Cosmologies Materialized: History of Science and History of Ideas

On History for the Present: Revisiting George Stocking's Influential Rejection of “Presentism”

“…Indeed, this celebrated “revolution” in science was widely identified as the turning point to modernity, when stultifying traditional dogma yielded to modern, free‐thinking rational inquiry, laying the groundwork (so it was suggested) for Euro‐American liberal democracy. In the mid‐twentieth century, this foundational narrative of twinned scientific and civilizational progress was baked into the general education curriculum of Harvard College, which Stocking attended (Tresch , 157), and it was extended to anthropology by Stocking's graduate mentor at the University of Pennsylvania, A. Irving Hallowell, who narrated the rise of scientific anthropology as the culminating product of a Euro‐American trajectory of cultural evolution . But Stocking, like many of his peers, reacted strongly against these ideas, which increasingly came to seem suspect as the Cold War hardened and the Vietnam War began.…”

Burning worlds of cartography: a critical approach to climate cosmograms of the Anthropocene

“…In the following I will discuss how, by simply employing the colour range from blue to red and purple to mark temperatures that political implications and emotions (like fear of doomsday) are inevitably attached to scientific graphs and maps – and why it is impossible to get rid of dissonant rational and emotional reactions when confronted with scientific climate change imagery. As a consequence of my pictorial analysis, I will discuss the imagery of burning worlds in a cosmogrammatic framework derived from the approach by John Tresch (). For this purpose I will relate the climate world maps to the long tradition of cosmic views of Earth from outer space before and after the Apollo program, most prominently the Earth photographs by NASA ‘Earth‐rise’ (1968) and ‘Blue Marble’ (1972).…”

“…In conclusion and in placing red future world maps within the context of a universal narrative, I would like to use the term cosmograms in the burning world's discussion, adapting the general argument of historian of science and anthropologist John Tresch and applying it to red climate maps (Tresch ). Cosmology is defined as a certain worldview that tells the fate of the world (often by gathering and interpreting astronomical data), the origin and evolution of the universe but also its eventual fate – the Earth's fate being the fate of all human cosmologies.…”

“…Even though the data maps of possible climate futures have not been constructed for meditation in the first place, switching to a cosmological perspective here is productive. Regarded as cosmograms, the red maps can be seen as representing a modern scientific ‘materialized cosmology’ (Tresch , 164), designed by ‘visioneers’ (McCray )…”

“…Being thus regarded, it also applies to the totalised images of climate futures that ‘cosmological ideas take on realist force when they are anchored, housed, and transmitted objects, technical networks, routine practices, and social institutions’ (Tresch , 162). It is for this reason why it is so important to approach such images critically because of associated totalising concepts and holism, although it will be very difficult to enrich and complement the predominant scientific understanding of the world and find alternative ways to interpret and materialise the fate of the World.…”