This week’s readings have triggered a lot of questions and reflexions, which I look forwards to discussing tomorrow.
I have however decided to dedicate this post to my first thoughts on my project, which has taken a significant step forwards these last few days: I have abandoned my plan A, which consisted in looking at coastal societies as very dynamic spaces of exchanges, and developed a plan B.
This plan B was inspired by MO3214: Travel Cultures in Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries which I took last semester and for which I wrote an essay about natural history and scientific explorations in the South Pacific in the late eighteenth century.
Looking back on this essay, and in the light of our discussions during these past few weeks, I notice that most of the literature I used was very Eurocentric and focused on national scientific institutions such as the Royal Society or on great figures of explorers and scientists, such as James Cook and Joseph Bank, considered as protagonists of British empire-building.
However, I believe that there is a much more transnational and complex story to tell about the creation and circulation of natural history knowledge at this time.
My reflection is based on two elements.
- Firstly, historical geography literature such as David Livingstone’s Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge highlights the importance of place when investigating the history of science: whereas scientific knowledge is often considered universal, its creation and dissemination in fact took place in numerous local sites (the field, the laboratory, the museum, …) which influenced its nature and content.
- Secondly, I understood after a brief encounter with Bruno Latour’s Science in Action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society that scientific knowledge is created and processed through international systems of scientific centres which create the necessary conditions to transform numerous disparate elements collected in peripheries into a standardized knowledge legible in metropolitan centres.
A common practice among natural historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was to collect plant specimens and bring them back (alive or dried) in European collections in which they were ordered. Once incorporated into collections, these specimens could be used as types against which other specimens could be compared, thus contributing to the establishment of a systematised knowledge of the natural world.
My initial idea for my project would be to take as a starting point a given botanical collection and to retrace the itinerary of the specimens composing it from their extraction from their natural environment to Europe. I could maybe also look at their circulation between collections.
The study could take the form of a series of focuses on different sites and actors involved in the plants’ journey. This could potentially enable me to both understand local realities of knowledge production and how these realities were connected to wider scale networks.
There are several avenues on which that could take me:
- Inspired from Kozol’s comment in the ARH Conversation – “the most effective transnational historical studies are those that examine how cultural practices and ideologies shape, constrain, or enable the economic, social and political conditions in which people and goods circulate within local, regional and global locale” – I could look at how transnational phenomena shaped those scientific networks and enabled a plant to circulate.
- Moreover, the importance of scientific centres was dependent on their political, social, economic and cultural capital and relations: this wide scientific network was therefore heavily dominated by European metropolitan centres which determined agendas and practices. Looking at intermediaries and more peripheral centres would enable me to ‘decentre’ Europe and to explore the necessary power relations embedded within this knowledge system.
- I could also be interested in looking at interactions between local indigenous knowledge systems and the European knowledge system. On the one hand, local knowledge was exploited, appropriated and integrated into European knowledge system. On the other hand, these interactions were far from being one way and local and European knowledge were influencing each other.
- Lastly, although, and maybe because, natural history endeavours were strongly linked to empire-building processes and rivalries between empires, it would be interesting to look at the cosmopolitan elements of scientific exchanges across national and imperial boundaries.
From there, my main questions would be:
- How do I choose and refine my topic?
- How can I find and choose a specific collection?
- How can I trace an object? Where do I find the sources?
- How do I ensure that my perspective is transnational?
- What could be a useful topic for the historiographical essay?