Two Penn State Faculty Win Guggenheim Awards
May 14, 2003
University Park, Pa. --- Dr. Robert N. Proctor, the Ferree Professor of the History of Science, and Dr. Matthew Restall, associate professor of Latin American history, women's studies and anthropology, were selected as Guggenheim Fellows for 2003.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation selects Fellows on the basis of their unusually distinguished achievements and their exceptional promise for future accomplishments. From a pool of 3,200 applicants, 184 scientists and scholars were selected for the current year.
Also co-director, of the Science, Medicine and Technology in Culture Initiative, Proctor will travel to Kenya, Tanzania, France, and several parts of Asia this fall for research on his project, "The Acheulean Enigma: Handaxes and Human Origins." The handaxe has become a near-iconic archaeological constant, having played a crucial role in the discovery of human "prehistory" circa 150 years ago. He will investigate how these mysterious artifacts have come to play such a central role in our imaginations of human origins, figuring also as signs for how we used to eat or talk or live in harmony or at war.
With the support of the grant, Proctor plans to explore how conjectures about handaxe function have changed over time, from the earliest references (and images) to the present. The largest part of his research will be to explore how views of Acheulean artifacts have changed in recent decades, and how political and ethical considerations have affected those views.
"On the surface, it's a departure of sorts for me," Proctor says. His past work has considered the history of cancer research, Nazi medicine, agates, and tobacco. "But Alan Walker and Pat Shipman -- both paleontologists on the faculty of the College's bioanthropology program-- have stimulated me into thinking about a range of new projects I now want to pursue."
A persistent interest in the political maneuvering and philosophical debates that lie behind scientific study has long characterized Proctor's work. While the surface concerns change from time to time, the Penn State professor seeks understanding about "the 'political' or 'moral history of science'-how cultural values influence scientific priorities and practices."
With regards to handaxes, he is seeking to better understand the nature and function of the tools, and why it has been so hard to establish consistent interpretations of the tools. He is also interested, though, in their status as modern cultural artifacts: as objects of dispute or for sale on E-bay, with certain forms of clichéd display in museums, even the ethical limits on their transit-the "whole picture," as he says.
Restall is also working on a vast study of interpretation of a more recent era. He has spent the last decade gathering material for his next book, "The Black Middle: Slavery, Society, and African-Maya Relations in Colonial Yucatan," and the Guggenheim grant will give him time to complete his research. His work will help historians and others understand another facet of the experiences that people of African descent had in the Americas.
"People claimed there weren't many African slaves there, but I came across evidence suggesting that was not the case," Restall says. "Then, I discovered that there were almost as many Africans as Spaniards at the beginning of the colonization of the peninsula. By the end of the Colonial period, there were as many people of mixed descent-Afro-Yucatecans, my own term-as there were Spaniards."
Restall is reconstructing their lives, getting to their voices and revealing actual documents of Afro-Yucatecans being interviewed and interrogated by colonial officials to tell their versions of life stories. For example, the Penn State researcher relates the tale of a slave who escaped from an English logging settlement in Belize, bordering on the Yucatan Peninsula. The slave had been born in Africa and was sold in Jamaica. After working in Jamaica, he was then sold to an owner in Belize. At the time he was there, he learned of a law issued by the Spanish crown, which said that any slave escaping from the British to a Spanish colony would be given sanctuary. The law was part of the various political and military maneuvering which competing colonial interests used at the time against one another. However, when the man crossed into the Spanish colony, he learned quickly that the law had been rescinded some years before. The man, as well as the few others who escaped with him, was shipped off to Havanna as property of the Spanish crown.
The example paints a complex picture of slave existence in the colonies, revealing the nationalistic rivalries at work, the laws and rumors to which many clung for hope, the passage of individuals through the colonies, and more. The story is only one of many narratives Restall has unearthed and documented.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was established in 1925 by U.S. Sen. Simon Guggenheim and his wife Olga as a memorial to a son who died in 1922. The foundation offers Fellowships to further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.
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