An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Philippe Bernhard Schmid (Centre for Research Collections Fellow 2023; University of St Andrews)
Brokerage & Materiality: The Scottish Enlightenment and the New Materialisms
Knowledge brokers in the Scottish Enlightenment, often working on the periphery of major urban centres, help us to see the necessity of material culture to maintain fragile networks of information exchange. Since the work of Jeremy Boissevain, anthropologists have acknowledged the essential role of resources for processes of cultural brokerage. This relationship has become more explicit in Actor-network theory (ANT), Bruno Latour’s reflections on intermediaries and mediators and new work gathered under the umbrella term of the New Materialisms. Inspired by the work of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett and others, these new perspectives share a view which gives primacy to material things and their mutual relations in collective structures or assemblages, while attributing agency both to human and non-human actors. Focusing on the surviving manuscript papers of the Scottish mathematician Colin Campbell of Achnaba (1644–1726), who was a minister of the Church of Scotland, my paper approaches knowledge brokers through their material resources. How could a minister in the Highlands – ‘a corner of the world where you have neither books nor company’ as one of his friends phrased it – become an intellectual mediator in the first place? By looking at this material archive of papers, which grew into a sizeable collection over the course of more than fifty years, I will explore the role of manuscripts not just as resources for humans but as brokers in their own right. Through the turbulent times following the Glorious Revolution in 1688, both Campbell and his archive endured as relics of the past, inspiring creative connections in scientific networks.
Click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/86535202023
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2