to the creation and reshaping of scholarly identities. These chapters interrogate the role of gender in historical sites and frameworks for constructing ideals and norms for scholarly recognition and legitimation. Funding bodies, transnational mobilizations, and institutional conditions underwrite distinctive internationalizations, disciplinary formations, and the creation of collective and individual personae, both successful and less successful. They show how long-distance transit, circulation, and exchange reshape personae and present altered opportunities for persona construction. In Chapter 2, Michael J. Barany shows how philanthropic, military, and civilian funding in the mid-twentieth century contributed to the globalization of mathematics and to the gendering of the discipline as an area for a particular kind of young man. The collective pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki was a mythological persona shared by a group of mathematicians who, in contrast to the projected persona of Bourbaki himself, emphatically embraced youth and jocular play. Barany stresses the formative function of patronage, especially the early support given individually and collectively to Bourbaki conspirators by the Rockefeller Foundation. Through publications, mathematical programmes, and social activities, the group contributed to the reformation of mathematics research and curricula and to the institutionalization of personal norms that favoured mobile, internationalist, charismatic, young men. The Bourbaki collaboration succeeded in a situation where professional mathematics was being reshaped in a globalizing context. In Chapter 3, John L. Hennessey follows American botanist William Smith Clark from the Northeastern United States to a Japanese colonial borderland and back again to the United States. Across these transitions and reconfigurations, Hennessey traces how Clark’s authoritative scientific persona and academic masculinity both enabled and obstructed aspects of his work and career in these respective contexts. Clark’s attempts to build an agricultural college in 1870s Hokkaido required transplantation, adaptation, and accommodation at both personal and institutional scales. These won him fame as a charismatic American in Japan but did not translate easily or effectively back home.
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In Chapter 4, Kaat Wils and Pieter Huistra consider how taking on an institutional perspective brings in new dimensions to scholarship on personae. Their study on the Belgian-American Commission for Relief in Belgium Educational Foundation’s exchange programme for young scientists shows how the emergence of new academic funding agencies and the expansion of travel grants in the early twentieth century installed a new regime of accountability on young scholars: handing in grant applications, being judged by selection committees, and reporting results on stays abroad. These regimes of evaluation, constructing and enforcing norms of what constituted a ‘good fellow,’ marginalized women and naturalized the implicit masculinity of the funding body’s constituents and beneficiaries. In Chapter 5, by combining a biographical and institutional perspective on persona formation, Anna Cabanel shows how studying the trajectory of an individual scientist—the Hungarian botanist Erzsébet Kol—exposes the interactive and gendered dynamics of research funding, travel, and international exchanges. For Kol’s successful career, these dynamics intermingled to shape a distinctive persona opened up by the patronage of a funding organization controlled by women, the International Federation of University Women, during the interwar period when only few women held permanent positions in academic environments and the large philanthropic organizations mainly supported male researchers. Here, both the individual scientist and the confederated body collaborated—not always straightforwardly—to articulate and justify the inchoate persona of ‘university woman’ as an intervention in scholarship and scholarly institutions. In Cabanel’s account, both construction and legitimation required extensive negotiation and accommodation within contexts designed around other personal norms, brought into question through acts of travel and self-representation. Part II: Bodies on Display Chapters in Part II examine the corporeal and incorporeal elements of personae on display, following how bodies and their counterpart disembodied features are called into being through different kinds of performance and unpacking what ideas of personal and scholarly selfhood are wrapped up in such embodiment-stretching enactments. This part begins with Chapter 6, in which Heini Hakosalo puts corpses at the centre of an analysis of corporeality in the personae of medical
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training and practice. Through anatomical study and dissection, medical students in the late nineteenth century enacted their own embodied personae in interaction with the body of the dissected cadaver, with the latter representing social, physiological, and always-embodied norms and expectations for medical personae. These anatomy studies can be characterized as ‘persona work’ where prospective physicians not only studied the body but also performed physically and emotionally demanding work on themselves in order to reshape their minds and bodies to be perceived as ‘scientific’ and as suitable practitioners on both dead and living bodies. The anatomy room was a male coded world with exclusionary gendered social practices, such as drinking and pranks that responded to the genuine ardours of anatomical education. Medical studies were therefore a special challenge for women, including Rosina Heikel, the first woman in Finland to obtain a medical degree. Chapter 7 focuses on persona performance and how historical models of scientific personae resonate in today’s online representations. Kim Barbour, Rachel Ankeny, Carolin Plewa, and Jodie Conduit investigate a cohort of Australian scientists who are public figures and active science communicators. They show that credibility and expertise are at the core of public self-presentations and trace a continuity in how scientists historically and today use techniques such as professional voice, attribution to ‘objectivity’, and epistemic virtues to establish an image of themselves as credible and accountable scientists worthy of public trust. Methodologically, their focus on contemporary online presentations productively contrasts with the kinds of embodiment and disembodiment manifested in historical archives. Identifying continuities between historical and contemporary practice, they offer new ways of conceptualizing scientists’ public self-presentation in multiple settings. In Chapter 8, Julia Dahlberg brings to the fore and elaborates the conceptualization of personae as constellations of virtues and skills. She uses the autobiographies of two siblings, sociologist Edward Westermarck and author Helena Westermarck, to show how nineteenth-century intellectuals embraced contemporary ideas of inborn qualities (such as geniality and creativity) and a ‘natural self’ to mark themselves as particularly suited to becoming scholars, writers, and public intellectuals. This kind of inward-looking embodiment challenges what it means for aspects of persona construction and performance to be corporealized, embedding that corporeality in shifting social and psychological science and complementary attitudes towards nature and cognition. Access to virtues and
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skills to create a persona was, however, not open to all: it was built on inclusions and exclusions of individuals and groups, based on categories such as gender and race. Part III: Multiple Masculinities The third and final part trains more precisely on the gendered aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarly personae in terms of scholarly masculinities. The chapters examine masculinities in disciplinary contexts, discussing how notions of masculinity and frameworks delimit acceptable personae and mark out paths of scholarly formation and practice, and how ideals and practices of scholarship define masculine virtues and spaces. In Chapter 9, Isak Hammar analyses the prerequisites of the collective persona of pedagogues in nineteenth-century Sweden by demonstrating how intersecting elements—the premature death of the pedagogue Carl Ulric Broocman in 1812, his travels and his publications, and his worshipful following—shaped the template for pedagogical scholars throughout the century. Broocman assembled models for a pedagogue’s persona in Central Europe from religious and academic contexts gleaned in his own early formation. His death at age 29 created an aura around his persona, linked to Christian conceptions of masculinity and martyrdom. In Chapter 10, Herman Paul interrogates two competing templates of scholarly personae, their combinations of virtues and skills, and their gender connotations in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German historiography. The template of a ‘whole man’ combining reason and emotion was set against a ‘guild scholar’ ideal that advocated increased specialization within the discipline of history. The competing models of personae represented different types of masculinities, embedded in political and religious contexts. Here, institutional contestation manifested conflicting ideals of masculinity associated with different models of scholarship and of scholarly persona. In Chapter 11, Christiaan Engberts explores constructions of scholarly personae in experimental psychology in late nineteenth-century Germany in terms of two virtues, loyalty and independence. Analysing the personal relationships between psychologist Wilhelm Wundt and his collaborators, he outlines the contours of a moral economy of scholarship with a delicate balance between conflicting virtues, contributing an explicit focus on the gendering of scholarly virtues to the literature on such moral economies. Both loyalty and independence were male-connoted virtues, balanced in
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a delicate tension expressed in a bourgeois masculinity and the gendered discourses of the German academy. In the concluding chapter, Kirsti Niskanen analyses the trajectory, persona constructions, and academic masculinity of the Swedish philosopher Einar Tegen between the 1920s and the 1940s. Niskanen uses the career of an individual scholar as a platform to investigate the complex relationship between knowledge and the persona of the knower, the gendered prerequisites for constructing scholarly personae, and the implications of the category of persona for the history of disciplines and scientific institutions. This chapter thus assembles, through a specific historical persona, a synthesis of both the question of masculinities in Part III and the broader methodological themes of gender, embodiment, institutions, travel, and scholarly personae across the volume as a whole.
Incarnations and Contestations This volume’s scholarship is rooted primarily in the historical field of scholarly and scientific persona studies that has flourished since Daston and Sibum’s formative 2003 collection. It reflects as well the fruitful interactions historians in this mould have enjoyed with many adjacent areas of scholarship concerned with identity and knowledge. Of special note in this regard is work on personae from the perspective of contemporary cultural and media studies, exemplified by the journal Persona Studies edited by P. David Marshall and colleagues, represented here by the collaboration of Barbour, Ankeny, Plewa, and Conduit.14 The theoretical grounds of the persona concept in cultural history and contemporary media studies are overlapping, with some important differences. Historical approaches tend, implicitly or explicitly, to follow Daston and Sibum’s framing based on Marcel Maus’s anthropological theory of personae as intermediates between the individual and the collective, transferred to the world of scholarship. Emphasizing the distinct private and public lives of figures such as celebrities or public intellectuals, contemporary cultural studies have tended to seize on Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of persona through the contrast between selves constructed and experienced as individuals and among collectives and masses. In common is the notion that persona is a category that relates individuals and collectives or institutions. Also shared is a conception of the performative and hybrid character of personae, where repertoires and templates from the past contribute through imitation and adaptation to the creation of
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behavioural patterns and self-presentations in the present.15 Scholars in both traditions have examined, with their respective emphases, the role of institutions and collective representations in persona construction. The most important difference between historical and contemporary media theories of personae is how they frame the object of study. The historiographical concept of persona has been used to investigate questions about the relationship between the personal and the social in the operation of science and scholarship, between the scholar or scientist as a person and the content of knowledge. Cultural and media theories of personae, by contrast, stress instead public and shared dimensions, and how performative presentations of personae constitute distinct sociocultural realities. That is, where historians have tended to emphasize the reflexive co-creation of personal and social realities, cultural and media theorists have tended to focus on their performative disarticulation. This contrast animates some of the most striking products of these approaches’ interactions in studies in the present volume and elsewhere, built around the simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal operation of persona work in our contexts of interest. To close this introduction, we would like to suggest how these interacting incarnations of the persona concept can newly illuminate the processes and contexts of knowledge creation and discipline formation. Exemplified across this volume, these approaches illustrate some exciting directions in current scholarship on scholarly personae. One outgrowth of the different emphases of the respective conceptions of personae just noted is a recognition that personae can themselves be contested and consequential objects of circulation. Here, transnational exchanges, institutions, and funding bodies work not only to move people, knowledge, and methods but also to circulate gendered scholarly personae. The ‘go-betweens’ of post-postcolonial global history discussed by, among others, Kapil Raj and Lissa Roberts, can be understood in this way to be carrying and reconstituting both personal and collective identities in their travels.16 Through the many mediations of activities between individuals and organizations, actors such as Nicolas Bourbaki, William Smith Clark, young Belgian exchange fellows, the International Federation of University Women and Erzsébet Kol as well as the Rockefeller Foundation and Einar Tegen, contributed to create research agendas, policies, mechanisms, knowledge circulations, and personae that helped transform education and research through complex co-constructions and negotiations of knowledge, practices and national and transnational
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academic identities. If the historical thread of persona studies underscores this work of co-construction, the cultural and media studies framing supplies a corresponding emphasis on the work of projection and outward representation that made these personae travel meaningfully across and between contexts. Each persona on the move indexes the circular relationships between scientific knowledge, methods, personae, and prestige. Effective gobetween personae drew from and had to be legible in a variety of registers, translating between (in the terms of media studies of personae) the professional, personal, and intimate. Professional registers in this terminology refer to the context-specific repertoires that people incorporate into the performance of their public personae. Similarly, personal and intimate registers refer to elements outside the professional (hobbies, interests, events, activities, information about the family, close friends, and loved ones) that can be included in the creation of the public self.17 Another notable theme in several chapters is the connection between embodiment and the routinized work of enacting and displaying a persona to derive scholarly or scientific authority, legitimacy, and prestige. A mathematical persona, a medical persona, an online persona, or a student or trainee persona each depends on embodied forms of cultivation and display to acquire and exhibit the skills and virtues associated with authoritative public identities. Various aspects of persona work are activated in these processes, along public, collective, performative, and mediated dimensions.18 In universities, these dimensions are often expressed in the creation of a professorial voice that marks rational authority and power in context-specific and heavily cultivated rhetorical forms and postures. As theorized by William Clark, the professorial voice has several dimensions: it speaks with the power of public institutions, it lectures with canonical authority, it echoes the reverence of voices spoken before and it can have ‘academic eros’, the capacity to convince by seduction.19 Connecting the production of such voices through disciplinary regimes to the power such voices wield through public representations, chapters in this volume account for the embodied postures and identities that consecrate authoritative utterances in scholarly contexts. A third theme we wish to highlight, related to the former, is masculinities and the new forms of subjectivity and embodiment that were actualized in the development of academic disciplines during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Michel Foucault proposed in his inaugural
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lecture at the Collège de France in 1971 that disciplines consist of “systems of control and delimitations of discourse” that regulate what could be said in a particular environment.20 This volume’s studies on the pedagogue Carl Ulric Broocman, German historians and psychologists, and the philosopher Einar Tegen add an explicitly disciplinary and institutional dimension to a historiography of science and scholarship that has already done much to connect gender, embodiment, and knowledge.21 Recent studies by Heather Ellis and Falko Schnicke have shown that masculinity was an inherent, unquestioned part of organizational life and discipline-building in different ways and in different contexts (nineteenthand early twentieth-century Britain and nineteenth-century Germany).22 Ellis has also pointed out the importance to study the role of women in the masculine self-formation of knowledge and disciplines.23 The role of emotions and the creation of different types of personae—such as scientific man, researcher, or entrepreneur—and how they were constructed in academic contexts illuminate the conditions for knowledge creation, and how power relations and conflicts between different personae within organizations, and between different kinds personae within one and the same person, provides a deeper understanding of how scientific knowledge is created.24 Amidst our repeated emphasis on construction and self-representation, one might wonder whether the essentially fictive production of scholarly personae renders them, to some extent, superficial or epiphenomenal. As a final remark, we think this volume’s focus on gender and embodiment trains each chapter’s attention on the lived realities and power structures that make personae matter profoundly. Making, wielding, and contesting scholarly personae has, historically, been a matter of visceral experience with marked consequences for would-be scholars and their institutions and wider contexts. In the transiting tangle of identities, bodies, and institutions that make up modern scholarship, analyses of personae can connect the elements, scales, and representations that set the terms and articulators of scholarly knowledge.
Notes 1. John Clark, “Intellectual History and the History of Science,” in A Companion to Intellectual History, eds. Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 182–198; Herman Paul,
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2.
3. 4. 5. 6.
7.
8.
9. 10.
11. 12.
“Introduction: Repertoires and Performances of Academic Identity,” BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 3–7, on 3. Canonically, Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599. Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum, “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories,” Science in Context 16, no. 1–2 (2003): 1–8, on 2. Daston and Sibum, “Introduction,” 3. Mineke Bosch, “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth Century Historians,” BMGN—The Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). Steven Shapin, “Who Was Robert Boyle? The Creation and Presentation of an Experimental Identity,” in Shapin, A Social History, 126–192; Elisabeth Wesseling, “Judith Rich Harris: The Miss Marple of Developmental Psychology,” Science in Context 17, no. 3 (2004): 294–314; Mineke Bosch, “Persona and the Performance of Identity: Parallel Developments in the Biographical Historiography of Science and Gender, and the Related Uses of Self Narrative,” L’Homme 24, no. 2 (2013): 11–22; also Mineke Bosch, “Looking at Laboratory Life, Writing a Scientific Persona: Marianne van Herwerden’s Travel Letters from the United States, 1920,” L´Homme 29, no. 1 (2018): 15–33. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). Bosch, “Scholarly Personae,” 41–43. Pieter Huistra and Kaat Wils, “Fit to Travel. The Exchange Programme of the Belgian American Educational Foundation: An Institutional Perspective on Scientific Persona Formation (1920–1940),” BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 112–134; Anna Cabanel, “‘How Excellent… for a Woman’? The Fellowship Programme of the International Federation of University Women in the Interwar Period,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 88–102; idem, “La fabrique d’une persona scientifique au féminin. The International Federation of University Women. Années 1920-années 1960,” (PhD thesis, Universities of Leuven and Groningen, 2019). Herman Paul, “What is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills and Desires,” History and Theory 53 (October 2014): 348–371. Herman Paul, “Introduction: Scholarly Personae: What They are and Why They Matter,” in How to be a Historian. Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, ed. Herman Paul (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2019), 1–14, on 3–6.
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13. Herman Paul, “Introduction: Scholarly Personae in the History of Orientalism, 1870–1930,” in Personae in the History of Orientalism, 1870–1930, eds. Christiaan Engberts and Herman Paul (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2019), 6. 14. Persona Studies 1 (2015)––5 (2019); P. David Marshall, Christopher Moore and Kim Barbour, Persona Studies: An Introduction (Wiley Blackwell, 2019). 15. Marshall et al., Persona Studies, 2–4; see also Barbour et al. in this volume. 16. See Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–26, 39–57; Kapil Raj, “Beyond Postcolonialism … and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science,” Isis 104, no. 2 (2013): 337–347; Lissa Roberts, “Situating Science in Global History Local Exchanges and Networks of Circulation,” Itinerario 33, no. 1 (2009): 9–30. https://doi.org/10.1017/s01651153 00002680. 17. See Marshall et al., Persona Studies, 65–72. 18. Marshall et al., Persona Studies, 67–81. 19. William Clark, “On the Professorial Voice,” Science in Context 16, no. 1–2 (2003): 43–57; William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 398–432. 20. Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 215–237. 21. E.g. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1989); Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin, Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Jan Golinski, “Humphry Davy’s Sexual Chemistry,” Configurations 7, no. 1 (1999): 15–41; Jan Golinski, The Experimental Self: Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 22. Heather Ellis, Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831–1918 (Springer, 2017); Falko Schnicke, “Princesses, Semen, and Separation: Masculinity and Body Politics in Nineteenth-Century German Historiography,” Bulletin/German Historical Institute 40, no. 1 (2018): 26–60. 23. Ellis, Masculinity, 73–77. 24. Jessica Wang, “Physics, Emotion, and the Scientific Self: Merle Tuve´s Cold War,” Historical Studies of the Natural Sciences 42, no. 5 (2012): 341–388.
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Works Cited Bosch, Mineke. “Persona and the Performance of Identity: Parallel Developments in the Biographical Historiography of Science and Gender, and the Related Uses of Self Narrative.” L’Homme, 24, no. 2 (2013): 11–22. Bosch, Mineke. “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth Century Historians.” BMGN ––The Low Countries Historical Review, 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54. Bosch, Mineke. “Looking at Laboratory Life, Writing a Scientific Persona: Marianne van Herwerden’s Travel Letters from the United States, 1920.” L´Homme, 29 no. 1 (2018): 15–33. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cabanel, Anna. “‘How Excellent… for a Woman?’ The Fellowship Programme of the International Federation of University Women in the Interwar Period.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 88–102. Cabanel, Anna. “La fabrique d’une persona scientifique au féminin. The International Federation of University Women. Années 1920-années 1960.” PhD thesis, Universities of Leuven and Groningen, 2019. Clark, John. “Intellectual History and the History of Science.” In A Companion to Intellectual History, edited by Richard Whatmore and Brian Young, Chichester, 182–198. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. Clark, William. “On the Professorial Voice.” Science in Context, 16, no. 1–2 (2003): 43–57. Clark, William. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Daston, Lorraine and Sibum, H. Otto. “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories.” Science in Context, 16, no. 1–2 (2003): 1–8. Ellis, Heather. Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831–1918. New York: Springer, 2017. Engberts, Christiaan and Paul, Herman, eds. Scholarly Personae in the History of Orientalism, 1870–1930. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2019. Foucault, Michel. “The Discourse on Language.” In The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith, 215–237. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959.Golinski, Jan. “Humphry Davy’s Sexual Chemistry.” Configurations 7, no. 1 (1999): 15–41. Golinski, Jan. The Experimental Self: Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. London: Routledge, 1989. Huistra, Pieter, and Wils, Kaat. “Fit to Travel. The Exchange Programme of the Belgian American Educational Foundation: An Institutional Perspective on
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Scientific Persona Formation (1920–1940).” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 112–134. Lawrence, Christopher, and Shapin, Steven. Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Marshall, P. David, Moore, Christopher, and Barbour, Kim. Persona Studies. An Introduction. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2019. Paul, Herman. “What is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills and Desires.” History and Theory 53 (October 2014): 348–371. Paul, Herman. “Introduction: Repertoires and Performances of Academic Identity.” BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review, no. 4 (2016): 3–7. Paul, Herman, “Introduction: Scholarly Personae: What They are and Why They Matter.” In How to be a Historian. Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, edited by Herman Paul, 1–14. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. Raj, Kapil. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Raj, Kapil. “Beyond Postcolonialism … and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science.” Isis 104, no. 2 (2013): 337–347. Roberts, Lissa. “Situating Science in Global History Local Exchanges and Networks of Circulation.” Itinerario 33, no. 1 (2009): 9–30. https://doi. org/10.1017/s0165115300002680. Schnicke, Falko. “Princesses, Semen, and Separation: Masculinity and Body Politics in Nineteenth-Century German Historiography.” Bulletin/German Historical Institute 40, no. 1 (2018): 26–60. Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in SeventeenthCentury England. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Shapin, Steven. “Who Was Robert Boyle? The Creation and Presentation of an Experimental Identity.” In A Social History of Truth, edited by Steven Shapin, 126–192. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Wang, Jessica. “Physics, Emotion, and the Scientific Self: Merle Tuve´s Cold War.” Historical Studies of the Natural Sciences 42, no. 5 (2012): 341–388. Wesseling, Elisabeth. “Judith Rich Harris: The Miss Marple of Developmental Psychology.” Science in Context 17, no. 3 (2004): 294–314.
PART I
Personae on the Move
CHAPTER 2
“A Young Man’s Game”: Youth, Gender, Play, and Power in the Personae of Mid-Twentieth-Century Global Mathematics Michael J. Barany
Introduction: A Mathematician’s Apology Eminent English mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy had neither the first nor the last word on what sort of person could be a mathematician and to whom the discipline belonged, but he certainly had one of the most memorable and oft-quoted formulations. “No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget”, he opined in his famous 1940 meditation, A Mathematician’s Apology, “that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game”.1 The Cambridge don’s sweeping pronouncements about the nature of mathematics and mathematicians hardly amounted to a universal orthodoxy, and his Apology provoked mixed reactions from the start.2 As a towering figure in English
M. J. Barany (B) University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 K. Niskanen and M. J. Barany (eds.), Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7_2
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and international mathematics, however, Hardy had for decades been in a distinctive position both to observe his profession and to shape it. Hardy’s remark framed an early section of the Apology on “this question of age”, citing a handful of examples of incandescent youthful mathematics, great men who died young, and once-great men who were undistinguished throughout their relatively early intellectual dotage.3 The special link between youth and mathematical talent was Hardy’s excuse for pursuing the field single-mindedly while he could, and for turning to the vulgar pastime of apologia once advancing years denied him the hope of mathematical brilliance. Notwithstanding a mathematical network that already included such luminaries as Mary Cartwright, who trained with Hardy and his collaborators from the late 1920s and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in their third cohort to include women (1947), Hardy took for granted that the assertion that mathematics belonged specifically to young men did not need explanation or justification. That it was, for these young men, a game was part figure of speech, and part another taken-for-granted facet of Hardy’s mathematical philosophy that defined a scholar’s virtue by the harmlessness or uselessness of his endeavours. The best mathematics, one gathers from Hardy’s Apology, was more profound than but ultimately comparable to ingenious play at the game of chess. Across their history in multifarious contexts, mathematicians have been depicted as characteristically young or old, male or female, playful or serious. Each such characterization can be linked to historically specific circumstances of mathematical practice, to changing notions of the nature of mathematical thought, and to varied virtues and values attributed to mathematicians and their arts.4 As Hardy composed his apology, the world of mathematics was transforming in ways that gave new life to mathematics as a “young man’s game”. Institutions and infrastructures of internationalization specifically favoured mathematicians who could make themselves legible in terms of those three signifiers. This chapter historicizes Hardy’s remark, asking what bodies, gender identities, and sociabilities modern mathematicians and their institutions presumed and supported, and what consequences these had for mathematicians’ disciplinary and knowledge formations. I begin by placing each of Hardy’s three terms in longer histories of associations between mathematics and age, gender, and play. I then examine the persona of Nicolas Bourbaki, a collective pseudonym that became one of the most
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recognizable and controversial figures of mid-twentieth-century mathematics. Bourbaki’s collective construction opens a perspective on broader changes in mid-twentieth-century mathematics and the importance of youth, masculinity, and play for mathematicians’ ability to thrive amidst the period’s distinctive challenges and opportunities. In particular, the disembodied, distributed persona of Bourbaki hinged on the articulation of specific kinds of embodied individuals who were never entirely hidden from view. I argue that mid-century efforts to finance and underwrite a globalizing discipline tended to concentrate resources around elite cadres of young, charismatic, well-networked men such as those associated with the Bourbaki pseudonym. These structures and infrastructures, notably involving new philanthropic sponsors, gave special prominence to an abstract, synthetic, ludic approach to mathematics. This approach, also associated with Bourbaki, formed the more visible and internationally mobile extreme of a mathematical discipline defined by renewed orientations to both “pure” and “applied” research.5 Gendered and generationally-delineated forms of play, including puns and pranks, supported both intellectual and institutional developments and underwrote a specifically ludic global modernity for an elite segment of the mathematics discipline. Defining themselves and their subject in terms of tricks and play, mathematicians built separate social and conceptual worlds driven by playful pursuits of otherworldly abstraction. That is, there was a fundamental connection between the personae, ideas, infrastructures, and scales of travel in modern mathematics, derived in large measure from the conjoined challenges of moving people and their identities and ideations across the globe. Bringing historical specificity to Hardy’s decontextualized pronouncement about mathematics allows one to trace the embedded and embodied conditions and consequences of a distinctly influential ideal of the mathematician’s persona. This persona’s regulatory and disciplinary operation in international mathematics was firmly rooted in its historical moment, and in ideals and circumstances that do not appear at first glance to presume or depend upon the categories Hardy invoked. Rather, figurations like Hardy’s worked to universalize and naturalize highly contingent and even idiosyncratic conceptions of who could be a mathematician. Historicization can, in this way, both explain the universalizing operation of persona construction and help to undermine it.
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A Young Man’s Game Calculation, accounting, measurement, and other activities associated with the origins and applications of mathematics have always kept the subject firmly grounded in the worlds of serious reckoning and industry.6 However, mathematical theory—especially the kind of mathematical theory that explicitly eschews such worldly matters and that would eventually dominate images of mathematics in philosophy and culture—was the stuff of games long before it was a systematic science. Recreations involving numbers and shapes can be found in the written and archaeological records of an enormous range of human cultures.7 Puzzles and problems let people explore and articulate mathematical patterns, challenge each other, and demonstrate their wit and ingenuity. In the ancient Mediterranean, a context often marked as an origin for mathematics as a distinct theoretical social endeavour, play drove both mathematical ideas and their rhetorical forms.8 Such ludic features, in varying guises, have often marked off mathematics as an intellectual or scholarly enterprise in opposition to its vulgar worldly settings and uses.9 Play appears in the history of mathematics in three main forms. Play has been an object of mathematics through the long-established genre of mathematical recreations, which deploy mathematical ideas and themes in puzzles and games for stimulation and amusement.10 Games have been the subject of mathematical theory, furnishing problems that motivate debate and inquiry that can lead to quite serious applications, philosophies, and methodologies. The field of probability, notably, emerged from speculation and investigation regarding a small collection of games of chance.11 Much later, the economically and geopolitically consequential field of game theory used play and games as both models and potent conceptual resources for theorizing about a wide range of phenomena, including the deadly serious hypothetical phenomenon of nuclear war.12 Finally, play has been a mode or framework for mathematics, infusing a wide range of genres of and approaches to mathematical research. This place for play in mathematics inflects mathematical discourses with terms like “tricks” and tropes like Hardy’s about virtuous uselessness.13 These three strands of play in mathematics blend and interact across their history, affecting the personal repertoires available to would-be mathematical scholars and practitioners. Mathematical techniques and technologies can carry dual uses, doubling as recreational, commercial,
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or other kinds of devices.14 New theories of probability made philosophical and political problems out of the pastimes of gentleman gamblers.15 An entire genre of early modern recreational problem gave rise to practices and principles behind that period’s pivotal reformulations of algebra, which in turn rendered those recreations trivial and dull.16 This transformation took a broad class of arithmetical rules found predominantly in mercantile contexts and subordinated them to methods and speculations more associated with certain philosophers, dividing communities of mathematical discourse and practice in the process. While most available records for earlier periods of these interweavings of mathematics and play come from sources that are explicitly or presumptively gendered male, one can infer from women’s historical roles in education, commerce, household labour, and other areas that these were not exclusively masculine discourses. Schoolwork, with its associated puzzles and mnemonics, became an especially important early modern setting for female-gendered mathematical play.17 The mathematical puzzles and solutions in the eighteenth-century Ladies Diary were avidly read and contributed by women and men alike, and exemplified a public culture of mathematical problem solving where women participated as a matter of cultural attainment and men played mathematically in female-gendered spaces.18 In this respect, recreational mathematics blended into other gendered pursuits of mathematics as a cultural value, class marker, and devotional practice.19 In the French Enlightenment, savants associated with the Académie des Sciences worked to monopolize the authority of mathematical expertise by distancing it from frivolous, recreational, or metaphysical matters, which the Académie’s men gendered as female.20 This anti-metaphysical project placed mathematics as a sober, rational, and worldly pursuit progressively established as a form of natural knowledge accumulated by perceptive men.21 Where pedagogical settings of mathematical mirth linked some parts of the subject to youth, this cumulative and naturalistic conception of the subject made mathematics squarely the province of seasoned scholars. One could be precociously or preternaturally perceptive in the eighteenth century, but this only hastened one’s course on a path to mathematical wisdom won by sustained experience and belonging to men distinguished in attainment and age. European mathematics started to become a young man’s game in the sense of Hardy’s remark during a period of pedagogical intensification in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Paris, new models of
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elite engineering education valorized abstract and technically demanding mathematical rigour as a means to cultivate and evaluate disciplined minds, developed in tandem with the military discipline of young men’s bodies.22 Meanwhile, across the Channel in Cambridge, a shifting examination culture and associated changes to students’ technical training gave rise to an elitist model of education that tightly linked the energetic vigour of young men to a difficult and intricate style of mathematical problem solving that drew on the new French mathematics and then developed into something all its own.23 Cambridge colleges and examiners specifically excluded young women as lacking the physical wherewithal for their new mathematics, while mathematics tutors encouraged their male charges to train mind and body with drills on blackboards and rowing boats, on the page and sporting pitch, alike.24 This model was not without challengers. Sophie Germain persisted through class and gender barriers to make a mark in the polytechnical mathematics of early-nineteenth-century Western Europe in part by employing a pseudonym, Le Blanc.25 As young women fought for access to Cambridge mathematics and began to prove themselves the equals of their male counterparts, the dominant value systems surrounding these examinations and their associations with mathematical talent shifted alongside norms and expectations elsewhere to preserve male privilege while allowing space for exceptional women to participate in some capacities.26 Technical perseverance and the corresponding stress on athletic prowess receded in favour of another form of play, idealizing innate male creative genius disconnected from corporeal vigour.27 Hardy himself was sharply critical of his experience as a student and then professor in Cambridge’s system, which he felt trivialized the imaginative work of creative mathematics, and became a fierce advocate for reform.28 Farther afield, American mathematicians at the turn of the twentieth century articulated their own models of mathematical masculinity rooted in agrarian traditions and the trope of the self-made man.29 In the context of this chapter’s argument about globalization, it bears notice that Hardy certainly had in mind his brief mentorship of and collaboration with Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who made contact with Hardy by post in 1913 at the age of 26. Ramanujan frustrated and dazzled the English mathematician with miraculous-seeming mathematical claims from his 1914 arrival in England until his death in 1920. His creative brilliance, persistent ill health, and alien style of reasoning offered Hardy an inspiring far-extreme contrast against the
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physically and technically demanding mathematics of Cambridge examinations. Germain’s, Ramanujan’s, and others’ challenges to prevailing norms for mathematical personae arose and became visible in part through epistolary and embodied travel that connected these exceptional figures to new locales and institutions. Social and geographic distance made space for alternative identities and the tensions they could introduce, and mathematicians in the discipline’s international and later global eras responded by supporting, tacitly and explicitly, new personal norms and modes that promised to transcend the seams and tensions of such troubling connections. The young male genius at play in the mathematical world of his own mind was a long-brewing response to early-nineteenth-century models of technocratic disciplinary elitism, one that incorporated prevailing cultural and philosophical images of Romantic (even tragic) male genius.30 Even so, and notwithstanding a growing roster of young eminences heralded for their ingenious theories, the iconic personas of mathematics continued to include the serious, wrinkled, and worldly. For every meteoric youth like Bernhard Riemann, Évariste Galois, or Niels Henrik Abel, one could find a celebrated elder like Carl Friedrich Gauss (noted alike for his early precocity and later sagacity), Henri Poincaré, or David Hilbert, revered for wisdom and insight that shone undiminished late into their careers. By the early twentieth century, youth, masculinity, and play had strong associations for some with mathematical talent, but these were neither universal nor exclusive nor unequivocal. The remaining sections of this chapter examine the confluence of circumstances that propelled these aspects of a mathematical persona to a new prominence in the twentieth century.
Making Bourbaki To support themselves and win fame for their work, mathematicians have turned to a wide variety of patrons across their many historical contexts. In royal courts, elite academies, academic institutions, and other settings, mathematicians have depended on each other’s and on third parties’ evaluations of their skill, importance, and potential. Patronage matters to the history of mathematical personae because it structures whose opinions, evaluations, and suppositions matter to the allocation of resources and prestige. The people who control where and to whom such support is directed have an immense power to shape the kinds of personae that
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can thrive and become normative in the segments of the discipline that depend on them. The story of pseudonymous mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki is not typically told in terms of patronage, but such relationships can explain a lot about the peculiar enterprise behind this iconic name.31 The young, male, assertively playful mathematicians who would combine to create Bourbaki’s persona starting circa 1935 were, in the preceding decade, among the earliest mathematical beneficiaries of a relatively new patron for their field, the network of educational and scientific organizations underwritten by Rockefeller philanthropy.32 The Rockefeller Foundation and associated philanthropies, including the International Education Board, were in turn among a collection of large philanthropies supported by monopolistic American corporate wealth that profoundly shaped international science, politics, and development in the twentieth century.33 The advent of Rockefeller philanthropy for mathematics meant that assessments from a new kind of evaluator would become important for a significant segment of the profession. This evaluator, the philanthropic programme officer, was steeped in the values of American philanthropy, often had scientific training, but was rarely versed in the latest mathematics—nor did he (always he) consider such expertise necessary or useful.34 Programme officers aimed to disburse their philanthropies’ resources efficiently and effectively, and to leave a lasting mark over a wide institutional and geographic field with time-limited financial interventions. In this capacity, their philanthropies recapitulated the logic of financial speculation behind the commercial enterprises that funded them. When evaluating and investing in people, therefore, programme officers aimed to develop effective non-mathematical proxies for identifying those mathematicians who would best achieve the long-term aims of short-term philanthropic support. Intervening from the outside of the discipline and relying on its existing infrastructures to sustain their investment after the period of a grant or fellowship, programme officers had to be sensitive to biases and power structures within a discipline, whether or not they approved of them. A funding recipient who would be unable to thrive after the funding ran out was not a sound investment, even if their failure to thrive had nothing to do with their personal ingenuity. For the male-dominated profession of mathematics, this made it hard to defend supporting women with limited foundation resources.35 Biases within a discipline had a
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double effect on who could benefit from a Rockefeller grant, affecting a candidate’s progress in the field—and hence visibility and legibility as someone worth funding—as well as the candidate’s post-fellowship prospects. To have the longest possible effect, a funding candidate should be as young as possible while still presenting a reasonable certainty of becoming established in the discipline. Programme officers deliberately sought candidates at the earliest points in their careers where they could safely be regarded as a sound prospect, and not some uncertain flash-inthe-pan. Mathematicians recognized talent and ingenuity across a wide range of ages, but to a Rockefeller officer it was only the bottom end of that range that mattered for many kinds of investment. Referring in 1930 to “the rule that mathematicians develop early”, officer W. E. Tisdale gave voice to a rule of thumb that mathematicians could be considered sound investments while comparatively young.36 Such an evaluation need have no bearing on whether mathematical brilliance was exclusive to such young charges—indeed, aspects of scientific philanthropy necessarily assumed a certain longevity—but the logic of a short-term investment in a long-term prospect led officers to emphasize and to concentrate resources around the youngest possible men. So it was that Wickliffe Rose, one of the original Rockefeller Foundation trustees and the founding president of the International Education Board, planned to create in the mid-1920s a series of “travelling fellowships for exceptional young men in mathematics” to develop international connections and promote the careers of promising European mathematicians.37 Rose had little personal knowledge of the sort of mathematics being pursued then in European universities, but he was a well-connected and resourceful correspondent. Assembling information from American mathematical elites, Rose and a small team of subordinates developed a general sense of Europe’s most significant institutions and enough information about career models and fellowship candidates to direct their available funds.38 International Education Board and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships supported Szolem Mandelbrojt (1924–1926), André Weil (1926–1927), Jean Dieudonné (1930–1931), and René de Possel (1930–1932), who would go on to be four of the founding members of the Bourbaki collaboration. Beginning in December 1934, together with a slightly shifting cast of four to six others—mostly associated with the elite male École normale supérieure in Paris—and a number of occasional interlopers, these four
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beneficiaries of Rockefeller philanthropy resolved to undertake a collective project to reform the university mathematics curriculum with a multivolume textbook under the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki.39 Their project required creating and projecting a double persona: first, a pseudonymous persona for their assumed authorial identity of Nicolas Bourbaki, and second, a shared collective persona for the collaboration animating the pseudonym. Both of these personae played important roles for the group’s work, reception, and significance to the period’s mathematics. The biographical narrative for Bourbaki, the pseudonym, was deliberately mythological, shifting, and gnomic. Initial presentations, for instance in the cover letter accompanying Bourbaki’s first submitted article in 1935, described a refugee from Poldavia, an invented country first prominently used by agitators for the far-right Action française, recently situated in an ethnically-coded suburb of Paris and reluctantly persuaded to share his mathematical speculations.40 This Bourbaki was, in some tellings, a decorated scholar now living in anonymity after being deracinated from the land where he had won recognition. In other tellings, his academic routes shifted to other obscure or imagined Eastern European locales, and he assumed more the character of an itinerant intellectual. Bourbaki’s current and past employment varied with the collaborators’ institutional situations and senses of the moment: at first he lacked an academic situation altogether, but would eventually claim affiliations with Hermann and Cie., the Rockefeller Foundation, the real University of Nancy, and the portmanteau University of Nancago (from Nancy and Chicago), among others.41 Adopting the identity of an older, rootless mathematician from Eastern Europe gave Bourbaki’s authorial persona the weight of an experienced voice whose previous anonymity could be explained away by institutional obscurity and the vagaries of geopolitics. This was someone who could be expected to have something important to say, who had paid his dues and could claim the right to be heard, not some brash upstart tilting over-confidently at the establishment.
A Double Persona The collaboration that produced Bourbaki’s pseudonymous works had its own separate but intertwined collective persona. Youth was a central feature of their self-characterizations and at points they promoted rumours of a mandatory retirement age, although the historical record is mixed on its observance in practice. The group loudly asserted its radical
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collectivity and anonymity, subsuming individual contributions into a whole they claimed could not be attributed to individual contributors.42 However, membership in the group was something of an open secret, and many interlocutors knew and interacted with multiple collaborators by name.43 Indeed, this open secret status was essential for members of the collaboration to accrue professional rewards from their participation, and was also a requirement for routine aspects of their work, especially related to funding: Nicolas Bourbaki could not sign a contract or deposit a cheque, but his collaborators (and, from 1952, a formally registered corporation under their control) could. The collective insisted that every word attributed to Bourbaki had been debated, drafted, and extensively revised by every member. They disclosed a quasi-mythologized set of working practices to certain friends and colleagues, revolving primarily around regular meetings called Congresses, whose raucous proceedings were recorded in pun-laden accounts in the group’s newsletter La Tribu.44 Funded by sources including Rockefeller Foundation grants and royalties from the Bourbaki textbooks, Bourbaki Congresses were rambunctious, alcohol-fuelled affairs that combined a variety of recreations with demanding performances of mathematical virtuosity, typically in scenic environs. A 1949 edition of La Tribu reported that “The flood of francs and dollars dispensed by Freymann [director of the textbooks’ publisher Hermann and Cie.] and Rockefeller spun the heads of the delegates, who gorged themselves with Armagnac”.45 A later interloper and Bourbaki sympathizer of long standing recounted to a correspondent that the Congress he attended “was great fun […]. The sessions were very lively, with cheerful insults flowing freely; one session broke up in disorder twice”.46 While some women were present at these Congresses, they were typically lumped in reports with locals and occasionally farm animals as “extras” and under no circumstances were considered part of the mathematical enterprise.47 Pranks, in-jokes, and what can fairly be described as systematic hazing reinforced collaborators’ solidarity while letting outsiders know their peripheral place. A Rockefeller Foundation grant summary described the group as “a small number of exceedingly brilliant young French mathematicians” making up “a research unit” organized to “bring to various areas of mathematics new imagination, clarity, and vigor”.48 For Rockefeller officers, the group’s collective persona as a vigorous and youthful research group justified substantial funding. The group’s aged individual pseudonymous
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persona appears in a secondary capacity, without reference to its associated biographical claims, as an aspect of the collective’s character and practice. Here, the nakedly mythological character of the pseudonymous persona masks the more subtly mythological character of the collective persona, allowing the collaborators to benefit from an image of rigorous, egalitarian, radically creative authorship that they would have been hard-pressed to demonstrate otherwise. For the group, the need and opportunity to explain their individual pseudonym thus substituted for the more difficult prospective challenge of explaining and justifying their respective individual and joint personae and practices. The pseudonym’s singular, male, typically-francophone voice further naturalized the collective’s demographic homogeneity.49 If the collective persona of the energetic Bourbaki collaborators took the fore in backrooms and grant reports, the pseudonymous persona had pride of place in Bourbaki’s most visibly prominent venue: the mathematical literature.50 Most often, this persona appeared how most mathematical personae appear in this setting, as a name, a voice, and a collection of claims and demonstrations in a formal text. Where biographical details appeared, they often winkingly reminded a discerning reader—one already in on Bourbaki’s open secret—of the pseudonym’s fictional biography through invocations of place names, invented organizations, or other conventional status markers. Other mathematicians’ references to Bourbaki typically effaced the pseudonym’s peculiarity by treating it as a normal name in the literature. The exceptions to this pattern diverted emphasis from the pseudonym to the collective persona, always treating the collaboration as a coherent whole and adopting its self-characterizations. Samuel Eilenberg, who regularly reported on Bourbaki’s work for the abstracting journal Mathematical Reviews and who ultimately joined the collaboration himself in 1950, wrote for Mathematical Reviews in 1942 that “Bourbaki is the pen name of a group of younger French mathematicians who set out to publish an encyclopedic work covering most of modern mathematics”.51 Emphasizing the collaborators’ youth and crediting an extreme and unrealistic rendering of the group’s goals alike legitimated their theoretical project and announced the group as an agent of lasting change worth joining.52 One of Bourbaki’s most notorious pranks occupied the precarious middle ground between the pseudonymous and collective personae. The pseudonym twice tried and failed to become a member of the American
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Mathematical Society (AMS). The AMS received applications in 1948 and 1949 under two different avenues for membership, respectively for members of a subscribing department (at the University of Chicago) and of a foreign partner society (the Société Mathématique de France). Because the applications were prepared separately and because Bourbaki’s mythologized pseudonymous biography resisted definitive standardization, there were significant discrepancies between the two application forms. These became a resource for the American Mathematical Society’s Secretary to delegitimize the latter application, adopting a formalistic posture towards biographical assertions so that he could dismiss them on the grounds of inconsistency alone, rather than wade into the depths of play and imposture that characterized the Bourbaki collaborators’ collective practice.53 Play was a vital resource for Bourbaki collaborators to create and project a group identity, but the AMS Secretary made clear that this same element disqualified their pseudonymous singular persona from participation in the formal organizational life of mathematics. Concerned for his organization’s dignity, he observed in backroom discussions of the second application that “I rather resent membership in the Society being made a matter of jest”.54 One correspondent suggested a direct approach of declaring “that we know that there is no such person [as Bourbaki], but that the name covers a group of mathematicians” and denounced the prank as immature and “not worthy of seriously minded mathematicians”.55 The AMS Secretary went so far as to share his outrage with the Rockefeller Foundation’s Warren Weaver, who duly diagnosed the prank as “quite childish” and suggested seeking a cooler head in the person of André Weil—never suspecting Weil’s primary role as an instigator of this and other Bourbaki pranks.56 Only one higher-up in the American Mathematical Society countenanced embracing the prank and granting Bourbaki membership, and he did so by absorbing the group enterprise into the singular pseudonymous persona. “There is no question in my mind”, he wrote, “but that N. Bourbaki has made a stronger imprint on present day mathematics and his fame will last longer than that of most of present members of our Society and it behooves us of taking cognizance of this fact”.57 For at least one later observer, the prank’s very immaturity directly affirmed the merit of the collective persona’s claim to reshape mathematics. Presenting Bourbaki to readers of the magazine Scientific American, Paul Halmos declared that “Yes, the joke may be sophomoric, but sophomores are young, and
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mathematics is a young man’s profession” and added that “Bourbaki’s emphasis on youth is laudable”.58 As Bourbaki’s mathematical programme and its associated philosophies spread beyond professional mathematics to fields as varied as education, anthropology, economics, and literature, the double persona of an authoritative pseudonym and a young, radical collective continued to lend coherence and authenticity to what could often be an incoherent and inauthentic undertaking.59 Describing his involvement during Bourbaki’s cross-cultural heyday, an American mathematician told a crime writer covering the group for the Saturday Evening Post that “Mathematics is like prizefighting. It’s a young man’s game”.60 Linking boxers’ strapping young bodies to the Bourbaki collective’s strapping young minds, the comparison naturalized the kind of scrappy belligerence required to fight for a title or to reform the foundations of a discipline. In boxing and mathematical foundations, there can only be one champion, at least in principle, and the wisdom of age is no protection against an up-andcoming contender. (One might add that in boxing and in mathematical foundations, there are, it turns out, many champions recognized and disputed by different authorities. In the messy realities of competing institutions coexisting with mythologized universalisms, too, the comparison holds.) All this was of a piece with the generational challenge Bourbaki loudly presented to French and international mathematics, asserting primacy after a generation supposedly lost to the Great War.61 In this context, it is worth observing that (at least by the crude measure of Google’s ngram corpus62 ) the phrase “a young man’s game” first gained widespread currency in English during the Great War in reference both to the war itself and to non-military pastimes, and saw a subsequent spike in usage with the Second World War.63 The collective Bourbaki persona’s youth embedded it in a philanthropic and war-inflected cultural logic of generational change, of brilliance over experience, and of the promise of perpetual renewal through (a mythical) mandatory retirement and influx of virile young bodies and minds. Its masculinity underwrote the group’s entitlement to assault their discipline, and to do so as an assertively univocal collaboration. Its pranks, wordplay, fictions, and commitment to play showed Bourbaki’s collective animators to be the right kind of young men for their project, men whose mental dexterity and freewheeling creativity opened up radical possibilities for mathematics.
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Economies at Scale Bourbaki’s double persona succeeded in part because the world of professional mathematics was changing. In addition to changing patronage relationships, which helped launch and sustain the careers of individuals behind the collaboration and furnished resources for the collaboration itself, the new relevance of global scales of production and exchange created new demands and opportunities that Bourbaki was distinctively positioned to exploit. One can understand these changes and their interaction with Bourbaki and the model of a “young man’s game” through the respective reconfigurations of mathematicians’ material, cultural, social, and political economies. Successive inflows of philanthropic, military, and civilian government funding dramatically changed the material conditions of international mathematics in the decades following the 1920s.64 Combined with new technologies of composition, print, and transportation, these made it possible for mathematicians to make long-distance travel a routine part of professional practice for some, while enabling the names and ideas of a far greater share of the profession to travel still farther through the periodical literature. The Bourbaki enterprise relied on both of these mechanisms of propagation. Personal travel let them maintain an intensive and ludic collaborative culture through regular Congresses, even as collaborators dispersed as war refugees and as political, economic, and professional migrants. As up-and-coming young men, Bourbaki collaborators lay privileged claim to sponsorship within programmes designed to connect and develop national and regional mathematical infrastructures. After the Second World War, some of the first UNESCO technical assistance experts in mathematics were associated with Bourbaki, and the group’s transgressive methods and ideology thrived in regions building new infrastructures for professional mathematics as a personally-reinforced shortcut to the discipline’s vanguard.65 Expanded infrastructures for circulating texts, meanwhile, kept these intellectual and ideological communities meaningfully connected.66 The individual persona of Bourbaki enjoyed a massive distribution through bylines, citations, and textbooks. Hampered in the past by relatively expensive production requirements and limited markets, mathematical publishing became newly profitable as new sponsors poured resources into libraries and research budgets. This, in turn, created the conditions for
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systematic translation, large print runs of popular textbooks, a thriving trade in inexpensively produced lecture notes from advanced courses and seminars, and other developments that specifically contributed to the Bourbaki enterprise’s global reach. Bureaucratic and publishing infrastructures sustaining these new material conditions for mathematics depended intensively on secretarial and administrative labour, typically performed by women, often typing and corresponding under the bylines of male mathematicians and administrative officers. Different customs of taking on others’ names and personae thus reinforced masculine images and practices in mathematical-institutional hierarchies both from above and from below. As common academic institutions and shared locales became less necessary for sustained group solidarity in the mathematics profession, the groups that prospered best over long distances were those that adopted modes and methods like Bourbaki’s. Myths, jokes, anecdotes, and a regular stock of cultural reference points gave groups a sense of coherence that could be maintained through letters, postcards, and irregular personal encounters. Corresponding features of methodological and theoretical programmes—effectively, conceptual puns—gave a corresponding coherence to research distributed over wide geographies.67 In these respects, play provided a significant and often underappreciated connective resource for mathematicians’ new scales, one directly linking ludic personae to ludic approaches to mathematics.68 Indeed, in these circumstances mathematics itself could appear as a trickster. For Hardy, mathematics was “the most curious [subject] of all—there is none in which truth plays such odd pranks”.69 It was a curious subject fit to curious men. Hardy claimed mathematics to be “one of the most specialized talents”, with a talented mathematician unlikely to exhibit much “general ability or versatility” or to do anything but “undistinguished work in other fields”.70 To open what was, in 1950, the largest ever gathering of mathematicians, American mathematician Oswald Veblen observed that “Mathematics is terribly individual”, and that “The more one is a mathematician the more one tends to be unfit or unwilling to play a part in normal social groups”.71 Mathematicians, according to Veblen, must “group themselves together as mathematicians” because being a mathematician was the surest sign that one was fit only for mathematical company. In the social economy of mathematical research, elite young men who were free to travel and could feel at home in the often-homogeneous company
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of fellow mathematicians were distinctively positioned to benefit from a disciplinary matrix that so explicitly prized such walled-off homosociality. Like the cultural economy of play, this social economy had intellectual consequences, raising the profile of mathematics and mathematicians alike that flourished in orderly self-contained worlds of their own design. Reproduced across institutes, departments, and conferences and Congresses small and large, such social orders affirmed the primacy of mathematical insiders who could afford not to distract themselves with the cares and affairs of non-mathematicians. Particular kinds of young men thrived in these social environs, while institutional and career structures placed them in the company of (and sometimes in conflict with) older mathematicians with their own sources of prestige and authority. Hardy’s remarks have been associated with a persistent myth that groundbreaking mathematics is the exclusive province of the young, a notion that has not withstood empirical scrutiny.72 At the same time, the social conditions that governed elite careers as Bourbaki came to prominence made visible brilliance a virtual requirement and expectation for new entrants that did not extend to those who were already established. Creative mathematics is difficult for young and old alike, and mathematicians can spend years working in an area before they feel capable of contributing significant new results.73 Career gateways and patterns ensured that the question of why an elite young mathematician lacked brilliance could not come up, as such a would-be mathematician was effectively barred from the disciplinary elite in the first place. Older mathematicians were, by these same tokens, the only ones who could be considered simultaneously among the discipline’s elite and in the midst of a creative drought, and their age was thus a ready explanation for this contrast with their younger counterparts for reasons entirely separate from the supposed association between age and creativity. These material, cultural, and social economies found expression through mathematicians’ new political economies. National and international organizations shared and extended each others’ infrastructures, generally reinforcing the hegemony of American institutions with the resources to serve as infrastructural pivots. Reciprocity agreements between national societies—including the French-American agreement the Bourbaki collaborators exploited in their second application on the individual persona’s behalf to the American Mathematical Society—were concrete expressions of an extensible solidarity. Such solidarity presumed
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that good-faith participation in one’s immediate mathematical surroundings qualified one to participate in a global community alongside those one had never met nor might ever meet in person. Investments and exchanges building up and connecting these institutional orders narrowed around those who fit the part of future disciplinary leaders. Young, male, charming, and mobile mathematicians took the lion’s share of resources in a model of institutional development built around circulation and diffusion emanating from mathematical metropoles.74 Those who could establish both social and theoretical coherence from brief contact and maintain these across longdistance exchanges offered precisely what such developmental frameworks presumed and required.
Conclusions: Making the Men of Modern Mathematics Next to (and perhaps including) Hardy’s Apology, no book from the first half of the twentieth century did more to define the modern mathematical persona for subsequent generations than number theorist Eric Temple Bell’s 1937 Men of Mathematics, a colourful and often inventive tour of the biographies of modern European history’s mathematical geniuses.75 Bell’s men (and one woman who appears in a dual-headed chapter with her male mentor), even those regarded in their own time as sober sages, appear here largely as precocious misfits, precisely the sort of young men at play to whom Hardy would grant mathematical priority just a few years later. The playful and irreverent author Bell declared his primary interest “in mathematicians as human beings” and so, in a nod to the genre of Great Man History, proposed through “an appreciation of their rich personalities” to illuminate the true significance of the achievements of modern science.76 These mathematicians, in Bell’s telling, were “as human as anybody else—sometimes distressingly more so”.77 Bell’s pretence of explaining the achievements of modern mathematics through a series of outlandish caricatures makes for dubious historiography. But his notion of locating something of the nature of modern mathematics in the persona of the mathematician—duly historicized— indicates something essential about the entangled operation of persona, context, and ideas in mathematical modernity. This chapter has argued that patronage relations, in the context of multiple intersecting economies of mathematical activity, supported mathematical personae adapted to the
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modalities and biases of disciplinary globalization. Personae marked as young, male, and playful thrived for historically specific reasons whose contingency fell away in universalizing portrayals like Bell’s and Hardy’s. The project of transcending professional and intellectual contexts, for mid-twentieth-century global mathematicians, depended on forms of support and solidarity that intensified the value and reach of very particular subject positions. Perhaps the twentieth century’s most successful occupants of the persona of the young man at play, also among the period’s most successful agents and beneficiaries of globalization, were a French collective of mathematicians who adopted the pseudonymous persona of a sometimes-reclusive Eastern European man of an older generation. Playfully posturing in Nicolas Bourbaki’s name, this collective winkingly secured their own respective reputations as people worth supporting and following in mid-century mathematics. Such posturing allowed Bourbaki collaborators and their supporters to alternate subject positions, with Bourbaki’s animators participating in international mathematics as a univocal disembodied author and a many-bodied association of ambitious young mathematicians. Though the Bourbaki collaboration did not have a monopoly on the patronage, prestige, ideas, or personae of their mid-century period of ascendancy, their story marks at a relative extreme a transformation to the mathematical discipline that continues to be felt today. Bright young stars, still predominantly men who look and in many ways present themselves like the Bourbaki collaborators and come from similar social pedigrees, continue to dominate mathematicians’ multifarious enterprises to identify and support talented leaders and to extend their reach around the world.78 This visible and often insidious bias has deep roots in decisions about how to organize and support a growing discipline made before most currently active mathematicians were even born, and carried forward by generations thence. These historical traces call attention to latent tensions between mathematicians’ global, even universal ambitions and the disciplinary infrastructures through which they pursue them, tensions manifest in the personae that became hegemonic in figures like the Bourbaki collaborators. The radical imposture of Bourbaki’s hybrid personae represented one highly effective critique of mathematical ideas and institutions whose dimensions, conditions, and consequences are manifest in the history of twentieth-century mathematics. Yet the Bourbaki collaborators by no
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means exhausted the critical potential of their own project. Consider, in counterpoint, the reconfiguration recently offered under the name Laboria Cuboniks, an anagram of Nicolas Bourbaki, turning the latter’s confrontation, alienation, and universalism into a gnomic critical platform of xenofeminism seeking new relations between identity, technology, and nature.79 Informed by the older feminist slogan that the personal is political,80 a critical engagement with the politics and institutions of modern and contemporary mathematics must encompass the personal dimensions of disciplinary formations. Historicizing and reworking the contingent elements that made mathematics a young man’s game may help bring into view other personae, other norms, other mathematics.
Notes 1. G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967 [1940]), 70. 2. Daniel Silver, “In Defense of Pure Mathematics,” American Scientist 103, no. 6 (2015): extended online version at https://doi.org/10.1511/2015. 117.418. 3. Hardy, Apology, 70−73. 4. See, e.g., S. Hottinger, Inventing the Mathematician: Gender, Race, and Our Cultural Understanding of Mathematics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016). 5. See Amy Dahan Dalmedico, “An Image Conflict in Mathematics After 1945,” in Changing images in mathematics: From the French Revolution to the new millennium, eds. U. Bottazzini and A. Dahan Dalmedico (London: Routledge, 2001), 223–253; Alma Steingart, “Conditional Inequalities: American Pure and Applied Mathematics, 1940–1975” (PhD Diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013). 6. See Jens Høyrup, In Measure, Number, and Weight: Studies in Mathematics and Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994). 7. E.g. C. Zaslavsky, Africa Counts: Number and Pattern in African Cultures (Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1973). 8. Reviel Netz, Ludic Proof: Greek Mathematics and the Alexandrian Aesthetic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 9. See, e.g., Markus Asper, “The Two Cultures of Mathematics in Ancient Greece,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics, eds. E. Robson and J. Stedall. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 107–132; K. Hill, “‘Juglers or Schollers?’: Negotiating the Role of a Mathematical Practitioner,” British Journal for the History of Science 31, no. 3 (1998): 253–274.
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10. See Karine Chemla, “Explorations in the History of Mathematical Recreations: An Introduction,” Historia Mathematica 41, no. 4 (2014): 367–376. 11. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); L. Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 12. Paul Erickson, The World the Game Theorists Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 13. See M. Harris, Mathematics Without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), esp. chapter 8. 14. E.g. Serafina Cuomo, “Exploring Ancient Greek and Roman Numeracy,” BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics 27, no. 1 (2012): 1–12, on 4–6. 15. Hacking, Emergence, and Daston, Classical. 16. Albrecht Heeffer, “How Algebra Spoiled Recreational Problems: a Case Study in the Cross-cultural Dissemination of Mathematics,” Historia Mathematica 41, no. 4 (2014): 400–437. 17. E.g. Kathryn James, “Reading Numbers in Early Modern England,” BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics 26, no. 1 (2011): 1–16. On this and related themes linking education, play, numeracy, and chance, see Jessica Marie Otis, “‘Sportes and Pastimes, done by Number’: Mathematical Games in Early Modern England,” in Playthings in Early Modernity: Party Games, Word Games, Mind Games, ed. Allison Levy (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 2017), 131–144. 18. Shelley Costa, “The ‘Ladies’ Diary’: Gender, Mathematics, and Civil Society in Early-Eighteenth-Century England,” Osiris 17 (2002): 49–73. 19. E.g. Massimo Mazzotti, The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Mazzotti, “From Genius to Witch: The Rise and Fall of a Filosofessa,” Los Angeles Review of Books 18 (2018). 20. Mary Terrall, “Émilie du Châtelet and the Gendering of Science,” History of Science 33, no. 3 (1995): 283–310; Mary Terrall, “Metaphysics, Mathematics, and the Gendering of Science in Eighteenth Century France,” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, eds. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 246–271. In view of the next section’s argument about gender, patronage, and institutions, see also Mary Terrall, “Masculine Knowledge, the Public Good, and the Scientific Household of Réaumur,” Osiris 30 (2015): 182–201. 21. J. Richards, “Historical Mathematics in the French Eighteenth Century,” Isis 97 (2006): 700–713.
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22. B. Belhoste, “Un modèle à l’épreuve: L’École polytechnique de 1794 au Second Empire,” in La formation polytechnicienne, 1794–1994, eds. Belhoste, Dahan Dalmedico, and Picon (Paris: Dunod, 1994), 9–30; C. Gillispie, “Un enseignement hégémonique: les mathématiques,” La formation polytechnicienne, 31–43; Richards, “Historical Mathematics.” Cf. Phillips, “An Officer and a Scholar: Nineteenth-Century West Point and the Invention of the Blackboard,” History of Education Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2015): 82–108. On the social and intellectual history of the ‘technical’ in relations between science and mathematics, see Theodore M. Porter, “How Science Became Technical,” Isis 100 (2009): 292–309. For the connection to Porter’s analysis, I thank Natalia Cecire, whose own work underscores the gendered dimensions of designating particular forms of knowledge as technical; Natalia Cecire, American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), esp. 128–133. 23. Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 24. Andrew Warwick, “Exercising the Student Body: Mathematics and Athleticism in Victorian Cambridge,” in Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, eds. Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 288–326. Cf. Alison Winter, “A Calculus of Suffering: Ada Lovelace and the Bodily Constraints on Women’s Knowledge in Early Victorian England,” in Science Incarnate, 202–239. 25. Amy Dahan Dalmedico, “Sophie Germain,” Scientific American 265, no. 6 (1991): 116–123. Such gender-obscuring pseudonyms are widespread in many fields beyond mathematics. 26. Claire G. Jones, Femininity, Mathematics and Science, c.1880–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 27. Joy Rankin, “Lady Wranglers,” The New Inquiry 17 (November 2016), online. 28. See G. H. Hardy, “The Case Against the Mathematical Tripos,” The Mathematical Gazette 13, no. 181 (1926): 61–71. 29. Ellen Abrams, “‘Indebted to No One’: Grounding and Gendering the Self-Made Mathematician,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 50, no. 3 (2020): 217–247. 30. Cf. Amir Alexander, Duel at Dawn: Heroes, Martyrs, and the Rise of Modern Mathematics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Moon Duchin, “The Sexual Politics of Genius,” 2004. 31. Elsewhere in the historiography of science, patronage and personae have well-established links. E.g. M. Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993).
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32. Liliane Beaulieu, Bourbaki: Une histoire du groupe de mathématiciens français et de ses travaux (1934–1944) (Ph.D. diss., Université de Montréal, 1990), 69–102; R. Siegmund-Schultze, Rockefeller and the Internationalization of Mathematics Between the Two World Wars: Documents and Studies for the Social History of Mathematics in the 20th Century (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001); C. Goldstein, “La théorie des nombres en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres: De quelques effets de la première guerre mondiale,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences 62, no. 1 (2009): 143–175. 33. Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations and the Rise of America Power (New York: Columbia, 2012); Mark Solovey, Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2013). 34. See Michael J. Barany, “Rockefeller Bureaucracy and Circumknowing Science in the Mid-Twentieth Century,” International Journal for History Culture and Modernity 7 (2019): 779–796. 35. E.g. Warren Weaver, N.S. Notes on Officers’ Techniques (Rockefeller Foundation, 1946), 30. This handbook is available online at https://roc kfound.rockarch.org/digital-library-listing/-/asset_publisher/yYxpQfeI4 W8N/content/n-s-notes-on-officers-techniques. 36. Siegmund-Schultze, Rockefeller, 87. 37. Rose to Mittag-Leffler, 27 March 1924, Archives Mittag-Leffler, Djursholm, Sweden. 38. Barany, “Circumknowing”; Siegmund-Schultze, Rockefeller; M. J. Barany, “The Officer’s Three Names: The Formal, Familiar, and Bureaucratic in the Transnational History of Scientific Fellowships,” in Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology, ed. John Krige (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 254–280. 39. Beaulieu, Bourbaki: Une histoire, ii:105–108; L. Beaulieu, “A Parisian Café and Ten Proto-Bourbaki Meetings (1934–1935),” The Mathematical Intelligencer 15, no. 1 (1993): 27–35; L. Corry, “Writing the Ultimate Mathematical Textbook: Nicolas Bourbaki’s Élements de mathématique,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics, eds. E. Robson and J. Stedall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 565–588. 40. Liliane Beaulieu, “Bourbaki’s Art of Memory,” Osiris 14 (1999): 219– 251, on 238–239; M. J. Barany, “Impersonation and Personification in Mid-Century Mathematics,” History of Science (in press), https://doi. org/10.1177/0073275320924571, § “Cover stories”; see also M. Audin, “La Vérité sur la Poldévie,” 2009, http://oulipo.net/fr/la-verite-sur-lapoldevie, accessed 2017. 41. See Barany, “Impersonation,” esp. § “From fiction to fraud.” 42. Beaulieu, “Memory,” 246–248.
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43. Beaulieu, Bourbaki: Une histoire, 286. I explore the construction and consequences of Bourbaki as an open secret at length in an article currently under revision. 44. Scanned editions of La Tribu can be found on the website of the Archives Bourbaki, http://archives-bourbaki.ahp-numerique.fr/. 45. “Compte rendu du Congrès oecuménique du cocotier (avril 1949),” Archives Bourbaki, http://archives-bourbaki.ahp-numerique.fr/items/ show/96, accessed 2020, on 1. On Freymann and Hermann, see Maurice Mashaal, Bourbaki: Une société secrète de mathématiciens (Paris: Éditions Pour la Science, 2002) translated by Anna Pierrehumbert as Bourbaki: A Secret Society of Mathematicians (Providence: American Mathematical Society, 2006), 53. 46. Frank Smithies to Ralph Boas, 3 May 1953, folder A10, Papers of Frank Smithies, St. John’s College Library, University of Cambridge, quotation by permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College. This research was supported by a Grattan-Guinness Archival Research Travel Grant. 47. Beaulieu, “Memory,” 226. 48. See Grant in Aid for the University of Nancy, Faculty of Sciences, Account RF 47139, September 1948, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Record Group 6.1, sub-series 2: Paris Field Office, Box 8, Folder 55. 49. Pseudonyms gave cover to homogeneous collectives even when diverging more significantly from those collectives’ demographic features, e.g. the male Cambridge (UK) collective that wrote under the female-gendered pun name Blanche Descartes. See C. A. B. Smith and S. Abbott, “The Story of Blanche Descartes,” The Mathematical Gazette 87, no. 508 (2003): 23–33. The group explicitly modelled itself on and paid tribute to Bourbaki, on a smaller scale. 50. Barany, “Impersonation,” § “Cited, unseen.” 51. S. Eilenberg, review of Bourbaki, Éléments de mathématique. Part I. Mathematical Reviews MR 3,55d, accessed as MathSciNet MR0004746, 1942. 52. I thank Natalia Cecire for recalling in this context the mid-century cultural association between youth, modernization, and Americanization in Franco-American relations, evident here in the positioning and reception of Bourbaki’s collective persona. See, e.g., Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 53. Barany, “Impersonation,” § “From fiction to fraud.” 54. Records of the American Mathematical Society, John Hay Library, Brown University (hereafter “AMS records”), box 36, folder 11, Kline to Hildebrandt, 16 January 1950. 55. AMS records, box 36, folder 11, Hildebrandt to Kline, 20 January 1950.
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56. AMS records, box 36, folder 11, Weaver to Kline, 7 March 1950. 57. AMS records, box 36, folder 11, Hille to Kline, 8 March 1950. 58. Paul R. Halmos, “Nicolas Bourbaki,” Scientific American 196 (1957): 88– 99, on 99. On youth and fun in the cultural politics of postwar physics, see Jessica Wang, “Physics, Emotion, and the Scientific Self: Merle Tuve’s Cold War,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 5 (2012): 341–388, on 376–378. 59. David Aubin, “The Withering Immortality of Nicolas Bourbaki: A Cultural Connector at the Confluence of Mathematics, Structuralism, and the Oulipo in France,” Science in Context 10, no. 2 (1997): 297–342. Cf. C. Phillips, “In Accordance with a ‘More Majestic Order’: The New Math and the Nature of Mathematics at Midcentury,” Isis 105, no. 3 (2014): 540–563. 60. Kobler, “Who is Bourbaki?” Saturday Evening Post 239, no. 5 (1966): 34–35, on 34. 61. David Aubin, L’ élite sous la mitraille. Les normaliens, les mathématiques et la Grande Guerre, 1900–1925 (Paris: Presses de l’ École Normale Supérieure, 2018). 62. Google Books Ngram Viewer, English (2012) corpus, search term “a young man’s game,” https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content= a+young+man%27s+game&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus= 15&smoothing=1, accessed 2020. 63. On generational thinking in and around the Great War, see Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). On the social history of generation discourse as a marker of generational conflict, cf. Dan Bouk, “Generation Crisis: How Population Research Defined the Baby Boomers,” Modern American History 1, no. 3 (2018): 321–342. 64. Michael J. Barany, “Remunerative Combinatorics: Mathematicians and their Sponsors in the Mid-Twentieth Century,” in Mathematical Cultures: The London Meetings 2012–2014, ed. B. Larvor (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016), 329–346. 65. Michael J. Barany, “Fellow Travelers and Traveling Fellows: The Intercontinental Shaping of Modern Mathematics in Mid-Twentieth Century Latin America,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 46, no. 5 (2016): 669–709. 66. Michael J. Barany, “Abstract Relations: Bibliography and the InfraStructures of Modern Mathematics,” Synthese (2020), in press, https:// doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02683-3. 67. Michael J. Barany, “Integration by Parts: Wordplay, Abuses of Language, and Modern Mathematical Theory on the Move,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 48, no. 3 (2018): 259–299.
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68. One might say ludic ‘styles’ of mathematics, and indeed founding Bourbaki collaborator Claude Chevalley offered a significant forerunner to recent philosophical interest in mathematical ‘styles.’ Chevalley, “Variations du style mathématique,” Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale 3 (1935): 375–384. See P. Mancosu, “Mathematical Style,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2017), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathem atical-style/, accessed 2020. 69. Hardy, Apology, 80. 70. Hardy, Apology, 70. 71. Oswald Veblen, “Opening Address of Professor Oswald Veblen,” in Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. 1950, eds. Lawrence M. Graves, Paul A. Smith, Einar Hille, and Oscar Zariski (Providence: American Mathematical Society, 1952), 124–125. 72. Nancy Stern, “Age and Achievement in Mathematics: A Case-Study in the Sociology of Science,” Social Studies of Science 8, no. 1 (1978): 127–140; Jordan Ellenberg, “Is Math a Young Man’s Game? No. Not Every Mathematician is Washed up at 30.” Slate, 16 May 2003, https://slate.com/human-interest/2003/05/is-math-ayoung-man-s-game.html, accessed 2020; Reuben Hersh and Vera JohnSteiner, Loving + Hating Mathematics: Challenging the Myths of Mathematical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 251–272. 73. M. J. Barany, “Mathematical Research in Context,” (MSc diss., University of Edinburgh, 2010), 31–40. Available online at http://mbarany.com/ EdinburghDissertation.pdf. 74. This image found voice in one of the earliest homages to Bourbaki in the mathematical literature, a 1938 parody article under the pseudonym of lion-hunter H. Pétard: “A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Big Game Hunting,” American Mathematical Monthly 45: 446–447. See Gerald L. Alexanderson and Dale H. Mugler, eds. Lion Hunting & Other Mathematical Pursuits: A Collection of Mathematics, Verse and Stories by Ralph P. Boas, Jr. (Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America, 1995); Barany, “Integration,” 280–282; Barany, “Impersonation”; Blanche Descartes’s (see note above) pun-filled poem “Hymne to Hymen” celebrating Pétard’s wedding to Bourbaki’s daughter Betti deserves its own close reading in connection with this chapter’s themes and must, alas, be deferred to a future analysis. 75. E. T. Bell, Men of Mathematics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937). Three ancient Greek mathematicians fall under the chapter heading of “modern minds in ancient bodies.” 76. Bell, Men, 3–4. For a provocative comparison between Bell’s approach and Classical traditions of mathematical commentary, see Markus Asper,
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77. 78. 79.
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“Personae at play. ‘Men of Mathematics’ in Commentary.” Historia Mathematica 47 (2019): 4–15. Bell, Men, 8. See Michael J. Barany, “The Fields Medal Should Return to its Roots,” Nature 553 (2018): 271–273. Laboria Cuboniks, The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alientation (Brooklyn: Verso, 2018), online as Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, https://laboriacuboniks.net/manifesto/xenofeminism-apolitics-for-alienation/, accessed 2020. It is perhaps significant that the collective animators of Cuboniks stress Bourbaki’s valorisation of abstraction and generality rather than Bourbaki’s gendered history when identifying the link between the pseudonyms. E.g. Ágrafa Society, “Interview with Laboria Cuboniks: New Vectors from Xenofeminism,” Seminar 1 (2019), online, http://www.zineseminar.com/wp/issue01/interviewwith-laboria-cuboniks-new-vectors-from-xenofeminism/, accessed 2020. Carol Hanisch, “The Personal Is Political,” in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, eds. Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt (New York: Radical Feminism, 1970), online at http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHw ritings/PIP.html, accessed 2020.
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Phillips, Christopher J. “An Officer and a Scholar: Nineteenth-Century West Point and the Invention of the Blackboard.” History of Education Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2015): 82–108. Porter, Theodore M. “How Science Became Technical.” Isis 100 (2009): 292– 309. Rankin, Joy. “Lady Wranglers.” The New Inquiry 17 (November 2016), https:// thenewinquiry.com/blog/lady-science-no-26-pt-2-lady-wranglers/, accessed 2020. Richards, Joan. “Historical Mathematics in the French Eighteenth Century.” Isis 97 (2006): 700–713. Siegmund-Schultze, Reinhard. Rockefeller and the Internationalization of Mathematics Between the Two World Wars: Documents and Studies for the Social History of Mathematics in the 20th Century. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001. Silver, Daniel. “In Defense of Pure Mathematics.” American Scientist 103, no. 6 (2015): extended online version at https://doi.org/10.1511/2015.117.418. Smith, C. A. B. and Abbott, S. “The Story of Blanche Descartes.” The Mathematical Gazette 87, no. 508 (2003): 23–33. Solovey, Mark. Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2013. Steingart, Alma. “Conditional Inequalities: American Pure and Applied Mathematics, 1940–1975.” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013. Stern, Nancy, “Age and Achievement in Mathematics: A Case-Study in the Sociology of Science.” Social Studies of Science 8, no. 1 (1978): 127–140. Terrall, Mary. “Émilie du Châtelet and the Gendering of Science.” History of Science 33, no. 3 (1995): 283–310. Terrall, Mary. “Metaphysics, Mathematics, and the Gendering of Science in Eighteenth Century France.” In The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, 246–271. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Terrall, Mary. “Masculine Knowledge, the Public Good, and the Scientific Household of Réaumur,” Osiris 30 (2015): 182–201. Veblen, Oswald. “Opening Address of Professor Oswald Veblen.” in Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. 1950, edited by Lawrence M. Graves, Paul A. Smith, Einar Hille, and Oscar Zariski, 124–125. Providence: American Mathematical Society, 1952. Wang, Jessica. “Physics, Emotion, and the Scientific Self: Merle Tuve’s Cold War.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 5 (2012): 341–388. Warwick, Andrew. “Exercising the Student Body: Mathematics and Athleticism in Victorian Cambridge.” In Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, edited by Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin, 288–326. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
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Warwick, Andrew. Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Weaver, Warren. N.S. Notes on Officers’ Techniques. Rockefeller Foundation, 1946. Winter, Alison. “A Calculus of Suffering: Ada Lovelace and the Bodily Constraints on Women’s Knowledge in Early Victorian England.” In Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, edited by Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin, 202–239. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Wohl, Robert. The Generation of 1914. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Zaslavsky, Claudia. Africa Counts: Number and Pattern in African Cultures. Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1973.
