Boundary-Work, Border Crossings, and Trading Zones

Boundary-Work, Border Crossings, and Trading Zones 

Modem Alchemy raises questions about boundaries among disciplines or fields of knowledge and how those boundaries are redrawn, transgressed, or productively blurred. Issues such as these have been theorized for some time by sociologists, anthropologists, and historians of science. I have deliberately avoided much of these disciplines vocabulary in this monograph in order to make its story as broadly accessible as possible, but I would like to give a brief account of the conceptual work to which this project owes an immense debt. 

But sanitization alone is not a sufficient concept for describing the two-way exchanges between occultism and science that 

My analysis shows not only how scientists engage in boundary-work to distinguish science from nonscience, but also how a variety of other groups construct boundaries (and consequently themselves as groups) not only with respect to more orthodox scientists and skeptics but with respect to each other. In short, scientific boundaries are recursive, nested, and multiple there are layers of scientificity that become clearer as one unfolds levels of skepticism and pseudo-scientificity both within and across discursive boundaries. Boundary-work therefore is going on in all directions, not just in the direction of orthodox science toward religion and pseudoscience.  

Occult engagements with atomic physics and chemistry exemplify the kind of boundary work that Hess elaborates, in which groups strategically attempt to manipulate layers of scientificity. Such a dynamic was at play in many late-nineteenth-century occult writings, including those of many Golden Dawn members. 

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