The pursuit of science in the field encompasses a diversity of conducts and places. Studying science in the field therefore proves a rich terrain of enquiry for scholars anxious to approach science as a set of physically situated material practices. Every case study will reveal new aspects of the multifaceted and constantly evolving category we call science, adding density to our knowledge thereof.

Scientists and Scholars in the Field is the latest volume to appear in a strand which, starting in the late 1970s, is animated by an interest in the various historical aspects of this most untidy endeavour that seems to resist generalization, and strives for the particular. The volume is the outcome of the activities of an international research network for ‘the history and sociology of fieldwork and scientific expeditions’. Its members met on a number of occasions and what we have here is a collection of papers given at their final conference, in 2008.

In their introduction, the editors present the volume as intended to extend ‘the discussion of the methodology, theory and history of fieldwork’ beyond ‘the disciplines of anthropology and geography’; to include such hitherto neglected fields as glaciology, the study of religion, meteorology or folklore studies will only ‘enhance our understanding of field practices in fieldwork and expeditions as social and cultural processes’ (p. 11). To be sure, the scope is large, and perhaps even more so than any previous collection on the topic. However, the absence, in this introductory essay, of references to the literature on the history of field sciences could weaken the case for the significance of the set of essays assembled here. From the work of David Allen on the history of natural history, and of Roy Porter or Martin Rudwick on the history of geology and palaeontology, through to that of Robert Kohler on field biology and Donna Haraway or Amanda Rees on primatology, the existing literature on the history and practices of field sciences already casts its net widely, beyond anthropology and geography. Still, there is much interest to be found in these seventeen essays. This is mostly because of the time span covered, from the late seventeenth century to the early twenty-first, but also because the volume contains studies related to many different places and countries, which could prove helpful in the future for comparative purposes.

A number of essays engage with the early, ‘pre-Malinowskian’, history of fieldwork. Michael Harbsmeier's opening essay on eighteenth-century fieldworkers calls for a re-examination of this history altogether. It argues that, contrary to the received account, practitioners of fieldwork did not wait for Malinowski before ‘going out to places, coming back with information about how people live there, and making that information available to the professional community in practical form’ (p. 45). Rengenier Rittersma's fine-grained analysis of Ferdinando Marsili's investigation of the biogeography and ecobiology of truffles in eighteenth-century Italy is just another example of such an early practitioner of fieldwork, whose ‘enquiry in some respects anticipated current hydnological research’ (p. 94).

Other essays examine the genealogies of the institutional orderings associated with the practice of science in the field. For example, Daniel Clinkman's chapter examines the cooperation between the Royal Society of London and the British military during the second half of the eighteenth century. It highlights the early entanglement of fieldwork with military expeditions, and the role of the military in the professionalization of the Royal Society in relation to field research. Such essays remind us of field sciences’ close relationship with the imperialist project in general and Western expansionism in particular. Not only did field scientists benefit from the infrastructures imperial powers had set up in the remote places where fieldwork took place, but also imperial expansion profited from the work of cartographers, botanists and naturalists in the conquest of unknown territories and the exploitation of their natural resources. Further, with the trophies, artefacts, animals, plants and maps they brought back home, field scientists contributed to the advertisement and legitimization of the imperialist project within populations from the metropolis. They also, as Jeppe Strandsbjerg's chapter on early modern cartographers shows, contributed to shaping and defining the national territory.

At the other end of the volume's historical arc, a few essays engage with the recent history of fieldwork, during the first decade of the present century. Kristian Nielsen analyses the Danish Galathea 3 Expedition, whilst Jenny Beckmann concentrates on the Swedish Taxonomy Initiative. Adopting a more sociologically inclined approach to their topic, they foreground the notion that, because of its openness, the field, as a site of scientific enquiry, is a fertile ground for studies of the way knowledge gets deployed in our societies, based on a definition of science ‘as a form of communicative action’ (p. 364).

The volume concludes with two essays. In the first, anthropologists Mikkel Bunkenborg and Morten Axel Pedersen reflect on ‘the strange death of the [ethnographic] expedition’, and make the case for this method of generating ethnographic data based on movement, for ‘one can get a better sense of the size and qualities of very big objects by measuring them against one's own movements’ (p. 427). The other, by Matthew Edney, is a reflection on the history of cartography and mapmaking. It concludes with the notion that as much as ‘the field’ encompasses a multiplicity of situations and circumstances, so there is no one single kind of map or mapping practice. These two essays, taken together, stand as an apt parting commentary on the volume as a whole. As a kind of scholarly expedition through time and space, it encourages movement through multiple perspectives on, and approaches to, the history of the practices of science in the field. And the reader, helped by these diverse cartographies of discrete scholarly territories, gets a better sense of the size and qualities of the very big object that fieldwork is.