CHAPTER 3
Fashioning a Scientific Persona in a Colonial Borderland: The Many Identities of William Smith Clark in 1870s Colonial Hokkaido John L. Hennessey
Studies of scientific personae repeatedly emphasize the essential role of context. In their foundational article on the subject, Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum write that “Personae are creatures of historical circumstance; they emerge and disappear within specific contexts”.1 Kirsti Niskanen, Mineke Bosch, and Kaat Wils describe scientific personae as “templates that emerge and develop in historical contexts”.2 Herman Paul observes that “much… current research [on scientific personae] examines how ‘repertoires’ are being ‘performed’ in specific historical contexts, and how this relates to issues of scientific credibility, gender exclusion, institutional politics and scientific ethics”.3 He notes elsewhere that “personae and performances can never be considered apart from each other…. to do justice to both individual agency… and the discursive power of culturally sanctioned scripts”.4 Through interactions between the repertoires
J. L. Hennessey (B) The Hugo Valentin Centre, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 K. Niskanen and M. J. Barany (eds.), Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7_3
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underlying personae and the performances they enact, personae are both shaped by and shape their context. Most existing studies of scientific personae consider scientists operating in their own “home” contexts, which are, after all, where most scientists form and inhabit their personae. Due to the nature of their work, however, since at least the eighteenth century many scientists operated far from home, in radically different social or cultural contexts. From at least the eighteenth century, a great many scientists conducted fieldwork or otherwise operated in colonial contexts, as maritime empires opened up new possibilities for travel and experimentation in the far reaches of the globe. In such contexts, typically marked by externally imposed social and cultural destabilization to which the scientists themselves often contributed, the extreme power disparities inherent to the colonial situation had distinctive effects on their work and personae.5 Persona studies offers a useful way to navigate between ideals and realities of colonial science and the agency of individual scientists. In this chapter, I will consider the multifaceted persona of an American botanist operating in an extremely complex, evolving colonial context: late-nineteenth-century colonial Hokkaido, the northernmost of presentday Japan’s four large islands. In the 1870s, Hokkaido was a colonial borderland with a complex social hierarchy. The island had long been home to indigenous Ainu people, whom the Japanese and visiting Westerners frequently compared with and treated similarly to indigenous peoples in other settler colonial contexts in North America and Europe. Though the island remained largely in Ainu hands until the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the new, Western-oriented Meiji government launched an ambitious programme of settler colonialism throughout Hokkaido designed to make the island unambiguously Japanese, establishing the Kaitakushi, a colonial development agency for this purpose.6 Reflecting their admiration for the settlement of the American West, Japanese leaders chose the United States as a model, hiring many American advisors and copying American legislation such as the Homestead Acts and US Indian Policy.7 This history made colonial Hokkaido in the 1870s an unstable context shaped by actors from a complex hierarchy. The indigenous Ainu had the best knowledge of their homeland but were considered too “primitive” by the Japanese government to have a legitimate claim to their land and were increasingly outnumbered and marginalized by Japanese settlers. Many or
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most of the latter were poor and, to fill official settlement goals, increasingly convicts. In addition, the Kaitakushi employed former samurai who ended up in Hokkaido after making their last stand there against the Meiji forces in the 1867–1868 civil war, but also a number of top political leaders from the new regime. Finally, hired Western advisors, mostly American, had an ambiguous relationship to the Japanese leaders of the Kaitakushi. Technically they were subordinated to the Japanese leaders and in their employ, but they were used to giving orders and usually convinced that they had far greater knowledge and represented a higher degree of civilization than the Japanese. In some ways, this colonial context was special for American advisors, as they were not nationals of the colonizing power. There was, in fact, often friction between white American hired experts and Japanese officials over who was to make key decisions, not least because the position of the Japanese in the “civilizational”/racial hierarchy of nineteenth-century geopolitics was still not fully stable.8 A debate raged in the West for decades over whether the Japanese should be welcomed into the community of “civilized” nations or considered an existential threat to the “white race” and Christendom. Nevertheless, in practice, American advisors to the Japanese colonial development agency in Hokkaido operated in much the same way as contemporaneous colonial scientists elsewhere.9 While sometimes quarrelling with Japanese bureaucrats, they were still unquestionably in the upper reaches of the colonial hierarchy and were free to act towards the indigenous population with impunity.10 The peak in the number of hired foreigners in Japan came amid great Japanese enthusiasm for foreign technologies, which the Meiji government embraced in order to make the country strong enough to resist foreign encroachment. Government officials greatly valued the scientific, legal, and military knowledge that hired foreigners offered and were eager to avoid diplomatic incidents with their advisors’ home countries (on several occasions prior to the Meiji Restoration, foreign warships had led punitive raids on Japanese port cities in response to attacks on their nationals). Though formally subordinated to their Japanese hosts, Americans in Hokkaido nevertheless wielded considerable power and influence analogous to that of Western scientists in other colonial contexts. It was in this unstable, highly stratified colonial context that William Smith Clark (1826–1886, Fig. 3.1), a well-respected botanist, proponent of scientific agriculture, and founding president of Massachusetts Agricultural College (or MAC, the present-day University of Massachusetts,
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Fig. 3.1 William Smith Clark (Photo courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Amherst) was hired to create a replica of his home institution in Hokkaido during the 1876–1877 academic year. Sapporo Agricultural College (or SAC, present-day Hokkaido University) was intended to train a new generation of Japanese colonial administrators, spread advanced agricultural knowledge to newly-arriving settlers, and serve as a centre for research into how to best exploit Hokkaido’s considerable natural resources.11 This chapter will argue that the mutable colonial context in which he operated granted Clark an unusual degree of freedom to shape his persona, a freedom of which he took full advantage in order to secure his authority at the new school and shape the local context to his needs. Clark drew on existing models of authority from his home
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context of New England, but creatively combined these in an entirely different milieu to great effect. While the various facets of Clark’s persona succeeded in legitimizing him as an expert and even a “great man” in the eyes of his Japanese students and many Japanese officials, it largely failed to win him the esteem of his countrymen after his return home. This chapter provides an intriguing example of how scientists operating during the zenith of modern colonialism could create a uniquely authoritative persona in a colonial context that drew on models from their home context but had vastly different effects abroad.
Clark’s Background and Road to Hokkaido One can observe most of the elements of the persona that Clark would fully achieve in Hokkaido in his earlier career, but he often ran into criticism and obstacles that constrained the full development and successful deployment of this persona in the United States. A native of Amherst, Massachusetts, Clark was by all accounts an energetic, charismatic individual with a larger-than-life persona.12 He had a reputation as a captivating orator, reportedly introduced the custom of Christmas trees to Massachusetts and may even have been the mysterious “Master” to whom his neighbour Emily Dickinson wrote three famously enigmatic love letters.13 He had a brilliant beginning to his career, earning a doctorate in mineralogy and chemistry at Georgia Augusta University in Göttingen in the budding field of astrolithology, studying the mineralogical properties of meteorites.14 He was the first graduate of Amherst College to earn a doctorate.15 While in Europe, he visited the British Kew Gardens and was reportedly inspired to switch fields from mineralogy to botany by the magnificent, gargantuan water lily Victoria amazonica (called Victoria regia at the time).16 His interest in meteorites and giant water lilies is indicative of his lifelong attraction to the dramatic and exotic, which also aided in his self-promotion throughout his career. Clark returned to the United States as energetic as ever, having picked up some Old World customs like greeting people by hugging and kissing, which was viewed with some suspicion in his New England Puritan community.17 He quickly got a job teaching chemistry at his alma mater. When the American Civil War broke out, Clark swiftly enlisted, foreshadowing his willingness to pursue adventure far from his family later in life. He revelled in the glory of serving what he viewed from the beginning as a patriotic and humanitarian cause that also reflected positively on his
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college and community, writing, for example, that “I am in the great army as one of the representatives of the College and endeavor to do my whole duty as a patriotic citizen soldier fighting for republican institutions and for human freedom”.18 At the beginning of his military career, he seems to have been enraptured with the romance of war and the opportunities it offered for male bonding and exhibiting manliness, ebulliently writing to his father that “It is a glorious sight to see a thousand men marching straight forward into the fire from a thousand muskets aided by a battery of cannon and men never feel more manly than when they are doing it”.19 The system of military ranks also appealed to Clark’s vanity and strongly competitive nature, and many of his letters express his sense of entitlement to ever higher ranks and impatience for pending promotions. For unknown reasons, Clark suddenly resigned his commission in 1863, in the middle of the war, but his primary biographer, John Maki, speculates that it could have been out of frustration at not obtaining the rank of general, which he had openly coveted in several of his earlier letters.20 The untimely end of his military career notwithstanding, Colonel Clark was received as a hero upon his return to Amherst and was referred to by his military title for the rest of his life.21 His status as a war hero and repertoire of harrowing battle stories would only further enhance the other aspects of his already overpowering persona. After returning to Amherst, Clark resumed his academic career and also served for several stints as a politician in the Massachusetts state legislature. Despite his numerous other passions, Clark stuck with botany for the rest of his academic career, pursuing well-received studies in plant biology, especially regarding the movement and pressure of sap in plants. He was a firm supporter of the new school of scientific agriculture that sought to use methodical research to increase agricultural efficiency. Putting this conviction into practice, he lobbied hard for the establishment of Massachusetts Agricultural College (MAC—now the University of Massachusetts, Amherst) under the provisions of the Morrill Act, becoming its first president.22 He successfully raised $50,000 from his fellow residents of Amherst to ensure the placement of the college there, an early success that likely gave him overconfidence in his fund-raising aptitude later in life.23 Despite these achievements, Clark seems to have grown increasingly restless and frustrated with university politics. His personal correspondence reveals that he was deeply affected by criticism against his leadership and salary, which critics viewed as exorbitant, in political assemblies and
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also in the press.24 Later writing to his wife from Tokyo, Clark (sarcastically?) lauded Japanese press censorship, writing, “Thank God, in this country editors are held responsible for what they print, and a considerable number are kept where most of ours ought to be – in jail”.25 Such critiques served as a check on the persona Clark sought to create—a universally appreciated, manly, dynamic leader and leading scientist. Clark worked extremely hard all his life and pushed himself to excel intellectually and morally in a variety of ways. He expressed more than a little bitterness when he believed that his intense efforts were not recognized. It is clear that this partly derived from the lower academic status of agricultural colleges at this time, which were largely viewed as vocational schools even though Clark had higher ambitions. Though his botanical research was praised by the likes of celebrated Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz, Clark suffered from a chip on his shoulder that he seems to have tried to compensate for in part by undertaking manly, adventurous exploits.26 Always ready to assume leadership roles, Clark also had an authoritarian streak, requiring the complete loyalty of his subordinates and associates. He frequently had difficulty coping with subordinates who failed to properly recognize his superior wisdom and intellect. When a group of his MAC students protested against a requirement to perform manual labour as part of their studies, for example, he took a hard line. As one of the students recounted the incident years later: We presented our case, and Clark replied in no unmeasured terms, declaring that we were in rebellion against the college. Then it was that… [William] Wheeler… – who, by the way, had been excused from manual labor in order to assist in teaching the lower classes in mathematics, – rose to the occasion and punctured the claim that we were in rebellion by putting this leading question: “Mr. President, do you consider it rebellion to demand the fulfillment of the contract plainly set forth in the catalogue, that the manual labor required would be in the nature of manual progressive training?”27
Clark huffily replied that “he had not come there to be lectured to” and stormed out after leaving the students with a “promise of immediate obedience to college authority” that they were expected to sign, but which none of them did, much to his irritation.28 Given these frustrations and an apparent longing for adventure, it was probably not too difficult for representatives of the Japanese government to lure him to
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Hokkaido, especially at almost double his American salary.29 MAC had hosted several Japanese exchange students, and a high-ranking Japanese statesman on a tour of the United States had reportedly been impressed during a visit to the college.30 Headhunting an American college president who was also a reputable scientist and former military officer was considered a coup by the Japanese. For Clark, the choice was clear. Here were people who recognized his talent and were willing to pay a premium for it.
Homosociality and Clark’s Entourage in Hokkaido Clark’s sojourn in Hokkaido is noteworthy, among other things, for its extremely homosocial character. From existing materials, it appears that Clark had precious little interaction with women during his year in Hokkaido, which was mostly spent with two male American colleagues, male Japanese translators (at least one of whom had previously been an exchange student at MAC) and officials of the Kaitakushi and the all-male student body. Clark was allowed to hand-pick two associates to travel with him and teach at the new college. He chose two talented former students from MAC, engineer William Wheeler (1851–1932) and fellow botanist David Pearce Penhallow (1854–1910). Clark was married, apparently happily, and had no fewer than eight children, but nevertheless seems to have made little or no effort to bring them with him to Hokkaido— ultimately only Wheeler, Penhallow, and Japanese functionaries would accompany him on his journey across the continental United States and the Pacific. He did agree to a shorter contract, of only one academic year, than what the Kaitakushi had originally wanted.31 It is unclear if this was because of the difficulty of getting a longer leave of absence from MAC or because he was reluctant to be away from his family. While there seems to be no evidence to suggest that Clark’s marriage was unhappy, Clark more often than not attended local social functions alone, as his wife was pregnant no fewer than twelve times during the first eighteen years of their marriage and it was taboo in New England high society to socialize while visibly pregnant.32 There was thus some distance between Clark’s family sphere and his social and professional spheres (the latter of which overlapped considerably) even in America, a separation that may have made an independent sojourn in Japan more natural for Clark. All the same, his letters home indicate his great fondness for his children, whose lives
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Fig. 3.2 The Clark Family, c. 1875 (Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
he continued to be involved in from afar with words of affection and encouragement (Fig. 3.2).33 Reading Clark’s (and also Wheeler’s and Penhallow’s) letters, one gets the impression that his overwhelmingly male company was a—for Americans of the time—natural result of the rough, frontier character of Sapporo. The three men’s letters home are filled with stories of adventure from the “pristine” “wilderness” of the Hokkaido interior (in fact, home to many Ainu). Nevertheless, a careful reading and corroboration with other source materials reveal that they in fact spent most of their time in comfortable, Western-style housing in what was actually a well-developed town that was probably on par with many contemporaneous towns in the American West. Sapporo in the 1870s was the headquarters of the Kaitakushi and was large enough to support businesses like a photography studio and events like organized horse races.34 Moreover, both Wheeler and Penhallow, who stayed for several years and each served as college president for a time, brought over their wives following Clark’s departure (Wheeler briefly returned to the United States to marry his fiancée first).
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This reveals that they did not consider Sapporo too rustic for women and the domestic life they were used to from home.35 It could be that they came to this conclusion only after spending some time in Sapporo or that Clark did not bring his family for financial reasons, but it still created a noteworthy situation. In any case, Clark seems to have thrived in the homosocial environment at SAC, using it to reinforce the masculine elements of his vigorous, adventurous persona. The homosocial bonds he forged seemed to be primarily not with Wheeler and Penhallow, however, but with his Japanese students. It is not clear whether Clark had hoped that his two assistants, both of whom were far younger and had previously studied under him at MAC, would hold him in awe or become close friends. Both were certainly very hard-working and academically gifted. While it seems that Penhallow was inspired as a student to follow in Clark’s footsteps, interestingly, Wheeler was not so sycophantic, having successfully led the protests against Clark’s policy of manual labour as a student, as we have seen. It does not seem as though Clark held a grudge against Wheeler, and the three MAC men certainly spent a great amount of time together both on the long boat trip over and at SAC, where they lived in the same house.36 Nevertheless, it is clear in Wheeler’s letters that he did not idolize Clark the way SAC’s younger Japanese students did, even if he seems to have had a good working relationship with him.37 The persona that Clark established seems definitely to have resonated best with the first class of SAC, a group of ambitious and highly impressionable young Japanese men.
The Master and His Disciples All sources indicate that Clark made a deep and lasting impression on his Japanese students.38 Clark accomplished this by fashioning a multifaceted persona in which he presented himself as a strong but benevolent leader. As a middle-aged, white, American man (Clark turned 50 the same day he arrived in Sapporo), skilled orator, war veteran, accomplished scientist and, perhaps above all, individual who possessed both strong convictions and great self-confidence, Clark mesmerized his young students.39 In the words of a SAC alumnus, “Young men were extremely fond of him, and venerated him as their hero”.40 To a greater extent than was possible in his home context, Clark combined scientific knowledge and moral lessons in his teaching. As
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revealed in an essay by one of his star students, Sat¯o Sh¯osuke, who much later would become president of SAC himself, Clark and his American colleagues imparted a strongly normative view of agriculture.41 This reflected the Jeffersonian ideal of independent, hard-working, selfsufficient farmers forming the backbone of the nation, supporting ideals of manliness and dignity.42 Sat¯o’s essay, submitted for full reprinting in the local newspaper Amherst Record in 1878 by an obviously proud Clark, sounds like one of Clark’s own ebullient, patriotic, pastoral speeches: Ever since man was ordained to earn his bread by the sweat of his face, agriculture has been one of the most important and most useful arts for the sustenance of human life…. It is the most honorable and most delightful occupation that man can ever pursue. It gives him an independent, selfreliant spirit, steady, vigorous character and healthy, sound constitution.43
The last sentence clearly echoes Clark’s ideals and is a good description of Clark’s own persona. One also catches an echo of Sat¯o’s American teachers’ defensiveness, however, at the idea that agriculture was not as serious or “academic” a subject as more traditional courses of university study, especially when Sat¯o feels it necessary to write that even “men of high culture and enlightened class have become agriculturalists”.44 Clark had indeed often clashed with state politicians and other critics in Massachusetts over his ambition to make MAC an institution that provided young men with a full and well-rounded education rather than merely serving as a vocational school. While Clark’s ambitions in this regard would collapse in the face of continued criticism and financial problems shortly after his return to the United States, in Hokkaido he was given a free hand to implement the kind of combined scientific-liberal arts education that he so passionately advocated, attracting excellent students from around Japan.45 Clark went much further than spreading notions of farmers’ masculinity, vigour, and independence, however, also pushing his ideals of temperance and wholesome living on his students. He employed a similar strategy as he had in Massachusetts, pressuring the students to sign a pledge, in this case to abstain from “opium, tobacco and alcoholic liquors; and also from gambling and profane swearing”.46 Despite the fact that alcohol was (and still is) an important part of male socialization in Japan and that no equivalent moral disapprobation was attached to drinking in Japanese culture, this time Clark succeeded in getting his students to sign
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his pledge. In a letter shortly after Clark’s return to the United States, Sat¯o writes in anguish that one of his classmates had reneged on his pledge and drunk alcohol, but it seems as though Clark largely succeeded in enforcing his moral code during his tenure.47 Although there is less information on it than the other vices Clark condemned, indicating that it might not have been included in writing in the pledge, SAC alumnus Miyabe Kingyo later recalled (based on stories from his former classmates, since he himself began his studies after Clark’s departure) that: “In the moral and physical development of the students he believed the first reform to be made was in the control of sexual desire”.48 Clark reportedly communicated these moral dictums beginning in his speech at the very start of the school year.49 As Miyabe put it: “Hating compromise, regarding good as good, and bad as bad, strictly avoiding tobacco and liquor, he was in short a man of strong principles”.50 Nevertheless, he succeeded in winning the obedience of his students through leading by example, being the first to sign the pledge.51 In his characteristically dramatic fashion, he also smashed several bottles of wine that he had brought with him and later refused to drink at a Kaitakushi social function.52 For Clark, morality was largely equivalent with Christianity, and according to a frequently-repeated anecdote, he succeeded after a long argument in convincing the director of the Kaitakushi to let him teach the Bible at the college since according to him, he could not teach ethics without it.53 By the end of his year-long stay in Sapporo, Clark had converted his students to Christianity, once again by having them sign a pledge, which he named the “Covenant of Believers of Jesus”. This unusual document opens with a creed-like series of statements starting with “We believe…” and subsequently combines some of the Ten Commandments with what are apparently Clark’s own additions. These notably included the commandment “Thou shalt obey and honor thy parents and rulers”, a directive of which the Kaitakushi would undoubtedly have approved.54 Though Clark was not a professional missionary and it was far from clear that he should proselytize the students he had been hired to teach scientific agriculture (Christianity had only very recently been legalized in Japan), his dual role as a scientific expert and spiritual authority proved remarkably successful. Although some of his students clearly signed the Covenant merely out of pressure and later gave up the new faith, a number of others remained ardent believers throughout their
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lives, creating a strong Christian movement in Hokkaido that persists to this day.55 This included many members of later classes, who had never met Clark but nonetheless were inspired by his already considerable legacy. Among this group was Uchimura Kanz¯ o, one of SAC’s most famous graduates and Japan’s best-known Christians, who notably ran afoul of the government years later for refusing emperor worship on religious grounds. According to Miyabe, himself an ardent Christian, all members of SAC’s second class (beginning the fall after Clark’s departure) also signed the Covenant, although about half of those from the first two classes who signed later renounced Christianity.56 The Sapporo Independent Church that Clark’s religious disciples founded would by 1922 complete the construction of a Clark Memorial Church building.57 Clark effectively joined the teacher and missionary sides of his persona using a third role, that of a father figure. It is clear from both his and his students’ accounts that Clark assumed a paternal role and felt very close to his students, several of whom he remained in contact with after his return to the United States. In one of his letters to Uchida Kiyoshi, a former student, he wrote, “Do not fail to tell all your classmates that I love them as tenderly as ever, even as if they were my own sons”.58 In some ways, SAC had a boarding-school-like atmosphere, and Clark frequently interacted with his students outside of the classroom, “often gathering together young men and instructing, encouraging, inspiring them by story, tale of adventure, interesting experience or anecdote”.59 Clark took his role to be more than the academic and moral fostering of his students; he also viewed it as important to teach them to enjoy life. “Betimes [Sometimes] he went about the student dormitories, and, if he found a student studying in the afternoon, he would tell him to get out into the open and breathe the pure air of heaven. He was known even to challenge the students to snow battles”.60 The still unfixed context of colonial Hokkaido, and indeed, of Japan itself in the midst of a major social revolution, permitted Clark to establish an unusually close relationship with his students, who also were living far away from home and were easily awed and inspired by Clark’s expertise and strong persona. Such a relationship would almost certainly not have been possible in the more established context of Massachusetts, as Clark’s students’ resistance to his pledge of obedience indicates.
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Clark and Japanese Settler Colonialism Besides his interaction with his Japanese students, translators, and employers, it is important to touch on the colonial aspects of Clark’s persona during his time in Hokkaido. I discuss Clark’s role in the colonization of Hokkaido elsewhere, notably Clark’s ethnographic fascination with the Ainu.61 Though subordinated to the Japanese, the position of the Ainu in Hokkaido’s social structure was still not entirely fixed in previous decades, when sporadic attempts were made to assimilate them, including the Japanese schooling of several Ainu at a predecessor to SAC. At Clark’s new college, however, Ainu students and female students, both of whom had earlier been admitted to the previous Kaitakushi school, were completely absent.62 This was probably not Clark’s decision, as the Japanese government had previously decided to reform the school as an elite technical college for future colonial administrators, in which there would be no place for women and Ainu.63 Unlike the Japanese government, however, I have found no evidence that Clark ever considered attempting to educate the Ainu, and he even largely dismissed the possibility of their Christianization.64 As I argue elsewhere, Clark played an important role in changing conceptions of the Ainu, plugging them into pre-existing Western colonial civilizational categories by describing them as a “primitive” race that had not changed for thousands of years.65 Transplanting this Western colonial framework to a new context arguably helped Clark to assert the authority that white men enjoyed in Western colonial territories around the world. This is apparent in a remarkable photograph now in the possession of the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts in which Clark poses in full dress attire with his Japanese translator Hori Seito and a group of unidentified Ainu women, one of whom is partially exposed while breastfeeding (Fig. 3.3).66 The photo provides a striking demonstration of how Clark introduced colonial ethnographic conventions to Hokkaido and used gendered, racial, and sartorial codes to assert his authority. Dressed in a similar Western costume and adopting an analogous pose, Hori is obviously trying to assume a comparable position.67 Despite this reinforcement of his persona through a classic colonial othering of the Ainu, Clark was remarkably enamoured of the Japanese, praising them as culturally equal or even in some ways superior to Americans in front of presumably shocked American audiences after returning to the United States.68 Clark seems to have expected loyalty from his subordinates, but
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Fig. 3.3 “Dr. Clark and Karahuto Ainu Women.” Artist in Japan, photograph 1875–1877, 4 × 6 ¼ inches (10.16 × 15.875 cm). Gift of Mrs. Russell Robb, 1918. TR 2017.2 (Courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts)
also felt a strong sense of loyalty to those who admired him and treated him well. Unlike many other American advisors to the Japanese government, including Wheeler, Clark did not enhance his sense of authority by arguing that he was culturally superior to the Japanese, but he did adopt colonial practices of othering directed at the Ainu. The photo described above and the significant collection of Ainu artefacts he amassed strongly suggests that he used his powerful persona to coerce them into cooperation with his “scientific” collecting.69
Manliness, Civilization, and Clark’s Persona The above sections have demonstrated that different forms of masculinity were central to Clark’s persona, created in a strongly homosocial frontier environment. Whether as a father figure, a daring adventurer, or a brilliant scientist, manliness was a leitmotif linking the different sides of Clark’s persona. The historical moment in which Clark worked in Hokkaido is
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noteworthy, as it occurred in the midst of a transformation of conceptions of manliness and its linkages in science. Taking the polar explorers Elisha Kent Kane (operating in the 1850s) and Robert Peary (operating around the turn of the twentieth century) as examples, Michael Robinson has argued that the once close ties between manliness and science broke down during the latter half of the nineteenth century.70 While inner attributes, particularly self-control, intellectual aptitude, and a scientific eye were seen as the quintessence of manliness in the early nineteenth century (as exemplified by Kane), by the turn of the twentieth century, fears of “overcivilization” creating effete men had made science a “suspect influence”.71 Explorers like Peary were to encapsulate a rugged, “muscular” manliness for which scientific achievement was less important than overcoming the effects of civilizational decadence on a hostile frontier.72 The manliness of Clark’s persona was in many respects closer to that of Kane, though also strongly characterized by physical vigour and adventure. It is clear that self-control was essential to Clark’s manliness. Rather than escaping the supposed effeminizing influences of modern civilization that would preoccupy Americans in subsequent decades, Clark styled himself as a bearer of civilization to the wild frontier. He would not tolerate lower standards of moral comportment even in such a milieu, as evidenced by his absolute ban on sex, alcohol, and swearing. The civilizational structures of New England were to be replicated in Hokkaido as quickly as possible, whether in the form of higher education or Christianity. Though it is impossible to be certain about his day-to-day dress from surviving records, the photograph of Clark, Hori, and the Ainu women and children strongly suggests that proper Western clothes were another aspect of the American East Coast civilization that Clark instilled in his new colonial setting. In this photograph, Clark’s suit—complete with tie, vest, and pocket watch chain—along with his stiff posture and severe expression are key props in the performance of his manliness and civilization, irrespective of context. In fact, it is striking how similar Clark appears in this colonial ethnographic photo to how he appears in a formal portrait taken in America (Fig. 1). Whereas his dress would have been unremarkable in his home context, it made him stick out and granted him authority in colonial Hokkaido, an authority that high-ranking Japanese men like Hori were keen to imitate as best they could. In other respects, Clark’s manliness was expressed through his decisiveness and ability to command loyalty in his subordinates. Clark’s environment was strongly homosocial, but it was not one of equals. Being
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“president” was crucial to Clark and, as we have seen, there was little that frustrated him more than having his authority questioned. Clark mitigated the possibility of appearing as a tyrant by cultivating a fatherly persona in which he performed the role of a benevolent patriarch. This role made it possible for him to both be a strong, stern leader, and an almost boyish companion (in snow fights, for example) depending on the situation. Clark’s leadership acumen and manliness were further expressed through the expeditions into the Hokkaido “wilderness” on which he led his students. Their aim was scientific and educational, but they also allowed Clark to draw on contemporaneous Western manly explorer tropes. In an important special issue of Osiris on scientific masculinities, Erika Milam and Robert Nye argue that “Professional success [in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries] required not only scientific acumen but in addition the ability to negotiate the gendered cultural norms of scientific society”.73 Indeed, Clark seems to have expected that his adventures on a distant frontier would enhance his manliness back in his Massachusetts home context. Nevertheless, while his lectures on his sojourn in Hokkaido drew large crowds and impressed many, his manly persona was still in various ways questioned and undermined after his return to the States.74
Departure and Failure to Readjust to American Life Clark’s stay in Hokkaido, while only ten months long, left a lasting impression on his students and arguably even the American-style refashioning of Hokkaido. Hokkaido was left with prominent Japanese Christians, as well as American-style farming techniques and architecture that continue to differentiate it from the rest of Japan to this day. Clark has been memorialized in Japan with statues, monuments, manga graphic novels, and a high school named in his honour. He is still a staple figure in Japanese history textbooks, and his supposed parting words to his students: “Boys, be ambitious!” both encapsulate the salient traits of his persona and have long served as an unofficial slogan for Hokkaido. In his home country, however, Clark has largely fallen into oblivion. Perhaps understandably, Clark had great difficulty adjusting to the limitations on his authority and persona imposed by his home context after enjoying so much freedom and success in Hokkaido. He appears to have been acutely aware of this himself and seems to have attempted to solve the problem by returning to Hokkaido. There are indications
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that Clark petitioned the Japanese authorities to return for another tour, but in vain.75 This has curiously been overlooked by Clark’s biographers, who, perhaps eager to perpetuate an (in their view) inspiring story of American-Japanese intercultural exchange, tend to emphasize the fact that the Kaitakushi originally had wanted to hire him for a longer period.76 The Kaitakushi’s decision not to rehire Clark may have been for purely economic reasons. Clark’s salary was considerably more than Wheeler’s or Penhallow’s and the Japanese government had just begun a campaign of trying to phase out expensive foreign advisors, which were eating up a not inconsiderable share of the national budget.77 It could also be, however, that his flamboyant persona was less popular with the Kaitakushi than with his students, his posthumous celebration by Japanese authorities notwithstanding. The burdens of office as president of MAC from which Clark had temporarily been able to escape returned with a vengeance as soon as he arrived back in Amherst. The college was in dire financial straits and attacks in the press continued, often pointing out what they considered to be his excessively high salary as a major source of the problems. Though clearly appreciative of many of Clark’s contributions to MAC and less sharp-tongued than his enemies in the press, even a special committee appointed by the college’s alumni association summarily criticized Clark’s management of the college.78 These difficulties would eventually lead to Clark’s resignation, but even before this took place, he had begun attempting to create yet another context for himself through the founding of a “floating college” that would take students on a round-the-world maritime tour, with him as president, of course. Again, the evidence is limited, but one can assume that the plan did not involve bringing along his family, leading one to wonder whether Clark’s longing for far-away adventures had something to do with his dissatisfaction with family life or longing for a male homosocial environment. The isolation of a ship in international waters would also presumably have given Clark almost total control over the circumstances under which he worked and fashioned his persona, even more so than Sapporo. We will never know, however, for Clark failed to raise sufficient funds for this project. The plan, which was not originally Clark’s but the brainchild of businessman James O. Woodruff, came remarkably close to succeeding, undoubtedly crushing Clark when it finally failed shortly after his resignation from MAC (in the understanding that he would be moving on to a more exciting position). At great expense and in the face of numerous
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legal hurdles, Woodruff had procured a ship and attracted extensive media attention and the support of a considerable segment of America’s financial elite. Though interest in the plan was to all appearances great, the project was enormously expensive and ultimately failed to attract the necessary number of full-paying students needed to cover its costs, announcing a long-term postponement of the voyage only weeks before the scheduled launch date. To make matters worse, soon after this initial setback, Woodruff died, leaving Clark alone at the helm of the floating college scheme. As his biographer John M. Maki has shown, the resurrected expedition’s itinerary and Clark’s letters to his Japanese friends indicate that he intended to use the maritime school to return to Japan and relive his glory days from Sapporo (although, curiously, he does not seem to have planned any stops in Hokkaido, only in Tokyo and other more southerly port cities).79 As with MAC, however, the financial difficulties of this college also seem to have ultimately proven insurmountable for Clark, who quietly gave up after several years of great expectations.80 In a dramatic turn, Clark subsequently gave up teaching and set off to strike it rich in the American West, employing his expertise in mineralogy. Using his charisma and what remained of his reputation in Amherst, he raised a large sum of capital for a publically-traded company that dealt in mining property and assets. Like the floating college scheme, his business venture initially prospered, with stock prices skyrocketing. Clark, clearly overjoyed, flaunted his new-found wealth. He now had another project that involved large doses of adventurous travel, in this case in the American West, although this time he brought along his wife on at least one occasion. After problems with the mine and revelations of mismanagement and of his partner’s past conviction of fraud, however, stock prices tumbled. Clark’s ill-conceived mining venture, for which he had raised funds among his family, friends, and former colleagues in Massachusetts, ended in bankruptcy and disgrace.81 A broken man, Clark died several years later back at his home in Amherst. The inflated persona that he had fashioned for himself in Hokkaido had proven untenable in an American context and in the face of harsh financial realities.
Conclusion Although importantly exposing the problematic power disparities and violence inherent to the colonial situation, classic postcolonial history has been accused by some historians of science for reproducing an inaccurate narrative of the (forcible) transplantation of Western science to the non-West. Instead, according to Kapil Raj, it is important to recognize
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that “scientific objects, techniques, nations, empires and national identities are co-constructed” in colonial contexts. “This shift in perspective allows one to see the colonial encounter as a locus of the emergence of certain types of knowledge which would not have appeared but for contingent circumstances”, he continues.82 Although Clark, during his brief sojourn in Northeast Asia, exercised his authority to shape his surrounding social context through a domineering persona that drew mainly from his American background, this chapter has argued that his persona and the academic, religious, political, and cultural imprint it left on Japan were not merely transplanted across the Pacific but were viable only in the unique context of 1870s colonial Hokkaido. Mineke Bosch defines scientific persona as “a (truly) embodied performance of scholarly or scientific identity that makes use of cultural and scientific repertoires of conduct in order to convince professional peers and the wider audience of the scholars’ or scientists’ reliability and credibility”.83 For Bosch, legitimacy in the eyes of other scientists is key to scientific persona, but in Clark’s case and in the case of many other scientists operating in colonial contexts, their audience was more often colonial administrators and local residents rather than “scientific peers”. As Bosch and other scholars of scientific persona have ably demonstrated, a scientist’s perceived credibility, even among his or her peers, is affected by many other repertoires or performances that are not inherently related to “science”, with masculinity being perhaps the most obvious example. The other sides of Clark’s persona that were so effective in Hokkaido but failed to win him the same legitimacy among the Massachusetts scientific and political elite were therefore not inherently alien to the fashioning of a scientific persona in a non-colonial, home context. In Clark’s case, however, the persona pieced together from these European and American elements in the context of 1870s Hokkaido proved untenable without its specific colonial power relations and social structure. Besides providing a particularly colourful example of a late-nineteenthcentury scientific persona, studying William Smith Clark is thus useful for reflecting on the dialectical relationship between performance and context in the creation of a persona. In colonial Hokkaido, whose social context was in the process of a dramatic transformation, Clark was accorded great freedom to fashion a persona that would enhance his authority. This persona, with its strong moral imperatives, various masculine attributes, Christian and American values, and emphasis on science, succeeded both in according Clark a position of influence and in shaping the evolving
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context of colonial Hokkaido. Clark drew on existing templates from his home context, including dramatic orator, scientist, missionary, white explorer, and benevolent patriarch, but combined these in a unique and uniquely effective way that accorded him a strong legacy, at least in Japan.
Notes 1. Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum, “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories,” Science in Context 16, no. 1/2 (2003): 3. 2. Kirsti Niskanen, Mineke Bosch and Kaat Wils, “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice—Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly and Artistic Identities,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 1. 3. Herman Paul, “Scholarly Personae: Repertoires and Performances of Academic Identity,” BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 5. 4. Herman Paul, “Sources of the Self: Scholarly Personae as Repertoires of Scholarly Selfhood,” BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 135. 5. See, for example, Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008). 6. See Richard Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan (London: Routledge, 1996); Michele M. Mason, Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan: Envisioning the Periphery and the Modern Nation-State (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 7. Mason, Dominant Narratives; Danika Medak-Saltzman, “Staging Empire: The Display and Erasure of Indigenous Peoples in Japanese and American Nation Building Projects (1860–1904) (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2008); John L. Hennessey, “Rule by Association: Japan in the Global Trans-Imperial Culture, 1868–1912” (PhD diss., Linnaeus University, 2018), part I. 8. Fumiko Fujita, American Pioneers and the Japanese Frontier: American Experts in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994). 9. In fact, the use of mercenaries as well as Europeans from other countries in colonial administration and even as ordinary settlers was far more common than the era’s neatly divided imperial world maps suggest. Leopold II’s Congo Free State was staffed by Europeans from a myriad of countries and the French légion étrangère are but two well-known examples of a larger trend. See, for example, the special issue on Sweden and Colonialism in Historisk tidskrift, fall 2020. 10. John L. Hennessey, “A Colonial Trans-Pacific Partnership: William Smith Clark, David Pearce Penhallow and Japanese Settler Colonialism
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11. 12.
13.
14.
15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
26. 27.
28. 29.
30. 31. 32.
in Hokkaido,” Settler Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/220 1473X.2019.1627697. Hennessey, “Rule by Association,” part I. The most comprehensive and widely-cited, if perhaps overly uncritical, biography is John M. Maki, A Yankee in Hokkaido: The Life of William Smith Clark (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002). See also Fujita, Amer¯ Y¯ ican Pioneers; Ota uz¯ o, Kur¯ aku no ichinen: Sapporo N¯ ogakk¯ o shodai ky¯ ot¯ o no Nihon taiken (Tokyo: Sh¯ owad¯o, 1979); and Watanabe Masao, Oyatoi gaikokujin kagaku ky¯ oshi (Tokyo: K¯ odansha 1976). Ruth Owen Jones, “Neighbor -- and friend -- and Bridegroom –: William Smith Clark as Emily Dickinson’s Master Figure,” The Emily Dickinson Journal 11, no. 2 (2002): 48–85. Miyabe Kingo, “William Smith Clark,” trans. George M. Rowland, ed. William Smith Clark II, unpublished manuscript dated 1922. William Smith Clark Papers (RG 003/1-1867). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Box 8:29; Watanabe, Oyatoi Gaikokujin, 302. Jones, “Neighbor,” 52. Miyabe, “William Smith Clark,” 4. Jones, “Neighbor,” 51. Clark to President Stearns of Amherst College, 21 December 1861, quoted in Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido, 60. Clark to his father, 20 February 1862, quoted in Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido, 63. Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido, 72. Ibid. These and other basic biographical details are based on Ibid. Miyabe, “William Smith Clark,” 1. Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido. Clark to Harriet Clark, 23 July 1876 in William Smith Clark, W.S. Clark’s Letters from Japan, ed. Takashi Kawabata, Naoki Ohnishi and Kimiyuki Nishide (Sapporo: Miyama Press, 1987), 12. Miyabe, “William Smith Clark,” 6. William Henry Bowker (1907), quoted in Takasaki Tetsur¯o, William Wheeler: A Young American Professor in Meiji Japan, trans. Kazue E. Campbell (Sapporo: Hokkaido University Press, 2009), 23. Ibid.; Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido, 100. “Clark’s salary for the year in Japan was 75 per cent more than the approximately $4000 he was receiving as president of MAC.” Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido, 132. Ibid., 124. Fujita, American Pioneers; Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido, 129. Jones, “Neighbor,” 57.
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33. Clark, W.S. Clark’s Letters. 34. William Wheeler to his mother, 26 June 1877; Fanny Wheeler (wife of William Wheeler) to Mrs. Wheeler (her mother-in-law), 22 June 1879, William Wheeler Papers (RG 002/3 W54). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst. 35. William Wheeler Papers; Takasaki, William Wheeler. 36. Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido, 148. 37. William Wheeler Papers. ¯ 38. Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido; Fujita, American Pioneers; Ota, Kur¯ aku no ichinen; Watanabe, Oyatoi gaikokujin. 39. Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido, 145. 40. Miyabe, “William Smith Clark,” 3. 41. This chapter presents Japanese names in the Japanese order, with the family name first. 42. Sat¯ o Sh¯ osuke, “Agriculture and its Development,” Amherst Record, 14 August 1878. Reproduced in William Smith Clark, Sat¯ o Sh¯ osuke and Uchida Kiyoshi, Kur¯ aku no tegami: Sapporo N¯ ogakk¯ o seito to no ¯ ofuku shokan, ed. Sat¯ o Masahiko, Naoki Onishi and Hideshi Seki (Sapporo: Hokkaid¯ o Shuppan Kikaku Center, 1985), 78–83. For a more detailed analysis, see Hennessey, “Rule by Association,” Chap. 4. 43. Sat¯ o, “Agriculture,” 78. 44. Ibid., 79, 82. 45. Hiroko Willcock, “Traditional Learning, Western Thought, and the Sapporo Agricultural College: A Case Study of Acculturation in Early Meiji Japan,” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (2000): 983–985; Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido, 224–225. 46. Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido, 173–174. 47. Sat¯ o Sh¯ osuke to Clark, 14 February 1878 in Clark, Sat¯o and Uchida, Kur¯ aku no tegami, 254. 48. Miyabe, “William Smith Clark,” 8. 49. Ibid., 7. 50. Ibid., 3. 51. Ibid., 7. 52. Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido, 174. 53. Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido, 144; Christy Anne Czerwien, “‘Boys be Ambitious!’: The Moral Philosophy of William Smith Clark and the Creation of the Sapporo Band” (B.A. thesis, West Texas A&M University, 2008), 6–7, http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/8244/. 54. Czerwien, “Boys Be Ambitious!”, Covenant reproduced on p. 54. 55. Ibid. 56. Miyabe, “William Smith Clark,” 10. 57. Ibid., 12.
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58. Clark to Uchida Kiyoshi, 9 October 1880 in in Clark, Sat¯ o and Uchida, Kur¯ aku no tegami, 216–218. 59. Miyabe, “William Smith Clark,” 3. 60. Ibid., 8. 61. Hennessey, “A Colonial Trans-Pacific Partnership.” 62. Christopher Frey, “Developing Education for Colonization in Meiji Japan: Americans and the Kaitakushi Tokyo Provisional School, 1872– 1875,” unpublished manuscript from 2017, Academia.edu, https://www. academia.edu/25242511/Developing_Education_for_Colonization_in_ Meiji_Japan_Americans_and_the_Kaitakushi_Tokyo_Provisional_School_ 1872-1875. Accessed 3 April 2017. 63. Willcock, “Traditional Learning,” 978–979. 64. “President Clark’s Address,” Amherst Record, 5 September 1877. 65. Hennessey, “A Colonial Trans-Pacific Partnership.” 66. See Yujin Yaguchi, “Remembering a more layered past in Hokkaido– Americans, Japanese, and the Ainu,” Japanese Journal of American Studies 11 (2000): 109–128. 67. Ibid., 117. 68. Hennessey, “Rule by Association,” 78. 69. John Hennessey, “Engineering Japanese Settler Colonialism in Hokkaido: A Postcolonial Reevaluation of William Wheeler’s Work for the Kaitakushi,” Asia in Focus 6 (July 2018), http://www.asiainfocus.dk/wpcontent/uploads/2018/07/AIF_ISSUE6_Final-Hennessey.pdf. 70. Michael Robinson, “Manliness and Exploration: The Discovery of the North Pole,” Osiris 30, no. 1 (2015): 89–109. 71. Ibid., 98. See also Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 72. Robinson, “Manliness and Exploration.” 73. Erika Lorraine Milam and Robert A. Nye, “An Introduction to Scientific Masculinities,” Osiris 30, no. 1 (2015): 9. 74. Amherst Record, 1 August 1877. 75. William Wheeler to his mother, 3 December 1877, William Wheeler Papers. 76. Fujita, American Pioneers; Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido, 129. 77. William Wheeler to his mother, 3 December 1877. William Wheeler Papers; Jones 1980, pp. 39, 42. 78. Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido, 219–235. 79. Maki, Yankee in Hokkaido, 240. 80. Ibid., Chap. 9. 81. Ibid., Chap. 10. 82. Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 93.
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83. Mineke Bosch, “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians: Explorations of a Concept,” BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 35.
References Primary Sources Amherst Record Clark, William Smith. W.S. Clark’s Letters from Japan. Edited by Takashi Kawabata, Naoki Ohnishi and Kimiyuki Nishide. Sapporo: Miyama Press, 1987. Clark, William Smith, Sat¯o Sh¯ osuke and Uchida Kiyoshi. Kur¯ aku no tegami: Sapporo N¯ ogakk¯ o seito to no ¯ ofuku shokan. Edited by Sat¯ o Masahiko, Naoki Onishi and Hideshi Seki. Sapporo: Hokkaid¯ o Shuppan Kikaku Center, 1985. Miyabe Kingo. William Smith Clark. Translated by George M. Rowland. Edited by William Smith Clark II. Unpublished manuscript dated 1922. William Smith Clark Papers, Box 8:29. William Smith Clark Papers (RG 003/1-1867). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. William Wheeler Papers (RG 002/3 W54). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Secondary Sources Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 . London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Bosch, Mineke. “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians: Explorations of a Concept.” BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54. Czerwien, Christy Anne. “‘Boys be Ambitious!’: The Moral Philosophy of William Smith Clark and the Creation of the Sapporo Band.” B.A. thesis, West Texas A&M University, 2008. http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/8244/. Daston, Lorraine and Sibum, H. Otto. “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories.” Science in Context 16, no. 1/2 (2003): 1–8. Frey, Christopher. “Developing Education for Colonization in Meiji Japan: Americans and the Kaitakushi Tokyo Provisional School, 1872–1875.” Unpublished article from 2017. Academia.edu. https://www.academia.edu/ 25242511/Developing_Education_for_Colonization_in_Meiji_Japan_Americ ans_and_the_Kaitakushi_Tokyo_Provisional_School_1872-1875. Accessed 3 April 2017.
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Fujita, Fumiko. American Pioneers and the Japanese Frontier: American Experts in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994. Hennessey, John L. “A Colonial Trans-Pacific Partnership: William Smith Clark, David Pearce Penhallow and Japanese Settler Colonialism in Hokkaido.” Settler Colonial Studies (2019). https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2019. 1627697. Hennessey, John L. “Engineering Japanese Settler Colonialism in Hokkaido: A Postcolonial Reevaluation of William Wheeler’s Work for the Kaitakushi.” Asia in Focus 6 (July, 2018). http://www.asiainfocus.dk/wp-content/uploads/ 2018/07/AIF_ISSUE6_Final-Hennessey.pdf. Hennessey, John L. “Rule by Association: Japan in the Global Trans-Imperial Culture, 1868–1912.” PhD diss., Linnaeus University, 2018. Jones, Ruth Owen. “‘Neighbor – and friend – and Bridegroom –’: William Smith Clark as Emily Dickinson’s Master Figure.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 11, no. 2 (2002): 48–85. Maki, John M. A Yankee in Hokkaido: The Life of William Smith Clark. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002. Mason, Michele M. Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan: Envisioning the Periphery and the Modern Nation-State. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Medak-Saltzman, Danika. “Staging Empire: The Display and Erasure of Indigenous Peoples in Japanese and American Nation Building Projects (1860– 1904).” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2008. Milam, Erika Lorraine and Nye, Robert A. “An Introduction to Scientific Masculinities.” Osiris 30, no. 1 (2015): 1–14. Niskanen, Kirsti, Bosch, Mineke, and Wils, Kaat. “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice—Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly and Artistic Identities.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 1–5. ¯ Y¯ Ota uz¯ o. Kur¯ aku no ichinen: Sapporo N¯ ogakk¯ o shodai ky¯ ot¯ o no Nihon taiken. Tokyo: Sh¯ owad¯o, 1979. Paul, Herman. “Scholarly Personae: Repertoires and Performances of Academic Identity.” BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 3–7. Paul, Herman. “Sources of the Self: Scholarly Personae as Repertoires of Scholarly Selfhood.” BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 135–154. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2008. Raj, Kapil. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Robinson, Michael. “Manliness and Exploration: The Discovery of the North Pole.” Osiris 30, no. 1 (2015): 89–109.
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Siddle, Richard. Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan. London: Routledge, 1996. Takasaki Tetsur¯ o. William Wheeler: A Young American Professor in Meiji Japan. Translated by Kazue E. Campbell. Sapporo: Hokkaido University Press, 2009. Watanabe Masao. Oyatoi gaikokujin kagaku ky¯ oshi. Tokyo: K¯ odansha, 1976. Willcock, Hiroko. “Traditional Learning, Western Thought, and the Sapporo Agricultural College: A Case Study of Acculturation in Early Meiji Japan.” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (2000): 977–1017. Yaguchi, Yujin. “Remembering a More Layered Past in Hokkaido–Americans, Japanese, and the Ainu.” Japanese Journal of American Studies 11 (2000): 109–128.
CHAPTER 4
Scholarly Persona Formation and Cultural Ambassadorship: Female Graduate Students Travelling Between Belgium and the United States Kaat Wils and Pieter Huistra
In February 1923, the Brussels physicist and secondary school teacher Alice Scouvart contacted one of the American staff members of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) Educational Foundation in Brussels to recommend a candidate for a fellowship for a year of graduate study in the United States. A former fellow herself, Scouvart had good contacts with staff member Millard Shaler. She explained that the candidate, Elisabeth Pissoort, doctor in medicine, had been a student of
K. Wils (B) KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] P. Huistra Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 K. Niskanen and M. J. Barany (eds.), Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7_4
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hers, “perfect on account of school work, behavior and power of will”. Scouvart continued in her less-than-perfect English: I think that Miss Pissoort is especially interesting because she is an orphan since early childhood, she took up medical studies from her own will. […] Alone in life, she does not know any lady next to her teachers and professors who can help her. […] I think that if she might have one year experience in an American hospital, she might have a greater chance when back here, to enter the medical career with hope of success… which is much more difficult here for a woman than a man, especially if she has few worldly acquaintances.1
In a post-scriptum, Scouvart added that Pissoort’s command of English was very good, as she had spent a whole year in England. Shaler carefully read Scouvart’s letter, marked a few passages and responded in a reassuring way. He was no formal member of the selection committee, but promised to do everything he could to help her candidacy. According to his judgement, the information that Scouvart had given was very much in the candidate’s favour.2 Shaler kept his promise. Pissoort received a scholarship and spent a year at Johns Hopkins University to specialize in Dermatology. She would not return to Belgium, but set up a practice in New York and become an American citizen. While it is difficult to assess how much Scouvart’s letter teaches us on the person of Pissoort, her letter does reveal something on the persona its author associated with a successful applicant. Besides the stress on behaviour, academic work, and language skills, Scouvart chose to point to the students’ background as an orphan lacking a supporting network to underline Pissoort’s independence and strong will. Her former teacher probably associated these qualities with the challenge of travelling to the United States and successfully performing a year of graduate study. Scouvart’s letter also informs us about the working of the scholarship programme. In taking the initiative to write Shaler (who in his very informal response reminded Scouvart of his wife’s wish to meet up soon), Scouvart unintentionally confirmed the importance of personal networks within the selection procedure. In addition, while she rightly pointed to the difficulties of women to gain access to male dominated professions, the correspondence reveals the space young female scientists seemed to have gained within this specific scholarship programme. Lastly, Scouvart’s letter attests to a perceived asymmetry between Belgium and the
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United States in terms of openness to female academically trained professionals. It also attests to the belief that having been in the United States would enhance a woman’s academic or professional opportunities afterwards in Belgium. These observations bring up larger questions. How was access to scientific travel regulated by this foundation, which functioned as a gatekeeper of transatlantic scientific travel? What qualities were needed to be selected as a fellow and in what ways were these qualities gendered? To what extent were travel experiences between Belgium and the United States shaped by the differing gendered academic cultures of both countries? These questions are at the heart of this contribution on the CRB Educational Foundation’s travel programme between Belgium and the United States during the interwar years. Our contribution focuses on women’s participation in the programme during the interwar years and on the role of gender in the ways in which the foundation constructed and enacted ideals of being a good fellow. Our research does not only aim to enrich the scholarship on the history of scholarly personae by systematically integrating gender as a category of analysis. We also hope to broaden current historical research on personae by taking an institutional perspective. Scholarly personae, or broadly shared epistemic ideals and bodily repertoires that are associated with good scholarship and that have to be performed in order to be recognized as a scholar, are situated somewhere between the individual and the institutional, as Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum stated in 2003 in a seminal article on “scientific persona” (which can be considered as a synonym of “scholarly persona”, as long as it also includes the social sciences and humanities).3 Subsequent work on the historiographical potential of the concept has also pointed to the role of external pressures, institutional policies, and the regulative ideals of social groups such as patrons or science administrators in the formation of personae.4 Much empirical research on the history of scholarly personae focuses on individual or collective biographical trajectories of scholars. Studies on different types of scholars have analysed the negotiations which persona formation entails from the scholar’s perspective, taking into account its social dimension informed by gender, class or ethnicity, disciplinary academic cultures or institutional pressures.5 Such studies, for sure, have also paid attention to scholarly personae as tools to understand (intra-)disciplinary identities or debates. In a similar vein, specific academic genres such as obituaries have been approached as battlegrounds
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for discussions on scholarly personae, taking a “middle-range position between the biographical and the social”.6 In our contribution, we will build upon this existing work, but we wish to add an extra layer to our understanding of persona formation by adopting an institutional perspective. So far, not many historians have explored this perspective, which looks at the way in which institutions such as funding agencies co-create personae by installing specific evaluative techniques and practices.7 In asking these questions, we come close to the study of today’s evaluative cultures, a burgeoning field within the sociology of knowledge. This type of research, which reminds historians of the continuing importance of informal rules and criteria in assessment practices, is, however, not primarily interested in questions of persona formation.8 The advent of new academic funding agencies and the expansion of travel grants in the early twentieth century constitute an interesting possibility to study persona formation from such an institutional perspective. Young scientists had to meet new demands, which had to be “invented” by new institutions that could (or could choose not to) rely on older repertoires and images of scholarship. Applying for grants, being judged by selection committees, and reporting on the scientific results of a stay abroad: these are all instances of a new regime of accountability where ideals on scholarly life were enacted and exchanged, in a context of increasing transnational contacts. As in most of academic life, women held a marginal position in most of these institutions. This was certainly the case for the CRB Educational Foundation during the interwar years. In what follows, we start with a brief presentation of the organization and the position of women in its interwar history. We then focus on the foundation’s policies of selection and surveillance of fellows. We subsequently turn to the fellows’ own experiences and relate them to the foundation’s construction of the persona of a fellow.
From War Relief to Belgian American Educational Foundation Founded in 1920 as a bilateral project, the CRB Educational Foundation constitutes a textbook case of what Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith in their recent study Global Exchanges, Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World have called the second wave of scholarship programmes.9 The first wave, starting in the 1860s,
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mainly consisted of unilateral, government-sponsored national, or empirebased travel programmes such as the Rhodes programme, paralleling the growing importance of strong and competing nation states and empires on the one hand and the professionalization of science on the other hand. The second wave, which arose in the 1910s, was of a quite different nature. In times of war, academic mobility came to be understood as a way to promote peace and international understanding. Paralleling a broader search for political and cultural infrastructures that allowed for international cooperation, the notions of reciprocity and exchange were introduced in scholarship programmes. Differently from before, the United States now started to play a prominent role in the field of scholarly exchange programmes, with philanthropic associations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation as main actors. These institutions invested in modelling post-war scientific practices and institutions in Western Europe on those in the United States, an effort that would be intensified after the Second World War.10 In the case of the CRB Educational Foundation, its wartime origins are obvious. After the First World War, the Commission for Relief in Belgium, that had provided humanitarian aid in occupied territory, disposed of a large amount of remaining funds. The two leaders of the relief programme, the later American President Herbert Hoover and the Belgian banker and entrepreneur Emile Francqui secured the remaining relief money and destined it for the development of higher education in Belgium. Two closely intertwined foundations were set up in 1920– 1921, each of which reflected the ambitions of their respective chairman. Francqui led the Brussels-based University Foundation, that was specifically geared towards the internal improvement of Belgium’s lagging higher education system. Hoover designed “his” foundation, which had offices in Brussels and New York, as “a memorial to American relief activities during the war” that would “build a permanent bridge of fine and high relationship” between Belgium and the United States.11 He chose to work with “former CRB men” rather than academics. Hallam Tuck and Millard Shaler, engineers just as Hoover who had participated in war relief activities, led the Brussels office. Perrin Galpin, who had volunteered for the relief work in Belgium while an exchange student from Rhodes in Oxford, staffed the New York office. The wartime origins of the educational programme remained explicit in its name until 1938, when the organization was renamed Belgian American Educational Foundation.
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While the stated goal of the Foundation was to stimulate intellectual exchanges between Belgium and the United States, the transatlantic exchange of students and scholars soon constituted its core activity. Between 1920 and 1940, 687 persons crossed the Atlantic to study, teach, or perform research with the support of the foundation.12 Most of the fellows were young scientists, thus maximizing the possibility of long-term effects of the exchange experience. For every American fellow travelling to Belgium, on average two Belgian students went to the United States. This had not been the initial plan of the foundation, but as no graduate programmes of study comparable to the American ones existed at Belgian universities, American interest in the exchange programme soon became more limited than on the Belgian side. The imbalance in participation also paralleled the foundation’s aim to rebuild Belgian academic life in a war-ruined country and its belief that American research universities with their much more extended staff and equipment, deserved emulation. The impact on Belgian academic life was indeed important. By 1938, fourteen per cent of the staff members at Belgian universities had been in the United States under the auspices of the foundation.13 The differences between American and Belgian universities and their respective reputations also reflected in the different distribution of academic disciplines within the exchange programme. Overall, during the interwar years, Belgians, more than Americans, travelled to specialize in medical and engineering sciences (52% of Belgians versus 13% of Americans). The percentage of Americans coming to Belgium to study social sciences and humanities was much higher than among Belgians going abroad (66 versus 28%). Only within the natural sciences, the share of students was almost equal. Belgians tended to travel to the United States to learn advanced techniques in medical and applied technical research, mostly in laboratories. Americans rather chose fields that were associated with “the old Continent”, such as French literature, art, and history. They often also came to work in libraries and archives that preserved unique documents. Less visible for contemporaries were the differences in participation by gender. The CRB Educational Foundation, which had an all-male executive management and board, did not include gender as a category in its own statistics. During the interwar years, about 20% of the American fellows were female. The women’s colleges Radcliffe and Mount Holyoke were among those 15 institutions that sent five or more students to
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Belgium in the course of the interwar years. Among the Belgian exchange students and scholars, only 10% were women, a percentage that included an all-female group of fifteen children’s health teachers.14 For the Belgian case, this is significantly lower than women’s share in university degrees in the same period, which corresponded to 17%.15 Moreover, women were absent from the most prestigious category of visiting professor, and almost absent from the category of visiting scientist. Women were clearly overrepresented in some non-regular and less prestigious categories such as honorary fellowships where no money was involved (and one could for instance accompany a partner who was paid), more practically oriented special fellowships in domains such as library science and social work, and in the group of 15 children’s health teachers. Patterns of female marginalization that have been described by Margaret Rossiter as “hierarchical discrimination”, a marginalization that grows with the prestige of the functions or awards at stake, were clearly at work.16 At the same time, however, the Foundation was concerned with women’s higher education. As early as 1921, Hoover had requested to examine the possibility to establish a women’s college in Belgium. The project soon foundered, probably due to a lack of interest on the Belgian side, where separate university education for women was unknown.17 Hoover’s idea to stimulate women’s higher education in Belgium nevertheless materialized two years later, when the foundation funded the purchase of a building in Brussels for a non-academic, professional college for women. Between 1928 and 1932, however, two similar requests to fund professional schools for women were turned down, with reference to the fact that they did not contribute to the intellectual exchanges between Belgium and the United States.18 By that time, indeed, the foundation focused almost exclusively on its scholarship programme. While the participation of women was not a central concern in its policies, the question was not absent, in the first place in debates on what fellows should ideally look like and how to select them.
Selecting the Ideal Fellow Finding the ideal fellow was a difficult task that aroused many doubts and discussions among the CRB officers. In 1930 Galpin reflected on that year’s selection procedure posing the quintessential question: “Just what are we trying to accomplish? […] Is it more valuable to work on intellectual relations of Belgium and the USA or on the bony structure
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of the embryonic ear?”19 Indeed, from its start in 1920, the exchange programme cherished a double aim: to stimulate scholarly education and research on the one hand, and to foster friendship between Belgium and the United States on the other hand. This meant that the ideal fellow was both an excellent student and a good ambassador. Financial support was preferably limited to those candidates who excelled in their specific domain of study and who prepared themselves for research, teaching, or other public service. While abroad, they had to act as good representatives of their country. Upon return, a lifelong task awaited them: Belgian fellows were for instance expected to “spread in Belgium the useful knowledge which they acquire in America in order to make use of their experience for the good of their country, and to develop close relations between Belgium and the United States”.20 Contemporary fellowship programmes also tried to reconcile different, sometimes opposing, demands to their fellows. Similarly to the ambitions of the CRB, the Rhodes fellowship programme as well as the French Albert Kahn Around the World travel programme stressed the importance of mutual cultural understanding as an important long-term aim of the scholarships they awarded. The resulting sex and gender exigencies differed completely, however. The Rhodes programme did not accept women as applicants until as late as 1977 and framed its prospective fellows as “capable leaders”. Since 1905, the Kahn programme had encouraged women to participate (albeit with the specific requirement that women had to travel in pairs of two).21 The Kahn programme recruited among (academically trained) secondary school teachers, which gave its aim of international understanding a different, less public, and less masculine meaning. When in the 1920s the International Federation for University Women set up its own, all-female fellowship programme, it explicitly chose to focus on strict scientific aims and criteria, and to exclude criteria related to personality or appearance. As Anna Cabanel has shown, this policy of promoting a disembodied type of scientific persona was part of a strategy aimed at overcoming long-standing bias against the alleged amateurism of female scholars.22 The CRB fellowship programme had no formal restrictions towards women. However, the language used by the foundation was consistently masculine—the category of “young men” was omnipresent in internal documents. The comprehensive profile of the ideal CRB fellow, including specific personality traits, also contained implicitly gendered connotations and thus shaped the possibilities for women. These connotations became
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manifest and sometimes explicit in the discussions on the admission of fellows. The need to make concrete decisions—which candidates qualified as suitable fellows?—resulted in ongoing discussions about the application procedure of the CRB, often opposing the Belgian and the American branch of the organization. A fellow’s application started with a four-page questionnaire. Alongside factual queries on the candidate’s education and the profession of her/his parents, the fellow was also expected to sketch her/his plans after completion of the stay abroad. The male gender of a normal CRB fellow was written into this questionnaire as well, through question 9 about the candidate’s marital status and follow-up questions on the fellow’s “wife”. The fellow had to supplement the questionnaire with letters of recommendation. The writers of these letters tried to live up to the CRB’s double expectations of scholarly excellence and ambassadorship. In 1921, for instance, an American candidate from the all-female liberal arts Smith College was praised as “a highly desirable representative of the American college woman in Belgium”.23 Former CRB visiting professor Henri Fredericq, professor of biochemistry in Liège, recommended his student Marcel Florkin because he possessed “to the highest degree all those qualities which arouse on the other side of the Atlantic a favorable opinion of the Belgian youth of our universities”.24 The recommendation letters also shed some light on the gendered nature of what was expected of a fellow. The overwhelming majority of male applicants were praised for their masculine virtues such as perseverance and strong will, as well as their professionalism. A 1937 recommendation letter on the medievalist Albert Lynd concluded in the following way: “He is (what would be called in the stock market) a good investment”.25 Female applicants were also qualified for their “excellent” or “interesting” academic results. At the same time, their social and moral qualities were highlighted more often. If, typically, in 1921 the engineer James Legrand received a recommendation from his Leuven professor Albert van Hecke for being “a very gifted boy, he works with method, regularity and already handles the English language very well”, then in 1925 the biologist Lenette Rogers was presented, among other things, as “pleasing in appearance and manner”.26 She was also praised as “a good mixer”, immediately followed by the conclusion: “So far as it is possible for a woman, she is the type that should accomplish much the sort of thing that you have mentioned as desirable in connection with these fellowships, through personal contact and impressions”.27
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Obviously, the recommendation letters were scripted, and to the frustration of the CRB, they did not always predict a fellow’s success. What appeared to be good fellows on paper, might not meet the CRB’s demands in practice. As Galpin wrote to Shaler in January 1924 about that year’s selection of fellows: “The quality of the men is uneven and one or two Belgians who do not play the game in America may injure the Foundation and Belgium”.28 Such disappointments led the CRB officials to adjust and rethink their selection procedure. This concern was certainly not unique to the CRB Educational Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation for instance experimented in the same period with different types of selection procedures, ranging from local selection committees that assessed applications to relying exclusively on its own American officers who regularly visited laboratories, searching for young talented researchers who could be directly granted a travel fellowship, without applications.29 The CRB would work out different solutions for the American and the Belgian side of the selection procedure. On the American side of the CRB, after two years of relying on the nomination of fellows by the participating universities, a fellowship Selection Committee consisting of professors and academic administrators was established. Throughout the interwar years, the composition of the committee would remain relatively stable. Occasionally, a Belgian visiting professor of the CRB Educational Foundation was added. As Belgian universities did not offer graduate study programmes, one of the main challenges of the American Selection Committee was to find candidates who were not merely looking for graduate course work, but who were also able to work independently. The yearly announcement soon included the requirement that a candidate “must be capable of independent study or research” and “must have definite plans for his proposed work in Belgium”.30 In Belgium, selection took place in a much more complicated constellation. The task of selecting the fellows was attributed to the academic members of the Board of the University Foundation. In the early 1920s, the Selection Committee consisted of seven members: Francqui, the University Foundation’s staff member Edouard Willems, a Brussels professor in medicine and university administrator, and the rectors of the four Belgian universities. They judged the applications of the CRB Educational Foundation and drew up a ranking of the candidates. Soon, however, the CRB officials became frustrated with the procedure, among others with what they perceived as particularist tendencies, each university
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(through its rector) trying to obtain as many fellowships as possible.31 That is why in 1923, in an attempt to exert more control over the rectors’ decisions, Shaler was added to the Belgian selection committee. In the same year, Shaler and Tuck started conducting interviews with each candidate, “not especially in connection with his studies, but particularly with regard to his individuality and his knowledge of English”.32 These interviews resulted in frank assessments, sent to the Selection Committee. They combined criteria as divergent as research mentality, research subject, written and oral English skills, equilibrium between the universities and personality. The stress on personality in interviews reveals a first tension between the CRB officials and the predominantly academic selection committees, concerning the ambassadorship of the fellows. According to Galpin, the Belgian university rectors gave too much weight to the academic results of the applicants and too little to “their character and personal presentability [sic] outside their purely academic attainments”.33 Similarly, in 1935, Shaler and Tuck voiced their concern about the American fellows who had been coming to Belgium: “We are not asking that candidates should be ‘good mixers’ but we do feel that they should be presentable and of the type we like to feel is representative of America”. And, remarkably, this specific quality was racialized: Shaler and Tuck related these observations to the fact that “we have been sending too many Jews”. From New York, Galpin offered a reassurance that confirmed the rather explicit anti-Semitism: there would be only one Jew in next year’s selection, even though, according to him, another candidate looked like one in his photograph.34 A second issue leading to tension—fellows’ disciplinary affiliation— brought gender issues to the surface. Unlike the Rockefeller Foundation, which strongly focused on the medical and social sciences in its European funding schemes, the CRB aspired to stimulate all disciplines.35 This ambition was hampered by the Brussels Selection Committee’s strong preference for technical, medical and economic disciplines—disciplines geared towards the “rebuilding” of Belgium.36 Illustrative is the rejection of literature student Germaine Collette’s request for a one-year extension of her stay at Stanford. Substantiating the committee’s negative decision in a note to Tuck and Shaler, Edouard Willems referred to Francqui’s wish to invest first in medicine and engineering, in the second place in business and only exceptionally in philosophy, philology, and law. The New York office was not amused. Galpin’s answer pointed to the gendered
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effects of this policy: “We do not feel it would be wise to exclude any good men or women. […] It also seemed likely that the new views of the Fondation Universitaire would tend to shut out Belgian women students from the benefits of the fellowship”.37 The fellowship was extended, but the University Foundation in the further discussion of the case did quite symptomatically not take up the issue of female access to fellowships. A third issue was whether fellows could bring their families. At the start of the exchange programme, it seemed clear that both aims of the foundation—stimulating science and fostering cultural diplomacy—were best served by young single scholars (most frequently imagined as men). Unhindered by material and emotional concerns, they were expected to devote themselves completely to their work on the one hand, and to social contacts with the local community on the other hand. The age-old monastic ideal of scholarship seemed to match well with the new ideal of cultural exchange. As early as October 1921, opinions between Brussels and New York started to diverge. At that time, Shaler and Tuck in Brussels complained about the American fellows accompanied by their wives and (on three occasions) children. They wrote that these fellows “cannot find time not only to do justice to their university studies, but to get any advantage from social contact with Belgians. Being older men they are less easily influenced and moulded by such contact”.38 Notwithstanding these concerns, the American side of the CRB would remain more family-friendly, also because advanced scholarships, and thus older fellows, became the norm on the American side of the programme. One effect of the decision to send families was that it allowed more chances for “collaborative couples” and thus for female scientists.39 In December 1929, for example, the American cytologist Thomas Weier wrote from Leuven: “Each day Mrs Weier goes with me to the laboratory to help in making microscopic preparations so that we may accomplish as much as possible in our short stay”.40 When in 1926–1927 the botanist Raymond Bouillenne and his wife, the chemist Marie Bouillenne-Walrand, managed to both obtain a fellowship to work at the University of Pennsylvania, Raymond explicitly referred to the advantages of staying abroad together: “Accompanied by Mrs. Bouillenne, I am living in Philadelphia as I did in Belgium. I enter, as a matter of fact, more deeply into the modus vivendi of American people than would have been possible, had I been alone in hotels or in boarding houses. We call on and receive at home our Professors and their wives and also other friends”.41
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In sum, the American officials of the CRB—also those residing in Brussels—showed a greater concern to stimulate women as possible fellows during the application and admission procedure than the Belgian rectors or the officials at the University Foundation. Returning to the case of Elisabeth Pissoort with which this article started, it is noteworthy that it was Shaler who wrote to Willems at the University Foundation: “I very much hope that she obtains her scholarship and I am all the more desirous of this in view of the fact that she is the only woman candidate this year. She is from all points of view, as far as personality, intelligence and her ability to understand English is concerned, much superior to a considerable percentage of the young men whom I have examined”.42 Pissoort received a scholarship indeed. To what extent did her and others’ actual travel experiences match the CRB’s expectation of the ideal fellow?
Experiences of Exchange The CRB made great efforts to make its fellows’ experience as rewarding as possible. First of all, this involved a lot of practical arrangements, such as booking the boat trip with Red Star Line between Antwerp and New York, helping out upon the fellows’ arrival and, in particular for female students, finding housing. After the travel, the CRB offered facilities and support to combat loneliness and forge a group feeling among fellows. On the Belgian side, the CRB Club House, located next to the office and offering a quiet room for studying and a living room with a collection of American newspapers and periodicals, was meant to function as an attractive meeting place for both American and former Belgian fellows. Alongside a yearly Thanksgiving dinner organized by the Brussels office, people who were close to the foundation, among whom the wives of Tuck and Shaler, regularly organized weekend excursions, lunches, or afternoon teas, in some cases specifically for the female fellows. On the American side, Galpin was a tireless host during the fellows’ first days in New York. He also encouraged the establishment of local CRB clubs, such as the one established in 1925 in Boston, to encourage meetings between Belgian and former American fellows. Actively following fellows during their stay abroad was as much an expression of the CRB’s genuine concern as it indicated the desire to control the fellows’ good behaviour. To ensure that grantees would act as ideal fellows—that is: showing diligence and respectability—the CRB relied upon reports produced both by its own officials and other
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observers, such as professors at host institutions. The CRB did not feel inhibited to report upon a whole range of topics, including rather personal ones. Just one example were the political preferences of Caroline Bourland, a professor in Spanish literature from Smith College who came to Belgium to do research on the teaching of Spanish in sixteenth-century Flanders. In New York, Galpin was suspicious of Bourland’s interest in the Spanish Civil War, and feared she might have fanatical loyalist, republican sympathies. Tuck and Shaler ensured him that, while Bourland was indeed open about her sympathies, she was a hard-working fellow who made an excellent impression everywhere.43 On another occasion, Galpin delved into the love life of the physicist Françoise Dony, who had become engaged with an American researcher. “Discreet inquiries” were made into the fiancé, who—to the foundation’s relief—appeared to be a “very estimable gentleman”.44 The gendered and racialized expectations of candidates before they obtained fellowships remained present in the CRB’s reports on actual fellows, albeit in varying degrees of explicitness. The chemist Lucy Pickett, for example, was judged negatively, not only because her French was unacceptably bad, but also because her personality was deemed too demanding and capricious.45 The Belgian student in social work, Georgette Furstenhoff who, in 1923, studied at Berkeley but had a negative experience with a traineeship, resulting in an early leave, was assessed in the following way by Galpin: “Her temperament injured her work. She was too sympathetic with the patients and wept over their troubles so that she was a nervous wreck at the end of that time and resigned from training. […] She is very enthusiastic about America and is in good hands. She is, however, extremely independent”—independence obviously being a problematic character trait in the light of reigning gender expectations as well as the CRB’s desire to control its fellows.46 The first African American recipient of CRB money was Francis Monroe Hammond, who received a Special Grant-in-Aid for his philosophy studies in Leuven. In a correspondence with the CRB, Hammond’s examination results were judged upon by one of his Leuven professors as “maybe very good if one assesses them from the perspective of the capacities of his race. From an absolute point of view, they are barely satisfactory”.47 If the CRB’s reports on its fellows were stamped by its expectations, the same was true for another source of information employed by the foundation: the reports written by fellows themselves. This practice of self-reporting was installed by the CRB to learn about the fellows’
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needs, observe, and control their activities, and to prepare future fellows. Prospective fellows were encouraged to read reports as a first introduction to the country and the university they would visit. By consequence, later fellows reproduced the observations of their predecessors, inducing a uniformity in these texts, which was reinforced by the strict CRB instructions for writing them. Reports had to cover the study or research programme, the specificities of the host university and the broader experience abroad. During the first years, specific questions were added that testified of the (perceived) asymmetrical relation between both countries. Fellows were asked to suggest, based on their experience abroad, reforms in the academic system in their home country. Belgians also had to explain in what way they hoped to spread “the knowledge and experience of American methods and thought” after their return.48 American fellows, on the contrary, were encouraged to report on the “principal failures of University organization in Belgium”.49 The rather explicit directions of the CRB also took in existing images and clichés about the Old and the New World: American fellows had to group their observations regarding Belgium under the heading “old countries”. No wonder, then, that the fellows’ reports on their transatlantic exchange show a standardized experience—as is so often the case with travel writing. American fellows were amazed by the richness in historical treasures and cultural life, but also by the absence of modern living comfort, especially with regard to bathing and heating facilities. They were also struck by what was perceived as an old-fashioned observance of courtesy and etiquette and a hierarchical social stratification, which explained why “our American manners, camaraderie, and frankness are at times misunderstood”.50 Belgian reports on American academia were much in line with how the fellows had been prepared by the CRB. The facilities of the American universities, the modern equipment of laboratories, and well-organized library collections deeply impressed the exchange students. The way scientists behaved and interacted was also something of a culture shock for the Belgians, who were not used to the democratic and collaborative atmosphere in research laboratories and other research settings. Used as they were to an academic culture based on hierarchical relations between a maître and his student, they were confronted with a different academic habitus.51 “Those very friendly and fairly intimate relations between students and professors is one of the things we lack in our Belgian institutions, where many professors do not even know the names of the men
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and girls they teach”, the linguist Irma De Jans observed after her stay at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.52 Exceptionally, the very positive renderings of the American teaching system were complemented by more sceptical notes. In 1923, Germaine Collette, a student of literature, reflected on the system in the following way, echoing broader anti-American cultural criticism: “On the whole I have the impression that the regular work imposed upon American students has a tendency to become mechanical. It is always very conscientious work but I am afraid it does not develop independence of taste and judgment as our system does”.53 The reports written by fellows testify to an experience whereby students compared and contrasted their own and another nation’s values and practices, confronted various preconceptions and national stereotypes, and articulated strengths and weaknesses of both countries. As has been argued by Whitney Walton in a study on educational travellers to and from the United States, this resulted in a revised sense of patriotism with an internationalist touch to it.54 This revised sense of patriotism was also one of the aims of the foundation. Students were expected to return to their country, to put what they had learned at the service of their nation and to function as ambassadors of their guest country. Judged by the vibrancy of its alumni association, the foundation seems to have been quite successful in attaining this goal, even when references to a shared war experience had quite soon lost their topical meaning for most fellows.55 While the fellows’ experiences often seemed to conform to the carefully crafted expectations of their funder, there were also limits to the extent to which the experience of exchange matched the existing scripts. Real-life experience could, obviously, deviate from theory. The very first reports by American female fellows were so frank and outright negative about Belgium, that the CRB introduced a system of double-entry bookkeeping: one confidential, “with straight-forward criticism of the arrangements made with respect to American fellows”, and one more public, “so as to create no social or administrative difficulties”.56 American disappointments focused, firstly, on the Belgian academic system. “The quality of the teaching made it preferable to read than to attend lectures”, a history student reported, while another fellow, a philosophy student, confessed that “on the whole the courses are neither as advanced nor as stimulating as I had hoped they might be”. A bacteriologist observed that there was no check on class attendance, no discussions, no quizzes or interactions with the professor. Notes on the course from the previous year were
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readily obtainable. “Such a system cannot help but lower the general average standard of scholarship of the student body”, she concluded, although she added that such a system, which placed the responsibility upon the initiative of the student, could bring out the best qualities in the exceptional student. A student in literature judged that the University of Brussels corresponded to a “distinctly poor undergraduate college in America”, while a law student concluded in the following way: “After careful consideration, I fear I cannot mention any features of the Belgian system that I think could be advantageously applied by the universities with which I am familiar in the US”.57 Not only the Belgian academic system hindered American female fellows to embody the ideal CRB fellow in practice. The other side of the desired persona, the ambassadorship, was equally hard to enact because of the nature of Belgian social and academic life. Especially Leuven provided social hardship to female students, as was exemplified by the case of Anne Hart. As an advanced student in medieval literature in 1920–1921, she had been among the first cohort of 39 students to be admitted to the Catholic University of Leuven. Her observation was quite blunt: “Any participation in the student life at Louvain was made difficult by the attitude of the men toward the women and impossible by the special reglement governing the young women”. Hart had only found out about the regulations a month after she had arrived. Contact between male and female students was virtually impossible. The presence of a nun at the meals of Hart and her Belgian and Russian fellow students in the dormitory was mandatory. Attendance at the early mass was compulsory. An innocent pastime such as “tea at a town pastry shop” was forbidden.58 In response to this situation, some women would decide, with the support of the CRB, to live in Brussels while studying in Leuven. This was the case for the aforementioned biologist Lenette Rogers, who in 1926 reported: “I find this arrangement infinitely more desirable than to live in Louvain [… ] where contacts are hard to make or maintain due to the great barriers between the men and women students. […] Life at Louvain for a woman would be very dull indeed, and if she is alone, inadvisable”.59 Exclusion of female fellows was probably gravest in Leuven but it was also part of the experience of fellows in Ghent and Brussels, where female students were admitted since the 1880s. Their observations seem to confirm what Carol Dyhouse noticed on the British universities: the presence of a minority group of women frequently served to underline rather than to undermine the norms of the dominant masculine culture.60
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The CRB fellows reported that it was difficult for women to make new acquaintances, to find housing, and that Belgian families were not inclined to host a female student on the same terms as they would a male student, without considering her as a lady-help. As Catherine Rich, the aforementioned student in bacteriology, wrote: “[Belgian society] places the American girl, especially, in a difficult position as few Belgians understand the freedom and independence that is part of her life”.61 Some male CRB fellows also reported on the difficult position of women. They encouraged the CRB to make special efforts to support them.62 The fact that the CRB quarters in Brussels offered attractive lodgings for single men but not for women, certainly added to this feeling. In 1928, these quarters even remained empty, as the male fellows were all accompanied by their wives, the literary scholar Harriet Moriarty did not fail to notice.63 After some years, however, experiences of American CRB fellows would become more positive. Belgian academics had been repeatedly instructed by the CRB to take care of their American guests in a more personal way, and this seemed to be bearing fruit. In response to the disappointment of the first generations of fellows on the Belgian course offer, the American fellowships were transformed into research-oriented Advanced Fellowships. In many cases, the research stays not only resulted in several co-publications with the Belgian supervisor, but also in more long-standing research collaborations.64 With a view to their social integration, fellows staying in Brussels were encouraged to take their lunches in the Club of the University Foundation, where they could meet Belgian academic staff members. The weekly Sunday afternoon gatherings at the CRB house, where a piano and an open fire were installed, were clearly also helpful in countering loneliness.65 From the start of the exchange programme, Belgian female fellows offered a more positive reading of their American experience. There clearly was no need to start with confidential reports on the Belgian side. Although female fellows were not very explicit about it, the existence of female spaces such as women’s colleges and women’s dormitories, or networks such as the American Association of College Women seem to have been experienced positively.66 The issue of lodgings for female students was also taken care of by the host universities in ways that were certainly unknown to Belgian fellows. Apart from the peculiar case of Leuven and a small Maison des Etudiantes in Brussels, specific facilities for female students or researchers did not exist in Belgium. Belgian fellows hence had to be introduced into the system. In 1921, for instance,
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Galpin wrote the following to the CRB office in Brussels concerning the aforementioned Irma De Jans, who had experience as a language teacher and held a doctorate in Germanic philology: “Please understand that we were most strongly advised by several different persons at the University, including the Dean of Women to take the room in the French House for Miss De Jans. The Dean stated that she will be associated almost entirely with young women of her own maturity and she will have happier relations and form a juster picture of American womanhood by entering the French House, rather than obtaining a room outside”.67 There was, however, exclusion in the United States as well. Marie-Thérèse Meuleman, medical doctor, learned that she could not become “House Officer” of the Boston Hospital, since there was no accommodation for women in the hospital.68 Marie-Thérèse Degard, another doctor who in 1937 hoped to acquire an additional degree in biology at the California Institute of Technology, was astonished to learn that this was not possible for women, although she had been able—partly thanks to interventions of the CRB—to do experimental work in several laboratories. This situation incited her to formulate some broader reflections on the situation of women at American universities: “In several universities women are not allowed. In others some professors are so hard on them that no women are able to go through to the doctor’s degree. As this is well-known, the girls choose their university accordingly. I thought that only happened in Europe. I was disappointed to notice that sort of thing in the United States in which in general women’s work is appreciated as much as men’s work”.69 In spite of the obvious differences in opportunities for academic women between Belgium and the United States, Degard’s explicit analysis was exceptional. The first generations of Belgian female fellows did not thematize gender in their reports. This was in line with the CRB’s demands, which did not touch upon gendered differences. When addressing future fellows in the early reports, female fellows resorted to the “he”-form, reinforcing the implicit idea that a “normal” fellow was male. This was also in line with the existing strongly masculine and hierarchical Belgian academic culture, which did not encourage female fellows to reflect on gender issues. As in other European countries, access to higher education and to liberal professions had been on the agenda of the first organized women’s movements since the 1880s, but this had not resulted in a collective visibility or self-consciousness of female university
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students before the First World War. Rather, the women’s reports testified of a concern not to attract attention as an individual—parallel to the broader tendency of many “first female students” since the late nineteenth century to keep a low profile. The transatlantic exchange experience did however sometimes invoke awareness of gender issues. Both the aforementioned Marie BouillenneWalrand, who travelled with her husband, and the chemist Marguerite Van Hauwaert noticed how much more female-friendly the United States were, in terms of education, travel, and social relations.70 They could also have referred to the fact that American women had won the vote in 1920, while Belgian women merely had acquired municipal suffrage. Aimée Racine, a student in commercial law at the University of Wisconsin, was very outspoken about the benefits of American society: “Another thing which I like is the equality, both legal and social which exists between the sexes. There are almost unlimited opportunities for women. Practically no field of business or science is closed to them. […] These conditions ought to be imitated in our country”.71 Even though these types of comments were scarce among Belgians, the Belgian fellows mirrored in their reflections on gender relations the experiences of their American counterparts. For women, the persona that the CRB constructed seemed more within reach in the United States than in Belgium, both in its scholarly and its social aspects.
