Alternative Logics of Soviet “Pseudoscience”: Amateur Encounters with the Tunguska Explosion

This talk will use the wide-ranging amateur expeditions that began in the late 1950s to the site of the 1908 Tunguska explosion in Siberia to explore the pattern of thinking behind researchers who have often been dismissed as pseudoscientists. Embracing methodologies, institutional arrangements, and transdisciplinary perspectives eschewed by the meteorite and comet specialists at the Academy of Sciences, the participants in the annual fieldwork expeditions to the site of the explosion ....