Nature’s keepers: Working families and the economy of earthly objects

This article develops a historical anthropology of craftspeople in the sciences through the story of the family Wunder, who for three generations (from 1771 to 1832) ran a prolific trade in rare plants and large mammal fossils from their workshop in the mountains of Upper Franconia. Studies of scientific homes and families have had an extraordinary impact on the history of science, showing how experiments and museums were so housed as to model highly exclusive scientific publics, and how projects of inquiry were shared among spouses, children, and servants. But this literature has rarely stepped outside of elite, urban homes and country estates. Doing so demonstrates how material flows conventionally oriented around metropolitan institutions could hinge on the spatial logistics of post roads, highland footpaths, inns and taverns – and the families who minded them. Viewed from the village, new university and museum institutions rose in reciprocal action with rural projects, otherwise excluded from the story of a liberal-bourgeois public sphere and the emergence of the modern natural sciences ( Naturwissenschaften ). I argue further for a thick description of science among craftspeople and peasants, suggesting nature’s keepers as a useful social category for actors involved in the everyday production of the economies and spatial logistics of natural inquiry. Across Central and Alpine Europe, inns, workshops, and country lanes composed a substructure of scientific life that materially shaped natural history and its theoretical horizons in “deep time,” directing the movements of earthly objects and educated travelers.