Conclusion Private funding bodies such as the CRB Educational Foundation were relatively new scientific institutions in the interwar years. These funding agencies introduced new practices and demands to scientists, creating a scientific persona with obvious gendered connotations. In the case of the CRB, institutional persona formation took place in both explicit and implicit ways. Explicitly, as the CRB consisted of a group of men who actively tried to define and negotiate what type of scientists they wanted to support: candidates who were at the start of their careers and combined a good academic record with strong social skills, “personality”, and potential to act as an “ambassador”. More implicit were the effects of the CRB’s procedures. To obtain the fellowships from the CRB, young scientists needed to master genres that were quite new in the interwar years, such as grant applications and progress reports in which the fellows answered to funding bodies.
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Such instances of contact between the CRB and its fellows—filing an application, giving an interview to the selection committee, or writing a report—were performances. At these moments, the (prospective) fellows had to answer to what the CRB exacted from them—they had to enact a fundable fellow. These performances were one of many aspects of scientific work, but the number of occasions in which funding bodies played a significant role would consistently increase in the course of the century, which underlines the relevance of the analysis we presented in this contribution. As becomes clear from the CRB’s admission forms, reports, templates, and correspondence, these procedures were silently yet consistently framed in a gendered and racialized way: the default fellow was a white male. The implicitly masculine character of the persona propagated by the CRB was reflected in the participation of female scientists: their numbers were lower than might have been expected based on their relative share in the student population. While the CRB officials acted with a certain awareness of the difficulties female candidates and fellows encountered, the CRB’s Belgian partners did not share this awareness. All female candidates and fellows faced gendered inequalities and biases that existed both in the academic and the broader social world. Those inequalities were stronger in Belgium than in the United States. Belgian academia and the wider Belgian society proved a real hindrance to the possibility to enact the CRB’s desired persona. For the Belgian fellows travelling to the United States, however, the experience of living in a country with more opportunities for women could function as an enabler to inscribe themselves into the CRB’s persona of the scientist-ambassador, bringing home new visions on gender and society. More generally, even though fellows were expected to inscribe themselves into a “sexless” discourse, the exchange experience itself proved a powerful incentive to challenge that discourse, as became clear from the reflections and comments on gender relations by both American and Belgian female fellows. This challenging could also take on other forms, especially for the Belgian fellows, who might choose, as Elisabeth Pissoort did, to deny their prescribed role in the rebuilding of post-war Belgium and decide to start a medical practice in New York. As our analysis has suggested, institutional persona formation should be considered as an increasingly important element of twentieth-century science and its gendered character, but the divergent appropriations by groups and individuals of institution-made personae were as much part of this history.
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Notes 1. BBAEF, 1.2.1: Alice Scouvart to Millard K. Shaler, February 9, 1923. 2. BBAEF, 1.2.1: Shaler to Scouvart, February 15, 1923. 3. Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum, “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories,” Science in Context 16, no. 1–2 (2003): 2. 4. Herman Paul, “What Is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills and Desires,” History and Theory 53 (October 2014): 367–369; Gadi Algazi, “Exemplum and Wundertier: Three Concepts of the Scholarly Persona,” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 27; Kirsti Niskanen, Mineke Bosch and Kaat Wils, “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice—Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 2. 5. See, for instance, Mineke Bosch, “Scholarly Personae and TwentiethCentury Historians: Explorations of a Concept,” BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54. 6. Quotation Herman Paul, “Introduction: Scholarly Personae in the History of Orientalism, 1870–1930,” in Scholarly Personae in the History of Orientalism, 1870–1930, eds. Christiaan Engberts and Herman Paul (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2019), 6; See also Jeroen van Dongen and Herman Paul eds., Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and Humanities (Cham: Springer, 2017). 7. Pieter Huistra and Kaat Wils, “Fit to Travel. The Exchange Programme of the Belgian American Educational Foundation: An Institutional Perspective on Scientific Persona Formation (1920–1940),” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 112–134; Anna Cabanel, “‘How Excellent… for a Woman’? The Fellowship Programme of the International Federation of University Women in the Interwar Period,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1(2018): 88–102; Anna Cabanel, La fabrique d’une persona scientifique au féminin. The International Federation of University Women. Années 1920-années 1960 (unpublished PhD thesis, Universities of Leuven and Groningen, 2019). 8. See, for instance, the work in the wake of the influential study by Michèle Lamont, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Michael Ochsner, Sven E. Hug, and Hans-Dieter Daniel, eds. Research Assessment in the Humanities. Towards Criteria and Procedures (Cham: Springer, 2016). 9. Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith, “Introduction: A World of Exchanges,” in Global Exchanges, Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World, eds. Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018), 1–29.
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10. On the post-Second World War efforts, see for instance, John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 11. C.R.B. Educational Foundation, Inc. Annual Report for 1920 (New York, s.d.), 18, 19. Subsequent reference: Annual Report [year]. For a broader history of the origins and workings of the CRB Educational Foundation, see Liesbet Nys, Kenneth Bertrams and Kaat Wils, A Century of Transatlantic Scientific Exchange: The Belgian American Educational Foundation, 1920–2020 (Louvain: Leuven University Press, forthcoming). 12. All global numbers and percentages on the period 1920–1940 are based on Annual report 1939 and 1940, 9, 54–55, 72–74. 13. Annual Report 1937 , 8. 14. This calculation is based on the list of individual fellows that can be found in Renaud Bardez, A Companion to the Study of the Belgian American Educational Foundation (Unpublished inventory, 2018), 18–46, 181–194. 15. Andrée Despy-Meyer, “Les étudiantes dans les universités belges de 1880 à 1941,” Perspectives Universitaires 3, no. 1–2 (1986): 17–49. 16. Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, vol. 1: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 267–275. 17. Annual Report 1921 and 1922, 12; and BBAEF, 1.2.1: Memorandum of Discussion with Mr. Hoover, November 27, 1921. 18. Annual Report 1924, 6; BBAEF, 7.2.5 and 7.7.9. 19. Perrin C. Galpin to M.K. Shaler and W.H Tuck, February 14, 1930, quoted in Sara Coghe, Diplomaten en diploma’s. De ambities van de Commission for Relief in Belgium Educational Foundation en de ervaringen van haar fellows aan de Katholieke Universiteit van Leuven (1920–1940) (Unpublished master thesis KU Leuven, 2018), 22. 20. Annual Report 1920, 33. See, for the American side, for instance, Annual Report 1935, 11. 21. Tamson Pietsch and Meng-Hsuan Chou, “The Politics of Scholarly Exchange: Taking the Long View on the Rhodes Scholarships,” in Global Exchanges, Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World, eds. Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018), 41–42; Whitney Walton, Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad: France and the United States, 1890–1970 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 39–61. 22. Cabanel, “‘How Excellent,’” 94–100. 23. BBAEF, 2.2.2: W.A. Nilson to Perrin C. Galpin, recommending Abba Bowen, April 11, 1921. 24. Henri Fredericq to Millard K. Shaler, February 2, 1928, quoted in Huistra and Wils, “‘Fit to Travel,’” 128.
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25. BBAEF, 2.23.10: Lynn T. White to Perrin C. Galpin, recommending Albert Lynd, 15 November 1937. 26. “Un garçon fort bien doué, il travaille avec méthode, régularité et manie déjà fort bien la langue anglaise,” quoted in Coghe, Diplomaten, 58; Alma G. Stokey to Perrin C. Galpin, recommending Lenette Rogers, February 20, 1925, quoted in Coghe, Diplomaten, 58. 27. BBAEF, 2.8.6: University of Wisconsin Professor to Perrin C. Galpin, recommending Lenette Rogers, 1925. 28. BBAEF, 7.33.1: Letter from Perrin C. Galpin to Millard K. Shaler, January 6, 1924. 29. See, for instance, on the German social sciences selection committee: Judith Syga-Dubois, “Managing Scientific Exchange in Interwar Germany,” in Global Exchanges, Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World, eds. Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018), 113–126; on the policies of the Rockefellers’ officers in France in the biomedical sciences: Ludovic Tournès, “Le réseau des boursiers Rockefeller et la recomposition des savoirs biomédicaux en France (1920–1970),” French Historical Studies 29, no. 1 (2016): 77–107. 30. Annual Report 1924, 29. 31. See for instance BBAEF, 1.8.1: Letter from Perrin C. Galpin to the University Foundation, September 15, 1924; and BBAEF, 7.14.5: Memorandum—Suggestions on Selection of CRB Belgian Fellows, NY office, January 17, 1928, and letter from Millard K. Shaler to Perrin C. Galpin, May 1, 1929. 32. BBAEF, 1.2.3: Letter from Millard K. Shaler to Perrin C. Galpin, January 24, 1923. 33. BBAEF, 7.33.1: Letter from Perrin C. Galpin to Millard K. Shaler, January 6, 1924. 34. Letter from William Hallam Tuck and Millard K. Shaler to C. Galpin, June 21, 1935 (first quotation); Letter from Perrin C. Galpin to William Hallam Tuck and Millard K. Shaler, June 7, 1935 (second quotation). 35. See for instance Ludovic Tournès, “La fondation Rockefeller et la construction d’une politique des sciences sociales en France (1918– 1940),” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63, no. 6 (2008): 1371–1402. 36. BBAEF, 1.2.3: Note de M. le Dr. Héger sur la modification éventuelle du règlement des bourses Américaines, n.d. [following upon the board meeting of the University Foundation of February 29, 1923]. 37. BBAEF, 1.2.2: Letter from Edouard Willems to Millard K. Shaler and William Hallam Tuck, February 3, 1923, letter from Perrin C. Galpin to Shaler and Tuck, March 2, 1923 (quotation), and letter from Willems to Shaler and Tuck, March 5, 1923.
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38. BBAEF, 2.2.12: Letter from William Hallam Tuck and Millard K. Shaler to the office of the CRB Educational Foundation in New York, October 14, 1921. 39. On the concept and historical significance of ‘collaborative couples,’ see Annette Lykknes, Donald L. Opitz and Brigitte Van Tiggelen, eds. For Better or For Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences (Basel: Birckhäuser, 2012). 40. BBAEF, 5.2: Preliminary report by Thomas Weier, dated December 1929. 41. BBAEF, 5.6: Preliminary report by Raymond Bouillenne, dated December 1926. 42. BBAEF, 1.4.22: Letter from Millard K. Shaler to Edouard Willems, March 21, 1923. 43. BBAEF, 2.23.2: Letter from Perrin C. Galpin to William Hallam Tuck and Millard K. Shaler, December 28, 1938, and letter from Tuck and Shaler to Galpin, January 13, 1939. 44. BBAEF, 1.21.8: Letters from Perrin C. Galpin to CRB Brussels office, April 19 and May 3, 1932. 45. BBAEF, 2.24.1: Letter from Jacques van der Belen to Perrin C. Galpin, December 27, 1939. Van der Belen joined Tuck and Shaler in the Brussels CRB office in 1936. 46. BBAEF, 7.33.1: Memorandum. Trips of Secretary to visit Belgian Fellows in West, New York, February 21, 1924. 47. BBAEF, 2.24.4: Letter from Léon Noël to Jacques van der Belen, January 20, 1939. On the Hammond case, see also Coghe, Diplomaten en diploma’s, 63–65. 48. BBAEF, 1.2.1: Memorandum to all Belgian Fellows, 1921–1922. Final Reports. 49. BBAEF, 2.2.12: Questionnaire to serve as a guide to American fellows in preparing their reports, February 10, 1922. 50. Final report by Walter Marx, August 22, 1934, quoted by Coghe, Diplomaten en diploma’s, 52–53. 51. See also Tournès, “Le réseau des boursiers Rockefeller,” 91. 52. BBAEF, 5.4: Final report Irma De Jans, July 1922. 53. BBAEF, 5.4: Preliminary report Collette Germaine, dated June 1923. 54. Whitney Walton, “Internationalism, Travel Writing, and Franco-American Educational Travel, 1898–1939,” in Crossing the Atlantic: Travel and Travel Writing in Modern Times, eds. Thomas Adam and Nils Roemer (Arlington: Texas University Press, 2011), 58. 55. As of 1929, the Belgian CRB alumni had their own journal Bulletin du Cercle des Alumni de la Fondation Universitaire. 56. BBAEF, 2.2.12: Questionnaire to serve as a guide to American fellows in preparing their reports, February 10, 1922.
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57. BBAEF, 2.1.14: Final report Amos Wilder, June 18, 1921 (first quotation); BBAEF, 2.2.10: Preliminary report Catherine Rich, December 17, 1921 (second quotation); BBAEF, 2.3.1: Preliminary report Florence Dixon, undated [January/February, 1922] (third quotation); BBAEF, 2.4.3: Preliminary report Clara Marburg, February 24, 1922 (fourth quotation); and BBAEF, 2.2.1: Preliminary report Eleanor Allen, December 11, 1921 (fifth quotation). 58. BBAEF, 2.1.5: Final report Anne B.G. Hart, July 1921. 59. BBAEF, 5.6: Preliminary report Lenette Rogers, December 1926. 60. Carol Dyhouse, “The British Federation of University Women and the Status of Women in Universities, 1907–1939,” Women’s History Review 4, no. 4 (1995): 470. 61. BBAEF, 2.3.1: Preliminary report Florence Dixon, undated [January/February, 1922]. 62. See for instance BBAEF, 5.2: Final report Leland Goodrich, April 5, 1925; Preliminary report Gray Cowan Boyce, January 1926. 63. BBAEF, 5.2: Preliminary report Harriet Moriarty, December 1928. 64. See, for instance, the final report of the pharmacologist Keith Grimson on his work in Ghent with Professor Corneille Heymans, September 2, 1939 (Stanford, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, CRB Educational Foundation Collection, Box 4, Folder 3). 65. See, for instance, BBAEF, 5.2: Preliminary report Mary Sherrill, December 3, 1928; Preliminary report Maurice Chazin, December 1929; Preliminary report Ruth Mary Reed, December 1929; Final report Ruth Mary Reed, August 1931. 66. BBAEF, 5.5: Preliminary report Elsa Claes, January 1925 and Final report Elsa Claes, 15 June 1925 (on how living in a dormitory had facilitated her social integration); BBAEF, 5.4: Final report Georgette Furstenhoff, June 1923 (on her regular participation in the meetings of the Association of College Women in San Francisco). 67. BBAEF, 1.3.7: Letter of Perrin Galpin to the CRB Office in Brussels, August 4, 1921. 68. BBAEF, 1.5.15: Letter of Marie-Thérèse Meuleman to Perrin C. Galpin, April 20, 1924; Letter of Perrin C. Galpin to CRB Office Brussels, May 5, 1924. 69. BBAEF, 5.10: Final report Marie-Thérèse Degard, July 30, 1937. 70. BBAEF, 1.9.5: Preliminary report Marie Bouillenne-Walrand, August 21, 1927; BBAEF 5.2: Preliminary report Marguerite Van Hauwaert, February 1932. 71. BBAEF, 1.7.8: Preliminary report Aimée Racine, January 23, 1926.
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Bibliography Archives Brussels, Archive of the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BBAEF). Stanford, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, CRB Educational Foundation Collection.
Published works Bosch, Mineke. “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians: Explorations of a Concecpt.” BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54. Cabanel, Anna. “‘How Excellent… for a Woman’? The Fellowship Programme of the International Federation of University Women in the Interwar Period.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 88–102. Cabanel, Anna. La fabrique d’une persona scientifique au féminin. The International Federation of University Women. Années 1920-années 1960. Unpublished PhD thesis, Universities of Leuven and Groningen, 2019. Coghe, Sara. Diplomaten en diploma’s. De ambities van de Commission for Relief in Belgium Educational Foundation en de ervaringen van haar fellows aan de Katholieke Universiteit van Leuven (1920–1940). Unpublished master thesis KU Leuven, 2018. C.R.B. Educational Foundation, Inc. Annual Report (New York, s.d.) [1920– 1940]. Daston, Lorraine and Sibum, H. Otto “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories.” Science in Context 16, no. 1–2 (2003): 1–8. Despy-Meyer, Andrée. “Les étudiantes dans les universités belges de 1880 à 1941.” Perspectives Universitaires 3, no. 1–2 (1986): 17–49. Dyhouse, Carol. “The British Federation of University Women and the Status of Women in Universities, 1907–1939.” Women’s History Review 4, no. 4 (1995): 465–485. Gadi, Algazi. “Exemplum and Wundertier: Three Concepts of the Scholarly Persona.” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 8–32. Huistra, Pieter and Wils, Kaat. “Fit to Travel. The Exchange Programme of the Belgian American Educational Foundation: An Institutional Perspective on Scientific Persona Formation (1920–1940).” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 112–134. Krige, John. American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Lamont, Michèle. How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
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Lykknes, Annette, Opitz, Donald L., and Van Tiggelen, Brigitte eds. For Better or For Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences, Basel: Birckhäuser, 2012. Niskanen, Kirsti, Bosch, Mineke and Wils, Kaat. “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice—Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 1–5. Nys, Liesbet, Bertrams, Kenneth and Wils, Kaat. A Century of Transatlantic Scientific Exchange. The Belgian American Educational Foundation, 1920–2020. Louvain: Leuven University Press, forthcoming. Ochsner, Michael, Hug, Sven E., and Hans-Dieter Daniel eds. Research Assessment in the Humanities. Towards Criteria and Procedures. Cham: Springer, Cham, 2016. Paul, Herman. “What Is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills and Desires.” History and Theory 53 (October 2014): 348–371. Paul, Herman. “Introduction: Scholarly Personae in the History of Orientalism, 1870–1930.” In Scholarly Personae in the History of Orientalism, 1870-1930, edited by Christiaan Engberts and Herman Paul, 1–16. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2019. Pietsch, Tamson and Chou, Meng-Hsuan. “The Politics of Scholarly Exchange. Taking the Long View on the Rhodes Scholarships.” In Global Exchanges, Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World, edited by Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith 33–64. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018. Rossiter, Margaret W. Women Scientists in America, vol. 1: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Syga-Dubois, Judith. “Managing Scientific Exchange in Interwar Germany.” In Global Exchanges, Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World, edited by Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith, 113–126. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018. Tournès, Ludovic. “La fondation Rockefeller et la construction d’une politique des sciences sociales en France (1918–1940).” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63, no. 6 (2008): 1371–1402. Tournès, Ludovic. “Le réseau des boursiers Rockefeller et la recomposition des savoirs biomédicaux en France (1920–1970).” French Historical Studies 29, no. 1 (2016): 77–107. Tournès, Ludovic and Scott-Smith, Giles. “Introduction. A World of Exchanges.” In Global Exchanges, Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World, edited by Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith, 1–29. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018. Van Dongen, Jeroen and Paul, Herman eds. Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and Humanities. Cham: Springer, 2017.
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Walton, Whitney. Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad: France and the United States, 1890–1970. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Walton, Whitney. “Internationalism, Travel Writing, and Franco-American Educational Travel, 1898–1939.” In Crossing the Atlantic: Travel and Travel Writing in Modern Times, edited by Thomas Adam and Nils Roemer, 50–78. Arlington: Texas University Press, 2011.
CHAPTER 5
A Woman in a “Man Made World”: Erzsébet Kol (1897–1980) Anna Cabanel
Introduction Laureate of an international fellowship funded by the International Federation of University Women (IFUW) in 1935, Erzsébet Kol (1897–1980), a Hungarian botanist and specialist of snow and ice algae, extended her field of expertise to a new continent. Her journey took her from American cities and universities on the east coast of the United States to the snowfields and glaciers of Alaska. As Kol was organizing her expedition to Alaska, she asked the persons in charge of the US National Park Service the authorization to use the Rangers’ cabins during her fieldwork. She later recalled, “I asked the US Forestry Service if I might stay in the Rangers’ cabins in some of the national parks. Sometimes there are no inns and in a tent my apparat might rust. The gentleman told to me that the Rangers do not have their families with them. He thought it would not be suitable for me to stay in their cabins. But I explained to him–you see, he did not understand–that I am a university woman.”1
A. Cabanel (B) University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands © The Author(s) 2021 K. Niskanen and M. J. Barany (eds.), Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7_5
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Faced with their reluctance to comply with her request, as they perceived the cabins as an unsuitable environment for a woman, Kol had to remind them she was a ‘university woman.’ Underlining the word ‘university’ in the letter she then sent to the IFUW committee, she explicitly claimed the persona conveyed by the organization, acting as one of its representatives. This episode raises interesting questions on the construction and embodiment of a persona—here the one of ‘university woman’—at the individual level. In recent developments in the history and philosophy of science, scholars have started to pay greater attention to the analysis of a collective and cultural image of the scientist, using the analytical prism of persona.2 Between the individual and the institutional, personae function as ideals and models that one has to perform to be recognized as a scientist. As historians have shown, both embodiment and performance play an important role in the scientific persona formation.3 As such, the concept makes for an interesting tool with which to research the link between performance, scientific authority, and legitimate knowledge. In line with this growing body of literature, the present chapter studies the link between the identity of scientists (specifically, but not limited to their sex), their credibility as scientists, and the conditions for the recognition of their work. Bringing together the biographical and the institutional perspectives, it aims to contribute to the discussion on the influence of scientific organizations that acted as funding bodies on the construction and promotion of scientific personae. As Kol was one of the IFUW fellows, her example allows investigating the interactive dynamics at stake in the formation process of scientific personae, in-between the personal, individual strategies and the collective and institutional ones. The chapter thus examines how individuals, who won a fellowship, mobilize and mixed (existing) scientific repertoires to gain visibility and recognition in the scientific and academic communities. Using the scientific trajectory of Kol as a case study, this chapter does not aim to be merely biographical but to reflect on the way female scientists constructed their persona in constant negotiation with different contexts, whether they were cultural, geographical, institutional, or disciplinary. Kol’s example raises interest in the gendered component of scientific credibility and the conflicts that can arise between sometimes culturally opposed scientific identities. The analysis of Kol’s trajectory relies on different sources, both biographical and more institutional: her regular reports to the IFUW, her
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correspondence not only with the IFUW board but also with other scientists and scientific institutions, her scientific papers on snow and ice algae, and, last but not least, her autobiographical narrative of her year abroad, entitled Tiszaparttól Alaszkáig (from Tizsapart to Alaska).4 Although reports and correspondences for other (IFUW) fellows are available, Kol’s autobiographical narrative on her year abroad is an exceptional source. As Tournès and Scott-Smith point out, the description of the actual time of the scholarship, from the grantee’s archives, paradoxically constitutes “a blind spot in the history of scholarship programs.”5 The analysis of Kol’s testimonies can contribute to filling this gap, giving useful insights into the fellows’ international experience, and in which way they use it to promote themselves as scientists.
The Scientific Ambitions of the International Federation of University Women: Exchange, Travel, and Fellowships Although the existence of female academic networks goes back to the late nineteenth century, the foundation of the International Federation of University Women in the aftermath of the First World War formalized the international ambitions of graduated women. For the first time in history, members of existing networks from the United States and Great Britain joined forces to create an organization capable of bringing together scientific and scholarly women from all over the world. As defined by the first article of its constitution in 1920, the IFUW’s goals were both scientific and internationalist. The organization aimed to “promote understanding and friendship between the university women of the nations of the world, and thereby to further their interests and develop between their countries sympathy and mutual helpfulness.”6 From the beginning, the IFUW shared the other international women’s organizations’ ideals to enhance the place and role of women on the international stage, but its focus was solely on the ‘university women’—that is, women who had obtained a degree from a university. In her study of three major women’s organizations at the beginning of the twentieth century, Leila Rupp notes that the argument of the single-sex membership was based on an ideology of difference, based on either biological or cultural factors.7 Although some individuals questioned the very existence of a difference between sexes, this idea remained
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marginal at that time. That women have specific qualities—such as the promotion of peace—or that they share common experiences, such as motherhood, subordination to men, or even violence, remains the chief argument of separatist movements and their collective identity relied on a feminine identity. Even though the IFUW members did not support a strong separatist vision and actively promoted a cooperation between men and women, the single-sex dimension served their strategies: to counter discriminations against women and to give them a chance to take part in the international academic and scientific worlds. As Virginia Gildersleeve, one of the founders of the IFUW, pointed out at the 4th IFUW International Conference held in 1926 in Amsterdam: We are still living in a ‘man made world’, and in this world we must conquer our place and our right […]. The general interest is the sum of the interest of men and women and it is only then really and truly general when both are taken equally into account.8
The development of the IFUW also responded to structural changes affecting the scientific and academic scene at that period. The emergence of international funding bodies, especially in connection with the American philanthropy, contributed to change the scale of academic exchanges and mobility but also of scientific practices.9 Funding scientists to conduct research abroad became a common practice, and at the same time, the capability of receiving international funding and having experiences abroad functioned as a proof of scientific excellence for individuals.10 While funding bodies became a cornerstone of the scientific world in the twentieth century, they seemed to have strengthened the gendered imbalance in science and academia, as very few women obtained such funding and research opportunities.11 To overcome this gendered discrimination, academic women’s networks developed their own fellowship programmes to support women’s scientific research and academic careers.12 In the early 1920s, the IFUW members created an international fellowship programme specially designed to enable women to continue their research in a foreign country for a period of at least one year, and during the interwar years, they awarded nearly fifty scholarships to young graduates and senior researchers in the realms of science and art from over fifteen different countries.13 While the IFUW’s leading members explicitly defended the project of an international fellowship programme by and for women to offset the
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low proportion of women as fellowship recipients in other programmes, the attention they devoted to the selection process also demonstrates that they were conscious of a more insidious discrimination at work within scientific funding. Not only did funding bodies provide scholars with the means to conduct their research but also actively took part in shaping new types of scientific identities and ideals through the selection of the ‘best’ fellows. Consequently, by awarding merely male researchers, funding bodies such as the Rockefeller Foundation contributed to promote a masculine ideal of the scientist. Interestingly, while the hegemonic ideal—represented by the scientist (or academic) that was unmarked by its male gender—served as the normative model, the persona of the ‘university woman’ was not a reduced version of this general ideal. Although the IFUW members did not call themselves feminists, they never erased the gendered dimension of their identity, quite the contrary. As the term ‘university woman’ shows, they fully embraced their identity as women and as academics. The IFUW functioning is similar, to a certain extent, to other organizations that were organized around ethnic or religious identities—the United Negro College Fund created in 1944, for instance, explicitly aimed to promote African Americans in the US higher education system.14 Even though the ideal type of fellow defined in the IFUW discourses was based on both scientific and internationalist arguments, the persona shaped during the IFUW evaluation and selection procedure relied almost exclusively on scientific considerations. By selecting the fellows in the most rigorous way possible, on the sole basis of their intellectual capacities and research, the IFUW leaders emphasized the elitist and meritocratic dimension of the organization’s fellowship programme. They consciously ignored considerations of another nature, such as personality traits, personal circumstances, or the appearance of candidates, to overcome prejudices that hinder the recognition of female scientists. By doing so, and advertising it publicly, their aim was to place their laureates on an equal footing with fellows from other recognized funding bodies.15 In 1935, the IFUW offered two fellowships: an IFUW Senior Fellowship, restricted to candidates over the age of 30 and conducting research in Arts, and a Crusade Fellowship, which was open to all candidates, regardless of age or scientific topic.16 Twenty-three candidates from fifteen countries applied to the Crusade Fellowship, representing research projects in a wide spectrum of disciplines—the largest group, among which Erzsébet Kol, being in biology and botany.
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The 1935 International Federation of University Women’s Laureate ‘From Tizsapart to Alaska’ The access to education for Hungarian women followed the Western timeline: around the mid-nineteenth century women obtained the right to secondary education and, under pressure of feminist groups, the curriculum gradually evolved. It was no longer aimed solely at educating future mothers and wives, but instead at granting women access to university. The relationship between feminists and university education explains this evolution: a majority of Hungarian feminist activists were university graduates—especially activists from the Jewish community who represented half of the female student population in Budapest at the very beginning of the twentieth century.17 Unfortunately, very little information is available concerning the history of the Hungarian Association of University Women, but it is likely that connections existed between its members and the Hungarian feminist movements. Born in 1897, Kol grew up in Kolozsvár, a university city in Hungary. Following the First World War and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the region fell under Romanian domination, and the Royal University of Franz Joseph moved to Budapest before being relocated in Szeged (1921–1941).18 In 1921, Kol completed her studies in biology at the Franz Joseph University and began her first research at the university’s General Institute of Botany, where she defended her doctoral thesis in botany four years later. For her research, she visited various laboratories and biological stations in Europe before becoming a ‘Privat Dozent’ in botany at the University of Szeged in 1932.19 Although Kol already belonged to a certain elite of Hungarian women, her scientific and academic career prospects remained limited within her home country. Based on a survey conducted by the Hungarian Association of University Women and published in the IFUW Bulletin in 1936, only nineteen women held a position in academia in the 1930s in Hungary and none of them had reached the rank of professor yet.20 Encouraged by the president of the Hungarian Association, Kol applied to the Crusade Fellowship at the age of 38.21 Her research proposal comprised the extension of her previous research on microvegetation of the snowfields and glaciers of Europe to the high mountain
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regions of North America. Through the comparison of the samples gathered in two different continents, her aim was to “find interesting and important conclusions […] with reference to the distribution of life on the surface on earth and with regard to the theories about the two continents forming a supra continent.”22 As the minutes of the IFUW Award Committee reveal, Kol appeared both as a “promising candidate” who would “benefit more from the opportunity of research in another country” than her direct competitor, a Canadian botanist named Hunter who the selectors considered as “already almost too much of a specialist.”23 The selection of Kol as the fellow for 1935 must be understood in the light of the IFUW’s ambitions and the general context. The IFUW selectors were eager to select the ‘best’ fellow, and Kol met most of their expectations: she had already published about thirty scientific papers, not only in Hungarian but also in French and German. Her proficiency in foreign languages, her travels in Europe, and her contacts with European scientists made her not only a suitable applicant for an international grant but also a good candidate to embody the internationalist ideals promoted by the IFUW. Kol’s scientific journey started in the spring of 1936. On 10 March 1936, she left Europe on the board of the Lloyd and arrived in New York seven days later. The members of the local branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) arranged her stay at the Barnard College, which was “the best and biggest accommodation for international women,” as Kol recalled in her memoirs.24 After spending the first two months working in the libraries of the city and meeting American botanists, she left for Washington D.C. to present her final study plan to the AAUW members. Conscious of the costs that an expedition to Alaska would entail, she applied for additional funding to extend her research to Alaska and managed to secure a grant of $700 awarded by the Smithsonian Institution.25 Waiting for the summer, the ideal season for her fieldwork, she stopped in several cities on her way to meet other botanists, work in laboratories, and visit institutions. In Ann Arbor, she worked with the Professor W. Randolph Taylor—who was familiar with her topic—at the botanical laboratory of the University of Michigan. All along her trip, as was the case in New York and Washington D.C., the AAUW facilitated her stay and contacts with locals. Her fieldwork eventually started in June, throughout what she poetically calls “the America of snow and ice,” from the mountains of Colorado to Yellowstone National Park and the Glacier National
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Fig. 5.1 Erzsébet Kol’s route throughout Alaska, 1936 (AAUW, “Kol”)
Park.26 Through her book, she gives a vivid description of her experiences and impressions, and details of her scientific discoveries. At the beginning of July, she left Seattle to study the flora of the glaciers and snowfields of Alaska, following the itinerary shown on the Fig. 5.1. In September 1936, as the first snow put an end to her research, she started her journey back to the cities of the East Coast, and at the end of October, she eventually left ‘the New World’ for Hungary, spending a few weeks in London to study her samples of snow and ice algae. A Decisive Step? Upon her return to Hungary, Kol’s career took a new turn. Previously ‘Privat Dozent,’ she got a permanent position as an assistant professor at the University of Szeged in 1937, becoming one of the very first women
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to obtain such a position at a Hungarian university. In the report she sent to the organization in 1938, Kol dedicated part of her academic recognition to the scholarship she had received from the American branch of the IFUW: I am really glad to have received this fellowship, not only because it gave me an opportunity to see many of the beauties of America and to carry on my studies on another continent, but because the results of these studies have aided me to receive a permanent post in the botanical department of Ferenc József University in Szeged from the Hungarian Government.27
This rhetoric is common in the fellows’ reports.28 Without overestimating the impact of the fellowship in an individual’s scientific path, a few elements show that Kol’s career benefited from her stay abroad. She expanded her network, conserving close connection with some scientists she met during her stay in the United States, such as Professor Taylor with whom she maintained a regular correspondence throughout her life. During her stay in Crosby Hall (the international clubhouse of the IFUW in London), she met two other female botanists conducting research on algae thanks to a Crosby Hall Residential Fellowship supported by the British Federation of University Women: the South-African Mary Pocock and the New Zealander Elizabeth Flint.29 The publication of an article on green algae in Antarctica citing Flint and Kol as co-authors in 1968 proves that they stayed in contact and collaborated.30 In terms of scientific outputs, her stay abroad also proved to be beneficial. Her research outcomes have resulted in publications in American scientific journals. According to Wynne, her work on snow and ice algae in North America and the comparison with those in Europe led her to construct a new classification of the Kryo-organisms based on their preferred environment.31 This led her to establish the silicotrophiccalcitrophic theory stating that “the composition of the algal floras was correlated with the PH of meltwater” and explaining the different colours taken by the snow.32 Erzsébet Kol remained active and stayed particularly prolific in terms of scientific publications, describing new species, travelling, or receiving samples from different parts of the world, and she was particularly proud of having “the largest algae collection of the world.”33 Although her theories would later be disputed by other scientists, in 1963 an alga was named Koliella, in recognition of her work and scientific contribution.
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In Kol’s own words, her journey across North America played a key role in her career, providing her with a wealth of opportunities in terms of research, encounters and collaborations, recognition, and career development. She is not an isolated example as underlined in the prosopographical study of IFUW fellows between 1924 and 1945.34 For many of them, the research fellowship played a crucial role in their careers and the expression of their scientific expertise and credibility. The number of women who got academic positions is remarkable (15 of the 58 fellows became professors), but we might keep in mind that the group considered is small and duly selected among the cultural elites of their time. Although it would be illusory to judge the IFUW fellowship programme in terms of failure or success by referring only to the fellow’s careers, this high success rate validates the strategies of the selection and award committee and the legitimacy of the persona ‘university woman.’ If the reception of a fellowship seems to have constituted a decisive step in many women’s careers, a deeper analysis of Kol’s scientific journey, however, makes it possible to evaluate how the gendered component of the persona ‘university woman’ was negotiated in different contexts and the impact it had on Kol’s performance of scientific credibility. Her case sheds light on the hybrid nature of a scientific persona, in constant negotiation between sometimes conflicting scientific repertoires, foremost for a woman in a ‘man made world.’
Bricolage and Negotiations: Conflicting Scientific Ideals As historians have noted, the creation of scientific personae often results in a bricolage of scientific repertoires, embodied by individuals and recognized by the community.35 The aim here is thus to study how female fellows used their experience abroad to negotiate their identity as a scientist. The in-depth analysis of written sources, such as Kol’s reports, her autobiographical narrative Tiszaparttól Alaszkáig, and photographs, reveals how Kol navigates her identity, borrowing patterns of different scientific repertoires.
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From the Snow and Ice Fields to the Laboratory: Scientific Practices, Virtues, and Personae Fieldwork occupied an important part of Kol’s scientific work, especially during her stay in the United States. As seen in the previous section, she devoted much of her time observing and collecting specimens of snow and ice algae in the remote parts of North America. In many respects, Kol corresponds to the ‘type’ of the field biologist or field scientist.36 In recent years, historians have increasingly paid attention to the physical places where science is carried on and to the virtues and ethos associated with those.37 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the laboratory began to take a dominant place in science, carrying out ideals of placelessness and objectivity. Introducing this new place, as Kohler framed it, contributed to create the field as a cultural category, that is ‘not-lab,’ leaving field scientists at a disadvantage.38 Whereas lab-workers were clearly identified as professional scientists, the identity of field scientists was more ambiguous, as the field itself was open to more than one type of social category: in the field, scientists, sportsmen, and vacationers mixed and mingled more easily than in the well-defined space of the laboratory.39 The dichotomy between the field and the laboratory, and the practices associated with them, however, is less clear than it first appears. The growing lack of legitimacy associated with the field forced its practitioners to adapt and even adopt behaviours more directly identifiable as scientific, that is ‘lab-like.’40 While traditionally field scientists devoted an important part to the description of the itinerary in their narratives and articles as a proof of authenticity, they gradually adopted the codes of laboratory scientists. Dropping out marks of subjectivity in favour of the use of passive voice and abstraction functioned as a strategy to gain scientific credibility.41 The comparison of Kol’s prose in her autobiographical narrative and in her scientific articles reveals the botanist’s different literary strategies. Whereas with Tiszaparttól Alaszkáig, Kol aimed to popularize and share her experience with the Hungarian readers, using detailed and long descriptions, she gave very little place to the report of her itinerary in her scientific publications. This, however, did not aim to diminish the importance of the field. In her scientific articles, Kol highlighted the necessity of carrying out scientific research in the field:
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The development cycle of the snow inhabiting organisms is not exactly known, nor do we even know what role these organisms play in the biological cycle of areas covered by snow or ice… Therefore, it has been necessary to conduct in the field such investigations, because the organisms could not be cultivated in warm lowland laboratories…42
This remark, far from being insignificant, allowed Kol to legitimize the figure of the field scientist, by highlighting the importance of the natural environment in scientific experiments. The plea for studying nature ‘in nature’ became a way to legitimate the social category of the professional field scientist.43 Kol described glaciers, for instance, as “high-mountain laboratories,” an expression commonly used by field scientists of her time that deliberately blurred the frontiers between field and lab as places of science.44 This legitimization of the field scientist, which involved the adoption of practices and ideals linked to the laboratory domain, was more of syncretism than assimilation. The scientists in question borrowed methods from both the laboratory and the field, inventing a hybrid scientific persona that reconciles ideals previously perceived as antinomic. Kol’s narrative strategies reflect this hybrid dimension. Whenever possible, she combined her research trip with a visit to biological stations. As such stations did not yet exist in Alaska, Kol still conducted lab-like research, carrying her microscope on her glacier excursions. As she wrote in her final report to the IFUW: “Taking my microscope with me, I climbed to the snowfields and glaciers, and here I studied the microorganisms of the red snow.”45 In her article published in the Smithsonian Institution’s journal, she again underlined how she brought lab-practices into the field. “I also made microscopic examinations on the spot as frequently as possible,” she wrote, “and always brought back living material in thermos bottles to be worked on later in camp.”46 Either from the biological stations or on the field, Kol continued to perform her dual identity, combining laboratory and field practices, collecting and analysing snow and ice algae (Fig. 5.2). The photograph above was taken during her expedition to the slopes of Mount Rainier in Washington State in July 1936 and published in Tiszaparttól Alaszkáig. Kol appears as a field scientist dressed in clothing adapted to the conditions in which she was travelling (and which one, at the time, would consider more masculine than feminine). The apparent disorder of the rocky massif is in fact a very convincing scene: a tongue
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Fig. 5.2 Portrait of Erzsébet Kol on the Mount Rainier, 1936 (Kol, Tiszapartt´ol, 273)
of snow occupies the background—Kol was measuring its level—the biologist uses the boulder in the foreground as a work table; careful observation allows us to distinguish a box probably intended for taking samples and a microscope. Discreetly smiling, Kol takes the pose of the researcher bent over her object. Scientists working in the field commonly used these types of photographs to prove their legitimacy and credibility. Back in Hungary, Kol sent AAUW members a photograph taken in her laboratory. In the photograph below [Fig. 5.3], the decor and clothing have changed completely. She no longer appears as a field biologist but
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Fig. 5.3 Erzsébet Kol in her biological laboratory, university of Szeged, Hungary, circa 1937 (AAUW, “Kol.”)
has adopted the characteristics of the lab-scientist. She poses in her laboratory at the University of Szeged, dressed in a white coat, surrounded by her collection, and getting ready to take one of the samples of snow and ice algae. Much more than illustrations, these two portraits are visual performances, intended to guarantee both the authenticity of the botanist as a field scientist and her credibility as a laboratory biologist in an
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academic setting. Moreover, they show how Kol contributed to reconcile two worlds perceived as antinomic (the laboratory and the field) through the transformation of the latter into the former to legitimize it. While adopting the laboratory’s code par excellence—the long white blouse—a detail in the second photo is worth noting: Kol is wearing a pair of polished shoes with heels. Was it because of a lack of attention or the result of a conscious choice? The fact remains that these shoes are enough to show the expression of a femininity that has conquered the male cultural space of the laboratory and invite us to examine the way Kol negotiated the expression of this femininity in different cultural contexts. A Gendered Tale? Gender, Exploration, and (Dis)Embodiment Places in science, such as the laboratory and the field, are historically and culturally gendered because of their close association with specific skills and virtues that appeal to a certain idea of masculinity and virility.47 Robert Kohler highlighted the gendered component of the field while studying the participation of women in biological excursions between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.48 When women took part in such expeditions, they did so as wives, daughters, or assistants to biologists; they may have collected specimens or made sketches, and even co-wrote scientific papers. As field observation increasingly became a scientific career in its own right, however, it consequently relegated women on the field—but also men without formal training—to the position of amateurs. The degree of masculinity attached to the scientific field showed wide variations. In the first half of the twentieth century, the fringes of the civilized world and the wilderness, like the poles, required specific qualities embodied by the masculine ideal of the naturalist explorer.49 While laboratory workers were attached to ideals of self-effacement, to produce a somehow disembodied knowledge, the physicality of individual experiences still occupied a crucial place in the persona of professional field scientists. Strength, endurance, physical discomfort, and suffering functioned as proof of credibility.50 Working in the field, notes de Bont, “was systematically presented as an adventurous undertaking.”51 The adoption of the explorer’s repertoire by scientists was common and exploration became a “metaphor for scientific investigation,” scientifically, but also physically and emotionally.52 American Arctic explorers, braving danger at the risk of their lives, offered one of the most popular embodiments of this
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male ideal of the period. As Michael Robinson points out, women were involved in this process. As fervent writers and readers of this exploration genre, women “have shaped the ideas and practices of manly exploration” constructing the image of the heroic scientific explorers.53 Under the pen of the poet Elsa Barker, for instance, the scientist Robert Peary (1856– 1920) came to embody the ideal of the explorer, a virile and muscular hero who faced one of the most extreme and yet unconquered regions represented: the North Pole. Given the extreme nature of Kol’s research field, it is interesting to study the ways she negotiated her identity both as a woman and as a field scientist conducting research in a highly (culturally) gendered place. As seen in the previous point, Kol adopted a rather dry prose in her scientific publications, giving more importance to her scientific undertakings and results than to the more sensational aspects of her expedition. In her autobiography Tiszaparttól Alaszkáig and in her reports, however, she used rather different narrative strategies, using characteristic patterns of the exploration genre. She deploys lyrical prose—the chapter titles are often poetic and colourful—and content that is both educational and scientific. The remarkable character of her work lies in the fact that Kol portrays herself as a scientific heroine. By highlighting the rudimentary and dangerous aspect of her expedition in Alaska, she appropriated the codes of the adventurous explorer. Her description of the trip by boat from Seattle to Alaska, via Vancouver Island, surrounded by a thick fog, contributed to create an epic atmosphere along her journey.54 Travelling from the Kennecott mines to the coast side, she recalled the interior of Alaska as an “uninhabited territory” across which “the bus or car runs for hours and hours without passing any sign of civilization except an occasional road-house or fox-farm or Indian villages.”55 She gave a detailed description of the dangerous roads that crossed the proglacial rivers by means of “wooden bridges without any wall or railing and badly in need of repair,” standing at the end of the bridge “a poster to be seen with the words ‘This bridge is unsafe.’”56 While emphasizing the adventurous nature of her journey, in conformity with the genre of the scientific exploration, explicit references to the physical and emotional experience are remarkably absent. Unlike polar exploration narratives, Kol did not use military terms to describe her journey—the image of the scientist-explorers conquering nature was common in this genre—nor did she gender the field by associating nature with feminine attributes. Despite her physical presence in the field,
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Kol seems to conceal her corporeal existence, to overcome prejudices and appropriate scientific and cultural ideals and repertoires traditionally associated with a certain form of virility. However, the gendered dimension is far from absent from her narrative. Several anecdotes aim to point out, always with a certain degree of derision, the discrimination she endured, linked to her sex, and the gendered stereotypes that prevailed in the field. As she prepared for her expedition to Alaska from the AAUW headquarters in Washington D.C., the reactions of some Smithsonian Institution researchers reveal characteristically gendered attitudes. Aleš Hrdliˇcka, Czech anthropologist and first curator of the natural history museum at the Smithsonian Institute, for instance, promptly discouraged her to go to Alaska. Returning from an expedition to the northernmost territory of the United States, he described the place as terribly hostile and infested with mosquitoes, a place from which she was likely to return “only barely alive” to which she replied: “We won’t know until I get there.”57 That she chose to publish this exchange reveals her willingness to show her readers the irony of the situation. Allusions to mosquitoes, wild beasts, or many extreme conditions were commonplace in exploration literature, emphasizing the heroic or Spartan character of those who dare to venture into inhospitable lands. Because of their supposed fragility, women were perceived as physically unsuitable for such conditions, as shown by the warning of Hrdliˇcka. Kol’s meeting with US National Park Service officials also revealed persistent prejudices about the possibility of women going into the field. In the quotation at the start of this chapter, the presence of a woman in a men’s environment (the Ranger cabins) seemed incongruous to them. By asserting her identity as a (female) academic and by underlining this second term, Kol intended to clarify that only her ‘second’ body should matter in the field: not her physical body as a woman, but her symbolic, asexual body as a scientist. The two portraits presented earlier, one taken in the ‘extreme’ field and the other in Kol’s Hungarian laboratory, serve as an expression of the conquest of space and of ‘masculine’ scientific practices by a woman. The importance that she seems to attach to these portraits—whether she includes them in her scientific articles, in her travel narrative, or uses them as personal publicity by sending them to various institutions— confers a performative dimension to the photographs. The background, the posture, gestures, and clothing are elements that convey a form of scientific credibility and legitimacy to female scientists. The portrait of
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Kol on Mount Rainier [Fig. 5.2] shows, for instance, how female scientists had to negotiate and transcend existing gender boundaries and to some extent step into men’s shoes—although not literally. Her example is not unique: there are many portraits of female scientists showing their quiet conquest of scientific spaces and practices. One can think of the portrait of another international grantee of the IFUW, the Australian geologist Germaine Joplin. One of her portraits pictures her during a field trip in Australia in the 1930s. Joplin is posing against a rocky background, wearing a trench coat, and a hat decorated with a flowery border, a hammer in her right hand, and a notebook in her left: woman and scientist. Both Kol and Joplin, while not displaying a vindicated femininity, did not hide it. While the persona of the field scientist, linked to the male body and heroic, was culturally opposed to the expression of ‘women’s nature,’ Kol shows that their opposition was culturally constructed but that in reality they are perfectly reconcilable. This shows how images and the use of artefacts play a central role in the expression of a scientific persona. Joplin, for instance, posed with a hammer and others holding or posed next to a scientific tool linked to their own research.58 A portrait taken by Randolph Taylor during Kol’s stay in Ann Arbor in the spring of 1936 depicts the Hungarian biologist sitting at a desk in the university’s botany department where, under Taylor’s supervision, she studies the latter’s seaweed collection.59 Unlike the other two portraits, this photograph does not appear to have been used for public purposes. The botanist is sitting at a desk covered with papers and notes, her right hand resting on a microscope. The microscope refers par excellence to the professional biologist: the depiction of scientists using or placed near a microscope became increasingly popular at the turn of the twentieth century, reflecting the experimental turn— symbolized by the microscope—in many sciences, including botany.60 Instead of wearing a white lab-coat [Fig. 5.3], she wore a very feminine blouse, whose motifs and embroidery are directly reminiscent of Hungary, the presence of the microscope ensuring Kol’s scientific identity. This recognizable national pattern in Kol’s clothing invites us to reflect on another site of negotiation: How did the international scholarship holders negotiate their identity, at the crossroads of different national contexts?
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International Expertise: The Foreigner and the Public Intellectual International contacts and exchanges have a direct influence on the perception of the fellowship holders. As Michael Barany rightly notes, travel and circulation alter the identity of a person who, far from remaining “singular and coherent,” has to negotiate and deploy multiple faces according to different national and/or institutional contexts.61 As foreigners and as women in a male-dominated world, female fellows confronted a double otherness. Their status as foreigners may have created unprecedented opportunities for female scientists who, destined to return home at the end of their fellowship, did not appear as direct competitors in the host country’s labour market. Precisely because she was a foreigner, Kol was often considered as an exceptional scholar, frequently receiving special treatment designed to make her stay in the United States easier and productive. But travelling women generally had to face more difficulties than male fellows. In this context, the support of networks of female graduates played a crucial role in the success of women’s scientific journey as many IFUW fellows have emphasized in their reports. As the fellowships were temporary, the international experience had a specific goal: to enable fellowship recipients to use their new knowledge to the benefit of their country. This idea of circulation was central in the IFUW and other funding bodies’ policies.62 Throughout her writing, Kol underlines how she used her international expertise to promote the scientific advancement of Hungary. Her new international stature allows Kol not only to share what was being done in the United States but also to take a fresh look at her own country, adopting a reflective stance thanks to the hindsight gained during her time abroad. A typical example is the passage she devotes in the foreword of Tiszaparttól Alaszkáig to the need for national parks: they serve both, she asserts, to protect “original nature” and to “ensure its posterity,” while educating the people and strengthening within them, through the natural beauties of the country, a national sense of belonging and pride.63 From her experience at American universities, she also emphasized the importance of the biological stations in educating students. According to her, students should not observe nature in a classroom but in its natural environment, following the example of American universities:
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Our universities would also benefit from having biological stations. They would give students the opportunity to familiarize with the fauna and flora surrounding them. The realization of such stations not only depends on pecuniary resources […]. It is mainly a question of having determination.64
Kol did not limit her remarks to the field of science and education but covered other aspects of American society and customs. Throughout her book, she mentions the gendered division of labour, the relationship between students and teachers, and the impact of household appliances on the lives of American women, always bringing in comparison with Hungary. Her encounters with African American populations and Native American Indian peoples made a great impression on her and she repeatedly engaged in a quasi-ethnological and ethnographic study of these groups that were “unusual to the European eye.”65 Although well aware of the prejudices women had to face because of their gender, one can see how the race component, though mainly unmarked, also plays a crucial role in the definition of a scientist’s persona. Even though she was a foreigner, Kol identified with the white population of the United States and distanced herself from other ethnic categories. It is interesting to note that all the IFUW fellows during the interwar years were white (except for an Indian chemist, Kamala Bhagwat) and belonged to educated and rather wealthy social classes.66 Kol’s remarks in her book reflect the role of cultural intermediary or translator, in the linguistic but also social or national sense, that fellowship holders had to play between their native country and the host country.67 When Kathryn McHale, then the AAUW Executive Director, wrote in 1936 to the Smithsonian Institution to support Kol’s application, she insisted on this internationalist dimension. The additional grant, she wrote, “will contribute greatly not only to the development of scientific knowledge but also to the establishment of better international relations.”68 However, one must avoid a naïve interpretation which would presuppose that international circulations transcend cultural and national differences. On multiple occasions, Kol identified herself as a “Hungarian representative” and adopted a nationalist tone that did not escape the AAUW’s notice. As noted in an AAUW confidential report: “At headquarters we get Christmas cards from Dr. Kol, which always carry some nationalistic sentiments. Sometimes she has sent cards with coloured maps showing the territory lost by Hungary after the last war.”69
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The preceding remarks, proposals, and, to a certain extent, the expression of nationalist sentiment testify how Kol adopted the position of public intellectual in her country. If it remains difficult to measure her influence in Hungary, there is no coincidence that the Hungarian Botanical Society commissioned Kol to write a book about her journey in North America. In 1940, the same year the book was published, she was appointed professor of botany at the University of Szeged. Although the circumstances of her appointment are not clear, the interest of the Hungarian scientific community in Kol’s international experience and stature is undeniable.
An Incarnation of the University Women? Self-fashioning and Collective Strategies Adopting a biographical perspective provides a better understanding of how female fellows used their fellowships and their experience abroad to build their scientific identity and academic career. Yet, the case of Erzsébet Kol illustrates more than an individual trajectory. As wrote Steven Shapin in his biography of Robert Boyle: Identity at once belongs to an individual and to the collectivities of which that individual is a part… While Boyle systematically made himself available as a pattern, his effective constitution into a template for others’ emulation was a collective enterprise.70
Stepping out of the individual’s time is important: as an IFUW fellowship holder, Kol was consciously part of a collective dynamic, as the publication of her autobiography testifies. At the intersection between individual strategies and collective ones, the aim of this last part is to reposition Kol’s journey within the collective strategy and to highlight the interactions at stake in her promotion as a model for female scientists. How did Kol come to incarnate an ideal type, a successful scientific persona for women, in her own writings and in the IFUW and AAUW commemorative practices? Kol actively took on the role of both IFUW representative and spokesperson for female academics. She used Tiszaparttól Alaszkáig to publicly defend and promote her vision of the role and place of female scientists in modern societies. Being an IFUW fellowship holder, she especially stressed the importance of fellowships for women. Dedicating one
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chapter of her memoirs to the history of the AAUW and IFUW, Kol highlighted the university’s women’s movement. The former laureate pointed out the multiple positive consequences of the support offered to female scientists by research grants: this applied not only to the recipient but also to women and the good of society in general as it raises the intellectual level of the nation. Mobilizing arguments of both a universal and patriotic nature, the researcher called on countries all over the world— foremost Hungary—to take part in the financing of fellowships, to give more women the opportunity to complete their studies or research work. Considering she also obtained financial support from the Smithsonian Institution, that she highlighted the IFUW fellowship programme in her book reveals her willingness to act as spokesperson for the latter organization. Kol used her memoirs to set an example for female scientists. She recounts anecdotes and memories that are part of a rhetorical strategy designed to make her embody a model of scientific success for women. One anecdote she recounted from her stay in Ann Arbor offers a good example of this strategy. Invited to a student party at the Ann Arbor university housing, she remembered the Dean introducing her as “an example to follow as a woman, who has gone alone to the new world to conduct independent scientific research.”71 A note kept in the AAUW archives, which reports Kol’s words during her interview with the American branch’s executive committee, reflects Kol’s ambitions and intention: You see, I must do a good piece of work–so good that the men scientists will recognize it. Then they will see that a woman can really be a scientist. Then it will be easier for all women who wish to be scientists in my country.72
Attempting to measure the actual role of Kol in the promotion and recognition of women in the Hungarian scientific and academic community is a challenge. Nevertheless, her ‘programme’ of excellence reveals how the process of exemplification depends in part on the fellowship holders themselves. In presenting herself as a role model and as a representative of university women, Kol pursued a strategy both personal and collective, defending her interests and promoting those of IFUW members and of all female scientists.
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The construction and promotion of Kol as a model simultaneously served and resulted from collective strategies. In 1937, the AAUW published a booklet presenting a selection of national and international laureates who had received one of the AAUW fellowships, including Kol. To be part of this select group was an honour. As the book’s foreword points out, this sample of awardees “should demonstrate the merits and success of the fellowship programme by showing the results the awardees have achieved in terms of scientific achievement and the advancement of women around the world.”73 A Mexican physician who came to the United States to specialize in gynaecology at Johns Hopkins University Medical School in 1934 appears as an example because she “learned something that will be useful to the women of [her] country.”74 Of Kol, who was up until the fellowship a “privatdozent at the University of Szeged […] without regular pay, tenure or retirement,” the authors highlighted the importance of the fellowship in her career: When Dr. Kol returned to Hungary, honoured by awards from the AAUW and the Smithsonian Institution, and with the best collection of snow algae in the world, she was appointed assistant professor, the only woman to hold a regular faculty post in Hungary.75
Remarkably, Kol’s portrait draws on a combination of scientific repertoires similar to that which the scholar mobilizes in her own writings. While describing her as “a small, feminine figure with brown, cheerful eyes and a pleasant sense of humour,” the booklet emphasizes the adventurous nature of the Hungarian botanist which blurs gendered boundaries. She appears as an explorer, sacrificing her comfort and safety to the progress of science: The expedition was adventuresome and arduous. To save money, Dr Kol frequently dispensed with guides, although the going was difficult and often dangerous. She climbed the snow fields of Pike’s Peak, Independence Pass, Yellowstone Park, Glacier National park, and Mount Rainier, and made trips to Mount McKinley Park […] to others in British Columbia.76
The sketch that accompanies the text reinforces the theme: dressed as a woman, with an almost athletic build, alone in a high mountain landscape, equipped with a long walking stick that gives her some dignity as a
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guide or leader, Kol traces her route with a determination that strikes the observer (Fig. 5.4). One might interpret the emphasis placed on the adventurous and almost initiatory aspect of Kol’s journey, especially through this illustration, as a metaphor to illustrate the adventure of women conquering the worlds of science and academia, overcoming the various obstacles encountered along the way. The 1930s brought new challenges for female scientists as Europe witnessed many anti-feminist movements.77 Anti-feminist reactions against the employment of women “and especially against women engaged in intellectual work” occupied the attention of council members during their international meeting held in Budapest in 1934.78 In this context, the success of a fellow such as Kol was important. As stated in the AAUW booklet: To many of us, snow algae may not be a matter of pressing importance, but at a time when the retrogression in women’s opportunities is only too evident, it is a definite achievement to have contributed to such recognition of a woman scholar.79
Fig. 5.4 Erzsébet Kol during fieldwork (AAUW, AAUW Fellows, 41.)
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If the celebration of Kol as a model answered to the urgency of the time, it was also part of a larger memorial work. The commemoration of scientific heroines, like Kol, corresponds to what Goffman has defined as ‘impression management,’ i.e. the attempt, conscious or unconscious, by an individual or group to influence others’ perception of a person, object, or event.80 While ‘great scholars’ often act as cultural heroes, the process of heroism and scientific commemoration is eminently gendered. The cult of great men—precisely—and the consequent obliteration of the role and contribution of women unquestionably contribute to the strengthening of the male identity of the scientific persona. Bosch uses the expression ‘burden of tradition’ to refer to how the memory enterprise of science contributes to the erasure of women.81 In celebrating their own heroines, IFUW members challenged the dominant memory culture in science, producing their own stories of heroines and not just heroes while promoting the persona of the ‘university woman.’ One can see here the effort of funding bodies in creating and supporting scientific personae that fit and strengthen their ambitions.
Conclusion As Steven Shapin showed, the evolution of the relationship between scientists and their sources of funding has contributed to a great change in the understanding of scientific activity.82 It has moved from a vocation to a profession, reinforcing the differentiation between the category of professional scientist, holding an academic title, and amateur. Besides very tangible benefits, a fellowship award conferred authority and social and scientific capital on the recipient and Kol’s trajectory illustrates the importance of transnational exchanges and intercultural encounters in an individual’s scientific recognition. Analysing fellowship programmes, including the one of the IFUW, allows to enhance the circular nature of scientific authority and prestige at stake. The ability to award the best candidates proved the legitimacy and credibility of the institution itself. This had direct consequences for the recognition of future grantees and female scientists—the former fellows having demonstrated women’s capacity to carry out quality scientific research—but also concrete financial implications, especially for an organization like the IFUW, whose fellowship programme depends entirely on individual donations and subscriptions from its members.
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The study of the fellowships granted by the IFUW reveals how IFUW leaders defined their identity by determining award criteria for the fellowships. Their main concern was to compensate for the exclusion, or at least the strong under-representation of women in most fellowship programmes, by enhancing female scientists whose research distinguished itself by its quality. While this commitment is undeniably progressive, it only aimed to reduce gender inequalities, without ever taking into account social and cultural inequalities. Aspiring fellows did not simply conform to the qualities expected by the members of the jury. Once they were granted a fellowship, they were eager to go beyond the model implicitly formulated by the institution, and they did so through their travels, the reports they gave, and the scientific quality of the research they conducted. They aspired to show that they were valuable scientists, before being women’s equality activists. Kol’s scientific and autobiographical writings, but also her photographs, function as a performance through which she has chosen to embody the persona of ‘university woman.’ The introduction of fellowship reports by funding agencies, which required the laureate to comply with the expectations of selectors, also had a great influence on the modern scientific habitus and the expression of the fellows’ scientific persona. The sources available on fellows are therefore shaped by the (historical) processes of persona construction and by the administrative functioning of funding agencies. As Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum wrote, scientific personae are not ex-nihilo creations, but require a “delicate balance between old and new cultural forms.”83 Kol’s trajectory shows how enacting a persona results from a constant negotiation and combination of different repertoires in relation to different contexts, either institutional, disciplinary, cultural, or geographical. Her journey through North America gave her a repertoire of qualities and models that she incorporated into her persona and performance: her example thus underlines how personae are always hybrid constructions. That the participation and recognition of female scientists have long been hampered by stereotypes, based on their supposed intellectual and physical inability to take part in scientific activity, underlines the intrinsic link between the expression of scientific persona (or credibility) and the physical (and sexual) identity of the person who embodies it. To gain recognition, Kol had to make different personae work together. She simultaneously combined ancient or traditional scientific repertoires
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with more modern elements, which were sometimes culturally opposed. She transgressed traditional scientific norms to overcome gender biases against women. By showing that a reconciliation between masculine ideals and expressions of femininity—an adventurous or heroic femininity, for example—is possible, Kol contributed to strengthening the legitimacy of university women as a fully-fledged and credible persona, and not as a diminished version of the (masculine) ideal type of the scientist or field scientist. Acknowledgements This research has been co-funded by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Fund (Sweden) & KU Leuven, as part of the SPICE project (Scientific Personae in Cultural Encounters). I would like to thank Suzanne Gould, then archivist of the American Association of University Women, who gave me access to the IFUW fellows’ files, and to Michael Wynne (Ann Arbor University, United States) and Paul Broady (Canterbury, New Zealand) who kindly sent me valuable information and documents related to Erzsébet Kol’s and Elizabeth Flint’s scientific and personal trajectories. I am also grateful to my Ph.D. supervisors Mineke Bosch and Kaat Wils, as well as the editors of this volume Kirsti Niskanen and Michael Barany for their comments and thorough reading of this chapter.
Notes 1. American Association of University Women (AUW), “Notes on Dr. Kol,” AAUW archives, box 441 (AAUW headquarters, Washington, DC). 2. Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum, “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories”, Science in Context 16 (2003), no. 2: 1–8. 3. Kirsti Niskanen, Mineke Bosch and Kaat Wils, “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice—Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities”, Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 1–5; Mineke Bosch, “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians,” BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54. 4. Erzsébet Kol, Tiszapartt´ol Alaszkaig ´ (Budapest, Kiadja a Krr´alyi Magyar Term´eszettudom´anyi T´arsulat, 1940). 5. Ludovic Tournès and Gilles Scott-Smith, “Introduction: A World of Exchanges. Conceptualizing the History of International Scholarship Programs (Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century),” in Global Exchanges: Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World, eds. Ludovic Tournès and Gilles Scott-Smith (Oxford, NY: Berghahn Books, 2018), 8.
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6. IFUW, IFUW Complete Set of Constitutions and By-Laws, 1920, Article 1, Records IFUW, inv.no. 256 (Atria, Amsterdam): 1. 7. Leila Rupp, World of Women: The Making of an International Women Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 8. IFUW, Bulletin no. 8: Report of the Fourth Conference, Amsterdam, July 28 to August 28, 1926, Records IFUW, inv. no. 71 (1926): 6, 8. 9. Ludovic Tourn`es, L’argent de l’influence: les fondations am´ericaines et leurs r´eseaux europ´eens (Autrement, Paris, 2010). 10. Tournès and Scott-Smith, “Introduction”; Pieter Huistra and Kaat Wils, “Fit to Travel. The Exchange Programme of the Belgian American Educational Foundation: An Institutional Perspective on Scientific Persona Formation (1920–1940),” BMGN -Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 112–134. 11. Kirsti Niskanen, “Searching for ‘Brains and Quality’. Fellowship Programs and Male Constructions of Scientific Personae by the Rockefeller Foundation in Sweden During the Interwar Period,” Paper, The 7th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science, 22–24 September (Prague, Czech Republic, 2006). 12. Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America. Vol 1 Struggles and strategies to 1940 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 13. The American and British associations already had their own national fellowship programmes and the European Fellowship of the AAUW had been giving American women the opportunity to study in European centres of learning since the 1890s. Following the creation of the IFUW fellowship programme in 1924, all international fellows were selected by the IFUW award committee. 14. Marybeth Gasman, Envisioning Black Colleges: A History of the United Negro College Fund (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). 15. Anna Cabanel, “How Excellent… for a Woman? The Fellowship Programme of the International Federation of University Women in the Interwar Period,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 88–102. 16. The Crusade Fellowship was funded by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) in the 1920s and awarded by the IFUW award committee. 17. Judith Szaport, “Sisters or Foes: The Shifting Front Lines of the Hungarian Women’s Movements, 1896–1918”, in Women’s Emancipation Movements in the 19th Century: A European Perspective, eds. Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003), 194–195.
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18. After the Treaty of Trianon in 1921, the Franz Joseph University had to move to Hungary, in Szeged. In her letters, Kol refers to the university using its Hungarian name: Ferenc József. 19. P. Komáromy, “In memoriam Dr. Erzsébet Kol (1897–1980),” Annales Historica-Naturales Musei Nationalis Hungarici 74 (1982): 5–10. 20. IFUW, Bulletin: Seventh Conference, Cracow, Poland, Records IFUW, inv. no. 78 (1936): 6, 8. 21. Kol, Tiszapartt´ol, 1. 22. AAUW, “Kol”. 23. IFUW Award Committee, Minutes 1935, Records IFUW, inv.no. 494 (Atria, Amsterdam). 24. Kol, Tiszapartt´ol, 4. 25. Smithsonian Institution archives, “Kol,” SIA RU000046 collection, Office of the secretary office records, 1925–1949, Dossier no. 14, “Grants—Kol to O’Brien”. 26. Kol, Tiszapartt´ol, 87. 27. Kol, “Final Report, Fellowship Crusade International,” 1938, AAUW archives, box 441 (AAUW headquarters, Washington, DC): 7. Ferenc József was the Hungarian name of Franz Joseph University. 28. Pieter Huistra and Kaat Wils, “Fit to Travel”. 29. BFUW Academic Sub-Committee, 5BFW/03/04/07 (London School of Economics, London). 30. Elizabeth Flint and Erzsébet Kol, “Algae in Green Ice from Balleny Island, Antarctica”, New Zealand Journal of Botany 6, no. 3 (1968): 249–261. 31. Michael J. Wynne, “Phycological Trail-Blazer no. 7: Erzs´ebet Kol,” Phycological Newsletter 31, no. 3 (1995): 1–4. 32. Wynne, “Erzsébet Kol,” 2. 33. Kol, “Final Report,” 6. 34. Anna Cabanel, “La fabrique d’une persona scientifique au féminin. The International Federation of University Women (années 1920-années 1960)” (PhD diss., University of Groningen and KU Leuven, 2019). 35. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum, “Introduction;” Mineke Bosch, “Scholarly Personae.” 36. Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 37. Herman Paul and Jeroen van Dongen, Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and Humanities, Springer International Publishing, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 321 (2017); Raf de Bont, “The Explorer and the Documentalist,” in Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and Humanities, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 321, eds.
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38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.
45. 46.
47. 48. 49. 50.
51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.
59. 60. 61.
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J. van Dongen and H. Paul (New York: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 129–147. Kohler, Landscapes and labscapes, 194. Robert E. Kohler, All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors and Biodiversity, 1850–1950 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006). Raf de Bont, Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870–1930 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Kohler, Landscapes and labscapes. Erzsébet Kol, “The Snow and Ice Algae of Alaska,” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 101, no. 16 (1942). de Bont, Stations in the Field. Jeremy Vetter, “Labs in the Field? Rocky Mountain Biological Stations in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of the History of Biology 45, no. 4 (2012): 587–611. Kol, “Final Report,” 5. Kol, “Biological Research on the Snowfields and Glaciers of Alaska”, in Explorations and Field-Work of the Smithsonian Institution in 1937 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1938), 69. de Bont, “The Explorer”; Naomi Oreskes, “Objectivity or Heroism? On the Invisibility of Women in Science,” Osiris 11 (1996): 87–113. Kohler, All Creatures. Michael Robinson, “Manliness and Exploration: The Discovery of the North Pole,” Osiris 30 (2015): 89–109; de Bont, “The Explorer.” Rebecca M. Herzig, Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); de Bont, “The Explorer.” de Bont, “The Explorer,” 131. Herzig, Suffering for Science, 71. Robinson, “Manliness and Exploration,” 100–101. Kol, Tiszapartt´ol, 116. Kol, “Final Report,” 4. Kol, “Final Report,” 4. Kol, Tiszapartt´ol, 69. Cabanel, La fabrique. On scientific portraits see: Ludmilla Jordanova, Defining Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits 1660–2000 (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000). Photograph reprinted in Wynne, “Erzsébet Kol,” 1. Boris Jardine, “Microscopes”, in A Companion to the History of Science, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chichester: Wiley, 2016), 515. Michael Barany, “The Officer’s Three names: The Formal, Familiar and Bureaucratic in the Transnational History of Scientific Fellowships,” in How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology, ed. J. Krige (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 276.
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62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.
68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.
78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.
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Barany, “The Officer’s Three Names,” 265. Kol, Tiszapartt´ol, 1. Kol, Tiszapartt´ol, 40. Kol, Tiszapartt´ol, 43. Cabanel, La fabrique. On this topic, see, for instance: Raj Kapil, “Go-Betweens, Travelers, and Cultural Translators,” in A Companion to the History of Science, ed. Barnard Lightman (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2016), 39–57. Smithsonian Institution Archives, “Kol.” AAUW, “Kol.” Shapin, A Social History, 127, 129. Kol, Tiszapartt´ol, 29. AAUW, “Kol.” AAUW, AAUW Fellows, AAUW, Washington, DC. BFUW archives, 5BFW/04/16 (1937): 2–3. AAUW, AAUW Fellows, 23. AAUW, AAUW Fellows, 45. AAUW, AAUW Fellows, 41. Christine von Oertzen, Science, Gender and Internationalism: Women’s Academic networks, 1917 –1955 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700–1950: A Political History (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). IFUW Meetings of the Council, 19th Council, Budapest, 1934, Records IFUW, inv.no. 129, 28. AAUW, AAUW Fellows, 45. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Anchor, 1959). Mineke Bosch, “Geleerdengenialogie versus de biografie in gender- en wetenschapsstudies”, Gewina 23 (2000): 15–32. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008). Daston and Sibum, “Introduction,” 5.
References Primary Sources (Unpublished) AAUW. “Kol,” AAUW archives, box 441. AAUW headquarters, Washington, DC. BFUW Academic Sub-Committee. 5BFW/03/04/07. London School of Economics, London. IFUW Award Committee. Records IFUW, inv.no. 494. Atria, Amsterdam. IFUW Fund Appeal Committee. Records IFUW, inv.no. 543. Atria, Amsterdam.
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Primary Sources (Published) AAUW 1937, AAUW Fellows, AAUW. Washington, DC. In BFUW archives, 5BFW/04/16. London School of Economics, London. Flint, Elizabeth and Kol, Erzsébet. “Algae in Green Ice from Balleny Island, Antarctica.” New Zealand Journal of Botany 6, no. 3 (1968): 249–261. IFUW Bulletins. Bulletin no. 8: Report of the Fourth Conference, Amsterdam, July 1926 to August 28, 1926, Records IFUW, inv. no. 71. Atria, Amsterdam. IFUW Bulletins. Seventh Conference, Cracow, Poland, 1936, Records IFUW, inv. no. 78. Atria, Amsterdam. IFUW Complete Set of Constitutions and By-Laws, 1920. Article 1, Records IFUW, inv.no. 256. Atria, Amsterdam. IFUW Meetings of the Council. 19th Council, Budapest, 1934, Records IFUW, inv.no. 129. Atria, Amsterdam. Kol, Erzsébet. “Biological Research on the Snowfields and Glaciers of Alaska.” In Explorations and Fieldwork of the Smithsonian Institution in 1937 , 69–74. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1938. Kol, Erzsébet. Tiszapartt´ol Alaszkaig. ´ Budapest: Kiadja a Krr´alyi Magyar Term´eszettudom´anyi T´arsulat, 1940. Kol, Erzsébet. “The Snow and Ice Algae of Alaska.” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 101, no. 16 (1942): 1–36.
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Cabanel, Anna. “La fabrique d’une persona scientifique au féminin. The International Federation of University Women (années 1920-années 1960).” Ph.D diss., University of Groningen and KU Leuven, 2019. Daston, Lorraine and Sibum, Otto. “Introduction: Scientific Personae ant their Histories.” Science in Context 16, no. 2 (2003):1–8. de Bont, Raf. Stations in the Field. A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870–1930. Chicago, Il: University of Chicago Press, 2015. de Bont, Raf. “The Explorer and the Documentalist.” In Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and Humanities, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 321, edited by J. van Dongen and H. Paul, 129–147. New York: Springer International Publishing, 2017. Gasman, Marybeth, Envisioning Black Colleges: A History of the United Negro College Fund. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor, 1959. Herzig, Rebecca M. Suffering for Science. Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Huistra, Pieter, and Wils, Kaat. “Fit to Travel. The Exchange Programme of the Belgian American Educational Foundation: An Institutional Perspective on Scientific Persona Formation (1920–1940).” BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 112–134. Jardine, Boris. “Microscopes.” In A Companion to the History of Science, edited by Bernard Lightman, 515–529. Chichester: Wiley, 2016. Jordanova, Ludmilla. Defining Features. Scientific and Medical Portraits 1660– 2000. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Kapil, Raj. “Go-Betweens, Travelers, and Cultural Translators.” In A Companion to the History of Science, edited by Barnard Lightman, 39–57. Chichester: Wiley, 2016. Kohler, Robert E. Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Kohler, Robert E. All Creatures. Naturalists, Collectors and Biodiversity, 1850– 1950. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Komáromy, P. “In memoriam Dr. Erzsébet Kol (1897–1980).” Annales Historica-Naturales Musei Nationalis Hungarici 74 (1982): 5–10. Niskanen, Kirsti. “Searching for ‘Brains and Quality’. Fellowship Programs and Male Constructions of Scientific Personae by the Rockefeller Foundation in Sweden During the Interwar Period.” Paper, the 7th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science, 22–24 September, Prague, Czech Republic, 2006. Niskanen, Kirsti, Bosch, Mineke, and Wils, Kaat. “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice—Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 1–5.
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Offen, Karen. European Feminisms 1700–1950: A Political History. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Oreskes, Naomi. “Objectivity or Heroism? On the Invisibility of Women in Science.” Osiris 11 (1996): 87–113. Paul, Herman and van Dongen, Jeroen. Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and Humanities. Springer International Publishing, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 321, 2017. Robinson, Michael, “Manliness and Exploration: The Discovery of the North Pole.” Osiris 30 (2015): 89–109. Rossiter, Margaret. Women Scientists in America. Vol 1 Struggle and strategies to 1940. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Rupp, Leila. World of Women: The Making of an International Women Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Szaport, Judith. “Sisters or Foes: The Shifting Front Lines of the Hungarian Women’s Movements, 1896–1918”. In Women’s Emancipation Movements in the 19th Century: A European Perspective, edited by Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, 189–205. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003. Tourn`es, Ludovic. L’argent de l’influence: les fondations am´ericaines et leurs r´eseaux europ´eens. Autrement, Paris, 2010. Tournès, Ludovic and Scott-Smith, Gilles. “Introduction: A World of Exchanges. Conceptualizing the History of International Scholarship Programs (Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century).” In Global Exchanges: Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World, edited by L. Tournès and G. Scott-Smith, 1–29. Oxford, NY: Berghahn Books, 2018. Vetter, Jeremy. “Labs in the Field? Rocky Mountain Biological Stations in the Early Twentieth Century.” Journal of the History of Biology 45, no. 4 (2012): 587–611. von Oertzen, Christine. Science, Gender and Internationalism. Women’s Academic networks, 1917–1955. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Wynne, Michael J. “Phycological Trail-Blazer no. 7: Erzs´ebet Kol.” Phycological Newsletter 31, no. 3 (1995): 1–4.
