Hearsay is Not Excluded: A History of Natural History 0300273673, 9780300273670

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Yale Agrarian Studies Series James C. Scott, series editor

Pastoral Swedish landscape by Marie Christine Larson, the author’s great-great-grandmother, circa 1860. Author’s collection.

Hearsay Is Not Excluded A History of Natural History

Michael R. Dove

New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the Council on Southeast Asian Studies, and the Coe Fellowship at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University. Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund. Excerpt from Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms, copyright © 1964, renewed 1993. Courtesy of the University of Texas Press. Excerpts from The Order of Things, by Michel Foucault, translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith, translation copyright © 1970 by Penguin Random House LLC. Used in the United Kingdom by permission of Routledge, reproduced by arrangement with Taylor & Francis Group; used in the rest of the world by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpts from Hanunóo Agriculture: A Report on an Integral System of Shifting Cultivation in the Philippines, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 1957, reprinted by Elliot’s Books 1975. Reprinted with permission from the estate of Harold C. Conklin. Cover illustration: The “bausor tree,” from the Ortus Sanitatis (Garden of Health), published by Jacob Meydenbach in Mainz in 1491. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Illustrations of Rumphius, Linnaeus, Wallace, and Conklin on the opening pages of chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 by Katherine Ball. Copyright © 2024 by Michael R. Dove. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Bulmer type by Integrated Publishing Solutions. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2023937921 ISBN 978-0-300-27367-0 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-300-27010-5 (paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to the memory, mentorship, and work of Harold C. Conklin

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Contents

Preface  ix Acknowledgments  xix

Introduction Natural History: Scope, Method, History  1

One The Seventeenth Century, Rumphius: “I Would Rather Be Astounded”  38

I n t e r l u d e . I m a g i n a t i o n   65 Two The Eighteenth Century, Linnaeus: “The Laps Are Our Teachers”  69

I n t e r l u d e . C o n t r a d i c t i o n   103 Three The Nineteenth Century, Alfred Russel Wallace: “Not Merely the Journal of a Traveller”  108 I n t e r l u d e . R e p a t r i a t i o n   150

Four The Twentieth Century, Harold C. Conklin: “A Word Having to Do with Knowledge”  156 I n t e r l u d e . p r e t e r n a t u r a l   186

Epilogue “Lucubrationes”  191 Notes  205 Bibliography  231 Index  251

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Preface

T h e t i t l e f o r t h i s b o o k r e p r e s e n t s a play on a line in Michel Foucault’s 1973 work The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. In chapter 5, “Classifying,” which is about the field of natural history, he writes, “Observation, from the seventeenth century onward, is a perceptible knowledge furnished with a series of systematically negative conditions. Hearsay is excluded, that goes without saying.” By hearsay Foucault refers to popular or folk knowledge and its gradual marginalization and ultimate exclusion from the field of natural history, and indeed natural science in general, over the past several hundred years. In a subsequent publication Foucault clarifies these remarks: “There was a time when those texts which we now call ‘literary’ (stories, folk tales, epics, and tragedies) were accepted, circulated, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author. Their anonymity was ignored because their real or supposed age was a sufficient guarantee of their authenticity.” The place of these texts within science came to be taken by a different sort of text, also anonymous, but based on a different measure of authority: “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a totally new conception was developed when scientific texts were accepted on their own merits and positioned within an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of established truths and methods of verification.”1 My subject in this volume is the historic practice of natural history from which hearsay was not excluded. I examine the work of four natural historians, who wrote within the period of transition referred to by Foucault but, writing against the tide of change, managed to retain a dimension of folk knowledge in their studies. They are four of the greatest natural historians of the past four centuries: Georgius Everhardus Rumphius in the seventeenth century, Carl Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, Alfred Russel Wallace in the nineteenth century, and Harold C. Conklin in the twentieth century. All four also are recognized as ancestral figures in the modern discipline of anthropology. The field of natural history is millennia-­old. As David French writes, “Natural history too is a category ix

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recognisable equally to Romans, at least, as to moderns.” There are both continuities and changes in the field from the classical era to the present, but in broad terms, natural history is the holistic, interdisciplinary, and observation-based study of the world, encompassing human society or not, depending upon the era.2 Much of my own work, as an anthropologist, has focused on hearsay or what I call folk knowledge, its role in local systems of livelihood, and its value in conservation and development programs. I have studied folk knowledge of the environment and natural resources during extended periods of fieldwork in Asia, including eight years in Indonesia—two years in West Kalimantan and six years in Central Java—four years in Pakistan, then another eight years working across Asia from a base in Hawaii, followed by a quarter century of teaching and research in this field at Yale University. Much if not most of this folk knowledge is not recognized, understood, or appreciated by the wider world. My own work has consisted in helping to make these systems legible to metropolitan audiences, including the conservation and development institutions with which I was affiliated during these years, in particular their staffs of natural scientists. This entailed studying the barriers in the modern natural sciences to ­appreciation of traditional systems of knowledge for natural resource management. My research trajectory in Southeast Asia brought me early on to Alfred Russel Wallace and his captivating monograph on his time in the East Indies, The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan, and the Bird of Paradise. A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature, and I share Celtic ancestry and—on the maternal side of my family—a surname with him. His accounts of shooting every orangutan he saw prompted me, when settled at my own field site in Borneo for dissertation research, to take on the care of an orphaned long-tailed macaque (Macaca fascicularis), whom I named Alfie, in expiation of Wallace’s sins in this regard (frontispiece to the introduction).3 My own doctoral research focused on swidden agriculture, so Harold C. Conklin’s monograph on swidden cultivation in the Philippines, Hanunóo Agriculture: A Report on an Integral System of Shifting Cultivation in the Philippines, hovered over me as the widely recognized but also forbidding standard of what a study of this topic should look like. I came to Georgius Everhardus Rumphius and Carl Linnaeus later in my career—to Rumphius because of his celebrated work on

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the infamous poison tree (Antiaris toxicaria) of the East Indies, from his magisterial The Ambonese Herbal. I had come across use of this poison among the Dayak in Kalimantan, not in actual hunting or warfare but as part of a discourse of tribal savagery that they employed to frighten off Malay thieves—which resonated with Rumphius’s account. I came to Linnaeus by way of his little-known accounts of burn-beating or swidden cultivation in rural Sweden—related in his Lachesis Lapponica, or a Tour in Lapland—his sympathetic account of it, and the political storm that he endured as a result, which also resonated with my own experiences in Southeast Asia. These four natural historians are little read today, partly in reaction to the long privileging of white, male scholars at the expense of other voices, and partly because of the view of all colonial-era scholarship as a technology of imperial conquest. But some dead white men are capable of surprise, as some of the research carried out during colonial times clearly escaped the political hegemony of the times. What E. P. Thompson calls the “enormous condescension of posterity” can get in the way of accessing valuable historic research.4 For example, many scholars today, inspired by the worldviews of indigenous communities, are critical of a vision of humanity as separate from the natural world. But Rumphius, Linnaeus, Wallace, and Conklin long practiced a matter-of-fact study and valorization of anthropogenic landscapes, the sort of landscapes that ecologists and botanists—still laboring under a Cartesian divide between culture and nature—ignored through most of the twentieth century in favor of pristine wilderness settings. The implicit acceptance of the value and importance of such landscapes is reflected in the texts of these four scholars, which may focus on a wildflower, then an agricultural practice, then a tribal artifact, all without formal transitions in the text, much to the consternation of some modern readers.5 They all held an unabashedly holistic view of the world. Also, whereas self-reflexivity and attention to the positionality of the scholar is greatly valued in the social sciences and humanities today, the works of these four natural historians are exemplary in this regard. The authors are present, as persons with opinions, in their texts. All four had political positions, for which they advocated, and this is manifest in their texts: they do not separate themselves from their research, they do not elaborate a distinction between pure and applied research. Furthermore, whereas

