Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
e i g h t
What is the earth?
the establishment of the international Seismological Association (iSA)
in Strasbourg in 1901 was, in the words of its founder, georg gerland, a
case of “nations uniting for collaborative, idealistic work.”
1
gerland even
suggested that the iSA's members could “call themselves apostles of world
peace.”
2
As a humboldtian quest to integrate local geology, global physics,
and the anthropology of disaster, seismology would seem ideally suited
to internationalism.
3
Yet the iSA represents a contentious episode in the
un
making of disaster as a scientific object. gerland's version of scientific in-
ternationalism pried the earthquake apart into (1) a geophysical cause, ac-
cessible only to instrumental analysis, and (2) a human impact, the object
exclusively of an “anthropomorphic” gaze. the story of the iSA manifests
incongruities between the global visions of scientific modernizers and the
local realities of communities at risk. Such tensions are part of what Jeremy
Vetter has recently described as a persistent conflict between “the globalizing
and universalizing ambitions of modern knowledge-making and the practi-
cal needs of a world of tremendously complex and variable environments
whose knowing matters so much for human survival and sustainability.”
4
the iSA was founded at a pivotal moment in the history of what his-
torians have recently labeled “the observatory sciences.” taking both the
heavens and the earth as their subjects, these fields shared a humboldtian
focus on precision measurement, numerical data processing, and the repre-
sentation of scientific information on a global or cosmic scale. At the turn
of the twentieth century, the observatory sciences were uncertainly poised
between a nineteenth-century dream of popular enlightenment and the im-
peratives of scientific professionalization and military-industrial develop-
ment.
5
What form seismology would take as an international, observatory
