Geoscience Reference
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earthquake researchers who are working more in the open-minded spirit of
von Humboldt.”
15
Following the trail of the methods of observational seismology thus
leads to a remarkable comparison. In states as different as republican
Switzerland, imperial Austria, progressive-era California, and Communist
China, a similar system of “citizen science” flourished. We can conclude
that seismology's cultivation of amateurs made it ideologically useful to
very different political regimes. As Fan points out, “citizen science” is an in-
herently political concept, an outgrowth of the “ideology, institutions, and
functions of a state.” As we have seen, seismic observing networks served as
testing grounds for a remarkable range of political principles—populism in
Comrie, anarchism in San Francisco, multinationalism in imperial Austria.
Both the Swiss in the late nineteenth century and the Chinese in the 1960s
and 1970s used seismological networks to inculcate scientific habits and a
sense of national unity. Both states fostered a scientific epistemology that
prioritized mass participation. As Fan observes, the mobilization of citizens
to produce knowledge of environmental hazard has been a basic tactic of
nation-building in very different political contexts.
16
This analogy between direct democracy and totalitarianism might cast
doubt on the alleged potential of citizen science to democratize the sciences.
Yet we should recognize the limits of the comparison. Nineteenth-century
seismology stands out for the modesty with which its practitioners ap-
proached the public. Maoist science was instead “mostly top-down despite
its claim of the mass line.”
17
Moreover, the Chinese demanded observations
of phenomena that, by definition, preceded earthquakes. They relied on
instruments, not observers, for records of ground movement. Nineteenth-
century seismology, by contrast, asked observers to record the moment
of potential catastrophe. It explicitly placed the conditions of knowledge
under investigation, subverting Kant's division between the pragmatic and
the critical. Whether in China, Europe, or the United States, seismology
since the 1930s has avoided that radical move. As scientists canvassing sur-
vivors of the 1994 Northridge earthquake put it, “We emphasize that this
questionnaire was constructed to study earthquake intensities and not the
sociological and psychological aspects of human response to earthquake
shaking.”
18
Translation
As I write, six seismologists face charges of manslaughter in Italy because of
an alleged failure of public communication. These scientists and one gov-