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there are many critiques today of reductionism in the natural sciences, these four scholars embraced many different disciplines, theories, and methods, including the humanities, and they were conspicuous in seeking out and giving weight to folk knowledge—their works are multivocal. Of most importance perhaps, the modern ontological turn has focused scholarly attention on the need to see dominant ontologies as contingent and to recognize and study those of others. These four natural historians were scientists but they were not modern scientists; consequently, their ontologies are not implicated in many of the failings of modern science. There is a temporal, historic dimension to ontological diversity: by definition, those who belong to a given era will share many fundamental ontological characteristics, and those who are not of that era will not. This makes a compelling case for reengaging with historic natural history. The works of the four aforementioned natural historians is not without problematic aspects from a modern perspective, however, which can present a challenge when reading them. Current emotions and politics can inhibit our reading and thinking across temporal, ontological differences. How, then, can we read historic texts against the grain of contemporary academic critiques to access the work of scholars like these? How can we draw inspiration from historic natural histories to navigate modern concerns? How best to challenge contemporary norms and habitus of writing and reading: how can we apply a new habitus of reading to old works of natural history? As a step in the direction of this new habitus, I will employ in this volume the device of intercalary textual commentary on my analysis of the work of Rumphius, Linnaeus, Wallace, and Conklin (as Interludes on  Imagination, Contradiction, Repatriation, and Preternatural). The great American novelist John Steinbeck, who also made noteworthy contributions to the field of natural history, pioneered the device of intercalary chapters in his 1939 novel on Dust Bowl migrant families, The Grapes of Wrath. As Robert DeMott writes in his introduction to a recent edition of the book: “In early July 1938, Steinbeck told literary critic Harry T. Moore that he was improvising his own ‘new method’ of fictional technique: one that combined a suitably elastic form and elevated style to express the far-­ reaching tragedy of the migrant drama. In The Grapes of Wrath he devised a contrapuntal structure with short lyrical chapters of exposition and background pertinent to the migrants as a group—chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12,

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14, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29—alternating with the long narrative chapters of the Joad family’s exodus to California—chapters 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 13, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 30.”6 Steinbeck’s objective was to construct a contrast between the two types of chapters, to create two different views of reality. As Demott continues: “Steinbeck structured his novel by juxtaposition. His ‘particular’ chapters are the slow-paced and lengthy narrative episodes that embody traditional characterization and advance the dramatic plot, while his jazzy, rapid-fire ‘interchapters’ work at another level of cognition by expressing an atemporal, universal, synoptic view of the migrant condition. In one way or another, Steinbeck’s combinatory method has allegiances to the stereopticon [a projector with two lenses]. . . . The novel demonstrates how form itself is a kind of magic lantern, a shifting lens for magnifying and viewing multiple perspectives of reality.”7 Steinbeck hoped that this narrative structure would function as a pedagogical device, to open readers up to a political message that they would not otherwise receive. Here again is DeMott: No matter what aural or visual analogy we apply, the fact remains that The Grapes of Wrath is not a closed system of historical periodicity, but a relational field, a web of connections between text and context, nature and culture, physical earth and human inhabitants. His “general” or intercalary chapters (“pace changers,” Steinbeck called them) were expressly designed to “hit the reader below the belt. With the rhythms and symbols of poetry one can get into a reader—open him up and while he is open introduce things on a [sic] intellectual level which he would not or could not receive unless he were opened up,” Steinbeck revealed to Columbia University undergraduate Herbert Sturz in 1953. Throughout his career, Steinbeck was always a relational thinker, and in Grapes, the intercalary chapters provide a kind of anthropological “thick description” of the American migrant plight. . . . Text and context are integrally related to each other in a kind of necessary complementarity, “a unique ecological rhetoric,” according to Peter Valenti.8

The need for this sort of pedagogy is as great today as during the Depression and Dust Bowl years. Historic natural histories have the potential to contribute to our understanding of global environmental change

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and related questions pertaining to the politics of knowledge, science skepticism, the status of folk knowledge, and the value of social science. Entrenched thinking on these questions may be “opened up,” to use Steinbeck’s phrase, by the juxtaposition of perspectives in the intercalary structure of this volume, and more generally by the juxtaposition of historic natural history with current environmental scholarship. Ultimately, I wish to ask, what part of the historic influence of these four natural historians was due to their ability to combine the use of folk knowledge and the biological sciences in the study of culture and nature? To return to the quote from Foucault with which I began, how did their study of hearsay contribute to the development of natural history, and how did natural history contribute to their understanding of hearsay? Of most importance, what does it mean that the study of hearsay in particular and natural history in general waned as the modern scientific disciplines were rising; what does it mean that the two developments seem to have co-­ occurred? And finally, did this historic co-occurrence lay the groundwork for the modern crisis of confidence in science, and if so, what is to be done about it? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the origin of the term “intercalary” lies in ancient Jewish, Greek, and Roman calendars, in which intercalary days or months were used to adapt the lunar to the solar reckoning of time. There is a similar temporal dimension to my planned use of intercalary chapters, which I will use to briefly step out of the time- and place-focused discussions of the work of each scholar—Rumphius, Linnaeus, Wallace, Conklin—to raise some of the issues that transcend those specific contexts.9 The medievalist and postmodern scholar Umberto Eco writes, “Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry,” which in the case here means inquiry from the perspectives of anthropology, area studies, and studies of human-animal relations, among other fields.10 I begin this volume with an introductory chapter that examines the ancient roots of natural history; the challenge of reading historic works in natural history from a modern perspective; their interdisciplinary and holistic character; their unique field methods; the everlasting debate over the ­wisdom of studying far versus near and the field versus the armchair; and the modern history of natural history. Then I devote one chapter each to

