Etienne Benson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3595407 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Etienne Benson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Etienne |
| FAMILY NAME | Benson |
| SIGNATURE | BENSON E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 77 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Retooling
Retooling is a ubiquitous practice that mobilizes innovation, maintenance, and repair to address sociotechnical change in times when transformations seem difficult to accomplish. Retooling entails an intentional reorientation of purpose, foregrounds the nonlinear trajectories of technological and scientific shifts, and focuses our attention on the meso level of organizational and collective life. This paper offers a theorization of retooling grou…
Squirrel Nation
Introduction
In recent decades, scholarship in the history of science has explored the emergence and development of sciences in which fields serve as privileged sites of knowledge production. Much of this work has focused on the field sciences' formative period from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, and it is the definitions of the field, fieldwork, and field science emerging from the study of this period that have come to dominate the…
The Post-Heroic Field
This essay argues for taking fieldwork seriously, but not too seriously. It focuses on geologists and geomorphologists in the United States in the post–World War II decades who used irony, satire, and self-conscious staging to negotiate the contradictions between the tradition of frontier fieldwork that they had inherited from the late nineteenth century and the realities of mid-twentieth-century fieldwork, which they often found hard to fit into…
Estimated truths
Random river
Program Earth
Field Life
Reviewed by: Field Life: Science in the American West during the Railroad Era by Jeremy Vetter Etienne Benson (bio) Field Life: Science in the American West during the Railroad Era. By Jeremy Vetter. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. Pp. 512. $49.95. The history of an epistemic rift lies at the center of this account of the field sciences in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains region of the United States between the 1860s and the…
A Centrifuge of Calculation
Beginning in 1920, bird banding in the United States was coordinated by an office within the U.S. Biological Survey that recruited volunteers, issued permits, distributed bands and reporting forms, and collected and organized the data that resulted. In the 1920s and 1930s, data from thousands of volunteers banding millions of birds helped ornithologists map migratory flyways and census bird populations on a continental scale. This essay argues th…
Feral Animals in the American South
The historical subfield of evolutionary history is concerned with the coevolution of humans and other species. It draws on biological understandings of evolutionary processes while seeking to show how those processes are shaped by human action in specific historical contexts. Although informed by research on evolutionary processes spanning hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, evolutionary history usually focuses on shorter time scales…
Trackable life
Naming the Ethological Subject
Argument In recent decades, through the work of Jane Goodall and other ethologists, the practice of giving personal names to nonhuman animals who are the subjects of scientific research has become associated with claims about animal personhood and scientific objectivity. While critics argue that such naming practices predispose the researcher toward anthropomorphism, supporters suggest that it sensitizes the researcher to individual differences a…
Endangered birds and epistemic concerns
This chapter concerns with producing new knowledge about endangered species of birds that appears on the nature side, although its position becomes less clear on closer inspection. It argues varied conceptualizations of endangerment has shaped not only the way that ornithological knowledge but also focuses of ornithologists concern. At some risk of overemphasizing historical discontinuities, author divides the history of research and conservation…
Territorial Claims
In the twentieth century, conservation biology became one of the forms of expert knowledge contributing to governmental efforts to manage territories and populations. This article offers a situated account of the development of one of the key concepts deployed by biologists for such purposes in the mid-twentieth century: territoriality. It focuses on the work of Helmut K. Buechner, an American wildlife biologist who spent two years in Uganda on a…
Tom Williamson, An Environmental History of Wildlife in England, 1650-1950
Generating Infrastructural Invisibility
The fact that industrial infrastructures are embedded in complex environments animated by unexpected agencies is often invisible to their users-at least those who live in rich, industrialized societies with reliable systems for distributing water, power, and other goods and services. This article investigates how that invisibility is generated through a case study of electric power transmission in California in the early twentieth century. In the…
Shepherding wild life
The Urbanization of the Eastern Gray Squirrel in the United States
If they had tuned in to radio station wrc on July 12, 1934, residents of Washington, D.C., could have heard a talk by Vernon Bailey, the recently retired chief field naturalist of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey. Bailey was best known for his involvement in controversies over wolf eradication in the West, but his radio talk that day was on a subject closer to home and less politically charged, at least on the surface: “Animals Worth Knowing …
Civilizing Nature
Ciferae
Reviewed by: CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers by Tom Tyler Etienne Benson (bio) Tom Tyler, CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, 320 pp. $90.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. As I was beginning to think about preparing this review, a colleague picked up Tom Tyler’s CIFERAE off my desk and began flipping through its pages. A few moments later, he put it back down and expressed some bewilderment about its t…
