Scientific Practice in the

Contexts of Peripheral
Science: C. V. Raman and
His Construction of a
Mechanical Violin-Player
Deepanwita Dasgupta

East Tennessee State University

Peripheral science, i.e., scientic activity outside the standard Western

contexts, is often viewed as not a very interesting topic in the philosophy of
science. In this article, I seek to propose a framework for thinking about such
scientic practices with the help of a case study. I argue that the peripheral
scientic practices offer us a new window for understanding how contributory
expertise in science can be born amidst difcult circumstances, and how, in
seeking to found such new practices, peripheral scientists often build (emerging)
trading zones. I nally argue that in the transnational scientic practices of
the twenty-rst century, understanding such zones might be essential for understanding the nature of scientic enterprise as well as for formulating a (future)
science policy.
1. Science in Peripheral Contexts

We can avoid, above all, the mistake of thinking that unless one is
big one is negligible. Fred Hoyle, Motives and Aims of the Scientist

This paper tries to think about the contexts of scientic practices in peripheral spaces, spaces that exist outside the domain of the resource-rich and
well-established scientic communities. I ask the question whether contributions from such modest circumstances can give rise to any creative
expertise that is capable of producing novel outcomes in science, and
whether exploring such contexts might give us reasons for changing our
I would like to thank Alexander Levine at the University of South Florida for his encouragement and discussions on the topic of peripheral science, and for creating the schematic
diagram of Ramans violin-player. I also take this opportunity to thank the two anonymous
referees who read an earlier version of this paper, and urged me to further clarify the concept
of peripheral science.
Perspectives on Science 2016, vol. 24, no. 4
2016 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

doi:10.1162/POSC_a_00212
381

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Peripheral Science: C. V. Raman

current mental model of what we take science to be. I assume, of course,

that scientic thinking can be present in modest as well as in resource-rich
circumstances, and little-known episodes from the history of science can
show us all the hallmarks of productive scientic thinking. To this end,
I shall present here a relatively little-known case study derived from the
early acoustic researches of C. V. Raman on the violin family of instruments.
These early researches eventually led Raman to his more well-known later
work on light scatteringnally providing a path to the discovery of the
Raman Effect.
In building models for scientic practice and scientic thinking, philosophers and historians of science typically focus on the contexts of scientic
communities in Europe and North America. Reasons for such standard
preferences can be easily found. Not only can such communities train their
own practitioners, they also usually are able to gather a consensus around
the knowledge that they produce. The image of a concentrated center
and its numerous research effortstherefore dominates all our analyses of
science, whether such analyses occur in the form of scholarly articles, textbooks, or in the shape of more popular science writing. Thus, when we think
of science, we usually restrict ourselves to thinking about a center, which is
usually thought of as embodied in some European or American scientic
community. It is from within such central communities that all groundbreaking research is expected to emerge, including any research that leads
to new discoveries. Let us call this image the central community model of science. The implicit conclusion that follows from this model is that since
most scientic activity (and scientic creativity) occurs at this central spot,
it is here that we should concentrate most of our philosophical energies.
Interesting science most likely is going to be science produced by some
resource-rich central community.
But do all interesting examples of scientic activity always exhibit such central
origins? What about a scientic community that, for example, operates
outside Western contexts or one that takes up a new practice where it
had held no such previous track record of expertise? Or, one that includes
deliberately oppositional groups? What happens if we see in the history of
science contributions from the newly-emerging and smaller peripheral
communities while they were still in the process of gaining their rst footholds in science? What forms of analysis shall we then apply to understand
their practices?
In considering the work of those communities whose practices contribute
to scientic knowledgeand yet who operate at some distance from the
central communitieswe enter the world of peripheral science. Regarding
such communities we may start with the question: how do such people enter into
the practices of science and establish their rst track records? How do they produce