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Rumphius, Linnaeus, Wallace, and Conklin, followed in each case by an intercalary chapter. In chapter 1 I focus on Rumphius, in the seventeenth century, in what was then the Dutch East Indies: I first discuss the use of folk knowledge in his research and then his fantastic account of the infamous upas poison tree; I analyze the stories surrounding the tree to show that relations between East and West in Rumphius’s era were more complex than imagined, with agency, imagination, and strategic knowledge production on both sides; and I end the chapter with a discussion of the aesthetic dimensions of Rumphius’s scholarship. In chapter 2 I write of the work of Linnaeus in the eighteenth century in Sweden. I begin with a review of the model of “professional travel” that he developed in his major expeditions to Sweden’s remote territories, then I examine the overlooked ethnographic dimension of his field reports, focusing on agriculture and herding, and native food and medicine, with fine-grained descriptions of the daily life of peasants and tribal peoples. I discuss his attitudes toward, and representation of, native peoples, in particular regarding the state-sanctioned practice of “burn-beating” or swidden cultivation. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the principal theoretical issues pertaining to Linnaeus’s system of binomial classification and his thesis of the “economy of nature.” Chapter 3 concerns Alfred Russel Wallace and the eight-year period of research in the East Indies from 1854 to 1862 that produced his masterpiece, The Malay Archipelago. I first discuss the odd depiction of this work as a “travel book,” which I trace to his study of anthropogenic landscapes, with cultural as well as natural dimensions; I contrast his approval of heavy-handed Dutch colonial economic policy to his appreciation of native trading traditions, which reflects his complex positionality—the multiple roles and voices he assumed at that particular time and place in colonial relations between Asia and Europe. In chapter 4 I focus on the fieldwork of Harold C. Conklin during the second half of the twentieth century with two groups of tribal agriculturalists in the Philippines, the Hanunóo on Mindanao and the Ifugao of Northern Luzon. I begin the chapter with a discussion of his genre-defining ethnography, with its exacting descriptions of everyday reality, and his analysis of swidden agriculture, which upended conventional views of this

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practice. I then discuss the contribution that this work made to theories of representation, based on his aversion to generalization, his “fine description,” and his use of graphics among other means. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the political implications of such representation and how time and place make the study, or not. The epilogue commences with the suggestions by Michel Foucault and Mary Pratt that the “marvels” of colonial natural history were a cover for clandestine political-economic ends. The reality is more complex than this, as secrecy, and theorizing regarding secrecy, on the part of the colonized as well as colonizer, was inherent to the project of natural history. This is illustrated by revisiting Rumphius’s account of the poison tree and the flights of fancy that it provoked among both Dutch colonists and native peoples in the East Indies. There are commonalities in the work of the four natural historians discussed in this volume, involving the disciplined habitus of fieldwork, the definition of the scientific object, and the place of the author in the text—which offer insights into contemporary challenges from both Orientalism and science skepticism.

K i l l i n gwort h , CT , July 2022

Notes 1. Foucault 1973:132; Foucault 1979:20. The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) gives the modern definition of “hearsay” as “that which one hears or has heard someone say; information received by word of mouth, usually with implication that it is not trustworthy; oral tidings; report, tradition, rumour, common talk, gossip,” which is partly deprecatory, but I use it here in the more positive sense intended by Foucault. 2. French 1994:x. 3. See Costa (2019a:71) on the impact of these accounts of shooting orangutan on “modern sensibilities.” 4. On this critique in anthropology, see Gupta and Stoolman (2022). Thompson 1963. 5. See the discussion of James Boon in my introduction and chapter 3. 6. DeMott 2006:xvi. Note: DeMott says that chapter 15 in Grapes of Wrath is “a swing chapter that participates in both editorial and narrative modes.” In 1940 John Steinbeck and the biologist Edward E. Ricketts carried out an expedition around the Baja Peninsula into the Sea of Cortez, the results of which were subse-

P r e f a c e xvii quently published in two books, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941) and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951). Richard Astro (1995:vii), who wrote the introduction to a 1995 edition of the latter, referred to this collaboration as “a relationship between a novelist and a scientist that ranks among the most famous friendships in American letters”—a friendship that could, by bridging the modern divide between the sciences on the one hand and the arts and letters on the other, produce a holistic work resembling the historic natural histories. 7. See also Dove 2021. 8. DeMott 2006:xvi–xvii. 9. Oxford English Dictionary 1989. 10. Eco 1983:380. The cover illustration, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, depicts the “bausor tree,” said to kill those who slept underneath it. This first appeared in the Ortus Sanitatis (Garden of Health), published by Jacob Meydenbach in Mainz in 1491 and is notable as the first printed encyclopedia of natural history. Thought to be an image of the upas or poison tree described by Rumphius in chapter 1, it demonstrates the long-lived role of the Occidental imagination in Oriental natural history. The accompanying text describes the preparation of the poison from the tree’s sap (in the original Latin and in translation): . . . [et po]nat sup[er] ea gumi arabicu. Et misceat bene sine intermissione donec albescat. Et si no[n] albescit prima vice iterum calefaciat patella ut prius do—nec fiat albu. Et eode[m] modo fit ex aliis gumis. . . . [let him place it] on top of that arabic gum. And let him mix it well without any pause until it turns white. And if it does not turn white at the first instance, then let him heat it again in a small plate as before until it becomes white. And it happens in this same way with other [types of ] gums.

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Acknowledgments

T h e r e s e a r c h a n d w r i t i n g t h a t contributed to this volume were supported by the Yale School of the Environment, the Council on Southeast Asia Studies, and the Coe Fellowship at the Peabody Museum of Natural History. The students in my advanced seminars at the Yale School of the Environment (“Disaster, Degradation, Dystopia: Social Science Approaches to Environmental Perturbation and Change” during the spring semesters of 2016, 2017, and 2019, and “Biopolitics of Human-Nonhuman Relations: New Anthropological Approaches to the Non-Human” during the spring semesters of 2020, 2022, and 2023) were wonderful interlocutors who contributed to development of the themes in this book. I have been ably assisted in my library research by several exceptional research assistants: Evan Singer, Jenna Musco, Gabe Snashall, Zoe Lee-Park, and Xiyao Fu. For administrative and financial matters, I have relied upon the industriousness of my administrative assistant, Julie Cohen. I thank my doctoral advisee Lav Kanoi for his painstaking translation of the Latin text for the “bausor tree” in the Ortus Sanitatis. Finally, I am indebted to Jean Thomson Black, my longtime editor at Yale University Press, for her ever-­wise guidance and support in this project; to my equally longtime mentor James C. Scott, for his generous offer to include my work in his Agrarian Studies Series; to Joyce Ippolito, my production editor at the Press; and to anonymous and exceptionally insightful external reviewers for the Press. None of the aforementioned people or organizations necessarily agrees with anything said in this volume, however, for which I am alone responsible. Earlier analyses of some of the material in this book were published as follows: Dove, Michael R. 1983. “Tinjauan Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao Karya H. C. Conklin, dan implikasinya bagi studi agro-ekologi di Indonesia” (Review of Ethnographic

