From the Alps to Egypt (and Back Again): Dolomieu, Scientific Voyaging, and the Construction of the Field in Eighteenth-Century Natural History

Abstract

What is the/a field? A juxtaposition of particular natural objects, a space to be moved through, a realm of focused attention? This chapter explores the creation of one — or, rather, many — such ‘field’(s) by the naturalist, collector, and scientific voyager Deodat de Dolomieu during the crucial decades surrounding the French Revolution. I propose to follow the rambling and circuitous career of this one individual, not so much for its own sake, as rather for the insights it may offer into how eighteenth-century naturalists envisioned, and shaped, the fields they pursued. Practitioners of natural history in the late Enlightenment, I will argue, came to define for themselves a set of ‘fields’ simultaneously geographical and disciplinary in their articulation. They marked these fields not only by the possessive evocation of certain natural objects (such as rocks, in Dolomieu’s case) and of the larger terrestrial formations whence they originated (such as mountains, islands, volcanoes) but also by appeals to the locality and particularity of terrain. Voyaging thus became crucial to the scientific enterprise, as the forms of a naturalist’s contact with the field — for Dolomieu, a local and hospitable European field, far removed from that experienced by more famous contemporary voyagers to the South Seas and other exotic locales — generated the matter of the field itself. This chapter investigates Dolomieu’s successive reformulations of his own ‘field’ over the course of a career that took him from volcanic isles near Malta to the salons of Paris and the slopes of the Alps; to the shores of Egypt, as a member of Napoleon’s ill-fated expedition; and finally back to his beloved Alps again. Amidst these shifting conditions of encounter with the natural world, Dolomieu’s revisions of his own disciplinary allegiances, from natural history to mineralogy to the emerging discipline of ‘geology’, reflect the transformations of the particular and local ‘fields’ he travelled in.1