PART II
Bodies on Display
CHAPTER 6
Cut Out for Medicine: Anatomical Studies and Medical Personae in Fin-de-Siècle Finland Heini Hakosalo
Rosina Heikel (1842–1929) was the first woman to study medicine and to work as a medical officer in Finland. The earliest preserved document on Heikel’s desire to become a doctor is a letter written to her by her physician brother Alfred Heikel (1835–1868), probably during the first part of 1865. Alfred explained that he did not object to her plans in principle, because he believed that both men and women had the right to follow their calling and to fulfil their potential, but he warned her that there would be many practical problems. The first and perhaps the foremost would be anatomical studies. Solid anatomical knowledge was a sine qua non for a doctor, and it could not be gained from books only; one also needed to dissect. In order to see if she was cut out for medicine, Rosina should visit a morgue or a dissecting room with the help of the local medical gentlemen. “First test your resistance to the smell”, Alfred wrote, “and then see if you have the courage to cut into a piece of flesh, but keep in mind when you do so that it is no moral failure to leave it be, given that
H. Hakosalo (B) University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 K. Niskanen and M. J. Barany (eds.), Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7_6
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there is no specific need for female doctors”. He also warned Rosina that many men, even when “fortified by drink”, had not been able to bear the stench and had given up on the idea of a medical career after such a visit.1 Alfred Heikel’s letter touches upon several factors that gave gross anatomy a special place in medical studies: the position of anatomical training as the cornerstone of medical know-how and professional identity, handson dissection experience as the core element of anatomical education, dissection as a test or trial with sensory and affective dimensions, and the gendered nature of medical education in general and anatomical studies in particular. In this chapter, I will discuss these themes in the context of Finland (and, to a lesser extent, Sweden) between 1880 and 1920 with reference to the notion of medical persona. The primary source material for this chapter consists of published and unpublished autobiographical and biographical texts, letters, and photographs.2 First-hand descriptions of anatomical studies are plentiful but scattered. In medical memoirs, the two most frequently discussed phases of medical studies are the anatomical course (during the preclinical studies) and the obstetrical course (during clinical studies). Both are bound to a specific space—the dissecting room and the maternity clinic, respectively—and associated with strong emotions and intensive in-group sociability. One is marked by the presence of death and the other by the presence of life (and sometimes death, too). Indeed, the amount of anatomical narratives itself, as well as their often vividly sensory and emotional nature, points towards the perceived importance of anatomical studies for the formation of the medical self. There is no shortage of secondary literature on the history of anatomical teaching, which is a common sub-theme both in general histories of anatomy and in histories of medical education.3 Sociologists of medicine grew interested in the social and emotional dimensions of anatomical teaching in the 1950s and 1960s.4 Historical studies that discuss the importance of the social, emotional, and sensory aspects of anatomical training include Michael Sappol’s research on anatomy and medical identity in nineteenth-century USA; John Harley Warner’s studies on dissecting room photographs and the practices they commemorated; and Laura Kelly’s work on medical education (notably women’s education) in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Ireland. Ruth Richardson’s Death, Dissection and the Destitute, a thorough account of the acquisition of bodies for anatomical dissection in nineteenth-century Britain, also affords glimpses of the organization of anatomical studies and the emotions involved. The development of anatomical and pathological examinations is one of the themes tackled by Eva Åhrén in her study on
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the modernization of the conceptions and practices pertaining to death in Sweden.5 The history of anatomical teaching in Finland, however, is largely unexplored.6 This chapter discusses the relationship between anatomical studies and medical personae. It argues that the gross anatomy course essentially contributed to the formation of the medical self by fostering a set of traits and qualities deemed essential to the medical persona. These traits and qualities pertained not only to knowledge and skills but also to emotions and the senses. They were distinctive enough to set the medical persona apart from the personae of the university student and the lay professional, and even more clearly from the personae available for middle-class women at the time. The historical context—Finland between 1880 and 1920—is well suited for such an investigation because, despite major social changes and violent political upheavals, the structure and contents of medical studies remained mostly unchanged. The most radical novelty seen in the medical faculty during this period was the female medical student. The repercussions of the introduction of this novelty stand out clearly against the relative stability of medical studies. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first discusses the notion of persona, the second charts the organization and functions of anatomical studies, and the third focuses on the entrance of the female student to the scene of medical education.
Speaking of Personae A simple definition of persona seems insufficient here because the concept has been defined and employed in somewhat divergent ways in historical studies.7 I therefore start with a discussion on some variants of historical persona studies. Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum’s framing remains a convenient starting point.8 Apart from providing useful definitions, quoted many times in this volume too, the paper identifies what can be regarded as the three poles of historical persona studies: the persona itself (or, more commonly, personae in plural), the collective, and the individual. The paper also addresses the interaction of the three. For instance, Daston and Sibum note that, in order to survive, personae must be embodied by individuals and granted significance by society, and that individuals, in turn, are moulded by personae.9 These three basic elements are summed up in Fig. 6.1. Another standard reference point is Herman Paul’s work. He has discussed the notion of scholarly persona theoretically in several papers
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Fig. 6.1 Three dimensions of historical persona studies
and applied it empirically on the history of historiography. According to Paul, scholarly personae are “ideal-typical models of what it takes to be a scholar”,10 “template[s] to which scholars are invited to conform”,11 and “characterized by different constellations of virtues and skills or, more precisely, by different constellations of commitments to goods (epistemic, moral, political, and so forth), the pursuit of which requires the exercise of certain virtues and skills”.12 For Paul, the primary task is to track out the contours of scholarly personae available at a given time in a given place (a), but he also acknowledges the relevance of the two other edges of the triangle (b, c). For instance, he writes that, in order to survive, personae need to be recognized by collectives and appropriated and honoured by individuals.13 Differences in methodological emphasis between students of scientific and scholarly persona are reflected in their conceptual and syntactic choices. Daston, Sibum, and Paul, who regard the study of the emergence, development, and disappearance of personae as the primary task of historical persona studies, prefer an active voice, with personae as the subject. For Daston and Sibum, personae emerge and disappear, create, exert pressure, develop, rise, shape individuals, and threaten to overwhelm the self.14 Paul’s personae, too, are remarkably active creatures. They affect, mould and shape, cultivate and encourage, influence, allow, interfere, define, exert power, make their impact felt, distinguish themselves and reveal their contours, offer templates, and embody virtues and skills. They also interact with other personae: they are influenced and outweighed, and live in tension or in harmony with other personae.15
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Occasionally, personae are also acted upon. For instance, Daston and Sibum write that personae are incarnated or embodied by individuals and that they are cemented, fashioned, and consolidated by actors.16 In Paul’s papers, scholars cultivate or embody personae, navigate between competing personae, and compromise on their ideal personae. Institutions invoke, cultivate, sustain and promote personae, and superimpose them on historians.17 An alternative approach is suggested by Mineke Bosch, Kirsti Niskanen, and Kaat Wils.18 These three historians prefer to start from the bottom edges of the triangle (b, c), prioritizing the ways individuals appropriate personae and institutions mould them, rather than the personae an sich. Again, the methodological emphasis is reflected in the way that they talk about personae. Personae do sometimes emerge or develop, shape or facilitate, but they are far more likely to be acted upon. Thus, in the papers of these authors, personae are cemented, transferred, shaped and reshaped, constructed, enacted, and, most commonly, created by someone (individuals) or by something (institutions). We also meet compound verbal nouns referring to processes like “persona-shaping” and “persona formation”.19 In her empirical work, Mineke Bosch has applied the concept of personae in the context of biographical research, focusing on individuals’ efforts to appropriate, assume, or reforge a persona for themselves (b).20 Kaat Wils and Pieter Huistra, on the other hand, have been primarily interested in the role of institutions in creating and upholding personae (c).21 Although Paul is sceptical about applying the notion of personae in the context of individual biography,22 it would seem that the vantage points outlined above—personae, individuals, and institutions—are complementary rather than incompatible. Approaching the study of medical personae from the first perspective (a), we might ask what it took to be a good doctor in a given place at a given time—what, for instance, was the preferred set of traits and qualities of a medical professional in early twentieth-century Finland? Starting from the second position (b), the primary question would be what individuals did in order to turn themselves into good doctors, how and where they learned about the prevailing professional models, and how they sought to appropriate these. From the third perspective (c), we might ask how certain communities or institutions legitimized, undermined, or defined the qualities and traits that went into the making of the medical persona. However, the first question may be regarded as foundational, since it would be very difficult to answer the latter two without at least a preliminary idea about the first.
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This paper approaches the question primarily from the third vantage point. It focuses on a particular institutional and educational arrangement—the gross anatomy course—that was instrumental in promoting a specific set of traits and qualities and thereby upholding a certain medical persona. Aspiring doctors learned to perform the essential professional repertoires at several stages and in several arenas. Anatomical studies were a particularly important and transformative stage, entered at the very beginning of the medical trajectory. I will start by shortly describing the way anatomical studies were organized and then discuss the main aspects of persona work involved. These aspects include cognitive commitments and craft skills, social capabilities, emotional styles, and sensory predilections.
Persona Work in the Dissecting Room Finnish medical teaching has displayed a rare degree of continuity and uniformity. Until the mid-twentieth century, the Medical Faculty at the Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki (renamed the University of Helsinki after Finland’s independence in 1917) was the only medical school in the country. It taught and examined all domestically trained doctors, constituting the sole gateway to the medical field. In principle, graduates were licensed by the National Board of Health (Lääkintöhallitus ), but in practice this power, too, lay with the faculty, as all duly examined graduates were licensed without further tests or examinations. The educational set-up thus clearly differed from the USA, where a host of different medical schools competed for students without much government regulation, from the UK, with its multitude of separate teaching, examining, and licensing bodies, and even from neighbouring Sweden, where students were encouraged to move between the three medical schools (Stockholm, Uppsala, and Lund). The uniformity of the medical education in Finland contributed to the uniform social outlook and ethos of the profession. Medical studies fell into three parts. After completing grammar school, students enrolled for premedical studies at the School of Natural Sciences (located at the Faculty of Philosophy). The coursework took two to three years and consisted mainly of natural sciences. Having passed their premedical examinations, the students enrolled at the Medical Faculty, where studies were divided into the preclinical (theoretical) and clinical (practical) phases. Preclinical studies contained courses on anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, and medical chemistry and on completion led
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to the qualification of Candidate of Medicine. Clinical studies consisted of clinical lectures and clerkships. In addition, most students complemented their clinical training by working as interns and / or substituting for rural community physicians. Medical studies concluded in the Licentiate of Medicine examination and degree (still the basic medical degree in Finland), after which the graduates were licensed and registered by the National Board of Health. Until 1914, women graduates needed an additional permission to practice and hold office. The permission was routinely granted but contained severe restrictions concerning women’s right to hold public office.23 The relative importance of the anatomy course is underscored by its volume and place in the curriculum. It was the first course that students took after enrolling at the Medical Faculty and becoming medical students proper, and it required more time and effort than the three other preclinical courses put together. The anatomy course consisted of lectures, examinations, and dissection24 practice, the latter being the most important and time-consuming part. Getting into the dissecting room was in itself a minor trial, a test in persistence and good timing. New students were admitted only if and when there was enough “material” (cadavers) for them to work on, and the anatomical institution suffered from a chronic shortage of dead bodies. Frustrated by the wait, some students travelled to Germany to take the course there.25 This option was clearly more accessible to men than to women. The most obvious purpose of the course was to impart knowledge on the macroscopic structure (and, by implication, functions) of the human body. Solid anatomical knowledge was regarded as the necessary basis of future medical and especially surgical know-how. Teaching took place by means of spoken and written word, visual images, macro- and microscopic samples and three-dimensional models, and, above all, anatomical dissections. The anatomical institute, nicknamed Aasis , was located in the neoclassical centre of Helsinki, together with the university’s main building, the cathedral, and most of the government buildings.26 For students, the core space of the anatomical institute was the dissecting room. It was a long, narrow room with windows on one of the longer walls. It was heated by means of two wood-burning stoves and illuminated first by gas and later by electric lamps. There was a row of wooden tables for carrying out the dissections and a stone table for preparing the bodies.27 Anatomical dissections were organized in much the same way as they were elsewhere in the world. A group of 4–8 students worked on a
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cadaver, each tackling one part of the body, trying to make its structures as distinct as possible. In the 1880s, there was only one teacher to supervise and examine the students, whose number seldom exceeded twenty. The number of both students and staff rose towards the end of the period. An amanuensis (usually a senior student) supervised the daily work, while an assistant (a member of the teaching staff) inspected the outcome and examined the students after they were finished with a body part. “My diary swarms with examinations: neck in, neck out, hand in, hand out”, sighed a student.28 When an entire organ system, say, the nervous system, had been covered in this way, a larger, “topographical” examination took place. The final examination was taken with the professor and covered the whole body. Students were expected to digest a huge amount of detailed information in a relatively short time; the course particularly taxed the memory. The physician Arthur Clopatt (1858–1933), reminiscing about his anatomical training, confessed that he had had nightmares about the final examination long after the termination of the course.29 Another doctor wrote, “I don’t think that my mind has ever, either before or after, contained as much information as it did in the final anatomical examination”.30 The Swedish internist Israel Holmgren (1871–1961), who studied at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm in the 1890s, described in his memoirs how he struggled to make sense of the anatomy of the abdominal area and how, in the end, passed the examination by learning the textbook by heart.31 Some students also took home different lessons from the dissecting room. Selma Lilius (1873–1939) completed the anatomical course in Helsinki during spring term of 1900. She reported to a sister that the course was laborious but interesting and that Aasis was less forbidding than she had been told to expect. She not only took an interest in anatomical knowledge as such but also pondered on “the people who are brought here”.32 To another sister, Lilius explained that although many of her fellow students found the presence of decaying bodies depressing, and although it had indeed been horrible at first to touch a dead body, the cadaver stood as a welcome reminder that the soul would one day be freed of the body and, by the same token, from everything that was unclean, ugly, and burdensome. “And the time we need to be bounded by that death-body is short”.33 As can be gathered, Lilius was a deeply religious woman (she would later become a missionary doctor). At the time of writing, her sense of mortality was heightened by personal experiences:
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she had recently nursed both her father and a beloved older sister through their final illnesses. Anatomical training was not only about knowledge but also about observational and manual skills. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, dissections had been carried out by the students themselves rather than by a demonstrator. As John Harley Warner notes, “It was in anatomy more than any other sphere of medicine that experience – knowledge authorized by hands immersed in the messy stuff of nature – trumped texts”.34 Herman Paul, who defines personae as constellations of skills and virtues, writes that having a skill means having the competence to carry out certain task(s) and to master certain techniques. Skills are inherently difficult and must be learned gradually through imitation and practice.35 The manual and observational skills that were fostered by dissections clearly fit this description. The students were supposed to turn the cadaver into neat anatomical specimens, which required dexterity and perseverance. Although they had dissected small animals during the premedical zoological course, the “material” they were now working on was new and in many ways challenging to them. Medical autobiographies describe how difficult it could be to uncover fine blood vessels or nerve projections, or to work one’s way through the murky maze of the intestines.36 Honing their observational skills and their hand-eye coordination, the students gradually came into possession of skills that were considered an essential part of the “constellation of skills and virtues” that constituted the medical persona. The students not only turned dead bodies into specimens but also rendered them in two-dimensional representations. Drawing was a valued skill in medicine, especially in macroscopic and microscopic anatomy. Anatomical departments employed professional artists, students’ notebooks were filled with detailed anatomical and histological illustrations, and some anatomy teachers were known as veritable virtuosos with chalk and blackboard. The process of representation could give rise to a sense of wonder. “Cells, with all their parts, came into being under our very eyes”, wrote Swedish physician Nanna Svartz (1890–1986) about the drawings of her histological teacher at Karolinska.37 The visual nature of anatomy is also evidenced by the lavishly illustrated anatomical atlases and textbooks that the students studied. Dissections and anatomical illustrations had a close, two-way relationship: ideally, the prepared body part would have been as graphically illustrative as an anatomical image, while anatomical illustrations were based on dissections.38
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The stated primary function of the gross anatomy course was to impart knowledge on the structure of the human body. This knowledge was deemed essential to medical students, practitioners, and scientists. However, people sometimes doubted the ability of the cadavers used in anatomical dissections to impart accurate anatomical information, considering how much they differed from living bodies and from fresh dead bodies. Having been stored in preservation liquid, sometimes for a considerable period of time, they were “dried brown mummies”.39 If the body had been carelessly preserved, “the degeneration could be quite disturbing”.40 That such considerations did not seriously undermine the position of anatomical instruction as the cornerstone of medical studies during this period indicates that the course had other functions besides imparting knowledge or teaching skills. These functions were related to character formation and professional acculturation. As both medical sociologists and historians have noted, in-group socialization was a prominent part of anatomical training. Warner and Rizzolo, for instance, observe that “The collaborative character of dissection intensified its significance as a professional rite of passage”.41 In Finland, Sari Aalto has noted the importance of the course for social bonding among students.42 The dissecting room was a social space from the outset. Students dissected in small groups, in close physical proximity, for an extended period of time. They often worked long hours, and there was (at least in the nineteenth century) nothing to stop them from staying deep into the night. The dissecting room was also a socially exclusive space, restricted to the use of medical students and staff. The course provided medical students, for the first time during their studies, with shared, out-of-the-ordinary experiences that none of the other students had. It marked the beginning of the social exclusivity of the medical students’ corps and contributed to the development of the collegial mindset. The dissecting room was remembered at least as much for its social life as for the actual work. Medical autobiographers indeed typically speak of “life” rather than “work” in the dissecting room, describing this life as “merry” and “fun”.43 It was a life marked by heightened team spirit and by larger and smaller celebrations, rituals, jokes, singing, and storytelling. According to the Finnish surgeon Richard Faltin (1867–1952), “drinking went on among the stinking cadavers at all hours”.44 Clopatt confirms that brandy was consumed in great quantities. A passed examination, even a minor one, called for a celebration, which was typically a very wet occasion. Faltin and Clopatt both took their anatomy course
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in the 1880s. Drinking within the dissecting room became less common after that, thanks to the stricter discipline imposed by a new professor of anatomy, but alcohol definitely remained a part of the anatomy student’s life.45 Tobacco (in Helsinki) and snuff (in Stockholm) were all but universally consumed by male students and teachers working in the dissecting room.46 Dissecting room narratives can be complemented by photographic documents. John Harley Warner and James Edmondson have published a richly illustrated book on dissecting room photographs in American medical schools from 1880 to 1920.47 A typical representative of this extremely popular photographic genre shows a group of students posing by a partly dissected corpse, sometimes with eyes downturned and instruments in hand, simulating a dissection, sometimes looking straight into the camera. These photographs commemorate the achievement and, above all, “the relationship among the dissectors”.48 Dissecting room photographs were common in Finland as well and—notwithstanding some differences in style—resemble their American counterparts (Fig. 6.2).
Fig. 6.2 Dissecting room group portrait, Helsinki 1914 (Helsinki University Museum)
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The emotional aspects of the anatomy course are closely connected with its social dimensions. As Ruth Richardson has put it, “The study of anatomy by dissection requires in its practitioners the effective suspension or suppression of many normal physical and emotional responses to the wilful mutilation of the body of another human being”.49 The students needed to unlearn deep-seated, culturally shared, emotional reactions to death and human remains. Upon entering the dissecting room for the first time, they often feared that the sights and smells they were about to encounter would make them faint or sick. The first cut into a dead body was described as an unforgettable experience. These fears were complemented by the social fear of losing face in front of fellow students and teachers. Judging by medical autobiographies and contemporary accounts, it did not usually take long for the students to learn to see the dead body as an inanimate object, a specimen. Students who had initially looked upon the cadaver with fear and awe and made their first cuts with a trembling hand soon thought nothing of drinking, eating, singing, and joking by the dissection table. This reification process was facilitated by peer pressure and support, by the outlook of the cadavers, and perhaps also by the fact that the bodies were those of prisoners. Warner believes that US medical students, who were predominantly European American, had fewer qualms about fooling around with bodies and body parts because the majority of the dissected bodies were those of poor African Americans. Students’ attitude consequently became more respectful as donated bodies became more common.50 In Finland, the sometimes irreverent attitude of the students towards the cadavers cannot be accounted for by racial or ethnic differences, but social class may well have added to the emotional distance between the students and their “material”. Sometimes students learned to cope with a specific fear too well for their own good. Before the age of antibiotics, the fear of infection was well founded, although the risk was much higher during courses on pathological anatomy or forensic medicine, where fresh bodies were examined, than during the anatomy course. It was not uncommon for student dissectors to become infected with tuberculosis or other diseases, and, in some cases, the death of a student from septicaemia could be traced back to a post-mortem examination.51 However, Israel Holmgren recalls that it was not considered manly to worry about infection or take precautions. “One did not concern oneself with such trivial matters”.52 Both students and staff demonstrated their indifference towards the
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danger of infection by helping themselves to the shared snuff container with unwashed hands. Bodies were handled without protective gloves, and it was common to see men fiddling with their moustaches or beards with soiled hands.53 Gallows humour and boisterous pranks figure prominently in dissecting room narratives, although the most offensive episodes have probably been omitted from published memoirs. There is already a touch of gallows humour in the nickname of the anatomical institute: the word Aasis comes from the Swedish as, meaning carcass. Some forms of merriment were spontaneous; others were more ritualized. An element of hazing was often involved, such as when a newcomer was obliged to waltz around the room with a cadaver and pay a fine in brandy if he dropped it. Skeletons and corpses were dressed up for photographs and body parts used as decorative elements in parties.54 The cheer and camaraderie of the dissecting room are almost invariably praised by medical memoirists. Humour served various purposes. First, it was a way of coping with unwanted emotions, notably fear. This function has been frequently mentioned in both sociological and historical studies. Laura Kelly, for instance, writes, “Through the writing of ghoulish stories and poems, medical students released their feelings of trepidation towards the dissecting room”.55 However, fear was not the only element in the emotional economy of the room, and there is no reason to regard fear and other negative feelings as more authentic than the cheer and the exhilarating feeling of community often described in medical memoirs.56 Second, the humour in dissection-room subculture served social purposes. Joint transgressions against cultural taboos and social conventions boosted in-group bonding. Third, these customs, rituals, and pranks can also be seen as tests. They provided a way of sounding out how far emotional and sensory learning and unlearning had advanced. Thus, for instance, by eating at the dissection table, a student could display both his indifference towards the danger of infection and his ability to regard the cadaver as an object. It is of course possible that the students never fully overcame their feelings of fear or disgust, but we are concerned here with the persona that they wanted to assume and project rather than their innermost feelings. Dissecting room pranks have their visual counterparts: snapshots of medical students fooling around with cadavers, skeletons, and body parts. The American dissecting room group portraits often contained macabre,
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humorous, and disrespectful elements. In Finland, judging by the examples that I have seen, there was a distinction between the two kinds of pictures. The group photographs are usually static and matter of fact, without humorous props. The more candid snapshots, on the other hand, depict medical students with bones, skulls, or severed heads and hands. They are often blurred, whether because the subjects were moving, the lighting was poor, or the camera was a non-professional one. Some of the pictures that I have seen have been glued on the pages of photo albums but look torn, apparently because someone tried to remove them from the album (Fig. 6.3). It is possible to look upon the various dissecting room performances, practices, and rituals as emotional practices. The anthropologist Monique Scheer introduced this Bourdieu-inspired concept in an influential 2012 paper, defining emotional practices as: …habits, rituals, and everyday pastimes that aid us in achieving a certain emotional state. This includes the striving for a desired feeling as well as the modifying of one that is not desirable. Emotional practices in this
Fig. 6.3 An album snapshot of a medical student with a severed head (Helsinki University Museum)
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sense are manipulations of body and mind to evoke feelings where there are none, to focus diffuse arousals and give them an intelligible shape, or to change or remove emotions already there. In other words, they are part of what is often referred to as ‘emotional management’ and the ongoing learning and maintaining of an emotional repertoire. These practices are very often distributed, that is, carried out together with other people, artefacts, aesthetic arrangements, and technologies.57
This kind of emotional management, I suggest, was an essential part of dissecting room life and allowed the students to learn emotional repertoires that were consonant with the dominant medical persona. Further, the anatomy course involved sensory un- and re-learning, closely linked with the emotional transformation. Students learnt to endure sights and smells that they initially found revolting. As an academic subject, anatomy was eminently visual, but autobiographies and egodocuments are more likely to contain references to touch and, above all, smell than references to sight. Selma Lilius told her sister that touching a cadaver for the first time had been a terrible experience, but that she soon got used to it.58 The characteristic smell of the dissecting room is often mentioned, though seldom described in any detail.59 The smell was so pervasive that it stuck to the hair, skin, and clothing of the students and followed them outside the institution. Gerda Kjellberg (1881–1972), who studied at Karolinska between 1900 and 1911, recounted in her memoirs that she and her fellow students used to have their afternoon tea in a small, untidy coffee house close to the institute, “for we brought with us from the anatomical, pathological and chemical departments a smell that no amount of soap or changing clothes could free us from. It stopped us from visiting eateries that were more particular about their patrons”.60 Joan Cassell, another Bourdieu-inspired anthropologist, stresses in her book on contemporary female surgeons in the USA that much of what it takes to be a surgeon and to be accepted as one is not acquired by means of spoken or written word but rather “learned by the body”.61 Cassell writes that “Becoming a surgeon involves incorporating distinctive attitudes toward time, food, fatigue, illness, and bodily distress”.62 Paraphrasing Cassell, we might say that getting through the anatomy course, students incorporated distinctive attitudes towards human remains and death on the one hand and towards one’s peers on the other hand. And the similarities do not end there: becoming a surgeon in the USA in
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the 1990s and becoming a medical student in Finland at the turn of the twentieth century were both gendered processes.
Women, Anatomy, and the Medical Persona Women entered the medical sphere gradually from the 1860s onwards. This process, which was neither easy nor linear, raises many questions relevant for persona studies. For instance, what was required to be both a woman and a doctor, and how could the qualities and traits that were culturally assigned to a young (gentle)woman be harmonized with the ideal of the doctor? More specifically, what happened when women first entered the dissecting room? In many countries, the issue of women’s medical education was fiercely debated during the last third of the century.63 Anatomical studies figured prominently in these debates. Many opponents of women’s studies felt that it was enough to evoke the image of a young woman by the dissection table, cutting into a naked male body, surrounded by male students, to demonstrate how patently absurd the very notion of women’s medical training was. The images were often highly emotional and sensory. In 1878, the Lancet cited “a distinguished surgeon” proclaiming that he would rather see his daughter dead than studying anatomy in the dissecting room.64 According to a standard argument, an anatomical education would brutalize and harden women, de-gendering them and making them unattractive in the eyes of men.65 It is clear that many people both in and out of academia found it extremely difficult to fit the prevailing ideal of middle-class womanhood with the practice of anatomical dissection, which was considered an essential element in the development of a doctor. The female anatomist was regarded by opponents of women’s medical education as a kind of unholy category mistake, an example of things that ought to be kept apart. The first women seeking medical training were highly aware of the practical and symbolic significance of anatomy. We do not know if Rosina Heikel ever visited the local morgue, as her brother Alfred suggested,66 but she did recognize the pivotal significance of anatomical instruction. In 1865, she was among the first female students to enrol in the Institute of Gymnastics and Physiotherapy in Stockholm. Anatomy was only one of the subjects taught there, but Heikel chose to highlight it her reminiscences. In these reminiscences, she distinguished herself from the other female students by emphasizing her personal interest in anatomy: while
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the other ladies stood by the walls with handkerchiefs pressed to their noses during anatomical demonstrations, she went straight to the dissection table to get a better view. The year-long course was not enough to satisfy her thirst for anatomical knowledge: “the knowledge obtained was so minimal, [that it] only provided a taste of something more”. She returned to Stockholm a year later to take private lessons in anatomy and physiology.67 Helena Westermarck (1857–1938), who published a biography on Heikel in 1930, likewise stressed Heikel’s overwhelming interest in anatomical knowledge and her persistence in seeking it, as well as her lack of squeamishness in dealing with dead bodies—features befitting a medical persona.68 Other pioneering female physicians described their relationship with anatomy in similar terms, highlighting their thirst for and their determination and cunning in obtaining anatomical knowledge. Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910), for instance, sailed to Paris in search of further medical education after having graduated from an American medical college. In Paris, she wrote, “I […] dissected at l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts alone, employed a répétiteur who drilled me in anatomy and smuggled me into the dead-house of La Charité at great risk of detection, where I operated on the cadaver”.69 Michael Sappol has noted that “anatomical narrative was crucial to the acquisition and performance of medical identity” in nineteenth-century America.70 It was no less crucial for early female doctors, who developed their own version of the anatomical narrative, a version that was designed to counter the claim that they were unsuited for anatomical study (and thus for medicine). Faced with the “threat” of female students, many medical schools resorted to physical segregation.71 It was commonly used in the course of anatomical studies. When Blackwell studied at the Geneva Medical School (USA), she dissected with “four of the steadier students […] in the private room of the surgical professor”.72 Even Irish medical schools, in general more egalitarian than their British counterparts, taught anatomy to men and women separately until 1937.73 The stated motives for adopting such arrangements varied. One of them was to protect women from the homosocial and, in many respects, emphatically masculine culture of the dissecting room. Drinking, smoking, hazing, obscene jokes, and macabre pranks were extremely difficult to reconcile with late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century notions of femininity. Other motives were to keep the male students from having to change their ways and to protect teachers from moments of embarrassment.
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Rosina Heikel started dissecting in the main dissecting room with the rest of the students, but when she was offered a chance to move to a private space, she gratefully accepted. In an interview that she gave much later in life, she explained that she wanted to get away from the dissecting room because she suffered from being an object of constant attention.74 Westermarck makes it clear that the privacy came at the cost of social exclusion: “Alone and quiet she carried out her work, never having the chance to benefit from the stimulating and encouraging influence that fellow students can exert upon each other”.75 By 1888, when the next women enrolled at the Helsinki Medical Faculty, things had changed. Female medical students now took the same courses and the same examinations, and they faced no physical segregation, neither during anatomical studies nor during clinical service. However, a degree of social segregation remained. Female students preferred to team up with each other during dissection practice, and they apparently did not take part in the most boisterous dissecting room activities. Dissecting room photographs carry traces of the different social roles of male and female students. While women are, as a matter of course, present in “official” dissecting room group photos (Fig. 6.2), there are no women in the more candid snapshots.76 However, there is a third type of photograph with anatomical associations and with often female subjects (Figs. 6.4–6.5). These are studio portraits where women pose with anatomical props, clearly intended for circulation beyond the small in-group of fellow students. The figure that we meet in these pictures is learned (as indicated by the presence of books and papers) and has earned a legitimate place in academia (the student cap). She possesses anatomical knowledge and thus medical authority (skull and bones, anatomical drawings). She is a serious person: calm and collected, captivated by and knowledgeable about the structure of the human body (one woman studies a book with anatomical illustrations; another demonstrates something on a skull). The persona embodied here is also unmistakably feminine: elegantly dressed, carefully coiffured, indisputably respectable— note the engagement and wedding rings on the hand of one of the ladies in Fig. 6.5, prominently displayed at the centre of the image. The human remains included in these pictures are immaculately clean and gleaming white, with no suggestion of dirt or foul smell. It is as if these portraits had been staged, point by point, to present a counterimage to the gory “lady dissector” evoked by opponents of women’s medical education. These photographs illustrate female students’ efforts to navigate between
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Fig. 6.4 Kaarina Kari (1888–1982), a medical student, photographed in the late 1910s or early 1920s (Photograph Finnish Sports Museum, Helsinki)
the dominant (emphatically male) medical persona and the persona of the young respectable woman, and their efforts to obtain the essential skills and virtues constituting the former without renouncing all the traits and qualities of the latter. Herman Paul’s way of defining scholarly personae as constellations of “skills and virtues” is useful in conceptualizing academic gender discrimination. Basing on this definition, we can say that the early female medical students faced two chief forms of discrimination, one pertaining to skills and the other to virtues. The former was at play when women were denied (full) access to the institutions imparting the skills constitutive of medical personae. Historical studies on women’s entry to medicine have typically focused on such institutional barriers. Discrimination that pertains to virtues is more effusive and insidious. Whereas medical skills could be acquired by means of organized teaching, virtues could be adopted only by interacting with and imitating people who exhibited these virtues. Restricting access to such people could therefore function as an effective
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Fig. 6.5 A group of female medical and dental students, Helsinki, c. 1902 (Photographer unknown. Kuvassa—valokuvia suomalaisista ry.)
unofficial means of exclusion. Virtues could also be construed as innate. A common if rather crude form of virtue-based discrimination was to define a trait as being essential to a good doctor and then to claim that a specific category of people could never possess that virtue on account of what they were.77 In fin-de-siècle European medicine, arguments of this kind were issued against Jews, Catholics, and, most commonly, women. An argument of this kind might state, for instance, that women could not be scientists (and professors) because they by definition lacked creative genius and freedom of thought, or that women could not be surgeons because they lacked the necessary virtues of decisiveness and emotional detachment.
Conclusion The anatomy course was by design a transformative experience for new medical students. The traits and qualities that medical students were expected to appropriate during the course differed in many respects from those of the generic university student. It is no wonder that the course
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had a strong and lasting impact on the student and is often revisited in medical memoirs. The traits and qualities that the student came to know and appropriate in the course of anatomical studies were not only cognitive but also practical, emotional, and sensory. They pertained to beliefs and intellectual values but also things like emotional reactions, sensory experiences, or physical appearances. They strongly overlapped with those characterizing the mature medical persona. The medical persona—the medical self to aspire to—that arises from (auto)biographies and popular biographical anecdotes is, first of all, male. He possesses an impressive amount of knowledge, including detailed knowledge of the structure of the human body. He is able to maintain his courage and capacity to act (sometimes to the point of recklessness) in the face of death and disease. He does not shrink away from the sight, touch, or smell of human remains. He is able withstand physical and mental strain. He is dextrous and has a keen eye for visual detail. He is fiercely collegial. He works hard and plays hard, and is fond of stories, anecdotes, and jokes. Not unfrequently, these stories and anecdotes are related to the anatomy course, in tacit acknowledgement of the importance of anatomical instruction for the construction of the medical self.
Notes 1. Alfred Heikel to Rosina Heikel, s.d. Heikel’s Collection, Case 1. The Archive of the Swedish Literature Society in Finland (ASLSF). The dating of the letter is somewhat uncertain because its first page or pages are missing. The contents of the smallish personal archive that Rosina Heikel left behind have been carefully selected, quite possibly by herself. With a few exceptions, the archive only contains documents related to her medical career. She must therefore have regarded Alfred’s letter important in this respect. Her consistency in archiving only career-related material probably explains why the first page(s) of Alfred’s letter are missing, as personal and family news were usually handled at the beginning of a letter. On Rosina Heikel’s life, see Helena Westermarck, Finlands första kvinnliga läkäre Rosina Heikel. Kvinnospår i finländskt kulturliv (Helsingfors: Söderström & Co, 1930); Heini Hakosalo, “Lääkäri Rosina Heikel. Pitkänmatkanjuoksijan yksinäisyys”, in Naisten aika. Valkoinen varis ja muita oppineita naisia, eds. Riitta Mäkinen and Marja Engman (Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2015), 21–36. 2. I have identified 146 published book-length memoirs and autobiographies written by Finnish doctors, the great majority of them (123) by
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3.
4.
5.
6.
men. The unpublished autobiographical material is mainly derived from Lääkärintyön muistot (“Memories of Medical Work”), a major collection of doctors’ written reminiscences, collected and archived by the Finnish Literature Society (FLS) and Swedish Literature Society in Finland (ASLSF). In this material, men and women are represented in roughly equal proportion. The bulk of the historical dissecting room photographs that I have been able to find are held by the Helsinki University Museum and the Åbo Akademi University Library (Turku). For a general history of anatomy, see, e.g., T.V.N. Persaud, M. Loukas and R.S. Tubbs, History of Human Anatomy (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 2014). John Harley Warner, “Witnessing Dissection: Photography, Medicine, and American Culture”, in Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine, eds. John Harley Warner and James M. Edmondson (New York: Blast Books, 2009), 7–192, 27. Michael Sappol, “The Odd Case of Charles Knowlton: Anatomical Performance, Medical Narrative, and Identity in Antebellum America,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82, no. 3 (2009): 460–498; Michael A. Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Warner, “Witnessing Dissection,” 27; John Harley Warner and Lawrence J. Rizzolo, “Anatomical Instruction and Training for Professionalism from the 19th to the 21st Centuries,” Clinical Anatomy 19, no. 5 (2006): 403–414; Laura Kelly, “Fascinating Scalpel-Wielders and Fair Dissectors’: Women’s Experience of Medical Education, c. 1880s–1920s”, Medical History 54, no. 4 (2010): 495–516; Laura Kelly, “Anatomy Dissections and Student Experience in Irish Universities c. 1900–1960s,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42, no. 4 (2011): 467–474; Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Phoenix Press, 2001 [1988]); and Eva Åhrén Snickare, Döden, kroppen och moderniteten (Stockholm, Carlssons, 2002). The book has been published in English as Death, Modernity, and the Body: Sweden 1870–1940 (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2009). The most notable exception is Sari Aalto, who has discussed the anatomy course in her research on medical studies at the University of Helsinki in the twentieth century. Sari Aalto, “‘Ilman kollegiaalisuutta ei ole lääkäreitä’. Lääkäriyhteisö ja ammattikunnan kulttuuriin kasvaminen”, in Vapaus, terveys, toveruus. Lääkärit Suomessa 1910–2010, ed. Samu Nyström (Helsinki: Suomen Lääkäriliitto, 2010), 52–157; Sari Aalto, Medisiinarit, ammattiin kasvaminen ja hiljainen tieto. Suomalaisen lääkrikoulutuksen murroksen vuodet 1933–1969 (Helsinki: Helsingin yliopisto, 2016), 206. Mikko Niemi, Kuolema iloitsee palvellessaan elämää. Suomen anatomian
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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.
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historia 1640–1990 (Helsinki: Valtion painatuskeskus, 1990) is a small descriptive overview on the history of anatomy in Finland. Different approaches have been discussed in, e.g., Herman Paul, “Sources of the Self: Scholarly Personae as Repertoires of Scholarly Selfhood,” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016), 135–154, here 5; Herman Paul, “Introduction: Scholarly Personae: What They Are and Why They Matter,” in How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000, ed. Herman Paul (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 1–14; Gadi Algazi, “Exemplum and Wundertier: Three Concepts of the Scholarly Persona,” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 8–32. Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum, “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories,” Science in Context 16, no. 2 (2003): 1–8. Daston and Sibum, “Introduction,” 6–7. Herman Paul, “What Is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills, and Desires,” History and Theory 53 (2014): 348–71, here 348. Paul, “What Is,” History and Theory, 353. Paul, “What Is,” History and Theory, 348. Paul, “What Is,” History and Theory, 354. Daston and Sibum, “Introduction,” 5–7. Paul, “What Is,” History and Theory, 264, 356, 360. Daston and Sibum, “Introduction,” 5–7. Paul, “What Is,” History and Theory, 15. Kirsti Niskanen, Mineke Bosch and Kaat Wils, “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice: Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly and Artistic Identities,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 1–4. Niskanen, Bosch and Wils, “Scientific,” Persona Studies, 1–4. Mineke Bosch, “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians: Explorations of a Concept,” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54; Mineke Bosch, “Looking at Laboratory Life, Writing a (new) Scientific Persona. Marianne van Herwerden’s Travel Letters from the United States, 1920,” L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 29, no. 1 (2018): 15–33. Individual(s) also function as the starting point in, for instance, Rozemarijn van de Wal, “Enacting Self and Scientific Personas: Models for Women Health Professionals in Dr. S. Josephine Baker’s Fighting for Life,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 32–44; Amy Rubens, “Constructing the persona of a Professional Historian. On Eileen Power’s Early Career Persona Formation and Her Year in Paris, 1910–1911,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 45–59; and Lisa Svanfeldt-Winter, “Writing a Folklorist’s Persona in the Field: How Defining the Object of Study Defines the Scholar,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 18–31. All these contributions are included in a themed issue of Persona Studies, edited by Niskanen, Bosch and
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22. 23.
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Wils. In addition, Svanfeldt-Winter approaches the notion of persona via the study of individuals in her Ph.D. thesis Where Scholars Are Made: Gendered Arenas of Persona Formation in Finnish Folkloristics, 1918–1932 (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2019). Pieter Huistra and Kaat Wils, “Fit to Travel. The Exchange Programme of the Belgian American Educational Foundation: An Institutional Perspective on Scientific Persona Formation (1920–1940),” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 112–134. The topic has also been explored by Anna Cabanel in her “How excellent … for a women? The fellowship programme of the International Federation of University Women in the Interwar Period,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 88–102, and in her Ph.D. thesis La fabrique d’une persona scientifique au féminin. The International Federation of University Women (années 1920-années 1960) (University of Groningen, 2019). E.g. Paul, “What Is,” History and Theory, 364. On medical studies in Finland during the period, see Kyllikki Kauttu and Tapani Kosonen, Suomen Lääkäriliitto 1910–1985 (Helsinki: Suomen lääkäriliitto, 1985): 204–206; Aalto, “Ilman kollegiaalisuutta,” 52–157; and Heini Hakosalo, “Nothing to Write Home About? The Tuberculosis Sanatorium as a Site of Clinical Training (Finland, 1900–1960), in Medical Education: A History in 21 Case Studies, eds. Delia Gavrus and Susan Lamb (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). The Swedish system was roughly similar to the Finnish system until 1907, when the former was streamlined by taking away premedical studies and examinations. A similar step was taken in Finland in 1941. On the history of medical studies in Sweden, see Nils O. Sjöstrand, “Läkarnas grundutbildning 1800–1977”, in Ett sekel med läkaren i fokus. Läkarförbundet 1903–2003, ed. Nils O. Sjöstrand (Stockholm: Sveriges Läkarförbund, 2003), 329–49. I use the term “anatomical dissections” to refer exclusively to the dissections that students did as part of the anatomical course. Students would later also conduct post-mortem examinations during courses on pathological anatomy and forensic medicine. During the latter courses, they would study fresh bodies rather than preserved ones with the purpose of identifying pathological processes and possible causes of death. The Faculty Council often discussed the scarcity of bodies. It seems that the only time the shortage was lifted during the period discussed here was in the aftermath of the 1918 Civil War. The Proceedings of the Council of the Medical Faculty, e.g. 25 May 1905 § 2, 14 September 1918 § 1. The Archive of the Medical Faculty I (1828–1924). The Central Archive of the Helsinki University (CAHU). Scarcity of bodies, and the long wait it often caused, is also talked about in medical memoirs, e.g. Aleksis Tähkä, Lääkärin muistelmia viideltä vuosikymmeneltä I (Porvoo: WSOY,
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27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.
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1962), 27, 33; K.E. Kallio, Osallistumiseni elämään. Kirurgin muistelmat (Helsinki: Otava, 1973), 35; Yrjö Reenpää, Ajateltua ja koettua (Helsinki: Otava, 1974), 33; Arvo Ylppö, Elämäni suurten ja pienten parissa. Muistikuvia ja kuvamuistoja (Porvoo and Helsinki: Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö, 1964), 25. On the anatomical institute, Rainer Knapas, “Yliopiston rakennukset”, in Keisarillinen Aleksanterin yliopisto 1808–1917 , eds. Matti Klinge et al. (Helsinki: Otava, 1989), 216–276, 274; and Eino E. Suolahti, Helsingin neljä vuosisataa (Helsinki: Otava, 1972 [1950]), 15. Arthur Clopatt, “Hågkomster från anatomiesalen på 1880-talet,” Hufvudstadsbladet, 8 November 1928, 6. Marja-Liisa Paljakka in the collection Lääkärintyön muistot, 34. FLS. Clopatt, “Hågkomster”. Kallio, Osallistumiseni elämään, 36. Israel Holmgren, Mitt liv. Första delen (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1959), 49. Selma Lilius to Amy Taube, May 20, 1900. Selma Rainio’s Archive. FNA. Selma Lilius changed her surname to Rainio in 1906. Selma Lilius to Lilli Lilius, February 4, 1900. Selma Rainio’s Archive. FNA. Warner, “Witnessing Dissection,” 8–9. Paul, “What Is,” History and Theory, 358. Kallio, Osallistumiseni elämään, 35; Holmgren, Mitt liv, 49. Nanna Svartz, Steg för steg. En självbiografi (Helsingfors: Söderströms, 1968), 42–43. On the history of anatomical illustrations and the sense of vision, see Martin Kemp, “‘The Mark of Truth’: Looking and Learning in Some Anatomical Illustrations from the Renaissance and Eighteenth Century,” in Medicine and the Five Senses, eds. W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1993), 85–121. Mary Hunter has discussed the infiltration of the Parisian art world by medical ideas (The Face of Medicine: Visualising Medical Masculinities in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016) and studied Henri Gervex’s Autopsy at Hôtel-Dieu (1876) as an illustration of medical masculinities, with some reference to the notion of persona (“Intern, Orderly, Artist, Corpse: Emerging Masculinities in Henri Gervex’s Autopsy at Hôtel-Dieu.” Oxford Art Journal 38, no. 3 [2015]: 405–426.) Eva Åhrén discusses two- and three-dimensional representations of bodies at length in her Döden, kroppen och moderniteten (89–121). Carin Berkowitz offers a thorough analysis of the use of visual and three-dimensional aids in anatomical teaching in her book of Charles Bell. Carin Berkowitz, Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
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39. Pentti Siltanen, Sydänlääkäri. Kirjokuvia taipaleeltani (Helsinki: Otava, 2002), 185. Marja-Liisa Paljakka in the collection Lääkärintyön muistot, 699. FLS. 40. Holmgren, Mitt liv, 50–51. 41. Warner and Rizzolo, “Anatomical instruction,” Clinical Anatomy, 404. 42. Aalto, “Ilman kollegiaalisuutta,” 62. 43. Holmgren, Mitt liv, 50; Clopatt, “Hågkomster”. 44. Richard Faltin, Mitt liv (Helsingfors: Söderströms, 1961), 56. 45. The Proceedings of the Academic Senate, 9 February 1885 § 12. CAHU. Clopatt, “Hågkomster”. 46. Ylppö, Elämäni, 24; Faltin, Mitt liv, 55; Clopatt, “Hågkomster”; Holmgren, Mitt liv, 50–51. 47. Warner and Edmondson, Dissection. 48. Warner, “Witnessing Dissection,” 11. 49. Richardson, Death, 31. 50. Warner, “Witnessing Dissection,” 25–26. 51. When Jarl Heikel died of “acute septico-pyemia” as a young medical student in 1911, the rector of the university wrote to his father that Jarl was one those who had “succumbed to the dangers related to medical studies”. Waldemar Ruin to Felix Heikel, 25 May 1917. Felix, Jarl ja Rosina Heikel (file). Helsinki University Museum. 52. Holmgren, Mitt liv, 50. 53. Holmgren, Mitt liv, 50–51. 54. Faltin, Mitt liv, 56: Clopatt, “Hågkomster”. 55. Kelly, “Anatomy dissections,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 474. 56. In discussing early modern anatomical dissections, Rafael Mandressi has observed that whereas emotional techniques were indeed an essential part of the practice from the beginning, there was more to these techniques than just suppressing fear. Rafael Mandressi, “Affected Doctors: Dead Bodies and Affective and Professional Cultures in Early Modern European Anatomy,” Osiris 31 (2016): 119–136. 57. Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 193–220, here 209. 58. Selma Lilius to Lilli Lilius, February 4, 1900. Selma Rainio’s Archive. FNA. 59. Faltin, Mitt liv, 56–57; Clopatt, ”Hågkomster”; Ylppö, Elämäni, 24. 60. Gerda Kjellberg, Hänt och sant (Stockholm: P.A. Norstedts & Söner, 1951), 85. 61. Joan Cassell, The Woman in the Surgeons Body (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998), 12–13. 62. Ibid., 104.
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63. James C. Albisetti, “The Fight for Female Physicians in Imperial Germany,” Central European History 15 (1982): 99–123; Clare Brock, “The Lancet and the Campaign Against Women Doctors, 1860– 1880,” in (Re)creating Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Amanda Mordavsky Claber (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 130–145; Anne Digby, Making a Medical Living: Doctors and Patients in the English Market for Medicine, 1720–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Patricia M. Mazón, Gender and the Modern Research University: The Admission of Women to German Higher Education, 1865–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Claire Brock, British Women Surgeons and their Patients, 1860–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 64. Sir William Jenner at the meeting of the Convocation of the University of London, January 15, 1878, Lancet 19 January 1878, 105. On the arguments advanced against women dissectors, see also Kelly, “Anatomy dissections,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 509–510; Warner, “Witnessing Dissection,” 9–10. 65. For example, Arthur Kirchhoff, Die akademische Frau. Gutachten hervorragender Universitätsprofessoren, Frauenlehrer, und Schriftsteller über die Befähigung der Frau zum wissenschaftlichen Universitätsstudium und Berufe (Berlin: Hugo Steinitz, 1897), 73. 66. Alfred Heikel to Rosina Heikel, s.d. Rosina Heikel’s Collection, Case 1. ASLSF. 67. Rosina Heikel, “I strid mot fördomar” (manuscript, no page number). The Archive of the Konkordia Union, Case 17. FNA. Westermarck Finlands första kvinnliga, 55–57. 68. Westermarck, Finlands första kvinnliga, 104. 69. Elizabeth Blackwell, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1914), 164. 70. Sappol “The odd case,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 460, 468. 71. On spatial segregation as a “micromechanism of power”, see Heini Hakosalo, “Akateemisen vallan variaatioita: naiset saksalaisessa yliopistojärjestelmässä ennen ensimmäistä maailmansotaa,” Tiede & Edistys 3 (2000), 191–204. 72. Blackwell, Pioneer Work, 59–60. 73. Kelly, “Anatomy dissections,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 498, 509–512. There are also examples of pioneering female medical students who refused to dissect in a separate space and were allowed to stay in the joint dissecting room. Auguste Forel, Rückblick auf mein Leben (Zürich: Europa-Verlag, 1935), 45; Svartz, Steg för steg, 161. 74. M.F. [Maikki Friberg] “Tri Rosina Heikeliä haastattelemassa,” Naisten Ääni 12 (1917) 10: 112–114, here 113.
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75. Westermarck, Finlands första kvinnliga, 104. 76. This goes for the ones that I have seen, but their number is too small for making definite conclusions about the matter. 77. The persona problematic could be linked with discussions on “epistemic injustice” by means of the notion of epistemic virtue. To deny that a person or a group can ever possess a certain epistemic virtue (and thus to fully incorporate a certain persona) would then amount to epistemic injustice. On the concept of epistemic injustice, see Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice. Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Bibliography Archival Sources Archive of the Swedish Literature Society in Finland (ASLSF). Finnish Literature Society (FLS). Finnish National Archives (FNA). Läkarminnen [Memories of Medical Work]. Lääkärintyön muistot [Memories of Medical Work]. Rosina Heikel’s Collection. Selma Rainio’s Archive. The Archives of the Medical Faculty I (1828–1924). The Archive of the Konkordia Union. The Central Archive of the Helsinki University (CAHU). The Proceedings of the Academic Senate (1885).
Printed Sources Aalto, Sari. “‘Ilman kollegiaalisuutta ei ole lääkäreitä’. Lääkäriyhteisö ja ammattikunnan kulttuuriin kasvaminen.” In Vapaus, terveys, toveruus. Lääkärit Suomessa 1910–2010, edited by Samu Nyström, 52–157. Helsinki: Suomen Lääkäriliitto, 2010. Aalto, Sari. Medisiinarit, ammattiin kasvaminen ja hiljainen tieto. Suomalaisen lääkrikoulutuksen murroksen vuodet 1933–1969. Helsinki: Helsingin yliopisto, 2016. Åhrén Snickare, Eva. Döden, kroppen och moderniteten. Stockholm: Carlssons, 2002. English version: Eva Åhrén. Death, Modernity, and the Body: Sweden 1870–1940. Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2009. Albisetti, James C. “The Fight for Female Physicians in Imperial Germany.” Central European History 15 (1982): 99–123.
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Algazi, Gadi. “Exemplum and Wundertier: Three Concepts of the Scholarly Persona.” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 8–32. Berkowitz, Carin. Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Blackwell, Elizabeth. Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1914. Bosch, Mineke. “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians: Explorations of a Concept.” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54. Bosch, Mineke. “Looking at Laboratory Life, Writing a (new) Scientific persona. Marianne van Herwerden’s Travel Letters from the United States, 1920.” L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 29, no. 1 (2018): 15–33. Brock, Claire. British Women Surgeons and Their Patients, 1860–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Brock, Claire. “The Lancet and the Campaign Against Women Doctors, 1860–1880.” In (Re)creating Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by Amanda Mordavsky Caleb, 130–145. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Cabanel, Anna. “How Excellent … for a Women? The Fellowship Programme of the International Federation of University Women in the Interwar Period.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 88–102. Cabanel, Anna. La fabrique d’une persona scientifique au féminin. The International Federation of University Women (années 1920–années 1960). Groningen: University of Groningen, 2019. Cassell, Joan. The Woman in the Surgeons Body. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998. Clopatt, Arthur. “Hågkomster från anatomisalen på 1880-talet”, Hufvudstadsbladet, 8 November 1928: 6. Daston, Lorraine and Sibum, H. Otto. “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories.” Science in Context 16, no. 2 (2003): 1–8. Digby, Anne. Making a Medical Living: Doctors and Patients in the English Market for Medicine, 1720–1911. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Faltin, Richard. Mitt liv. Helsingfors: Söderströms, 1961. Forel, Auguste. Rückblick auf mein Leben. Zürich: Europa-Verlag, 1935. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Hakosalo, Heini. ”Lääkäri Rosina Heikel. Pitkänmatkanjuoksijan yksinäisyys.” In Naisten aika. Valkoinen varis ja muita oppineita naisia, edited by Riitta Mäkinen and Marja Engman, 21–36. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2015.
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Hakosalo, Heini. “Nothing to Write Home About? The Tuberculosis Sanatorium as a Site of Clinical Training (Finland, 1900–60).” In Medical Education: A History in 21 Case Studies, edited by Delia Gavrus and Susan Lamb. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021. Holmgren, Israel. Mitt liv. Första delen. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1959. Huistra, Pieter and Wils, Kaat. “Fit to Travel. The Exchange Programme of the Belgian American Educational Foundation: An Institutional Perspective on Scientific Persona Formation (1920–1940).” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 112–34. Hunter, Mary. “Intern, Orderly, Artist, Corpse: Emerging Masculinities in Henri Gervex’s Autopsy at Hôtel-Dieu.” Oxford Art Journal 38, no. 3 (2015): 405– 426. Hunter, Mary. The Face of Medicine: Visualising Medical Masculinities in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Jenner, Sir William. “Meeting of the Convocation of the University of London, January 15, 1878.” Lancet, 19 January 1878: 105. Kallio, K.E. Osallistumiseni elämään. Kirurgin muistelmat. Helsinki: Otava, 1973. Kauttu, Kyllikki and Kosonen, Tapani. Suomen Lääkäriliitto 1910–1985. Helsinki: Suomen lääkäriliitto, 1985. Kelly, Laura. “Fascinating scalpel-wielders and fair dissectors’: Women’s experience of medical education, c. 1880s–1920s.” Medical History 54, no. 4 (2010): 495–516. Kelly, Laura. “Anatomy dissections and student experience in Irish universities c. 1900–1960s.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42, no. 4 (2011): 467–474. Kemp, Martin. “The Mark of Truth’: Looking and Learning in Some Anatomical Illustrations from the Renaissance and Eighteenth Century.” In Medicine and the Five Senses, edited by W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter, 85–121. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Kirchhoff, Arthur. Die akademische Frau. Gutachten hervorragender Universitätsprofessoren, Frauenlehrer, und Schriftsteller über die Befähigung der Frau zum wissenschaftlichen Universitätsstudium und Berufe. Berlin: Hugo Steinitz, 1897. Kjellberg, Gerda. Hänt och sant. Stockholm: P.A. Norstedts & Söner, 1951. Knapas, Rainer. “Yliopiston rakennukset.” In Keisarillinen Aleksanterin yliopisto 1808–1917 , edited by Matti Klinge et al., 216–276. Helsinki: Otava, 1989. M.F. [Maikki Friberg] “Tri Rosina Heikeliä haastattelemassa.” Naisten Ääni 12, no. 10 (1917): 112–114. Mandressi, Rafael. “Affected Doctors: Dead Bodies and Affective and Professional Cultures in Early Modern European Anatomy.” Osiris 31 (2016): 119–136.
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Mazón, Patricia M. Gender and the Modern Research University: The Admission of Women to German Higher Education, 1865–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Niemi, Mikko. Kuolema iloitsee palvellessaan elämää. Suomen anatomian historia 1640–1990. Helsinki: Valtion painatuskeskus, 1990. Niskanen, Kirsti, Bosch, Mineke and Wils, Kaat. “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice: Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly and Artistic Identities.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 1–4. Paul, Herman. “Sources of the Self: Scholarly Personae as Repertoires of Scholarly Selfhood.” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016), 135–154. Paul, Herman ”Introduction: Scholarly Personae: What They Are and Why They Matter.” In How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000, edited by Herman Paul, 1–4. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. Paul, Herman. “What Is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills, and Desires.” History and Theory 53 (2014): 348–371. Persaud, T.V.N., Loukas, M. and Tubbs, R.S. History of Human Anatomy. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 2014. Reenpää, Yrjö. Ajateltua ja koettua. Helsinki: Otava, 1974. Richardson, Ruth. Death, Dissection and the Destitute. Second edition with a new afterword. London: Phoenix Press, 2001 [1988]. Rubens, Amy. ”Constructing the Persona of a Professional Historian. On Eileen Power’s Early Career Persona Formation and Her Year in Paris, 1910–1911.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 45–59. Sappol, Michael A. A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Sappol, Michael A. “The Odd Case of Charles Knowlton: Anatomical Performance, Medical Narrative, and Identity in Antebellum America.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82, no. 3 (2009): 460–498. Scheer, Monique. “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion.” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 193–220. Siltanen, Pentti. Sydänlääkäri. Kirjokuvia taipaleeltani. Helsinki: Otava, 2002. Sjöstrand, Nils O. “Läkarnas grundutbildning 1800–1977.” In Ett sekel med läkaren i fokus. Läkarförbundet 1903–2003, edited by Nils O. Sjöstrand, 329–349. Stockholm: Sveriges Läkarförbund, 2003. Suolahti, Eino E. Helsingin neljä vuosisataa 1950. Helsinki: Otava, 1972. Svanfeldt-Winter, Lisa. “Writing a folklorist’s Persona in the Field: How Defining the Object of Study Defines the Scholar.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 18–31.
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Svanfeldt-Winter, Lisa. Where Scholars are Made: Gendered Arenas of Persona Formation in Finnish Folkloristics, 1918–1932. Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2019. Svartz, Nanna. Steg för steg. En självbiografi. Helsingfors: Söderströms, 1968. Tähkä, Aleksis. Lääkärin muistelmia viideltä vuosikymmeneltä I. Porvoo: WSOY, 1962. van de Wal, Rozemarijn. “Enacting Self and Scientific Personas: Models for Women Health Professionals in Dr. S. Josephine Baker’s Fighting for Life.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 32–44. Warner, John Harley and Rizzolo, Lawrence J. “Anatomical Instruction and Training for Professionalism from the 19th to the 21st Centuries.” Clinical Anatomy 19, no. 5 (2006): 403–414. Warner, John Harley. “Witnessing Dissection: Photography, Medicine, and American Culture.” In Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine, edited by John Harley Warner and James M. Edmondson, 7–192. New York: Blast Books, 2009. Westermarck, Helena. Finlands första kvinnliga läkäre Rosina Heikel. Kvinnospår i finländskt kulturliv. Helsingfors: Söderström & Co, 1930. Ylppö, Arvo. Elämäni suurten ja pienten parissa. Muistikuvia ja kuvamuistoja. Porvoo and Helsinki: Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö, 1964.
CHAPTER 7
Gifts of Nature? Inborn Personal Qualities and Their Relation to Personae Julia Dahlberg
Introduction In May 1926, a general strike brought public transport to an almost complete standstill and interrupted daily life in the United Kingdom for nine days. During those days, Edward Westermarck (1862–1939), professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, could not leave his home in Box Hill some 30 kilometres south of London. Due to the interruption of his otherwise busy daily routines, the professor had to find some other pastime. Eventually, the involuntary break in academic work resulted in the first draft of Westermarck’s memoirs, first published a year later in Swedish and then two years after that in English as Memories of My Life (1929). In the memoirs, Westermarck reflects upon his youth and studies during the 1880s, and how he, while working on his doctoral dissertation The Origin of Human Marriage (1889), later extended to the three-volume international bestseller The History of Human Marriage (1891), came from his native city Helsinki in Finland to work in London,
J. Dahlberg (B) University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 K. Niskanen and M. J. Barany (eds.), Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7_7
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and later undertook anthropological fieldwork in Morocco. The book ends with a long passage where Westermarck reflects upon the factors that contributed to his choice of occupation, and on the path that had taken him to his later position as an internationally renowned scholar and researcher.1 In this chapter, I analyse Edward Westermarck’s memoirs in order to discuss how Westermarck presented his own development into a researcher and scholarly public intellectual. I focus on the intellectual, mental, and physical abilities Westermarck presented as central to his own career and how, in his own view, he came to possess these qualities. I will explore how the nineteenth-century development of neurobiology, psychology, and other sciences of the human mind affected the common understanding of how humans gained different traits of personality. I will do this by comparing Westermarck’s memoirs to the writings of his sister—the artist, writer, and women’s rights activist Helena Westermarck (1857–1938).2 As I analyse how these scientific topics affected the scholarly and intellectual personae of the time, I will in particular focus on the idea that some personal abilities are inborn, and therefore, naturally present in the individual from birth. The current discussion about personae contains several different approaches to understand the concept. Some of the differences have previously been explored, for example, by Gadi Algazi, Lisa SvanfeldtWinter, and even more recently by Heini Hakosalo in her contribution to this volume.3 In a general sense, this article is intended as a reflection upon Herman Paul and colleagues’ discussion of epistemic virtues and skills. According to Paul’s definition, personae can be understood as models of (professional) selfhood or identity. As such, they can be seen as “models of abilities, attitudes, and dispositions that are regarded as crucial” for the pursuit of a social or professional activity, like scholarly study. Following this interpretation, several authors including Paul have suggested that personae can be seen as clusters of skills and epistemic virtues that the individual has to embody in order to be seen as trustworthy and recognizable in a social role, like that of a scholar or an intellectual.4 In this article, I will discuss how the idea of an inborn and natural self relates to Paul’s interpretation of personae. If, as suggested by Paul and others, personae are mostly about skills and virtues which can be gained and internalized through education, training, or a simple exertion of will or motivation, then how do we factor in that not all personal qualities or
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abilities are perceived as subject to the ambition or will of the individual? In response to this question, I propose that if not all abilities can be learned or acquired, it suggests a level of hidden exclusiveness embedded in the persona, which a discussion of only skills and virtues does not render visible. In fact, culturally defined ideas about what is “natural” to a specific gender, class, or ethnicity may make it much harder, if not impossible, for some individuals to receive recognition from contemporaries and peers as they try to embody a specific type of persona, such as that of a public intellectual. Thus, the idea of an inborn and natural self can work as a double-edged sword when applied to personae: while promoting the social prestige of certain personae on a general level, it also excludes entire social groups from the social recognition and trustworthiness that a successful embodiment of a persona can offer. I therefore suggest that if we think of personae in this way, it is important to recognize that personae cannot be embodied by all individuals on equal terms. Even though I primarily discuss the standpoint of Herman Paul, my methodology in this chapter differs from that of Paul and colleagues. As I work with a close analysis of two individuals’ autobiographies, I see them as performances where the individuals present themselves to others through a bricolage of repertoires in order to become recognized as credible in their own field. In this way, my approach comes closer to Mineke Bosch’s approach, which is partly different from Paul’s.5 Here, I agree with Svanfeldt-Winter, who points out that both of these approaches have their own benefits. While Paul’s approach is helpful for identifying the frames of both the disciplinary and the more general cultural requirements placed upon different personae, Bosch’s approach enables me to examine how these demands manifested themselves in the Westermarck siblings on an individual level, as well as individual negotiations of what was acceptable or desirable on an individual level.6 Before proceeding, I therefore wish to stress that I do not intended my discussion to be taken as a critique of Paul’s and other colleagues’ work. Hoping to complement what has previously been written, I will demonstrate that personae contain an element of both exclusivity and exclusiveness in relation to social categories like gender, age, class, and ethnicity.
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The Persona of the Self-aware Public Intellectual For the purpose of this article, I describe the public self of Edward and Helena Westermarck as two different versions of a persona associated with the public intellectual. In doing so, I assume that individuals continuously appropriate repertoires from several different personae and adapt them to the needs of the moment and to their own public selves. One example of such adaptation can be found in Steven Shapin’s A Social History of Truth, where he demonstrates that truthfulness was highly valued among scholars in seventeenth-century England, because it was a central notion in the British gentlemen’s code of honour.7 As I have discussed in some of my previous writing, the adaptations of professional personae that individuals embody might therefore not only include repertoires associated with different versions of similar personae but also repertoires that are primarily associated with altogether different social roles. In the case of a scholar, this could mean that an individual embodiment of scholarly persona also contains repertoires of, for example, an artistic persona, a motherly persona, or the persona of a dandy.8 As Herman Paul has pointed out, this sometimes completely contradictive mixture of repertoires can be explained by the fact that human beings, scholars and intellectuals included, are committed to the pursuit of multiple moral goods that may not always be easy to combine.9 A very illuminating example of how repertoires pass from one persona to another can be found in the persona of the scholarly public intellectual, which took form in the consciousness of the Western public towards the late nineteenth century. Though similar to the persona of the expert, it still had its own prominent features. The most important of these is the desire to participate in public debate outside the rather exclusive circles of public and private management and academia, which were the natural and more limited habitats of the expert.10 If we think of a scholarly public intellectual as an expert who communicates “specialized knowledge in an understandable and relevant way for a public outside of the specialty” while promoting the use of such knowledge in public discourse,11 then it would be fair to say that Edward Westermarck embodied this particular persona very well. Born in 1862 in Helsinki, in what was then an autonomous part of the Russian Empire referred to as the Grand Duchy of Finland, Edward Westermarck became known as a sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher. Starting in 1906, he acted as the first professor of sociology at the newly founded London School of Economics, as well
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as professor of philosophy at the Imperial Alexander University of Finland (later University of Helsinki), and later also at the Finnish Åbo Akademi University. In academic society in London, he was a well-known figure who frequented the same circles as many of the most famous scientist of the day. His London network included evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace and sexologist Havelock Ellis, who were his friends, as well as Francis Galton, who once requested that Westermarck should act as chair during one of the meetings of the Sociological Society where Galton held a lecture.12 As the author of several internationally praised works on moral theory and questions of marriage, gender, and sexuality, Edward Westermarck often used his expert position as a scholar to influence public opinion on questions related to these matters. Presenting his own views as based on enlightened expertise and rational thinking, Westermarck did not hesitate to use his authority as an expert to promote a more liberal attitude towards non-married relationships, divorce, and homosexuality. He also had many admirers among a liberal-minded public, among them the author George Bernard Shaw, who directly referred to Westermarck in his play Man and Superman (1903), and the women’s rights movement in Great Britain, Finland, and elsewhere, who considered Westermarck an ally in their causes.13 As a political activist, Westermarck also repeatedly participated in the political developments in his native country. He took part in the clandestine civil resistance against Russian authority in Finland during the early twentieth century. In 1899, he was one of the initiators of the so-called Pro Finlandia address, which collected the signatures of prominent international celebrities from both the cultural and the scientific world in order to protest against Russian rule in Finland. During World War I, he was a much-admired older mentor for a younger generation of Finnish political activists, acting as a member of the so-called Central Committée (Centralkommittén, C.K.), which began to plan for organized resistance to Russian rule in Finland. After the war, in the years following the Finnish independence, he was a member of the Finnish delegation, which successfully negotiated in the struggle over the Aland Islands in the League of Nations.14 As a particular form of scholarly persona, the “scholarly public intellectual” shared many of its repertoires with the self-aware “intellectual”, which entered into the cultural and political public arena during this time. In his analysis of the French intellectual field of the late nineteenth century, Christophe Charle shows how a number of French writers,
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artists, journalists, and social reformers turned the former adjective “intellectual” into a noun and began to refer to themselves as “intellectuals” (les intellectuels ).15 As these self-proclaimed and highly self-aware intellectuals began discussing the tasks of this newly invented social identity, they listed a cluster of habits, virtues, skills, and competencies that were to be expected of an “intellectual”. In doing so, they also made the intellectual recognizable as a social figure to others. Thus, they created a persona that was not clearly associated with any previously existing social category or professional role. As such, this newly established intellectual persona could be appropriated by nearly anyone who sought to influence public opinion and participate in public debate. At the same time, it could also be combined with commitments to other types of professional personae, such as that of a writer, artist, or scholar.16 Due to its generic nature, the persona of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century intellectual offers a revealing case study with the potential to shed light on several points of interest concerning the nature of personae. First, it underscores that there is a constant struggle for influence and recognition between different personae. In his analysis, Christophe Charle points to a growing competitiveness and constant struggle for social distinction, which forced certain groups within the elite to find new ways to differentiate themselves from rivals, and strengthen their public positions. Lacking the prestige and symbolic capital derived from a professional degree, a number of artists, writers, journalists, and other public figures wanted to distinguish themselves from the constantly growing masses of professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and other educated members of the liberal professions who seemed to compete for recognition in society. Using the concepts of Pierre Bourdieu, Charle argues these actors assumed a new and self-aware identity as “intellectuals” in order to present themselves as an exclusive public elite with a special responsibility to act as the critical consciousness of society, as intellectuals, and as the artistic avant-garde. As a result, they managed to both defend their cultural position and claim a privileged position at the centre of public debate.17 In doing so, one could claim, they also managed to make their contemporaries recognize a brand-new type of persona. Due to its high social prestige and potential to generate recognition, the persona of the intellectual became desirable not only for artists and writers, but also for a number of other figures who hoped to participate in public debate about society, including scholars and scientists.
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The second point of interest concerning the persona of the (selfproclaimed) intellectual is that new personae may include repertoires which were originally associated with other forms of personae. The speed with which the intellectual persona became recognizable to a wider public during the 1890s and early 1900s suggests that although the persona of the “intellectual” may have been new, it did not appear out of nowhere. One of its most apparent ancestors was the persona of the genius, which captured the collective imagination of the late nineteenth-century public. So much so that it leads Darren McMahon to suggest that during this time the entire Western world was spellbound by a “religion of genius”.18 The most important thing that these two types of persona had in common was their exclusivity: very few people could hope to embody either one of them in a way that would earn the recognition of others. As I will explain, this exclusivity was soundly anchored in a set of ideas of the time that presented certain parts of the human psyche as innate and therefore unachievable, forever unavailable to those not born with these particularly desirable abilities or characteristics.
The Idea of the Natural Self The early nineteenth century marks the emergence of a new biological materialism in the Western understanding of human psychology and identity. The scientific discussion on human intellectual and psychological abilities introduced several assumptions about the human self that had not been so clearly articulated before. The first of these ideas was that personality was a result of neurological processes over which the individual had little to no control. The formulation of this idea began around 1795 when French physiologist and philosopher Pierre Cabanis argued that the brain is the organ of consciousness in the same sense that the stomach is the organ of digestion. Thus, he became the first to publicly express the opinion that human consciousness was a result of material mechanistic processes, rather than an expression of an immaterial and immortal ego. Although he later retreated from the idea that all notions of a human soul were superfluous, others soon picked up the initial idea.19 Only a few years later, German physiologist Franz Josef Gall developed phrenology, a new medical discipline based on the assumption that the brain is the organ of the mind, composed of parts that each serve a distinct mental “faculty”, such as hope or self-esteem.20
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Another emerging idea was the notion that physiological features that produced mental reactions in the brain were similarly but not identically developed or shaped in individuals. This assumption explained why each human being has a unique set of mental and intellectual faculties. As the idea became more established towards the mid-nineteenth century, the list of mental and intellectual faculties believed to be present in the individual from birth grew longer. Scientists and scholars like the British sociologist Herbert Spencer, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, and the French physiologists Claude Bernard and Prosper Lucas, as well as the father of the eugenics movement Francis Galton, saw the human personality as a combination of pre-existing, natural dispositions. According to Galton, mental and intellectual capacities were inherited from ancestors just like any other biological phenomenon such as eye colour. Thus, it was believed that individuals received both positive qualities and less admirable dispositions from birth. The more positive of these innate qualities included intellectual faculties such as exceptional intelligence and creativity (or, “geniality” as the nineteenth century still preferred to call it), whereas the more negative ones included feeblemindedness, alcoholism, and criminality. Following the reasoning of scientific authorities such as Galton or Lombroso, these qualities could be either encouraged or discouraged by the environment, training, or personal motivation, but they could never fully be overcome, nor could they be gained through external influences.21 The ideas of an inheritable biological self were tied to a particular interest of scientists. From the early days of phrenology, scientists were particularly interested in those mental capabilities that were deemed exceptional and out-of-the-ordinary, such as the intellectual capacities of prominent scientists, writers, artist, composers, and political leaders. Thus, some scholars even went so far as to donate their own brains for other scientists to study after they passed away.22 Although phrenology soon fell out of favour, the scientific interest for inborn abilities did not. Towards the second half of the century, prominent scientists like Galton, Spencer, and Lombroso devoted special attention to the study of hereditary intellectual and creative abilities or “geniality” as these qualities were often collectively named. For example, in works such as Hereditary Genius (1869) and Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), Galton voiced the idea that biology and inheritance were fundamental in determining the level of intellect that any person could possess. Thus, only a high level of such inborn ability combined with hard work and
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energy could produce men of true genius. In English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture (1874), he studied the family backgrounds of prominent scientists in order to establish that the qualities that led to their success were hereditary. According to his investigations, intelligence and ability were biological traits and, as such, the product of nature, not nurture. Exceptional intelligence, just like exceptional creativity, was therefore a rare gift: either you had “it”, or you did not.23 However, as the idea of an inborn and natural self spread among scientists, it also gained ground in more popular discourse. In the 1860s, the French novelist Émile Zola began his ambitious project to study the effects of heredity and environment on human behaviour in novels such as Thérèse Raquin (1867) and the ambitious Rougon-Macquart series. Zola wanted to demonstrate how all human “virtue and vice” were products of natural processes, “like vitriol and sugar”, a phrase which he had encountered in the writings of the art historian Hippolyte Taine and decided to use as the epigraph for Thérèse Raquin.24 Thus, towards the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Western public had already been familiarized with the idea of an inborn and natural self, and these ideas began affecting the ways people understood themselves. Given this information, it is hardly surprising that Émile Zola has been credited with having been the first to refer to the existence of the previously mentioned self-aware class of “intellectuals” in his famous defence of the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus in 1898. To Zola, “intellectuals” were recognizable by a natural intellect and critical rationality, which allowed them to rise above petty interest and to act as the critical consciousness of society while defending those who lacked the ability to defend themselves.25 As illustrated by these examples, the early nineteenth-century scientific discourses on the very nature of selfhood came with the potential to have had an impact on self-understanding and, thus, self-expression, not only in the scientific and scholarly community but in a wider circle of other professions as well. Further illumination on the impact of this discourse can be found in an article by Michael Hagner, where he discusses how the phrenological interest in the brain affected the selfunderstanding of scholars, providing them with an incentive to donate their own brains to scientific investigations and phrenologists’ dissections. In return, Hagner argues, the scientists who donated their brains to science could expect to be commemorated with admiring, sometimes even hagiographic biographies granting them everlasting posthumous fame.26 In short, the developments of modern neuropsychology and especially the
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idea of a natural inborn self could potentially help generate considerable social prestige to certain types of personae. Of course, not all scientists and scholars went as far as to donate their brains to phrenological dissection. Turning to the memoirs of Edward Westermarck, I will show that there were other, less dramatic ways to benefit from the idea of a scholarly self, grounded in natural and inborn personal faculties. Westermarck relied strongly on the idea of the “natural” in the presentation of his public self. Combining the professional skills of the scholar and expert with a number of inborn and therefore natural abilities, he managed to harvest some of the symbolic capital of both the professional expert and the avant-garde intellectual.
What It Takes to Be a Scientist and Scholarly Public Intellectual In the final chapter of his memoirs, Edward Westermarck listed the different roles he had occupied during his lifetime: first, he mentioned his occupation a “researcher” [forskare] in the service of “science” [vetenskapen], then his position as a “university instructor” [universitetslärare], followed by his different political endeavours as a scholarly public intellectual. However, out of all these roles, he only considered his primary role as a scientific researcher as truly meaningful and important. While dismissingly describing his work as an academic instructor as “useful” at best, he ended by describing his political activities as “sporadic”. According to his own, rather modest, view, these were activities that he had only been driven to by circumstances. Thus, disregarding that his political activities had included considerable efforts in several international and domestic political campaigns, Westermarck chose to emphasize his own identity as a researcher and scientist. Underscoring that as a young man he had chosen “science” in general, and above all, “the science” that interested him the most, sociology/cultural anthropology, he chose to emphasize the “scientific” rather than the scholarly nature of the social sciences and of his own scholarly work.27 The natural sciences came with great prestige during Westermarck’s lifetime. Although the Swedish word vetenskap is less exclusively associated with the natural sciences compared to the English equivalent, it still reveals that Westermarck wanted to associate his own field of study with the practices of the natural sciences rather than with those of the humanities. In doing so, he acted like many other representatives of the relatively
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new disciplines of social sciences, who chose to describe their work as “scientific” in order to emphasize the rationally analytic, objective, and universal nature of their research.28 As a cultural anthropologist and sociologist, Edward Westermarck set out to apply an evolutionary view on human culture. In his first major work, The History of Human Marriage, he traced the “origins” of the institution of marriage back to its prehistoric past, to a point before the time of cultural differentiation. In his second magnum opus, the two-volume exposé The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906, 1908), he set out on a similar endeavour concerning the development of the human sense of ethics.29 Westermarck’s choice of words when describing his own research in the memoirs is therefore revealing. This attitude Westermarck seems to have adopted from his professional idols. According to the memoirs, Westermarck read Herbert Spencer’s First principles (1862) as a young student when the book appeared in Swedish in 1884. Thereafter, Spencer’s principles became the guidelines not only for his scientific work but also for his presentation of himself as a scientist. From Spencer’s principles, Westermarck appropriated a scientific ideal that included a strong faith in the objectivity of science; a scepticism towards religion, mysticism, and everything that could not be empirically observed; and a constant quest for “truth”. From Charles Darwin’s autobiographical Life and letters (1887), which Westermarck read around 1887, he also adopted a strictly methodical way of gathering information and the habit of paying extra attention to every detail which seemed to contradict any general theory in order to respond to any possible criticism before his opponents were able to object.30 These acknowledgements by Westermarck show how the reading of scientific and scholarly work influenced and inspired him to adopt scholarly attitudes from other scholars and integrate them in his own scholarly performance. The works of Darwin and Spencer were not the only influences on Westermarck’s presentation of his professional self. During his early years as a student and young researcher in Helsinki, Westermarck demonstrated an interest in psychological questions. At the time, both sociology and psychology belonged to the philosophy curriculum, which was Westermarck’s main subject of study. Having read some of the authorities on psychology at the time, such as Harald Høffding, Westermarck took part in debates about the nature of the human mind on several occasions during his younger years. For example, in 1892, he criticized his own professor, Thiodolf Rein, who had recently published the second volume
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of his work on psychology, Försök till framställning af psykologin eller vetenskapen om själen [An attempt at a presentation of psychology, or the science of the soul ] (1891). In a review of Rein’s work, Westermarck put forward the idea that the human mind and thoughts were derived from the physiological processes of the brain. He also spoke out in defence of the evolutionists, including Spencer, who considered the human personality to be part of the individual self from birth.31 As Westermarck grew older, he seems to become more convinced by these ideas. During his many years in London, Westermarck befriended the sexologist Havelock Ellis, who acted as the editor of a series of scholarly publications known as The Contemporary Science Series, where English translations of many influential works on questions related to the existence of an inheritable, natural personality were published. The series, which Westermarck probably was well acquainted with, included the English translation of Cesare Lombroso’s The Man of Genius (1869, English translation 1891) and Ellis’ own work The Criminal (1890), both of which are built on an understanding of an inborn, natural self that individuals could do little to change.32 This evolutionary understanding of a biologically inherited self also shaped the way Westermarck understood his own self: a scholar was primarily born, not made.
