Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe

If Thomas Gieryn asks you to take a trip with him, I recommend you pack your bags and go. In the meantime, Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe entices us with a beautifully written, witty, and revealing primer for his sociological tours of place. This book explores how specific locations— their history, lore, design, and material stuff—guide visitors toward particular forms of belief. Each chapter presents different twists on the ways that places make people believe. We begin by gazing on the navel of the world. Gieryn tours Delphi in Greece, ‘‘the mother of all truth-spots,’’ given its longstanding symbolic and practical position in western societies as the site for gaining the wisdom of human prophecy. In successive chapters, Gieryn wades across the cultivated wisdom of Walden Pond, Massachusetts (where Henry David Thoreau divined his lessons on simple living with nature); catalogues the botanical gardens of Leiden, in the Netherlands (where Carl Linnaeus found himself at the center of a sexual revolution by demonstrating his taxonomic system); surfaces the underlying morality of Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan (where Henry Ford manufactured a preserve for small-town entrepreneurial values); excavates the history and social psychology of pilgrimage in Southern Europe (where countless seekers have converged upon the Santiago de Compostela cathedral in Spain); lays bare the ‘‘architectures of impartiality’’ embedded in the design of two courthouses in St. Louis, Missouri (where the landmark Dred Scott and Michael Brown constitutional rights cases were litigated); dissects the process of commemoration at the symbolic birthplaces of the feminist (Seneca Falls), civil rights (Selma), and gay liberation (Stonewall) movements; and, finally, alternately sullies and then helps purify the ultra-clean labs on university campuses (where geochemists painstakingly exclude all things except the traces of their experimental metal isotopes). Gieryn explores the mechanisms that these very different spaces use to induce belief among their participants and visitors, designed as they are to convince us of their indexed truth, wisdom, or expression of authenticity. Truth-Spots is mandatory reading for scholars of science and technology studies (STS) and social psychologists of judgment and/or aesthetics. The book would be a wise choice for an upper-division undergraduate or graduate course in cultural sociology or knowledge production. It is ideally suited to those weeks focused on the processes of justification, credibility, legitimation, or boundary work. Each empirical chapter stands on its own, however, and could be used for topical relevance. The chapter on Linnaeus in Leiden, for example, would work well in a class that focuses on scientific or historical classification, whereas the chapter on ultra-clean labs would fit comfortably in the weeks that cover lab studies. The chapters on Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall are a good choice for social movements or inequality classes that cover symbolic resources, framing, narrative, or collective memory. The chapter on the St. Louis courthouses is ideal for a law and society course or any other that analyses how social politics gets embedded in technological and architectural design. It could pair particularly well with the classic works of Langdon Winner and Mike Davis. Given its eclectic choice of empirical cases, Truth-Spots may not satisfy abstract empiricists who demand allegiance to methodological convention and subfield specialization. It abandons any pretense toward naturalism in its selection of analytic units. This book also glides right past the metaphysical conundrums raised by concepts like ‘‘ground truth.’’ Although Gieryn makes an occasional gesture toward a critique of the notion of ‘‘post-truth politics,’’ the book does not provide a sustained engagement with the ontological and epistemological dilemmas of the geopolitical moment. These Reviews 159