Livingstone, David (1953–)

The history of geography was in some ways rewritten in David N. Livingstone's influential volume The Geographical Tradition (1992), which constituted both an important new disciplinary history and an attempt to write geography's history differently. Setting his work apart from textbook accounts and “in-house” disciplinary histories, Livingstone's book related the development of geography more closely to its broader social and intellectual contexts than had previous works, from Enlightenment challenges to classical authority, to the colonially acquisitive age of reconnaissance, to the age of statistics and the modern government and academic institutions of the late 20th century. Drawing on wider debates in the history of science, Livingstone demonstrated that geographical knowledge could be understood as a cultural product of, and political resource for, the times and places in which it was produced. He thus took up key questions raised in the postmodern turn in the history and philosophy of science—revolving around the demythologization of science as the objective, disinterested pursuit of knowledge—and explored their implications for the “messy” and applied contexts associated with the Western geographical tradition.

Built on theoretically informed and rigorous historical scholarship, Livingstone's work helped open geography's history to more reflexive and, at times, critical interpretations, and it did so by adding to, rather than detracting from, the historical richness of the field. Livingstone brought to these questions analytical skills honed in unraveling the complex interrelations of 19th-century science and religion. In works such as Darwin's Forgotten Defenders (1987), which focuses on some 19th-century theologians, and The Preadamite Theory and the Marriage of Science and Religion (1992), Livingstone challenged the “conflict model” of relations between science and religion, incorporating a broad sense of the intellectual diversity present in strains of Christian and evolutionary thought. In the North American context, Livingstone also contributed a major scientific biography of the Harvard physiographer Nathaniel Southgate Shaler. This work (1987) explores the interplay of regionalism, race, class, and science that shaped Shaler's late-19th-century career and offers, through Shaler, a vital portrait of the Cambridge scientific community during the 1870s and 1880s, when Darwinism shook the intellectual landscape.

Livingstone's close attention to historical context has been matched by a concern for situating scientific actors in their spatial and geographical settings. In a series of papers during the 1990s, Livingstone pushed geographers and historians to consider how particular geographical arrangements of scientific knowledge and knowledge-making practices were critical to what science is and how it has worked. Whether conceptualized in terms of specialized architectural spaces, the research field, or other local settings for scientific activities, in terms of national scientific cultures and institutions and varied national receptions of scientific ideas, or through the spatial relations and patterns of circulation that make such scientific spaces possible, notions of a geography of science, and the geography of geographical knowledge in particular, have emerged as cutting-edge fields, at both the subdisciplinary and the interdisciplinary levels. Livingstone elaborated some of these ideas in a slim volume, Putting Science in Its Place (2003), an elegant formulation of the geography of scientific knowledge as framed by three spatial categories: (1) sites (archetypal sites, venues of science), (2) regions (regional differences in scientific culture, uneven development of science), and (3) circulation (movement, mapping, scientific travel, spatial relations, diffusion). Bringing together scholarship in the history of science with the history and geography of geographical knowledge, Livingstone has also edited, with Charles Withers, recent collections such as Geography and Enlightenment and Geography and Revolution.

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