Edward Westermarck Advocating the Exclusivity of the Natural Self Memoirs and autobiographies were a popular kind of literature in the nineteenth century. Like many other printed materials, the genre owed part of its popularity to the cheaper and faster means of publications of the time. Additionally, there was a steadily growing reading public, which consumed literature, newspapers, and magazines for the purpose of information and education, as well as for recreation and amusement. The immense success of memoirs written by public figures like JeanJacques Rousseau, Charles Dickens, and Benjamin Franklin showed that memoirs and autobiographies tapped into the public’s hunger for celebrities and the (increasingly nationalistic) cult of great men.33 A well-written memoir had the power to promote the author’s position in the public space and offered a powerful tool for those wishing to manage their own public perception. In short, the narratives of such texts offer many detailed opportunities to study both the formation of different personae
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and the ways in which individuals displayed and performed their own public selves.34 In a sense, the nineteenth-century fascination with the autobiography meant that the genre could also be used to enhance the prestige of different types of personae. One idea that received plenty of attention was that of the natural and inborn self. In his account of the nineteenth century’s deep fascination for the “genius”, Darren McMahon has pointed to the contradictory trends of the time. In the aftermath of Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the Western world was characterized by growing demands for human equality and equal rights regardless of class, gender, or ethnicity. At the same time, it was also marked by a general, almost ecstatic belief in the existence of a highly exclusive minority of people with superior intellectual and creative abilities who ought to be granted special rights and privileges. Due to this culturally anchored belief, anyone who somehow managed to present themselves as naturally apt and gifted with exceptional natural abilities received immediate recognition and an influence over public discourse, which far exceeded that of the “average” citizen.35 Thus, to scholars and other intellectuals writing their memoirs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it would be clearly beneficial to write their autobiography in such a way that they appeared to possess the “natural” dispositions for intellectual work. This is exemplified in Edward Westermarck’s account of his youth. Westermarck’s account of his professional development follows a coherent storyline where the young boy and, later, the student, has to overcome specific obstacles while gradually transforming into the adult scholar writing his memoirs. The end point of this development is presented as obvious from the very beginning of the story. Thus, according to Westermarck’s own statement, he was driven to become a scientist as a young man. After some initial doubts, he followed through with this desire. Thus, in hindsight, Westermarck describes his path as a straight “road”, interrupted only by “minor detours” as it progressed towards his later role as a scientist and researcher.36 However, in the opening chapters of the memoirs, Westermarck’s future does not at all seem self-evident. Instead, from the very beginning of his account, Westermarck points to two major obstacles that his younger self had to overcome. The first one was his sickliness and physical weakness as a young boy. He suffered from recurring respiratory infections during his youth and seemed unfit for the physically demanding
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adventures of scientific fieldwork. The other obstacle was his own doubts about his intellectual capacities. Both of these obstacles turn out to be mere illusions, as Westermarck’s account goes on to describe how he eventually discovered that his initial assumptions about his physical and intellectual qualifications were false. Concluding that the young student did in fact possess all the necessary faculties for scientific work, these passages are some of the most vivid, perhaps even passionate in Westermarck’s otherwise rather sober prose.37 Still, his account of the obstacles of his youth creates a more uncertain portrait of a professional path than the statements at the end of his memoirs suggest. Westermarck’s account of his own transformation into a scholar begins with the memory of his graduation from school in 1881—an event that, ironically enough, he was too sick to attend. The summer after his graduation, his family sent him to a sanatorium in the Norwegian mountains to nurture his health. Here, the young man who, due to his sickliness, had spent much of his childhood in bed developed an interest in outdoor life and hiking. This seemed to have not only strengthened his lungs but also, for the first time, revealed his own physical stamina to himself. After his return to Finland, he spent the following three summers hiking through the lake district in central and northern Finland. These hikes, which appear to have been inspired by early Finnish ethnographers like Elias Lönnrot, took Westermarck to remote locations far beyond convenience or comfort. The longest of these hikes, from Vuokatti to Kuusamo, then to Kivakka, on the Russian side of the border, ended in Oulu and covered a distance of nearly 1500 kilometres. After this, Westermarck returned to Norway on two occasions, in 1885 and 1886, hiking through the Stavanger and Årdal areas and climbing several mountain peaks, among them Snøhetta, Uranostind, Glittertind, and finally, one of the highest mountains of northern Europe, Galdhøpiggen, at 2469 metres above sea level.38 The lengthy (around 25 of the 414 pages of the memoirs) and vivid descriptions of these youthful adventures mark a symbolic break in Westermarck’s account of his youth. His adventures in the Finnish forests and Norwegian mountains convinced him that, despite his previous sickness, he did, in fact, possess the physical strength and endurance to cope with extremely demanding conditions. In his mind, this was a requirement for scientific fieldwork. Or, as he later explains: “Even at this time, I nurtured a lively wish to sometime be able to travel to distant countries in order to study primitive tribes, and now I experienced for the first time a sense of
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that I would be able to undertake such a task and endure the hardships of it”.39 In this way, the poor health that Westermarck had suffered as a boy was presented as a temporary obstacle, which had to be overcome through the recovery of health and the revelation of a natural, inborn stamina rather than through intentional physical rehabilitation or fitness exercise. Just as Westermarck describes how he discovered his own physical capacities as a future researcher, he also gives a detailed account of how he found the intellectual capacity to become a scholar. Here too, the process that leads him to find the necessary qualities is described more in terms of a discovery of inborn and dormant abilities than as the result of any intentional effort to acquire such qualities through studying or hard work. This becomes apparent through Westermarck’s description of his early years as a university student and young graduate. In the beginning of his memoirs, Westermarck describes how, as a young schoolboy, he had doubts about his own intellectual capacities and, hence, about his suitability as a scientist. According to Westermarck, his own weak memory for detail and subsequent failure to memorize information meant that his schoolwork was laborious and difficult. Despite the fact that he graduated as the top student of his class (a piece of information that he makes sure to provide the reader), his slowness at learning led him to envy classmates who were faster in their reading, and he doubted his own intellectual “talent” and suitability for scientific work.40 However, just like the physical weakness, this doubt in his intellectual capacities is later thoroughly dismissed as the young man encountered increasing academic success. A key moment in his youth when he realized that, despite his slowness in reading, he still possessed the suitable disposition for a scientific career was the memory of his bachelor’s thesis, which he had completed as a student at the Imperial Alexander University of Helsinki. This first scientific endeavour, as minor as it was, convinced him that he possessed the necessary talent or gift [begåvning ] to become a scientist. Thus, in the light of this experience, Westermarck’s initial difficulties at school were not a sign of lacking intellectual capacities. In his memoirs, he later attributed his initial intellectual difficulties to the pedagogical methods of the time and to the requirement to learn one’s lessons by heart. Thus, as he claimed to later having realized, any “fool” could possess a good memory for detail, but true science required other talents.41
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Strikingly, this particular passage in Westermarck’s memoirs highly resembles ideas that were expressed in the contemporary scientific discussion about inborn geniality. For example, in his book Man of Genius, the Italian professor Cesare Lombroso discussed the impact of education on young “genius” minds. According to him, classic education where “professors of mediocrity” sought to educate “pupils of genius” was nothing but torture to children with exceptional talents, a “torment” that only the strongest could handle. To Lombroso, the immediate and most deplorable risk when a “child of genius” was forced to bear the “martyrdom” of being compelled to spend their brain on “a quagmire” of trivial things forced upon them by mediocre teachers was that the child could easily be “discouraged” and lose faith in themselves. Thus, each time an exceptional child was faced with classic instruction, humanity risked losing one of its finest and greatest.42 This resemblance between Westermarck’s and Lombroso’s ideas was likely more than a coincidence. In fact, Westermarck was quite familiar with Lombroso and his work. In his memoirs, Westermarck recalled how in 1893 he visited Italy and made a visit to Turin, where over the course of two days he visited Lombroso’s home and toured his criminological research facility at the local prison (Westermarck later returned on a second visit a few years later). From Westermarck’s account, we cannot tell if he had read Lombroso’s Man of Genius, which had appeared only two years earlier in English, but his writing seems to indicate that he was well familiarized with Lombroso’s work on a general level. Although Westermarck later ridiculed Lombroso’s theory that a person’s inborn criminality was visible through the form of his toes, he still demonstrated a great respect for this “ground breaker” [föregångare], who above all had managed to demonstrate “how deeply crime often can be rooted in the inborn nature of the criminal”.43 This passage shows that Westermarck rather unconditionally seems to have accepted the idea that some personality traits were indeed hereditary and rooted in a person’s natural self. In the context of these quotes, Westermarck’s account of his own troubles in school is shed in a new light, as according to Lombroso a failure to adapt to the monotony of school and the classic education model could be a sign of unrecognized exceptionality in a student. Faced with the lack of recognition from teachers and pedagogical institutions, weaker individuals would be discouraged, whereas the stronger would somehow safeguard their “sanity”, as Westermarck had done.44 Thus, just as he had done when describing his discovery of his dormant physical health and
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stamina, Westermarck seems to attribute his intellectual abilities, which enabled him to act as a researcher, to inborn predispositions rather than to intentional training, education, or any other forms of deliberate development of skills and abilities. These inborn, natural dispositions were in Westermarck’s opinion necessary preconditions for any young man who hoped to become a scholar. The general conclusion of this reading of Edward Westermarck’s memoirs is that the narrated self, which Westermarck presented in his memoirs, contains few references to abilities or skills that the young writer would have gained through education, training, or personal efforts. Instead, when writing about the young man he had once been, the mature author chose to focus on a select number of dispositions that he saw as innate and therefore natural. This emphasis on an inborn self can be interpreted as a way for Westermarck to make the “scientific” or scholarly persona that he sought to embody seem more exclusive. In doing so, he referred to ideas that were deeply rooted in the popular perception of the time. The benefit of this strategy was that it made the persona of the scholarly public intellectual seem more exclusive in comparison with those personae, which relied more on the display of professional skills or acquired abilities. Such personae were, for example, those of doctors, lawyers, and other free professionals, which Christophe Charle has identified as the professional competition of the self-aware “intellectual”.45 In this way, one could claim that Westermarck through his references to a natural and inborn intellectual self presented the intellectual persona as an exceptionally exclusive and thus, particularly desirable, form of persona. In doing so, he advocated the social status of the intellectual persona and participated in a collective and cultural effort to protect it from an unwelcome social competition with other professional experts, who competed for recognition and credibility in the eye of society.
Helena Westermarck Opposing the Exclusiveness of the Natural Self In the previous section, I have shown how references to a natural and inborn intellectual self helped Edward Westermarck render the intellectual persona a notion of exclusivity, which contributed to increasing the social status of the intellectual persona at a collective and cultural level. However, while the idea of a natural and inborn core of the self promoted the exclusivity, and hence, the desirability and prestige of some personae
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over others, it also promoted a form of excluding, which I will explore in the remaining section of this chapter. Here, I will discuss the writings of Edward Westermarck’s sister Helena in order to make some additional points about the element of competition present in the persona, and how the idea of a natural self helped exclude a whole range of different social groups from the intellectual persona. Referring in my argument to the specific case of gender, I end my discussion by suggesting that these mechanisms of exclusion may in other circumstances be applicable to a number of other social categories like, for example, age, class, or ethnicity. In her native country Finland, Helena Westermarck had a wellrecognized career as a painter, writer, women’s rights activist, editor, and public intellectual. Although she never received the international fame of her brother, she too had a very internationally oriented carrier, beginning in the 1880’s when she studied painting in Paris for several years, and continuing with a number of shorter and longer travels abroad in order to study, work, and occasionally, to take care of her health. Through these travels, and her involvement in the Finnish women’s rights organization Unionen, she was part of the large intellectual network of the international women’s rights movement of the early twentieth century. Here, personal network included women’s rights activists and cultural figures not only in Sweden and the other Nordic countries, but also to some extent in France and the United Kingdom.46 In her writings, Westermarck often referred to similar psychological ideas about a natural and inborn self that her brother believed in. For example, in 1894, she published a biography about George Eliot, the first major work presenting the British novelist to Swedish readers. Here, Helena Westermarck repeatedly emphasized Eliot’s “natural” or inborn intelligence and intellectual nature as well as her natural creativity or “geniality”.47 Although the former two of these concepts are not synonymous today, Westermarck used them as such, sometimes speaking of “intellect” [intellekt ] and sometimes “intelligence” [intelligens ] while referring to Eliot’s naturally sharp mind and her inborn talent for intellectual endeavours. Westermarck also repeatedly referred to Eliot’s innate “geniality” [genialitet ].48 In Helena Westermarck’s interpretation, the innate and therefore natural intellect and geniality of George Eliot explained not only Eliot’s prominence as novelist but also her ability to influence society through her literary activities as an editor and public figure. Thus, in Westermarck’s narrative, these exceptional intellectual traits were present in Eliot’s
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personality at birth, and they manifested themselves in early childhood. After that, Eliot’s intellectual and creative nature only strengthened and sharpened as the writer advanced in age and experience. Westermarck suggests that without these inborn and natural qualities, the woman by the name of Mary Anne Evans would never have been able to become the world-famous writer known as George Eliot. In Helena Westermarck’s account, George Eliot’s intellect and her creativity were equal, sometimes even superior, to that of her contemporary male writers and fellow intellectuals. There is nothing in Westermarck’s interpretation that hints at the possibility that Eliot, because of her sex, would have been less suited to intellectual and artistic pursuits. Alas, not all of Westermarck’s contemporaries shared her belief. Western culture has tended to associate abilities such as reason, logic, and intellect as well as artistic creativity or “geniality” with the male sex for centuries. The idea that only men could create art as well as science has deep roots in both philosophy and science.49 According to Friedrich Hegel, whose thoughts deeply penetrated all Finnish intellectual life in the nineteenth century, women lacked the ability to generate something completely new intellectually or artistically. Women, he held, could only hope to repeat, reproduce, or copy. Only men could possess the true “universal faculty” which was necessary for science, philosophy, and art.50 The idea that the different sexes were born with different natural abilities remained common until the twentieth century, regardless of the increasing number of voices (including Helena Westermarck’s) who in the nineteenth century began to question the idea of women’s supposed lack of inborn intellectual and artistic geniality.51 In his Hereditary Genius, Francis Galton mostly dealt with male “genius”, although he occasionally also spoke of “men or women of genius”. However, to the extent that his account dealt with intelligent women, they mostly occupied the positions of mothers and wives of male geniuses. As such, they were worthy of scientific interest only when discussing the heredity of geniality.52 Others, like Cesare Lombroso, were even more dismissive. In his Man of Genius, Lombroso stated: “In the history of genius women have but a small place. Women of genius are rare exceptions in the world. It is an old observation that while thousands of women apply themselves to music for every hundred men, there has not been a single great woman composer”. Although there existed a few exceptions to this rule, like George Eliot, Germaine de Staël, and George Sand, they could only be seen as freaks of nature. The “women of genius are men”, Lombroso stated. Although
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some women admittedly displayed an exceptional talent, they were still never as genius as Beethoven or Goethe.53 The writings of Lombroso and other scientific authorities on creativity and intelligence show that the idea of an inborn self was highly shaped by understandings of the time about which qualities that were “natural” to the different sexes. Women were thought to be born with the natural tendency to be more emotional and therefore less rational than men. They were often thought to be more easily influenced by others and therefore more likely to copy or reproduce what they had seen before. As such, they were considered less likely than men to achieve intellectual or creative greatness.54 In this regard, Helena Westermarck’s view on the female self differed from that of many of her contemporaries. In some of her most programmatic writings on women’s rights, Westermarck defended the idea that men and women were born with the same individual variety of natural qualities, talents, and dispositions. The biological sex of a person could therefore not reveal if that person was more suited than anyone else to perform a specific task. Thus, according to Helena Westermarck, the only reason why history featured such an abundance of male scientists, writers, painters, and other intellectuals was that society had placed so many restrictions on women, both in the past and in the present.55 In another of her articles, entitled “On strength of character in the woman” [Om karaktärsstyrka hos kvinnan], she argued that as long as women were robbed of the possibility to fully develop their inborn and natural personalities, no one could truly find out if female genius really existed. Quite ironically, in this article, Westermarck referred to the biography of the Italian journalist and pedagogue Paola Lombroso, daughter of Cesare Lombroso, to demonstrate her argument.56 Thus, while Westermarck definitely supported the idea of a natural and inborn self, she did not accept the idea that a person’s gender determined what was natural to that individual. Helena Westermarck’s stands on the natural and inborn self as independent of a person’s gender demonstrate how cultural assumptions about what is natural and inborn affect personae. Nineteenth-century women were not expected to possess the natural and inborn “creativity” or “intelligence” that was expected of an “intellectual” in the cultural context of Helena Westermarck’s time. Thus, if women, despite these assumptions, tried to embody an intellectual persona, they did not receive recognition for their performance.57 In this light, Helena Westermarck’s
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emphasis on the inborn and natural presence of intellect and geniality in George Eliot’s person can be seen as an effort to change the assumptions about the natural female self by proving that women, too, could possess a natural inclination for intellectual activities. Doing so, Westermarck made use of pre-existing opinions concerning the much-admired novelist and journalist, as Eliot was one of very few women who Westermarck’s contemporaries, including scientific authorities such as Cesare Lombroso, would have recognized as a true “genius”.58 Underscoring the supposedly natural and inborn intellect of Eliot, Westermarck attempted to demonstrate that Eliot, regardless of her gender, met the expectations concerning the “natural” abilities of a genius and an intellectual. Thus, trying to change her contemporaries’ understanding of female intellect and personality, Westermarck also attempted to affect the intellectual persona. In doing so, she hoped to make it easier for future women to present themselves as intellectuals and receive social recognition for their performances.
Inborn Nature or Nurtured Virtues? Some Final Remarks Concerning Personae In my discussion of the Westermarck siblings, I have demonstrated that both Edward and Helena Westermarck took the existence of a natural and inborn self for granted. To both brother and sister, certain inborn qualities like intelligence and creativity were central requirements of a public intellectual. Thus, in order to embody a convincing intellectual persona, both of them needed to find ways to embody these qualities in a way that would have convinced their contemporaries that they were natural and inborn parts of their personality. In this chapter, I have shown in more detail how Edward Westermarck went about this task in his memoirs, and as I have demonstrated elsewhere, similar attempts to embody natural and inborn qualities can also be found in Helena Westermarck’s memoirs.59 My reading of these texts therefore differs from the interpretations of personae by Herman Paul and other colleagues, which have focused on personae as manifestations of skills and virtues that can be gained through training, practice, or a persistent exercise of will.60 With this, I do not, however, wish to question the importance of virtues and skills to personae. After all, the memoirs of both Edward and Helena Westermarck are filled with manifestations of nurtured virtues (such as “love of fatherland”) and acquired skills (like the ability to paint in the
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case of Helena, or to speak Arabic like Edward). None the less, the difference is that although the Westermarck siblings had acquired some of these virtues and skills at a very young age, they did not present them as inborn. Therefore, even if the Westermarck siblings did not necessarily highlight the effort that had been required to obtain these virtues and skills, they did not seek to completely conceal them either. My discussion of the Westermarck siblings’ writings does also shed some light on why women of the nineteenth century often found it harder to embody the persona of the public intellectual than men did. As I have argued, the emphasis on supposedly inborn and natural qualities made the intellectual persona seem more exclusive and increased its social status. However, this emphasis could potentially also exclude large groups of people from the persona because many inborn qualities were associated with a specific gender. In Helena Westermarck’s writings, one can therefore find multiple examples of how she opposed the idea that gender was of any relevance to the inborn self. In doing so, she hoped to convince her contemporaries that women, regardless of their gender, could possess the innate intelligence and creativity which nineteenth-century culture associated with the persona of the public intellectuals. In this way, I have discussed how nineteenth-century scientific discourses on the human mind and personality shaped both the selfunderstanding of nineteenth-century people and the personae of the time. But of course, the scientific and scholarly debate on whether qualities such as intelligence or creativity are indeed inborn talents or acquired through a combination of favourable conditions and practice is not settled by any means, even today as we are entering the 2020s. It is therefore important to underline that I do not intend to provide an answer to this question. Instead, my point is to underscore that while personal capacities like intelligence and creativity undoubtedly have to be nurtured in order to develop fully, they are still often understood as natural and inborn abilities that cannot be acquired through an active and conscious effort. Thus, as many personal qualities in the nineteenth century were presented as abilities that could not be learned through training or the exercise of will alone, women were easily excluded from the possibility of successfully convincing others that they too met the requirements expected from an intellectual persona. Thus, what mattered was not how “intelligent”, “creative”, “objective”, or “rational” women were, but rather that their abilities often went unrecognized.61
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Finally, these reflections bring me to my last point, which perhaps is the most far-reaching. Since nineteenth-century personae were constructed upon assumptions about a natural and inborn self, then women were, of course, not the only ones who were robbed of the possibility of receiving recognition as they tried to embody the intellectual persona. Looking at the nineteenth-century discussion of intellectual and creative “geniality”, we can find more examples of a similar exclusiveness based on the assumptions of what was natural to different categories of individuals. For example, in his writings, Cesare Lombroso not only excluded women from “geniality” but also stressed that this rare inborn ability was a quality of certain classes and ethnicities. In his view, the influence of “race” was, for example, apparent among “men of genius”. Thus, the “Jews of Europe”, according to Lombroso, had demonstrated a clear tendency to rise above other people from “Africa and the East”, sometimes even surpassing “the Aryans” in terms of geniality (though the Jews had never been able to produce a Darwin).62 This suggests to me that various assumptions about what is to be considered natural for different age groups, classes, sexual orientations, or other social groups (e.g. mothers) can, and often do, affect the chances individuals have to successfully embody personae. Thus, if we add what is perceived as natural and inborn to the requirements of personae, we may get a somewhat different picture than if we only think of personae as performances of virtues and skills. If we recognize that mastering the many requirements of a successful performance of persona is never solely dependent upon the individual’s own ambition, persistence, or determination, we have to recognize that the persona is less democratic and open than it may seem. Studying how certain repertoires and personal qualities become naturalized as supposedly “inborn” and “natural” parts of a person’s personality therefore reveals the different practices, not only of social distinction but also of exclusion or even discrimination that are hidden within personae.
Notes 1. Edward Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage. Part I: The Origin of Human Marriage (Helsingfors: Edward Westermarck, 1889); Edward Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage. Vol. I–III (London: MacMillan & Co, 1891); Edward Westermarck, Memories of My Life (London: Allen & Unwin, 1929); and Edward Westermarck, Minnen ur
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mitt liv (Helsingfors: Söderströms, 1927). I will be referring the Swedishlanguage original of Westermarck’s memoirs, rather than the English translation, because the terms Westermarck chose to use are significant to my analysis. A selection of previous literature about Edward Westermarck and his scientific legacy: Rolf Lagerborg, Edvard Westermarck och verken från hans verkstad under hans tolv sista år 1927–39 (Helsingfors: Schildts, 1951); Juhani Ihanus, Multiple Origins: Edward Westermarck in Search of Mankind (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1999); Olli Lagerspetz and Kirsti Suolinna, Edward Westermarck: Intellectual Networks, Philosophy and Social Anthropology (Helsinki: The Finnish Society of Science and Letters, 2014); Olli Lagerspetz, Jan Antfolk, Ylva Gustafsson, and Camilla Kronqvist, eds., Evolution, Human Behaviour and Morality: The Legacy of Westermarck (London: Routledge, 2016); Niina Timosaari, Edvard Westermarck: Totuuden etsijä (Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2017); and Otto Pipatti, Morality Made Visible: Edward Westermarck’s Moral and Social Theory (London, New York: Routledge, 2019). 2. Helena Westermarck, Mina levnadsminnen (Helsingfors: Söderströms & Co, 1941). Helena Westermarck’s unfinished memoirs were published in Swedish after her death. A selection of previous literature about Helena Westermarck: Julia Dahlberg, Konstnär, kvinna, medborgare: Helena Westermarck och den finska bildningskulturen i det moderna genombrottets tid 1880–1910 (Helsingfors: Finska Vetenskaps-Societeten, 2018), http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-653-421-6; Arne Toftegaard Pedersen, Helena Westermarck: Intellektets idoga arbetare (Helsingfors: Svenska Folkskolans Vänner, 2016); Git Claesson Pipping, Men arbetet! Mitt arbete! Identitet och berättande i Helena Westermarcks yrkeskvinnobiografier (Göteborg: Makadam, 2007). About the relationship between Edward and Helena Westermarck: Julia Dahlberg, “When Artists Became Intellectuals: Female Artistic Persona and Science as a Significant Other,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 60–73, https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2 018vol4no1art688; and Julia Dahlberg, “Konst och vetenskap: Intellektuell gemenskap i Helena Westermarcks brev till sin bror,” Niin & Näin. Filosofinen aikakauslehti 89, no. 2 (2016): 57–66. 3. Gadi Algazi, “Exemplum and Wundertier: Three Concepts of the Scholarly Persona,” BMGN Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 8–32, http://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10262, especially pp. 9–16; Lisa Svanfeldt-Winter, “Where Scholars are Made: Gendered Arenas of Persona Formation in Finnish Folkloristics, 1918–1932” (diss., Stockholm: Department of History, Stockholm University, 2019), urn:nbn:se:su:diva-171246 (Retrieved 5 January 2020), 18–26, especially 26. See also Heini Hakosalo’s chapter in this volume.
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4. Herman Paul, “What Is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills, and Desires,” History and Theory 53, no. 3 (October 2014): 348–371, quote on 353, https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10717, 352. Also Herman Paul, “Sources of the Self: Scholarly Personae as Repertoires of Scholarly Selfhood,” BMGN Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 135–154, https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10268; Herman Paul, “Performing History: How Historical Scholarship Is Shaped by Epistemic Virtues,” History and Theory 50, no. 1 (February 2011): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2011.00565.x; Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and Impartiality: Epistemic Virtues in the Humanities,” in The Making of the Humanities. Vol. 3: The Modern Humanities, eds. Rens Bod, Jaap Maat and Thijs Weststeijn (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014): 27–42; Lorraine Daston and Peter Galisson, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007); Herman Paul, “Introduction: Repertoires and Performances of Academic Identity,” BMGN Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 3–7, http://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr. 10261; the collective contributions to Jeroen van Dongen and Herman Paul, eds., Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities (Cham: Springer, 2017); and Herman Paul, ed., How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). 5. Mineke Bosch, “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians. Explorations of a Concept,” BMGN Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54, http://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10263, especially 23–25. See also Mineke Bosch, “Persona and the Performance of Identity: Parallel Developments in the Biographical Historiography of Science and Gender, and the Related Uses of Self Narrative,” L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 24, no. 2 (2013): 11–22. http://doi.org/10.25595/1048; Kirsti Niskanen, Mineke Bosch, and Kaat Wils, “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice: Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (May 2018): 1–5, https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2018vol 4no1art748. 6. Svanfeldt-Winter, Where Scholars Are Made, 26. 7. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeethcentury England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). 8. Dahlberg, “When Artists Became Intellectuals,” Persona Studies, 60–73. 9. Paul, “What Is a Scholarly Persona?” History and Theory, 362–363. 10. Compare for example to the expert as described in Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
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11. Sven Eliaeson and Ragnvald Kalleberg, “Academics as Public Intellectuals,” in Academics as Public Intellectuals, eds. Sven Eliaeson and Ragnvald Kalleberg (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 1–16, especially 1–7; Helen Small, ed., The Public Intellectual (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 12. For a more extensive presentation of Westermarck’s international reputation and his role as a scholarly public intellectual see Timosaari, Edvard Westermarck: Totuuden etsijä; Lagerspetz and Suolinna, Edward Westermarck: Intellectual Networks. 13. Timosaari, Edvard Westermarck: Totuuden etsijä, 89–101, 132. 14. Ville Kajanne, “Edvard Westermarck ja kulttuuriadressin kokoaminen Italiassa” and Tony Lurock, ”Suomen tuntijat ja tutkijat Isossa-Britanniassa,” in Pro Finlandia: Suomen tie itsenäisyyteen. Vol. 2. Näkökulma: Saksa, Iso-Britannia, Itävalta ja Unkari, eds. Jussi Nuorteva and Pertti Hakala (Helsinki: Edita Publishing, 2015), 143–151, 273–283; Harri Korpisaari, Itsenäisen Suomen Puolesta: Sotilaskomitea 1915–1918 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2009), 58, 84; Westermarck Minnen ur mitt liv, 185–194, 385–397. 15. Christophe Charle, Naissance des ”Intellectuels” 1880–1890 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990). 16. I have previously discussed this development with regard to artistic personae in Dahlberg, “When Artists Became Intellectuals”. 17. Charle, Naissance des “Intellectuels.” 18. Darrin M. McMahon, Divine Fury: A History of Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 189. See also Penelope Murray, ed., Genius: The History of an Idea (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 19. Raymond Martin and John Barresi, The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 202. 20. Ibid., 202–203. 21. Martin and Barresi, The Rise and Fall, 202; McMahon, Divine Fury, 155–158, 168–169; Janet Browne, “Inspiration to Perspiration. Francis Galton’s ‘Hereditary Genius’” in Victorian Context in Genealogies of Genius, eds. Joyce E. Chaplin and Darrin M. McMahon (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016): 77–96. 22. Michael Hagner, “Skulls, Brains, and Memorial Culture: On Cerebral Biographies of Scientists in the Nineteenth Century,” Science in Context 16, no. 1–2 (March 2003): 195–218, https://doi.org/10.1017/S02698 89703000784. 23. Browne, “Inspiration to Perspiration,” 78–81; Francis Galton, English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture (London: MacMillan, 1874); Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: MacMillan & Co, 1869, second ed. 1892); and Francis
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25. 26. 27. 28. 29.
30. 31.
32.
33.
34.
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Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: MacMillan, 1883). Brian Nelson, “Zola and the Nineteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Zola, ed. Brian Nelson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1–18, here 3–4; Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin (Paris: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, 1867). Charle, Naissance des “Intellectuels”, 139–182. Hagner, “Skulls, Brains, and Memorial Culture” Westermarck, Minnen ur mitt liv, 410–411. Daston, “Objectivity and Impartiality”. Edward Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage (London: MacMillan & Co, 1891); Edward Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. Vol. 1–2 (London: MacMillan & Co, 1906, 1908). Westermarck, Minnen ur mitt liv, 33, 81. Thiodolf Rein, Försök till en framställning af psykologin eller vetenskapen om själen. Vol. 2. (Helsingfors: Edlund, 1891); Edward Westermarck, “Professor Reins kritik af den monistiska själsteorin,” Finsk Tidskrift 32, no. 1 (1892): 33–41, https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/aikakausi/binding/ 497573?page=1 (Accessed 12 October 2019). About the discussions on these matters in the Philosophical Society in Finland and Westermarck’s opinions, see also Georg Henrik von Wright, “Edward Westermarck och Filosofiska föreningen,” Ajatus: Yearbook of the Philosophical Society 27 (1965): 123–161, here 133–138; Jan Antfolk, “Westermarck as a Precursor of Evolutionary Psychology: The Nature and Nurture of Evolutionary Explanations,” in Evolution, Human Behaviour and Morality. The Legacy of Westermarck, eds. Olli Lagerspetz, Jan Antfolk, Ylva Gustafsson, and Camilla Kronqvist (London: Routledge, 2016), 78–84. Cesare Lombroso, L’uomo di genio in rapporto alla psichiatria (1888), English translation Man of Genius (London: Walter Scott, 1891); Havelock Ellis, The Criminal (New York: Scribner & Welfors, 1890). See for example Mineke Bosch, “Looking at Laboratory Life, Writing a (New) Scientific Persona. Marianne van Herwerden’s Travel Letters from the United States, 1920,” L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 29, no. 1 (2018): 15–34; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (second ed., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 63–102; Barbara Caine, Biography and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 27–40, 66–73. My reading of autobiographical texts is informed by a general understanding of autobiographies as documents of life-writing where the subject actively narrates their life story to themselves and to others. See Caine, Biography and History, 66–85, 97–102; Mary Fulbrook and
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36. 37. 38. 39.
40. 41. 42. 43.
44. 45. 46. 47.
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Ulinka Rublack, “In Relation. The ‘Social Self’ and Ego-Documents,” German History 28, no. 3 (September 2010): 263–272, https://doi. org/10.1093/gerhis/ghq065. I am in particular inspired by the example of Toril Moi, who, in her classic biography of Simone de Beauvoir, sought to understand not the “real Beauvoir” but, rather, the person who appears through Simone de Beauvoir’s writings. See Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvior: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). McMahon, Divine Fury, xix–xx. See also Murray, Genius and Kathleen Kete, Making Way for Genius: The Aspiring Self in France from the Old Regime to the New (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Ann Jefferson, Genius in France: An Idea and Its Uses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Joyce E. Chaplin, and Darrin M. McMahon, eds., Genealogies of Genius (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016). Westermarck, Minnen ur mitt liv, 410–412. Westermarck, Minnen ur mitt liv. Westermarck, Minnen ur mitt liv, 42–68. Westermarck, Minnen ur mitt liv, 55. “Redan vid denna tid hyste jag en livlig önskan att en gång kunna resa till fjärran länder för att studera primitiva folk, och nu erfor jag för första gången en förnimmelse av att jag skulle mäkta med en sådan uppgift och vara i stånd att uthärda de därmed förbundna strapatserna.” Westermarck, Minnen ur mitt liv, 16–17. Westermarck, Minnen ur mitt liv, 16–17, 26–27. Lombroso, Man of Genius, 159–161. Westermarck, Minnen ur mitt liv, 137–138, 190. “Den förnämsta betydelsen av hans och hans skolas verksamhet ligger måhända däri, att de visat vilka djupa rötter brottet ofta ha i brottslingens medfödda natur”. Lombroso, Man of Genius, 161–161. Charle, Naissance des “Intellectuels”. See further Dahlberg, Konstnär, kvinna, medborgare. Helena Westermarck, George Eliot och den engelska naturalistiska romanen: En litterär studie (Helsingfors: Wentzel Hagelstam, 1894). About Westermarck’s biography and its place in the European reception of George Eliot, see Git Claesson Pipping and Catherine Sandbach Dahlström, “‘Spirit of the Age(s)’: The Reception of George Eliot in Sweden,” in The Reception of George Eliot in Europe, eds. Elinor Shaffer and Catherine Brown (London, New York: Bloomsburry Academics, 2016), 103–119.
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48. For example Westermarck, George Eliot och den engelska naturalistiska romanen, 4, 11, 13, 21, 28, 29, 33. Further discussion; see Dahlberg, Konstnär, kvinna, medborgare, 154–155. 49. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1984). 50. Hegel expressed these opinions in an addition to §166 in Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts where he says: “Women can, of course, be educated, but their minds are not adapted to the higher sciences, philosophy or certain of the arts. These demands a universal faculty”. See Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1820), English translation Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (London: George Bell & Sons, 1896), 172. 51. About the changes in the view on female intellectual capacities: see Jerrold Seigel, Modernity and Bourgeois life. Society, Politics and Culture in England, France and Germany Since 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 316–335. 52. Galton, Hereditary Genius, 196, 331. 53. Quotes Lombroso, Man of Genius, 137–138. See also McMahon, Divine Fury, 168–169. 54. Lloyd, The Man of Reason, Pages. 55. Helena Westermarck, “Hvad vi vilja?”, Nutid 1, no. 1 (1895): 2–3. 56. Helena Westermarck, “Om karaktärsstyrka hos kvinnan”, Nutid 17, no. 11 (1909): 399–410. 57. This did evidently not stop nineteenth-century women from trying to embody supposedly male ‘natural’ qualities. 58. For example: Lombroso, Man of Genius, 138. 59. As I have discussed elsewhere, Helena Westermarck’s memoirs (Westermarck, Mina levnadsminnen, 11) start with an early childhood memory where Westermarck’s inborn and natural capacity to render an artistic expression to past events is emphasised. Dahlberg, Konstnär, kvinna, medborgare, 151–152. 60. For example, Paul, “Performing History”; Paul, “What Is a Scholarly Persona?”; Daston, “Objectivity and Impartiality”; Paul, “Introduction”; the collective contributions to Dongen and Paul, Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities; Paul, How to Be a Historian. 61. Compare to Anna Cabanel, La fabrique d’une persona scientifique au féminin: the International Federation of University Women: Années 1920– années 1960 (Groningen: University of Groningen, 2019), https:// doi.org/10.33612/diss.109504410, 20. See also Daston and Galisson, Objectivity, Pages. 62. Lombroso, Man of Genius, 133–134.
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Bibliography Algazi, Gadi. “Exemplum and Wundertier: Three Concepts of the Scholarly Persona.” BMGN Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 8–32. http://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10262. Antfolk, Jan. “Westermarck as a Precursor of Evolutionary Psychology: The Nature and Nurture of Evolutionary Explanations.” In Evolution, Human Behaviour and Morality: The Legacy of Westermarck, edited by Olli Lagerspetz, Jan Antfolk, Ylva Gustafsson, and Camilla Kronqvist, 78–84. London: Routledge, 2016. Bosch, Mineke. “Persona and the Performance of Identity: Parallel Developments in the Biographical Historiography of Science and Gender, and the Related Uses of Self Narrative.” L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 24, no. 2 (2013): 11–22. http://doi.org/10.25595/ 1048. Bosch, Mineke. “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians. Explorations of a Concept.” BMGN Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54, http://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10263. Bosch, Mineke. “Looking at Laboratory Life, Writing a (New) Scientific Persona. Marianne van Herwerden’s Travel Letters from the United States, 1920.” L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 29, no. 1 (2018): 15–34. Browne, Janet. “Inspiration to Perspiration. Francis Galton’s ‘Hereditary Genius’ in Victorian Context.” In Genealogies of Genius, edited by Joyce E. Chaplin and Darrin M. McMahon, 77–96. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. Cabanel, Anna. La fabrique d’une persona scientifique au féminin: the International Federation of University Women: Années 1920–années 1960. Groningen: University of Groningen, 2019, https://doi.org/10.33612/diss.109504410, 20. Caine, Barbara. Biography and History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Chaplin, Joyce E. and McMahon, Darrin M. eds. Genealogies of Genius. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. Charle, Christophe. Naissance des “Intellectuels” 1880–1890. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990. Claesson Pipping, Git. Men arbetet! Mitt arbete! Identitet och berättande i Helena Westermarcks yrkeskvinnobiografier. Göteborg: Makadam, 2007. Claesson Pipping, Git, and Sandbach Dahlström. Catherine. “‘Spirit of the Age(s)’: The Reception of George Eliot in Sweden.” In The Reception of George Eliot in Europe, edited by Elinor Shaffer and Catherine Brown, 103–119. London, New York: Bloomsburry Academics, 2016. Dahlberg, Julia. “Konst och vetenskap: Intellektuell gemenskap i Helena Westermarcks brev till sin bror.” Niin & Näin. Filosofinen aikakauslehti 89, no. 2 (2016): 57–66.
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Dahlberg, Julia. Konstnär, kvinna, medborgare: Helena Westermarck och den finska bildningskulturen i det moderna genombrottets tid 1880–1910. Helsingfors: Finska Vetenskaps-Societeten, 2018. http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978951-653-421-6. Dahlberg, Julia. “When Artists Became Intellectuals: Female Artistic Persona and Science as a Significant Other.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 60–73. https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2018vol4no1art688. Daston, Lorraine and Galisson, Peter. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Daston, Lorraine. “Objectivity and Impartiality: Epistemic Virtues in the Humanities.” In The Making of the Humanities. Vol. 3: The Modern Humanities, edited by Rens Bod, Jaap Maat and Thijs Weststeijn, 27–42. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Eliaeson, Sven and Kalleberg, Ragnvald. “Academics as Public Intellectuals.” In Academics as Public Intellectuals, edited by Sven Eliaeson and Ragnvald Kalleberg, 1–16. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. Ellis, Havelock. The Criminal. New York: Scribner & Welfors, 1890. Fulbrook, Mary, and Rublack, Ulinka. “In Relation. The ‘Social Self’ and Ego-Documents.” German History 28, no. 3 (September 2010): 263–272, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghq065. Galton, Francis. Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. London: MacMillan, 1883. Galton, Francis. English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture. London: MacMillan, 1874. Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. London: MacMillan & Co, 1869, second ed. 1892. Hagner, Michael. “Skulls, Brains, and Memorial Culture: On Cerebral Biographies of Scientists in the Nineteenth Century.” Science in Context 16, no. 1–2 (March 2003): 195–218, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889703000784. Hegel, Friedrich. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. (1820), English translation Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. London: George Bell & Sons, 1896. Ihanus, Juhani. Multiple Origins: Edward Westermarck in Search of Mankind. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1999. Jefferson, Ann. Genius in France: An Idea and Its Uses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Kajanne, Ville. “Edvard Westermarck ja kulttuuriadressin kokoaminen Italiassa.” In Pro Finlandia: Suomen tie itsenäisyyteen. Vol. 2. Näkökulma: Saksa, IsoBritannia, Itävalta ja Unkari, edited by Jussi Nuorteva and Pertti Hakala, 143–151. Helsinki: Edita Publishing, 2015. Kete, Kathleen. Making Way for Genius: The Aspiring Self in France from the Old Regime to the New. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Korpisaari, Harri. Itsenäisen Suomen Puolesta: Sotilaskomitea 1915–1918. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2009.
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Lagerborg, Rolf. Edvard Westermarck och verken från hans verkstad under hans tolv sista år 1927–39. Helsingfors: Schildts, 1951. Lagerspetz, Olli and Suolinna, Kirsti. Edward Westermarck: Intellectual Networks, Philosophy and Social Anthropology. Helsinki: The Finnish Society of Science and Letters, 2014. Lagerspetz, Olli, Antfolk, Jan, Gustafsson, Ylva, and Kronqvist, Camilla. eds. Evolution, Human Behaviour and Morality: The Legacy of Westermarck. London: Routledge, 2016. Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. London: Methuen, 1984. Lombroso, Cesare. L’uomo di genio in rapporto alla psichiatria (1888). English translation Man of Genius. London: Walter Scott, 1891. Lurock, Tony. “Suomen tuntijat ja tutkijat Isossa-Britanniassa.” In Pro Finlandia: Suomen tie itsenäisyyteen. Vol. 2. Näkökulma: Saksa, Iso-Britannia, Itävalta ja Unkari, edited by Jussi Nuorteva and Pertti Hakala, 273–283. Helsinki: Edita Publishing, 2015. Martin, Raymond, and Barresi, John. The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. McMahon, Darrin M. Divine Fury: A History of Genius. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Moi, Toril. Simone de Beauvior: The Making of an Intellectual Woman. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Murray, Penelope, ed. Genius: The History of an Idea. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Nelson, Brian. “Zola and the Nineteenth Century.” In The Cambridge Companion to Zola, edited by Brian Nelson, 1–18. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Niskanen, Kirsti, Bosch, Mineke and Wils, Kaat. “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice: Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (May 2018): 1–5, https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2 018vol4no1art748. Paul, Herman. “Performing History: How Historical Scholarship is Shaped by Epistemic Virtues.” History and Theory 50, no. 1 (February 2011): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2011.00565.x. Paul, Herman. “What Is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills, and Desires.” History and Theory 53, no. 3 (October 2014): 348–371, https:// doi.org/10.1111/hith.10717, 352. Paul, Herman. “Introduction: Repertoires and Performances of Academic Identity.” BMGN Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 3–7, http://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10261.
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Paul, Herman. “Sources of the Self: Scholarly Personae as Repertoires of Scholarly Selfhood.” BMGN Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 135–154, https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10268. Paul, Herman, ed. How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. Pipatti, Otto. Morality Made Visible: Edward Westermarck’s Moral and Social Theory. London, New York: Routledge, 2019. Rein, Thiodolf. Försök till en framställning af psykologin eller vetenskapen om själen. Vol. 2. Helsingfors: Edlund, 1891. Seigel, Jerrold. Modernity and Bourgeois life: Society, Politics and Culture in England, France and Germany Since 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenthcentury England. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Small, Helen, ed., The Public Intellectual. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Smith, Sidonie, and Watson, Julia. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, second ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Svanfeldt-Winter, Lisa. “Where Scholars Are Made: Gendered Arenas of Persona Formation in Finnish Folkloristics, 1918–1932.” Dissertation. Stockholm: Department of History, Stockholm University, 2019. urn:nbn:se:su:diva171246 (Retrieved 5 January 2020). Timosaari, Niina. Edvard Westermarck: Totuuden etsijä. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2017. Toftegaard Pedersen, Arne. Helena Westermarck: Intellektets idoga arbetare. Helsingfors: Svenska Folkskolans Vänner, 2016. van Dongen, Jeroen and Paul, Herman, eds. Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities. Cham: Springer, 2017. von Wright, Georg Henrik. “Edward Westermarck och Filosofiska föreningen.” Ajatus: Yearbook of the Philosophical Society 27 (1965): 123–161, https://fil osofia.fi/tallennearkisto/tekstit/4824 (Accessed 12 October 2019). Westermarck, Edward. The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. Vol. 1–2. London: MacMillan & Co, 1906, 1908. Westermarck, Edward. Minnen ur mitt liv. Helsingfors: Söderströms, 1927. Westermarck, Edward. Memories of My Life. London: Allen & Unwin, 1929. Westermarck, Edward. “Professor Reins kritik af den monistiska själsteorin” Finsk Tidskrift 32, no. 1 (1892): 33–41, https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/aikakausi/ binding/497573?page=1 (Accessed 12 October 2019). Westermarck, Edward. The History of Human Marriage. Vol. I–III. London: MacMillan & Co, 1891.
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Westermarck, Edward. The History of Human Marriage. Part I: The Origin of Human Marriage. Helsingfors: Edward Westermarck, 1889. Westermarck, Helena. George Eliot och den engelska naturalistiska romanen: En litterär studie. Helsingfors: Wentzel Hagelstam, 1894. Westermarck, Helena. “Hvad vi vilja?” Nutid 1, no. 1 (1895): 2–3. Westermarck, Helena. “Om karaktärsstyrka hos kvinnan.” Nutid 17, no. 11 (1909): 399–410. Westermarck, Helena. Mina levnadsminnen. Helsingfors: Söderströms & Co, 1941. Zola, Émile. Thérèse Raquin. Paris: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, 1867.
CHAPTER 8
Scientific Persona Performance Through Online Biographies and Their Relationship to Historical Models Kim Barbour, Rachel A. Ankeny, Carolin Plewa, and Jodie Conduit
Introduction Science communication involves the communication of scientific concepts, ideas, and knowledge to non-scientists, and often takes the form of popular science publications and events, or science education efforts. Science communication also serves additional purposes such as marking
K. Barbour (B) · R. A. Ankeny · C. Plewa · J. Conduit University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia e-mail: [email protected] R. A. Ankeny e-mail: [email protected] C. Plewa e-mail: [email protected] J. Conduit e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 K. Niskanen and M. J. Barany (eds.), Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7_8
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off experts from non-experts, science from other forms of enquiry, and scientists from other types of professionals or people.1 Early ideas related to good science communication focused on increasing literacy, interest in, and support for science, particularly amongst groups who may be less likely to be exposed to science education. More recently, there has been greater focus on science engagement and public understanding of science, in part out of recognition that the older ‘deficit’ model that underlay much of the work in science communication is insufficient. The assumption that the general public is somehow ‘deficient’ in knowledge or understanding, and that imparting more scientific information will result in more support for, and interest, in science, has been shown to be inaccurate.2 Hence more complex models that do not rely on a simple transmission of ideas or concepts have become increasingly favoured, including participatory methods (e.g. see Hilgartner and Gregory & Miller).3 Although science and technology studies scholars have extensively documented the theories and approaches associated with more sophisticated forms of engagement in contrast to unidirectional communication, many public-facing efforts tend to continue to rely on unidirectional transmission of information and education in the name of public engagement in science. Against this backdrop, and building on research into the ways in which humanities and social science academics produce online persona,4 we analyse different ways in which contemporary scientists5 present themselves in online spaces in order to develop a deeper understanding of online scientific personas.6 One way in which science communicators increasingly get their messages across to the general public is via social media, including public-facing profiles and websites. Although there are increasing numbers of professionals trained specifically in science communication, there also is a strong presence in Australia of practising and non-practising scientists who are recognized as science communicators and promoters, and who are rewarded with major prizes for their public-facing activities. In this chapter, they are our primary focus. There are at least two broader goals underlying this chapter. First, we seek to provide a ‘history of the present’ perspective on how scientists in their online presentations incorporate and reproduce persona in
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order to present themselves and their work to the public. We document considerable continuities between key features of personas produced by contemporary and historical scientists and contend that such features have become part of the discourse about what it means to be a scientist. Second, studying the ways in which contemporary scientists produce online personas is particularly important given rising concerns about the devaluation of scientific expertise and evidence in public discourse, claims about the prominence of ‘science denial’ and the decline of ‘trust in science,’ and fear of increased anti-science sentiments and their potential social and political effects, despite the admittedly problematic nature of this label.7 Scientists increasingly are relying both on their tried and true methods, such as presenting compelling scientific evidence, while also recognizing the need to motivate the public through personal anecdote, emotional appeals, and other methods to establish their expertise and credibility. There are a myriad of causes relating to the rising scepticism in some quarters about science and scientists, yet exploring, by drawing from successful historical models where appropriate, how scientists can be presented as credible, ethical, and experienced experts, who also are open to public debate over critical issues, could aid in supporting the wider public’s trust in scientific evidence and engage the public more fully in scientific debates.
Online Scientific Persona & Public Intellectuals Select scientists working within universities or other professional settings have long had some degree of connection with the public, whether through popular writing, public lectures, expert commentary, media engagement, or political connections. Indeed, some scientists have attained true celebrity status through these sorts of activities. Consider Charles Darwin and Marie Curie as historical examples, and Susan Greenfield, Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking as more contemporary examples.8 Although a relatively small percentage of scientists attain the status of public intellectuals, most contemporary scientists tend to cultivate publicand peer-facing persona. The capacity of working scientists to undertake outreach and engagement both with those within and outside of academia has grown dramatically since the development of the internet generally and social media in particular. Institutional profiles on university websites featuring leading scholars have expanded to encompass all
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researchers associated with an institution or research group, including those still studying in post-graduate positions. Media organizations include biographical statements for regular contributors and organizations that promote and supply guest speakers for corporate events include details of the scientists on their rosters. Beyond these job-specific promotional activities, as social media presence has become ubiquitous, scientists have personal profiles on varying platforms, serving both professional and personal networking needs. These disparate presences contribute to the individual’s online persona, “the strategic performance of identity through digitally networked media”.9 For those scientists working in science communication and engagement, this online persona can locate them within their network of peers, frame their contributions and impact, and demonstrate authenticity and expertise. The bulk of existing work on scientific personas comes from the study of historical figures (for a review, see Niskanen et al.).10 The work on scientific personas as cultural or social categories, as reported in the 2003 special issue of Science in Context (edited by Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum), provides insights into a range of historical figures who constructed personas of themselves as scientists by drawing on existing tropes, stereotypes, and identities.11 The authors of the articles collected in this important special issue make the case that “personae are not individuals, nor are they simply stereotypes or social roles”, and that adopting a persona can be understood as “transformative, to attain rather than to suppress genuine selfhood”.12 Building on this earlier work, Mineke Bosch argues that being perceived as a ‘reliable and trustworthy’ scientist or scholar is at the core of the persona that scientists can perform in a specific context.13 By applying these concepts to the scholarly personas of historians, Bosch discusses the ways in which these scholars drew on existing repertoires of identity performance associated with embodiment, and which variously emphasized illness, robust health, celibacy, and “actively practiced heterosexuality”, amongst other elements.14 In analysing the personas of specific historians, Bosch demonstrates clearly that the personas produced are a combination of existing tropes and stereotypes, together with the influences of the scholars themselves as agents in their own presentational practices, as performance is critical to personas. These findings align closely with the arguments presented by persona studies scholars working in the cultural studies/celebrity studies tradition (e.g. see work of P. David Marshall, Kim Barbour, Chris Moore, and Katja Lee).15 Indeed,
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as Bosch states, “knowledge cannot be recognised as valuable when it is not performed in a way that the scholar or scientist is seen as a trusted member of the scientific or scholarly community”, which underscores the need for research into contemporary scientists such as undertaken in this chapter.16 An additional key theme in the existing literature focuses on the differences between public characters deliberately produced by scientists as compared to the images produced in public contexts which in turn produce alternative personas. As Janet Browne argues, Darwin provides an excellent example of such contrasting views.17 In contrast to the often unflattering artistic caricatures published in the popular press, Darwin (and his supporters) structured his public appearances (both in professional contexts and when he received guests at his home) to his advantage, creating ritualized ways of “showing himself”, and hence acknowledging and reinforcing his status as a celebrity intellectual. Cathryn Carson explores the ways in which the physicist Werner Heisenberg’s persona evolved in the cultural context of post-World War II Germany, as he reconsidered what it meant to be ‘objective’ and even what it meant to be a ‘scientist’.18 In the case of the early twentieth-century Belgian botanist Joséphine Schouteden-Wéry, Sarah Erman illustrates how she constructed her public image as a professional teacher-scientist using various pre-existing cultural repertoires for female popular science writers and for scientists.19 However, as a result of combining these repertoires she created a hybrid and complex public self (what might be termed a ‘bricolage’ as utilized by Bosch, or perhaps even an early version of what we in the digital era would now term ‘multiplied selves’), the various facets of which were sometimes internally in tension.20 The examples of both Darwin and Schouteden-Wéry are instructive in demonstrating that scientists across history played different roles for different purposes; equally, the multiplicity of identity performance visible in contemporary online spaces has historical precedence. Similarly, Sam Schweber documents the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s struggles to integrate his distinct activities and personas into a consistent public image, particularly in the post-war period.21 These studies show the ways in which scientists can draw on myths, stories, and repertoires to construct their identities, particularly in association with gender, race, and class (see also Bosch).22 These examples can be viewed as parallel to the way in which contemporary scientists can ‘show themselves’ particularly through social media in order to establish themselves
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as celebrity scientists and science communicators, as will be illustrated below, but also how such personas are necessarily grounded within their sociocultural contexts. As a number of scholars have stressed, although these personas may begin as externally staged selves that could be viewed as inauthentic, they often evolve over time into real selves reflected in altered personalities and emotional attachments. Sometimes even establishing a deeper ethos associated with key qualities of what it means to be a scientist. Thus scientific personas can be viewed as “collective entities, a kind of cultural and social repertoires on how to be a person of science”.23 Professorial voice also has been emphasized as a critical part of the scientist’s persona, which in turn reinforces the authority associated with science due to its supposed ‘objectivity’.24 Essential characteristics of professorial voice found in historical cases include that it is authoritative and that it speaks on behalf of public welfare, themes which again are echoed in the contemporary context. In addition, the attribution of ‘objectivity’ as a key attribute of what makes a scientist emphasizes that there is a scientific ‘type’, which goes well beyond specific individuals and points towards a broader reality and consensus that can be conveyed by scientists as ‘knowers’.25 Such a “self-abstracting” type, as Carson terms it, is undoubtedly present in the contemporary personas established by scientists who are science communicators, as can be seen in the very language that they use, which evokes broader consensus and lack of individual views.26 However, in some historic contexts, there have been purposive efforts to create a ‘disembodied’ type of scientific persona in order to emphasise meritocracy and the universality of science, and to deemphasize more personal attributes such as gender. An example of the latter can be found in the case of the fellowship programme of the International Federation of University Women during the interwar period as analysed by Anna Cabanel.27 In our analysis of contemporary science communicators, there are clear trade-offs between the inclusion of personal details and stress on more universal, abstract, and disembodied qualities of scientists.
Methodology To develop a typography of existing online personas and to explore the ways in which specific scientists perform their scientific personas online, we focused our attention on Australian scientists who are actively and
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explicitly seeking to engage the public and who have been nominated for, or awarded, prizes for public engagement with science or science communication within Australia in the past decade. From an initial sample of over 230 names, we purposively selected a subset of highly visible scientists and conducted quantitative content analysis, while another 70 who met minimal requirements in terms of their available information were identified for inclusion in a process of qualitative data analysis. Online biographical statements (from here on ‘biographies’)28 were collected from a diverse range of sources for each scientist, with academic profiles being by far the most common. Biographies were coded using a coding schema developed as part of the pilot; the coding categories were designed to identify whether and how scientists were using traditional academic markers to demonstrate their expertise; whether they used accessible language to engage with the public; and when and how they incorporated elements of their personal lives into their professional profiles. Consideration of whether biographies were appropriate for the platform on which they appeared (i.e. a profile for The Conversation would be expected to have a different tone to a Twitter bio) was also included as a coding scheme category.
Findings When looking at the range of biographies presented in different spaces, it was clear that many scientists tailored their presentations to the likely audience of the site. Also interesting were the attempts to balance discipline expertise and accessibility. In some cases, the biographies included a significant quantity of discipline-specific terminology (coded by us as ‘jargon’), while including claims of being science translators, which we note may well be contradictory. Finding a balance between demonstrating expertise and making work accessible may be more straightforward for some disciplines than others. For instance, a scientist working on experimental cancer treatments depended heavily on long lists of terminology (he was also the most consistent across all biographies), while an ecologist was able to discuss her field site in uncomplicated, accessible terminology. However, we do note that biomedical scientists often translate their work for the public, in clinical practice and otherwise, and hence there is not likely to be a straightforward relationship between discipline and accessibility.
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Awards, publications, qualifications, and academic positions were predictable elements of almost all of the biographies collected and made up the bulk of the text. Indeed, the lack of information about the scientists’ current academic positions was more telling than its inclusion, particularly when this was absent from engagement-focused sites such as Twitter. Further survey or interview-style research would be required to determine if this was a protection mechanism to attempt to separate (however minimally) Twitter profiles from institutional profiles, whether to ensure academic freedom, or to protect their institutions from blowback should the scientist draw the interest of ‘trolls’ or negative media attention. A number of biographies specifically discussed the scientists’ international profiles or invitations, often in a manner clearly designed to establish their expertise. Whether this tendency is distinctive in Australia warrants further investigation, particularly given the tendency to look towards the United States, the UK, and the European Union for credentialing and recognition, often referred to in Australia as the ‘cultural cringe’. Superlatives were used relatively sparingly in the biographies and were evenly distributed between descriptions of the scientists themselves and their work. Descriptors such as ‘passionate’, ‘exceptional’, ‘highly awarded’, and ‘accessible’ were used in the scientists’ biographies to emphasize their achievements, while their research work was described variously as ‘novel’, ‘cutting-edge’, and ‘world-leading’. This type of wording was most likely to be in evidence on non-academic sites such as media organizations, with only the most mild language (‘novel’, for example) typically found on university profiles, and tending to refer to the scientists’ work rather than to his or her personal attributes. Again here, a bigger data set is required to investigate explanations for these patterns, but one hypothesis relates to the common ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’, which refers to the tendency to resent, attack, or criticize those of high status and hence, in turn, results in some underplaying their accomplishments (except perhaps in sporting contexts); trends which continue to have considerable influence in Australian culture.29 We hypothesized that there might be gendered differences in presentation and hence converted women’s and men’s data30 into percentages to make comparisons. We sought to analyse the ways in which the two groups were most similar or different and to determine what factors might be contributing to these differences. We note that without doing further research with scientists, this interpretation and discussion of gender
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influences is only exploratory, and interview or focus group research with scientists are likely to provide data to support additional or even contradictory interpretations. Most biographies were written in the third person, presenting an armslength view of the scientists and their work. This type of phrasing helps to position the scientist as an expert and gives the impression that the biography is a sort of testimonial, or perhaps that scientists ‘have someone to do this for them’. However, usage of the third person also creates a sense in which the scientist is being held apart from the reader, rather than speaking directly to them as a peer. Although women are just as likely to use third person in their biographies as men, women are much more likely to include passionate declarations about their work and its impact, positioning themselves as deeply invested and enthusiastic about their scientific endeavours. Such emphatic declarations of one’s enthusiasm and effort in relation to science align with early views of science as requiring considerable or complete self-sacrifice, and related terminology of ‘brides of science’, such as evidenced in discourse on Marie Curie.31 However, such statements are in contrast with the ‘narrative of unsought success’, such as found in the historic example of Annie Rommein in the nineteenth century, and thus could be viewed as downplaying proactive, goal-oriented work rather than luck as the foundations of female professional success.32 Drawing on our data, by contrast, men are very unlikely to make these sorts of personal connections with their work explicit in their bios (although presumably they still exist), instead tending to present dispassionate views. This gender split is interesting and warrants continued investigation. The inclusion of such information in women’s bios might be due to stereotypes or cultural norms about women’s roles in society and their openness about emotions. Alternatively, the lack of inclusion in men’s bios could reflect other norms, namely that men are expected to be naturally invested in and enthusiastic about their work and so such assertions are taken as unnecessary. Although it was more common for men to use discipline-specific jargon than women in at least one of their bios, the frequency of the use of jargon was relatively even. The use of technical terminology was relatively infrequent across the board. This bodes well for the levels at which scientists are engaging with the public, since the use of disciplinary-specific terms without explanation can cause scientists’ bios to be less easily interpreted by non-expert readers. Using jargon can have two possible main effects,
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one that is positive—namely that scientists sound more knowledgeable and have high levels of scientific expertise as they use nomenclature that is not easily understood—and an alternative that is negative—related to jargon causing scientists to sound elitist and inaccessible to the public as they are viewed as using ‘big words’ that no one understands. Our analysis revealed that scientists use their bios to ensure that they are seen as credible and authoritative. A range of specific strategies that help do this work include listing their institutions, positions, and markers of international recognition (along with awards and publications, although these are not as common). However, women appear to work harder than men to credential themselves, as they are more likely to include their titles and qualifications in their bios. It is possible that this tendency seeks to counter prevailing expectations that scientists are men; or perhaps it is related to recent movements in academia to combat sexism by ensuring that women are addressed by their titles (a recent Twitter campaign emphasized including ‘Dr’ in tweet handles, for example). More research is needed to explore this theme, as it could either be evidence of a push against the prevailing male dominance of the hard sciences in Australia, or conversely point towards the continuation of such dominance. If women have to do more to prove their expertise and credibility than men, then this additional labour is worth highlighting. Neither men nor women are likely to list their media experience, such as interviews, news articles, or television appearances, perhaps because such activities are not viewed as part of their roles as scientists. Such a finding was unexpected, particularly because these people are acknowledged and usually self-described science communicators. The absence of this type of information may point to fears of seeming ‘populist’ (and hence echoes some of the findings in the historic literature reviewed previously) or may once again be connected to the Tall Poppy Syndrome, as providing more detail would mean they would ‘stick out too much’ and thus open themselves up to being cut down. However, in connecting this data to the more detailed case studies produced by the pilot project, we found that the more prominent people featured in the pilot tended to have more engaging personas than those in the larger set, based on our qualitative reviews of the bios. The cause and effect of this finding would be interesting to tease apart through interviews or focus groups. We would predict that there is an intertwined or a spiralling effect in play, in that as people get more attention for something, they then put more effort into their online presence, which in turn leads to more attention
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and potentially greater assistance or advice on presenting themselves to their audience. There may also be effects of age or seniority in the field, though it is not clear whether people tend to develop more engaging personas as they get older, or instead better engage, be more inventive, or wishing to make themselves distinctive when they are younger. The common usage of the third person, along with other components of key information that were regularly included, meant that the biographies for any one person tended to be very consistent. This finding was unsurprising, given that people generally take an existing bio as a starting point and then adapt this to each new site. Such consistency also could indicate that scientists are trying to present consistent personas online. By presenting coherent identities across multiple sites, scientists make it easy to identify them given they are relying on consistent markers or descriptors. However, such tendencies could also mean that they are missing opportunities to connect with their audiences and create richer and more persuasive identities, making it harder for them to truly engage and enact change, which can be part of the agenda of science communicators, for example in connection with environmental or health issues. As seen in various historical examples such as Darwin, hybrid identities can sometimes be more effective and compelling than simplified, unitary personas.
Scientists’ Online Personas: Historical Continuities and Further Research Scientists recognize the need to engage with a wide range of audiences to advance the perceived role of science in benefiting society, as well as to combat the rise of so-called science denial and the devaluation of scientific evidence. Many view the latter as becoming more common in public discourse, for example in relation to climate change crisis and challenges to vaccination efficacy. Drawing on historical insights of the portrayal of scientific personas beyond academic audiences, we contend that our research on contemporary science communicators can contribute to our understanding of ways in which scientists establish their presences and portray their public personas across recent and more traditional media channels, and potential avenues for improving these practices. It is clear that credibility and expertise, along with openness to public discourse and relatability, are key characteristics that are critical to contemporary scientists who wish to engage with the public. In
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building their personas online, we expected that scientists would aim to achieve credibility and recognition of their research expertise as part of their efforts to engage with the broader public. Our findings indeed showed that science communicators use a variety of techniques to build credibility and establish their expertise, such as the use of third person language; the building of credentials through association with institutions, positions, and awards or other types of recognitions; and the use of discipline-specific jargon. These practices are well-aligned with historic findings about the important role of professorial voice.33 By emphasizing the abstract qualities and references to science rather than highlighting personal attributes or interests, the modern scientist personas examined here strongly echo prominent historical examples. In addition, these findings emphasize the importance of the role of the attribution of ‘objectivity’ and related ‘epistemic virtues’ that are particular to science. It could be contended that the personas of scientists are similar in an important way to what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison describe as the fifth (and most recent) epistemic virtue, that of ‘presentation’.34 In their analysis of scientific images, they note that images no longer merely represent scientific entities but are even used to manipulate and engineer them; similarly, the personas analysed here are not just representations of scientists but evolving and plastic presentations that are constantly iterated and modified but which are grounded in key epistemic norms. However, it is critical to note that these more traditional techniques aimed at strengthening perceptions of reputation, credibility, and objectivity may have unintended effects, such as distancing scientists from the publics which they hope to engage. The irony is that the techniques that could engage the community on a more personal level, and hence connect scientists with the broader community and enhance public interest and passion for science, such as using passionate terminology or the first person, creating narrative structures, and including personal interests, often are viewed as potentially undermining credibility not only of individual scientists but of science more broadly. Thus, perhaps unsurprisingly, such attributes appear to be downplayed in the biographies analysed in this study. Experimental research examining perceptions and attributions of the public towards scientific personas built on self-abstracting, as compared to highly personal narratives, could enable us to draw more refined conclusions as well as recommendations for scientists, particularly those seeking to be science communicators. Interestingly, our findings do indicate that female scientists are more likely to engage in passionate
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declarations about their research and in outlining their personal interests as compared to their male counterparts. This result clearly diverges from historical examples in which women scientists were found to either demonstrate their full commitment to science above all personal interests, or in which scholarly pursuits and interests were hidden behind narratives of indifference. The stronger contemporary presence of personal interests and passion hint at potentially changing gender roles in relation to public scientific personas, and further research is necessary to obtain insights as to the underlying reasons for such shifts. Some of our findings may be distinct to the Australian cultural context, for instance the presence and effects of the Tall Poppy Syndrome. While the scientists studied here appear to be comfortable with aspects of their expertise, they also do not wish to appear to use language that denotes too much about their success or to be seen as self-promoting. These concerns also could help to explain the lack of mentions of previous media experience. Whether this phenomenon exists outside of this cultural context remains to be investigated. Finally, it is critical to note that we have relied on a working assumption that online profiles that are engaging, accessible, and personal are ‘better’ in a critical sense, namely that they will attract more attention and be more effective at engaging the public in the scientists’ messaging. However, it is possible that taking these steps to make science and scientists themselves more accessible and engaging could backfire in some cases, particularly if the audience thus views the scientists’ activities as not sufficiently rigorous, and hence more fine-grained analysis of the effects of varying degrees of accessibility is warranted. It is possible to read these findings as both performance and performative. It can be seen as performance in the sense conceptualized by Erving Goffman, who used a dramaturgical analysis to explore the ways in which people enact contextually appropriate roles.35 These biographical statements are well and truly ‘front stage’ performances, produced for an anticipated audience and “informed by the parameters defining the situation and any prior or advanced knowledge” of how that performance will be engaged with.36 That prior knowledge could include how others in their field have previously written statements by using third person; the anticipated level of understanding of the audience as signalled through the use of discipline-specific terminology; or the deliberate surfacing of international recognition or academic service as a form of “dramatic realisation”, as previously discussed in relation to academic CVs.37 Equally, the exclusion of personal information such as family or
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marital status, non-academic interests, and non-academic work experience could reflect Nod Miller and David Morgan’s discussion of Goffman’s “maintenance of expressive control”, which noted that academics avoid “unwelcome intrusions from other areas of life into the front stage of the on-going presentation”.38 The deliberate choice to include more personal information would signal rejection of these types of strict performance management that could be read as a political statement of a type, or alternatively reflective of a misunderstanding of the ways in which academics should produce performances of themselves for public consumption. By focusing on those scientists recognized for their public engagement work, the sampling strategy used in this project seeks to inform and guide those scientists interested in public engagement or in being viewed as science communicators; hence, our results may be considered to be irrelevant to scientists more broadly. Admittedly, the building and maintenance of online personas, along with other types of public engagement work such as talks, workshops, and media engagements, can be timeconsuming and may seem to serve as distractions from scientists’ core research, teaching, and other roles. However, given the current global trends towards anti-intellectualism and resistance to scientific discourse, along with increasingly pressing social and environmental pressures which require evidence-based solutions, many would contend that all scientists should view themselves as publicly accountable. Thus, finding ways to bridge the gaps between scientists and non-scientists is critical, and understanding how best to develop effective, engaging, and credible online personas by reflecting on both historic and contemporary tropes is a significant part of this process. Finally, the continuities between key features of personas produced by contemporary and historical scientists are striking, despite the different forms of media now in use, and warrant further reflection and analysis in different contexts as they clearly continue to ground our understandings about what it means to be a scientist. Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge receipt of funding for this study from the 2017−2018 Interdisciplinary Research Funding scheme at the University of Adelaide via the Public Engagement in Science and Technology Adelaide (PESTA) research cluster. We also extend our thanks to our research assistants: Aislinn Rossi for her work on the pilot project, and Caitlin Adams for the second round of data collection and coding.
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Notes 1. Jane Gregory, “Science Communication,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed. ed., James D. Wright (Elsevier, 2015), 219−224. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8. 95088-8. 2. Patrick Sturgis and Nick Allum, “Science in Society: Re-Evaluating the Deficit Model of Public Attitudes,” Public Understanding of Science 13, no. 1 (2004): 55−74. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662504042690; Steve Miller, “Deficit Model,” in Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Communication, ed. Susanna Hornig Priest (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2010), 208−209; Molly J. Simis, Haley Madden, Michael A. Cacciatore, and Sara K. Yeo, “The Lure of Rationality: Why Does the Deficit Model Persist in Science Communication?” Public Understanding of Science 25, no. 4 (2016): 400−414. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0963662516629749. 3. Steven Hilgartner, “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses,” Social Studies of Science 20, no. 1 (1990): 519−539; Jane Gregory and Steve Miller, Science in Public: Communication, Culture, And Credibility. New York: Plenum Press, 1998. 4. Kim Barbour and David Marshall, “The Academic Online: Constructing Persona Through the World Wide Web,” First Monday 17, no. 9 (2012). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v0i0.3969; David P. Marshall, Kim Barbour, and Christopher Moore, “Academic Persona: The Construction of Online Reputation in the Modern Academy,” in The Digital Academic: Critical Perspectives on Digital Technologies in Higher Education, eds. Deborah Lupton, Inger Mewburn and Pat Thomson (London: Routledge, 2018), 47−62. 5. We rely on the somewhat narrow Anglo-European/Australasian meaning of the term ‘scientist’, namely those professionals trained in and involved in practicing the natural, medical, or experimental sciences (the so-called hard sciences) rather than those who work in the social or human sciences. 6. This chapter arose out of collaborations and funding from the Public Engagement in Science and Technology Research Cluster Adelaide (PESTA) at the University of Adelaide which seeks to explore a range of issues associated with public engagement and communication in STEM including best practices. 7. Anonymous, “Beware the Anti-Science Label,” Nature 545, no. 7653 (2017): 133−134. https://doi.org/10.1038/545133b; Naomi Oreskes, Why Trust Science? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 8. Janet Browne, “Charles Darwin as a Celebrity,” Science in Context 16, no. 1 (2003): 175−194; Declan Fahy and Bruce V. Lewenstein, “Scientists in Popular Culture: The Making of Celebrities,” in Routledge Handbook of
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9. 10.
11. 12. 13.
14. 15.
16. 17. 18. 19.
20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
26.
Public Communication of Science and Technology, eds. Massimiano Bucchi and Brian Trench (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 83−96. Kim Barbour, “HDRs and Online Persona,” Presentation in HDR Digital Identities Workshop (Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 27 March 2018). Kirsti Niskanen Niskanen, Mineke Bosch, and Kaat Wils, “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice: Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 1−5. Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum, “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories,” Science in Context 16, no. 1 (2003): 1−8. Daston and Sibum, “Introduction,” 3. Mineke Bosch Bosch, “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians: Explorations of a Concept,” BMGN —Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33−54. Mineke Bosch, “Scholarly Personae,” 48. Kim Barbour, P. David Marshall, and Christopher Moore, “Persona to Persona Studies,” M/C Journal 17, no. 3 (2014). http://journal. media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/841; P. David Marshall and Kim Barbour, “Making Intellectual Room for Persona Studies: A New Consciousness and a Shifted Perspective,” Persona Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 1−1; P. David Marshall, Christopher Moore, and Kim Barbour, “Persona as Method: Exploring Celebrity and the Public Self through Persona Studies,” Celebrity Studies 6, no. 3 (2015): 288−305; Christopher Moore, Kim Barbour, and Katja Lee, “Five Dimensions of Online Persona,” Persona Studies 3, no. 1 (2017): 1−11. Bosch, “Scholarly Personae,” 53. Browne Janet Browne, “Charles Darwin,” 175−194. Cathryn Carson, “Objectivity and the Scientist: Heisenberg Rethinks,” Science in Context 16, no. 1 (2002): 243−269. Sarah Erman, “A Teacher, a Scientist, a Wife: The Complex Self of Joséphine Schouteden-Wéry (1879−1954),” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 74−86. https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2018vol4no1art703. Bosch, “Scholarly Personae,” 33−54. Silvan S. Schweber, “J. Robert Oppenheimer: Proteus Unbound,” Science in Context 16, no. 1 (2003): 219−242. Bosch, “Scholarly Personae,” 33−54. Niskanen, Bosch and Wils, “Scientific Personas,” 1. William Clark, “On Professorial Voice,” Science in Context 16, no. 1 (2003): 43−57. Carson, “Objectivity,” 243−269; Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo, Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Carson, “Objectivity,” 261.
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27. Anna Cabanel, “How Excellent…for a Woman’? The Fellowship Programme of the International Federation of University Women in the Interwar Period,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 88−102. 28. Here we use the term ‘biography’ to refer to these short statements that are a familiar part of academic life, often shortened to ‘bio’ in English. Although in literature ‘biography’ indicates a text written by someone other than the subject, academic bios are most often autobiographical. These biographical statements may include details of research interests and achievements, publications, teaching responsibilities, and institutional connections, among other elements. The usage of ‘biographical statements’ in this chapter does not encompass comprehensive or book-length literary accounts of people’s lives written by others. 29. Stuart Macintyre, “Tall Poppy,” in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, ed. Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), Accessed November 10, 2018. http:// www.oxfordreference.com.proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/view/10.1093/ acref/9780195515039.001.0001/acref-9780195515039-e-1428; Burt Peeters, “‘Thou shalt not be a tall poppy’: Describing an Australian Communicative (and Behavioural Norm),” Intercultural Pragmatics 1, no. 1 (2004): 71−92. 30. An option was included in the data collection framework for people who did not identify as either a woman or a man but was not utilised as all fell into one of the two most common gender identifications. 31. Bosch, “Scholarly Personae,” 33−54. 32. Bosch, “Scholarly Personae,” 53. 33. Clark, “On Professorial Voice,” 43−57. 34. Lorraine Daston Daston and Sibum and Peter Galison, Objectivity. 35. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (United States of America: Anchor Books, 1959). 36. P. David Marshall, Christopher Moore, and Kim Barbour, Persona Studies: An Introduction (Hoboken: Wiley, 2020), 31. 37. Nod Miller and David Morgan, “Called to Account: The CV as an Autobiographical Practice,” Sociology 27, no. 1 (1993): 138. 38. Miller and Morgan, “Called to Account,” 139.
Bibliography Anonymous. “Beware the Anti-Science Label.” Nature 545, no. 7653 (2017): 133–134. https://doi.org/10.1038/545133b. Barbour, Kim, and Marshall, David. “The Academic Online: Constructing Persona Through the World Wide Web.” First Monday 17, no. 9, 2012. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v0i0.3969.