One infrastructure, many global visions
Argos is a satellite-based data collection and location system that has been in operation since the late 1970s; it is the only such system to be dedicated solely to environmental applications. This paper shows how multiple and sometimes conflicting ways of envisioning and studying the global environment have been embodied in the Argos system. In particular, it shows how the system’s initial focus on meeting the needs of meteorologists and oceanog…
From Wild Lives to Wildlife and Back
This article briefly sketches the history of the terms “wild life” and “wildlife” as they have been used in the United States since the late nineteenth century. It argues that “wild life” began to be used to refer to a class of living things at the beginning of the twentieth century and that it was only in the 1930s that “wildlife,” written as a single word, came into widespread usage. The emergence of this concept paralleled the development of t…
Generating Infrastructural Invisibility
The fact that industrial infrastructures are embedded in complex environments animated by unexpected agencies is often invisible to their users-at least those who live in rich, industrialized societies with reliable systems for distributing water, power, and other goods and services. This article investigates how that invisibility is generated through a case study of electric power transmission in California in the early twentieth century. In the…
One infrastructure, many global visions
Argos is a satellite-based data collection and location system that has been in operation since the late 1970s; it is the only such system to be dedicated solely to environmental applications. This paper shows how multiple and sometimes conflicting ways of envisioning and studying the global environment have been embodied in the Argos system. In particular, it shows how the system’s initial focus on meeting the needs of meteorologists and oceanog…
Naming the Ethological Subject
Argument In recent decades, through the work of Jane Goodall and other ethologists, the practice of giving personal names to nonhuman animals who are the subjects of scientific research has become associated with claims about animal personhood and scientific objectivity. While critics argue that such naming practices predispose the researcher toward anthropomorphism, supporters suggest that it sensitizes the researcher to individual differences a…
The Urbanization of the Eastern Gray Squirrel in the United States
If they had tuned in to radio station wrc on July 12, 1934, residents of Washington, D.C., could have heard a talk by Vernon Bailey, the recently retired chief field naturalist of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey. Bailey was best known for his involvement in controversies over wolf eradication in the West, but his radio talk that day was on a subject closer to home and less politically charged, at least on the surface: “Animals Worth Knowing …
Introduction
In recent decades, scholarship in the history of science has explored the emergence and development of sciences in which fields serve as privileged sites of knowledge production. Much of this work has focused on the field sciences' formative period from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, and it is the definitions of the field, fieldwork, and field science emerging from the study of this period that have come to dominate the…
Trackable life
Estimated truths
Random river
A Centrifuge of Calculation
Beginning in 1920, bird banding in the United States was coordinated by an office within the U.S. Biological Survey that recruited volunteers, issued permits, distributed bands and reporting forms, and collected and organized the data that resulted. In the 1920s and 1930s, data from thousands of volunteers banding millions of birds helped ornithologists map migratory flyways and census bird populations on a continental scale. This essay argues th…
The Post-Heroic Field
This essay argues for taking fieldwork seriously, but not too seriously. It focuses on geologists and geomorphologists in the United States in the post–World War II decades who used irony, satire, and self-conscious staging to negotiate the contradictions between the tradition of frontier fieldwork that they had inherited from the late nineteenth century and the realities of mid-twentieth-century fieldwork, which they often found hard to fit into…
Feral Animals in the American South
The historical subfield of evolutionary history is concerned with the coevolution of humans and other species. It draws on biological understandings of evolutionary processes while seeking to show how those processes are shaped by human action in specific historical contexts. Although informed by research on evolutionary processes spanning hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, evolutionary history usually focuses on shorter time scales…
Territorial Claims
In the twentieth century, conservation biology became one of the forms of expert knowledge contributing to governmental efforts to manage territories and populations. This article offers a situated account of the development of one of the key concepts deployed by biologists for such purposes in the mid-twentieth century: territoriality. It focuses on the work of Helmut K. Buechner, an American wildlife biologist who spent two years in Uganda on a…
From Wild Lives to Wildlife and Back
This article briefly sketches the history of the terms “wild life” and “wildlife” as they have been used in the United States since the late nineteenth century. It argues that “wild life” began to be used to refer to a class of living things at the beginning of the twentieth century and that it was only in the 1930s that “wildlife,” written as a single word, came into widespread usage. The emergence of this concept paralleled the development of t…
Civilizing Nature
Ciferae
Reviewed by: CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers by Tom Tyler Etienne Benson (bio) Tom Tyler, CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, 320 pp. $90.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. As I was beginning to think about preparing this review, a colleague picked up Tom Tyler’s CIFERAE off my desk and began flipping through its pages. A few moments later, he put it back down and expressed some bewilderment about its t…
