Randall White. L'affaire de l'abri du poisson: Patrie et préhistoire .L'affaire de l'abri du poisson: Patrie et préhistoire by Randall WhiteReview by: Reviewed by Michael ChazanIsis, Vol. 99, No. 2 (June 2008), pp. 436-437Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/591375 .

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which theories are scarce and often just barelyfalsifiable, is arguably not a science at all. Thursinsists, clearly and forcefully, that such objec-tions are precisely the point. He argues that the“scientific” status of all five bodies of knowl-edge was hotly disputed in the popular press atone time or another and that a close reading ofthe rhetoric used can tell us much about chang-ing notions of what Americans understood theword “science” to mean. Thurs’s interest in theUFO debates of the 1950s and 1960s, for exam-ple, is not in whether the UFOs were alienspacecraft or whether attempts to investigatethem as such were “scientific,” but in the rhe-torical strategies that all sides of the debate usedto cast their work as “scientific” and thus legit-imate.

Thurs’s sharp eye for a quotation and consid-erable skill at rhetorical analysis make thisapproach pay off handsomely. They also, how-ever, reinforce the book’s principal shortcom-ing: its relative lack of attention to anything butrhetoric. Thurs sketches the scientific issues thatwere at stake in each controversy and the cul-tural context within which each took place, butnot in any great depth. The book is written forhistorians of science and relies on the readeralready to “know the story”—a strategy thatpresents few difficulties for readers of Isis butmay limit the book’s utility to readers outsidethe field and its suitability for classroom use.The relative lack of attention to cultural contextsometimes robs Thurs of opportunities to shedadditional light on the rhetoric itself. The chap-ter on intelligent design (ID), for example, sayslittle about how court decisions in the 1980s, bybranding “creation science” as thinly veiled re-ligious doctrine, forced ID supporters to disas-sociate their “designer” from a divine Creatorand ID critics to attack it as a quasi-religionrather than as bad science (the teaching ofwhich, Stephen Jay Gould once quipped, is notunconstitutional).

Lack of attention to social and cultural con-text may also account for Science Talk’s unsat-isfying conclusion, which feels brief and per-functory compared to the detailed narrative andsophisticated analysis that precedes it. Havingconclusively shown that American notions ofscience have changed, and how they havechanged, Thurs does not go on to consider whatthose changes might say about American cul-ture. The book on Americans’ complex relation-ship with science remains to be written, butScience Talk is a major contribution to our on-going attempts to make sense of the subject.

A. BOWDOIN VAN RIPER

Randall White. L’affaire de l’abri du poisson:Patrie et prehistoire. 237 pp., illus., figs., bibl.Perigueux: Fanlac, 2007. €19 (paper).

In 1912 Jean Maurice Marsan, also known as“Jean the Fisher,” made the catch of a lifetime.Lying on his back in a small rock shelter in thePerigord region of southwestern France, he no-ticed the engraving of a salmon carved into thelimestone rock by the prehistoric inhabitants ofthe site. Randall White has followed a trail ofarchival documents to reconstruct the events setin motion when Marsan tried to sell this engrav-ing to a museum in Berlin. The result is a uniqueand fascinating record of the social context ofthe commercialization of archaeological mate-rial.

L’affaire de l’abri du poisson is a timelycontribution to the history of archaeology. Inrecent years archaeologists have engaged in ex-tensive discussion of the ethical dimensions oftheir discipline. The emerging codes of ethicalpractice formulated by organizations such as theSociety for American Archaeology center onissues regarding the control and ownership ofaspects of the archaeological record. However,there are very few detailed studies of the actualprocesses involved in such transactions.

The tale of Jean the Fisher shows that claimsfor the moral high ground in archaeology areoften built on a substrate of hypocrisy. The mostvocal critics of the sale of the engravedfish—men such as Denis Peyrony, who went onto be pillars of the archaeological establish-ment—were themselves engaged in the sale ofarchaeological collections, mostly to Americanmuseums. Much of the outcry over the sale toBerlin had to do with the destination.

White outlines the social context of this epi-sode, emphasizing the intense hostility to Ger-many in the years leading up to World War I.Among French prehistorians, the attempt to sellthe engraving was tied to the Swiss-Germanexcavator Otto Hauser, who was working in thePerigord at the time. White is able to demon-strate conclusively that Hauser had no connec-tion to this sale and that the reasons for his beingblamed for the incident were a combination ofturf wars for control of valuable archaeologicalresources and virulent anti-German sentiments,occasionally laced with anti-Semitism. Theirony is that Hauser, though a terrible archaeol-ogist, was neither German nor Jewish.