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a tradition of expertise in the different disciplines of science, and create what

may be called, following Kuhn, a tradition in normal science? And once
they acquire such traditions of normal science, can they also go ahead and
produce any revolutionary science?
Once these questions are asked, we see that we really do not have any
models for thinking about how scientic activity proceeds in such remote
contexts. This is a shortcoming that needs addressing in our times for a
very simple reason. With the rise of globalization, science is fast becoming
a transnational practiceindeed, it already is such a practice. There is also
the possibility that future scientic communities may not be entirely or
even predominantly composed of Western nations alone.1 And as the recent
discovery of the Higgs-Boson shows, even a central community requires
numerous peripheral partners in order to operate at its most optimum level.
Thus, what we require at this stage is some sort of theory about how the
newly-emerging centers of scientic activity begin their journey in making
new knowledge and how they establish (as well as consolidate) such traditions of expertise at their own home locations. Such early phases of
scientic practice might be very modest in character, but my claim is
that such practices do contain the germs for evolving into more mature
practices. After all, peripheries can often turn themselves into new centers.
To discuss scientic practices of this sort, we need, manifestly, a twocommunity model of science: a model that thinks about two unequal sets
of agents or protagonistsone an established community and the other a
newcomerand connect the two together in one epistemic loop. The goal
is then to see how a new scientic outcome emerges through the interactions
of two such dissimilar groups.
There are various ways of beginning this kind of exploration, but an
intuitive way to begin this is by considering a case studyan historical
example of a scientic community (or even an individual) that began its
journey from outside of the standard Western contexts, and yet maintained
a continuous presence in the practice of science by creating important
outcomes.2 Can we capture such entries into the practice of science in the
form of a general framework? In the following sections, this shall be my main
goal, and I shall try to sketch a process that might be taken as a possible
1. Indeed, it is already fairly common to see groups of scientists forming collaborations
outside the Western context over specic research problems, e.g., a collaboration among
the Japanese and the Indian scientists who together might design a public transportation
system.
2. Currently, there are several such middle-sizedperipheral, but still quite sophisticated
scientic communities in Brazil, China, India, South Korea, and perhaps in other parts of
the world. Taken together, they account for a good bit of the current globalized practice of
science.

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Peripheral Science: C. V. Raman

mechanism behind such early scientic practices, nally claiming that those
processes are operative in my case study. My case study will come from C. V.
Ramans early acoustic researches with the violin family of instruments,
which took place before he became interested in the phenomena of light
scattering. To understand how violins work, Raman designed a simple
mechanical violin player that helped him obtain precise measurements and
thus test his theory of bowed strings. The result was the creation of an
expertise that made Raman a creative contributor in the area of acoustic research and planted the seed for a small scientic community in the colonial
location of Calcutta. Episodes like this show us how a newcomer can lay the
foundation for a new scientic community by grasping a research program
from another group, and endowing that program with his or her own cognitive contributions. An exploration of this process shows that such small
associated steps can nally lead to the creation of some contributory expertise in the new researcher. Once we visualize this process in its early stages,
we can begin to see how such an activity might scale up to more mature
stages, eventually establishing a new community that can be capable of
establishing robust contacts with different existing centers and nally, becoming a center in its own right.
2. A Trading Zone Framework for Peripheral Science

The implicit aim behind this exercise is to argue that peripheral science
notwithstanding its modest beginningsconstitutes an important context
of science and scientic creativity. In developing an account for such scientic practices, we want to know how a newcomer and an established
group make their rst contacts, and how a new outcome emerges through
such interaction between two dissimilar groups. In short, here we see a type
of science that might be called, using a term from Philip Kitcher (1993,
p. 351), epistemologically sullied science.3 As Kitcher points out, such
sullied processes (or agents) may indeed benet science greatly at its community level, even though, typically, such episodes do not begin typically
begin with the pure disinterested love for truth. If our goal is to understand
such epistemologically sullied processes that are often at work in science in
its peripheral locations, what sort of framework shall we use for analyzing
the working of a peripheral scientic community?
I propose an intuitive framework here as follows. Typically, a peripheral
scientist begins his or her participation in scientic activity by taking an
3. Kitchers epistemologically sullied science of course is not about newcomers in a scientic practice, but only about the mainstream practitioners who are driven by different
non-epistemic goals, e.g., by priority motives, etc. But since such sullied motives also create
sharp divisions of cognitive labor within a scientic community, rendering some unequal to
some others, this model can easily be extended to include the contexts of peripheral practice.

