[Marxism] Cliff Conner talk

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Last night Cliff Conner spoke at the Brecht Forum about his new book 
"People's History of Science". He sent me a copy of his talk that can be 
read at: http://www.marxmail.org/cliff_conner.htm.

Here is an excerpt:

>>With regard to the past, I?m trying to show that science was not created 
out of the minds of great individuals, but was always a collective 
endeavor, and that the collective always included large numbers of working 
people­people who worked with their hands as well as their minds. The 
traditional way that history of science is discussed is in terms of the 
contributions of individual geniuses like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, or 
Einstein. I?m not trying to say that what those famous figures did was 
useless or uninteresting, but that there is much, much more to the history 
of science than that. And it?s that ?much more?­the collective 
contributions of many, many anonymous people­that has traditionally been 
ignored.

Some of the examples that I cite are not of anonymous people­a few of their 
names have actually been preserved in the historical record. An example is 
Onesimus, the African slave responsible for introducing the knowledge of 
smallpox prevention to North America early in the eighteenth century. 
Onesimus?s contribution represented a major leap forward in the science of 
epidemiology. But he didn?t create the knowledge he transmitted; that was 
produced by the experimentation of who-knows-how-many thousands of his 
African forebears, whose names, of course, are unknown to us. I tell 
Onesimus?s story in the book, but his name has to represent those anonymous 
Africans as well. The same is true of Tupaia, a Polynesian navigator whose 
name we happen to know because it was recorded in Captain Cook?s journals. 
Tupaia and a few others have to stand in for the many generations of 
Polynesian navigators whose knowledge of the Pacific enriched the sciences 
of oceanography, geography, and cartography.<<

There's a new website associated with the book with ordering instructions 
at: http://www.peopleshistoryofscience.com/

I have begun reading it for a review in Swans. Although I have only gotten 
to close to the end of the first chapter, I can recommend it as deeply 
illuminating and inspiring work. This book is a must.

--

www.marxmail.org


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