Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines [Hardcover]

In Anglo-European botany, it is customary to think of the vernacular as that which is not a Latin or Latinized scientific plant name. InUnmaking 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 colonization. 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 honor a flower to the touch of a skirt woven from banana fiber, 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 theorize “sovereign vernaculars,” or insight into plants that made andunmade 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.USKathleen Cruz Gutierrez traces a history of botany in the colonial Philippines, showing how local vernacular botanical practices stymied colonial efforts at classifying plant life.Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.“Examining the intersections of colonization, science, and nature,Unmaking Botanyinnovatively illustrates how botany in the colonial Philippines was shaped as much by scientific ideals and transimperial agendas as it was by science’s own epistemological limitations, internal disagreements, and nomenclatural instabilities. With this argument, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez draws important attention to how imperial science and knowledge systems are inflected by particular historical contexts, social contours, epilc4