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385

interest in problems that are already being discussed within a dominant,

established center. This happens either because the scientist lacks a home
base, or the immediate problems most salient at his or her home base are
not interesting (or familiar enough) to the established scientic community. Having taken an interest in the problems posed by the dominant
community, however, the peripheral scientist will next seek to develop a
practice of his or her own in the shape of an ongoing research program.
Such a program might consist in performing various sorts of activities
e.g., providing solutions to some current problems, further ne-tuning a
pre-existing solution, or simply taking some current solution to its next
level. If successful, and if accepted by the dominant community, this process will be reiterated by the peripheral practitioner, and after several such
iterationsand hopefully their acceptance by the established groupa
new scientic community will be born at that peripheral location, which
may then continue its practice for some time. Thus, the development of a
peripheral scientic community begins with the establishment of an epistemic loop between two dissimilar groupsone a newcomer, and the other
a set of recognized expertsthe dominant community lending its imprimatur to the epistemic efforts of the newcomer, and the newcomer bringing in his or her efforts to solve the problems of the established group. If all
goes well, the practice of science will thus gain a new member, who may
also bring with him or her some fresh insights from a novel context.
What has just emerged between the two communities is what Peter
Galison (1997) calls a trading zone, i.e., a small area where contact and
communication between two groups has been established despite their
otherwise signicant differences.4 Galisons idea of a trading zone, however, is that of contact between two already-recognized groups of experts
who simply happen to come from different knowledge domains. Clearly,
this does not exactly model the events that occur in a peripheral situation.
Manifestly, the peripheral members are not the epistemic equals of their
metropolitan experts, at least not in the beginning; neither are they recognized (yet) as new experts when they rst begin this activity. Since there is
no equality of intellectual authority between the two groups, how can then
we still use the notion of a trading zone?
It is here that a revised model of trading zone called the Study of
Experiences and Expertise (SEE) becomes very useful. The SEE model, rst
developed by Harry Collins and Robert Evans (2002), and then further
ne-tuned by Michael Gorman (2005), shows us how trading zones could
emerge in egalitarian as well as in non-egalitarian circumstances. This
4. Galison borrows this concept from anthropology, where we often see two different
groups or tribes coming in to trade despite their otherwise deep differences.

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Peripheral Science: C. V. Raman

extension of the trading zone concept allows us to see how such zones
might connect people and their associated expertise even though the agents
do not all stand at the same level epistemically. This formation of a trading
zone among unequal partners might take place through three possible
states: a State 1, which is the least cooperative of all, a State 2, which is
more cooperative, and which eventually may lead to a State 3. According
to Gorman, each state indicates the level of exchange and collaboration that
goes back and forth among the groups. Clearly, the higher the state, the
higher the level of cooperation. Such a trade can link groups who would
otherwise be considered quite unequal, but together, these two sets of dissimilar agents can try to attain a more collaborative level of scientic practice, sometimes even solving a new research problem. The entire sequence
of transactions might be visualized below in the form of a table.
Seen in this way, SEE sketches a mechanism that tells us how experts
from one community and newcomers from another community (who are
currently viewed as non-experts) might join forces in the form of a shared
practice, during the course of which the non-experts gradually become recognized as a (new) group of experts. This recognition anchors a tradition of
expertise on the side of the new entrants and it begins an epistemic loop
between the two groups. The cycle that gets established between the two
communities has the potential of being further reiterated by the newlyincluded members. This, historically speaking, is the conceptual scenario
behind most episodes of peripheral science.
SEEs can thus be viewed as the generalized model for all peripheral science, and it can serve as a way of thinking about how cognitive expertise in
science can begin in the middle of very challenging as well as modest circumstances, e.g., when a group of newcomers enters a scientic practice
with the goal of contributing to that tradition. A SEE zone, therefore, is
a place where new epistemic agents begin developing their own stocks of
contributory expertise. By contributory expertise here I mean the ability to
create an outcome in the research traditions of some scientic practice.
Because of its movement through different stages, the SEE zones are usually
in a state of ux, containing in them both the elements of cooperation as

Figure 1. The Three Types of Trading Zones and Their Respective Levels of
Expertise. Adapted with permission from Gorman 2005.