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Atlas of Ifugao by H. C. Conklin and Its Implications for Agroecological Studies in Indonesia). Prisma 12(6):79–88. Dove, Michael R. 1983. “Review of H. C. Conklin’s Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao and Its Implications for Theories of Agricultural Evolution in Southeast Asia.” Current Anthropology 24(4):516–519. Dove, Michael R., and Carol Carpenter. 2005. “The ‘Poison Tree’ and the Changing Vision of the Indo-Malay Realm: Seventeenth to Twentieth Centuries.” In Histories of the Borneo Environment: Economic, Political and Social Dimensions of Change and Continuity, edited by Reed L. Wadley, 183–210. Verhandelingen 231. Leiden: KITLV. Dove, Michael R. 2007. “Kinds of Fields.” In: Fine Description: Ethnographic and Linguistic Essays by Harold C. Conklin, edited by J. Kuipers and R. McDermott, 410–427. Monograph series 56, Yale Southeast Asia Studies. Dove, Michael R. 2014. “Dangerous Plants in the Colonial Imagination: Rumphius and the Poison Tree.” National Tropical Botanical Garden. Allertonia 13:29–46. Dove, Michael R. 2015. “Linnaeus’ Study of Swedish Swidden Cultivation: Pioneering Ethnographic Work on the ‘Economy of Nature.’” Ambio 44(3):239–248. Dove, Michael R. 2015. “The View of Swidden Agriculture, by the Early Naturalists Linnaeus and Wallace.” In Shifting Cultivation and Environmental Change: Indigenous People, Agriculture and Forest Conservation, edited by Malcolm F. Cairns, 3–24. London: Earthscan. Dove, Michael R. 2016. “Harold C. Conklin, 1926–2016.” American Anthropologist 119(1):174–177. Dove, Michael R., and Patrick V. Kirch. 2018. “Harold C. Conklin.” National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs: 1–14. Dove, Michael R. 2018. “In Remembrance of Harold C. Conklin.” In Shifting Cultivation Policies: Balancing Environmental and Social Sustainability, edited by Malcolm Cairns, v. Wallingford, UK: Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International.

Hearsay Is Not Excluded

The author with long-tailed macaque (Macaca fascicularis) named Alfie, after Alfred Russel Wallace, at his field site in West Kalimantan in 1975. Author’s photograph.

Intro d uction

Natural History Scope, Method, History

T h e t r a n s i t i o n f r o m a s c i e n c e t h a t could encompass hearsay or folk knowledge to a science that cannot is little remarked upon because that earlier science has itself become almost unintelligible. Foucault writes of a paradox in the history of science: “Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. . . . All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history. . . . How was the Classical age able to define this realm of ‘natural history,’ the proofs and even the unity of which now appear to us so distant, and as though already blurred?”1 In short, when we look back from the vantage point of contemporary academia, we can have only a “blurred” vision of those fields that have vanished. Foucault is describing an ontological shift: captive as we are to our own ontologies, anything else appears as but a blur. This blur, this strangeness, Foucault suggests, is worthy of our attention. Carl Linnaeus’s eighteenth-century Lachesis Lapponica, or a Tour in Lapland in northern Sweden, presents an example of something that looks “blurry,” or odd, to the modern reader. In six successive paragraphs he writes of roasting fish back-to-belly, making glue for bows from fish, carrying gear in a jacket not a bag, the willow herb and goldenrod in bloom, the habits and food of reindeer, and the appearance of a brook: One of the Laplanders had caught a quantity of the fish called Sikloja (Salmo Albula) of a large size. He stuck about twenty of them on one spit, the back of each being placed towards the belly of the next, and they were thus roasted before the fire. These fish had previously been dried, though not at all salted. 1

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Introduction

The glue used by the Laplanders for joining the two portions of different woods of which their bows are made is prepared from the Common Perch (Perca fluviatilis) in the following manner. Some of the largest of this fish being flayed, the skins are first dried, and afterwards soaked in a small quantity of cold water, so that the scales can be rubbed off. . . . When these people undertake a short journey only, they carry no bag for provisions, the latter being stored between their outer and inner jackets, which are always bound with a girdle, being wide, and formed of numerous folds, both above and below it. The Purple Willow-herb, or Epilobium (augustifolium?), made the fields at this time very beautiful. The Golden-rod (Solidago virgaurea) was likewise here in blossom, though not yet upon the alps, where it flowers later. I have never yet seen any animal swim as light as the reindeer. During the dogdays the herds of reindeer, belonging to the inhabitants of the woody parts of Lapland, are very badly off for want of snow, with which these animals refresh themselves in hot weather upon the alps. . . . The rivulet near Kiomitis Trask has a very white appearance, as if milk had been mixed with it.2

Linnaeus’s effortless and unremarked movement back and forth between what modern readers would consider to be disparate topics—but are obviously not for him—can seem bewildering. Linnaeus’s contemporary Gilbert White, in his The Natural History of Selborne, in Hampshire southwest of London, frequently draws analogies between human and nonhuman behavior that similarly transgress modern boundaries, as also between science and folk knowledge. For example, he employs everyday information about people to explain the behavior of birds, and vice versa: When I ride about in the winter, and see such prodigious flocks of various kinds of birds, I cannot help admiring at these congregations, and wishing that it was in my power to account for those appearances almost peculiar to the season. . . . As some kind of self-interest and self-defense is no doubt the motive for the proceeding, may it not arise from the helplessness of their state in such

I n t r o d u c t i o n 3

rigorous seasons; as men crowd together, when under great calamities, though they know not why? About the middle of May, if the weather be fine, the martin begins to think in earnest of providing a mansion for its family. . . . As this bird often builds against a perpendicular wall without any projecting ledge under, it requires its utmost efforts to get the first foundation firmly fixed, so that it may safely carry the superstructure. . . . But then, that this work may not, while it is soft and green, pull itself down by its own weight, the provident architect has prudence and foresight enough to not to advance her work too fast; but by building only in the morning, and by dedicating the rest of the day to food and amusement, gives it sufficient time to dry and harden. About half an inch seems to be sufficient layer for a day. Thus careful [human] workmen when they build mud-walls (informed at first perhaps by this little bird) raise but a moderate layer at a time and then desist; lest the work should become top-heavy, and so be ruined by it’s [sic] own weight.

Most startling is White’s suggestion that desert-dwelling Muslims may have adopted the habit of bathing in sand—a millennia-old practice in North Africa and around the Mediterranean—from observing the practice by birds: “Query.—Might not Mahomet and his followers take one method of purification from these pulveratrices [birds bathing in dust]? because I find, from travellers of credit, that if a strict Mussulman is journeying in a sandy desert where no water is to be found, at stated hours he strips off his clothes, and most scrupulously rubs his body over with sand or dust.”3 A century later, a similar mixture of topics can be found in Wallace’s 1869 The Malay Archipelago, which so bewilders some contemporary readers as to be labeled a “bizarre text” and an “odd hybrid of a book, part natural history, part ethnology.” Whereas these mixtures of topics seem strange to modern readers, for the better part of two millennia they did not seem so to readers in the western world, indeed they did not even seem to be mixtures. The very idea of mixing nature and culture, and science and folk knowledge, presupposes that they are otherwise separate, which is a culturally and historically contingent presupposition.4 The field of natural history has roots in the classical era, in what was then termed “meteorology” or “meteorologica.” In the 350 BCE work of

