Assistant Professor Svit Komel first Slovenian recipient of the Bader Prize
Daniel Hinterramskogler/ÖAW
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Assistant Professor Svit Komel of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana is the first Slovenian to receive the prestigious Bader Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for the best work by early-career researchers in the field of the history of science. He received the award for his doctoral dissertation Rule and Measure: A History of Juridical Practices in the Age of Surveys.
The dissertation offers an entirely new perspective on agrarian reforms that fundamentally influenced the development of capitalism in the territory of the former Habsburg Monarchy and continue to shape the Slovenian countryside today. In it, the author examines the abolition of peasant forest and pasture rights between approximately 1848 and 1895. He interprets the reform as a specific mode of exercising power and producing knowledge about local phenomena, customs, and practices, which he terms “the survey”.
The survey as power and knowledge of the local
In the 19th century, there was a veritable flood of such surveys. These were not merely population censuses; they included measurements of air pressure and temperature, the standardization of local weights and measures, and investigations into working and living conditions as well as soil quality. The aim of these surveys was to study distinctly local and variable phenomena for purposes of governance. Reports by jurists and foresters during agrarian reform served as the basis for abolishing peasants’ rights, while also being directly incorporated into scientific publications and textbooks. Similarly, surveys on the influence of forests on rainfall in the Habsburg Monarchy were used as arguments for or against the afforestation of the Karst region and the expropriation of peasants who used these lands as pastures. Professor Komel thus interprets the survey both as a specific mode of producing knowledge and as a means of exercising power over highly particular phenomena, customs, and the basic material conditions of everyday life.
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Peasants were not merely subordinate laypeople
He does not treat science as a pre-existing body of theory with which surveyors unilaterally transformed local realities. Based on a vast amount of previously unexplored archival material, Professor Komel shows that peasants possessed extensive legal and forestry knowledge, which enabled them in countless cases to reshape the categories and interpretations of surveyors. In this way, they were in some instances able to successfully resist expropriation, while at the same time significantly transform the legal and forestry knowledge produced within the framework of the survey. The struggle over interpretation hence provided a crucial means of fighting out the battle over land.
About the Bader Prize
The Austrian Academy of Sciences awards the Bader prize every two years for the best dissertation, scientific monograph, or other work in the field of the history of science to researchers who are no more than five years past the completion of their doctorate.