White also takes us through the highly com-plex process through which the rock shelter, andas a result the engraving found on its roof, wasexpropriated by the state. Local opposition tothe expropriation was overcome by the ability of

436 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 99 : 2 (2008)

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the emerging scientific establishment to musterpolitical support. The financial interests at stakewere significant. Owing to differences in thebuying power of French and German currency,the sums offered by the Berlin museum weresubstantial in the context of the lives of theseinhabitants of prewar rural France. As a finaltwist in the plot, the jury of local citizens forcedthe state to pay a very high price for the rockshelter, despite the protests of the archaeologiststhat it was overvalued!

This book is a significant contribution to thehistory of archaeology and will be of value toreaders interested in the professionalization ofscience in France in the early twentieth century.The writing is lively, and the volume is wellillustrated. The archival records, including let-ters and bureaucratic notices, are quoted in full,allowing the reader to gather a comprehensiveunderstanding of this fascinating but little-known event in the history of archaeology.

MICHAEL CHAZAN

Jian Zhang. Ke xue she tuan zai jin dai Zhong-guo de ming yun: yi Zhongguo ke xue she weizhong xin [The Science Association and theChange of Society in Modern China: A Study onthe Science Society of China]. (Zhongguo jinxian dai ke xue ji shu shi yan jiu cong shu.) 460pp., tables, bibl., index. Jinan: Shandong jiao yuchu ban she [Shandong Education Press], 2005.¥49 (paper).

Arguably the most influential Chinese scientificassociation during the first half of the twentiethcentury, the Science Society of China (SSC) notonly marked a major step in the professionaliza-tion of Chinese scientists but also profoundlyshaped modern Chinese science, education, andsociety in many ways. In this meticulously re-searched book, Zhang Jian, a historian at theShanghai Academy of Social Sciences, carefullyreconstructs the society’s history from its found-ing, in 1914, by a group of Chinese sciencestudents at Cornell University to its dissolution,in the early 1950s, when centralizing Commu-nist science policy left little room for an inde-pendent institution of civil society like the SSC.In the end, Zhang argues that despite its manysuccesses, the Science Society of China failed toestablish the independent authority of the scien-tific community in the face of the all-powerfulstate.

From the very beginning, the young foundersof the society had harbored the nationalist dreamof using the science and learning that they wereacquiring in the West to modernize China both

materially and culturally—a dream, as Zhangusefully points out, that was widespread amongthe thousands of Chinese students studying var-ious subjects in the United States during theearly twentieth century. As the centerpiece oftheir early activities, the society publishedKexue [Science], which became not only one ofthe earliest and most prestigious scientific jour-nals in China but also a vehicle to popularizescience and a forum to critique government pol-icy. Starting in the 1920s, the society alsofounded and operated a successful biologicallaboratory in Nanjing, which trained many ofthe first generation of modern Chinese biolo-gists.

Yet, as Zhang so richly details, the societymet with considerable challenges in maintainingKexue as a part of the public sphere and incarrying out scientific research. The two objec-tives sometimes came into conflict: in order tomaintain its growing scientific institutions, thesociety, though technically a private association,came to depend on the largesse of the govern-ment, whose goodwill its leaders carefully cul-tivated through close personal ties with officials.Any criticism of the government in Kexue mightjeopardize this precarious partnership. Thus, in1935, the society’s board retracted an editorialcritical of Nationalist science policy that hadbeen published in the journal, much to the dis-may of some of its members. Bing Zhi, directorof the society’s biological laboratory, protestedin a private letter to the editorial writer that“there is no freedom of speech even in the sci-entific circle” (p. 248). Thus, Zhang contendsthat the marginalization of civil society institu-tions such as the SSC did not start with theCommunists; they only took the Nationalistpractice to a much higher level.

In short, Zhang Jian has produced a well-documented, contextualized, and thoughtful his-torical study on an important scientific institu-tion in modern China. Both this and othervolumes in the series on the history of scienceand technology in modern China sponsored bythe Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute forthe History of Natural Science in Beijing showthe great promise of a younger generation ofhistorians of science in China. Written in livelyprose that is not common in academic writing inChina (or elsewhere), the book also uses theSSC to explore a wide range of other topics suchas the demographics of Chinese scientists. Onemay not agree with all Zhang’s arguments—forexample, I believe that nationalism played asmuch a role as financial need in attracting SSCleaders to enter into a partnership with the Na-tionalist government, and I wish that the book

BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 99 : 2 (2008) 437

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