One infrastructure, many global visions
Argos is a satellite-based data collection and location system that has been in operation since the late 1970s; it is the only such system to be dedicated solely to environmental applications. This paper shows how multiple and sometimes conflicting ways of envisioning and studying the global environment have been embodied in the Argos system. In particular, it shows how the system’s initial focus on meeting the needs of meteorologists and oceanog…
The Urbanization of the Eastern Gray Squirrel in the United States
If they had tuned in to radio station wrc on July 12, 1934, residents of Washington, D.C., could have heard a talk by Vernon Bailey, the recently retired chief field naturalist of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey. Bailey was best known for his involvement in controversies over wolf eradication in the West, but his radio talk that day was on a subject closer to home and less politically charged, at least on the surface: “Animals Worth Knowing …
Shepherding wild life
Endangered birds and epistemic concerns
This chapter concerns with producing new knowledge about endangered species of birds that appears on the nature side, although its position becomes less clear on closer inspection. It argues varied conceptualizations of endangerment has shaped not only the way that ornithological knowledge but also focuses of ornithologists concern. At some risk of overemphasizing historical discontinuities, author divides the history of research and conservation…
Territorial Claims
In the twentieth century, conservation biology became one of the forms of expert knowledge contributing to governmental efforts to manage territories and populations. This article offers a situated account of the development of one of the key concepts deployed by biologists for such purposes in the mid-twentieth century: territoriality. It focuses on the work of Helmut K. Buechner, an American wildlife biologist who spent two years in Uganda on a…
Tom Williamson, An Environmental History of Wildlife in England, 1650-1950
Generating Infrastructural Invisibility
The fact that industrial infrastructures are embedded in complex environments animated by unexpected agencies is often invisible to their users-at least those who live in rich, industrialized societies with reliable systems for distributing water, power, and other goods and services. This article investigates how that invisibility is generated through a case study of electric power transmission in California in the early twentieth century. In the…
Trackable life
Naming the Ethological Subject
Argument In recent decades, through the work of Jane Goodall and other ethologists, the practice of giving personal names to nonhuman animals who are the subjects of scientific research has become associated with claims about animal personhood and scientific objectivity. While critics argue that such naming practices predispose the researcher toward anthropomorphism, supporters suggest that it sensitizes the researcher to individual differences a…
Program Earth
Field Life
Reviewed by: Field Life: Science in the American West during the Railroad Era by Jeremy Vetter Etienne Benson (bio) Field Life: Science in the American West during the Railroad Era. By Jeremy Vetter. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. Pp. 512. $49.95. The history of an epistemic rift lies at the center of this account of the field sciences in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains region of the United States between the 1860s and the…
A Centrifuge of Calculation
Beginning in 1920, bird banding in the United States was coordinated by an office within the U.S. Biological Survey that recruited volunteers, issued permits, distributed bands and reporting forms, and collected and organized the data that resulted. In the 1920s and 1930s, data from thousands of volunteers banding millions of birds helped ornithologists map migratory flyways and census bird populations on a continental scale. This essay argues th…
Feral Animals in the American South
The historical subfield of evolutionary history is concerned with the coevolution of humans and other species. It draws on biological understandings of evolutionary processes while seeking to show how those processes are shaped by human action in specific historical contexts. Although informed by research on evolutionary processes spanning hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, evolutionary history usually focuses on shorter time scales…
Random river
Estimated truths
Introduction
In recent decades, scholarship in the history of science has explored the emergence and development of sciences in which fields serve as privileged sites of knowledge production. Much of this work has focused on the field sciences' formative period from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, and it is the definitions of the field, fieldwork, and field science emerging from the study of this period that have come to dominate the…
The Post-Heroic Field
This essay argues for taking fieldwork seriously, but not too seriously. It focuses on geologists and geomorphologists in the United States in the post–World War II decades who used irony, satire, and self-conscious staging to negotiate the contradictions between the tradition of frontier fieldwork that they had inherited from the late nineteenth century and the realities of mid-twentieth-century fieldwork, which they often found hard to fit into…
Squirrel Nation
Retooling
Retooling is a ubiquitous practice that mobilizes innovation, maintenance, and repair to address sociotechnical change in times when transformations seem difficult to accomplish. Retooling entails an intentional reorientation of purpose, foregrounds the nonlinear trajectories of technological and scientific shifts, and focuses our attention on the meso level of organizational and collective life. This paper offers a theorization of retooling grou…
Philosophy (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Environmental ethics (10 works) · Geography (10 works) · Biology (9 works) · Ecology (8 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · History (7 works) · Political science (7 works)