4

Introduction

the same name by Aristotle, he states that this field covers “everything which happens naturally,” including atmospheric phenomena, meteors and comets, seas, rivers, and earthquakes, excepting only the field of astronomy. Seneca’s wide-ranging work from the early 60s CE on Natural Questions takes Aristotelian meteorology as its subject matter and encompasses rivers, including the Nile; clouds, rain, hail, snow; winds, earthquakes; comets, meteors, rainbows, and other optical meteorological phenomena; as well as lightning and thunder.5 The thirty-seven books of Pliny’s famous 77 CE Natural History include a mathematical and metrological (science of weights and measures) survey of the universe; the geography and ethnography of the known world; the anthropology and physiology of humans; zoology; botany, agriculture, and horticulture; plants used in medicine; medical zoology; minerals and medicine, the fine arts, and gemstones. Modern commentators on these classical works all remark on their scope. As H. D. P. Lee says in his introduction to his translation of the Loeb edition of Aristotle’s Meteorologica: “It will be seen at once that we have here subjects dealt with today by several sciences, by astronomy, geography, geology and seismology, as well as meteorology in its modern connotation.” Seneca’s modern translator similarly writes: “Today’s reader will be struck by the range of modern disciplines that Seneca touches on—geography, meteorology, seismology, and astronomy—but the ancient reader would have seen that his work deals with what the Greeks called meteorologia, ‘meteorology.’ Ancient meteorology covered a much broader field than its modern counterpart.” The difference from the modern era lies in lumping versus splitting areas of historic inquiry, including what today would be seen as culture versus nature: it is a much more holistic vision. Thus, Roger French writes, “The people whom scientific historians see as practising science in the more or less distant past . . . called it philosophy and strove rather to stress the unity of knowledge than the separateness of its parts. Part of it was concerned with the natural world, but this part was not marked off from the others by any strict boundaries.”6 Lee attributes Aristotle’s expansive scope to the immaturity of the field: “This is typical of a stage in the development of the natural sciences in which they had not yet fully differentiated out from an all-embracing Natural Philosophy.” Lee as well as other modern commentators fault the

I n t r o d u c t i o n 5

content and scientific accuracy of these works: “That the Meteorologica is a little-read work is no doubt due to the intrinsic lack of interest of its contents. Aristotle is so far wrong in nearly all his conclusions that they can, it may with justice be said, have little more than a passing antiquarian interest. . . . The main interest of the work is to be found not so much in any particular conclusions which Aristotle reaches, as in the fact that all his conclusions are so far wrong and in his lack of a method which could lead him to right ones. In this he is typical of Greek science.” One of the principal perceived failings in these classical works is their mixing of empirical observations with folk knowledge that is deemed less empirical in nature. Thus, H. Rackham writes in the introduction to his translation of Pliny’s Natural History: “The work . . . is in the main a second-hand compilation from the works of others. In selecting from these he has shown scanty judgement and discrimination, including the false with the true at random; his selection is coloured by his love of the marvellous.” The fact that the editors who were tasked with introducing these classical works to modern readers felt obliged to level these criticisms, in the front matter of the works themselves, is striking. It suggests that in “reading back” across the intervening millennia, they were not immune to the “blurring” described by Foucault. Even French, an otherwise sympathetic reader of the ancient texts, writes: “Although many modern subject areas have something corresponding in Pliny’s text, it is a mistake to evaluate his ‘botany’ or ‘zoology.’ These are categories of modern science, and science does not seek to instruct morally, or to entertain, or to eschew theory and rely on the categorisation of consensual ‘fact.’” This statement is problematic not least in its implication that Pliny did these things but also its implication that modern scientists do not. But there also are scholars like Trevor Murphy who see Pliny’s contribution to the bigger picture of natural history: “Pliny is of major significance as a pioneer in the encyclopedic tradition. For historians of science, Pliny’s importance lies more in the concept and outline of Nature implicit in the structure of his book than in original theories or first-hand observations, of which there are few.”7 The natural historians discussed in this volume were also generally more appreciative of their classical sources. Quite at odds with Rackham’s implication that this would be deprecatory, Rumphius was often hailed as the “Pliny of the Indies” and Linnaeus as the “Pliny of the North.” E. M. Beekman, Rumphius’s modern editor, writes: “Rumphius’ bedrock of au-

6

Introduction

thorities were composed of Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) and Pliny the Elder (A.D. 22 or 23–79). They represent a solid foundation to build on, and modern hubris should not dismiss them with uninformed condescension. . . . Rumphius simply did not suffer from modernism’s curse of neophilia. At various times he cautions his readers to not belittle ancient or, for that matter, native sources.” Rumphius, in the seventeenth century, explicitly measured his efforts with respect to those of Pliny; and in the eighteenth century, Linnaeus often tested the observations of Pliny in his own fieldwork. In their centuries at least, Linnaeus and Rumphius seemed capable of reading back without the blurring described by Foucault.8 Foucault implies that if modern scientific practices make historical ones blurred, then the historic ones may help to make modern practices clear. Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay “These on the Philosophy of History,” writes of the “angel of history” (inspired by the Klee painting Angelus Novus), which is bound to look toward the past while being borne into the future. He invokes this image to argue that the present makes the past historical, it makes the past into something that does not simply affect the present but something that the present itself remakes: “No fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary.”9 Following Benjamin, the simple evolutionary sequence from natural history to modern biology looks more complex: we need to ask how the history of natural history has been rewritten to serve modern biology, how it has been made less comprehensible to make biology more comprehensible—and what has been lost in the process. One of the aims of this volume is to clarify what has been blurred, and also to blur what has been clarified. This is a story about how the past is strange to us now and how the present would be if we but had the perspective to see it; thus, the aim is to make the past less strange and the present more strange. Note that Foucault’s remarks on the history of natural history were directed toward the intellectual traditions of Western Europe. The four scholars who are the focus of this volume worked within the European/ North American academic community; but their interlocutors, and their folk knowledge, were part of very different intellectual worlds.

