SciCoMove researchers at the 26th International congress of History of Science and Technology (ICHST 2021, Prague)

On July 30, 2021 – Laura Chazaro, Susana Garcia, Irina Podgorny, and Nathalie Richard presented their research at the 26th International congress of History of Science and Technology, Prague.

The panel organized by Irina Podgorny and Nathalie Richard was entitled “Amateurs and vocational scientists: places of encounters, networks and scientific practices (19th Century)”.

Susana García (CONICET, Museo de La Plata, Argentina), “The pilot’s house and the local pilots’s collaboration in the scientific-naval expeditions in the Patagonian coast”

This paper examines a particular node of encounter and circulation of information during the first half of the 19th century: the “pilot’s house” at the mouth of the Río Negro, in Patagonia. From that place, the pilots watched over the navigation in the area and facilitated the entrance to the port of Carmen de Patagones, the southernmost town of the South American Atlantic coast at that time. Expert captains of the Patagonian navigation offered their services as pilots to merchant ships and naval expeditions. They also got engage in corsair activities, coastal trade and seal hunting. They provided reports and assisted in hydrographic surveys and they took the opportunity to copy maps and talk about the things of nature. In 1832, Captain Robert Fitz-Roy hired the services of two of these English pilots and their boats to carry out the hydrographic survey of the Patagonian coast along with officers of the HSM Beagle. The following year, Darwin stayed at the pilots’ house and talked to them about these works. This paper argues that the sites such as the Pilot’s house in Patagonia operated as places of sociability and information exchange among seafarers, travellers and residents

Laura Chazaro (CINVESTAV, Mexico City, Mexico), “The Pass of Cortés and its messengers of science: measurements and experiments at high altitudes in nineteenth-century Mexico”

In today’s world, laboratories are conceived as spaces reserved for experts, inaccessible to the inexpert, but this has not always been the case. In this paper, I seek to demonstrate how laboratories, the uses of precision instruments and their production, occupy other spaces and establish relations with subjects and objects foreign to the enterprises themselves. While producing knowledge and objects (vaccines, active ingredients, tissues) experimentalists interact with amateurs, peasants and travellers. Scientific practices, then, are produced outside the chambers of experimentation. To illustrate this, I discuss the various experiences and measurements conducted in a mountain refuge located in Paso de Cortés (3,400 m.a.s.l.) between the two great volcanoes of Mexico’s high central plain, Popocatepétl and Iztaccíhuatl. From Von Humboldt’s visit to New Spain (1803) to medical research in the late 19th century on high altitude respiration, this space summoned experts, indigenous peasants and the nature of the mountain itself to create barometric and thermometric measurements and, later, measurements of respiratory capacity and the number of red blood cells, as well as the cardiac resistance of animals, individuals both sick and healthy, and Mestizos and Indigenous. Laboratory instruments were installed in Paso de Cortés, the site where Hernán Cortés planned his Conquest of Tenochtitlan. The measurements and experiences produced there would later be transformed in the laboratories of the School of Medicine into legitimate evidence for a debate involving European theories about the respiratory capacity of the Indigenous and Mestizos at high altitude

Irina Podgorny (CONICET, Museo de La Plata, Argentina) and Nathalie Richard (TEMOS UMR CNRS 9016, Le Mans University, France), “Archaeology at the Hotel, Paleontology at the Café: scientific encounters in unexpected places

Through several case studies (the megalith site of Carnac, the collection of fossil bones from the Argentine Pampas), this paper will focus on the central role of unexpected locations in the development of archaeology and paleontology in the 19th Century. Hotels in France, a “chacra” in Uruguay, these facilities not only provided accommodation for traveling naturalists, tourists and passing archaeologists, but also displayed collections gathered by local collectors and/or their owners. These owners sometimes turned into experts, and became locally or globally renowned. In villages and small towns far from scholarly institutions (universities and learned societies), sometimes in larger cities outside the Western world, these locations were a central place for encounters between various actors, for the fabrication of science, the circulation of information and the sharing of know-how.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nathalie Richard (September 20, 2021). SciCoMove researchers at the 26th International congress of History of Science and Technology (ICHST 2021, Prague). SciCoMove — Scientific Collections on the Move. Retrieved May 19, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/twrp


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