The introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s focus as a whole and explores its relation to existing historiography, including its engagement with decolonial and postcolonial theory and scholarship in Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies. In highlighting the book’s unique arguments, contributions, and perspectives, the Introduction explains the concept and double meaning of "troubling encounters" and provides the book’s thematic organization. Noting that some chapters adopt a local perspective, others a national one, and yet others draw attention to transnational and even global domains, the Introduction reflects upon the variety of scales for interpreting and troubling the history of encounters in the human sciences. For the authors, the legacies of those scales are read in the myriad interactions of expedition science, in the relationality implied in fieldwork or the logic of settler colonial custodial institutions, and finally in the resulting theories about human nature and behavior that circulated globally within scientific circles and beyond.

The Preface outlines the origins, motivations, history, and stakes of the project that led to the publication of this book, and it discusses the project’s relationship to scholarship in Indigenous Studies and engagement of key works in that field. It explores what an approach informed by Indigenous Studies can bring to the history of the human sciences, and how it might build upon existing scholarship on this topic.

This chapter explores two different systems of research oversight in recent Brazilian history: the bureaucracies of the twentieth and twenty-first-century Brazilian state, and approaches developed by A’uwẽ (Xavante) aldeias over the same period in Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land. Focusing primarily on genetics-based research, Dent develops the concept of bureaucratic vulnerability. She argues that the way some geneticists have interpreted state regulatory systems regarding biosamples creates additional risks for Indigenous people under study. At the same time, Indigenous groups are placed in a bureaucratic double bind, where non-Indigenous experts are called on to justify and validate their claims in the eyes of the state. The protectionist state regulation contrasts with relationship-based practices that A’uwẽ interlocutors have developed over repeated interaction and years of collaboration with a group of anthropologists and public health researchers. Specifically, A’uwẽ have responded to the dual and interrelated challenges of recognition under a colonial state and the management of outside researchers through the careful modulation of researchers’ affective experience of fieldwork, working to create enduring relationships and mutual obligation.

Late seventeenth-century scholars sought to distinguish themselves from the stereotype of an academic pedant. They developed a new model of a scholar who was "prudent" or "gallant," that is, witty, strategic, fashionable, and judicious in career choices and areas of focus and able to perform fluently in mixed and noble audiences. They aimed to establish their reputations as celebrities by attracting attention in popular genres such as vernacular periodicals. Historians have recently identified this new model as an ancestor of the research scholar. Early modern academics constructed this model in contrast to the stereotype of doctrinaire bookworms committed to a priori systems. Prudent and gallant scholars embraced the change of knowledge over time. From a position of deep ignorance, they nevertheless dared to frame conjectures that might be disproven. They pivoted quickly in response to new evidence and varying audiences. Major exhibited these ideals in his vernacular science fiction, Voyage to a New World without a Ship or a Sail, and in his adoption of Fama (fame or rumor) as his personal brand.

In this conclusion, Stephen T. Casper reviews themes and findings from the entirety of the collection. He situates the book as a whole as a provocation to reconsider the traditional historiographic approach in the history of the human sciences.

Chapter 6 examines the devastating toll that the development of the hydropower nation took on people’s lives. In Henan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi, over 430,000 people were forced to leave their homes and communities due to the construction of the Sanmenxia Dam. This chapter focuses on the resettlement of over 7,000 residents from Henan to Gansu, revealing how the state’s pursuit of hydroelectricity not only altered the Yellow River’s physical landscape but also caused irreparable harm to the affected communities.

Experimental philosophy was institutionalized as a discipline in Central Europe with the first seminars and professorships. Major requested but did not receive a professorship in this discipline, yet he taught one of its first seminars. At the beginning of each meeting, Major lectured on experimental norms, but then spent most time experimenting upon objects in his collection in a purposefully nonmethodical way. The seminar integrated current research by Major and his students. Whirling from one experiment to the next, Major dramatized shifting, probabilistic knowledge and tried to lure students away from a priori systems. He often deployed phenomena from global craft or even street performances, but he distinguished experimental philosophy as a liberal discipline from its application to use. Major’s son-in-law, Wilhelm Ulrich Waldschmidt, became the first chair of experimental philosophy in Kiel in 1693. He taught many of the same experiments as Major, but, like others of his generation, he rearranged them to lend experimental philosophy a much more methodical air. A pedagogical presentation of experimental method developed distinct from the practice of experimental research.

By arguing for an earlier development of the research university, this book questions previous accounts that have seen the state or the corporation as the main drivers of the making of research. Whereas other accounts see a turn toward useful knowledge as a corrective to the overly bookish or pedantic knowledge of professors, academics themselves reformed scholarly approaches both in opposition to their academic forebears and to the entanglement of knowledge with use. Both theory and practice could be a bias. This book highlights the research university as a place to cultivate and protect critical thinking from political and economic pressure. Even proponents of useful knowledge adopted academic techniques because by improving the quality of knowledge they made it more useful. The early modern development of dynamic epistemic superstructures suggests approaches to interdisciplinarity and continuing knowledge change today. The book encourages academics to participate in knowledge reforms from a position of epistemic humility and a self-critical search for biases. It proposes how curation of knowledge still represents a viable approach, but one that could be reformulated to address the biases of the past.