Edgar Zilsel and the iberian moment. An artisanal conception of maritime culture
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/asclepio.2024.22Keywords:
Maritime expansion, Social change, Interaction, Normative framework, Intermediate professionalsAbstract
The so-called ‘Zilsel thesis’ is a broad sociological explanatory framework that attributes the emergence of modern science to a series of political and economic causes that led to the removal of the social barriers separating university scholars from artisans. In the face of a new wave of work on artisanal cultures that recaptures Zilsel’s ideas, this article argues that invoking the Austrian philosopher and historian’s ideas requires no longer identifying local and isolated cases of interaction between the two knowledge communities, but of a large-scale social phenomenon that effectively highlights a stable and enduring collaboration understood as a collective process. We believe that the maritime culture and cosmographical practices developed in the Iberian world in the first phase of European maritime expansion represent a plausible response to Zilsel’s thesis. An analysis of the epistemological transformations that took place within the Portuguese and Spanish maritime empires during the 16th century reveals that not only were the conditions for interaction between artisans and scholars created, but also that these conditions were carefully designed and regulated by the Iberian crowns through a rigid normative framework.
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Funding data
H2020 European Research Council
Grant numbers 833438
Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
Grant numbers PID2019-111054GB-I00