I n t r o d u c t i o n 7

Holism The challenge of recapturing the historic holistic practices of natural history is reflected in the work of even the most eminent modern scientists. For example, in his mid-twentieth-century text The Nature of Natural History, the prominent zoologist Marston Bates presents an impoverished view of the field, with little to no reference to its history and scope. He cites Linnaeus and Wallace, but only with regard to their classificatory work, and no scholars from the classical era; nor does he cite Gilbert White, much less Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold from modern times. Bates writes, “I like to think, then, of natural history as the study . . . of what plants and animals do.” Of the eighteen chapters in his book, only the final three deal with people, who come into the picture only insofar as the field is “applied”: “Forestry, wildlife management, fisheries management and conservation studies in general . . . come closer to representing applied natural history in the sense that electrical engineering represents applied physics.”10 One of the most important but now elusive dimensions of earlier natural history was its holistic view of the world, as reflected in the earlier-­ mentioned bewildering scope of the classical works in the field. The ­delineation of the broad field of meteorologica by Aristotle and subsequent followers like Seneca has already been mentioned. Also relevant is the work by Aristotle’s near contemporary Hippocrates, especially his fifth-century BCE Airs, Waters, Places. This, one of the most influential classical studies of the relation between society and environment, focuses on how climate affects both health and character, pursuing first a medical and then an ethnographic approach. Hesiod’s didactic poem Works and Days, written around 700 BCE, subsumes within this prosaic title “the general conditions of human existence, including a generous selection from popular moral, religious, and agricultural wisdom.”11 Virgil’s poem Georgics, published in 29 BCE, purports to be an agricultural manual but had political and allegorical dimensions that transcend farming. Herodotus’s Histories, written late in the fifth century BCE, ostensibly a recounting of a half century of Greek-Persian battles and widely recognized as one of the first historical studies, is also much more than this. As John Marincola writes in his introduction to the 2003 translation: “The variety of wares in the Herodotean bazaar is truly staggering. Given the title Histories,

8

Introduction

the modern reader might expect to find a linear narrative of battles, rulers, and political upheavals. This description would barely do justice to the work we have. Our word ‘history’ comes from the Greek historia, which originally meant ‘inquiry, investigation,’ and only later came to be applied specifically to the investigation of the past. Herodotus, however, lived in a time when categories of knowledge had not been rigidly separated, and his work ranges over many fields and includes geography, anthropology, ethnology, zoology, even fable and folklore.”12 The origins of the study of history, in particular this type of history, are central to the origins of the field of natural history. Herodotus’s sense of history still prevailed when Pliny titled his landmark work Historia Naturalis, which translates as research or inquiry into nature or the nature of things. French writes that “in looking at Pliny we are looking at the most obvious example of natural history in antiquity, and indeed at the greatest justification for seeing a topic of natural history in the ancient world.” An “inquiry into the nature of things” is an apt description of this work, which was a model for natural history research and writing for two millennia.13 The broad, classical idea of an “inquiry into the nature of things” characterized natural history well into the modern era. One of the foremost natural historians of the eighteenth century, Georges-Louis LeClerc, Comte de Buffon, wrote that natural history, “taken in its full extent, is an immense History, embracing all the objects that the Universe presents to us.”14 A seminal work was the country parson Gilbert White’s aforementioned 1789 The Natural History of Selborne. White introduces his work as “laying before the public his idea of parochial history, which, he thinks, ought to consist of natural productions and occurrences as well as antiquities” or “ancient customs and manners.” Egerton notes, “Only two of its nine illustrations are of natural history: a drawing of three fossil shells and a fold-out drawing of a black-winged stilt (Himantopus himantopus).” But the remaining illustrations, which include people and buildings, make it clear that White had a different definition of natural history. He ends the book—much but not by any means all of which is focused on “the life and conversation of animals”—with an appendix listing the number of people in his village and the number of baptisms, burials, and marriages over a sixty-year period. White’s work was cited by Thoreau and Darwin, the latter of whom honored it by making a pilgrimage to Selborne, and who had thought when young that he would become a country parson like

I n t r o d u c t i o n 9

White, doing natural history on the side. Donald Worster, one of the founders of the modern field of environmental history, says that White’s study of Selborne was seminal for modern ecological study.15 By the twentieth century it was being held up as the paradigm of a holistic approach to the study of society and environment, in contrast to the ever-increasing specialization of the sciences. White’s contemporary, the German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, developed a concept of “morphology,” positing an underlying unity in diversity of plants and animals, which influenced Humboldt, Darwin, Emerson, and Thoreau. A holistic view of nature guided the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s biogeography, based on five years of fieldwork in Central and South America. In his final work, titled Cosmos from the ancient Greek, he sought to unite geology, climatology, physics, natural history, and economics. Humboldt influenced subsequent scholars as disparate as Darwin and Thoreau. By the twentieth century, scholars were not casting their nets as wide, albeit with exceptions. A call to stem the tide came from Aldo Leopold in his essay “Natural History, the Forgotten Science,” in which he makes “a plea for a return to outdoor, holistic education, to a style of science open to amateurs and soberminded nature lovers, one more sensitive to ‘the pleasure to be had in wild things.’”16 A prominent and recurring pedagogical trope in these holistic depictions of the world was the description of interlocking nutrient cycles, especially between people and nature. For example, White writes regarding the consequences of livestock wading into ponds during the heat of the day to cool off: “During this great proportion of the day they drop much dung, in which insects nestle; and so supply food for the fish, which would be poorly subsisted but from this contingency. Thus nature, who is a great economist, converts the recreation of one animal to the support of another!” More famous is this example from Linnaeus, recounted by Koer­ ner, which brings humans into this cycling between life and death: “Traveling through provincial Sweden in 1746, Linnaeus noticed that people used churchyard soil for their cabbage patches. Human heads, he mused in his travel diary, thus turn into cabbage heads, which turned into human heads, and so on. ‘In this way, we come to eat our dead, and it is good for us.’” A century later, Thoreau gives a less sensational example: “The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are

10

Introduction

filled.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, on whose land Thoreau was living, and drawing on advancements in understanding of global dynamics, made the same point on a macro scale: “All the parts incessantly work into each other’s hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.” In the twentieth century, Leopold, also drawing on recent scientific advances, traces an atom in a rock through multiple creatures and existences eventually to the sea.17 The idea of a nutrient cycle is radical in the way that it inherently destabilizes the role of the human observer with a “god’s eye view,” turning the human into just one more element in an otherwise mundane cycle of nutrients. This troubled the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Observing that cattle may need grass and men may need cattle to survive, Kant wrote: “We do not then arrive in this way at any categorical end. On the contrary all this adaptation is made to rest on a condition that has to be removed to an ever-retreating horizon.” Kant pins the retreating horizon to the question of consciousness: the cycle only makes sense from the perspective of the one participant who is aware of the cycle, “For what purpose do these forms of [vegetable] life exist?” If vegetables only exist for herbivores, and herbivores only exist for carnivores, we must conclude that the ultimate purpose of creation is for man: “He is the ultimate end of creation here upon earth, because he is the one and only being upon it that is able to form a conception of ends.”18 This human-centric view of creation long preceded Kant, it was echoed by his contemporary Linnaeus, it was still present a century later in the work of White, but it was waning in Thoreau’s work, and it was not present in Leopold’s. One particular cycle that a number of natural historians have studied— including Linnaeus, Wallace, and Conklin—involves swidden agriculture. The term “swidden” is derived from the Old English swithen (from the Old Norse term sviona), meaning to clear by singeing or burning, and it is used by anthropologists in preference to the phrases “shifting cultivation” and “slash-and-burn agriculture,” which are regarded as inaccurate—since neither people nor fields shift, rather fields are rotated—or pejorative—as they are used colloquially today to castigate blunt-force political and economic practices.19 This form of agriculture utilizes fire to transform the

