Unmaking Botany Science & Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines

About this book

In Anglo-European botany, it is customary to think of the vernacular as that which is not a Latin or Latinized scientific plant name. In Unmaking Botany, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez traces a history of botany in the Philippines during the last decades of Spanish rule and the first decades of US colonisation. Through this history, she redefines the vernacular, expanding it to include embodied, cosmological, artistic, and varied taxonomic practices. From the culinary textures of rice and the lyrics crooned to honour a flower to the touch of a skirt woven from banana fibre, she illuminates how vernaculars of plant knowing in the Philippines exposed the philosophical and practical limits of botany. Such vernaculars remained as sovereign forms of knowledge production. Yet, at the same time, they fueled botany's dominance over other ways of knowing plants. Revealing this tension allows Gutierrez to theorise "sovereign vernacular", or insight into plants that made and unmade the science, which serves as a methodological provocation to examine the interplay of different knowledge systems and to study the history of science from multiple vantage points.

Contents

A Note on Orthography, Terms, and Formatting   ix
Introduction. Sovereign Vernaculars   1

Part I. A Botany at Its Most Defined
1. An Asymptotic Taxonomy   29
2. Scientific Statecraft   55

Part II. Science in a Place of Flux
3. Ubiquitous Sampaguita   85
4. Woven Transformations   107

Part III. Assembling a Wider Expanse
5. Field Labor's Menace   135
6. The Latin Babble   159

Conclusion. Of Place, Moment, and Source   183
Acknowledgments   199
Notes   205
Bibliography   235
Index   273

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Biography

Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.