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Barbour, Kim, P., Marshall, David, and Moore, Christopher. “Persona to Persona Studies.” M/C Journal 17, no. 3 (2014). http://journal.media-culture.org. au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/841. Barbour, Kim. “HDRs and Online Persona.” Presentation in HDR Digital Identities Workshop, Adelaide, University of Adelaide, 27 March 2018. Bosch, Mineke. “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians: Explorations of a Concept.” BMGN —Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54. Browne, Janet. “Charles Darwin as a Celebrity.” Science in Context 16, no. 1 (2003): 175–194. Cabanel, Anna. “How Excellent…for a Woman’? The Fellowship Programme of the International Federation of University Women in the Interwar Period.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 88–102. Carson, Cathryn. “Objectivity and the Scientist: Heisenberg Rethinks.” Science in Context 16, no. 1 (2002): 243–269. Clark, William. “On Professorial Voice.” Science in Context 16, no. 1 (2003): 43–57. Daston, Lorraine, and Sibum, H. Otto. “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories.” Science in Context 16, no. 1 (2003): 1–8. Daston, Lorraine, and Galison, Peter. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Erman, Sarah. “A Teacher, a Scientist, a Wife: The Complex Self of Joséphine Schouteden-Wéry (1879–1954).” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 74–86. https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2018vol4no1art703. Fahy, Declan, and Lewenstein, Bruce V. “Scientists in Popular Culture: The Making of Celebrities.” In Routledge Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology, edited by Massimiano Bucchi and Brian Trench, 83–96. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. United States of America: Anchor Books, 1959. Gregory, Jane, and Miller, Steve. Science in Public: Communication, Culture, and Credibility. New York: Plenum Press, 1998. Gregory, Jane. “Science Communication.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed, edited by James D. Wright, 219–224. Elsevier, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.95088-8. Hilgartner, Steven. “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses.” Social Studies of Science 20, no. 1 (1990): 519–539. Macintyre, Stuart. “Tall Poppy.” In The Oxford Companion to Australian History, edited by Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Accessed November 10, 2018. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/978019551 5039.001.0001/acref-9780195515039-e-1428.
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Marshall, P. David, and Barbour, Kim. “Making Intellectual Room for Persona Studies: A New Consciousness and a Shifted Perspective.” Persona Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 1–12. Marshall, P. David, Moore, Christopher, and Barbour, Kim. “Persona as Method: Exploring Celebrity and the Public Self through Persona Studies.” Celebrity Studies 6, no. 3 (2015): 288–305. Marshall, David P., Barbour, Kim, and Moore, Christopher. “Academic Persona: The Construction of Online Reputation in the Modern Academy.” In The Digital Academic: Critical Perspectives on Digital Technologies in Higher Education, edited by Deborah Lupton, Inger Mewburn and Pat Thomson, 47–62. London: Routledge, 2018. Marshall, P. David, Moore, Christopher, and Barbour, Kim. Persona Studies: An Introduction. Hoboken: Wiley, 2020. Miller, Nod, and Morgan, David. “Called to Account: The CV as an Autobiographical Practice.” Sociology 27, no. 1 (1993): 133–143. Miller, Steve. “Deficit Model.” In Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Communication, edited by Susanna Hornig Priest, 208–209. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2010. Moore, Christopher, Barbour, Kim, and Lee, Katja. “Five Dimensions of Online Persona.” Persona Studies 3, no. 1 (2017): 1–11. Niskanen, Kirsti, Mineke Bosch, and Kaat Wils. “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice: Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 1–5. Oreskes, Naomi. Why Trust Science? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Peeters, Burt. “‘Thou shalt not be a tall poppy’: Describing an Australian Communicative (and Behavioural) Norm).” Intercultural Pragmatics 1, no. 1 (2004): 71–92. Schweber, Silvan S. “J. Robert Oppenheimer: Proteus Unbound.” Science in Context 16, no. 1 (2003): 219–242. Shortland, Michael, and Yeo, Richard. Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Simis, Molly J., Madden, Haley, Cacciatore, Michael A., and Yeo, Sara K. “The Lure of Rationality: Why Does the Deficit Model Persist in Science Communication?” Public Understanding of Science 25, no. 4 (2016): 400–414. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0963662516629749. Sturgis, Patrick, and Allum, Nick. “Science in Society: Re-Evaluating the Deficit Model of Public Attitudes.” Public Understanding of Science 13, no. 1 (2004): 55–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662504042690.
PART III
Multiple Masculinities
CHAPTER 9
Immortal Beloved: Virtue, Death, and the Making of the Swedish Nineteenth-Century Pedagogical Scholar Isak Hammar
Introduction A week after his 29th birthday, Carl Ulric Broocman (1783–1812), one of the most influential pedagogues of the nineteenth century in Sweden, died after a period of severe illness. In the eulogy over the young scholar and teacher, posthumously printed in the last issue of his own pedagogical journal, Broocman was described as having embodied the qualities of a perfect pedagogue; not only selflessly dedicated to the advancement of his scholarly field, but above all devoted to his students.1 A paragon of virtue, Broocman was characterized by his zeal, love, and enthusiasm for his scientific calling, his patience, and cheerfulness among his pupils and his pure and noble heart. But the eulogy also dwelled at length on his frail body and fatal illness, his suffering and self-effacing diligence and
I. Hammar (B) Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 K. Niskanen and M. J. Barany (eds.), Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7_9
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perseverance in the face of adversity, to the point of evoking a Christ-like figure, a Messiah for the future of pedagogy. From the life and career of Carl Ulric Broocman, the components of a remarkable kind of scholarly persona could be assembled, one characterized by love and enthusiasm, and contrasted with austerity and castigation. His panegyrist thought him a worthy enough representative of his scholarly field to mould him into a model for others to follow.2 Broocman was portrayed as diligent and conscientious, but also as sensitive and passionate, effectively merging a specific form of Christian manliness with customary epistemic virtues.3 As the tragedy of his early demise was emphasized, his virtues as a scholar and a man were reinforced. This ideal-typical portrayal was engaged in a public negotiation over what it took to be a teacher and a scholar as well as a man around the turn of the nineteenth century.4 We might regard the repertoire of virtues deliberated on in the eulogy as specific qualities that pedagogical scholars, conforming to such a template, were supposed to develop or suppress in order to fulfil their professional role.5 At present, however, I am less concerned with whether or not subsequent scholars chose to do so, and more with the process that ended in the persona cast in the eulogy. In the present chapter, I will therefore trace the creation of this new scholarly template by working my way backwards, to the scholarly personae that inspired Broocman and from which, I argue, he developed his vision of a virtuous and paternal educator—a vision the eulogy in turn professed he had come to heroically embody. Furthermore, I aim to demonstrate that Broocman’s tragic death was instrumental in how the perfect pedagogue came to be presented, effectively enhancing the set of virtues crucial for his commanding memorialization.
The Legacy of Broocman At the time of his death, Broocman had gained a remarkable reputation as a gifted educator and been included in the highest ranks of educational politics in Sweden.6 He built this standing in part upon extensive travels in Germany, conducted on a royal stipend between 1804 and 1805 with the specific purpose of detailing the country’s school system. As I will show, these travels were instrumental to Broocman, providing him with exemplary scholarly virtues and vices he later circulated and that reverberated in the eulogy after his own death.7
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As a scholar, Broocman was a prolific part of the emerging scientific print culture of the era and he was particularly adept in utilizing print as a way to gain influence over his field.8 The result of the German expedition was a two-part monograph, published in 1807 and 1808, which came to include Sweden’s first general history of education. Just two years prior to his death, Broocman started his country’s first pedagogical journal, published between 1810 and 1812, which he further used as a platform in his attempts to influence the reorganization of the Swedish school system.9 Thanks in part to the articles he published therein, he became a recognizable voice in the escalating and persistent public debate over education reform and in 1812 he was summoned to join the educational committee tasked with reforming the Swedish School Ordinance, although he died after a period of deteriorating health before it could convene.10 In the years that followed his premature passing, Broocman’s standing kept growing and he was soon regarded as a visionary and a prodigy. Notably, as early as a decade after his death he was referred to as “Our Immortal Broocman” by Anders Fryxell, another influential educator during this period.11 Indeed, Fryxell’s reverential epithet suggests Broocman’s continued influence—and arguably even that a persona had indeed become manifest—but is also fitting for how Broocman’s reputation lingered in the history of education for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.12 Both as a scholarly writer, as a teacher and as a public debater, Broocman is often credited with having introduced several influential pedagogical theories of the era to his countrymen to the point of being seen as “the without doubt most pedagogically gifted person of his age”.13
The Broocman Template Instead of simply cutting what looked like a very promising career short, the name of Carl Ulric Broocman generated into a blue print for a contemporary scholar, his name ostensibly signalling a promising repertoire of virtues and character traits relevant to his peers. In other words, we can view Broocman as a “recognizable, codified template” from which others could fashion or negotiate a scholarly persona for the burgeoning scientific field of pedagogy.14 Here I will attempt to recreate the makings of what I for the purposes of this chapter call the “Broocman-template”
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and to study both its components and the process through which it was crafted.15 Scholarly persona is, at present, a fluid term, but is seen here as an embodiment of a set (or catalogue) of virtues that addresses how to fulfil the role of a scholar.16 I am interested in how Broocman was presented as an exemplary scholar, teacher, and man, but also aim to track those models of being a scholar that were available to Broocman himself and that I argue honed his self-presentation to such a degree that it left imprints in his obituary. As a result, I am concerned both with the question of how scholarly personae offer points of reference in developing a scholarly self, as well as with how personae (in this case the posthumous “Broocman template”) “emerge and develop in context”, and are “cemented and transmitted”, questions suggested by Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum.17 I believe the components of Broocman’s life and death provide insight into how personae can be shaped to fit a certain historical context and scholarly vision. With Broocman, whose manhood seems front and centre of the obituary, we would be amiss not to inquire as to whether this scholarly template was gendered, and if so, in what way. Notably, this ideal-typical portrayal of Broocman—as well as his own view of what it took to be a teacher and pedagogue for the nineteenth century—deviated from an archetypical stern and patriarchal teacher.18 Such a “mixture of new and old repertoires” that could have infused the “Broocman template”, Mineke Bosch has helpfully referred to as “bricolage”.19 In other words, the formation of a credible template for scholarly conduct also had wider implications for societal expectations of manliness.20 One aspect of this was the motif of the teacher as a father figure, as well as the ways in which the “Broocman template” was embedded in general ideals of Christian, protestant manliness at the time. Herman Paul has recently discussed different ways that scholars tend to use the term scholarly personae, identifying a micro-, macro-, and mesolevel of interest.21 While all of these hold merit and can be fruitfully followed in the study of Broocman, I will for the sake of clarity eschew Broocman’s self-fashioning (micro-level) to flesh out how Broocman related, to follow Paul, “(positively or negatively) to models (real or imaginary)” that the young scholar believed embodied “habits, virtues, skills or competences” needed to become a good pedagogical scholar.22 As Paul notes, such models depended on “broader templates” studied on the macro-level, including, in Broocman’s case, such recognizable archetypes
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as the “stern teacher”, “kind father”, or perhaps “spiritual leader”. In the second part of the study, my interest turns to how some of these scholarly virtues were presented as synonymous with the deceased Broocman by his eulogist and placed in a Messianic casing. Pedagogy was a new scholarly field in the early nineteenth century. Pedagogical seminars were given at Lund University from 1802 and in Uppsala from 1804 and in 1803 a specific pedagogical degree was introduced. As a burgeoning discipline, heroic role models were needed. The commemoration of Broocman offered one possible template of how a nineteenth-century pedagogical scholar was supposed to be; a template—that even if challenged by rival modes of fulfilling this role at the time—we know circulated among the in-group of nineteenth-century Swedish educators, teachers, and scholars. In other words, in 1812 and onwards the “Broocman template” existed as an embodiment of one possible model of being a pedagogical scholar. What, then, characterized this persona?
In Memory of Broocman The trajectory of Broocman’s posthumous reputation owed much to the image painted of him in the eulogy in question.23 In a famous— and oft-quoted—review of Broocman’s journal, published in 1813, the prominent historian Erik Gustaf Geijer directed readers looking to familiarize themselves with the late educator to the memorial, printed in the last issue of Broocman’s journal Magasin för föräldrar och lärare (Magazine for parents and teachers).24 Broocman’s obituary contained, besides the panegyric elements, also a biography of the deceased detailing his early life and career. The obituary, to be sure, was, and is, a genre that allows for and expects hyperbolic celebration and lamentations. Precisely for this reason, Herman Paul has argued the usefulness of obituaries (or necrologies) as historical sources based on the “culturally sanctioned standards for praise and blame” they reflect, standards that articulate “socially shared expectations, implicit or explicit codes of conduct, and biographical templates for scholars to conform to”.25 They tell other scholars how to live and behave. The obituary in question stands out for being printed in a scholarly forum, associated with the deceased himself. From this perspective, the list of virtues, personal and professional, found in Broocman’s obituary were both normative and exhortative.
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What then was the ideal-typical model that others were expected to follow? To begin with, a dominant component of the “Broocman template” was a general form of virtue and moral behaviour from which his pedagogical or epistemic virtues could not be separated.26 Scholars have stressed the interaction between scholarly repertoires and morality. Jason Baehr for instance notes that since a virtuous individual can be expected to genuinely care about “truth, knowledge, evidence, rationality, and understanding”, other lauded scholarly traits such as inquisitiveness, attentiveness, and thoroughness can, in the eyes of others, be anticipated to follow from virtue.27 In Broocman’s case, it was clear that such universal virtue was a prerequisite for any educator and scholar. Contrasting his virtue (dygd) with the corruption and moral decay of the present day, he was held up as an exemplum, worthy of remembrance because of his tireless efforts and extraordinary zeal (nit ) in the service of the public good (i.e. education of future generations).28 Known, according to the eulogist, from an early age for his diligence (flit ), piety, and good behaviour, he pursued the thorny road of the educator even at an age when immoral distractions were abundant. Such behaviour was seen as confirmation that he exemplified something more than “an everyday-sort of virtue”.29 Yet, it seemed, while virtue could be excessively lauded without risk, other scholarly traits should be mitigated and the reader was informed that Broocman should not be counted among the geniuses destined to dazzle the world with his grand achievements, repeating instead that his chief asset was his virtue and moral character.30 A personal morality, then, was at the heart of this commemoration, but in order to gain additional acuity I will be focusing on those “clusters of virtues” that signalled Broocman’s engagement with science, education, and teaching.31 After all, every schoolteacher was supposed to exhibit exemplary morality and godliness, whereas scientific and pedagogical virtues could be contested by rivalling modes of being an educator and a scholar. Consequently, tracing these epistemic virtues allows a more specific persona to emerge from the obituary. One example is how Broocman was characterized by his enthusiasm for “the sciences”—a term that at this point in Sweden not only included the humanities but also in fact considered them the yardstick of scientific endeavour. His scientific writings and work were, mirroring his character, described as meticulous, lucid, and conscientious. In his own writings, Broocman often emphasized the scientific element of pedagogy, stressing the need for
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thorough humanistic study as opposed to shallow, practical, and mechanical learning.32 The dichotomy was fundamental to the era, not only in Sweden but in Europe at large and infused much of Broocman’s vision. Humanistic study, in the principal shape of meticulous study of classical languages and virtuous ancient literature, was routinely equated with morality and hence masculine character development, while practical knowledge was suspected of material, or even egotistical, aims that might in fact hinder such development.33 Chad Wellmon has interpreted these developments in which moral considerations gained in relevance as a result of information overload and fears over the future of the university. To handle such cultural anxieties “knowledge was to be embodied not in an ever more exhaustive encyclopedia but instead in the character of the student”.34 Students, of course, were not the only ones that needed to be virtuous. As Wellmon argues, since its emergence around 1800, the epistemic authority of the German research university was based on its own “standards of excellence, ideals of conduct, and even virtues”. This in turn allowed it to “generate and transmit authoritative and legitimate knowledge”.35 Morality, again, was key to being a scholar and a teacher, a safe guard against producing useless or precarious knowledge. Broocman’s connection to the German culture of erudition was profound as was the Swedish system of education in general. A central motif in the portrayal of Broocman was his calling for the education and cultivation—in the sense of self-formation or Bildung —of Sweden’s youth. The passion he was said to have shown his students was aptly summarized in the sobriquet “the noble teacher and friend of the young”, yet he was also said to have worked tirelessly towards the improvement of Sweden’s entire school system.36 Furthermore, the eulogy also enumerated the traits of a “perfect youth leader” that Broocman was said to have possessed. These included his adaptability to individual needs of students, his cheerfulness in his instruction, and the fact that he was both patient and lenient. Broocman’s own notions of what it took to be a successful educator in early nineteenth-century Sweden were similar to those of his eulogist. The above-mentioned set of virtues was mirrored in a part of a speech, translated from German and interjected in the printed text, which Broocman had given when accepting his position as principal at the German National Lyceum in Stockholm (the school he had himself attended as a boy). By letting the deceased speak from beyond the grave, the eulogy effectively
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blurred the line between Broocman’s and his appraiser’s vision of the perfect pedagogical scholar. Shunning what he felt was the most common opinion about education, that it served to hastily teach young men practical skills that were felt to be most useful in civil society, Broocman emphasized in this interjected speech the “ennoblement” of the child’s soul to a “perfect humanity” as the goal of youth education.37 The sciences must not be humiliated to serve monetary ends and teachers should not betray humanity by celebrating this “spirit of the day”, but forge “wiser, nobler, and happier” citizens of the world.38 His vision was grand and ambitious. Moreover, he viewed this as part of a new form of didactics.39 In contrast, there were also vices to beware. Characteristically, Broocman vowed in this speech never to burden the souls of his students with his instruction or to force his teachings on them. A teacher should never torment his pupils with mechanical instruction when cheerful exploration would get better results, he said. Instead, the task of the teacher was to guide them to “the beautiful field of the sciences”.40 In an admiring review of Broocman’s journal, published in 1812, Broocman’s zeal, noble fervour, tirelessness, and diligence were all reported.41 Moreover, a year later, Geijer in his review mentioned above reiterated some of the dominant virtues conveyed in the obituary as well, but furthermore stressed the tragedy of Broocman’s early passing, “snatched in the flower of his youth” from his “zealous and purehearted” work to educate the young and serve his fatherland. Geijer, although critical of Broocman’s ideas for education reform, recognized that Broocman’s deeds and writings bespoke his “burning zeal” for a noble cause.42 When reading the obituary, Geijer wrote, one learns that it was Broocman’s own “untiring diligence” (arbetsamhet ) and his love and enthusiasm for his work that undermined his health and shortened his life.43 We will have reason to return to this notion of tragic death as a proof of virtue in life.
Envisioning the Swedish School Man It is clear that the obituary found an audience and that the portrayal of Broocman resonated in the public sphere at the time. Yet, as shown by the interjected speech, Broocman’s own vision of what it took to be a pedagogical scholar was instrumental. The components of the template stressed in the obituary are also visible in many of the articles Broocman
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wrote, particularly in his own journal. Frequently, he spoke in terms of calling, urging his peers to share the responsibility of fostering the citizens of the future.44 Moreover, Broocman kept coming back to the need to approach education with joy and cheerfulness and always on the individual level of the students themselves. In particular, Broocman argued that the educator must be sympathetic to the playful nature of young boys. Outlining what he saw as pedagogical vices, he dismissed “barbaric pedantry” and “excessive rationality” and cautioned against scaring students away from their games.45 On the contrary, an educator was to be a friend and mentor in such joyous activities, setting aside time for them to avoid raising “work-machines” and quenching “natural cheerfulness”.46 As shown, zeal (nit ) in particular was pronounced in the obituary over Broocman and the young schoolman emphasized this trait regularly in others as fundamental to their proficiency in education. The supervision of Swedish schools was, Broocman argued, best left to men who loved truth and virtue, who “burned with holy, unquenchable zeal”, who loved their country, and who worked tirelessly towards a future when the Swedish people would appear in all its “manly beauty and strength”.47 Dedication and effort were also the hallmark of one of Broocman’s own mentors, the principal of the German National Lyceum, Christian Wilhelm Lüdeke. Moreover, Lüdeke was also depicted as a caring friend, who encouraged and comforted his students, “like a tender Father”.48 The motif of the teacher qua father was also inverted by Broocman— the father was also supposed to be a teacher. With his “manly” will, the father of the student was supposed to instil work ethic, endurance, and a joyful obedience, but never use punishment or the threat of violence. Furthermore, Broocman envisioned the father—just like the teacher— joyfully spending time with his children in his spare time, partaking in their merriments and cheerfulness. In fact, without such commitment, no moral ennoblement was possible.49 Clearly then, the anonymous writer of the eulogy echoed many of Broocman’s own tenets for the pedagogical scholar of the future. But where, in turn, had Broocman found his own model behaviour?
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Navigating Foreign Personae Herman Paul has suggested that scholarly personae appear in the sources “as coordinates on imaginary maps”, providing “orientation in matters of virtue and vice by identifying a number of different conceptions of the scholarly self”.50 Navigating between these coordinates can be seen, Paul argues, as the search for a position matching the scholar’s own personal “values, beliefs, and interests”.51 With this in mind, I turn now to Broocman’s travels in Germany and the two-part monograph he published as a result, which can, I argue, be fruitfully seen as a navigation between the different scholarly personae he encountered there. While he evaluates a great many educators and scholars positively, two in particular—Salzmann and Pestalozzi—seems to have made dominant impressions on him, suggesting that his own scholarly self was in part fashioned upon these two figures. Consequently, we find the qualities and masculine virtues embodied by these two pedagogical scholars negotiated in the “Broocman template” created by his eulogist. From the pedagogical scholars Broocman learned about and often met in person, he could pick the qualities he wanted, forming, to his mind, a perfect pedagogue. He was in a unique position to do so, and also later on, inhabited an effective platform to circulate his hybrid scholar. By way of example, Johan Matthias Gesner, who had a “true pedagogical spirit”, was according to Broocman filled with love for his students and their self-cultivation, but also for the sciences themselves.52 Anton Friedrich Büsching, director of Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster in Berlin, dedicated himself “with the greatest zeal” to improving his school and the school system in general.53 Joachim Heinrich Campe from Hamburg was a particularly gifted writer, able to explicate subjects and concepts in a lively manner that was suitable and engaging for younger generations.54 Likewise, Christian Heinrich Wolke understood perfectly, “the art of lowering oneself to children, and through games and conversation pleasantly provide them with skills in old and new languages” and was “tireless” in inventing new ways of keeping his student’s interest alive.55 While vices are few and far between in Broocman’s enthusiastic narrative, some men like Johann Bernhard Basedow were “fragile, rash and rude” engaging in public strife with former friends.56 Broocman also mentioned that “old, mostly pedantic” schoolmen were resisting change, and furthermore discussed the idea of establishing seminars for the instruction of new teachers to supplant ignorant and immoral schoolmasters.57
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In 1805, Broocman visited the institute of Christian Gotthilf Salzmann in Schnepfenthal. When faced with adversity, Salzmann had preserved his place of learning, according to Broocman, with pure enthusiasm, patience, and diligence (ihärdighet ).58 While he had dedicated his life to the improvement of education and virtue, he also loved children with “a sincere heart” and continuously sought their “ennoblement”.59 Moreover, he described the institute and its teachers and students as “one big family”, all of them viewing Salzmann as their mutual father.60 In the shorter official account that Broocman delivered to the board of education prior to the publication of the two-part monograph, he stated that “Father Salzmann” lived at Schnepfenthal in “rural tranquility and innocence”.61 Broocman particularly approved of the fact that great emphasis was placed on the moral upbringing at the institute and be observed that “family feelings” were upheld with festivities, church service, and concerts. Corporal punishments were, on the other hand, rare.62 Furthermore, Broocman highlighted Salzmann’s religious enthusiasm, and his focus on “the mild teaching of Jesus”. Joy and cheerfulness were central to this teachings and the teacher should be as a friend, not an instructor, to the child.63
An Ideal Educator In Swedish history of education, Broocman has always been associated with the name Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi. In Broocman’s narrative, Pestalozzi was the man who finally reconciled the polarized opinions between German philologists and philanthropists, between a naïve belief in cheerfulness as a pedagogical method and an overly rigorous grammatical instruction in classical languages. In fact, Broocman’s account in general can be read as an attempt at manoeuvring this particular issue with the aid of the coordinates provided by different scholarly positions on the map over Germany’s pedagogical landscape. For Broocman, Pestalozzi represented something new and forward-thinking.64 One vital aspect of this change regarded the engagement of the teacher which had to be more attuned to the needs of his students, “an arduous care” which Broocman lamented that not all teachers were eager to pursue, instead resorting to “commands, threats and punishments”.65 In 1805, Broocman visited Pestalozzi in Switzerland. As with Salzmann, the religious devotion was a key characteristic, but in his biographical details over the Swiss educator Broocman also evoked a Christ-like
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saviour and champion of the poor.66 Pestalozzi dedicated himself fully to the instruction of children, as “their everything, their father, mother, teacher and steward” as well as their companion and playfellow.67 Broocman described Pestalozzi’s method as based on love and noted that he opposed schools where children were “tyrannically incarcerated” and forcibly instructed.68 Broocman also emphasized his patience and his dedication to the education of young people. Similar to Salzmann, Broocman described Pestalozzi as walking among his pupils, an old man but with a youthful energy. He was loved by others and was himself a loving and kind man. Mornings and evenings, he gathered his students and raised his “fatherly voice” to speak with all his heart of the teachings of Jesus. Broocman focused on his tenderness, mild warnings and encouragement and exclaimed at the end of his portrayal that the evenings spent at the side of the noble teacher Pestalozzi were among his most cherished.69
Christian Masculinity and Martyrdom Mineke Bosch has pointed out that a scholarly identity is not only contingent on scientific qualities, but also “resides in the body or bodily practices”.70 Social aspects such as physical health can thus play an important role in self-formation. In describing his failing health and death, the obituary seemed to purposely fashion the late Broocman as a Messiahlike figure, a martyr who had died for his calling: the education and ennoblement of Sweden’s youth. After the interjected part of Broocman’s speech which had, as discussed, served to enhance the virtue repertoire of a compassionate and worthy pedagogical scholar and educator, the eulogist stressed how Broocman’s own words invoked his “pure heart”; a man who in the faces of children saw a “paradisiacal innocence and bliss”. And are we not reminded by this of the heavenly friend of the child of whom the Evangelist tells us, who when children were taken before him, lifted, kissed and blessed them saying: Let the Children come to me.71
Broocman (whose interjected speech conspicuously contained a passage which lingered on an image of Jesus) was said to have had a “heavenly childlike mind” (barnasinne), from whence all his virtues flowed. His speeches, his sermons, and his instruction and entire life were described as a perpetual church service. Notably, such virtues as piety and resolve
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were merged and strengthened with Broocman’s decreasing health. By way of example, the hagiographical account stressed that neither Broocman’s courage nor his love of God abandoned him in the midst of the final and escalating torments caused by his “vanquishing” disease. Yet, the eulogist also took care to emphasize that he inhabited a sensitivity, suffering every small injustice directed against himself or others. Martina Kessel has pointed to the normative model of nineteenth-century masculinity as prescribing a man to be “educated yet sensitive, energetic yet passionate and capable of empathy”.72 In Broocman’s case, the eulogist conceded, such a delicate and noble soul was not beneficial to his health and perhaps one reason for his early demise. In a recent article on the development of the German historical discipline, Falko Schnicke has argued that “body, gender and disciplinary knowledge were interconnected” during the nineteenth century.73 From this perspective, the frail body of Broocman incorporated the virtues of the burgeoning pedagogical discipline, his tragic physical withering a benchmark to strive towards. Assuring the readers that he had lived a healthy as he could, it was also specified that Broocman had a weak bodily frame and that he therefore “dug his own grave with his noble strife”.74 In this manner, weakness was negotiated into an admirable quality, effectively upholding the delicate balance of societal protocols of masculinity. The final sections of the obituary thus conflated scholarly virtues with moral and religious traits and merged them with aspects of Broocman’s masculinity. As pointed out by David Tjeder, “the decades around 1800 were crucial in rewriting masculine ideals in Sweden”.75 Masculinity became, Tjeder argues, associated with usefulness to society, but men were also supposed “to accept the hardships of life, remain virtuous, and live according to God’s will”, tenets that were, as we have seen, infused in the persona of Broocman.76 In Broocman’s case, this usefulness was through the education, guidance and intellectual and moral development of Swedish male citizens. The endeavour itself was patriotic and nationalistic.77 Tjeder also points to the preoccupation with the Christian ideal of perseverance found in Swedish culture at the time, something which certainly resonates in how Broocman’s manly determination seemed only to be reinforced by his suffering, to the point of becoming what Steven Shapin has referred to as a “badge of spirituality”.78
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Concluding Remarks The Swedish scholarly field of pedagogy was new during Broocman’s lifetime. Consequently, there were few, if any, personae of Swedish pedagogues to navigate between. The Swedish pond was small, making scientific travel a crucial component, not only for the circulation of knowledge, but for the emergence of scholarly personae. Broocman found—and circulated—repertoires of scholarly masculinity in Germany, in older men who were adamant that education was a paternal charge, blending the role of the father and teacher, the child and the student. These repertoires reverberated, first in Broocman’s own writings where he proposed his vision of what a pedagogical scholar should be, later in his own eulogy when he became the embodiment of such a vision of the perfect pedagogical scholar. As a writer, editor, and debater as well as a member of the inner circle of influence in the politics of Swedish education, Broocman projected foreign models of scholarly behaviour on his native backdrop, and regardless of how well these modes of behaviour fitted him, it came to be a vital part of the legacy chosen for him by his eulogist. Approaching Broocman’s life and career through the lens of persona helps us understand the crucial correlation between Broocman’s intellectual milieu, his attempts to reach a position in the academic sphere, and his posthumous influence. The fact that pedagogy was a new and fragile field also meant that there was a lot at stake for those who attempted to solidify it. Champions of this scientific sphere had to be prudently chosen and portraits of prototypical examples chiselled carefully. Broocman’s obituary was not a neutral attempt to capture the short life of a man in its entirety, but a hagiographical account aimed at, and meant to inspire those, engaged in the issue of education. Scholarly virtues that indicated a preferred future were brought to the fore, vices brushed aside, and weaknesses turned into admirable traits. This role as harbinger of a new field was given the tragic hero Broocman. His scholarly virtues were not invented by the eulogist—we can, as I have shown, trace them further back—but the obituary emphasized them, shaping the deceased, as it were, into a scholarly persona, a point of orientation for contemporary and future peers. Vocational calling and enthusiasm, cheerful and perceptive commitment to the students and personal diligence and zeal were key characteristics of the “Broocman
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template”. But scholarly traits seemed not to be able to fill a pedagogical persona alone. It relied just as much on bourgeoisie, protestant values, and ideas corresponding to a specific form of Christian masculinity. Virtue, piety, and patriotism were non-negotiable creeds. Furthermore, in the “Broocman template”, science and education could not be separated. In Broocman’s vision as in the template crafted by the obituary, a credible pedagogical scholar was also, perhaps foremost, a teacher. Conforming to the “Broocman template” meant appropriating these aspects of his persona, and also to emulate an evangelical love and attentiveness to children. Casting Broocman as a Christ-like figure and a martyr only served to enhance these traits—boosting his compassion, gentleness, and zeal to superhuman level—yet such overtones were also present in his own catalogue of personae, in the piety and fatherly love he had accentuated in Salzmann and Pestalozzi. His early death thus merged with his ambitions in life, blending his own standards and ideals with societal norms of masculine behaviour and the perceived needs of a newly established scholarly field, thus making the immortal Broocman the scholarly pedagogue incarnate.
Notes 1. “Minne af Carl Ulric Broocman”, Magasin för lärare och föräldrar 6 (1812): 52–84, 60–61. The text, which translates “In Memory of Carl Ulric Broocman”, was written by an anonymous friend. 2. Cf. Herman Paul, “The Virtues of a Good Historian in Early Imperial Germany: Georg Waitz’s Contested Example,” Modern Intellectual History 15, no. 3 (2018): 681–709, 685. 3. On epistemic virtues, see e.g. Julia Driver, “The conflation of moral and epistemic virtue,” Metaphilosophy 34, no. 3, (2003): 367–383; Jason Baehr, The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and more specifically as regards persona, Herman Paul, “What is a scholarly persona? Ten theses on virtues, skills, and desires,” History and Theory 53, no. 3 (2014): 348–371, 348–349; and “German Thoroughness in Baltimore: Epistemic Virtues and National Stereotypes,” History of Humanities 3, no. 2 (2018): 327–350, 329. 4. Kirsti Niskanen, Mineke Bosch and Kaat Wils, “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice—Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 1–5, 1.
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5. Jeroen van Dongen and Herman Paul, “Introduction: Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities,” in Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities, ed. Jeroen van Dongen and Herman Paul (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019), 1–10, 2. See also Herman Paul, “The Virtues and Vices of Albert Naudé: Toward a History of Scholarly Personae,” History of Humanities 1, no. 2 (2016): 327–338, 327. 6. Sven Askeberg, Pedagogisk reformverksamhet: ett bidrag till den svenska skolpolitikens historia 1810–1825 (Uppsala, 1976), 19–20; Thomas Neidenmark, Pedagogiska imperativ och sociala nätverk i svensk medborgarbildning 1812–1828 (Stockholm: Institutionen för pedagogik och didaktik, Stockholms universitet, 2011), 94, 124. Carl Ulric Broocman was born in 1783, in Gävle, Sweden. From 1799, he studied at Uppsala University, graduating philosophy master (philosophie magister) in 1803. 7. See also Neidenmark, Pedagogiska imperativ, 117. 8. On the relevance of print for the legitimacy of knowledge, see Chad Wellmon, Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), in particular Chapter 7. For the Swedish print market, see Henrik Edgren, Publicitet för medborgsmannavett: det nationellt svenska i Stockholmstidningar 1810–1831 (Uppsala, 2005). 9. Wilhelm Sjöstrand, Pedagogikens historia. 3:2, Utvecklingen i Sverige under tiden 1809–1920 (Lund: Gleerup, 1965), 122. 10. See Karl Larsson, “Reformtankar i svensk skolpolitik 1809–1820,” Pedagogisk tidskrift 82 (1946): 179–196, 181. 11. Anders Fryxell, Förslag till enhet och medborgerlighet i de allmänna undervisnings-verken (Stockholm, 1823), 12. 12. For Broocman as ahead of his time, see, for instance, Sjöstrand, Pedagogikens historia, 121 on Broocman’s “pedagogical alertness”; Wiberg refers to him as a “man of the Enlightenment,” and as “hundred years ahead of his time” in Albert Wiberg, “Carl Ulric Broocmans projekterade realskola i Stockholm 1806,” Pedagogisk Tidskrift 75 (1939): 5–19, 9, 16. See also Askeberg, Pedagogisk reformverksamhet, 126. 13. Albert Wiberg, Carl Ulric Broocman: bidrag till en biografi (Stockholm: Fören. för svensk undervisningshistoria, 1950), 5. On Broocman’s influence, see also Karl Larsson, “Pedagogisk realism: Carl Ulric Broocman—en enhetsskolans förkämpe,” Svensk Lärartidning (1936): 135–136; Askeberg, Pedagogisk reformverksamhet, 19–20; Carl Ivar Sandström, Utbildningens idéhistoria: om samhällsförändringarnas inflytande på undervisningens mål och idéinnehåll genom tiderna i Sverige och utlandet (Stockholm: Svensk facklitteratur, 1997), 138, 157; Esbjörn Larsson, En lycklig mechanism: olika aspekter av växelundervisningen som en del av 1800-talets utbildningsrevolution (Uppsala: Historiska institutionen vid Uppsala universitet: 2014), 31, 50.
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14. Gadi Algazi, “Exemplum and Wundertier: Three Concepts of the Scholarly Persona,” BMGN —Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 8–32, 17. 15. On templates as an “essential cultural resource for forging personae,” see Algazi, “Exemplum and Wundertier,” 12. 16. Herman Paul, “Ranke vs Schlosser: Pairs of Personae in NineteenthCentury German Historiography,” in How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000, ed. Herman Paul (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 30–40, 31. 17. Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum, “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories,” Science in Context 16 (2003): 1–8, 5. See also Niskanen et al., “Introduction,” 2. 18. For Broocman as representing a new, even radical, vision on education, see Neidenmark, Pedagogiska imperativ, 94–95, 117, 135. 19. Mineke Bosch, “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians: Explorations of a Concept,” BMGN —Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54, 43. See also Elisabeth Wesseling, “Judith Rich Harris: The Miss Marple of Developmental Psychology,” Science in Context, 17, no. 3 (2004): 293–314, 309; Mineke Bosch, “Looking at Laboratory Life: Writing a Scientific Persona: Marianne van Herwerden’s Travel Letters from the United States, 1920,” L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 29, no. 1 (2018): 15–34, 17. 20. Bosch, “Scholarly Personae,” 35. 21. Herman Paul, “Introduction: Scholarly Personae: What They Are and Why They Matter,” in How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000, ed. Herman Paul (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 1–14, 9–11. 22. Paul, “Introduction,” 11. 23. For one thing, it provides much of our subsequent knowledge of Broocman’s life and career. Wiberg suggests that the text was written by Jacob Adlerbeth, the secretary of the educational committee of 1812 to which Broocman had been summoned, but unable to participate in. 24. Erik Gustaf Geijer, Review of Magasin för Föräldrar och Lärare, Swensk Literatur-Tidning, nos. 9, 11, 14 (1813), 130–131. A review of Broocman’s journal in Journal för Litteraturen och Theatern published in 1812 also quoted the eulogy at length. 25. Herman Paul, “Weber, Wöhler, and Waitz: Virtue Language in Late Nineteenth-Century Physics, Chemistry, and History,” in Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities, ed. Jeroen van Dongen and Herman Paul (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019), 91–107, 92. See also Julian Hamann, “‘Let us Salute One of Our Kind’: How
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26.
27. 28. 29. 30. 31.
32.
33.
34.
35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.
45. 46.
47.
I. HAMMAR
Academic Obituaries Consecrate Research Biographies,” Poetics 56, no. 3 (2016): 1–14, 1–2. On this, see van Dongen and Paul, “Introduction,” 4, 7. Cf. Stephen Gaukroger, “The Persona of the Natural Philosopher,” in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity ed. Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger and Ian Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 17–34, 24. Baehr, The Inquiring Mind, 2. “In memory,” 52–53. “In memory,” 63. “In memory,” 60. For “cluster of virtues,” see Paul “German Thoroughness,” 333. See also Algazi, “Exemplum and Wundertier,” 11: “a set of virtues deemed necessary for engaging in scholarly practice”. On this dichotomy, see Isak Hammar, “A Conflict Among Geniuses: Challenges to the Classical Paradigm in Sweden, 1828–1832,” History of Education 48, no. 6 (2019): 713–730. Hammar, “A Conflict,” 724. See also Jonas Hansson, Humanismens kris: Bildningsideal och kulturkritik i Sverige 1848–1933 (Eslöv: B. Östlings bokförl. Symposion, 1999), 69. Wellmon, Organizing Enlightenment, 9. On information overload, see also Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2010). Wellmon, Organizing Enlightenment, 8. “In memory,” 62. “In memory,” 64–67. “In memory,” 65. “In memory,” 68. See also Neidenmark, Pedagogiska imperativ, 95. “In memory,” 71–72. Journal för Litteraturen och Theatern, no 253, 260, 262 (1812). Geijer, Review, 130. Geijer, Review, 131. See, for instance, Carl Ulric Broocman, “Skrifvelse till Rikets samteliga Skollärare och alla andra för Läroverket nitälskande män,” Magasin för lärare och föräldrar, no. 1 (1810): 99–102, 99. Carl Ulric Broocman, “Om uppfostran till Patriotism,” Magasin för lärare och föräldrar, no. 1 (1810): 1–58, 13–14. Carl Ulric Broocman, “Huru kunna och böra Föräldrar lätta Skollärares arbete vid deras barns undervisning?,” Magasin för lärare och föräldrar, no. 2 (1811): 103–117, 115. Carl Ulric Broocman,”Om nödvändigheten af ett rätt organiseradt Uppfostrings-Collegium,” Magasin för lärare och föräldrar, no. 4 (1812): 41–48, 44.
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48. Carl Ulric Broocman, “Om Stockholms undervisningsverk,” Magasin för lärare och föräldrar, no. 3 (1811): 13–42, 31. Lüdeke’s successor, Plageman was likewise pious and industrious, caring deeply for the school according to Broocman. 49. Carl Ulric Broocman, “Huru kunna och böra Föräldrar lätta Skollärares arbete vid deras barns undervisning?,” Magasin för lärare och föräldrar, no. 2 (1810): 103–117, 107–108. 50. Paul, “Virtues and Vices,” 333. 51. Paul, “Virtues and Vices,” 334. See also Paul, “Virtues of a Good Historian,” 700. 52. Carl Ulric Broocman, Berättelse om Tysklands undervisningsverk ifrån dess äldsta intill närvarande tider (Stockholm, 1807–1808), Chapter 6, 115. 53. Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 6, 118. 54. Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 5, 37. 55. Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 5, 31. 56. Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 5, 33. 57. Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 5, 49, 69. For old schoolmen, see also chapter 5, 88, 90. 58. Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 5, 53. 59. Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 5, 40–41. 60. Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 5, 54. See also Carl Ulric Broocan, Relation om Tyskland i pedagogiskt hänseende, reprinted in Wiberg, Carl Ulric Broocman, 516. 61. Broocman, Relation, 516. 62. See also Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 6, 142. 63. Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 6, 143. 64. Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 6, 110. 65. Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 6, 112. 66. See for instance, Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 6, 161–162, 163, 166. 67. Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 6, 163. 68. Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 6, 165. For love as central to Pestalozzi’s method, see also 166, 168, 175. 69. Broocman, Berättelse, chapter 6, 176. 70. Bosch, “Scholarly Personae,” 42. 71. “In memory,” 77. 72. Martina Kessel, “The ‘Whole’ Man: The Longing for a Masculine World in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Gender & History 15, no. 1 (2003): 1–31, 2. 73. Falko Schnicke, “Princesses, Semen, and Separation: Masculinity and Body Politics in Nineteenth-century German Historiography,” German Historical Institute London Bulletin 40.1 (2018): 26–60, 29. 74. “In memory,” 81. The sentiment was repeated in the review in Journal för Litteraturen och Theatern, 1812.
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75. David Tjeder, The Power of Character: Middle-class Masculinities, 1800– 1900 (PhD diss, University of Stockholm, 2003), 133. 76. Tjeder, Power of Character, 134. 77. On Broocman’s view on patriotism, see also Jens Ljunggren, Kroppens bildning: Linggymnastikens manlighetsprojekt 1790–1914 (Eslöv: B. Östlings bokförl. Symposion, 1999), 63–65. 78. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Gentility, Credibility, and Scientific Knowledge in Seventeenth Century England (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 152.
References Algazi, Gadi. “Exemplum and Wundertier: Three Concepts of the Scholarly Persona.” BMGN —Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 8–32. Askeberg, Sven. Pedagogisk reformverksamhet: ett bidrag till den svenska skolpolitikens historia 1810–1825. Uppsala, 1976. Baehr, Jason. The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Blair, Ann. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Bosch, Mineke. “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians: Explorations of a Concept.” BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54. Bosch, Mineke. “Looking at Laboratory Life: Writing a Scientific Persona: Marianne van Herwerden’s Travel Letters from the United States, 1920.” L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 29, no. 1 (2018): 15–34. Broocman, Carl Ulric. Berättelse om Tysklands undervisningsverk ifrån dess äldsta intill närvarande tider. Stockholm, 1807–1808. Broocman Carl Ulric. “Om uppfostran till Patriotism.” Magasin för lärare och föräldrar, no. 1 (1810): 1–58. Broocman, Carl Ulric. “Skrifvelse till Rikets samteliga Skollärare och alla andra för Läroverket nitälskande män.” Magasin för lärare och föräldrar, no. 1 (1810): 99–102. Broocman, Carl Ulric. “Huru kunna och böra Föräldrar lätta Skollärares arbete vid deras barns undervisning?” Magasin för lärare och föräldrar, no. 2 (1811): 103–117. Broocman, Carl Ulric. “Om Stockholms undervisningsverk.” Magasin för lärare och föräldrar, no. 3 (1811): 13–42.
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Broocman, Carl Ulric. “Om nödvändigheten af ett rätt organiseradt Uppfostrings-Collegium.” Magasin för lärare och föräldrar, no. 4 (1812): 41–48. Broocman, Carl Ulric. Relation om Tyskland i pedagogiskt hänseende. Reprinted in Albert Wiberg, Carl Ulric Broocman: bidrag till en biografi. Stockholm: Fören. för svensk undervisningshistoria, 1950, 497–545. Daston, Lorraine and Sibum, H. Otto. “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories.” Science in Context 16 (2003): 1–8. Driver, Julia. “The Conflation of Moral and Epistemic Virtue.” Metaphilosophy 34, no. 3 (2003): 367–383. Edgren, Henrik. Publicitet för medborgsmannavett: det nationellt svenska i Stockholmstidningar 1810–1831. Uppsala, 2005. Fryxell, Anders. Förslag till enhet och medborgerlighet i de allmänna undervisnings-verken. Stockholm, 1823. Gaukroger, Stephen. “The Persona of the Natural Philosopher.” In The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity edited by Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger and Ian Hunter, 17–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Geijer, Erik Gustaf. Review of Magasin för Föräldrar och Lärare. Swensk Literatur-Tidning, nos. 9, 11, 14 (1813). Hamann, Julian. “‘Let us Salute One of Our Kind’: How Academic Obituaries Consecrate Research Biographies.” Poetics 56, no. 3 (2016): 1–14. Hammar, Isak. “A Conflict Among Geniuses: Challenges to the Classical Paradigm in Sweden, 1828–1832.” History of Education 48, no. 6 (2019): 713–730. Hansson, Jonas. Humanismens kris: Bildningsideal och kulturkritik i Sverige 1848–1933. Eslöv: B. Östlings bokförl. Symposion, 1999. Kessel, Martina. “The ‘Whole’ Man: The Longing for a Masculine World in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Gender & History 15, no. 1 (2003): 1–31. Larsson, Esbjörn. En lycklig mechanism: olika aspekter av växelundervisningen som en del av 1800-talets utbildningsrevolution. Uppsala: Historiska institutionen vid Uppsala universitet, 2014. Larsson, Karl. “Pedagogisk realism: Carl Ulric Broocman––en enhetsskolans förkämpe.” Svensk Lärartidning (1936): 135–36. Larsson, Karl. “Reformtankar i svensk skolpolitik 1809–1820.” Pedagogisk tidskrift 82 (1946): 179–196. Ljunggren, Jens. Kroppens bildning: Linggymnastikens manlighetsprojekt 1790– 1914. Eslöv: B. Östlings bokförl. Symposion, 1999. “Minne af Carl Ulric Broocman.” Magasin för lärare och föräldrar 6 (1812). Neidenmark, Thomas. Pedagogiska imperativ och sociala nätverk i svensk medborgarbildning 1812–1828. Stockholm: Institutionen för pedagogik och didaktik, Stockholms universitet, 2011.
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Niskanen, Kirsti, Bosch, Mineke, and Wils, Kaat. “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice––Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 1–5. Paul, Herman. “What is a scholarly persona? Ten theses on virtues, skills, and desires.” History and Theory 53, no. 3 (2014): 348–371. Paul, Herman. “The Virtues and Vices of Albert Naudé: Toward a History of Scholarly Personae.” History of Humanities 1, no. 2 (2016): 327–338. Paul, Herman. “The Virtues of a Good Historian in Early Imperial Germany: Georg Waitz’s Contested Example.” Modern Intellectual History 15, no. 3 (2018): 681–709. Paul, Herman. “German Thoroughness in Baltimore: Epistemic Virtues and National Stereotypes.” History of Humanities 3, no. 2 (2018): 327–350. Paul, Herman. “Weber, Wöhler, and Waitz: Virtue Language in Late NineteenthCentury Physics, Chemistry, and History.” in Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities, edited by Jeroen van Dongen and Herman Paul, 91–107. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019. Paul, Herman. “Introduction: Scholarly Personae: What They Are and Why They Matter.” In How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000, edited by Herman Paul, 8–16. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. Paul, Herman. “Ranke vs Schlosser: Pairs of Personae in Nineteenth-Century German Historiography.” In How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000, edited by Herman Paul, 30–40. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. Review of “Magasin för lärare och föräldrar.” Journal för Litteraturen och Theatern, nos. 253, 260, 262 (1812). Sandström, Carl Ivar. Utbildningens idéhistoria: om samhällsförändringarnas inflytande på undervisningens mål och idéinnehåll genom tiderna i Sverige och utlandet. Stockholm: Svensk facklitteratur, 1997. Schnicke, Falko. “Princesses, Semen, and Separation: Masculinity and Body Politics in Nineteenth-century German Historiography.” German Historical Institute London Bulletin 40.1 (2018): 26–60. Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Gentility, Credibility, and Scientific Knowledge in Seventeenth Century England. University of Chicago Press, 1994. Sjöstrand, Wilhelm. Pedagogikens historia. 3:2, Utvecklingen i Sverige under tiden 1809–1920. Lund: Gleerup, 1965. Tjeder, David. The Power of Character: Middle-class Masculinities, 1800–1900. PhD diss, University of Stockholm, 2003. van Dongen, Jeroen and Paul, Herman. “Introduction: Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities.” In Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the
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Humanities, edited by Jeroen van Dongen and Herman Paul, 1–10. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019. Wellmon, Chad. Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Wesseling, Elisabeth. “Judith Rich Harris: The Miss Marple of Developmental Psychology.” Science in Context, 17, no. 3 (2004): 293–314. Wiberg, Albert. “Carl Ulric Broocmans projekterade realskola i Stockholm 1806.” Pedagogisk Tidskrift 75 (1939): 5–19. Wiberg, Albert. Carl Ulric Broocman: Bidrag till en Biografi. Stockholm: Fören. för svensk undervisningshistoria, 1950.
CHAPTER 10
The Whole Man: A Masculine Persona in German Historical Studies Herman Paul
Introduction To what extent did German historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries aspire to be “a whole man” (ein ganzer Mann)?1 Historians, not unlike philosophers and novelists, used the phrase on numerous occasions, as shorthand for a mode of masculinity that sought to reconcile demands of reason and emotion by combining astuteness, industry, and determination with imagination, love of country, and “human warmth”. As Martina Kessel has argued, the widespread of this “whole man” rhetoric in the late nineteenth century can be interpreted as a sign of dissatisfaction with growing societal differentiation, including especially a drifting apart of the traditionally male territory of work and the femalegendered realm of domestic life. In this reading, der ganzer Mann such as propagated in nineteenth-century novels and moral advice literature appears as “a man of the world”, able to integrate “the increasingly distinct spheres of work, family, private life and sociability”.2
H. Paul (B) Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 K. Niskanen and M. J. Barany (eds.), Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7_10
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For many German historians, this was an attractive ideal. The Munich historian Karl Theodor Heigel (1842–1915), for instance, invoked it in many of his biographical essays, especially in praising scholars and artists whom he judged able to satisfy demands of reason and emotion alike. Yet what exactly was Heigel doing in advocating a whole man ideal? Did he give voice to an ideal of masculinity that was widely shared in his profession? Or did the ideal serve instead as a corrective to a growing dominance of historians socialized in institutional contexts (e.g. source editing projects like the Monumenta Germaniae Historica) that stimulated their rational capacities more than their emotional sensitivity? In his fascinating recent study of masculine ideals and practices in German historical studies, Falko Schnicke argues that the whole man amounted to a “disciplinary persona” to which nineteenth-century historians were all expected to conform.3 Insofar as the whole man rhetoric conveyed a desire to avoid one-sidedness that comes with overspecialization or, in positive terms, a desire to live a well-balanced life, this is no doubt correct: no historian dared to advocate abandonment of political responsibilities or moral duties for the sake of full devotion to historical research. However, in presenting the whole man as a marker of the “male character of the discipline as a whole”, Schnicke overlooks that der ganzer Mann primarily served as a contrastive ideal, invoked by historians who criticized or distanced themselves from alternative models of professional identity.4 Specifically, when Schnicke quotes the 1886 obituaries of Leopold von Ranke and Georg Waitz as evidence for the prevalence of the whole man ideal, he ignores that Waitz was widely perceived as embodying an antithetical model, given that both he and his students, intentionally or not, downplayed the importance of political commitment and aesthetic talent for historians committed to deepening historical knowledge.5 As I shall argue in this chapter, it was precisely the (perceived) growing dominance of Waitzean Fachmänner in late nineteenth-century German historical studies that led Heigel and others to admire ganze Männer. The whole man was invoked, not as a shared ideal, but with the aim of challenging a competing model: that of the Zunftgelehrte or “guild scholar” who slavishly conformed to what his profession demanded from him, never transgressed the confines of his specialism, and seldom displayed any passion except appetite for work and excessive love of detail. Precisely to the extent that Zunftgelehrten failed to recognize both the political significance of historical scholarship and the importance of reaching
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non-specialist audiences with well-written books, Heigel felt a need to advocate the whole man as an alternative model of how to be a historian. The case of Heigel therefore draws attention to a plurality of scholarly personae that circulated among historians in Wilhelmine Germany. If scholarly personae are culturally sanctioned models of how to be a scholar, typically described in terms of virtues, skills, or competencies, then Heigel’s juxtaposition of Fachmänner and ganze Männer shows that such personae did not exist in the singular.6 Multiple personae, often defined in contrast to each other, competed for hegemony within the historical profession. In passing, I will note that much the same is true for the modes of masculinity implied in these competing scholarly personae. Drawing on what Kessel calls a polar gender model, Johann Gustav Droysen, Heinrich von Treitschke, and others insisted on the need for historians to excel in “male” virtues traditionally associated with Prussia and Protestantism: courage, determination, and commitment to a public cause. Consequently, they perceived the Waitzean persona as lacking “male strength” and “firmness”. Heigel’s whole man ideal, however, challenged such polarizing of male and female character traits. It tried to combine them by demanding historians to cultivate such traditionally female traits as empathy and sensitivity, in addition to Treitschkean resoluteness and “warm-blooded” patriotism. What this suggests is that different personae could have different gender connotations. Although, by Heigel’s lifetime, German historical studies was still an all-men’s business, the kinds of masculinity embraced by German historians were more diverse than scholarship has so far acknowledged.7
Spice Nuts and Marzipan Who was Karl Theodor Heigel? Although he was one of many German historians who had grown up with poetry and drama, Heigel was rather unique in being a theatre director’s son who had applied to an art academy, been rejected, and become a history professor instead (at his alma mater, the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he acquired a leading position next to Hermann Grauert and Sigmund Riezler). Heigel’s presidency of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, from 1904 to 1915, testified to his high standing in Bavarian academic life.8 His artistic inclinations had never left him, though. Heigel was a gifted speaker and a vivid stylist, who wrote a handful of books (including a
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well-received biography of Ludwig I of Bavaria), but greatly preferred the essay format. As Alfred Dove, himself a prolific essayist, once said: Heigel knew how to do research, but was at his best in his vignettes, portraits, essays, and sketches.9 Few of these pieces appeared in professional journals: most of them were solicited by papers like the Allgemeine Zeitung and subsequently collected in volumes of essays, almost a dozen of which appeared during Heigel’s lifetime.10 Judging by these essays, the greatest praise that Heigel could bestow on a person was that he had been “a whole man”. This was how he characterized, among others, the mineralogist and poet Franz von Kobell, the Bavarian cabinet secretary Friedrich von Ziegler, and the two men who had towered over German politics in the 1870s and 1880s: Emperor Wilhelm I and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. In describing these men as “whole”, “well-rounded”, or “balanced”, Heigel invoked a figure with outspoken masculine connotations. Over against a classic, polarized gender model that equated masculinity with reason and femininity with emotion, the “whole man” represented a combination of these qualities. “Educated yet sensitive, energetic yet passionate and capable of empathy”, the whole man was, in Heigel’s words, endowed with qualities of “head and heart” alike, which enabled him to think like a statesman without lacking human warmth.11 Partly, this wholeness was achieved by cultivating social and cultural practices outside one’s immediate sphere of work. In Ziegler, who Heigel said was as thoroughly acquainted with contemporary art as with the intricacies of Bavarian politics, as well as in Kobell, “a real artist and true scholar”, Heigel admired an earnest commitment to Bildung.12 Yet equally important as broad cultural formation was a commitment to sociability, such as exhibited by Wilhelm von Giesebrecht, Heigel’s teacher and predecessor at the University of Munich. Giesebrecht’s adage, “Labour during day hours, guests at night”, aptly conveyed the importance of balancing work with social activities. Drawing on personal memories, Heigel narrated how Giesebrecht had had the habit of buying Christmas presents for his students, spending Christmas Eve with them around a Christmas tree in his living room, and filling their pockets with spice nuts and marzipan before saying them goodbye.13 Even more important than Bildung and sociability, however, was the dispositional precondition for both: a well-rounded, evenly developed character, able to maintain a balance between the demands of reason and emotion. “Strong-minded and indefatigable active, yet receptive to
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inspiration [Begeisterung ]”, the ganzer Mann as Heigel envisioned him was neither a dispassionate rationalist nor a man ruled by his feelings.14 He “abhors the sentimentality of unhardened hearts as much as rudeness of character, falsely admired as ‘tranquility that comes with life experience’”.15 For professionals working in contexts that stimulated their rational capacities more than their emotional sensitivity, this ideal of wholeness therefore served as a corrective. As Heigel observed about Ludwig von Bürkel, another high official at the Bavarian court: “Being a man of the world [Weltmännliches Wesen] does not seem compatible with warm-hearted friendship”. Yet Bürkel, as formal and aloof as one would expect a Weltmann to be, had proven himself able of cordial friendships and true compassion with others, thereby challenging traditional masculine stereotypes in the all-male world of Bavarian high officialdom.16 Some of this may seem reminiscent of eighteenth-century ideals of balance and moderateness such as found among historians like Johann Georg Wiggers and Arnold Heeren.17 At least in one respect, however, Heigel’s ideal distinguished itself from these older ones. For Heigel, receptiveness to inspiration was inseparable from an ability to hear the voice of duty when it called, to recognize the demands of the time (Forderung des Tages ), and to acknowledge the priority of patriotism, especially at moments when the country was in need.18 Ganze Männer, therefore, included those “courageous strategists, quiet scholars, passionate poets, [and] far-seeing civil servants” who had prepared the path to Germany’s unification and, after the outbreak of the First World War, those students and professors who abandoned their regular duties to volunteer in the army.19 Without exception, Heigel’s ganze Männer were warm-blooded patriots, who treated others not merely on spice nuts and marzipan, but also, if needed, on bullets and bombs.
Heinrich von Treitschke When Heigel looked for such “whole men” among his contemporaries in the German historical profession, it was Heinrich von Treitschke whom he regarded as the highest embodiment of this ideal. On various occasions, but most notably in a lecture given at the University of Munich, two years after Treitschke’s death, Heigel portrayed the Berlin historian as an earnest man, living by the courage of his convictions, staunchly defending his views in classroom and parliament alike, yet able to turn into a cheerful
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conversationalist as soon as glasses appeared on the table.20 Despite all quarrels and criticism, Treitschke’s life and work had been harmonious, as the man had managed to combine “the two highest tasks of the historian, the artistic and the scholarly”, most notably in his Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (5 vols., 1879–1894).21 On top of that, Treitschke had been a true patriot, “German in every fiber” of his being, who sang his country’s praise occasionally a bit too loud, yet was clearly committed to serving the national cause, while showing an admirable talent for discerning what kind of historical studies the German people needed.22 So, for Heigel, Treitschke came close to embodying the ganzer Mann ideal—“the rolling-into-one of ‘the scientist, the artist and the warrior’”.23 Unmistakably, for Heigel, the historian as a whole man sharply contrasted with other kinds of historians, including especially the narrow specialist. In his Munich lecture, Heigel depicted Treitschke as the antithesis of a type known as Zunftgelehrte—a historian who slavishly conforms to what his guild demands from him, never transgresses the confines of his specialism, and seldom displays any passion except appetite for work and excessive love of detail.24 In Johann Gottfried Herder’s classic description, approvingly quoted by Heigel, such Zunftgelehrten are like “apothecaries of old fallen autumn leaves who do not see the forest bursting into bud and leaf”.25 They may know everything about late medieval charters, but treat the Holy Roman Empire as if it were as dead as the Babylonian or Macedonian past, without realizing that its trees begin to sprout out green leaves again—a metaphoric reference to the Empire of 1871.26 Zunftgelehrten, in other words, lack the “wholeness” that Heigel appreciated in Treitschke because of their failure to recognize the political significance of their work as well as their inability to write anything except dry scholarly prose. In Heigel’s mouth, then, Zunftgelehrten was as derogatory a term as Urkundionen in Jacob Burckhardt’s vocabulary (referring to a “type of philologists and historical researchers”, prevalent in circles of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, “who consider themselves superior to everyone if they have found out that Emperor Conrad II went to the toilet at Goslar on May 7, 1030”).27 Indeed, by ironically dismissing Zunftgelehrten, Heigel joined a chorus of voices complaining about virtues of accuracy and precision that were degenerating into vices of pettiness and narrow-mindedness, especially among historians in contexts like the MGH . As Droysen had famously thundered in a letter to
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Wilhelm Arendt: “We in Germany have, through the Rankean school and the Pertzians [i.e., the young historians employed by Georg Heinrich Pertz in the MGH ], got grumpily bogged down in so-called criticism, whose entire enterprise consists of deciding whether one poor devil of a chronicler has transcribed something from another”.28 In his talk on Treitschke, Heigel specified the target of his criticism by paraphrasing yet another critic of narrow-minded professionalism, the essayist Karl Hillebrand, who already in the 1870s had mocked the pedantry of young history graduates who seemed to know exactly what counted as professional and what did not: “If Thucydides appeared in public today, a private lecturer from Leipzig or Göttingen would know well how to expose, in one or another literary periodical, the lack of method of the unfortunate historian who is not a product of Ranke’s or Waitz’s seminar”.29 Tellingly, in his paraphrase, Heigel omitted Ranke’s name—he had too much respect for the Berlin historian—so that Waitzstyle professionalism became the sole target of his criticism.30 This was unsurprising: philological virtues (“criticism”, “precision”, “penetration”) had been cultivated nowhere as sternly as in Waitz’s historical exercises.31 Waitz, moreover, had regarded literary style as an overpriced good. He had famously claimed that historians ought to value research (Forschung ) over writing (Darstellung ).32 Also, over the course of his career, Waitz had distinguished ever sharper between scholarship and politics, which had made him an almost perfect antitype of Treitschke, who did not hesitate to admit that the patriot in him was a thousand times starker than the professor.33 As Ernst Bernheim observed, some of Waitz’s students, plus royaliste que le roi, managed to show even more contempt for artistic and political aspirations than Waitz himself had done, which in turn made them easy targets for scorn from historians identifying with Treitschke or Heinrich von Sybel.34 So when Heigel exhorted the students in his audience to read Treitschke’s Deutsche Geschichte, “the most splendid achievement of German historical writing”, he hoped these volumes would show them that historical research was not incompatible with aesthetic aspiration or patriotic feeling: “Wissenschaftlichkeit does not exclude a warm heartbeat”.35 In a more critical vein, Heigel held up the example of Treitschke to challenge a mode of historical scholarship that “inclines towards Alexandrianism, only serving itself”.36 Like Treitschke himself, who had ridiculed all “well-educated seminar plants”, or Dove, who had mocked “the narrow philological school of seminars à la Waitz”,37 Heigel sought
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to delegitimize a type of historian that was well-versed in Latin palaeography, but ignorant or even indifferent about art and politics. The whole man, in other words, served as an antitype to the Zunftgelehrte, or as an anti-ascetic model that aimed to correct the one-sidedness of a Waitzean catalogue of virtues.
Scholarly Personae Crucially, this strategy did not imply total identification: Heigel reserved the right to be critical of Treitschke. As a Bavarian, he told his audience, “I could never befriend myself with Treitschke’s political confession of faith”.38 Neither did his praise imply that he admired Treitschke’s “too ornate rhetoric” or that he dreamt of a political career like Treitschke’s.39 Likewise, Heigel’s stated aversion to historians of the sort bred in Waitz’s exercises did not amount to an attack on his colleague Hermann Grauert, who had been a product of these Übungen, or to a belittling of the auxiliary sciences such as taught in Munich.40 The book series that Heigel edited with Grauert included volumes on medieval constitutional history that could have been written under Waitz’s supervision.41 Also, several Munich dissertations dwelt at length on such highly specialized issues as the authorship of the Confutatio primatus papae (a fifteenth-century antipapist treatise).42 Heigel’s juxtaposition of Zunftgelehrten and ganze Männer must therefore not be misunderstood as a contrast between Treitschke and Waitz as individuals. At a more generic level, Heigel contrasted two types of historians, characterized by narrow devotion to the pursuit of historical knowledge and a fortunate cross-fertilization of scholarly, artistic, and political aspirations, respectively. In preferring the latter over the former, Heigel’s point was not that Treitschke himself could serve as a model for imitation. The model in question was rather an ideal-type in Max Weber’s sense of the word: an abstract concept, which never corresponds exactly to a historical case, but offers a deliberately “one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view”, in relation to which real historical cases can be positioned.43 Treitschke came close to embodying Heigel’s whole man ideal, just as Waitz came close to personifying the Zunftgelehrte. Strictly speaking, however, both Zunftgelehrten and ganze Männer were idealtypes, which could serve as convenient reference points for Heigel and his audience precisely to the extent that they offered schematic, one-sided descriptions of historiographical virtues and vices.
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The virtue at stake in Heigel’s juxtaposition of Zunftgelehrten and ganze Männer was a notorious one: “objectivity”.44 Interestingly, Heigel did not simply claim that objectivity was important to the former and irrelevant to the latter. The issue rather was what the virtue in question meant and what kind of objectivity historians should try to practice. Did objectivity amount to an “abstraction from our individuality” that would enable historians to interpret “the facts of history” without preconceived ideas (voraussetzungslos )? In that case, objectivity required a renunciation of all the “influences of our natural tendencies” that interfere with the acquisition of knowledge.45 Then objectivity amounted to an ascetic repression of passions and preferences such as often attributed to Ranke (“I wish I could as it were extinguish myself”) and classically described by Ranke’s older contemporary, Wilhelm Wachsmuth: “Robbed of all bonds of nationality, which might impede or impair the telling of truth, all temptations and views of a party or stand, [and] all religious bias, free from prejudices and affections except those for truth and virtue, [and free] from passions (sine ira et studio) …”.46 This was the kind of objectivity that Droysen had denounced as “eunuch-like”, in the sense of lacking “proud masculinity”, and what Treitschke had condemned as the “bloodless objectivity” of historians unwilling or unable to put their hearts into their work.47 Following Treitschke, however, Heigel could envision a different kind of objectivity: one that made demands on head and heart alike. As Heigel quoted from a letter received from Treitschke in 1883: “I believe that historical objectivity consists in treating as large what is large and as small what is small”.48 On another occasion, Treitschke had defined true objectivity as “comprehension of the unlimited right of the personality”.49 Objective in this definition were those historians who acknowledged the importance of human agency, the great power of great men in particular (“It is men who make history”).50 Notably, this kind of objectivity did not require historians to suppress their feelings of admiration or contempt for historical agents, but encouraged them to express those value judgements, partly to recognize true greatness (or the lack thereof) among historical agents, partly also to demonstrate their own strength of character. Would any “German man”—Heigel’s description of Treitschke—remain silent if his country’s honour was assailed?51 On the one hand, then, Heigel associated objectivity with “doing justice” and with “recognizing” someone’s greatness, merits, or success.52 On the other, he emphasized that objectivity, rightly understood, was well compatible with patriotic feeling. As he
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stated shortly after his lecture on Treitschke: “[The historian] will always have to write cum studio and often cum ira”.53 Heigel’s talk in Munich, then, was an exercise in drawing schematic contrasts, not for the sake of pinpointing Treitschke’s or Waitz’s position in German historical studies, but with the aim of propagating an anti-ascetic conception of the historian’s task, consistent with an ideal of well-rounded masculinity. Although Heigel’s ideal-typical contrast between ganze Männer and Zunftgelehrten emphasized the distinctiveness of Treitschke’s achievements in a profession largely populated by narrow-minded specialists, the individual named Treitschke did not coincide with the type he represented. Close as he had come to embodying Heigel’s ganzer Mann ideal, Treitschke had failed to meet his aesthetic standards. So, for Heigel, Treitschke deserved posthumous praise in so far as he had approached the ideal-type; not the other way around. Negatively, this implied that among German historians, the ganzer Mann was still an ideal awaiting full realization. Positively, however, it meant that others, too, could be honoured for approximating the ideal—Ludwig Häusser and Sybel, for instance, in both of whom Heigel detected a felicitous pairing of “statesman-like insight” with “the quiet spirit of a researcher”.54 Consequently, Heigel’s aim in juxtaposing Waitz and Treitschke was not to highlight individual differences, but to draw attention to two different models of how to be a historian, characterized by cold and warm-blooded objectivity, respectively. Following Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum, historians of the humanities have come to denote such models as “scholarly personae”.55 Part of what makes this concept attractive is that it draws attention to the demands that scholarly work makes upon the self. Historians employed by associations like the Hansische Geschichtsverein were often months away from home to collect and transcribe medieval sources in foreign archives (with only a quick chocolate bar for lunch, as Dietrich Schäfer remembered: no precious research time could be wasted on lunch breaks).56 These environments and job expectations made rather different demands on the historian’s abilities than the University of Heidelberg, where in 1874 the newly appointed Bernhard Erdmannsdörffer faced the challenge of having to continue Häusser’s and Treitschke’s tradition of spectacular lecturing.57 “Scholarly personae” is a technical term for the distinct catalogues of virtues, skills, or competencies characteristic of such models of how to be a historian. Given that the abilities that scholars deemed relevant for their work not only differed across institutional contexts, but also
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often changed considerably over time, scholarly personae are a promising prism for comparative, transdisciplinary lines of inquiry.58 Although the concept of “personae” is relatively new—no nineteenthcentury historian ever spoke about scholarly personae—it is worth emphasizing that the models denoted by it already existed in Heigel’s own time. Nineteenth-century historians even engaged in fierce debate over such models, which they typically named after high-profile figures (Ranke, Sybel, Waitz, Johannes Janssen) whom they perceived as embodying certain virtues or vices more than others. Thus, George P. Gooch’s 1913 verdict that “Ranke was the most objective, Treitschke … the most subjective of German historians” echoed late nineteenth-century commonplace distinctions between “objective” historians following Ranke’s footsteps and “subjective” historians resembling Treitschke.59 Max Lenz and Martin Philippson are but two examples of historians who distinguished as schematically as Heigel between Treitschke-style “subjectivism” and Ranke-style “impartiality”.60 This implies that there is no need for historians of the humanities to impose their own concepts of scholarly personae upon the past. They can fruitfully examine how nineteenth-century scholars themselves mapped their fields with help of clearly delineated models of virtue and tried to steer a course between, stay away from, or identify with one or more of these personae.61
Modes of Masculinity While these personae have so far been analysed in terms of virtues and skills, hardly any attention has been paid to their gender connotations. There is an emerging body of literature on how scholars’ “self-fashioning” or “presentation of self”—the voices they adopted, the clothes they wore, the beards they grew—conformed to, or challenged, culturally sanctioned standards for male and female conduct in public.62 Also, following Bonnie G. Smith, Falko Schnicke has done important work in showing to what extent nineteenth-century German historical studies were permeated with masculine values, as evidenced not only by stylized self-presentations (letters, photos, portraits), but also by the social codes regulating male exchange in educational settings (lectures, seminars, historische Übungen).63 Nonetheless, no one has tried so far to explain why Treitschke-style “subjectivism” was experienced as more masculine than Ranke-style “objectivity” or why Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, the man who lent his name to the persona of a “moralist” historian, was
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still posthumously perceived as “a male spirit” in comparison with the “female one” associated with Ranke.64 Where did these different gender connotations come from? The case of Heigel’s whole man ideal allows for two observations. First, whereas the verdicts just quoted all relied on a polar gender model that presented sensibility and imagination as typically female and intelligence and judgement as characteristically male, der ganzer Mann challenged this dichotomy by requiring men to cultivate reason and emotion alike. In the realm of historical studies, this amounted to a rehabilitation of character traits traditionally associated with female history writing, such as Empfindsamkeit (sensibility).65 From Treitschke’s perspective, Heigel’s whole man was therefore less traditionally masculine than the persona he himself sought to embody. As long as intuition, empathy, and kindness were gendered as female, Heigel’s admiration for well-rounded personalities that could just as easily paint a tender biographical portrait as summon their students to obey the voice of duty when the country was in need appeared as a curious mixture of male and female traits.66 Secondly, Heigel’s example shows that models of masculinity were not only connected to scholarly personae, but also embedded in political and religious geographies. In Treitschke’s understanding of things, Protestantism and Northern Germany (Prussia) were embodiments of masculine courage and determination, especially if compared to their feminine others: the Catholic Church and Southern Germany (Bavaria).67 Writing from Munich, and self-consciously identifying as Bavarian, Heigel therefore faced the charge of having too feminine a background to stand on equal footing with Protestant historians from Prussian descent—just as Catholic historians throughout the German Empire had to counter the suspicion that they were incapable of “Protestant” impartiality.68 Heigel’s appropriation of the ganzer Mann ideal may therefore well have had an element of self-defence. It allowed him to highlight the masculinity of his favourite persona, even if this masculinity was of a different, less hegemonic kind than the one advocated by his Prussian colleagues.
Epilogue To what extent, finally, these models were tied to specific moments in German history became apparent after Heigel’s death in 1915. In their obituaries, Heigel’s students almost unanimously argued that their teacher had embodied the very same qualities that he had admired in others.
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Heigel had been an artist and a scholar rolled into one, a “man of fullness” (Mann der Gesamtheit ), made “of a single mold” (aus einem Gusse), or, in short, a whole man himself.69 As such, Heigel had been able to integrate art and scholarship in a harmoniously manner—a theme that ran throughout the obituaries.70 Yet precisely for this reason, Wilhelm Hausenstein argued, Heigel had also been a man of yesterday, even one of “before yesterday”—belonging to an age in which it had still been possible to be a man of learning and a man of letters simultaneously.71 Part of what gave the whole man ideal a distinctively nineteenthcentury touch was, of course, the First World War. Back in 1911, Heigel himself had already pointed to a periodical need for “virtues of war”—will-power, robustness, persistence, and fidelity to one’s duties— that were not exactly identical to the “virtues of peace” practised by Wilhelm von Giesebrecht on Christmas Eve.72 Another factor challenging the whole man ideal was the entrance of women into the historical profession. Just a few years after Heigel’s death, the first female student would obtain a university teaching qualification (Habilitation) from the University of Munich—a clear sign that the days of all-male scholarly sociability were numbered.73 Most importantly, however, the professional identities of historians, journalists, and writers had been subject to processes of ongoing differentiation, partly through the growth of the historical profession and increasing habits of specialization among its members, partly also through “professionalization” of German newspaper journalism.74 Against this background, Heigel could be interpreted as embodying a type of historian that was no longer available to his students—just as Alfred Dove had seemed as a voice from the past in continuing, until his death in 1916, the habit of preferring finely crafted essays over deftly footnoted monographs.75 Heigel had wanted to be a whole man in an age that saw the rise to prominence of a new scholarly persona, the Waitzean Fachmann, but been unable to reverse the trend, despite all inspiration that he had provided to his students. In the melancholic words of perhaps his most talented student, the Bavarian archivist and future Munich professor Ivo Striedinger: “The peculiar mixture of heart and mind that characterized him has once existed, but will not return…”.76
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Notes 1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. Funding has been generously provided by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). 2. Martina Kessel, “The ‘Whole Man’: The Longing for a Masculine World in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Gender and History 15 (2003): 1–31, at 2. 3. Falko Schnicke, Die männliche Disziplin: Zur Vergeschlechtlichung der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft 1780–1900 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015), 125. 4. Ibid., 137. 5. Herman Paul, “The Virtues of a Good Historian in Early Imperial Germany: Georg Waitz’s Contested Example,” Modern Intellectual History 15 (2018): 681–709. 6. Herman Paul, “Introduction: Scholarly Personae: What They Are and Why They Matter,” in How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000, ed. Herman Paul (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 1–14. 7. In distinguishing between multiple modes of masculinity, this chapter draws on recent theorizing on “multiple masculinities” as conveniently summarized in James W. Messerschmidt, “Multiple Masculinities,” in Handbook of the Sociology of Gender, ed. Barbara J. Risman, Carissa M. Froyum, and William J. Scarborough, 2nd ed. (Cham: Springer, 2018), 143–153; Ben Griffin, “Hegemonic Masculinity as a Historical Problem,” Gender and History 30 (2018): 377–400. 8. As Heigel told the story in “Karl Theodor von Heigel,” in Geistiges und künstlerisches München in Selbstbiographien, ed. W. Zils (Munich: Max Kellerer, 1913), 151–156. After his ennoblement in 1897, Heigel was entitled to add the prefix “von” to his last name. 9. Alfred Dove, “Aus der Münchener historischen Werkstatt,” Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung (10 February 1900): 1–3, at 2. 10. Erich König, “Karl Theodor von Heigel †,” Historisches Jahrbuch 36 (1915), 476–479, at 477; E. Marcks, “Karl Theodor von Heigel,” Jahrbuch der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1916 (Munich: Verlag der k. b. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1916): 149–158, at 154. 11. Kessel, “Whole Man,” 2; Karl Theodor von Heigel, “Friedrich von Ziegler” (1897), in Heigel, Biographische und kulturgeschichtliche Essays (Berlin: Allgemeiner Verein für deutsche Literatur, 1906), 290–297, at 290. 12. Heigel, “Friedrich von Ziegler,” 294; Karl Theodor Heigel, “Franz von Kobell” (1891), in Heigel, Essays aus neuerer Geschichte (Munich: C. C. Buchner, 1892), 326–347, at 327.
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13. Karl Theodor Heigel, “Wilhelm von Giesebrecht” (1889), in Heigel, Essays aus neuerer Geschichte (Munich: C. C. Buchner, 1892), 313–325, at 320, 321. 14. Heigel, “Zur Erinnerung,” 5; Heigel, “Friedrich von Ziegler,” 293. 15. Heigel, “Zur Erinnerung,” 2. 16. [Karl Theodor Heigel], “Ludwig von Buerkel,” Allgemeine Zeitung (24 July 1903): 1–2, at 1. 17. Schnicke, Männliche Disziplin, 121–128. 18. Karl Theodor von Heigel, “Die Verlegung der Ludwigs-MaximiliansUniversität nach München im Jahre 1826” (1897), in Heigel, Neue geschichtliche Essays (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1902), 21–50, at 49. 19. Karl Theodor von Heigel, “Festrede zum Gedächtnis Kaiser Wilhelm I” (1897), in Heigel, Neue geschichtliche Essays (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1902), 306–331, at 306; K. Th. von Heigel, Krieg und Wissenschaft: Rede gehalten in der öffentliche Sitzung der K. Akademie der Wissenschaften am 14. November 1914 (Munich: Verlag der K. B. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1914), 10. 20. Heigel, “Zur Erinnerung,” 2. 21. Ibid., 1, quoting Heinrich von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. 2 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1882), 35. 22. Heigel, “Zur Erinnerung,” 2. 23. Kessel, “Whole Man,” 2. 24. Heigel, “Zur Erinnerung,” 3. 25. Karl Theodor von Heigel, Zu Schillers Gedächtnis: Rede in der öffentlichen Sitzung der K. B. Akademie der Wissenschaften am 15. März 1905 (Munich: K. B. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1905), 3, quoting [Johann Gottfried Herder], “Philosophie und Schwärmerei, zwo Schwestern,” Der Teutsche Merkur (1776), no. 4, 138–149, at 147. The English translation is borrowed from Günther Jacoby, “Herder as Faust,” The Open Court 27 (1913): 98–119, at 111. 26. Heigel, “Wilhelm von Giesebrecht,” 323. 27. Jacob Burckhardt to Gottfried Kinkel, 17 April 1847, in Burckhardt, Briefe, ed. Max Burckhardt, vol. 3 (Basel: Benno Schwabe & Co., 1955), 65–68, at 68. Treitschke himself had also dissociated himself from Zunftgelehrten, e.g. in a letter to Gustav Freytag, 13 November 1865, in Gustav Freytag und Heinrich von Treitschke im Briefwechsel, ed. Alfred Dove (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1900), 69–75, at 72. 28. Johann Gustav Droysen to Wilhelm Arendt, 20 March 1857, in Droysen, Briefwechsel, ed. Rudolf Hübner, vol. 2 (Osnabrück: Biblio-Verlag, 1929), 441–443, at 442. The English translation is borrowed from Klaus Meister, “Thucydides in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides, ed. Christine Lee and Neville Morley (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 197–217, at 211.
