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“With the Practiced Eye of a Deaf Person”: Harriet Martineau, Deafness and the Scientificity of Social Knowledge

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Abstract

The paper explains the important role played by Harriet Martineau in the scientization of British politics and consequently in the development of Victorian Social Science. I suggest that there is much we can learn about the scientificity of social knowledge from the relationship between Martineau’s deafness, her career as a social investigator and a reporter, and her reflections about the practice of social science. Because Martineau was a pioneer who entered into a field that was not yet institutionalized, her knowledge making practices inevitably reflects the particular dispositions that guided her innovations. Martineau’s exposure, early in her career, to the modus operandi of governmental social investigations by royal commissions and her experience with popularizing the products of these investigations via wide public opinion campaigns, coupled with Martineau’s specific dispositions as a deaf woman, facilitated her interest in mediating credible knowledge about society and helped her to develop an innovative methodological skill-set as a social investigator, which later on in her career made her a pioneer figure in the field of social science.

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Notes

  1. This temporal profile of scientific activity, which distinguishes science from ‘faster’ practices such as journalism or politics, is also recognized by Bourdieu who sees the “suspending of urgency, the pressure of ‘things to do’” as a “scholastic disposition” and as conditions of existence of all scholarly fields (Bourdieu 2000, 206).

  2. At the same time, we can view the acceleration of scientific activities as a politicization of science: the acceleration of the production, circulation and public dissemination of academic knowledge production. In his On Television and Journalism Bourdieu criticizes this very process when he condemns the ‘fast thinking’ and the intellectual ‘fast food’, which is served up by scholars who are seduced by the swift velocities of the media and its logic of commercialization. These “media intellectuals,” according to Bourdieu becomes “cultural celebrities,” who prefer to speak publicly (and under rigorous time constraints) by writing “fast and short pieces for newspapers” or appearing on radio and TV talk shows rather than publishing academic articles in journals “who nobody ever reads.” (Bourdieu 1998).

  3. I use the term “Governmental Investigations” instead of the more commonly used term “Royal Commissions”, which originated in the fifteenth century, to indicate a transformation in the modus operandi of these commissions in the nineteenth century. Governmental investigations were composed from three to seven politicians who served as commissioners in London and were responsible for the writing and the dissemination of the official reports, and a few sub-commissioners (or inspectors) who were often recruited from Oxbridge (lawyers, priests, medical doctors) and were responsible for data collection un the filed and writing periodical local reports that will later be integrated into the official reports.

  4. In arguing that Martineau’s innovative empirical methods were important in establishing social investigations as a filed of scientific expertise (social science), I’m in no way suggesting that empiricism is the only scientific method or that Martineau’s method are the only proper way to do social science.

  5. Because the draft of the initial chapter did not survive we are unable to estimate the particular contribution and added value of Martineau’s own field research in America to her reflection on the practice of social research in How to Observe.

  6. Martineau was well aware that her deafness might be used to question the reliability of her investigations. In her Autobiography, Martineau writes about Sydney Smith, an American slave owner who made the sarcastic remark that “she is writing a book … to prove that the only travellers who are fit to write books must be both blind and deaf.” In a revealing passage, Martineau attributes Smith’s reference to her deafness to a passage she wrote in the preface to her Society in America: “In that preface I explained the extent to which my deafness was a disqualification for travel, and for reporting of it: and I did it because I knew that, if I did not, the slaveholders would make my deafness a pretext for setting aside any part of my testimony which they did not like” (1877, 186).

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Gabay, N. “With the Practiced Eye of a Deaf Person”: Harriet Martineau, Deafness and the Scientificity of Social Knowledge. Am Soc 50, 335–355 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-019-9401-0

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