Reflections on Fieldwork Around Europe*

This article is about the act and practice of doing interviews. In contrast to an ascendant enthusiasm for automation, computation, and digitization, it focuses on the process of interviewing as a relational mode of historical research and on uses of interviews that occur prior to their mobilization as evidence in historical accounts. The central argument is that, well before interviews can be used as historical sources, the practice of interviewing is useful for charting scientific networks, creating textual records, and generating archival questions. After setting the analytic stage, the article proceeds almost ethnographically through a series of conversations and interviews in order to illustrate some of the ways that interviewing-as a practice of knowing in and through relations-resists formalization and remains irresolvably human, social, and staged. In the conclusion, the article turns to epistemological questions raised when using interviews in historical writing. It argues that incorporating research interviews into the methodological repertoire of the history of science and medicine offers an occasion to practice reflexivity with respect to the narrative grounds of historical claims. It suggests that this might encourage a confrontation with the discipline's inherited epistemic valuation of naturalism.