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29. Karl Hillebrand, “Ueber historisches Wissen und historischen Sinn” (1874), in Hillebrand, Zeiten, Völker und Menschen, vol. 2 (Berlin: Robert Oppenheim, 1875), 311–333, at 318. 30. Heigel, “Zur Erinnerung,” 3. Back in 1877, Heigel had dedicated his Habilitationsschrift to Ranke: Karl Theodor Heigel, Der österreichische Erbfolgestreit und die Kaiserwahl Karls VII (Nördlingen: C. H. Beck, 1877), iii*. 31. G. Waitz, Die historischen Übungen zu Göttingen: Glückwunschschreiben an Leopold von Ranke zum Tage der Feier seines fünfzigjährigen Doctorjubiläums, 20. Februar 1867 (Göttingen: W. Fr. Kästner, 1867), 4; Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen, “Private Übungen und verkörpertes Wissen: Zur Unterrichtspraxis der Geschichtswissenschaft im neunzehnten Jahrhundert,” in Akademische Wissenskulturen: Praktiken des Lehrens und Forschens vom Mittelalter bis zur Moderne, ed. Martin Kintzinger and Sita Steckel (Basel: Schwabe, 2015), 143–161. 32. Georg Waitz, “Falsche Richtungen: Schreiben an den Herausgeber,” Historische Zeitschrift 1 (1859): 17–28, at 25. 33. Thomas Brechenmacher, “Wieviel Gegenwart verträgt historisches Urteilen? Die Kontroverse zwischen Heinrich von Sybel und Julius Ficker über die Bewertung der Kaiserpolitik des Mittelalters (1859–1862),” in Historische Debatten und Kontroversen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Elvert and Susanne Krauß (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 2003), 34– 54, esp. 53; Treitschke to Freytag, 13 November 1865, in Freytag und Treitschke im Briefwechsel, 72. 34. Ernst Bernheim to Karl Lamprecht, 2 January 1885, in “Über das eigentliche Arbeitsgebiet der Geschichte”: Der Briefwechsel zwischen Karl Lamprecht und Ernst Bernheim sowie zwischen Karl Lamprecht und Henri Pirenne 1878–1915, ed. Luise Schorn-Schütte and Mircea Ogrin (Cologne: Böhlau, 2017), 66–67, at 67. 35. Heigel, “Zur Erinnerung,” 1, 3, 5. 36. Karl Theodor Heigel, “An die akademische Jugend!” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 11 (1914): 776–779, at 779. 37. Heinrich von Treitschke to Alfred Dove, 1 September 1873, in Dove, Ausgewählte Briefe, ed. Oswald Dammann (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1925), 38–39, at 39; Alfred Dove to Heinrich von Treitschke, 13 May 1873; ibid., 32–35, at 34. 38. Heigel, “Zur Erinnerung,” 1. 39. Ibid., 2, under reference to Paul Bailleu, “Heinrich von Treitschke,” Deutsche Rundschau 89 (1896): 41–76, 237–271, at 51. 40. On the auxilliary sciences in Munich, see Hedwig Dickerhof-Fröhlich, Das historische Studium an der Universität München im 19. Jahrhundert: Vom Bildungsfach zum Berufsstudium (Munich: Minerva, 1979), 109–113.
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41. Max Jansen, Die Herzogsgewalt der Erzbischöfe von Köln in Westfalen seit dem Jahre 1180 bis zum Ausgange des 14. Jahrhunderts: Eine Verfassungsgeschichtliche Studie (Munich: H. Lüneburg, 1895); Maximilian Claar, Die Entwicklung der venetianischen Verfassung von der Einsetzung bis zur Schliessung des grossen Rates (1172–1297) (Munich: H. Lüneburg, 1895). 42. Paul Joachimsohn, Gregor Heimburg (Bamberg: C. C. Buchner, 1891), viii; P. Albert, Matthias Döring, ein deutscher Minorit des 15. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Süddeutsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1892), 129–194. 43. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949), 90. 44. On the rise of this virtue in the late nineteenth-century humanities, see Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and Impartiality: Epistemic Virtues in the Humanities,” in The Making of the Humanities, ed. Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn, vol. 3 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 27–41. 45. Ernst Bernheim, Lehrbuch der historischen Methode: Mit Nachweis der wichtigsten Quellen und Hülfsmittel zum Studium der Geschichte (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1889), 493, 498. 46. Leopold Ranke, Englische Geschichte vornehmlich im sechszehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. 2 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1860), 3; W. Wachsmuth, Entwurf einer Theorie der Geschichte (Halle: Hemmerde und Schwetschke, 1820), 126. 47. Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik (1857), ed. Peter Leyh, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977), 236; Johann Gustav Droysen to Georg Beseler, 16 January 1853, in Droysen, Briefwechsel, vol. 2, 144–146, at 145; Heinrich von Treitschke to Eduard Heinrich von Treitschke, 19 November 1864, in Heinrich von Treitschkes Briefe, ed. Max Cornicelius, vol. 2 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1913), 351–352, at 351. On the sexual images that Droysen employed in describing the historian’s work, see Schnicke, Männliche Disziplin, 422–435. 48. Heigel, “Zur Erinnerung,” 4, citing Heinrich von Treitschke to Karl Theodor Heigel, 2 February 1883 (published in Heinrich von Treitschkes Briefe, ed. Max Cornicelius, vol. 3 (Leipzig S. Hirzel, 1920), 548–549, at 549). Notably, this was an almost literal quotation from what the dramatist Heinrich von Kruse had put in the mouth of one of his characters, the imperial court official Granville: “I know that you treat as small what is small, as large what is large”. Heinrich von Kruse, Moritz von Sachsen: Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1872), 154. 49. Heinrich von Treitschke, “F. C. Dahlmann,” in Treitschke, Historische und politische Aufsätze vornehmlich zur neuesten deutschen Geschichte, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1865), 359–445, at 402. 50. Heinrich von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. 1 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1879), 28.
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51. Heigel, “Zur Erinnerung,” 5. 52. K. Th. Heigel, “Ludwig I. von Bayern als Freund der Geschichte: Zum Centenarium seines Geburtstags,” Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung (1886): 3449–3451, 3465–3467, at 3450; Heigel, “Ueber die Memoiren des bayerischen Ministers Grafen von Montgelas,” Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-philologischen und historischen Klasse der k. b. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München (1885): 424–442, at 425. 53. K. Th. Heigel, Deutsche Geschichte vom Tode Friedrich d. Gr. bis zur Auflösung des alten Reiches, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1899), vii, viii. Back in 1838, Sybel had already stated that historians should write “cum ira et studio.” Volker Dotterweich, Heinrich von Sybel: Geschichtswissenschaft in politischer Absicht (1817 –1861) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 42, 53. 54. Heigel, Deutsche Geschichte, vol. 1, v. 55. Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum, “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories,” Science in Context 16 (2003): 1–8. 56. Dietrich Schäfer, Mein Leben (Berlin: K. F. Koehler, 1926), 89. 57. Eberhard Gothein, “Bernhard Erdmannsdörffer †: Ein Gedenkwort,” Preußische Jahrbücher 104 (1901): 15–22, at 20. 58. Jeroen van Dongen and Herman Paul, “Introduction: Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities,” in Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities, ed. Jeroen van Dongen and Herman Paul (Cham: Springer, 2017), 1–10. 59. G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1913), 153; Thomas Gerhards, Heinrich von Treitschke: Wirkung und Wahrnehmung eines Historikers im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2013), 75–84, 97, 137. 60. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Max Lenz papers, inv. no. 8, “Geschichte der deutschen Geschichtschreibung” (1901), transcript by Martin Hass, 144–145; M. Philippson, “Henri de Treitschke,” Revue Historique 61 (1896): 349–353, at 351. With this necrology, Philippson continued his long-standing feud with Sybel and Delbrück such as described by Geneviève Warland, “Der deutsch-jüdische Historiker Martin Philippson (1846 bis 1916): Wissenschaftsvermittler zwischen Deutschland und Belgien,” in Belgica: terra incognita? Resultate und Perspektiven der historischen Belgienforschung, ed. Sebastian Bischoff et al. (Munster: Waxmann, 2016), 56–67, at 62. On Lenz’s appropriation of Ranke, see Hans-Heinz Krill, Die Rankerenaissance: Max Lenz und Erich Marcks: Ein Beitrag zum historisch-politischen Denken in Deutschland, 1880–1935 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1962), 6–41 and, more critically, Günter Johannes Henz, Leopold von Ranke in Geschichtsdenken und Forschung, vol. 1 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2014), 452–457.
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61. As I argue in Herman Paul, “The Virtues and Vices of Albert Naudé: Toward a History of Scholarly Personae,” History of Humanities 1 (2016): 327–338. 62. Kirsti Niskanen, Mineke Bosch, and Kaat Wils, “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice: Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 1–5; Mineke Bosch, “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians: Explorations of a Concept,” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54; Mineke Bosch, “Persona and the Performance of Identity: Parallel Developments in the Biographical Historiography of Science and Gender, and the Related Uses of Self Narrative,” L’Homme 24, no. 2 (2013): 11–22. 63. Schnicke, Männliche Disziplin, 501–540; Falko Schnicke, “Princesses, Semen, and Separation: Masculinity and Body Politics in NineteenthCentury German Historiography,” German Historical Institute London Bulletin 40, no. 1 (2018): 26–60; Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 103–129. 64. [Paul Lindau], “Das literarische Parlament,” Der Salon für Literatur, Kunst und Gesellschaft (1877): 226–230, at 227, as discussed in Herman Paul, “Ranke vs Schlosser: Pairs of Personae in Nineteenth-Century German Historiography,” in Paul, How to Be a Historian, 36–52, at 41. Back in 1828, Heinrich Leo had already criticized Ranke’s voice for being too female: Schnicke, Männliche Disziplin, 417–418. 65. Angelika Epple, Empfindsame Geschichtsschreibung: Eine Geschlechtergeschichte der Historiographie zwischen Aufklärung und Historismus (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003). 66. On the continuing power of this polar gender model in nineteenthcentury Germany, see Karin Hausen, “Family and Role-Division: The Polarisation of Sexual Stereotypes in the Nineteenth Century: An Aspect of the Dissociation of Work and Family Life,” in The German Family: Essays on the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury Germany, ed. Richard J. Evans and W. R. Lee (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 51–83, at 53–61. 67. Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik: Vorlesungen gehalten an der Universität zu Berlin, ed. Max Cornicelius, vol. 1 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1897), 247. 68. Bernd Mütter, Die Geschichtswissenschaft in Münster zwischen Aufklärung und Historismus unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der historischen Disziplin an der Münsterschen Hochschule (Munster: Aschendorff, 1980), 246–251. 69. Marcks, “Karl Theodor von Heigel,” 156, 150. 70. Ludwig Wolfram, “Zur Erinnerung an Karl Theodor von Heigel,” Deutsche Geschichtsblätter 16 (1915): 135–146, at 141; Gustav Sommerfeldt, “Der Geschichtsforscher Karl Theodor von Heigel,” Mitteilungen
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71. 72. 73. 74.
75.
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des Vereines für Geschichte der Deutschen in Böhmen 54 (1915): 137– 141, at 137; [Karl Alexander von Müller], “Karl Theodor von Heigel,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 12 (1915): 558–560, at 559; Paul Joachimsen, “Karl Theodor Heigel †,” Vergangenheit und Gegenwart 5 (1915): 207; F[riedrich] D[üfel], “Karl Theodor von Heigel †,” Westermanns Monatshefte 118 (1915): 425–426. Wilhelm Hausenstein, “Karl Theodor von Heigel,” Das Forum 2 (1915): 44–48, at 44. Karl Theodor von Heigel, “Einheitsstaat oder Bundesstaat?” (1911), in Heigel, Deutsche Reden (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1916), 1–21, at 11–12. Christiane Wilke, Forschen, Lehren, Aufbegehren: 100 Jahre akademische Bildung von Frauen in Bayern (Munich: Herbert Utz, 2003), 33. Horst Walter Blanke, “Historiker als Beruf: Die Herausbildung des Karrieremusters ‘Geschichtswissenschaftler’ an den deutschen Universitäten von der Aufklärung bis zum klassischen Historismus,” in Bildung, Staat, Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert: Mobilisierung und Disziplinierung, ed. Karl-Ernst Jeismann (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1989), 343–360; Jörg Requate, Journalismus als Beruf: Entstehung und Entwicklung des Journalistenberufs im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 131–138, 222–236. Herman Paul, “A Missing Link in the History of Historiography: Scholarly Personae in the World of Alfred Dove,” History of European Ideas 45 (2019): 1011–1028. Ivo Striedinger, “Karl Theodor Heigel,” in Heigel, Deutsche Reden, ix–xx, at ix.
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Secondary Literature Blanke, Horst Walter. “Historiker als Beruf: Die Herausbildung des Karrieremusters ‘Geschichtswissenschaftler’ an den deutschen Universitäten von der Aufklärung bis zum klassischen Historismus.” In Bildung, Staat, Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert: Mobilisierung und Disziplinierung, edited by Karl-Ernst Jeismann, 343–360. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1989. Bosch, Mineke. “Persona and the Performance of Identity: Parallel Developments in the Biographical Historiography of Science and Gender, and the Related Uses of Self Narrative.” L’Homme 24, no. 2 (2013): 11–22. Bosch, Mineke. “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians: Explorations of a Concept.” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54. Brechenmacher, Thomas. “Wieviel Gegenwart verträgt historisches Urteilen? Die Kontroverse zwischen Heinrich von Sybel und Julius Ficker über die Bewertung der Kaiserpolitik des Mittelalters (1859–1862).” In Historische Debatten und Kontroversen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Jürgen Elvert and Susanne Krauß, 34–54. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 2003. Daston, Lorraine, “Objectivity and Impartiality: Epistemic Virtues in the Humanities.” In The Making of the Humanities, edited by Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn, vol. 3, 27–41. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Daston, Lorraine, and Sibum, H. Otto. “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories.” Science in Context 16 (2003): 1–8. Dickerhof-Fröhlich, Hedwig. Das historische Studium an der Universität München im 19. Jahrhundert: Vom Bildungsfach zum Berufsstudium. Munich: Minerva, 1979. Dongen, Jeroen van, and Paul, Herman. “Introduction: Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities.” In Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities, edited by Jeroen van Dongen and Herman Paul, 1–10. Cham: Springer, 2017. Dotterweich, Volker. Heinrich von Sybel: Geschichtswissenschaft in politischer Absicht (1817 –1861). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978. Epple, Angelika. Empfindsame Geschichtsschreibung: Eine Geschlechtergeschichte der Historiographie zwischen Aufklärung und Historismus. Cologne: Böhlau, 2003. Eskildsen, Kasper Risbjerg. “Private Übungen und verkörpertes Wissen: Zur Unterrichtspraxis der Geschichtswissenschaft im neunzehnten Jahrhundert.” In Akademische Wissenskulturen: Praktiken des Lehrens und Forschens vom Mittelalter bis zur Moderne, edited by Martin Kintzinger and Sita Steckel, 143–161. Basel: Schwabe, 2015.
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Gerhards, Thomas. Heinrich von Treitschke: Wirkung und Wahrnehmung eines Historikers im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2013. Griffin, Ben. “Hegemonic Masculinity as a Historical Problem.” Gender and History 30 (2018): 377–400. Hausen, Karin. “Family and Role-Division: The Polarisation of Sexual Stereotypes in the Nineteenth Century: An Aspect of the Dissociation of Work and Family Life.” In The German Family: Essays on the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany, edited by Richard J. Evans and W. R. Lee, 51–83. London: Croom Helm, 1981. Henz, Günter Johannes. Leopold von Ranke in Geschichtsdenken und Forschung, vol. 1. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2014. Kessel, Martina. “The ‘Whole Man’: The Longing for a Masculine World in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Gender and History 15 (2003): 1–31. Krill, Hans-Heinz. Die Rankerenaissance: Max Lenz und Erich Marcks: Ein Beitrag zum historisch-politischen Denken in Deutschland, 1880–1935. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1962. Meister, Klaus. “Thucydides in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” In A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides, edited by Christine Lee and Neville Morley, 197–217. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. Messerschmidt, James W. “Multiple Masculinities.” In Handbook of the Sociology of Gender, edited by Barbara J. Risman, Carissa M. Froyum, and William J. Scarborough, 2nd ed., 143–153. Cham: Springer, 2018. Mütter, Bernd. Die Geschichtswissenschaft in Münster zwischen Aufklärung und Historismus unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der historischen Disziplin an der Münsterschen Hochschule. Munster: Aschendorff, 1980. Niskanen, Kirsti, Bosch, Mineke, and Wils, Kaat. “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice: Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 1–5. Paul, Herman. “The Virtues and Vices of Albert Naudé: Toward a History of Scholarly Personae.” History of Humanities 1 (2016): 327–338. Paul, Herman. “The Virtues of a Good Historian in Early Imperial Germany: Georg Waitz’s Contested Example.” Modern Intellectual History 15 (2018): 681–709. Paul, Herman. “A Missing Link in the History of Historiography: Scholarly Personae in the World of Alfred Dove.” History of European Ideas 45 (2019): 1011–1028. Paul, Herman. “Introduction: Scholarly Personae: What They Are and Why They Matter.” In How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000, edited by Herman Paul, 1–14. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019.
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Paul, Herman. “Ranke vs Schlosser: Pairs of Personae in Nineteenth-Century German Historiography.” In How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000, edited by Herman Paul, 36–52. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. Requate, Jörg. Journalismus als Beruf: Entstehung und Entwicklung des Journalistenberufs im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im internationalen Vergleich. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995. Schnicke, Falko. Die männliche Disziplin: Zur Vergeschlechtlichung der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft 1780–1900. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015. Schnicke, Falko. “Princesses, Semen, and Separation: Masculinity and Body Politics in Nineteenth-Century German Historiography.” German Historical Institute London Bulletin 40, no. 1 (2018): 26–60. Smith, Bonnie G. The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Warland, Geneviève. “Der deutsch-jüdische Historiker Martin Philippson (1846 bis 1916): Wissenschaftsvermittler zwischen Deutschland und Belgien.” In Belgica: terra incognita? Resultate und Perspektiven der historischen Belgienforschung, edited by Sebastian Bischoff et al., 56–67. Munster: Waxmann, 2016. Weber, Max. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Translated by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch. New York: Free Press, 1949. Wilke, Christiane. Forschen, Lehren, Aufbegehren: 100 Jahre akademische Bildung von Frauen in Bayern. Munich: Herbert Utz, 2003.
CHAPTER 11
Wilhelm Wundt’s Critical Loyalty: Balancing Gendered Virtues Among Early Experimental Psychologists Christiaan Engberts
Introduction The philosopher and experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt taught a lot of young men who would subsequently have highly successful academic careers.1 One of his most celebrated former students was Oswald Külpe, who would become famous as the founder of the socalled Würzburg School of psychology.2 His work was so influential that he is sometimes referred to as “the second founder of experimental psychology on German soil”—the first one, of course, being his former teacher.3 Wundt, however, was critical of his accomplishments. Shortly after his Würzburg appointment he made this very clear both in their private correspondence and in a polemical article in his own journal, the Philosophische Studien.4 Even though their strong disagreements would last until Külpe’s death in 1915, their personal relation hardly suffered.
C. Engberts (B) Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 K. Niskanen and M. J. Barany (eds.), Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7_11
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Wundt emphasized that he hoped that “the inevitable critical debates will never ever tarnish our amicable personal relation!”5 Külpe cherished his words: “Your final wish for an untarnished preservation of the personal relations […] joyfully greets my warm and thankful heart”. He also gratefully remembered how his former teacher always used to encourage an independent attitude among his students.6 The ambiguity of the relationship between Wundt and Külpe was typical of the former’s relations with his peers, which were shaped by, among other things, friendship, respect, professional disagreement, and a drive for independent success. It is exactly this complexity that provides insight in the commitments and ideals that have shaped scholarship in the past as well as in the present. Especially when these ideals are in danger of coming into conflict with one another, we can get a sense of the virtues that learned men considered to be essential to good scholarship. In this chapter, I will look at late-nineteenth-century conceptions of scholarly virtue from two complementary perspectives. First, I will argue that scholarly personae are best understood as dynamic constellations of virtues. Next, I will reflect on the way in which these personae tend to draw on older, gendered catalogues of middle-class and aristocratic virtue. The case studies I will subsequently present serve to illustrate that the resultant constellation of virtues contains the seed for potential conflict. Even if such conflict is likely to take place between individual scholars, I will emphasize how it plays out within single personae, in which the balance between the gendered virtues of loyalty and independence is continuously redefined and recalibrated. I will elucidate the dynamics of this moral economy with case studies of the complex relations between Wundt and his peers, specifically his senior colleague Gustav Theodor Fechner, his tragically unsuccessful student Ludwig Lange, and his controversial but successful student Hugo Münsterberg.
Scholarly Personae and Gendered Virtues There are no simple answers to questions about the characteristics of good scholarship. Academics are widely expected to excel in a myriad of ways. They are expected to stand out as—among other things—innovative researchers, inspiring teachers, supportive colleagues, merciless critics, public intellectuals, and selfless pursuers of a noble quest for knowledge. Any convincing template for good scholarship, or scholarly persona, has to account for this wide variety of roles and ideals. Herman Paul has
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drawn attention to this complexity by describing scholarly personae as “constellations of commitments”.7 This definition is particularly attractive because it encourages the examination of different ways in which templates of scholarship can accommodate internal tension. Scholars who value the same commitments can be at odds with each other when they make different assessments of the relative weight of commitments. Individual scholars can experience tensions when they realize that their ideas about the relative weight of commitments can be susceptible to change through time. Promising as this approach may be, historians of scholarship rarely explicitly discuss the tensions existing within these constellations of commitments. There is a growing body of literature, however, that examines questions of good scholarship through the lens of virtue and vice. Steven Shapin has discussed the importance of assessments of virtue in settling questions of trustworthiness in early-modern experimental science.8 More recent works on scholarly virtue and vice include Sari Kivistö’s in-depth study of the vices of learning in early-modern Europe and an edited volume by Jeroen van Dongen and Herman Paul that provides a cross-disciplinary overview of epistemic virtues in the sciences and the humanities.9 These studies draw attention to a wide variety of scholarly virtues, such as love of truth, accuracy, impartiality, loyalty, and curiosity. The resulting repertoire of scholarly virtues is a prima facie attractive starting point for further investigations, not least because these commitments are orientated towards virtues that are still very recognizable to twenty-first-century researchers. Of course, the familiarity of most (or even all) of these virtues to twenty-first-century scholars does not help us in determining the desirability of any specific assessment of weight of any of the various commitments. In fact, I would argue that it is not even feasible to draw up an exhaustive overview of the many ways in which these different virtues, with their different and potentially ever-changing relative weights, relate to each other. In this chapter, I aim to add to the discussion of scholarly virtue by shedding light on the complex interplay between virtues rather than by elaborating on the manifold assessments and performances of any specific virtue. This interplay will be illustrated by a close look at two widely recognized virtues of scholarship: critical independence and loyal collegiality. Even if the relation between these two virtues might not be fully representative for all possible relations between all virtues of scholarship that modern-day researchers have come up with, the selection of
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exactly these virtues has certain advantages. In the first place, it will allow me to illustrate how the same virtues can alternately support and hinder each other. Secondly, both virtues tend to be highly valued by virtually all scholars and therefore offer a glimpse into the potential for conflict within personae. Finally, these particular virtues allow me to illustrate the way in which the understanding and performance of scholarly virtues are often shaped by the values and discourses existing in wider society. After all, virtues do not emerge in a vacuum. Those discussed in this chapter can be traced back to older catalogues of middle-class and bourgeois virtue. Deirdre McCloskey, for example, lists both “loyalty” and “autonomy” in her overview of the Western bourgeois virtues.10 In Wilhelmine Germany independence was widely recognized as a virtue of the middle-classes. Lothar Gall has pointed out that the “idea of autonomy, the spiritual and moral, but also the entirely practical independence” was central to the self-perception of the nineteenth-century German bourgeoisie.11 More recently, Manfred Hettling has argued that from the eighteenth century onward members of the middle-class were expected to lead independent lives: “Everyone can – and has to – determine by himself, which social position he wants to pursue”.12 Even though loyalty is not as ubiquitous as independence in the historiography of the German middle-classes, Ute Frevert and Ulrich Schreiterer have argued that it acquired a “specifically bourgeois colouring” in the nineteenth century.13 Herman Paul has argued along similar lines that loyalty was a cardinal virtue in the universe of bourgeois norms and values of Wilhelmine Germany.14 These bourgeois virtues typically had a highly gendered character. McCloskey has drawn up a diagram in which autonomy and freedom are presented as part of a masculine conception of virtue, while connection and solidarity are characterized as feminine.15 The association between such desirable qualities as autonomy, independence, and freedom on the one hand and masculinity on the other is rather common. Matthew McCormack, for example, has emphasized that “personal freedom was a prominent aspect of a Georgian man’s sense of his gender” that was “commonly articulated in terms of ‘manly independence’”.16 McCloskey’s characterization of solidarity as a feminine virtue, however, is not self-evident. A number of authors have pointed at widely-shared ideals of male comradery and friendship. For example, in W. C. Lubenow’s study of the “Cambridge Apostles”, an intellectual society founded in Cambridge in the early nineteenth century, the first chapter exclusively
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deals with the importance that its middle- and upper-class members attached to male companionship and solidarity.17 As this Cambridge example already suggests, the gendered character of virtues like loyalty and independence was not only clearly observable in the private sector and administrative circles, but in academia as well. Shapin explains that in early-modern times women were not seen as trustworthy scientific witnesses because of a supposed lack of independent intellectual qualities: their wills were assumed to be “so circumstanced that they could only act through men’s”.18 Paul Deslandes has described British universities as “highly gendered little worlds characterized by intense institutional loyalty […] and carefully articulated visions of male solidarity”.19 Bonnie Smith has demonstrated how scholarly activity, ideals of personal loyalty, and conceptions of gender were strongly intertwined. She has pointed out how novel nineteenth-century practices of scientific history, especially seminar training and archival research, went hand in hand with the all-pervasive emergence of historians imagining themselves as part of a male brotherhood.20 Other authors have also emphasized that independence was widely regarded as a gendered virtue in academic circles. Hannah and John Gay list hard work and independence among the ideals of manliness that shaped the ideal of the good scientist in the nineteenth century.21 In a recent study, Heather Ellis draws attention to a considerable number of British scholars who emphasize the importance of independence during this period.22 Robert Nye therefore makes a convincing argument when he emphasizes the highly assertive masculinity that created a nineteenthcentury culture of scholarship characterized by a strong emphasis on both “personal independence” and “intense bonds of personal loyalty”.23 His observations certainly apply to nineteenth-century Germany as well. Laura Otis’ discussion of the personal relations in the laboratory of the physiologist Johannes Müller, a place that was not unlike Wundt’s laboratory, repeatedly underlines the importance of both virtues. She describes Müller as a scholar looking for “soul-mates who would help him discover life’s plan” but also draws explicit attention to his students’ aspirations to independence.24
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Gender in German Academia The gendered character of independence and loyalty in late-nineteenthcentury academia is made very clear in an 1897 collection of assessments of the desirability of the increased accessibility of German universities for women. This collection was assembled by the publicist Arthur Kirchhoff after the Berlin professors Heinrich von Treitschke and Erich Schmidt had expelled the few female attendees from their lectures.25 The story goes, that Treitschke subsequently asked the beadle to guard the entrance of the lecture hall, to make sure that this would never happen again!26 In the wake of this incident, Kirchhoff asked a small number of Berlin professors for their thoughts on women in academia: Would they be capable to successfully finish an academic study, and if so, should the state actively promote their university admission?27 When his correspondents answered in too much detail to summarize their accounts in a short article, Kirchhoff contacted even more scholars in order to collect enough material for a comprehensive overview of the common opinions about women in higher education. He eventually brought together more than a hundred evaluations of scholars, physicians, and public intellectuals. The tenor of most contributions was that at least some women were obviously capable of completing an academic education. The correspondents disagreed, however, about a myriad of additional issues, such as the appropriateness of co-education, the necessity of special women’s colleges, and the desirability of female academic employment after the completion of their university studies. Even in the late-nineteenth century, readers noticed that Kirchhoff’s collection provided more insight into the gender conceptions prevalent among the—entirely male—professoriate of German universities than into the talents and ambitions of women. The feminist publicist Helene Lange characterized Kirchhoff’s book as a “useful benchmark – not of the assessment of the abilities of women of our time […] but of ‘the gentlemen’s own thoughts’ (Geist )”.28 These gentlemen’s gendered conceptions of loyalty found their most explicit expression in warnings against the influence of the presence of women on male student sociability. Arthur König, a Berlin philosopher who was relatively sympathetic to admitting women to his lectures, emphasized that the tone of student conversations would change and that professors and Privatdozenten would be forced to refrain from their habit
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to spice up their lectures with occasional inappropriate jokes.29 A pathologist from Würzburg argued that male students often saw their few female peers as intruders, which could lead to frictions and distraction during the lectures.30 Another medical professional from Leipzig added that it might be awkward to teach certain practical courses in front of a mixed audience.31 A Berlin legal scholar simply stated that “our universities are universities for men” and underlined that they were strictly “tailored to the male spirit (Geist )”.32 Kirchhoff’s correspondents used two different lines of reasoning to emphasize women’s lack of the masculine virtue of independence. One argument drew attention to their supposed intellectual reliance on men. A legal scholar from Strasbourg stressed that women tended to ask for the input of their male colleagues when dealing with challenging legal questions.33 The anatomist Gustav Fritsch also recognized an ineradicable tendency among even the most talented women to ask their male colleagues for guidance.34 A second line of criticism of the independence of female students dealt with their supposed inability to make original contributions to a growing body of scholarship. This point was made by a striking number of Kirchhoff’s informants.35 The judgement of the Strasbourg gynaecologist Wilhelm Alex Freund is quite representative in this respect: “Usually the scientific accomplishments [of women] do not rise above the level of mediocrity. Never has a woman set herself a grand, scientific task; never has she succeeded in solving even an easy task in a ground-breaking way”.36 Wilhelm Wundt was also approached by Kirchhoff. The gist of his concise reply was broadly the same as most of the assessments by his peers. On the one hand, he thought that there was no reason to block access to a university education for women. At the same time, however, he argued that there were certain physical, psychological, and moral differences between men and women, which made women unfit for—among other things—political and medical professions.37 His former student Münsterberg lived in the United States and contributed to the volume with an essay about women’s higher education in that nation. He had serious doubts about the usefulness of America’s example for Germany. Even though a university education for women was more common across the Atlantic than in Europe, Münsterberg emphasized that his stay in the United States had “not shattered his conviction, that women, except for a few brilliant exceptions, are not suited for scholarly research; in scholarship they cannot produce but only reproduce”.38 He remained
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in the camp of those German academics who doubted women’s ability to independently contribute to the advancement of scholarship.
The Loyal Criticism of Gustav Theodor Fechner In 1875, Wundt was appointed as Professor of Philosophy in Leipzig. He was expected to direct his attention to the intersection of philosophy and the natural sciences, which suited his interest in the meeting point between the physiology of perception and the philosophy of mind. When he arrived two older scholars with partially overlapping interest already lived and worked in the city: the physiologist Ernst Heinrich Weber and the founder of psychophysics Gustav Theodor Fechner. Both men taught their last courses in the academic year 1874–1875.39 Though Weber already passed away in 1878, Fechner would live until 1887 and he would develop a very amiable relationship with Wundt. Their friendly relationship was characterized, however, by strong disagreements on a number of scholarly questions, which they discussed in long letters. One of Fechner’s letters even counted more than 120 sides and contained extensive, but constructive, criticism of the work of Emil Max Mehner, who had finished his doctorate under Wundt’s supervision one year earlier.40 The first of their disagreements occurred in the wake of the 1877 Leipzig visit of the medium Henry Slade. His claims to be able to move objects by channelling forces from a fourth dimension had already been debunked by suspicious audiences in New York and London, but had nonetheless caught the attention of the Leipzig astrophysicist Friedrich Zöllner.41 He organized séances at his house to which he invited small groups of colleagues to witness Slade’s performance. Wundt and Fechner both attended one of these events apart from each other. Slade did not disappoint: a compass needle moved spontaneously, knots untied themselves, and a slate pencil wrote an encouraging message without being touched: “We feel to bless all those that try (?) to envestigate a subject so unpopular as the subject of Spiritualism”.42 While Zöllner was delighted and Fechner was cautiously enthusiastic, Wundt was not in the least convinced of Slade’s trustworthiness. In the subsequent years, Zöllner passionately defended his views about his experiences with Slade in books and journal articles.43 Other believers in the veracity of Slade’s performances, such as Hermann Ulrici and Immanuel Hermann von Fichte, also contributed raving reports.44 Against this backdrop Wundt decided to publish a critique under the
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title Spiritism: a so-called scientific question.45 In this booklet, he emphasized the profound untrustworthiness of all the witnesses, including himself. Because natural scientists are not trained to study supernatural phenomena, he argued, they have no special authority to judge their veracity. He also wryly noted that the spirits that Slade channelled almost exclusively communicated in English. Only one of their messages was in German, but it was “a defective German, like a fumbling American or Englishman would have written”.46 Fechner was one of the first to receive a copy of Wundt’s critique. Even if his criticisms were not primarily directed towards him, he felt the need to defend himself. Wundt’s doubts about the trustworthiness of the witnesses must have felt particularly relevant to Fechner, because his eyesight had been limited as the result of an incipient cataract.47 He wrote to Wundt that he preferred to discuss the issue “in private rather than in public”.48 He defended the ability of the witnesses to reach a wellinformed judgement: even if they were not specifically trained to judge supernatural phenomena, nobody could be better equipped to evaluate Slade’s performance. He also accused his younger colleague of intellectual insincerity. Because Wundt obviously presumed that Spiritism could not be real, Fechner argued, he unfairly supposed that its defenders had to be dishonest. He concluded his letter with the assurance that he hoped that their disagreement would not hurt their friendship. Even though Wundt amiably but critically answered to his objections, Fechner suggested in his next letter that they should now drop the subject: “Why would we keep on arguing […] I would rather not quarrel with you about this issue, now that we have convinced each other that we cannot lecture each other about those things about which we disagree”.49 Subsequent discussions between Wundt and Fechner would primarily deal with the correct interpretation and application of Ernst Heinrich Weber’s most famous legacy, which was already known as “Weber’s law” in the late-nineteenth century. It states that “the increase in any stimulus necessary to make a noticeable difference is a constant proportion of that stimulus”.50 Fechner was a recognized authority on the principle. Because of his contributions to its articulation and dissemination it is nowadays often referred to as the “Weber-Fechner law” or even simply as “Fechner’s law”.51 The principle provided ample grounds for discussion because it was used as the interpretative framework for most of the experiments on perception carried out in Wundt’s Leipzig laboratory.
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The research by Wundt’s students and collaborators usually provided the starting point for these discussions. Because their findings often touched on his long-standing interest in Weber’s law, Fechner carefully followed the activity in Wundt’s laboratory. He even discussed the research results with various of Wundt’s associates, such as Gustav Lorenz and Max Mehner.52 Wundt’s students were unlikely to act on Fechner’s suggestions without consulting their teacher. Therefore, Fechner often brought up these issues in his correspondence with Wundt as well. Even though the latter tended to defend his students’ work vigorously, Fechner valued these discussions for at least two reasons. In the first place, he thought it was important to privately share his criticism before he would eventually make it public. By providing this polite service he would give Wundt and his associates the chance to correct mistakes or to prepare an appropriate response.53 Secondly, he realized that Wundt’s objections could help him to improve his own arguments. Occasionally he even explicitly asked Wundt for critical comments on draft papers in which he criticized findings from his laboratory.54 In their personal relationship, Wundt and Fechner were able to combine loyal collegiality and critical independence almost effortlessly. Their mutual loyalty is most apparent in their reluctance to criticize each other in public. Even though Fechner may have been the least trustworthy witness of Slade’s performance, Wundt did not call him out by name in his critique of the 1877 séances at Zöllner’s. Fechner’s dismissal of Wundt’s characterization of these events was carefully confined to private letters. Likewise, his critique of the work carried under Wundt’s supervision was also largely shared in private rather than in public. Both men felt free to criticize each other strongly, because the private character of their personal correspondence created a safe space in which fundamental critique could be shared without any kind of repercussion. In such a safe environment, the willingness to be almost brutally honest could even be understood as the most appropriate and valuable proof of loyalty.
The Unfortunate Career of Ludwig Lange Ludwig Lange may have had the most disappointing career of Wundt’s doctoral students. He was the son of the classical philologist Christian Conrad Ludwig Lange, who taught in Leipzig from 1871 onwards.55 In 1885, when Lange was only twenty-two years old, his father passed away, which left him in a financially precarious situation. Wundt, however, had
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noticed his student’s mathematical prowess and hired him as an assistant. He must have realized that this decision was not entirely risk-free, because earlier that year Lange had already informed him about his troubled state of mind. He had explicitly pointed out that he had “reason to doubt the health of his mental state” and added that he regularly suffered from “agonizing passive fantasies [and] obsessive thoughts”.56 In the following two years, however, he proved to be a promising and hard-working young researcher. In these years, he published both his dissertation and an additional set of papers in the Philosophische Studien.57 In 1887, however, his promising career came to a standstill. In this year, he would suffer his first bout of mania. In the following years, such bouts would alternate with long periods of depression. His former physician recounted how he would be very talkative during his manic periods. What was more alarming, however, was the fact that he would then also be inclined to violence and prone to leave the house dressed in nothing but a top hat and a waistcoat. During his depressive periods he could stay in bed for months without talking to anyone.58 It is likely that Lange was the anonymous distinguished member of the Leipzig institute that Friedrich Kiesow, another former student of Wundt, would later refer to as “mentally deranged”.59 In the face of these setbacks Lange felt that he had no choice but to quit academia. In December 1887, he admitted to Wundt that his “chronic suffering of several years” had made it impossible to fulfil his scholarly duties any longer.60 This was not the end of the relationship between Wundt and Lange. The former student kept his former supervisor meticulously updated about his life. In 1889, he repeated his conviction that he should quit academia and “leave it to those who are better suited for it”. He would instead work on less-demanding pursuits, such as photography and learning the local language during a leisurely trip through Italy.61 During his most troubled periods he would retreat to a sanatorium. Recognizing this as an intriguing environment for an educated psychologist, he wryly pointed out to Wundt that he spent his time making “highly interesting psycho-pathological observations of others”.62 Even though these early letters after Lange’s retirement mostly mention details from his personal life, their later correspondence would also be dedicated to his repeated attempts to take up his scholarly career again. The first sign of Lange’s renewed interest in scholarship was his contribution to the issues of Wundt’s Studien that were compiled as a Festschrift for his 70th birthday in 1902. Lange’s contribution was his first published
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paper in many years.63 This was no immediate inducement to consider a return to academia. By the end of the First World War, however, Wundt and Lange explicitly and frequently discussed the latter’s return to academia. When he mentioned his aspiration to continue his work from three decades earlier, Wundt advised Lange to get in touch with Felix Krüger, who had recently succeeded him as the director of the Leipzig laboratory.64 One year later Wundt would also write a letter of recommendation for Lange for a position at the Leipzig university library.65 He did not, however, get the job, because the management preferred to hire someone with actual working experience as a librarian.66 When Wundt passed away in 1920 he had not been able to find a job for his unfortunate former student. The relationship between Wundt and Lange was very unequal. During the years immediately after the death of his father, Lange was financially dependent on his Doktorvater. Throughout the following decades Wundt would be his main connection to the world of scholarship. His mental health struggles had severely damaged most of his other ties to academia. Some of his peers even resented him for his troubles, because they feared that these would reflect unfavourably on the new Wundtian methods of psychological observation.67 In the light of this highly unequal relation, it is understandable that the relation between Wundt and Lange does not provide a schoolbook example of critical independence. Wundt’s continuous loyal attachment to his former student, however, is remarkable. Without his financial assistance Lange would not have been able to finish his doctorate. And even though the ensuing mental breakdown of his pupil must have upset Wundt, he would stay in touch with him for more than three decades, until own his death in 1920. He would demonstrate his unwavering trust in the scholarly prowess of his student by allowing a long paper by him in his 1902 Festschrift. He would further express his faith in Lange during the final months of the World War. Not only did he encourage him to return to academia, he also put his own credibility on the line by referring him to Felix Krüger and recommending him for a Leipzig librarianship.
¨ Criticizing the Loyal Hugo Munsterberg Wundt’s relationships with Fechner and Lange were quite straightforward. Fechner was a trusted older colleague and Lange was a highly appreciated but troubled former student. His relationship with Hugo
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Münsterberg, however, was more complicated. Münsterberg was born in Danzig in 1863. In 1882, he arrived in Leipzig with the intention to study medicine. Soon after attending a series of lectures by Wundt in the summer of 1883, however, he decided to study experimental psychology instead.68 He already finished his dissertation with Wundt in 1885.69 In 1887, he would receive his doctorate in medicine in Heidelberg and only one year later he would publish the Habilitationsschrift that allowed him to teach as a Privatdozent at the philosophical faculty of the University of Freiburg.70 Münsterberg’s work soon drew the attention of William James at Harvard. On his instigation Münsterberg was appointed as the director of Harvard’s psychological laboratory in 1892. Except for some short stays in Germany in 1895–1897 and 1910, Münsterberg would remain at Harvard until he passed away in 1916.71 Wundt and Münsterberg would stay in touch until the latter’s death. In their correspondence they repeatedly emphasized their willingness to engage critically with each other’s work. After he had received a copy of Wundt’s System der Philosophie in 1889, Münsterberg asked a rhetorical question in his letter of thanks: “Should I, because the author is my teacher whom I owe much, leave the words that burn in my throat unspoken?” He answered this question in the negative and added that he had “admitted often enough without reserve […], often enough to be free of any suspicion of flattery” that he did not always agree with his Doktorvater.72 In some of his letters, Wundt displayed an appreciation of Münsterberg’s honest criticism: “You can be assured that […] I can truly appreciate how much I owe not only to those who stood beside me as like-minded collaborators, but also to those who forced me through a rigorous criticism of my views […]. Amongst those, […] you […] are placed far in the front ranks”.73 On the surface Wundt’s encouragement of Münsterberg’s critical independence seems to be in line with his attitude towards Külpe described in the opening paragraph of this chapter. It also resembles Laura Otis’ description of the physiologist Johannes Müller, who aimed to make “his favourite students scientists by respecting their own scientific thinking”.74 A closer look at the correspondence between Wundt and Münsterberg, however, suggests that their relation was not characterized by such profound mutual respect. A significant part of this correspondence consisted of Münsterberg’s recurring appeals for recognition. This topic surfaced in a number of ways. One of its most awkward manifestations was in Münsterberg’s repeatedly expressed suspicions that Wundt deliberately tried to damage his scholarly
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reputation and career opportunities. In 1890, one of Wundt’s students, George Dwelshauvers, published a study in which he accused Münsterberg of plagiarizing Wundt’s work.75 Assuming that Dwelshauvers would not have published this without Wundt’s prior approval, Münsterberg discussed the topic with his former teacher: “I confess that the accusation to steal pocket watches would have been less hurtful; but I stayed silent in public […]. I kept hoping […] that you would take the opportunity to vindicate me, because only you are in the position to know how preposterous Dwelshauvers’ accusation is”.76 Wundt, however, hardly showed any empathy. He testily pointed out that Münsterberg’s assertion that he had not plagiarized him amounted to the accusation that he, Wundt, had actually plagiarized his own student instead! He claimed to remember exactly when he had come up with the supposedly plagiarized sections and indignantly refused to exonerate Münsterberg.77 Six years later they had another, similarly awkward, exchange. This time Münsterberg accused Wundt of “hampering his career at every turn” after a colleague in Bern had told him that he would have been appointed there some years earlier if the faculty would not have received a “devastating evaluation” from his former teacher.78 Wundt’s reply has not survived, but Münsterberg’s next letter suggests that his Doktorvater simply sidestepped the accusations and instead complained about an American newspaper article in which Münsterberg had argued that Berlin was the only German university with the same facilities for the study of psychology as Harvard: of course Wundt would have preferred him to have heaped some praise on his Leipzig laboratory as well. Münsterberg also asked for recognition in a more straightforward way: again and again he underlined that he was his teacher’s most loyal and admiring follower. When he congratulated Wundt for his sixtieth birthday he added that “among your many students there is not a single one that can be considered to surpass me in personal adoration for you”.79 Four years later he emphasized that his colleague Heinrich Rickert had called him “the only true Wundtianer”.80 Almost a full decade later he still reminded Wundt of the fact that he had “held on to the spirit of [his] laboratory more faithfully than any other experimental psychologist in the Reich”, and added that outside of Leipzig Wundtian experimental psychology was “practiced by men, who are not able to inspire and who are increasingly willing to abandon it”.81 The perceived necessity of such constant reassurances of admiring loyalty suggests that Münsterberg did not experience his relation with former teacher as a very affectionate one.
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The awkwardness of their relation is further illustrated by their discussion of gratitude. In 1890, Münsterberg wrote Wundt to complain that he had heard rumours that Wundt had accused him of ungratefulness. He argued that he could live without his Doktorvater’s appreciation of his scholarly accomplishments, but claimed that he “would lose [his] self-respect, when [Wundt’s] accusation of ungratefulness would be warranted”.82 His former teacher denied that he had ever made such accusations, but hardly tried to reassure his worried student. Instead he pointed out that when “somebody wants to show his gratitude by his own will”, this could only be done by working “reliably, diligently, and meticulously without caring about authorities or [his] career”.83 In this way, he indirectly accused Münsterberg of the ungratefulness of which he had just exonerated him, because in the same letter he also asserted that his former student’s recent work had been “rushed and not sufficiently matured”. To add insult to injury Wundt also mentioned that he had indeed shared this particular unfavourable judgement with mutual acquaintances, which suggests that the worrying reports that Münsterberg had received were most likely quite accurate. In the relationship between Wundt and Münsterberg, the balance between collegial loyalty and critical independence was precious. On the one hand, they both explicitly acknowledged the importance of honest mutual criticism. Because Münsterberg had been able to secure a successful career in the United States without Wundt’s support, he could take a more independent attitude towards his former teacher than his former co-student Lange. As illustrated by the example of Külpe in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, Wundt was perfectly wellable to make a distinction between scholarly criticism and the friendship between himself and his former pupils. His relationship with Münsterberg, however, never reached the same level of amiable confidentiality. The fact that Münsterberg was by far his most famous and successful student who was not invited to contribute to the 1902 Festschrift further illustrates that he kept him at arm’s length. This continued to baffle and unsettle Münsterberg, who craved for some respect from his teacher. Through the years he unsuccessfully tried to show his loyalty and gratitude, but he only experienced rejection and accusations in return. He would try to win his Doktorvater’s approval until the end of his life: in 1915, he wrote to Wundt that he had not only recommended him for the Nobel Prize, he had also urged other colleagues to plead for him as well!84
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A Moral Economy of Scholarship Personal relationships between scholars often shape their everyday working lives as well as their career opportunities. These relations are moulded by more or less shared conceptions of virtue. In this chapter, I specifically looked into the interconnected ideals of collegial—sometimes even amicable—loyalty and the aspiration to critical independence. These ideals were lifted from already existing catalogues of middle-class, masculine virtue. In the first section of this chapter, I have drawn attention to the way in which both independence and loyalty were recognized as virtues among the nineteenth-century Western-European bourgeoisie. In the following section, I have provided a short overview of how these virtues were interpreted by some of the leading men of German scholarship specifically. They took pride in the ideal of the university as a space for male solidarity between different generations and favourably compared their own independent research endeavours with the supposedly docile intelligence of most academically-inclined women. The subsequent case studies have illustrated the complex ways in which loyalty and independence were intertwined in a moral universe of masculine virtue. Critical independence quite obviously belongs in such a universe. After all, the desire to present oneself as a critical or even polemical evaluator of one’s peers does not at all comply with older catalogues of feminine virtue that centred around such ideals as modesty, docility, and unqualified supportiveness. On first sight, the virtue of loyalty does not self-evidently belong in a moral universe of masculine virtue in the same way. Even though authors like Nye and Paul recognize it as part of the moral landscape of the predominantly male scholarly community of the late-nineteenth century, McCloskey’s account of the bourgeois virtues subsumes it under the feminine virtue of faith.85 The masculine character of loyalty becomes more clearly recognizable, however, when we take a closer look at the collegial and amiable relations between Wundt, Fechner, Lange, and Münsterberg. A first example of this loyalty is provided in Wundt’s correspondence with Fechner. Even though the latter repeatedly criticized the research carried out in the former’s laboratory, Wundt defended his students’ and collaborators’ work without exception. In standing up for his everyday colleagues, he displayed the sort of group loyalty that is often highly valued within another stronghold of masculine morality: the army. Peter Olsthoorn, for example, mentions loyalty, alongside honour and
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courage, as one of the traditional military virtues.86 Of course Wundt had the ultimate responsibility for all the research done in his laboratory. Following one recent study of military ethics, we could therefore say that he did not primarily display the virtue of loyalty—which in his understanding is a “virtue of the weak”—but the “comparable virtue from superiors to subordinates” which he describes as “something closer to benevolence”.87 The loyalty that Lange and Münsterberg show towards Wundt resembles loyalty as a virtue of the subordinate more closely. Because Wundt was by far Lange’s strongest connection to the world of scholarship after 1887, he loyally informed his former employer about his troubled condition while he was careful not to criticize him or overburden him with his requests. Münsterberg, who made his career without any significant support from Wundt, did not show the same restraint. In his eyes, the freedom to criticize each other’s work was the inescapable outcome of indubitable loyalty. In his letters to his former student Wundt, however, gave the impression that he disapproved of Münsterberg’s criticism and doubted his loyalty. In his responses Münsterberg therefore continued to place himself in a subordinate position in the way he emphasized his loyalty year after year. He even went so far as to present himself as his Doktorvater’s most faithful follower! Münsterberg was not completely mistaken in his conception of loyal collegiality and critical independence as two sides of the same coin: he was only misguided in the assumption that this applied to his relationship with Wundt. His characterization did apply, however, to the relation between Wundt and Fechner. When they discussed the veracity of Slade’s performance, both men felt free to criticize each other’s points of view. They were able to agree to disagree without any hard feelings. When they debated the work carried out in Wundt’s laboratory they also often disagreed about its exact merits. At the same time, they both realized that the other’s criticism was a valuable asset. Fechner could polish his arguments on the basis of Wundt’s defence of the work of his associates. Wundt and his collaborators could either make some adjustments in the reports of their work or think of a convincing defence against Fechner’s criticism, if he would eventually choose to publish it. Well-intentioned strong critiques could, of course, only be valuable assets if none of the parties involved felt that they had to hold back. This was only possible when all participants considered each other to be equals. This presumption of equality took the shape of a presumption of shared masculinity,
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or—in other words—a shared ability to dish out as well as to take some blows. These different interrelated expressions of loyalty and independence hark back to my earlier comments about scholarly personae as constellations of commitments. Different scholars with different relations strike different balances between their commitments to the virtues of loyal collegiality and critical independence. This variety of balances is wellcaptured by the conception of scholarly personae as representations of moral economies of scholarship. The idea of a moral economy can be traced back to E. P. Thompson’s 1971 article on the English crowd in the eighteenth century.88 Its emphasis on the shaping role of the delicate balance between social norms and values was only adapted in the history of science from the late nineteen-eighties onward. Steven Shapin’s work on the “tacit system of recognitions, rights, and expectations” that shaped the early-modern culture of English experimentalism is one of the first examples of a history of scholarship borrowing Thompson’s approach.89 More recent notable examples of the explicit utilization of the concept of moral economy are Robert Kohler’s description of the “moral ethos of cooperation and communality” among fruit fly geneticists in the United States in the early twentieth century and Lorraine Daston’s more theoretical reflections on the usefulness of the term.90 Kohler’s work is primarily inspiring because his meticulous analysis of a community of scholars encourages the same sort of close look at everyday practices as I have adopted in this chapter. Daston’s work is of interest because she provides a definition of moral economies that fits this approach. She describes a moral economy as a web of values that “stand and function in well-defined relation to one another” and that constitute “a balanced system of emotional forces, with equilibrium points and constraints”.91 The continuous attempts to reach a balance between collegial loyalty and critical independence as well as the many different manifestations of both virtues described in this chapter illustrate the complexity of this system. Even if Wundt, Fechner, Lange, and Münsterberg would all agree that loyalty and independence are both highly appreciated virtues, they would, also without exception, acknowledge that their articulation and relative importance can be perceived in a myriad of ways. The conception of a moral economy of scholarship as a balanced system which requires continuous efforts to maintain a precious balance suggests
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that we take Donna Haraway’s pressing suggestion to investigate “genderin-the-making” in the history of scholarship very seriously.92 Haraway distances herself from earlier attempts to reduce gender to nothing more than one of the many background conditions that might be relevant to our understanding of relations between scholars without paying attention to the ways in which scholarly environments foster the continuous renegotiation of conceptions and performances of gender. She contrasts her understanding of the gendered history of scholarship with that of Shapin and Schaffer, whose analyses she describes as characterized by a tendency to see gender as about “women instead of as a relationship” in which “nothing very interesting happened to gender”.93 One reason to refrain from seeing the masculine environment of Fechner, Wundt, Lange, and Münsterberg exclusively as a world of men in which no trace of women and femininity can be found, is the fact that a small number of women did actually work in Wundt’s laboratory. In the early nineteen-tens, Anna Berliner carried out research for her dissertation at exactly this place.94 Immediately after the First World War, Wundt also supervised the dissertation of Bertha Paulssen. The unwitting reader would not be able, however, to figure out that she was a woman: both the independently published version of her dissertation and the version printed in the Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie were attributed to “B. Paulssen”.95 The fact that this work by women was hidden, doesn’t make it less real. The ambiguous, half-forgotten, status of these contributions raises questions about the complexity of the gendered nature of the relation between men and women in this specific scholarly environment and what Haraway calls “gender-in-the-making”. Haraway also draws attention to the ambiguity of the gender connotations that go with certain virtues. One of the most interesting questions raised by Shapin’s work on early-modern scholarship, she argues, is how early-modern scholars were able to claim modesty as a masculine virtue.96 Similar questions can be asked about the virtue of loyalty. As I have stated, some authors consider this to be a feminine rather than a masculine virtue. The late-nineteenth-century scholars described in the paper, however, were able to come up with a masculine conception and performance of loyalty. The long-term amiable but professionally fruitless correspondence between Wundt and Lange provides a clear example of how a relationship grounded in a shared scholarly past remained viable through the continuous performance of ideals of masculine reciprocity grounded in
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a conception of the mutual obligations arising from the unequal relation between a Doktorvater and his doctoral student. Finally, I would like to emphasize once more that the virtues of collegial loyalty and critical independence were not the only virtues to which nineteenth-century experimental psychologists felt a commitment. The case of Münsterberg further illustrates this observation. In his correspondence with Wundt, the assessments of the relative weight of loyalty and independence are explicitly related to Münsterberg’s performance of other virtuous qualities, namely gratitude, reliability, diligence, and willingness to work without regard to career opportunities. Future research into the ways in which these (and other) virtues shape—and are being shaped—by conceptions and performances of gender could shed a further light on the intricate balances of the moral economy at these places that were more often than not seen as “universities for men [and therefore] tailored to the male spirit”.97
Notes 1. Funding for this research has generously been provided by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). 2. On Külpe and the Würzburg School, see: Horst Gundlach, “Oswald Külpe und die Würzburger Schule,” in Hundert Jahre Institut für Psychologie und Würzburger Schule der Denkpsychologie, ed. Wilhelm Janke and Wolfgang Schneider (Göttingen: Hogrefe Verlag für Psychologie, 1999), 107–124; Robert M. Ogden, “Oswald Külpe and the Würzburg School,” The American Journal of Psychology 64, no. 1 (1951): 4–19; David Lindenfeld, “Oswald Külpe and the Würzburg School,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 14 (1978): 132–141. 3. Ogden, “Oswald Külpe,” 5. 4. Wilhelm Wundt to Oswald Külpe, 18 September 1895, Universitätsarchiv Leipzig (hereafter UAL): NA Wundt/III/301-400/387/255258; Wilhelm Wundt to Oswald Küllpe, 20 September 1895, UAL: NA Wundt/III/301-400/389/265-276; Wilhelm Wundt, “Ueber die Definition der Psychologie,” Philosophische Studien 12 (1896): 1–66. 5. Wilhelm Wundt to Oswald Külpe, 20 September 1895, UAL: NA Wundt/III/301-400/389/265-276. Wundt’s emphasis. 6. Oswald Külpe to Wilhelm Wundt, 22 September 1895, UAL: NA Wundt/III/301-400/390/283-290. 7. Herman Paul, “What Is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills and Desires,” History and Theory 53, no. 3 (2014): 364.
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8. Steven Shapin, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England,” Isis 79, no. 3 (1988): 373–404. 9. Sari Kivistö, The Vices of Learning: Morality and Knowledge at Early Modern Universities (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Jeroen van Dongen and Herman Paul (eds.), Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities (Cham: Springer, 2017). 10. Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 66. 11. Lothar Gall, Bürgertum, liberale Bewegung und Nation: Ausgewählte Aufsätze, edited by Dieter Hein, Andreas Schulz and Eckhardt Treichel (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), 12. 12. Manfred Hettling, “Die persönliche Selbständigkeit: Der archimedischer Punkt bürgerlicher Lebensführung,” in Der bürgerliche Wertehimmel: Innenansichten des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Manfred Hettling and StefanLudwig Hoffmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 57. 13. Ute Frevert and Ulrich Schreiterer, “Treue: Ansichten des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Der bürgerliche Wertehimmel: Innenansichten des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Manfred Hettling and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 219–220. 14. Herman Paul, “Germanic Loyalty in Nineteenth-Century Historical Studies: A Multi-Layered Virtue,” História da Historiografia 12, no. 30 (2019). 15. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues, 304. 16. Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 2. 17. W. C. Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles, 1820–1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 18. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 89. 19. Paul R. Deslandes, British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 18. 20. Bonnie G. Smith, “Gender and the Practices of Scientific History: The Seminar and Archival Research in the Nineteenth Century,” The American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (1995): 1150–1176. 21. Hannah Gay and John W. Gay, “Brothers in Science: Science and Fraternal Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” History of Science 35, no. 4 (1997): 427. 22. Heather Ellis, Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831–1918 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). See, for example, pages 40, 58, 117, and 138.
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23. Robert A. Nye, “Medicine and Science as Masculine ‘Fields of Honor,’” Osiris 12 (1997): 61. 24. Laura Otis, Müller’s Lab (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 43. 25. Arthur Kirchhoff (ed.), Die Akademische Frau. Gutachten hervorragender Universitätsprofessoren, Frauenlehrer und Schriftsteller über die Befähigung der Frau zum wissenschaftlichen Studium und Berufe (Berlin: Hugo Steinitz, 1897). 26. Patricia Mazón, “Das akademische Bürgerrecht und die Zulassung von Frauen zu den deutschen Universitäten 1865–1914,” Zentrum für transdisciplinäre Geschlechterstudien, Bulletin 23: Zur Geschichte des Frauenstudiums und Wissenschaftlerinnenkarrieren an deutschen Universitäten (2001): 1. 27. Kirchhoff, Die Akademische Frau, VII. 28. Helene Lange, “Die akademische Frau,” Die Frau: Monatsschrift für das gesamte Frauenleben unserer Zeit 4, no. 4 (1897): 194. 29. Arthur König in Kirchhoff, Die Akademische Frau, 158. 30. Eduard von Rindfleisch in: Kirchhoff, Die Akademische Frau, 71. 31. Victor Birch-Hirschfeld in: Kirchhoff, Die Akademische Frau, 61. 32. Otto Gierke in: Kirchhoff, Die Akademische Frau, 23. 33. Paul Laband in: Kirchhoff, Die Akademische Frau, 30. 34. Gustav Fritsch in: Kirchhoff, Die Akademische Frau, 45. 35. See, for example, the comments of Georg Runze, Victor Birch-Hirschfeld, Emanuel Mendel and Adolf Lasson in: Kirchhoff, Die Akademische Frau, 10–11, 61, 132 and 164. 36. Wilhelm Alex Freund in: Kirchhoff, Die Akademische Frau, 106 37. Wilhelm Wundt in: Kirchhoff, Die Akademische Frau, 181. 38. Münsterberg, Hugo, “Das Frauenstudium in Amerika,” in: Kirchoff, Die Akademische Frau, 349. 39. Historische Vorlesungsverzeichnisse der Universität Leipzig: https:// histvv.uni-leipzig.de/dozenten/weber_eh.html and https://histvv.uni-lei pzig.de/dozenten/fechner_gt.html (last accessed at 25 November 2019). 40. Gustav Theodor Fechner to Wilhelm Wundt, no date, Universitätsarchiv Leipzig (hereafter UAL): Signatur: NA Wundt/III/17011723/1712/20. 41. Klaus B. Staubermann, “Tying the Knot: Skill, Judgement and Authority in the 1870’s Leipzig Spiritistic Experiments,” The British Journal for the History of Science 34, no. 1 (2001): 73–74. 42. Hermann Ulrici, “Der sogenannte Spiritismus eine wissenschaftliche Frage,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 74 (1879): 244. The question mark and language mistakes were part of the message. 43. For example: J. C. Friedrich Zöllner, “On Space of Four Dimensions,” Quarterly Journal of Science 8 (1878): 227–237; Friedrich Zöllner, Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen, 4 volumes (Leipzig: L. Staackmann, 1878–1881).
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44. Ulrici, “Der sogenannte Spiritismus” and Immanuel Hermann von Fichte, Der neuere Spiritualismus, sein Werth und seine Täuschungen. Eine anthropologische Studie (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1878). 45. Wilhelm Wundt, Der Spiritismus: eine sogenannte wissenschaftliche Frage: offener Brief an Herrn Prof. Dr. Hermann Ulrici in Halle (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1879). 46. Ibid., 15. 47. Preliminary report of the commission appointed by the university of Pennsylvania to investigate modern spiritualism in accordance with the request of the late Henry Seybert with a foreword by H. H. Furness Jr. (Philadelphia and London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1920), 106 (first published in 1887). 48. Gustav Theodor Fechner to Wilhelm Wundt, 18 June 1879, UAB: NA Wundt/III/1701-1723/1712/1b/17-44. 49. Gustav Theodor Fechner to Wilhelm Wundt, 25 June 1879, UAB: NA Wundt/III/1701-1723/1712/1c/45-48. 50. Arthur L. Blumenthal, “Shaping a Tradition: Experimentalism Begins,” in Points of View in the Modern History of Psychology, ed. Claude E. Buxton (Orlando: Academic Press, 1985), 55. 51. Though the term ‘Weber-Fechner law’ is often used often, Weber’s law and Fechner’s law are two distinct principles. The latter is generally seen as an elaboration on or a special case of the former. See: Stephen F. Davis and William Buskist (eds.), 21st Century Psychology: A Reference Handbook, vol. 1 (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2008), 183 and Neil Salkind (ed.), Encyclopedia of Research Design, vol. 3 (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2010), 1613. 52. Gustav Theodor Fechner to Wilhelm Wundt, 12 July 1885 and 13 April 1886, UAL: NA Wundt/III/1701-1723/1712/18/265-270 and UAL: NA Wundt/III/1701-1723/1712/20/301-446. 53. See, for example, Gustav Theodor Fechner to Wilhelm Wundt, 24 March 1885, UAL: NA Wundt/III/1701-1723/1712/12/187-224. 54. Gustav Theodor Fechner to Wilhelm Wundt, 7 April 1885, UAL: NA Wundt/III/1701-1723/1712/13/225-232. 55. M. v. Laue, “Dr. Ludwig Lange (Ein zu Unrecht Vergessener),” Die Naturwissenschaften 35, no. 7 (1948): 194. For more details on C.C.L. Lange’s career, see also: https://research.uni-leipzig.de/catalogus-profes sorum-lipsiensium/leipzig/Lange_892/markiere:Lange/ (last accessed, 25 November 2019). 56. Ludwig Lange to Wilhelm Wundt, 9 June 1885, UAL: NA Wundt/III/401-500/433a/171-182. 57. Ludwig Lange, Die geschichtliche Entwickelung des Bewegungsbegriffes und ihr voraussichtliches Endergebnis s (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1886). The dissertation was also printed in two parts in the 1886 volume of the
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58. 59.
60. 61. 62. 63. 64.
65. 66. 67. 68. 69.
70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.
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Philosophische Studien. Other articles were printed in the volumes for 1885 and 1888. Quoted in: Laue, “Dr. Ludwig Lange,” 194–195. F. Kiesow, “F. Kiesow,” in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, volume I, ed. Cark Murchison (New York, NY: Russell & Russell, 1961), 172. Ludwig Lange to Wilhelm Wundt, 30 December 1887, UAL: NA Wundt/III/401-500/433c/187-190. Ludwig Lange to Wilhelm Wundt, 28 January 1889, UAL: A Wundt/III/401-500/433f/199-206. Ludwig Lange to Wilhelm Wundt, 30 December 1887, UAL: NA Wundt/III/401-500/433c/187-190. Ludwig Lange, “Das Inertialsystem vor dem Forum der Naturforschung,” Philosophische Studien 20 (1902): 1–71. See, for example: Ludwig Lange to Wilhelm Wundt, 27 August 1918, UAL: NA Wundt/III/401-500/433k/231-232 and Ludwig Lange to Wilhelm Wundt, 4 September 1918, UAL: NA Wundt/III/401500/433l/233-234. Ludwig Lange to Wilhelm Wundt, 15 March 1919, UAL: NA Wundt/III/401-500/434a/253-256. Ludwig Lange to Wilhelm Wundt, 26 May 1919, UAL: NA Wundt/III/401-500/434b/257-262. Kiesow, “F. Kiesow,” 172. Phyllis Keller, States of belonging: German-American intellectuals and the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 22. Hugo Münsterberg, Die Lehre von der natürlichen Anpassung in ihrer Entwickelung, Anwendung und Bedeutung (Leipzig: Metzger & Wittig, 1885). Keller, States of belonging, 23; Hugo Münsterberg, Die Willenshandlung (Freiburg im Breisgau: C.A. Wagner, 1888). Frank J. Landy, “Hugo Münsterberg: Victim or Visionary?,” Journal of Applied Psychology 77, no. 6 (1992): 789. Hugo Münsterberg to Wilhelm Wundt, 9 June 1889, UAL: NA Wundt/III/701-800/764a/407-414. Wilhelm Wundt to Hugo Münsterberg, 21 August 1902, UAL: NA Wundt/III/701-800/768/601-604. Otis, Müller’s Lab, 67. Georges Dwelshauvers, Psychologie de l’apperception et recherches exp´erimentales sur l’attention: essai de psychologie physiologique (Brussels: Guyot, 1890), 147. Hugo Münsterberg to Wilhelm Wundt, 10 November 1890, UAL: NA Wundt/III/701-800/764b/415-426.
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77. Wilhelm Wundt to Hugo Münsterberg, 12 November 1890, UAL: NA Wundt/III/701-800/765/427-438. 78. Hugo Münsterberg to Wilhelm Wundt, 26 March 1896, UAL: NA Wundt/III/701-800/765e/485-500. 79. Hugo Münsterberg to Wilhelm Wundt, 15 August 1892, UAL: NA Wundt/III/701-800/765b/455-458. 80. Hugo Münsterberg to Wilhelm Wundt, 26 March 1896, UAL: NA Wundt/III/701-800/765e/485-500. 81. Hugo Münsterberg to Wilhelm Wundt, 5 November 1905, UAL: NA Wundt/III/701-800/768a/607-622. 82. Hugo Münsterberg to Wilhelm Wundt, 10 November 1890, UAL: NA Wundt/III/701-800/764b/415-426. 83. Wilhelm Wundt to Hugo Münsterberg, 12 November 1890, UAL: NA Wundt/III/701-800/765/427-438. 84. Hugo Münsterberg to Wilhelm Wundt, 20 October 1915, UAL: NA Wundt/III/701-800/768e/663-670. 85. Nye, “Medicine and Science,” 61; Paul, “Germanic Loyalty”; McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues, 66, 305. 86. Peter Olsthoorn, Military Ethics and Virtues: An Interdisciplinary Approach for the 21st Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), i. 87. Bruce Fleming, Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide: What Each Side Needs to Know About the Other, and About Itself (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2010), 80–81. 88. Edward P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50, no. 1 (1971): 7–136. 89. Shapin, “The House of Experiment,” 389. 90. Robert E. Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 92–93; Lorraine Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science,” Osiris 10 (1995): 2–24. 91. Daston, “Moral Economy,” 4. 92. Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan © _Meets_Oncomouse TM (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), 28. 93. Ibid. 94. Thomas A. Kindermann, Gerald D. Guthrie and Frank Wesley, “Anna Berliner, Wilhelm Wundt’s einzige Studentin,” Psychologie und Geschichte 4, nos. 3/4 (1993): 263–277. 95. Horst Gundlach, “Wilhelm Wundt, Professor, und Anna Berliner, Studentin,” Psychologie und Geschichte 5, nos. 1/2 (1993): 147. 96. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium, 29. 97. See note 31.
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Bibliography Blumenthal, Arthur L. “Shaping a Tradition: Experimentalism Begins.” In Points of View in the Modern History of Psychology, edited by Claude E. Buxton, 51–83. Orlando: Academic Press, 1985. Daston, Lorraine. “The Moral Economy of Science.” Osiris 10 (1995): 2–24. Davis, Stephen F. and Buskist, William, eds. 21st Century Psychology: A Reference Handbook, vol. 1. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2008. Deslandes, Paul R. British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850– 1920. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005. Dongen, Jeroen van and Paul, Herman, eds. Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities. Cham: Springer, 2017. Dwelshauvers, Georges. Psychologie de l’apperception et recherches exp´erimentales sur l’attention: essai de psychologie physiologique. Brussels: Guyot, 1890. Ellis, Heather. Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831–1918. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Fichte, Immanuel Hermann von. Der neuere Spiritualismus, sein Werth und seine Täuschungen. Eine anthropologische Studie. Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1878. Fleming, Bruce. Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide: What Each Side Needs to Know About the Other, and About Itself . Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2010. Frevert, Ute and Schreiterer, Ulrich. “Treue: Ansichten des 19. Jahrhunderts.” In Der bürgerliche Wertehimmel: Innenansichten des 19. Jahrhunderts, edited by Manfred Hettling and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, 217–256. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000. Gall, Lothar. Bürgertum, liberale Bewegung und Nation: Ausgewählte Aufsätze, edited by Dieter Hein, Andreas Schulz and Eckhardt Treichel. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996. Gay, Hannah and Gay, John W. “Brothers in Science: Science and Fraternal Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” History of Science 35, no. 4 (1997): 425–453. Gundlach, Horst. “Wilhelm Wundt, Professor, und Anna Berliner, Studentin.” Psychologie und Geschichte 5, nos. 1/2 (1993): 143–151. Gundlach, Horst. “Oswald Külpe und die Würzburger Schule.” In Hundert Jahre Institut für Psychologie und Würzburger Schule der Denkpsychologie, edited by Wilhelm Janke and Wolfgang Schneider, 107–124. Göttingen: Hogrefe Verlag für Psychologie, 1999. Haraway, Donna J. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan © _Meets_ Oncomouse TM . New York, NY: Routledge, 1997. Hettling, Manfred. “Die persönliche Selbständigkeit: Der archimedischer Punkt bürgerlicher Lebensführung.” In Der bürgerliche Wertehimmel: Innenansichten des 19. Jahrhunderts, edited by Manfred Hettling and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, 57–78. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000.
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Keller, Phyllis. States of Belonging: German-American Intellectuals and the First World War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Kiesow, F. “F. Kiesow.” In A History of Psychology in Autobiography, volume I, edited by Cark Murchison, 163–190. New York, NY: Russell & Russell, 1961. Kindermann, Thomas A., Guthrie, Gerald D., and Wesley, Frank. “Anna Berliner, Wilhelm Wundt’s einzige Studentin.” Psychologie und Geschichte 4, nos. 3/4 (1993): 263–277. Kirchhoff, Arthur, ed. Die Akademische Frau. Gutachten hervorragender Universitätsprofessoren, Frauenlehrer und Schriftsteller über die Befähigung der Frau zum wissenschaftlichen Studium und Berufe. Berlin: Hugo Steinitz, 1897. Kivistö, Sari. The Vices of Learning: Morality and Knowledge at Early Modern Universities. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Kohler, Robert E. Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Landy, Frank J. “Hugo Münsterberg: Victim or Visionary?” Journal of Applied Psychology 77, no. 6 (1992): 787–802. Lange, Helene. “Die akademische Frau.” Die Frau: Monatsschrift für das gesamte Frauenleben unserer Zeit 4, no. 4 (1897): 193–199. Lange, Ludwig. Die geschichtliche Entwickelung des Bewegungsbegriffes und ihr voraussichtliches Endergebniss. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1886. Lange, Ludwig. “Das Inertialsystem vor dem Forum der Naturforschung.” Philosophische Studien 20 (1902): 1–71. Laue, M. v. “Dr. Ludwig Lange (Ein zu Unrecht Vergessener).” Die Naturwissenschaften 35, no. 7 (1948): 193–196. Lindenfeld, David. “Oswald Külpe and the Würzburg School.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 14 (1978): 132–141. Lubenow, W. C. The Cambridge Apostles, 1820–1914: Liberalism, imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Mazón, Patricia. “Das akademische Bürgerrecht und die Zulassung von Frauen zu den deutschen Universitäten 1865–1914.” Zentrum für transdisciplinäre Geschlechterstudien, Bulletin 23: Zur Geschichte des Frauenstudiums und Wissenschaftlerinnenkarrieren an deutschen Universitäten (2001): 1–10. McCloskey, Deirdre N. The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. McCormack, Matthew. The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Münsterberg, Hugo. Die Lehre von der natürlichen Anpassung in ihrer Entwickelung, Anwendung und Bedeutung. Leipzig: Metzger & Wittig, 1885. Nye, Robert A. “Medicine and Science as Masculine ‘Fields of Honor.’” Osiris 12 (1997): 60–79.
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Ogden, Robert M. “Oswald Külpe and the Würzburg School.” The American Journal of Psychology 64, no. 1 (1951): 4–19. Olsthoorn, Peter. Military Ethics and Virtues: An Interdisciplinary Approach for the 21st Century. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Otis, Laura. Müller’s Lab. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Paul, Herman. “What Is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills and Desires.” History and Theory 53, no. 3 (2014): 348–371. Paul, Herman. “Germanic Loyalty in Nineteenth-Century Historical Studies: A Multi-Layered Virtue.” História da Historiografia 12, no. 30 (2019): 16–43. Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University of Pennsylvania to Investigate Modern Spiritualism in Accordance with the Request of the Late Henry Seybert with a Foreword by H. H. Furness Jr. Philadelphia and London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1920. Salkind, Neil, ed. Encyclopedia of Research Design, vol. 3. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2010. Shapin, Steven. “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England.” Isis 79, no. 3 (1988): 373–404. Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in SeventeenthCentury England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Smith, Bonnie G. “Gender and the Practices of Scientific History: The Seminar and Archival Research in the Nineteenth Century.” The American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (1995): 1150–1176. Staubermann, Klaus B. “Tying the Knot: Skill, Judgement and Authority in the 1870’s Leipzig Spiritistic Experiments.” The British Journal for the History of Science 34, no. 1 (2001): 67–79. Thompson, Edward P. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Past & Present 50, no. 1 (1971): 7–136. Ulrici, Hermann. “Der sogenannte Spiritismus eine wissenschaftliche Frage.” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 74 (1879): 239–271. Wundt, Wilhelm. Der Spiritismus: eine sogenannte wissenschaftliche Frage: offener Brief an Herrn Prof. Dr. Hermann Ulrici in Halle. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1879. Wundt, Wilhelm. “Ueber die Definition der Psychologie.” Philosophische Studien 12 (1896): 1–66. Zöllner, J. C. Friedrich. “On Space of Four Dimensions.” Quarterly Journal of Science 8 (1878): 227–237. Zöllner, Friedrich. Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen, 4 volumes. Leipzig: L. Staackmann, 1878–1881.
CHAPTER 12
The Scholarly Persona Embodied: Seclusion, Love, Academic Battles, and International Exchanges in the Shaping of a Philosophy Career Kirsti Niskanen
Scholarly personae—or “certain scientific types of person”—have historically been created in academia in male-dominated environments.1 At universities, scientific academies, and research institutions, personae were shaped, at least until the 1960s and 1970s, primarily in relationships between men. Women were to a large degree absent—or constituted only a small minority—in academic settings, while a rich culture of masculinities was created in academia through practices, places, and institutional cultures. Masculinities were constructed both in public spaces at universities—lectures, seminars, staff rooms and meetings, internal and public debates, expert opinions, reviews, academic battles—and in private life, in dorms, cafés, restaurants, walks with professors, and meetings in their
K. Niskanen (B) Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 K. Niskanen and M. J. Barany (eds.), Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7_12
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home, which students sometimes mention in autobiographical accounts.2 Masculinities were also created heterosexually, especially in private life, where women were present as fiancées, wives, lovers, associates, and, sometimes, as colleagues. In this essay, I will explore the formation of scholarly personae and masculinities through a single individual, the Swedish philosopher Einar Tegen (1884–1965). In his early career, Tegen embraced a persona that showed an individual commitment to seclusion, introspection, and detachment from the outer world. However, after a research stay in the United States between 1940 and 1942, Tegen shifted from a solitary thinker to a pioneer in interdisciplinary scholarship and an academic public intellectual who applied theoretical insights and research to practical, societal issues. My focus is on the masculinity constructions that were associated with these knowledge positions—the position of the isolated world-renowned philosopher on the one hand, and that of the socially committed intellectual on the other. I argue that Tegen’s career can be used as a platform to investigate in detail the complex relationship between knowledge and the persona of the knower, the gendered prerequisites for constructing scholarly personae and the implications of the category of persona for the history of disciplines and scientific institutions.
