Monday, 28 September 2015 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Steven Weinberg, UT Physics Department

“Keeping an Eye on the Present”

How does the history of science look through the eyes of a working scientist?
In his most recent book, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern
Science (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven
Weinberg says that “Today’s research can be aided and illuminated by a
knowledge of the past”; more pointedly, he argues that our current scientific
knowledge can shed useful light on past scientific efforts. Weinberg’s aim, he says, is not just to recount a sequence of scientific advances, but to shed light on “how we came to learn how to learn about the world.”

To Explain the World has already stirred up considerable controversy, in large
part because in it Weinberg comes close, as he says, “to the dangerous ground
that is most carefully avoided by contemporary historians, of judging the past
by the standards of the present,” and so of practicing what is often attacked
as “whig history.” In “Keeping an Eye on the Present,” he will offer what he calls “a gentle defense of the whig interpretation of the history of science.”

Bruce Hunt of the UT History Department will respond to Professor Weinberg’s talk and start off the discussion.
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Steven Weinberg is widely regarded as the most distinguished theoretical physicist in the world today. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in
1979, and since 1982 he has been the Josey Regental Professor of Science at
the University of Texas and the head of the Theory Group in the Department of Physics. He has written over 350 scientific papers and fifteen books, including standard works on general relativity and on quantum field theory. He is also noted essayist and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His most recent book, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, was published by HarperCollins earlier this year.

Friday, 25 September 2015 — 12:00 noon — WAG 316

Christopher Heaney, University of Texas

“The Pre-Columbian Exchange; or Crosby, Syphilis, and Peruvian Trepanation, Revisited”

This presentation revisits Alfred W. Crosby’s groundbreaking The Columbian Exchange to re-consider the assumptions behind its construction. Firstly, and most briefly, the lack of exchange between the Americas and the rest of the world before 1492, and the possible limitations that assumption places on deep indigenous history. Secondly, and less speculatively, the moral stakes of the exchange of New World biota for Old World biota, and Old World disease for New World disease—smallpox for syphilis. Whereas the rest of The Columbian Exchange is undisputed, the argued New World origin of syphilis continues to be a source of debate, underlining the moral stakes of its diagnosis and transmission. Without Indian syphilis to European smallpox, does ‘The Columbian Exchange’ become even more unbalanced? Is its New World presence disputed because of its identification as an index of ‘miscegenation’? Lastly, what does it mean to define a disease’s history by its pre-European origins, but not its pre-European treatment? How does a Columbian Exchange of disease occlude Pre-Columbian indigenous exchange?

The second half of the paper turns to an indigenous Peruvian who engaged in such a thought experiment well before Crosby. In the early twentieth century, a Harvard-trained archaeologist named Julio C. Tello used pre-Columbian ceramic depictions of disease, bones collected from pre-Columbian mummy bundles, and trepanned pre-Columbian skulls to argue that syphilis was not only indigenous to the New World—and not brought by enslaved Africans, as many white scholars tellingly believed in the nineteenth century—but that it had also been diagnosed and treated by Indian surgeons long before Columbus. In other words, Tello argued that before the Columbian Exchange made Indians seem like they were ‘born to die,’ they had access to a pre-Columbian reservoir of knowledge by which they healed to live—whose legacy Tello believed the Indians of the Americas deserved to reclaim.

Christopher Heaney is an advanced doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. His first book, Cradle of Gold (2010), explored the fight between Peru and Yale University over the Inca artifacts and human remains excavated at Machu Picchu in 1912. His SSRC- and Fulbright-Hays-supported doctoral research explores the European encounter with Inca and “ancient Peruvian” dead from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. It argues that the intellectual and physical circulation of Inca mummies and trepanned skulls provided a common material base of comparison for what became archaeology in the Americas, as well as an indigenous anthropology that esteemed pre-colonial Peruvian ancestry, mortuary knowledge, and sovereignty.