I n t r o d u c t i o n 11

nutrients in the forest into a form utilizable by crops, and then it utilizes the natural dynamics of afforestation to restore the fallowed cropland to forest, so that the cycle can eventually begin again. Most scholars of swidden agriculture have agreed that it is a sustainable adaptation to forest environments in which labor is scarcer than land, population-land balances allow for fallow periods long enough to restore forest cover between periods of cropping, and resource appropriation by external actors is minimal. The practice of swidden is rapidly waning in most—albeit not all— regions of the world, but its place in works of natural history still offers unique insights into the realm of indigenous knowledge, sustainable adaptations to forested environments, and the history of science. Close-grained studies of swidden agriculture were at the center of much of the pioneering work carried out in environmental anthropology, human ecology, and human geography in the twentieth century. And for centuries before that, systems of swidden agriculture were a preferred site for study by natural historians. Swiddens, which have been said to mimic the tropical forest, problematize the Cartesian divide between culture and nature more than any other system of agriculture. This makes swidden well-­suited to study within the holistic tradition of natural history, just as its study also helped to develop this tradition. Swidden systems have been some of the most important sites worldwide for the study of folk/vernacular/­ indigenous knowledge, regarding such topics as tropical forest ecology, ethnobotany and ethnozoology, integrated pest management, intercropping, weather prediction, fire dynamics, environmental risk, and pedology. For all these reasons, swiddens have been a pivotal site for the elaboration of natural history theories. It is not a coincidence, therefore, that Linnaeus, Wallace, and Conklin all studied swiddens, and Rumphius, living in the seventeenth century on the island of Ambon in eastern Indonesia, was certainly familiar with them as well.20 Natural history’s holistic vision of the world, which flourished over the past two millennia, was an interdisciplinary one. It waned, and natural history as a field waned, as narrowly defined scientific disciplines proliferated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bates, in his “The Nature of Natural History,” writes, “It is sometimes said that the day of the naturalist, in this sense, is past, because no man now can hope to master the complexities of all of the specialized sciences into which natural history has been divided.”21 It might be more accurate to say that the day of the

12

Introduction

naturalist is past because with the waning of the holistic vision no one feels the need to study all of the many dimensions of human-environment relations. One of these dimensions involves aesthetics and emotion. For most of its history, the field of natural history encompassed what would today be called the humanities as well as the sciences, in a way that seems quite foreign to modern observers. As previously noted, for example, Virgil, one of the greatest Roman poets and also author of the Aeneid, composed Georgics as a poem, the same form Hesiod used in his Works and Days. Seneca is as well known for his plays as for his philosophy; Aristotle wrote his Poetics on poetry and the theater; Pliny was a student of rhetoric as well as natural history; and the natural history of Herodotus is presented within the framework of a history. Hardy and Totelin write, “In Pliny’s eyes a poet could offer as valid a piece of information on plants as Theophrastus,” and “Homer, who mostly mentioned plants incidentally in the Iliad and Odyssey, was considered a botanical authority throughout antiquity.”22 The ease with which some scholars wrote poetry as well as natural history, or even both at the same time, persisted into the modern era. Gilbert White wrote both poetry and prose about nature, and most editions of The Natural History of Selborne are bound with eight pages of his poetry. Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin wrote The Botanic Garden, A Poem in Two Parts; and Goethe composed The Metamorphosis of Plants as a poem, while arguing in the face of skepticism that poetry and science are complementary: “People forgot that science had developed from poetry and they failed to take into consideration that a swing of the pendulum might beneficently reunite the two, at a higher level and to mutual advantage.” Rumphius introduced his mighty The Ambonese Herbal with a tribute to “the Lords Directors of the United East India Company,” followed by a preface “to the Reader,” and finally with a forty-five-line poem “The Author, to the Book.” The nineteenth-century Swedish novelist, playwright, and poet Johan August Strindberg wrote of Linnaeus, “Linnaeus was in reality a poet who happened to become a naturalist.” Poetic expression is important for what it says about the place of subjectivity, feeling, and values in the practice of natural history. These are palpable in the writing of Wallace, upon netting a long-sought-after butterfly: “The beauty and brilliancy of this insect are indescribable, and none but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced when I

I n t r o d u c t i o n 13

at length captured it. On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death.” Emotion also found a place in the work of Humboldt, who claimed that geography shared some common ground with aesthetics. It was similarly reflected in the extolling of fellowship with nature in the work of scholars like White and Thoreau.23 Worster says that in modern ecology “there is little room for that arcadian sense of fellowship [with nature] found in the science of Gilbert White, Thoreau, or Darwin.” Bates makes this point explicit: “The word ‘naturalist’ has got rather into academic disrepute in recent years, I think partly because it has come to be associated with another term, ‘nature lover.’” On the other hand, Beekman argues that an aesthetic sense like that of Rumphius can be found in the work of such twentieth-century biologists as Lewis Thomas. Snow, in a more upbeat updating of his pes­ simistic study of the “two cultures” of science and the humanities, claims that there is evidence that scientists in the academy are now talking to “non-specialised classes” and many more students are receiving a “humane education.” Certainly within the social sciences, the door has been opened to more humanistic forms of expression in recent years, including fiction as well as poetry, as in the annual competition for “ethnographic poetry” held by the American Anthropological Association.24

Method Although the holism and interdisciplinarity of natural history has received some scholarly attention, little if any has been paid to the methodologies that contribute to this holistic vision, in particular those involving the gathering of data from folk informants. Since the modern concept of folk knowledge as a realm apart did not exist in previous centuries, distinct methods for studying it also did not exist, and the gathering of such knowledge was an unremarked part of general inquiry. Classical-era natural historians gathered data from diverse sources. Hardy and Totelin write that “Dioscorides listed the ‘natives’ as one of his sources, the Greek word for whom is epicho¯rioi, literally ‘those who live in the region, the inhabitants.’” However, “vital information on plants could be contributed by people at all levels of ancient society, be they wood-

14

Introduction

workers, country women or mighty kings.” French writes that “Aristotle and his colleagues got their information from soothsayers, fishermen, bee-­ keepers and travellers who had seen exotic animals like the elephant and camel.” Rackham suggests that not everything in Pliny’s Natural History can be taken at face value, faulting him for “including the false with the true at random; his selection is coloured by his love of the marvellous.” But Rackham also acknowledges the lasting value of the folk knowledge reported in its pages: “Anecdotes that used to be rejected by critics as erroneous and even absurd have now in not a few cases been corroborated by modern research. The book is valuable as an anthropological document: it is a storehouse of scattered facts exhibiting the history of man’s reaction to his environment—the gradual growth of accurate observation, of systematic nomenclature and of classification, i.e. of Natural Science.”25 The work of Theophrastus (ca. 371–ca. 287 BCE), to this day commonly called “the father of botany,” in particular is exemplary in its treatment of folk knowledge. He peppers his great work Enquiry into Plants, written between 350 and 287 BCE—which along with De Causis Plan­ tarum (the causes of plants) is the most important botanical work of the classical era—with references to folk knowledge specific as to locale and/or ethnic group. For example, he writes: “The Arcadians say that the kermes-­ oak also takes a year to perfect its fruit; for it ripens last year’s fruit at the same time that the new fruit appears on it; the result of which is that such trees always have fruit on them. . . . And some of the Aeolians say that these [oaks with no heartwood] are the only oaks which are struck by lightning. . . . The people of Ida say that the fir is liable to a kind of disease. . . . According to the Arcadians it [cedar] has three fruits on the tree at once, last year’s, which is not yet ripe, that of the year before last which is now ripe and eatable, and it also shews the new fruit.” Theophrastus was especially fond of citing the Macedonians: “Others again, as the Macedonians, say that the elm is the only tree of this class which bears fruit. . . . Those in the marshes bud earliest, as the Macedonians say, second to them, those in the plains, and latest, those in the mountains. . . . The people of Macedonia say that there is also a kind of fir which bears no fruit whatever. . . . In the cone of the ‘male’ [silver fir] are a few seeds at the apex, while that of the ‘female,’ according to what the Macedonians said, contains none at all. . . . Some, for instance the Macedonians, call the one ‘ash’ (manna-ash), the other ‘horse-ash’ (ash).”26