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387

well as conict. In the State 1 of a SEE network, the trade remains minimal,
and whatever exchanges that are permitted between the two groups might
be controlled tightly by the elite group who give all the orders. In a peripheral context, this is the analog of the stage called diffusion, when goods
from one culture arrive in the other as a form of a civilizing mission. This
stage, however, can lead to a more contributory stage, when people from
both sides begin interacting, sharing their expertise, and here the newcomer
comes to contribute to the development of a shared research program. But a
State 2 network can easily slide down to a State 1 condition, if the established
group again comes to dominate the eld, e.g., if the newcomers happen to
back the losing side in a controversy. Finally, we can envision the possibility
of reaching State 3, where as a result of persistent, long-term exchanges, the
two have come to share their mental models, expertise, and even their epistemic goals. In such a situation, all hierarchy is virtually set aside, and the
zone becomes a level landscape, in which people and their skills are uently
traded in the form of new scientic representations and solved problems. This
is perhaps the condition that prevails within the central communities, but
typically this state does not extend to new communities, who cannot routinely
expect to begin from such lofty heights. Instead, they must begin by playing the game of science from its difcult initial conditions, seeking to sustain themselves somehow during that hard process in order to evolve more
trade with other, established scientic communities. As we can easily imagine, this is hard uphill work.
The force behind this process is usually an energetic member of the
peripheral group who initiates the exchange, and who keeps reiterating it,
if all goes well with his or her rst efforts. Peripheral scientic communities
are thus typically born in the midst of such epistemic exchanges: someone
seeking to establish a trading zone with another, well-entrenched, scientic
community. This type of effort typically begins modestly, and for diverse
reasonspolitical motives often quite prominent among them. The establishment of a trading zone of this type marks the beginning of a new peripheral practice, or in other words, a new indigenous scientic community. As this
process goes through its successive reiterations, a new trading zone emerges
between communities. The interaction between the two remains fragile however, for an early conict can easily lead to an abandonment of the whole
zone. The process is therefore full of risk, and, however rich its beginnings,
may prove to be quite unstable after all.
With this theoretical framework in hand, let us now attend to the
Raman case study. As a peripheral scientist working in colonial India,
C. V. Raman (18881970) is well-known for his discovery of the Raman
Effect. As a newcomer scientist, he built a lasting practice, rst in acoustics
then in optics, nally becoming the rst Asian Nobel Laureate in science.

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Peripheral Science: C. V. Raman

His work in acoustics and optics spans nearly forty years, during which the
nucleus of a modern scientic community emerged in India. I shall argue
here that the processes by which Raman established himself in the practice
of science exhibits all the stages of our trading zone modelwe see in his
work a series of small cognitive steps via which he initiated an encounter
with the research projects of the European metropolitan community, gained
a rst foothold in its scientic practice, and nally sustained this nascent
interface with new outcomes and experiments, always trying to scale up
to the next possible stage. I shall ask what sorts of goals he might have
cherished during such encounters,5 and how, as a peripheral researcher who
entered scientic practice from outside the main community, he built (and
left behind) a stable scientic practice. What was it like for him to develop
a research program in such a challenging context?
3. Efforts of a Peripheral Scientist: Building a Mechanical Violin Player

In 1928, C. V. Raman, then a professor of physics in the newly-established

post-graduate Science Department at Calcutta University, made the remarkable discovery that when light is scattered by the optically pure liquids and
vapors, a small part of that light undergoes color transformation. While
most of the light is dispersed in the form of a Rayleigh scattering (i.e.,
scattering in the same frequency), this is always accompanied by the modied scattering of a different frequency, and therefore light of a different
color. This modied scattering carries the molecular signatures of those substances that produce the scattering. Raman Scattering, also known as the
Raman Effect, is now a standard spectroscopic technique, routinely used
to probe substances at their molecular level in a non-invasive way, especially
since the discovery of laser.
Yet, this remarkable discovery originated with a peripheral scientist
who began his career in the sciences with no ready-made graduate tradition and with very little formal training upon which to base his skills. It
was therefore necessary in Ramans caseand in many other similar peripheral casesto evolve the necessary contributory expertise via some form of
self-training. This turns out to be a fairly complex process. First, one must
begin by choosing a research program from another established community
and deriving from that program a set of research questions that can be
usefully investigated with ones modest resources. This resulting work must
then be accepted by an expert group who provides the newcomer with the
necessary imprimatur and with it the possibility that someone else might
use those results in the near future. Ramans expertise in analyzing the wave
phenomenarst sound waves, and then light wavesis the result of this
5. Gorman calls these overarching goals as cases of moral imagination.

