"No former travellers having attained such a height on the earth’s surface”: Instruments, inscriptions, and bodies in the Himalaya, 1800-1830
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Authors
Publication Date
2018-03Journal Title
History of Science
ISSN
0073-2753
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Language
English
Type
Article
This Version
AM
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Fleetwood, L. (2018). "No former travellers having attained such a height on the earth’s surface”: Instruments, inscriptions, and bodies in the Himalaya, 1800-1830. History of Science https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275317732254
Abstract
East India Company surveyors began gaining access to the high Himalaya in the 1810s, at a time when the mountains were taking on increasing political significance as the northern borderlands of British India. Though never as idiosyncratic as surveyors insisted, these were spaces in which instruments, fieldbook inscriptions, and bodies were all highly prone to failure. The ways surveyors managed these failures (both rhetorically and in practice) demonstrate the social performances required to establish credible knowledge in a world in which the senses were scrambled. The resulting tensions reveal an ongoing disconnect in understanding between those displaced not only from London, but also from Calcutta, something insufficiently emphasized in previous histories of colonial science. By focusing on the early nineteenth century, often overlooked in favor of the later period, this article shows the extent to which the scientific, imaginative, and political constitution of the Himalaya was haphazard and contested.
Keywords
Himalaya, India, colonial science, surveying, instruments, bodies, senses, notebooks, borderlands
Sponsorship
The author is grateful to the Cambridge Commonwealth, European, and International Trust, Clare College, and the University of Cambridge Fieldwork Fund for support in conducting the research for this article.
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275317732254
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/267867
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