Doomsday Fieldwork, or, How to Rescue Gaelic Culture? The Salvage Paradigm in Geography, Archaeology, and Folklore, 1955 – 62

Abstract

Amid a resurgence of interest in histories of scientific fieldwork and in the geographies of the Cold War, this paper presents a comparative history of field practice across the distinct epistemic traditions of geography, archaeology, and folklore. The paper follows the intellectual practices of three research teams attempting to ‘rescue’ Gaelic culture from the development of a missile-testing station in the Scottish Hebrides. The aims of the paper are fivefold: to extend insights from the histories of scientific fieldwork to understand the production of social knowledge, to consider the coconstitution of fieldwork and the region, to expand recent histories of geography in the mid-20th century, to draw out the lingering significance of the ‘salvage paradigm’ in geography and other social sciences, and to reconceptualise this salvage fieldwork as a way of constructing social life as much as rescuing it.