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389

complex process. Not only did he have to teach himself how to do scientic
research, he also had to build a community at home and enter into a longstanding relationship with his dominant scientic community in the West.
This long-lasting relationship lasted for forty years, with several ups and
downs.
In the sections below, I shall be concerned with Ramans early acoustic
research with the violin family of instruments, which took place before he
became interested in light scattering. It is in the domain of acoustics that
he acquired the necessary contributory expertise that served as the basis for
his later work in optics, and it is during this period that he developed for
himself a visual mode of doing research, always seeking to make the mechanisms behind sound and light phenomena directly visible to the senses.
These are the techniques that he relied upon for the rest of his life. He
often used a kinematic analysis for solving the problems posed by earlier
researchers, such as Herman Helmholtz or Lord Rayleigh, hewing close to
their tradition, and yet always seeking to take their work to its next level.
The writings of Helmholtz and Rayleigh thus provided him with the
starting points of his research.6 In exploring his early work on the acoustics
of the violin family of instruments and his attempts to develop a theory of
the bowed strings, we come to see how he was trying to develop contributory expertise in acoustics for himself by analyzing wave phenomena in a
series of small but associated steps.
The reasons for Ramans interest in the acoustics of musical instruments
were quite simple. As a result of his exposure to Western education in the
Madras Presidency College, Raman had acquired an interest in the sound
and light phenomena. Musical research, i.e., research into the physics of
musical instruments, enjoyed great popularity during his day. And as he
was born into a family of accomplished musicians and played violin quite
well, not surprisingly, his rst entry into Western physics began with his
attempts to explore the acoustical properties of the violin and tabla, a popular Indian percussion instrument. Violin, in particular, occupied the major
share of Ramans attention during the years 19181924. To experimentally
study the properties of the violin and to nd a dynamical explanation for its
function, Raman decided to build for himself a mechanical violin-player at
his Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science laboratory (IACS)
in Calcutta.7
6. Raman read Helmholtzs book, The Sensation of Tone, during his college days in
Chennai, and later he also corresponded with Lord Rayleigh. Following Rayleigh, he took
up the problem of the color of the blue sea, to which he provided the correct solution.
7. The Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science was established in 1876 in
Kolkata by M. L. Sircar, a noted physician of the city, for the pursuit of independent scientic researches by the Indians. Raman joined this Association in 1905.

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Peripheral Science: C. V. Raman

The goal of the player was to mechanically simulate the playing conditions of a violin, allowing one to take measurements of the physical
quantities involved during an episode of play. Raman had already published some early theoretical proposals in the Bulletins of the IACS on
how the downward force of the bow produces a sustained musical tone
(Raman 1918). Furthermore, he had also come up with an elegant technique for photographing the vibrating strings, showing the formation of
nodes at different points during a vibration cycle and how those nodes
could move up or down assuming different positions. This was done by
means of a simple arrangement of mirrors, a few plates with slits, tuning
forks, and a carbon arc lamp. In designing a mechanical player for his violin
research, Raman was therefore seeking to take these initial modest efforts a
step further.
Assembled out of a disused optical bench, some abandoned bicycle
parts, and of course a violin and a bow,8 the purpose of the mechanical
player was to replicate normal playing conditions in order to make precise
measurements of the violins acoustics. According to his 1920 report to
the IACS, Ramans goal was to study the characteristics of the violin as a
resonator, discovering how the transmission of energy occurs between the
strings and the body of the instrument, and from thence to the air, nally
formulating the laws that underpin the performance of a human player, and
of course expressing those laws quantitatively (Raman 1920a).
As the two gures below show, while the bow in the set-up remained
xed, and the violin moved back and forth on a well-oiled cast-iron track.
The system, suitably driven by a shunt-wound motor, chosen no doubt for
its constant speed, had several degrees of freedom. First, by adjusting the
rheostat, one could adjust the speed of the whole experimental set-up. The
pressure of the bow on the strings that was held at the end of a long lathe
could be adjusted, which gave him full control over the two crucial inputs
of the systemspeed and pressure. Finally, there was a damping device
(attached to the bow) to take care of the vibrations produced by the movement of the violin on the cast iron track. The measurements from the
system were obtained either by reading a tachometer, or more directly by
using a stopwatch. The entire set-up was simple, intuitive, and extremely
low-cost, a predecessor to many other similar acoustic and optical set-ups
that Raman would evolve in the future, which nevertheless performed their
jobs of producing accurate measurements quite well. In the case of the present
violin-player, for example, Raman had complete control over the bowing
speed and the bowing pressure, as well as the distance of the bowing point
from the bridge.
8. Raman used a German copy of a Stradivarius for his player.

