This highly original study puts forward the notion that every culture has its own ways of assembling local knowledge, thereby creating space through the linking of people, practices and places.

In an eclectic and highly original study, Turnbull brings together traditions as diverse as cathedral building, Micronesian navigation, cartography and turbulence research. He argues that all our differing ways of producing knowledge - including science - are messy, spatial and local. Every culture has its own ways of assembling local knowledge, thereby creating space thrugh the linking of people, practices and places. The spaces we inhabit and assemblages we work with are not as homogenous and coherent as our modernist perspectives have led us to believe - rather they are complex and heterogeneous motleys.

“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University

Locations of Knowledge in Dutch Contexts brings together scholars who shed light on the ways locations gave shape to scientific knowledge practices in the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This interdisciplinary volume uses four hundred years of Dutch history as a laboratory to investigate spatialized understandings of the history of knowledge. By conceptualizing locations of knowing as time-specific configurations of actors, artefacts, and activities, contributors to this volume not only examine cities as specific kind of locations, but also analyze the regionally and globally networked and transformative character of locations. Many of the locations which are studied in this volume are still visible until the present day. Contributors are Azadeh Achbari, Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, Alette Fleischer, Floor Haalboom, Marijn Hollestelle, Dirk van Miert, Ilja Nieuwland, Abel Streefland, Andreas Weber, Martin Weiss, Gerhard Wiesenfeldt, and Huib Zuidervaart.

Prior to 1735, South America was terra incognita to many Europeans. But that year, the Paris Academy of Sciences sent a mission to the Spanish American province of Quito (in present-day Ecuador) to study the curvature of the earth at the Equator. Equipped with quadrants and telescopes, the mission’s participants referred to the transfer of scientific knowledge from Europe to the Andes as a “sacred fire” passing mysteriously through European astronomical instruments to observers in South America.By taking an innovative interdisciplinary look at the traces of this expedition, Measuring the New World examines the transatlantic flow of knowledge from West to East. Through ephemeral monuments and geographical maps, this book explores how the social and cultural worlds of South America contributed to the production of European scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment. Neil Safier uses the notebooks of traveling philosophers, as well as specimens from the expedition, to place this particular scientific endeavor in the larger context of early modern print culture and the emerging intellectual category of scientist as author.

Making creates knowledge, builds environments and transforms lives. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture are all ways of making, and all are dedicated to exploring the conditions and potentials of human life. In this exciting book, Tim Ingold ties the four disciplines together in a way that has never been attempted before. In a radical departure from conventional studies that treat art and architecture as compendia of objects for analysis, Ingold proposes an anthropology and archaeology not of but with art and architecture. He advocates a way of thinking through making in which sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to, or ‘correspond’, with one another in the generation of form. Making offers a series of profound reflections on what it means to create things, on materials and form, the meaning of design, landscape perception, animate life, personal knowledge and the work of the hand. It draws on examples and experiments ranging from prehistoric stone tool-making to the building of medieval cathedrals, from round mounds to monuments, from flying kites to winding string, from drawing to writing. The book will appeal to students and practitioners alike, with interests in social and cultural anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art and design, visual studies and material culture.

In this book the main trends, concepts and directions in cartography and mapping in modernism and post-modernism are reviewed. Philosophical and epistemological issues are analysed in cartography from positivist-empiricist, neo-positivist and post-structuralist stances. In general, in cartography technological aspects have been considered as well as theoretical issues. The aim is to highlight the epistemological and philosophical viewpoint during the development of the discipline. Some main philosophers who have been influential for contemporary thinking such as Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell, are considered. None of these philosophers wrote about cartography directly (excepting Kant), but their philosophies are related to cartography and mapping issues. The book also analyses the concept of paradigm or paradigm shift coined by Thomas Kuhn, who applied it to the history of science. Different cartographic trends that have arisen since the second half of the twentieth century are analysed according to this important concept which is implicit inside the scientific or disciplinary communities. Further, the authors analyse the position of cartography in the context of the sciences and other disciplines, adopting a positivistic point of view. Additionally, they review current trends in cartography and mapping in the context of information and communication technologies in a post-modernistic or post-structuralistic framework. Thus, since the 1980s and 1990s, new mapping concepts have arisen which challenge the discipline’s traditional map conceptions.