Theorizing Scholarly Persona and Masculinity The scholarly persona is a category somewhere between the individual and the social (scientific) institution. It can be metaphorically understood as a mask—“a cultural identity that shapes the individual in body and mind and creates a collective with a shared and recognizable physiognomy”, in Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum’s often-cited formulation.3 Persona is also a performance and requires always some form of audience.4 In academia, these audiences are made up of colleagues, superiors and subordinates, assessors, assessment committees, financiers, and other institutions that—at both individual and institutional levels—have the power to influence which personae are accepted and recognized in the scholarly community. Scholarly personae are historically conditioned. They are social and cultural repertoires that scholars and scientists are expected to acquire and exhibit in order to be accepted and recognized by their various audiences. Personae are, furthermore, created in social contexts where imitation and adaptation play an important role in social interaction and they are shaped and influenced by categories such as gender, class,
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age, ethnicity, and religious affiliation.5 The term highlights the fact that the production of knowledge is underpinned by people of flesh and blood, and that institutions and institutional conditions help to create scholarly personae through expectations and norms that affect what is considered acceptable and recognized knowledge.6 It has also been shown that the internationalization of research and the institutionalization of science during the first part of the twentieth century influenced the formation of scholarly personae through new forms of funding that emerged after the First World War. Germany had lost the war and was partly isolated, and North American research funders appeared on the academic scene in Europe, both as financiers of research and as organizations that created new role models for being a researcher.7 The decades after the First World War were also the period when women slowly entered academic research and higher education, as researchers and as university instructors. Gender is one of the social categories at the foundation of the formation of scholarly personae. In environments where only one gender is present, in academia usually men, gender is an unmarked category and often remains unexplored, as it is not contrasted with examples of women. Therefore, the history of academic masculinities is written through other stories than those of gender. Following Stefan Dudink, Jan Golinski, Heather Ellis, Nathan Ensmenger, and others, this essay focuses on gender-specific aspects of discourses, scientific cultures, practices, and contexts that are not primarily related to masculinity.8 My approach is based on the premise that academic institutions are social organizations, and I argue that even in homosocial (male) organizations, gender is made relationally through the actions and practices in which individuals are involved and through heterosocial and other relationships outside single-sex environments.9 I consistently use the terms “masculinity” and “masculinities” to denote that “man” is a social category and that specific forms of masculinity are shaped in relation to other masculinities and in relation to women.10 Masculinities are thus changeable, historically and culturally conditioned, as evidenced by the case study I present of the philosopher Einar Tegen. His academic life and career interest me because they can be used to investigate in detail how scholarly personae are related to academic institutions and institutional cultures, how personae can develop and change, and how persona constructions tie into constructions of masculinities and production of knowledge. Although the empirical evidence is largely about a named individual in a local context, it is not the individual biography that is my
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focus here but the larger phenomena, the emergence and implications of the scholarly personae that Tegen acquired during his career.
Masculinity Through Other Stories Einar Tegen made a career and lived his academic life in male-dominated academic contexts characterized by individualism, aggression, and competition. He was trained at the University of Uppsala as a “classical” philosopher, with the idea that the task of the philosopher was to “think” and to debate philosophical issues. The task of the professor, in turn, was to convey philosophical knowledge to his disciples, in the vein of “traditional authority”, as William Clark calls this position in his discussion of academic charisma.11 In my analysis of Tegen’s scholarly persona and academic masculinity, I focus on four distinct but related themes. The first is—as I mentioned above—that a rich culture of academic masculinities was created through discourses, behaviours, and actions at both individual and collective levels in the all-male environment of the Department of Philosophy at Uppsala University where Tegen studied, earned a doctorate, and worked as a teacher and researcher during the first twenty years of his career in the 1910s and 1920s. Women were almost completely absent from this environment for historical, legal, and structural reasons.12 To argue that masculinity is created in relationships between male philosophers does not mean that philosophy as a discipline embodies unique masculine traits. However, it is justified to claim that the Uppsala philosophy was characterized during this time by a culture of ontological, epistemological, and sociological traits that revolved around extreme individualism, rational thinking, personal eccentricity, and isolation from the outer world. This culture helped exclude women (and other outsiders) and reinforced the male-exclusive collective identity of the philosophers in Uppsala. The second theme in this investigation of scholarly personae and academic masculinities is that all-male environments, like university departments or schools of thought, do not exist in a vacuum but that individuals and groups in them are surrounded by, and interact with, women, children, and family (and other types of masculinities) in private life and in other contexts. Einar Tegen’s work-oriented persona and masculinity—which among other things meant that he had little contact with his children—was formed in an institutional and cultural context, and in gendered relationships, with other men and with women he
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surrounded himself with. The third characteristic of these environments is the agonistic cultures of academia, the scientific battles through which philosophers fought for positions and other resources and through which they—hardened by the struggles—carved out and reinforced certain features of their personae and their masculinity. The last theme in this story concerns the ways in which internationalization of research and the international exchange of researchers mobilized new visions of how to be a scholar and a more relational and democratic masculinity. Incarnating Persona and Masculinity—The Hard Core of the Uppsala Philosophy Einar Tegen was born in 1884 into a non-conformist farming family. He graduated from high school in 1907 and, afterwards, studied history, Scandinavian languages, and philosophy at the University of Uppsala. Unlike Central Europe and the Anglo-Saxon countries, the subject of philosophy in Sweden is divided into two disciplines, practical and theoretical philosophy. Simply put, practical philosophy involves the study of the philosophical foundations for “practical thinking”, with an emphasis on values, attitudes towards life, and norms of action, while theoretical philosophy deals with logic, epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of science. At this time, there were two leading professors of philosophy in Uppsala, Axel Hägerström (1868–1939) in practical philosophy and Adolf Phalén (1884–1931) in theoretical philosophy.13 Tegen attended lectures by both. He was strongly influenced by Hägerström but also felt drawn to Phalén and is in philosophical overviews counted as one of Phalén’s disciples.14 Uppsala philosophy was a school of thought characterized by criticism of metaphysics, by a naturalistic, materialistic ontology, criticism of subjectivism in the theory of knowledge and by value nihilism, or ethical emotivism, claiming that value statements lacked truth.15 Sociologically, Uppsala philosophy constituted a subculture within Uppsala University, characterized by ontological and epistemological discourses and behavioural templates that students aspiring to become philosophers imitated and made part of their own person. Tegen explains in his autobiography, written after his retirement in 1951, how, even as a student, he intuitively rather than consciously started shaping himself as a philosopher. He took on a persona that signalled what he believed was essential to being viewed as a credible, “real” philosopher. This was
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a collective persona in the culture and the spirit of the philosophers in Uppsala that is sometimes described in the literature as the “hard core” of Uppsala philosophy. A search for truth, a strong belief in the importance of philosophy and the philosopher’s mission in society, and personal qualities such as acuity, logically justified contempt of intuition and spontaneity, and detachment from the world were virtues that characterized the atmosphere at Uppsala.16 As a student, Tegen wrestled with the conflict between religion and his interest in philosophy.17 He was engaged in the young ecclesiastical movement in the 1910s but guarded himself against its mystical elements and eventually chose to focus on philosophy. Tegen wrote an article in the young ecclesiastical students’ journal in which he expressed the internal war between rational analysis and Christian faith. “He took Uppsala philosophy very seriously”, noted his son, the musicologist Martin Tegen in a chronicle of his parents. Tegen chose to continue with the philosophy “in the conviction that the truth is found in pure and honest thinking”, as Martin Tegen puts it.18 He was particularly captivated by Kant and submitted a licentiate thesis on his theory of knowledge for Phalén in 1916. He immersed himself in Kant’s works under the influence of Phalén and defended a thesis for his doctorate degree on Kant’s precritical period in May of 1918. The thesis is not easy to read. Its level of abstraction is high, with difficult terminology and long quotations of Kant in Latin. However, it was decisive for Tegen’s career that the thesis was favourably received among the philosophers at Uppsala and deemed of strong merit when he started to look for positions. He was nominated as associate professor [Privatdozent ] in connection with his public defence and awarded a three-year docent scholarship, with an additional extension of three years as well as a final extra year in 1924.19 In terms of leadership, the Uppsala philosophy was characterized by traditional authority, charismatic personalities, and symbolic violence. The environment was male and patriarchal, with hierarchical structures based on age, scholarly merit, and loyalty ties founded in friendship or common internal political interests. These were accompanied by animosity and a host of internalized battles. The students and doctoral candidates were trained in receiving and practicing verbal aggression. The intellectual atmosphere of the Uppsala school is often described as hard, marked by cold objectivity, factionalism, personal tragedies, eccentric life stories, and even poverty. Tegen’s teachers, Axel Hägerström and Adolph Phalén, rivalled for the position and prestige as the theoretical founders of the
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school, but they did not fight openly. Instead, the feud was conducted by their disciples. The academic culture was characterized by the undermining of the authority and reputation of the opponent, by subversive work and by learning to strike back, in speech and in writing. The author Sigurd Siwertz was Tegen’s contemporary and studied philosophy in Uppsala. In his memoirs, he describes this culture as “a half arctic asceticism”, with a contempt for feelings and “the outer life”, and with a culture that cultivated scholarly wit and irony as the highest merits: “Uppsala irony was a chapter in itself. It had all the nuances of the logical executioner’s murder mania, down to the grimaces of the more jargon-like superiority”.20 A scholarly persona can have several functions. It can cement comradery within in a group, it can help render the individual or the group respect and elevate their status in circles outside the scholarly environment, it can render material benefits, or it can lead to idolizing individuals or schools of thought, to name a few.21 In today’s terminology, Hägerström and Phalén could be characterized as nerds, as stereotypical representatives of a philosopher’s personality and masculinity, to the point of being clichés. They were academic men who were uncomfortable in their bodies and uncomfortable in contacts with the outside world. However, they were considered geniuses, their personae were influential, and they were hallowed by their contemporaries. In particular, Hägerström was often portrayed as the incarnation of a “real” philosopher: “That’s what a philosopher should look like”, was, for example, said by the author Karin Boye in the 1930s, referring to Hägerström’s complexion, hair, clothing, and posture. He was described as pale, with a forward-leaning posture due to his “relentless paperwork”, a white mane of hair, and burning black eyes.22 According to another description he had “tight black eyes, mustache and a slender neck of a bird”, a pince-nez on his nose and a long pipe in hand.23 The descriptions were not limited to Hägerström’s appearance but also concerned his behaviour. He was said to have been shy and kept a distance from his fellow men. His lectures consisted of reading a thick manuscript by rote; he did not greet the audience, hardly even looked at them, and left the lecture hall punctually when the class ended. Adolf Pahlén is said to have lacked Hägerström’s spirited intellectual personality and charisma. One of his students, Ingemar Hedenius, who later became professor of philosophy, described Phalén as proper and punctual with politically conservative sympathies—necessary in order to be accepted in the collegium of professors in Uppsala. As a
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lecturer, he showed no emotions or temperament and never improvised. However, he was described as astute, unpretentious, and intellectually honest.24 The Uppsala school is featured in literature, and descriptions of eccentric life stories and tragic academic destinies among philosophers are legion.25 Tegen depicts the ambiance of the school in his autobiography, stating that he was influenced by both Phalén and Hägerström. He was enchanted by Phalén’s bright mind and impressed by his teaching, which was clear and logical. He also held long conversations with Hägerström, both during walks in Uppsala following Hägerström’s lectures or in his home.26 Tegen also specifically notes that neither Phalén nor Hägerström cultivated any interest in relationships with philosophers outside their own circle: “The isolation in Uppsala was strong”.27 At the same time, this seclusion was the key to cohesion. By surrounding themselves with confidants and disciples, Hägerström and Phalén created a culture that was perceived as exclusive and difficult to access. It mobilized a particular form of masculinity as a way of asserting professional authority and status, which restricted access to positions within the group. The Uppsala school shaped Tegen’s academic way of being long after he left Uppsala. Its culture and scholarly persona were a “mask” which he profoundly incorporated into his own person.
Discourses of Love, Sexuality, and Persona In his 30s, Tegen felt the need to start a family in order to “balance the demanding labor of thinking with warmth and company”, as he explained to his mentor, landowner Oskar Ekman, in a letter in 1913: “A home would be a wholesome and healthy counterbalance to the debilitating, dissolving thinking, a life moment in the midst of all the preoccupation with theory. It seems to me as though a philosopher more than others needs a wife. The home would be warm and uniting. And then the rest and the joy”.28 In choosing between spirit and brain, between religion and philosophy, Tegen opted for reason, and the persona of the philosopher also seemed to guide his love life. At the same time as he decided to become a philosopher, he also decided to marry Gunhild Nordling, whom he had met at a Christian students’ meeting in 1911.29 He had been involved in a longstanding love affair with another, uneducated woman but brought this relationship to an end when he chose the path of philosophy.30
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The persona of the Uppsala school of philosophy echoes in Tegen’s letter to Gunhild in 1913, when he had made up his mind: “You see, choosing a girl means always choosing something more. You choose a life that is molded in a certain way. Choosing Gunhild, it is for Einar to choose philosophy. Choosing philosophy, is − perhaps − to choose a life of deprivation and poverty”. As a philosopher, Tegen did not picture himself in a family provider role, which he may have felt pressure to undertake if he did not marry a professional woman. He wanted to start “a scholarly household”, in Gadi Algazi’s terminology, and was looking for a woman who would understand and accept his choice of career.31 In Gunhild, he found something he had not encountered in any other woman: “a vivid understanding of his work and his problems. She could live in them, she like he”, Tegen continued, speaking to Gunhild in the third person. Gunhild was a woman who was willing to undergo with him “the burden, the daily burden and the burden of life”. He wanted to ensure that she understood that the life of a philosopher could entail hardship and poverty.32 The couple married in 1915. He was 31 years old, and she was five years younger. Gunhild Tegen studied in Uppsala and then worked as a history and social sciences teacher in a girls’ school before the marriage. Their two children, Inga and Martin, were born in 1916 and 1919. In the 1920s, Gunhild Tegen worked first as a translator but established herself as a journalist and writer. The family was dependent on her income. Einar Tegen’s docent scholarship was not enough to support a family, and he took on debts that he did not pay off until 1930 when his parents died and Tegen and his siblings received their inheritance.33 The Secluded Philosopher As associate professor, Tegen continued to cultivate the persona of Uppsala philosopher with a focus on abstract thinking and an interest in theories, seclusion, and introspection. After the defence of his thesis, he purposefully started to aim for a professorship. He first envisioned a deeper study of the Swedish philosopher Christopher Jacob Bostrom’s (1797–1866) work, but he changed his mind when Axel Hägerström asked him to teach a course on practical philosophy. This resulted in further courses on the theory of will and on value theory as well as the history of ethics. Tegen also took an interest in Husserl’s phenomenology and studied with him in Germany in 1921 and 1922. His theoretical
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interest was the psychological basis of human behaviour, and his major scientific work in the 1920s dealt with the theory of will. The first two parts, Moderne Willestheorien. Eine Darstellung und Kritik I and II [Modern Theories of Will. A Presentation, I and II] were published in German in 1924 and 1928. The third part, Viljandet i dess förhållande till jaget och aktiviteten [The Will and Its Relationship to the Self and the Activity] was published in Swedish in 1929. In these years, Tegen actively identified with a world of philosophical learning. His research method shaped him from within and he chiselled more clearly an image of himself as a true philosopher. His work with Moderne Willestheorien demanded, in his words, “concentration, alertness and the effort of will − a violent abstraction” that could not be reconciled with a family with two children and a social life.34 Thinking and writing required total seclusion from 1921 until 1923, a period that Tegen, in his autobiography, calls “the great isolation”. He describes it as “the tension of all forces on a single task”. His method was based on Hägerströms’s model of “a systematic analysis of the psychological condition”, phenomenological content analysis and a logical analysis of concepts. In practice, this involved reviewing previous theories of the will and analysing his own consciousness by looking inwards and holding conversations with himself. “The method corresponded to one side of my essence”, he says, emphasizing that he refused methods that involved contact with people, collecting representative material, observing processes, and exploring them. The result was a detachment from fellow human beings, which also meant his family was isolated from the outside world. “I was probably quite unbearable for my wife and children”, Tegen says and continues, “I did not have time for the family, and when I did not ‘think,’ I needed rest and tranquility, in other words, to be alone even then”. During those years, the family had very limited social contact, according to Tegen. His idealization and intensive concentration on solitary work was based on gendered conceptions of work and family life, and a gender division of labour. Gunhild Tegen took care of the household and the children with the help of housemaids, at the same time as she worked as a translator for a publishing house and helped him with proofreading. Sometime during 1927, when he applied for a professorship in Lund, in the south of Sweden, Tegen indicates that she got tired of him and left for a longer journey to Germany. Gunhild’s brother, Gunnar Nordling, came to the rescue and helped Tegen with proofreading and
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all the manuscripts for the final sprint of the application process.35 Tegen then had another, slightly shorter period of isolation when he completed the manuscript for the third volume of his work on the will.36 Tegen’s periods of isolation resulted in conflicts and a strong strain on his marriage. The couple solved the marital difficulties through long journeys abroad together. Among other trips, they lived in Germany and Italy during the summers of 1921 and 1922 and stayed for a period in Freiburg, where Tegen took the opportunity to study with Husserl. The children usually boarded with the family’s housemaids while their parents were away.37 An Emotional Breakthrough While working on the translation of Moderne Willestheorien into German in 1922 and 1923, Tegen fell in love with his translator, a young German woman, referred to in his autobiography as “G.H”. The love affair was serious on Tegen’s side and caused a dissonance between his scholarly persona and his person, between the idealized persona of a philosopher and his social and emotional reality. The infatuation is denoted in Tegen’s autobiography as “an emotional breakthrough”: “I became humanly richer through her and more open, inhibitions were broken down and I could give myself in a different way. That meant a lot to me, and I needed it”.38 The preserved collections of letters, both with G. H. and with Gunhild Tegen, indicate that the relationship with G. H. lasted in varying intensities into the early 1930s and that these years were at times difficult but also formative, both for him and for Gunhild. He was plagued by conflicting loyalties, jealousy, and strong feelings for both G. H. and his wife. When his intense love waned sometime around 1927 and Tegen decided not to divorce and marry G. H., it seems as if the couple found their way back to one another and embarked on a kind of open relationship.39 In 1930, for example, Tegen expressed his love for Gunhild, at the same time as he planned to once again meet with G. H. on a journey to Germany. He wished that Gunhild would use “the full freedom” he had given her and enjoy meeting with other men. Tegen had himself enjoyed a flirtation, “an intense experience”, during his journey, but it had not led to anything, and “it was in some ways enough for me”, he wrote. “It has cheered me up and prepared me for the rest of the journey”.40
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It is not clear whether Tegen’s relationship with G. H. was known outside of the circle of the three parties involved. Nevertheless, the course of events is meaningful because it is part of a larger pattern of a new sexual morality and new gender relations that were debated in the interwar years. Open relationships were hardly unusual in intellectual circles during this time. Under the influence of psychoanalysis, when educated women entered the labour market and endorsed a new kind of independence, sexual ethics, and marital morality, differences between male and female natures, both regarding sexuality and love, were vigorously debated.41 Gunhild Tegen participated in this debate as a journalist and writer. She published her first collection of short stories, Eros i Upsala och annorstädes [Eros in Uppsala and other places] in 1929 as well as her most famous novel of this period, the love triangle drama Slaven [The Slave, 1936], which follows a relationship between a young woman who is a botanist, her lover who is a professor of botany and another man, a young astronomer, whom she eventually marries.42 Gunhild Tegen’s authorship and journalism in these years were partly autobiographical, and in them she refined her own voice as an author, which included an independent view of love, sexuality, and morality concerning marriage, according to Cecilia Åse, who wrote about Gunhild Tegen’s authorship.43 By the end of the 1920s, the Tegen couple had both left their religious ties behind, and they seem to have developed a shared vision of sexuality, love, and marital morality. They acted out this vision together in their private life as well as individually in their professional lives. In parallel, they both crafted public personae, she as a writer and he as a scholar and philosopher. Concerning Einar Tegen, his relationship with the young German woman and his marital arrangements are momentous because they show how he gradually appropriated new sides of his scholarly persona: the isolated, anti-social seclusion from the world was broadened with an identity as a sexually active man who furthered his career with the assistance of women. Gunhild Tegen helped to support the family and maintained the household, and G. H. translated Tegen’s work into German and helped him with proofreading. In one of the many letters to G. H. he wrote in 1924, “I want to collect myself, get rest and peace and strength and power, be a man who looks his life and its problems in the eyes! […] I need you, I need love, I need women who love me and whom I myself can love”.44 The emotional breakthrough gave Tegen energy, and he participated in an intense battle for a professorship as a powerful and potent
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Fig. 12.1 Einar Tegen in his study, Lund 1931. University Library, Lund
man who did not fear resistance and a fierce fight. “I fought violently”, he notes in his autobiography, and concludes that the battle made him more secure and less afraid, and it taught him to trust himself (Fig. 12.1).45
Agonistic Practices of Academia Struggles for positions and resources were an inherent part of the academic life in a small country like Sweden, as Staffan Bergwik shows in his study of the history of natural sciences in the early 1900s.46 A formative experience and a decisive step in Tegen’s career occurred in 1927 when he applied for a professorship in theoretical philosophy at Lund University. His main qualifications were the first two volumes of Moderne Willestheorien. The appointing process took two and a half years and turned into one of the most famous battles in the historiography of Swedish twentieth-century philosophy. Contrary to Uppsala, the philosophy in Lund did not constitute a proper school but was characterized by
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a philosophy that was empiricist and Kantian, with historical, humanistic, and psychological interests.47 Tegen lost the position to his main rival, Alf Nyman from Lund, largely due to the rivalry between the philosophers at the two universities.48 The magnitude of this battle is explained by scarcity of opportunities to earn a living as a philosopher. In practice, the other option besides a professorship was to become a high school teacher.49 The battle raised a familiar theme in the modern history of masculinity—“the hardening of men”. To become “real men”, men need to be hardened by enduring physical pain.50 Translated into the academic world, hardening meant inflicting pain on the opponent and harming him psychologically and socially. In Tegen’s case, the fight was both an imitation and a performance. As a role model for battling for a position, he had Axel Hägerstöm who fought a similar fight (and lost) in the mid1890s.51 During this battle, Tegen gained use of the entire arsenal of verbal aggression and logical argumentation he acquired during his career. Through the combat, he created an informal position for himself in the academic community, and his self-representation during these years, as the appeal process continued, played an important role in the shaping of his persona and his scholarly career. The feud is well documented, and the published texts surrounding this affair include expert statements, letters of complaint, appeals and responses to these, comprising over 1000 pages.52 Tegen was very active and litigious and proved his worth within the community of philosophy by exhibiting a persona and a masculinity built on intellectual and moral qualities: assertiveness and the ability to establish himself through arguments, create alliances and endure battles with persistence and cunning. The battle was a performance that strengthened and elevated the masculine collective persona of Uppsala philosophers. Despite internal disputes, the representatives of the school set up a united front to Tegen’s defence. He managed to enlist as supporters the foreign minister, conservative politician Ernst Trygger who was formerly a professor of legal history at Uppsala University, as well as Vilhelm Lundstedt, a lawyer who belonged to the Uppsala school of philosophy and was a Social Democratic member of the parliament. Through Lundstedt, the appointment process became an issue of party politics and was seen as a conflict between the right and the left. The conservative Prime Minister Arvid Lindman finally decided in Tegen’s disadvantage. By that time, he and the other adversaries were widely known outside the narrow public sphere of
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academia. The battle became a media event that was described extensively in both newspapers and satire magazines.53 Tegen was successful soon after that, when a chair of practical philosophy was announced in Lund in 1929. He was appointed without a fight.54 The appointment—and thus Tegen’s combative persona—also had material implications for the Tegen family. The economically scarce circumstances as Privatdozent in Uppsala were turned into a well-paid professorship and a large apartment in downtown Lund.55 However, Tegen stayed in Lund for only six years. In 1937, a chair in practical philosophy was established at the University of Stockholm with money provided through a donation. The vacancy was not announced and the vice chancellor of the university, the historian Sven Thunberg, who was Tegen’s former fellow student in Uppsala, played an active role in the appointment.56 Tegen stayed in Stockholm until his retirement in 1951 (Fig. 12.2).
Fig. 12.2 The Tegen family in their living room in their new apartment in Lund, 1931. University Library, Lund
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Impact of America and a More Democratic and Relational Persona Constructing a new persona is a delicate balance between old and new ways of being in the world, as noted by Daston and Sibum in their introduction.57 This became evident during Tegen’s later career. His professional development in the 1940s can be read as an enactment of a new kind of scholarly self that, on a deep personal level, laid bare the tensions between the persona of the isolated, world-renowned philosopher and that of the socially committed intellectual. In 1937, when Tegen took up his new professorship at Stockholm University, he was on the way to an intellectual reorientation. His philosophical interest was still the psychological basis for human action, but his horizons were widening. During his time in Lund (1931–1936), he had become interested in new anthropology and the theoretical and empirical research that—under the influence of phenomenology—regarded man as “a unity of body and soul, feeling and reason, and rooted in the world”.58 He was also influenced by gestalt psychology and by the German sociologists who fled to Lund after the Nazi takeover. Gunhild Tegen was involved in the anti-Nazi movement, and the couple socialized with German refugees like the sociologist Fritz Croner, who also became Tegen’s friend. Tegen had also been appointed in a government investigation [Befolkningskommissionen] headed by the economist Gunnar Myrdal. It had strengthened his interest in social science issues.59 Tegen was Stockholm University’s first professor of practical philosophy. The humanities and social sciences were in the construction and formation stage at the university, meaning that the professors had great freedom to define the curriculum of the discipline they were in charge of. Gunnar Myrdal, who had taken up a professorship in economics a few years earlier, belonged to a group of social scientists and humanists who wanted to promote interdisciplinary research at the university.60 Immediately after beginning his professorship, Tegen, Myrdal, and political scientist Herbert Tingsten started a new, higher-level seminar focusing on philosophy and social science.61 Tegen’s teaching in practical philosophy thus had a social science bent when he decided to go to the United States in 1939. He was convinced that the United States was the country where “the new dynamic knowledge about humans” (empirical sociology, personality psychology, and cultural anthropology) had its main representatives.62 He applied for and received funding from the Swedish
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Wallenberg Foundation for a six-month stay at US universities. When he left in May of 1940, he had already decided to stay longer and apply for additional funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which was also granted, initially for a six-month stay and then as an extension (due to the war) for another year. Tegen’s years in America illuminate the role of internationalization and international contacts in the construction and modification of scholarly personae. Extensive literature has posited scientific travel as an important component in the creation and exchange of scientific and scholarly knowledge, the formation of transnational scientific networks, and the dissemination and evaluation of knowledge in different spaces.63 Mobility and the circulation of people contribute to and mobilize new and unexpected resources for knowledge production. Travelling provides the opportunity to test the value of new truth claims, theories, and methods in different settings, and to exchange arguments and knowledge across time and place, as Bruno Latour noted in Science in Action in the 1980s.64 However, international exchanges involved more than just a transfer of knowledge, methods, or technologies. They also stimulated the formation of new scientific and scholarly identities. “America Was the Most Powerful Experience of My Life” The stay in the United States made an indelible impression on Tegen in at least three respects: it consolidated and deepened the theoretical and methodological reorientation which he had cautiously begun during the 1930s, it mobilized new visions and repertoires of being a scholar and an academic leader, and it inspired Tegen to step into the role of an academic public intellectual. In all these respects, imitation and adaptation to American role models played a major role. Tegen’s travels in the United States can be followed in detail through his diaries, his correspondence with colleagues in Stockholm and elsewhere, and his long report to the Rockefeller Foundation. The foundation and its officers played a crucial role during Tegen’s stay by opening the doors to top American universities, highlighting the importance of funding institutions for the creation of scholarly personae.65 All the main social science milieus were included in Tegen’s programme, with longer stays at large, prestigious universities, including Yale, Harvard, University of California at Berkeley, Columbia, and the New School of Social Research. His curiosity, diligence, and intellectual openness are striking.
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He arrived in San Francisco via the Soviet Union and Japan in June of 1940 and visited both private and state universities and colleges from south to north, from east to west. Different areas and institutions interested him, in fields ranging from experimental research on neuroses in animals to the newest polling methods, which were not yet implemented in Sweden. Between department visits, he devoted himself to the study of scientific literature, focusing on journals and books unavailable in Sweden. He took a week off now and then, especially after Gunhild Tegen came to the United States in March of 1941, but his leisure time was often devoted to visits to academic institutions and to creating professional contacts. Tegen also had close contacts with the Swedish immigrant organizations in the United States, with the ScandinavianAmerican Foundation and with academics of Swedish descent, among them the sociologist George Lundberg and criminologist Thorsten Sellin. Both these men came and lectured in Stockholm later in the 1940s.66 Tegen quickly noted at the beginning of his stay that American philosophy did not hold the standard he expected. He particularly reacted to the religious elements in teaching at colleges and smaller universities he visited, where he met teachers with “an old-fashioned metaphysical, even confessionally bound views” in philosophical questions. He decided to completely set philosophy aside and learn as much as possible about research and education and about social and personality psychology as developed at American universities. He noted afterwards that the most fruitful visit was to the Institute for Human Relations (IHR) at Yale, with its interdisciplinary research and innovative teaching methods. He also greatly benefited from discussions with Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and the cultural anthropologist Ralph Linton at the New School of Social Research.67 Both of these institutions and their teaching methods were reflected immediately after in his lectures and seminars in Stockholm; the same can be said about his discussions with Gordon Allport and George Lundberg.68 Back home in Sweden Tegen brought large quantities of literature, compendiums, and teaching materials that he used as a basis for his lectures and as a model for the new seminars he initiated. In addition to the intellectual, scholarly studies, Tegen was interested in the education system in the United States. He made systematic comparisons between the Swedish and the American organization of higher education, university cultures, the relationship between professors and students, and the way in which colleagues interacted, both in the everyday dealings at departments and in private gatherings. In drafts of lectures and
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letters that he did not share with anyone, it is possible to follow Tegen’s internal, intellectual work and how he, through comparisons, works on his own ideas—a process that modifies his scholarly persona. Below are a few examples. In notes for a lecture at the Scandinavian-American Foundation in 1941, Tegen contrasted a number of areas of academic life in the two countries. The United States had a clear advantage in almost every respect: the climate for debates at American universities was freer and more open-minded than in Sweden. Individual freedom was greater, there was less “sour criticism” of people who want to advance, and there was less collegial envy; people were helpful and friendly and could enjoy other people’s success. Regarding teaching, the US students were bolder; they discussed and asked questions in a way that Swedish students did not. “Symbolic! Open doors and windows [at seminar classes]”, he noted in the margin. He also notes that the leading ideas in many areas in the United States—philosophy, psychology, and sociology—are European, but in America they are presented with new emphases, new combinations and as products of new syntheses. The Americans also have their own theories such as behaviourism, he writes, and the synthesis of behaviourism, Gestalt psychology and psychoanalysis has a prominent place in American scientific life. “My own interest”, he states. A year later, he added a postscript to the notes, commenting on the forms of interaction among colleagues at US universities: colleagues meet for lunch, there are departmental meetings once a week, and it is common to socialize without alcohol, both at lunch and in private settings: “The food is simple, no spirits as a rule. Water, coffee, milk. The milk glass is not less worthwhile. Simple, healthy habits. Even dinner at home without alcohol”.69 Tegen’s observations are clearly stereotyped and superficial. They build on the fact that as a visiting scholar he was not involved in the daily work of the departments. He focused on things that he disliked in Sweden and used them as a lens to view conditions in the United States and idealize what he is experiencing and seeing. At the same time, Tegen was a person who thought while he was writing. A scholarly persona can be seen as a form of self-fashioning and intellectual work that individuals perform on themselves in order to conduct their minds and persons in a way that is understood as scientific, and a bricolage where new patterns of behaviour are mixed with previous layers of self-conceptions.70 It appears as if Tegen, while preparing his lecture, conducted work in which he
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anecdotally compared his experiences of Swedish academic life with his observations and experiences of American universities. Emerging through his notes and letters is a picture of how these comparisons reshaped his scholarly persona. A draft of a letter to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Tegen’s colleague, professor Elias Wessén in Stockholm, provides a deeper view into his inner intellectual life and thoughts. Tegen wrote to discuss economic issues and an extended leave of absence. In order to make Wessén understand his wish to stay an extra year in the United States, he frankly and confidently told Wessén about his own intellectual development. During his time in Lund, he had developed an interest in social psychology and personality psychology, theories related to natural sciences and psychology and the interface between physics and philosophy—“big and difficult issues”. To venture into new areas had been enriching but also frustrating: “The result is that I constantly had to fight for my time, lecturing about things that I did not possess complete knowledge of”. He then states in a key passage of the letter: “But on the other hand, I wanted to be part of these contemporary problems and opinions and do something about them − in fact, they are far more important than many philosophical systems and ideas with centuries-old traditions”.71 Tegen thus had for many years nurtured a drive to redefine and reorient his academic role. The stay in the United States strengthened and augmented the change. However, Tegen was also realistic. A note in the margin indicates that he understood that the generous grant from the Rockefeller Foundation was not about benevolence or concern for his personal development but about American influence in Europe. “[The RF] has been truly magnificent, but their attitude obviously depends on their interest in making US social and psychological science known in Sweden”. 72 After returning home, Tegen also stepped into a role as an “academic public intellectual”. I use the term to refer to “an academic specialist communicating his or her expert knowledge to ‘lay persons’ outside of the research specialty”.73 The most important non-academic work he devoted himself to, which took much of his time and energy, was the presidency of Samarbetskommittén för demokratisk upplysning [SDU, The Swedish Joint Committee for Democratic Reconstruction], founded in 1943. The association worked with, in Tegen’s own words, the “reeducation of authority-minded Germans and cultural custody of refugees from central European countries”.74 The goal was to inform and support democratic, intellectual, and cultural reconstruction in Europe. Intellectuals, such as Tegen and Alva Myrdal (who was the vice-president of
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SDU), were fervently engaged in researching and finding explanations to the psychological foundations of Nazi mentality, drawing inspiration from Erich Fromm and the Frankfurt school.75 In 1945, in collaboration with Gunhild Tegen, he published an interview study with survivors of the concentration camps, De dödsdömda vittnar [The witnesses sentenced to death]. A commitment he regretted was the presidency of Samfundet Sverige—Sovjetunionen [the Sweden-Soviet Union Association]. Deeply inspired by his stay in the United States, in the last years of the war he held an idealistic belief that cultural cooperation without political propaganda would promote a bridge between peoples and act as a “mediator between East and West in the service of a new world”. The association never achieved an independent position, irrespective of the Soviet Union and political considerations that Tegen thought it ought to have. He therefore left the association in 1947.76 “I Lived Out My Ideas But Died, Scientifically Speaking” The United States meant a personal metamorphosis for Tegen. The new kind of scholarly persona he created and acted out in his academic life during the 1940s was a hybrid where old repertoires and ideals were mixed with impulses from his US journey. This hybrid persona was partly acknowledged and influential—he succeeded in his role as a teacher and supervisor and is remembered and appreciated by his former students and doctoral candidates. However, in a scholarly respect, he failed. He did not manage to create an entrepreneurial scholarly persona that corresponded to the new demands set by financiers such as the Rockefeller Foundation that included time limits, evaluation of research, and presentable results.77 Tegen’s position as a professor involved both spoken and unspoken demands and obligations. The explicit obligations included an extensive teaching schedule—lectures and seminars that were reported in the educational journals of the faculty each semester. A professor was expected to create a scientific interest in the field, attract students to the discipline, and supervise them to licentiate and doctoral degrees. Immediately after returning from the United States, Tegen redirected his lectures and seminar teaching. Instead of moral philosophy, value theoretical questions, and ethics, for example, which he had lectured on before travelling to the United States, he now lectured and gave seminars on American psychology, social psychology, personality psychology, and cultural anthropology, as well as on Swedish folk movements and sociology.78 His
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lectures encompassed a broad field, from Yale psychology to psychoanalysis, from Gordon Allport’s personality theory to Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, both of which were examined in detail. He organized series of seminars with various themes, and top American scholars—including George Lundberg and Ralph Linton—were invited to lecture in Stockholm. The ten-year period between 1942 and 1951 was full of activity at the university. Tegen states in his autobiography that the academic year 1950–1951, shortly before his retirement, was his “great year of teaching”.79 He lectured on his own manuscript on American psychology and gave seminars with the problem of authority as an ongoing theme. Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality was discussed thoroughly, with visits from philosophers from Oslo and presentations of two licentiate dissertations, as well as visits by David Rodrick and John Thompson from the United States. Tegen gave about 50 seminars that academic year, alongside his lectures.80 Overall, Tegen filled his position with his new persona and used the power embedded in his professor chair to promote the research ideas and the development of his students. He accepted student candidates who were rejected by other professors due to their independent and cross-disciplinary research ideas, such as Joachim Israel, who later became professor of sociology, and ethnologist and economic historian Börje Hanssen, whose interdisciplinary approach (ethnology, economic history, sociology) in his dissertation thesis is regarded today as groundbreaking but was considered controversial in the1940s.81 Influenced by his experiences from the United States, Tegen exhibited a more relational and democratic academic persona and masculinity than was usual at the time. His seminars were characterized by openness and discussions, according to his former students. He was considered undogmatic, friendly, encouraging, and open to new ideas.82 The position of professor was also associated with non-formal, unspoken demands, and expectations of academic achievement: to conduct research and to publish books and scientific articles. In addition to teaching and engaging in societal issues, Tegen had one great ambition: to write a book about “the new science of man”, his grand opus.83 The plan was to gather all the knowledge he had gained in the United States on various schools of psychology and social psychology into a synthesized presentation, accompanied by his own, independent opinions and reflections. Tegen took a leave of absence from the department twice in order to work on the book, in 1945 and 1949, but failed to carry
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out the project. A draft of the manuscript with a table of contents and a preface is preserved in his personal archive. He published a preamble to the book, Amerikansk psykologi [American Psychology], in 1950. It is an introduction to American social psychology before the 1930s, and it received mixed reviews. The psychologist Anna-Lisa Kälvesten, one of the few women who participated in Tegen’s seminars, praised it in Morgontidningen on 9 April 1950.84 Otherwise, the reception among colleagues was friendly but indifferent, and the book is not considered to have left any mark in the scholarship or teaching in practical philosophy or social psychology.85 Tegen also prepared for the creation of a new, interdisciplinary Institute for Social Psychological Research at Stockholm University, and he contacted the Rockefeller Foundation on the matter in the mid-1940s. The response was one of disinterest. Tracy B. Kitteridge, who had been director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Social Science Division and supported Tegen during his US stay, had moved on to other duties. The lack of prestigious scientific publications caused Kitteridge’s successors to regard Tegen as a confused has-been, as he approached the foundation with his new plans: “T. had a number of things to propose. I declined all except the one about the book. […] I would have declined this too, but he was a former fellow. He seems to me a disorganized person who is unlikely to come to a focus on anything”, noted one of the officers in his diary in 1947.86 Tegen’s failure to complete his grand opus was due in large part to his own strict requirements for completeness, originality, and perfection. He writes in his autobiography that after his return he had formed “a unified, personal view” of what he had learned in the United States, and that he should have written “a book about the journey, not about the ‘American science of man’”—a more modest but not a less interesting book. In terms of persona, we can see how his former self-conception—the persona of Uppsala philosophy—had involved great pain and frustration in the now-over-60-year-old philosopher. “I cannot say how I suffered under the necessity of postponing, constantly postponing, the writing of this, my only and true book. But I intended, of course, to do something damned fine, to include the people and the principles and science and teaching and research in one go − with the result that nothing came out of it”. The reason was, he then says, that he “stood with hands and feet in the pushing, current real world”, and that he wanted to practically implement the ideas he had learned to appreciate in America: “I lived out my ideas in practical activity but died, scientifically speaking”.87
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Continuity and Change—Possibilities and Risks One main conclusion of this article is that that the scholarly persona is a deeply gendered phenomenon, even in environments where only one gender is represented. As much as the secluded persona of the Uppsala philosophy was formed in relation to superior men and to colleagues in the academic environment, it was shaped in relation to sexuality, women, and family, and to culturally coded notions of what it meant to be a (male) philosopher. Another conclusion is about the importance of internationalization and international exchanges in the formation of scholarly personae. Tegen was on his way to a scholarly and personal reorientation when he went to the United States in 1940. His stay there exposed him not only to new knowledge and new teaching methods, which he brought back to Sweden, but the stay also inspired him to become the person and scholar he wanted to be. Impressions from the journey provided him with templates and repertoires for a scholarly persona that were in tune with his values and new interests. He created more collegial relationships with doctoral students and younger colleagues than was common in academia at the time, and he sought self-fulfilment as an academic leader by revitalizing the teaching curriculum in his field, supporting and initiating new research, and leading investigations and projects outside the university. During his stay in the United States, Tegen developed an interest in the social-psychological prerequisites of democracy. There was no ideological contrast, he noted in 1953, between his scholarly activities and his sociopolitical engagement after his return from America: “For the practical work I gained understanding and ideas from social psychology and cultural anthropology, and many of the refugees whom I was dealing with were interested in principal questions of social science and psychology, as well as being active in scientific work”.88 The third conclusion is that the scholarly persona is a powerful category of person that can render an individual influence and notoriety but also, as in this particular case, lead to the loss of reputation. What would have happened, for instance, if Tegen had succeeded in completing his grand opus about American psychology, social psychology, and the development of new sociology? Would the book have been acknowledged by his contemporaries, made him well known, and respected among his colleagues? Would the new, more democratic and relational persona he promoted have gained greater esteem and acceptance during the last ten years of his career?
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Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the helpful comments and criticisms of Åsa Burman, the colleagues at the Gender History seminar at Stockholm University, as well as comments of Sigrídur Matthíasdottír at the Nordic Women’s and Gender History Conference in Oulu, Finland, in June 2018. This research is part of the SPICE project (Scientific Personae in Cultural Encounters ), funded by Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation.
Notes 1. Lorraine Daston and Otto H. Sibum, “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories,” Science in Context 16, no. 1–2 (2003): 2. Daston and Sibum use the word “scientific” in its continental meaning, embracing both the human and natural sciences (cf. the term wissenschaftlich in German). 2. Einar Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning. [unpublished manuscript] (Uppsala universitetsbibliotek, Einar Tegens samling, 1953), 20. 3. Daston – Sibum, “Introduction,” 2. 4. Daston – Sibum, “Introduction,” 5; Karen Green and Jacqueline Broad, “Fictions of a feminine philosophical persona: Christine de Pizan, Margaret Cavendish and philosophia lost,” in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe. The Nature of a Contested Identity, ed. Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroges and Ian Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 229–253; Mineke Bosch, “Looking at Laboratory Life, Writing a Scientific Persona: Marianne van Herwerden’s Travel Letters from the United States, 1920,” L’Homme: Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 29, no. 1 (2018): 15–33. 5. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (USA: Anchor Books, 1959); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1993); Judith Butler, “Gender as performance,” in A critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals, ed. Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 1996); Mineke Bosch, “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians: Explorations of a Concept,” BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 4 (2016): 33–54. 6. Daston and Sibum, “Introduction,” 6–7; Conal Condren, “The Persona of the Philosopher and the Rhetorics of Office in Early Modern England,” in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe. The Nature of a Contested Identity, ed. Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroges and Ian Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006), 66–89; Karen Green and Jaqueline Broad, “Fictions of a Feminine Philosophical Persona: Christine de Pizan, Margaret Cavendish and Philosophia Lost,” in Condren & al, ibid, 229–253.
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7. Katharina Rietzler, “Experts for Peace: Structures and Motivations of Philanthropic Internationalism in the United States and Europe,” in Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars, ed. Daniel Laqua (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 45−65; Christian Fleck, A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences. Robber Barons, the Third Reich and the Invention of Empirical Social Research (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Pieter Huistra and Kaat Wils, “Fit to Travel. The Exchange Program of the Belgian American Educational Foundation. An Institutional Perspective on Persona Formation,” BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 4 (2016):112–134; Kirsti Niskanen, “Snille efterfrågas! Rockefeller Foundation, forskarpersona och kön vid Stockholms högskola under mellankrigstiden,” Scandia 83, no. 2 (2017): 12–40; Kirsti Niskanen, “Möjlighetsstrukturer och excellens. Rockefeller Foundations stöd till internationalisering av svenska samhällsvetenskaplig forskning under 1920–1950-talen,” Lychnos. Årsbok för idéoch lärdomshistoria (Lund: Lärdomshistoriska samfundet, 2018), 199– 214; Anna Cabanel, “‘How Excellent… for a Woman?’ The Fellowship Programme of the International Federation of University Women in the Interwar Period,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 88–102; Anna Cabanel, “La fabrique d’une persona scientifique au féminin. The International Federation of University Women. Années 1920-années 1960” (Unpublished PhD Diss., Universities of Leuven and Groningen, 2019); Ludovic Tournés and Giles Scott-Smith, “Introduction. A World of Exchanges,” in Global Exchanges. Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World, ed. Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018), 1–29. 8. Stefan Dudink, “The Trouble with Men. Problems in the History of ‘Masculinity’,” European Journal of Cultural Studies l, no. 3 (1998): 419–451; Jan Golinsky, “The Care of the Self and the Masculine Birth of Science,” History of Science 40, no. 2 (2002): 125–145; Heather Ellis, Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831–1918 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Nathan Ensmenger, “‘Beards, Sandals, and Other Signs of Rugged Individualism’: Masculine Culture within the Computing Professions,” Osiris 30, no. 1 (2015): 38–65; Ben Griffin, “Hegemonic Masculinity as a Historical Problem,” Gender & History 30, no. 2 (2018): 377–400; Falko Schnicke, “Princesses, Semen, and Separation: Masculinity and Body Politics in Nineteenth-Century German Historiography,” Bulletin / German Historical Institute 40, no. 1 (2018): 26–60. 9. Sarah Fenstermaker and Candance West C. eds., Doing Gender, Doing Difference: Inequality, Power, and Institutional Change (New York: Routledge 2002); David Collinson and Jeff Hearn, “Naming Men as Men: Implications for Work, Organization and Management,” Gender,
12
10. 11. 12.
13.
14. 15. 16. 17.
18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.
29. 30.
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Work and Organization 1, no. 1 (1994): 2–22; Griffin, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 377–400. Collins and Hearn, “Naming Men as Men,” 2–22. William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 16–19. No woman gained a doctorate in philosophy in Sweden before 1950 according to Hanna Markusson Winkvist’s study on the first generation of university women in Sweden. Hanna Markusson Winkvist, Som isolerade öar:de lagerkransade kvinnorna och akademin under 1900-talets första hälft (Eslöv: Symposion, 2003), 232–239. Henrik Lagerlund, Filosofi i Sverige under tusen år (Lund: Studentlitteratur 2003), 169–187; Svante Nordin, Från Hägerström till Hedenius. Den moderna svenska filosofin (Bodafors: Doxa, 1983), 25–59. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 19–20; Nordin, Från Hägerström till Hedenius, 73–91. Lagerlund, Filosofi i Sverige under tusen år, 169–187; Nordin, Från Hägerström till Hedenius, 46–47. Nordin, Från Hägerström till Hedenius, 32–37; Sigfrid Siwertz, Att vara ung: minnen (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1975), 140–147. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 16–23; Martin Tegen, Einar och Gunhild Tegen: en krönika om deras liv och verk [unpublished manuscript] (Stockholm 2003), 18–27. Tegen, Einar och Gunhild Tegen, 38–39. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 25–27. Siwertz, Att vara ung, 140–145; Nordin, Från Hägerström till Hedenius, 25–114. Daston and Sibum, “Introduction,” 6–7. Nordin, Från Hägerström till Hedenius, 58–59. Nordin, Från Hägerström till Hedenius, 58–59. Nordin, Från Hägerström till Hedenius, 58–59. Nordin, Från Hägerström till Hedenius, 59–63, 93–114; Siwertz, Att vara ung, 158–166. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 20. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 34. Einar Tegen to Oscar Ekman 20/3 1913 in Torbjörn Fogelberg, Godsägare Oscar Ekman på Bjärka-Säby: människor, miljöer och tankar kring en stor svensk donator (Sigtuna: Sigtunastiftelsen, 1995), 47. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 25–26. Uppsala universitetsbibliotek, Collections of letters (Tegen 22: 453 A1). See also, Staffan Bergwik, Kunskapens osynliga scener: vetenskapshistorier 1900–1950 (Göteborg: Makadam, 2016), 33–66; Donald L. Opitz, Annette Lykknes and Brigitte van Tiggelen eds., For Better or for Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2012).
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31. Gadi Algazi, “Scholars in Households. Refiguring the Learned Habitus, 1480–1550,” Science in Context 16, nos. 1–2 (2003): 9–42. 32. Einar Tegen to Gunhild Tegen 18/9 1913, Uppsala universitetsbibliotek, Collections of letters, Tegen’s collection 453 A1. 33. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 29, 39. 34. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 30. 35. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 29–30. 36. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 38. 37. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 29–33. 38. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 32–33. 39. Einar Tegen to Gunhild Tegen 31/7 1923; Einar Tegen to Gunhild Tegen 19/5 1930, Uppsala universitetsbibliotek, Collections of letters, Tegen’s collection 453 A. 40. Einar Tegen to Gunhild Tegen 31/5 1930, Uppsala universitetsbibliotek, Collections of letters, Tegen’s collection 453 A. 41. Karin Johannisson, Den sårade divan: om psykets estetik (och om Agnes von K, Sigrid H och Nelly S) (Stockholm: Bonnier, 2015), 32–54, 217–237, 253–262; Eva Borgström, Berättelser om det förbjudna: begär mellan kvinnor i svensk litteratur 1900–1935 (Göteborg: Makadam, 2015), 229–260; Marta Ronne, Två världar och ett universitet. Svenska skönlitterära universitetsskildringar 1904–1943. En genusstudie (Uppsala: Uppsala universitet, 2000), 230–280. 42. Uppsala universitetsbibliotek: Gunhild Tegens samling, 48. 43. Åse, Kärlek och snusk, 5. 44. Einar Tegen to G. H-s. 11/6 1924, Uppsala universitetsbibliotek, Collections of letters, Tegen’s collection 453 A1. 45. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 38. 46. Bergwik, Kunskapens osynliga scener, 90–93. 47. Nordin, Från Hägerström till Hedenius, 22, 137. 48. Nordin, Från Hägerström till Hedenius, 77–90. 49. Svante Nordin, Ingemar Hedenius: en filosof och hans tid (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2004), 53–54. 50. Jonas Frykman, “On the Hardening of Men,” in Identities in pain, ed. Jonas Frykman, C. Nadia Seremetakis and Susanne Ewert (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 1998), 126–150. 51. Nordin, Från Hägerström till Hedenius, 25. 52. Nordin, Från Hägerström till Hedenius, 73–91; Tegen, Einar och Gunhild Tegen, 57–62; Tegen, Levernes beskrivning, 38. 53. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 38; Nordin, Från Hägerström till Hedenius, 77–90. 54. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 41; Nordin, Från Hägerström till Hedenius, 89–90. 55. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 41.
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56. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 57. 57. Daston and Sibum, “Introduction,” Science in Context, 5. 58. Jan Bengtsson, Den fenomenologiska rörelsen i Sverige (Göteborg: Daidalos, 1991), 108. 59. Einar Tegen, “Filosofi och sociologi” in Stockholms högskola under Sven Tunbergs rektorat: minnesskrift tillägnad Sven Tunberg vid hans avgång från rektorsämbetet den 31 december 1949 (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1949), 184–185; Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 44–49; Tegen, Einar och Gunhild Tegen, 81–84. 60. Kirsti Niskanen, “Snille efterfrågas! Rockefeller Foundation, forskarpersona och kön vid Stockholms högskola under mellankrigstiden,” Scandia 83, no. 2 (2017): 12–40. 61. Tegen “Filosofi och sociologi,” 191; Jan Bengtsson and Anders Molander, Den svenska sociologins födelse (Göteborg: Daidalos, 1998), 14. 62. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 61. 63. Whitney Walton, Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad: France and the United States, 1890–1970 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Heike Jöns, “Academic travel from Cambridge University and the Formation of Centres of Knowledge, 1885–1954,” Journal of Historical Geography 34, no. 2 (2008): 338–362; Raj Kapil, Relocating Modern Science. Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, 2007); Ana Simões, Ana, Carneiro, and Maria Paula Diego, eds., Travels of Learning: A Geography of Science in Europe (Boston: Kluwer academic Publishers, 2003); James A. Secord, “Knowledge in Transit,” Isis 95, no. 4 (December 1, 2004): 654–672; Sörlin, Sverker, De Lärdas Republik: Om Vetenskapens Internationella Tendenser (Malmö: LiberHermod/Institutet för framtidsstudier, 1994), 158–244; Mohammad Fazlhashemi, Lena Eskilsson and Ronny Ambjörnsson, eds., Reseberättelser: Idéhistoriska Resor i Sociala Och Geografiska Rum (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2001). 64. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Milton Keynes: Harvard University Press, 1987), 210– 228. 65. Huistra and Wils, “Fit to Travel,” BMGN – The Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 112–134; Kirsti Niskanen, “Snille efterfrågas! Rockefeller Foundation, forskarpersona och kön vid Stockholms högskola under mellankrigstiden,” Scandia 83, no. 2 (2017): 12–40; Anna Cabanel, “‘How Excellent… for a Woman?’ The Fellowship Program of the International Federation of University Women in the Interwar Period,” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 88–102; Anna Cabanel, “La fabrique d’une persona scientifique au féminin, 185–232; 275–316.”
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66. Tegen, “Filosofi och sociologi,” 192–193, Uppsala universitetsbibliotek, Collections of letters (Tegen 48: Report to the Rockefeller Foundation). 67. Uppsala universitetsbibliotek, Collections of letters (Tegen 48: Report to the Rockefeller Foundation). 68. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 76–77. 69. Uppsala universitetsbibliotek, Collections of letters (Tegen 48: Notes). 70. Condren et al., “Introduction,” 7; Bosch, “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth Century Historians,”; ibid.,“Looking at Laboratory Life.” 71. Einar Tegen to Elias Wessén, Uppsala universitetsbibliotek, Collections of letters (Tegen 22). 72. Einar Tegen to Elias Wessén, Uppsala universitetsbibliotek, Collections of letters (Tegen 22). 73. Ragnvald Kalleberg, “The Role of Public Intellectual in the Role-Set of Academics,” in Knowledge for Whom?: Public Sociology in the Making ed. Andreas Hess and Christinas Fleck (London: Routledge, 2013), 253–274. 74. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 69. 75. Christin Mays, “For the Sake of Democracy, Samarbetskommittén för demokratiskt uppbyggnadsarbete, and the Cultural Reconstruction of Post-World War II Europe” (Unpublished Masters Diss., University of Uppsala, Department of History, 2011), 43–45. 76. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 93–126. 77. Christian Fleck, A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences. Robber Barons, the Third Reich and the Invention of Empirical Social Research (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), 21–25; Niskanen, “Snille efterfrågas!,” 12–40. 78. Riksarkivet, Stockholm: Stockholms högskolas arkiv, Dagböcker, 1939; Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 76. 79. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 76. 80. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 75–78. 81. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 78–86; Bengtsson and Molander, Den svenska sociologins födelse, 108. 82. Bengtsson and Molander, Den svenska sociologins födelse, 54–60, 105–111, 143. 83. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 68–74. 84. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 46. 85. Bengtsson and Molander, Den svenska sociologins födelse, 91, 151. 86. Tegen, “Filosofi och sociologi,” 181; The Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York: RF Rb 10, Fellowship recorder cards. 87. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 70–71. 88. Tegen, Levernesbeskrivning, 66–67.
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References Unpublished Sources Riksarkivet, Stockholm: Stockholms högskolas arkiv, Dagböcker. Tegen, Einar. Levernesbeskrivning [unpublished manuscript] Uppsala universitetsbibliotek, Einar Tegens samling, 1953. Tegen, Martin. Einar och Gunhild Tegen: en krönika om deras liv och verk/sammanställd av Martin Tegen [unpublished manuscript], Stockholm, 2003. The Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York: RF Rb 10, Fellowship recorder cards. Uppsala universitetsbibliotek, Collections of letters (Tegen 22, 46, 47, 48, 453 A1). Uppsala universitetsbibliotek: Gunhild Tegens samling.
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Index
A Aalto, Sari, 158 Aasis, 155, 156, 161 Åbo Akademi University, 185 academic eros, 12 Agassiz, Louis, 61 Åhrén, Eva, 150 Ainu, 56, 63, 68–70 Albert Kahn Around the World, 90 Algazi, Gadi, 182 Allport, Gordon, 332, 336 American Association of University Women (AAUW), 119, 125, 129, 132–136 American Civil War, 59 American Mathematical Society (AMS), 33, 37 Amherst College, 59 anatomy course/anatomical studies, 149–151, 154–169 anti-intellectualism, 228 Arndt, Hannah, 10 Åse, Cecilia, 326
Australia, twenty-first century, 220–228 authority, 12, 25, 37, 58, 66, 68–71, 74, 114, 137, 166, 185, 220, 243, 295, 318, 320, 321, 322, 336
B Baehr, Jason, 242 Barany, Michael, 6, 131 Barbour, Kim, 8, 10, 218 Barnard College, 119 Basedow, Johann Bernhard, 246 Belgian American Educational Foundation, 87 Belgium, twentieth-century, 219 Bell, Eric Temple, 38–39 Bergwik, Staffan, 327 Bernard, Claude, 188 Bernheim, Ernst, 267 biological materialism, 187 Blackwell, Elizabeth, 165
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Niskanen and M. J. Barany (eds.), Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7
349
350
INDEX
borderlands, 56 Bosch, Mineke, 3, 55, 74, 137, 139, 153, 183, 218–219, 240, 248 Bostrom, Christopher Jacob, 323 botany, 59–60, 117, 130, 133, 326 Bouillenne, Raymond, 94 Bouillenne-Walrand, Marie, 94, 102 Bourbaki, Nicolas, vi, 6, 11, 22–23, 28–37, 39 Bourbaki Congresses, 31 Bourdieu, Pierre, 186 Bourland, Caroline, 96 Boye, Karin, 321 Broocman, Carl Ulric, 9, 13, 237, 251 Browne, Janet, 219 Burckhardt, Jacob, 266 Büsching, Anton Friedrich, 246 Butler, Judith, 3
C Cabanel, Anna, 7, 90, 220 Cabanis, Pierre, 187 California Institute of Technology, 101 Cambridge University, 21, 26 Campe, Joachim Heinrich, 246 Carnegie Corporation, 87 Carson, Cathryn, 219 Cartwright, Mary, 22 Cassell, Joan, 163 Catholic University of Leuven, 99 Centralkommittén, 185 Charle, Christophe, 185–186, 197 Clark, William, 12, 318 Clark, William Smith, 57, 74 Clopatt, Arthur, 156, 158 collaborative culture, 35 Collège de France, 13 Collette, Germaine, 93, 98 colonial ethnographic conventions, 68
colonialism, 56, 59 colonial power relations, 74 Commission for Relief in Belgium Educational Foundation, 7, 83–88, 92, 102 Cox, Brian, viii, 217 creativity, 8, 34, 37, 188–189, 198–202. See also geniality Croner, Fritz, 330 Cuboniks, Laboria, 40 cultural turn, 2 Curie, Marie, 217, 223 D Darwin, Charles, 191, 203, 217, 219, 225 Daston, Lorraine, 2, 3, 10, 55, 85, 138, 151–153, 218, 226, 240, 270, 304, 316, 330 Degard, Marie-Thérèse, 101 De Jans, Irma, 98, 101 Deslandes, Paul, 291 Dickens, Charles, 192 Dickinson, Emily, 59 Dieudonné, Jean, 29 dissection practice, 166 Dongen, Jeroen van, 289 Dony, Françoise, 96 Dove, Alfred, 264, 267, 273 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 263, 266, 269 Dudink, Stefan, 317 Dwelshauvers, George, 300 Dyhouse, Carol, 99 E École normale supérieure, 29 Edmondson, James, 159 educational reform, 239, 244 Eilenberg, Samuel, 32 Ekman, Oskar, 322
INDEX
Eliot, George, 198–199, 201 Ellis, Havelock, 185, 192 Ellis, Heather, 13, 291, 317 embodiment, 4, 5, 8, 10, 12, 13, 114, 127, 183, 184, 218, 240–241, 250, 265, 272 of knowledge, 13 emotional practices, 162 emotions, history, 9, 272 England, nineteenth-century. See London, nineteenth-century Ensmenger, Nathan, 317 epistemic virtues, 4, 8, 176, 182, 226, 238, 242, 251n3, 289 Erdmannsdörffer, Bernhard, 270 Erman, Sarah, 219 eugenics, 188 evaluative culture, 86 Evans, Mary Anne, 199
F Faltin, Richard, 158 Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 288, 294, 295 fellowships career benefits, 121 collective dynamic strategy, 133 elitism, 117 exclusion, 99, 101, 138 gendered, 91, 96, 102–103, 116 programs, 28, 90, 116–117, 122, 134, 138 racialized, 96, 103 travel, 90, 92, 131, 138, 331 femininity(ies), 5, 116–117, 124, 130, 164–168, 264, 290–294, 302, 305 conception of virtue, 290 dissecting room, 156, 159, 163–168 fellowship, 94, 114, 117, 122, 133 scientific field, 127
351
‘university woman’, 7, 114, 117, 122, 137 Fichte, Immanuel Hermann von, 294 Finland, nineteenth-century, 151 First World War, 87, 102, 115, 118, 185, 265, 273, 298, 305, 317 floating college, 72–73 Florkin, Marcel, 91 Foucault, Michel, 12 France, twentieth-century, 198 Francqui, Emile, 87, 92 Franklin, Benjamin, 192 Fredericq, Henri, 91 Freund, Wilhelm Alex, 293 Frevert, Ute, 290 Fritsch, Gustav, 293 Fromm, Erich, 332, 335–336 Fryxell, Anders, 239 funding influence of, 114 royal stipend, 238 See also patronage Furstenhoff, Georgette, 96
G Galison, Peter, 226 Gall, Franz Josef, 187 Gall, Lothar, 290 Galpin, Perrin, 87–96, 101 Galton, Francis, 185, 188, 199 Gay, Hannah, 291 Gay, John, 291 Geijer, Erik Gustaf, 241, 244 gender biographical statements, 218, 227 discrimination, 116, 167 division of labour, 324 fellowships, 91, 103, 116 gender-in-the-making, 305 identities, 22, 117, 128 male-dominated environments, 315
352
INDEX
medical education, 150, 164, 166 natural abilities, 190, 193, 199 performance, 5, 305–306 play, 22–23, 25–27, 38 scientific credibility, 55, 114 “sexless” discourse, 103 travel fellowships, 92–94 universal faculty, 199 See also polar gender model Geneva Medical School (USA), 165 geniality, 8, 188, 196. See also creativity genius, 26–27, 168, 189, 193, 199–201 Georgia Augusta University, 59 Germain, Sophie, 26, 27 Germany nineteenth-century, 9, 13, 262, 271, 279n66, 290, 291 twentieth-century, 261 Gesner, Johan Matthias, 246 Giesebrecht, Wilhelm von, 264, 273 Gildersleeve, Virginia, 116 Goffman, Erving, 3, 137, 228 Golinski, Jan, 317 Gooch, George P., 271 Grauert, Hermann, 263, 268 Great War, 34, 45n63 Greenfield, Susan, 217
H Hägerström, Axel, 319, 320, 323 Hagner, Michael, 189 Hakosalo, Heini, 7, 149, 182 Halmos, Paul, 33 Hanssen, Börje, 336 Haraway, Donna, 305 Hardy, Godfrey Harold, 21–26, 36–40 Hart, Anne, 99 Hausenstein, Wilhelm, 273 Häusser, Ludwig, 270
Hawking, Stephan, 217 hazing, 31, 161, 165 Hecke, Albert van, 91 Hedenius, Ingemar, 321 Heeren, Arnold, 265 Hegel, Friedrich, 199 Heigel, Karl Theodor, 262–263 Heikel, Alfred, 150 Heikel, Rosina, 8, 149, 164, 166 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 266 heredity, 189, 199 Hermann and Cie, 30, 31 Hettling, Manfred, 290 hierarchical discrimination, 89 hierarchy, 56, 57 Hillebrand, Karl, 267 historiography, 9, 13, 38, 152, 290, 327 Høffding, Harald, 191 Hokkaido, 6, 55–75 Hokkaido University, 58 Holmgren, Israel, 156, 160 Homestead Acts, 56 homosociality/homosocial, 5, 37, 64, 70 Hoover, Herbert, 87, 89 Hori Seito, 68 Horney, Karen, 332 Huistra, Pieter, 7, 153 Hungarian Association of University Women, 118 Hungarian Botanical Society, 133 Hungary, interwar, 118, 120–121, 125–127, 129–135 hybrid identities, 225
I identity feminine, 116 gendered, 22, 117. See also gender, identities
INDEX
hybrid, 225. See also hybrid identities masculine, 318 scholarly, v, vi, 3, 6, 248, 331 strategic, 218 Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki, 154 individualism, 318 intellect, 61, 188, 201 intellectual milieu, 250 internalization of research, 22–23, 27–29, 87–88, 116, 131–133, 319, 331, 338 International Education Board, 28, 29 International Federation of University Women (IFUW), 7, 11, 14n10, 104n7, 113–122, 130–134, 137–141n34, 172n21, 220 interwar (period), 7, 85, 86, 88, 92, 116, 132, 326 Israel, Joachim, 336 J Janssen, Johannes, 271 Japan, nineteenth-century, 332 Johns Hopkins University, 84 Joplin, Germaine, 130 K Kaitakushi, 56 Kälvesten, Anna-Lisa, 337 Kane, Elisha Kent, 70 Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, 156 Kelly, Laura, 150, 161 Kessel, Martina, 249, 261, 263 Kiesow, Friedrich, 297 Kingyo, Miyabe, 66 Kirchhoff, Arthur, 292–293 Kitteridge, Tracy B., 337 Kivistö, Sari, 289 Kjellberg, Gerda, 163
353
knowledge, theory of, 319 Kobell, Franz von, 264 Kohler, Robert, 123, 127, 304 Kol, Erzsébet, 7, 11, 113–139 König, Arthur, 292 Krüger, Felix, 298 Külpe, Oswald, 287–288, 299–301
L Ladies Diary, 25 Lancet, 164 Lange, Christian Conrad Ludwig, 296 Lange, Helene, 292 Lange, Ludwig, 288, 296 Latour, Bruno, 331 La Tribu, 31, 44n44 Lee, Katja, 218 Lenz, Max, 271 Lilius, Selma, 156, 163 Lindman, Arvid, 328 Linton, Ralph, 332, 336 Lombroso, Cesare, 188, 192, 196, 199–201, 203 Lombroso, Paola, 196, 200 London, nineteenth-century, 13 London School of Economics, 141n29, 181, 184 Lönnrot, Elias, 194 Lubenow, W.C., 290 Lucas, Prosper, 188 Lüdeke, Christian Wilhelm, 245 Lundberg, George, 332, 336 Lundstedt, Vilhelm, 328 Lynd, Albert, 91
M Magasin för föräldrar och lärare, 241 Maki, John M., 60, 73 Mandelbrojt, Szolem, 29 Marshall, P. David, 10, 218
354
INDEX
masculine virtues, 9, 91, 246, 293, 302, 305 masculinity(ies), 7, 12–13, 34, 65, 71, 249–250, 261–262, 272–273, 315–318, 322 academia, 6, 10, 315–319, 329 adventurer, 69 bourgeois, 10 Christian, 9, 74, 248, 251 colonialism, 74–75 conception of virtues, 290 democratic, 319, 336 elitism, 27 farming, 319 fellowships, 91 homosocial, 5, 62, 64, 69, 70–71, 165, 317 impartiality, 272 international exchange, 319 martyrdom, 9, 248 mathematics, 25–27, 34 military, 303 military virtues, 303 patriotism, 251, 263 performance, 74, 328 pranks, 34, 165 “real” philosopher, 319, 321 relational, 319, 336 religious, 9 scholarly virtues, 9 shared, 262, 303 verbal aggression, 320, 328 “a whole man”, 261, 264 youth, 23, 27 Massachusetts Agricultural College (MAC), 57, 60–65, 72 Mathematical Reviews , 32 mathematics, 6, 21–40 Académie des Sciences , 25 Cambridge University, 26, 27 the French Enlightenment, 25 gendered, 23, 25–27
homosociality, 36–37 individualistic, 36 natural knowledge, 25 physical prowess, 26 play, 22–25, 33 Romantic male genius, 27 social economy, 36, 37 “a young man’s game”, 21–22, 25, 34, 35, 39 youth and, 22, 25–27, 29, 31, 33–34, 37–38 Maus, Marcel, 10 McCloskey, Deirdre, 290, 302 McCormack, Matthew, 290 McHale, Kathryn, 132 McMahon, Darren, 187, 193 medical persona, 8, 12, 150–157, 163–169 medical teaching, history, 151, 172n23 Mehner, Emil Max, 294, 296 Meiji Restoration of 1886, 57 Meuleman, Marie-Thérèse, 101 Milam, Erika, 71 Miller, Nod, 228 Monroe Hammond, Francis, 96 Moore, Chris, 218 moral economy, 9, 288, 304, 306 morality, 66, 242, 243, 326 Morgan, David, 228 Moriarty, Harriet, 100 Mount Holyoke, 88 Müller, Johannes, 291, 299 multiple personae, 263 Münsterberg, Hugo, 288, 293, 299–306 Myrdal, Alva, 334 Myrdal, Gunnar, 330
N natural intellect, 189, 198
INDEX
Niskanen, Kirsti, 10, 55, 139, 153 Nordling, Gunhild, 322. See also Tegen, Gunhild Nordling, Gunnar, 324 Nye, Robert, 71, 291, 302 Nyman, Alf, 328 O Olsthoorn, Peter, 302 online biography, 221 open relationships, 326 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 219 Otis, Laura, 291, 299 P patronage, 6, 7, 28, 35, 38, 39, 41n20, 42n31 Paul, Herman, 4, 9, 55, 151, 152, 157, 167, 182–184, 201, 240–241, 246, 288–290 Peary, Robert, 70, 128 pedagogy, 238, 239, 241, 242, 250 Penhallow, David Pearce, 62–64, 72 performance, viii, 3–5, 7, 8, 12, 31, 56, 70, 74, 103, 122, 126, 138, 162, 183, 191, 200–201, 203, 218–220, 228, 290, 294–296, 303, 305–306, 316, 328 performativity, 10–12, 129, 228 persona bias, 39, 90, 269 bricolage, 122, 219, 240, 333 collective entities, 220 colonialism, 56–58, 68–69, 73–75 definition of, vii–viii, 2–4, 10–13, 55–56, 74, 85–86, 114, 151–154, 182–187, 201–203, 218–220, 240, 263, 270–271, 288–289, 315–317 disciplinary, 4, 6, 9, 12, 23, 39, 138, 262
355
formation, 5, 7, 85–86, 102–103, 171n20 gender connotations, 9, 263, 271, 305 gendered processes, 164 hybrid constructions, 138 innate characteristics, 187 intellectuals, 182, 186–187, 197–198, 200–202 interwar, 89, 102, 220 mask, 32, 316, 322 mediation of, 2 medical, 7, 8, 12, 150–154, 157, 163–169 “multiple selves”, 219 natural self, 187, 192 performative act, 3 race, viii, 9, 57, 64, 68, 96, 103, 132, 203, 219 repertoires, 3, 10, 55, 122, 138, 184, 187 skills and virtues, 12, 127, 157, 167, 182, 201 studies, vii, 3, 10, 12, 56, 151–152, 164, 218 template, 9, 10, 55, 253n15 theory of, 10 university student, 151 See also scholarly persona personality, 90, 93, 96, 102, 182, 187–188, 192, 199–203, 220, 272, 321, 330 Pertz, Georg Heinrich, 267 Pestalozzi, Johan Heinrich, 246–248, 251 Phalén, Adolf, 319–322 Philippson, Martin, 271 philosophy, 22, 24, 93, 98, 191, 199, 294, 318–323, 327–330, 332–334, 337, 338 Phrenology, 188 Pickett, Lucy, 96
356
INDEX
Pissoort, Elisabeth, 83–84, 95, 103 play, v, vii, 6, 22–27, 33, 36–39, 87, 92, 114, 124, 130–132, 167–169, 224 polar gender model, 263, 272, 279n66 Possel, René de, 29 postcolonial, 73 posthumous influence, 250 pranks, 8, 23, 31–33, 161 professional acculturation, 158 professional repertoires, 154 pseudonym, vi, 6, 22, 26, 30–34, 42n25, 44n49, 46n74, 47n79 psychology, history of, 13, 328 public intellectual(s), 8, 10, 133, 182– 184, 190, 197–198, 201–202, 217, 288, 292, 331 international contacts, 131
R race. See persona, race Racine, Aimée, 102 Radcliffe, 88 Raj, Kapil, 11, 73 Ramanujan, Srinivasa, 26–27 Ranke, Leopold von, 262, 267–272 Rein, Thiodolf, 191 religion, 191, 320 Rhodes Scholarship program, 87, 90 Richardson, Ruth, 150, 160 Rich, Catherine, 100 Rickert, Heinrich, 300 Riezler, Sigmund, 263 Rizzolo, Lawrence J., 158 Roberts, Lissa, 11 Robinson, Michael, 70, 128 Rockefeller Foundation, 6, 11, 28–33, 43n35, 87, 92–93, 117, 331–334 Rodrick, David, 336 Rogers, Lenette, 91, 99
Rommein, Annie, 223 Rose, Wickliffe, 29 Rossiter, Margaret, 89 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 192 Royal Society, 22 Royal University of Franz, 118 Rupp, Leila, 115
S Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf, 246, 247, 251 Sand, George, 199 Sappol, Michael, 150, 165 Sapporo Agricultural College (SAC), 58, 64–68 Sapporo Independent Church, 67 Sat¯ o, Sh¯ osuke, 65, 66 Saturday Evening Post , 34 Schäfer, Dietrich, 270 Scheer, Monique, 162 Schlosser, Friedrich Christoph, 271 Schmidt, Erich, 292 Schnicke, Falko, 13, 249, 262, 271 scholarly persona biographical narrative, 30, 32–33, 115, 122–123, 133, 138, 150, 169, 218, 221, 262 constellation of commitments, 152, 289, 304 constellation of virtues, 8, 152, 288 definition, 2, 151, 182, 289, 316–317 exclusivity, 183, 187, 197 explorer repertoire, 127 gendered, 11, 288, 317 genius, 187 isolation, 318 objectivity, 320 online, 12, 216–221, 225–228 professorial voice, 8, 12, 220, 226 religion, 322
INDEX
scientific travel, 85, 250, 331 self-presentation, vii, 8, 11, 240, 271 social media, 216–221, 225 Western bourgeois virtues, 290 scholarly repertoires, 250, 289, 338 morality, 242 virtues, 242 scholarly template, 238 gendered, 240 scholarly virtues and vices, 238 scholarship exchange programs, 87–89 Schouteden-Wéry, Joséphine, 219 Schreiterer, Ulrich, 290 Schweber, Sam, 219 science communication, 215–218, 221 science communicators, 8, 216, 220–221, 225–228 science denial, 217, 225 Scientific American, 33, 42n25, 45n58 scientific persona formation, 114 Scott-Smith, Giles, 86, 115 Scouvart, Alice, 83, 84 Second World War, 34–35, 87 selfhood, 7, 182, 189, 218 Sellin, Thorsten, 332 Shaler, Millard, 83–84, 87, 92–96 Shapin, Steven, 3, 133, 137, 184, 249, 289, 291, 304–305 Shaw, George Bernard, 185 Sibum, H. Otto, 2–3, 10, 55, 85, 138, 151–153, 218, 240, 270, 316, 330 situated identities, 2 Siwertz, Sigurd, 321 Smith, Bonnie G., 271, 291 Smith College, 91, 96 Smithsonian Institute, 129 social distinction, 186, 203 Société Mathématique de France, 33 Spencer, Herbert, 188, 191–192
357
Staël, Germaine de, 199 Striedinger, Ivo, 273 Svanfeldt-Winter, Lisa, 182–183 Svartz, Nanna, 157 Sweden nineteenth-century, 9, 237, 243 twentieth-century, 327 Sweden Wallenberg Foundation, 331 Sybel, Heinrich von, 267, 270–271 T Taine, Hippolyte, 189 Tall Poppy Syndrome, 222, 224, 227 Taylor, W. Randolph, 119, 121, 130 Tegen, Einar, 10–13, 316–339 Tegen, Gunhild, 323–326, 330, 332, 335. See also Nordling, Gunhild Tegen, Martin, 320 Thompson, E.P., 304 Thompson, John, 336 Thucydides, 267 Thunberg, Sven, 329 Tingsten, Herbert, 330 Tisdale, W.E., 29 Tjeder, David, 249 Tournès, Ludovic, 86, 115 travel and exploration writing, 128 travel fellowship, 92. See also fellowships, travel Treitschke, Heinrich von, 263–272, 292 Trygger, Ernst, 328 Tuck, Hallam, 87, 93–96 Tyson, Neil deGrasse, 217 U Uchida, Kiyoshi, 67 Uchimura, Kanz¯o, 67 Ulrici, Hermann, 294 UNESCO, 35 United Negro College Fund, 117
358
INDEX
United States interwar, 85 nineteenth-century, 150, 165 twentieth-century, 304 University Foundation, Belgium, 87, 92–95, 100 University of Michigan, 119 University of Nancago, 30 University of Nancy, 30 University of Wisconsin in Madison, 98 U.S. Indian Policy, 56 V Van Hauwaert, Marguerite, 102 Veblen, Oswald, 36 virtue, vii, 4, 9, 22, 123, 152, 167– 168, 186, 202–203, 238–245, 247–251, 263, 266–271, 277, 288–291, 302–306, 320 W Wachsmuth, Wilhelm, 269 Waitz, Georg, 262, 267, 268, 270–271 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 185 Walton, Whitney, 98 Warner, John Harley, 150, 157–160 Weber, Ernst Heinrich, 294–295
Weber, Max, 268 Weier, Thomas, 94 Weil, André, 29, 33 Wellmon, Chad, 243 Wessén, Elias, 334 Westermarck, Edward, 8, 181–185, 190–193, 197, 201 Westermarck, Helena, 8, 165, 182, 184, 198–202 Wheeler, William, 61–64, 69, 72 Wiggers, Johann Georg, 265 Wils, Kaat, 7, 55, 139, 153 Wolke, Christian Heinrich, 246 women gender, 85, 116, 132, 139, 223 scientists (female scientists), 84, 94, 103, 114–115, 117, 119, 129–130, 131, 133–134, 136–138, 168, 200, 227 Wundt, Wilhelm, 9, 287–288, 291 Y youth, 181, 193–195, 243, 248. See also mathematics, youth and Z Ziegler, Fredrich von, 264 Zola, Émile, 189 Zöllner, Friedrich, 294, 296