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391

With this simple device, Raman decided to investigate the following

four relationships so to explain the acoustic properties of the violin (Raman
1920a).
1. The relationship between the rate of change in the downward pressure of the bow and changes in the position of the bowed region.
2. The relationship between the bowing speed and the bowing pressure.
3. How the bowing pressure varies with changes in pitch (Raman
checked this on the G string).
4. Finally, how muting affects the bowing pressure (also checked on
the G string).
With respect to the rst question, Raman began with Helmholtzs
analysis of the vibrations of bowed strings, and sought to take that analysis
to its next logical conclusion. During an episode of playing, the string is
repeatedly plucked by the bow, and therefore displaced, but it always
returns to its original position. The conguration of this repeated displacement can be plotted in the form of a curve, which Helmholtz had done
already. When one observes this curve as a function of time, the pattern
shows itself to be a two-step zigzag curve that sits within a parabolic envelope. Raman took this basic analysis of Helmholtz as his starting point,
and thereafter sought to provide a more detailed kinematic analysis of
the whole playing process, showing in detail how each of the three subsystemsthe strings, the bridge, and the cavity of the violin (plus the air
trapped inside)were responding to one another during an episode of
playing. Using graphical as well as analytic tools, he sought to make the
kinematics of the system visible to the observer. The graphical mode of

Figure 2. A photograph of Ramans violin-player, adapted from Weidman 2006

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Peripheral Science: C. V. Raman

Figure 3. Schematic diagram of Ramans violin-player (Source: Alex Levine)

analysis was applied to plot the velocity of the bow, the bowing pressure,
distance from the bridge, sound frequency, and so on, while the corresponding analytic mode was applied to formulate simple equations that
articulated the vector positions, velocity, etc. Taken together, these two forms
of analyses gave him a full picture of how the violin works.
In general, his ndings agreed with views that he had published earlier
in the Bulletins of the Association and also in Philosophical Magazine (Raman
1920b). The result of bringing the bow nearer the bridge usually increases
the intensity of its tone. Since at any time an extended area of the bow is in
contact with the string, Raman used two coefcients of frictiondynamic
and staticto observe how the two contiguous graphs evolve when the
bowing pressure was increased gradually, and when the bow moved further
away from the bridge. He found that on the D string, the bowing pressure
varied in inverse proportion to the square of the distance of the bow from
the bridge, except when the bowed point was too far from the bridge or the
speed of the bow was very low. He was thus able to write down the formula
for the minimum and maximum bowing pressure in such situations.
With regard to the relationship between bowing speed and bowing
pressure, his guesses were also similarly borne out. Change in the speed
of the bow is one of the main techniques of the violinist, who normally uses
it to increase the intensity of the tone. Raman found that on the D string,
the bowing pressure rises quickly with increase in the bowing speed, the
pressure rising roughly in proportion with the speed.
The other two relationships turned out to be somewhat mixed in character. The bowing pressure, as Raman found, varied with the changes in

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393

pitch, but not in a linear way. Instead, on the G string, the relationship
showed several maxima and minima, especially between the frequencies of
520 and 570. Finally, muting clearly affected the bowing pressure (on the
G string) but, again, the relationship was not a linear one.
The exploration of this fourfold relationship provided him with a fairly
good kinematic analysis of how the violin works. It also gave rise to a
further set of research questions that he could protably work on, e.g.,
how to construct structurally trouble-free violins, an explanation of the
tone known as the wolf-note, the effects of heavier and lighter stringing,
and so on. With these results in hand, Raman gained his rst round of contributory expertise in acoustics that allowed him entry into a new trading
zone, where he could truly claim to have joined the practice as one of its
contributing members. Ramans results were well-received by the dominant community in Europe, and in 1927 he was invited to contribute to
the German Handbuch der Physik as its only non-European author. By that
time, of course, he had been strongly drawn to optics, especially to the
phenomena of light scattering, and was thus already beginning to move
away from acoustics. This is the eld in which he nally made his most
prominent mark, discovering the Raman Effect. From the position of being
a complete newcomer, Raman had nally managed to gain entry into the
practice of science by building a trading zone in acoustics via his participation into the research program of another established community.
4. Inside a Trading Zone: Developing Scientic Expertise as a
Peripheral Scientist

