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Book Review
| Global Institutions and Social Knowledge: Generating Research at the Scripps Institution and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, 1900s–1990s. By Virginia M. Walsh. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. xvi + 171 pp. Figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index. Paper $20.00.
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| It is deeply unfortunate that Virginia Walsh died before she could finish her study of how institutions and institutional players shape and create scientific knowledge. By posthumously publishing her work, Sandeep Prasada has allowed us to see at least where she was heading in her thoughts about the interaction between knowledge production, belief creation, and institutional agents. |
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Walsh focuses on the roles that Scripps Institution of Oceanography played in U.S. relations to the sea from the 1900s to the 1990s, correctly highlighting the ontological questions that arise in oceanographic research. Arguing for an "institutional approach" that navigates between neorealist and interest-group analytical schools in current international relations literature, she borrows from both political science theory and new constructivist trends in the history of science. She argues, "Human beliefs about environmental problems—whether they exist, how severe they are—shape human action. To understand social action, therefore, we must develop some explanation as to how people, either individually or in groups, form beliefs." For Walsh, the explanation comes from analyzing how three forms of "fixes"—the positional fix, the statutory fix, and the committee fix—allowed Scripps to affect and shape their investigations of the oceans throughout the twentieth century. |
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In the early twentieth century, consecutive directors at Scripps used their position to affect how scientists pursued their research agendas. After World War II, Scripps embraced research to heighten American Cold War submarine and atomic technologies, hybrid institutions that put Scripps' directors in joint roles as researchers and as political agents. These case studies provide Walsh with her foundational study of a positional fix in action. With the advent of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), Walsh demonstrates a statutory fix by examining how treaty language—in this case reliance upon maximum-sustainable-yield theories—established ontological realities on which future legislation would be enacted. Finally, with such beliefs cemented, she shows how scientific committees tied to the IATTC also shaped and created beliefs on which future action would be taken. |
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As a whole, while Walsh targets an international relations readership, the work raises important questions for those interested in environmental and marine environmental studies. By questioning how social institutions combine with empirical observation for the creation of scientific knowledge—the hallmark of constructivism as laid out by Jan Golinski (Making Natural Knowledge, Cambridge, 1998)—Walsh forces us to see that environmental knowledge rests as much upon who has the authority to speak for nature as on the information generated in the study of that nature. Furthermore, by focusing on an oceanographic institution, she highlights the particular ontological challenges faced by anyone seeking understandings of the oceans. As her discussion of the IATTC reveals, these complexities, discussed by Keith Benson, Helen Rozwadowski, and David van Keuren (The Machine in Neptune's Garden, Science History Publications, 2004) arise when one must rely upon technological and instrumental proxies to study an environment where humans cannot exist for long periods. Finally, Walsh's discussion of different mechanisms by which beliefs are established—positional, statutory, and committee—offers environmental historians new tools to take to their own work on the confluence of natural knowledge and social behavior. |
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The current work reflects the stage where Walsh left her work. Discussions of Scripps' activities are brief, and while useful as an overview, they lack the detail that surely would have helped her make her case. Furthermore, some will find the assumptions she makes factually and structurally troubling. For example, Walsh claims that there was little economic role for Scripps in the early twentieth century—or marine science in general—thereby freeing the institution from interest-group or governmental influence. Studies in the history of science have shown for some time the difficulty in claiming that science and scientists can be isolated from the larger social context. Furthermore, such a claim clashes with the U.S. Fish Commission's interest in fish culture and its application of scientific methods and federal resources to expand U.S. fisheries industries dating back to the 1880s. Yet such discrepancies reflect more the unfinished nature of the work rather than problems with the work itself, and surely would have been corrected. |
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Ultimately, Walsh's untimely passing cut short a provocative study that, had she been able to expand her ideas, would have been a strong contribution to both environmental historians and international relations scholars alike. As it stands, however, this makes clear the need to question how we understand the oceans, who has that knowledge, how they use that knowledge, and how a society shapes its beliefs around such knowledge. For environmental historians, and the increasing number of marine environmental historians, this work offers important new ways to approach human understandings of and behaviors toward our environment. |
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Matthew G. McKenzie is maritime studies faculty at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. |
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