“Sense and the science of nineteenth-century environmental determinism,”

In 1865, nineteen-year-old William Healey Dall was appointed second in command of the Western Union Telegraph Expedition Scientific Corps. The expedition aim was to gauge the feasibility of running a telegraph wire overland from California to Europe by way of the Bering Strait. U.S. Congress, operating under the aegis of the Smithsonian Institution, commissioned a Scientific Corps to capitalize on the expedition infrastructure through the collection of regional things, intelligence, and beings. This contribution follows Dall’s use of the mollusks he collected as specimens into the scientific discourses they were called upon to shape. It unpacks how specimens and specimen collections were leveraged as evidence for environmentally deterministic perspectives, and how object-based classificatory practices and theories of biotic development hatched in the natural sciences were brought to bear on analyses of human culture. In so doing, it also proposes a means of excavating how the mode of subjectivity that is sensation, accumulated in the everyday work of science-making, figured alongside more formally trained methods and theories into the formation of scientific knowledge about environs beyond the ken of Euro-American science. The premise here is that the analysis of the things, practices, and theories employed in one researcher’s diagnosis of Beringia as an adverse environment, alongside the field diaries, correspondence, and other materials relating to his time in the field, has the potential to lend unique insight into how embodied experience entered the purview of what has historically constituted objective knowledge about the environment.