What do we see in this episode of a newcomer putting together a simple

device, such as a mechanical violin player, for measuring and visualizing
the acoustic properties of the instrument? The insight, I think, is quite
simple. Scientic activity might begin in a variety of circumstances in
which there may or may not be any resources for authoritative credentialing or even training. Yet, those efforts do bear the stamps of genuine, creative acts of science, and are capable of further cognitive development.
They are also often the natural cognitive responses of a society, which is
faced with a new set of cultural goods, and is seeking to respond to those
goods in a creative new way. The central community model of science, which
takes all science to be the contribution of a few dominant, resource-rich
communities, rarely glancing at its peripheries, thus gives us an essentially
incomplete image of science. A complete account of scientic practice and
scientic thinking should include at least some of the mechanisms by which
newcomers from various contexts join the scientic practice, and of how
they form a basis which thereafter has the potential to become new centers
of science. In short, a scientic practice should be viewed as an open system,

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Peripheral Science: C. V. Raman

allowing in it contributions from various kinds of stakeholders, who may

be newcomers or other sorts of novel contributors, and not simply as a
closed system of a few well-qualied experts. And while in this short paper
I have only discussed Ramans individual activities, almost completely
bypassing his interactions with the European scientic community, it should
not be forgotten that this early individual stage was crucial for his preparation
for the next round of more ambitious contributions and his lasting contacts
with the various centers of Euro-American communities. This study can
therefore be seen as a modest illustration of how the rst stage of a (new)
trading zone emerges into existence.
Ramans kinematic analysis of the violin by means of his mechanical
player shows us how a peripheral scientist could produce little pieces of
normal sciencesamples of contributory expertiseby using his own cognitive resources in the task of developing a research program that he has
adopted from someone else. This gained him an entry into the established
practice of acoustics. In modifying the experimental set-ups of the European
scientists and creating his own, Raman later produced several hybridized
experimental set-ups, always nicely adapted for his own use. He used, for
example, mostly sunlight, abundantly available in Calcutta, for his optical
experiments, and unlike other European physicists he collected data by
sight rather than by exposing photographic plates. Through these processes, he created a platform for his own (future) home community, and a
track record that he could expand in the future, eventually handing over
some of his experimental techniques to his students, such as K. S. Krishnan.
Clearly, the trading zone that he produced by these methods had its share
of difculties, for the entire process depended on how well he was able to
maintain himself within that new trading zone. Being a member of a
peripheral community, and especially being one of its pioneering members,
can be difcult uphill work.
But the practice of science is clearly wider than the efforts of a few
central communities. Though Ramans results were well-received by the
dominant community in Europe, this need not always be the case, for such
work might also be rejected by the main community, or even be forgotten
after an initial phase of acceptance. But such expertise, once created, leaves
behind a trace or an exemplar. Raman, for example, forged for himself the
skills and the contacts that he always relied on laterhis experimental techniques, his preference for kinematic analysis, his eminently visual modes of
reasoning all gave him the necessary expertise to move on to the next stage of
building a more ambitious SEE network in optics. Raman left his acoustic
researches soon after 1924, switching over permanently to optics. But the
traces of his early acoustic work, which today we can read about in the old
volumes of the Bulletins of the IACS and in the Philosophical Magazine, tells us

Perspectives on Science

395

how a peripheral scientist, who nds himself in the position of being a rstgeneration researcher, gradually evolves for himself the skills that can turn
him into a contributor in the new practice of science. In studying how a simple mechanical violin-player was built and used in an unknown laboratory in
colonial Calcutta, we see how the peripheral practice of science can build
a small nucleus of science (and create a set of new practitioners) through the
energetic activities of a newcomer. Working rst single-handedly, and then
with a small group of students, Raman created in his IACS laboratory in
Calcutta, the nucleus of a small indigenous Indian scientic community.
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