I n t r o d u c t i o n 15

Arthur Hort, the editor of the Loeb edition of Theophrastus’s Enquiry into Plants, suggests that these frequent references to local folk knowledge of plants are based on interviews carried out by the students of Theophrastus at the Lyceum in Athens, who are thought to have approached two thousand during his tenure there: “May we not hazard a guess that a number of the students were appropriately employed in the collection of facts and observations? The assumption that a number of ‘travelling students’ were so employed would at all events explain certain references in Theophrastus’ botanical works. He says constantly ‘The Macedonians say,’ ‘The men of Mount Ida say’ and so forth. Now it seems hardly probable that he is quoting from written treatises by Macedonian or Idaean writers. It is at least a plausible suggestion that in such references he is referring to reports of the districts in question contributed by students of the school. In that case ‘The Macedonians say’ would mean ‘This is what our representative was told in Macedonia.’”27 Theophrastus’s use of these sources of folk knowledge was not unsophisticated; he recognized when his sources disagreed, when they were in error, and when their reasoning was flawed: Trees which do not root deep, and especially silver-fir and fir, are liable to be uprooted by winds. So the Arcadians say. But the people who live near Mount Ida say that the silver fir is deeper rooting than the oak, and has straighter roots, though they are fewer. . . . Thus the people of Mount Ida distinguish [among oaks]. But the people of Macedonia make four kinds. . . . Of the maple, as we have said, some make two kinds, some three. . . . As to the fruit [of the ash], the people of Ida supposed it to have none, and no flower either; however it has a nut-like fruit in a thin pod, like the fruit of the almond, and it is somewhat bitter in taste. . . . The people of Mount Ida in the Troad say that the ‘male’ tree [cornelian cherry] is barren, but that the ‘female’ bears fruit. . . . However the people of Macedonia say that both trees bear fruit, though that of the ‘female’ is uneatable. . . . The ‘cedar,’ some say, has two forms, the Lycian and the Phoenician; but some, as the people of Mount Ida, say that there is only one form.

Theophrastus does not try to “cleanse” his data by eliminating such disagreements, rather he reports them and treats them as a call for further

16

Introduction

study: “Some say that it [the water chestnut] is annual, others that the root persists for a time, and that from it grows the new stalk. This then is matter for enquiry.” An example of such study involves the folk understanding of the cyclical growth of the reeds used for pan pipes, which Theophrastus both faults but explains: “As to the reed used for pipes, it is not true, as some say, that it only grows once in nine years and that this is its regular rule of growth; it grows in general whenever the lake is full: but, because in former days this was supposed to happen generally once in nine years, they made the growth of the reed to correspond, taking what was really an accident to be a regular principle.”28 An appreciation of folk knowledge similar to that of Theophrastus is found in Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne: lacking the scope of two thousand students in a lyceum, his use of folk knowledge takes places on a more intimate level. White often prefaces his statements with attributions like these: “For a very respectable gentleman assured me that . . .” or “My Sussex friend, a man of observation and good sense, but no naturalist . . . sends me the following account . . .” or “One of my neighbors, an intelligent and observing man, informs me that . . . .” For another example, White writes of an “apparent regard” between “two incongruous animals,” a horse and a hen, the record of which he obtained from “a very intelligent and observant person.” It is noteworthy that White feels obliged to speak to the character of his informant and thus the value of his observations. Sometimes he further attests to this value by explaining why a particular informant is well-placed to make his observations:29 As yet I have not quite done with my history of the oedicnemus, or stone curlew; for I shall desire a gentleman in Sussex (near whose house these birds congregate in vast flocks in the autumn) to observe nicely when they leave him (if they do leave him), and when they return again in the spring. . . . With regard to the oedicnemus, or stone curlew, I intend to write very soon to my friend near Chichester, in whose neighbourhood these birds seem most to abound; and shall urge him to take particular notice when they begin to congregate, and afterwards to watch them most narrowly whether they do not withdraw themselves during the dead of the winter. . . . This gentleman, as he occupies a large farm of his own, and is abroad early and late, will be a very proper spy upon the

I n t r o d u c t i o n 17

motions of these birds: and besides, as I have prevailed on him to buy the Naturalist’s Journal (with which he is much delighted), I shall expect that he will be very exact in his dates.

White is not undiscriminating in his views of folk observations and knowledge, especially regarding what might be regarded as folk superstitions: “You judge very right, I think, in speaking with reserve and caution concerning the cures done by toads: for, let people advance what they will on such subjects, yet there is such a propensity in mankind towards deceiving and being deceived, that one cannot safely relate any thing from common report, especially in print, without expressing some degree of doubt and suspicion.” He is sympathetic regarding the strength of such beliefs and assures his readers that they still exist: “It is the hardest thing in the world to shake off superstitious prejudices.” White gives the examples of the public drowning of an accused witch just 25 years before he was writing; the use within memory of pollard ashes—trees split open, through which children are pushed, then bound back up—to cure “ruptured children”; and the use also within memory of a “shrew-ash,” in which a live shrew-mouse is embedded, which can then be used to cure various diseases of livestock. White gives an insightful explanation of the origin of such beliefs, taking as an example the belief in omens from the Gryllus domesticus or house cricket: “They are the housewife’s barometer, foretelling her when it will rain; and are prognostic sometimes, she thinks, of ill or good luck; of the death of a near relation, or the approach of an absent lover. By being the constant companions of her solitary hours they naturally become the objects of her superstition.” By pointing out the omnipresence of the cricket, White transforms it from a source of superstition to a handy point of ecological reference.30 The place of folk knowledge in earlier natural history studies is often misunderstood. Egerton tracks the critique and dismissal of folk beliefs as a metric for the progress of ecological science. During the Elizabethan era in England, Thomas Moffett compiled an important study of insect pests but, according to Egerton, “He was not skeptical of reported folklore, such as locusts three-feet long from India, whose hind legs were used as saws.” Writing of the early medieval period, Egerton claims that the “Byzantines were often as gullible as Romans in accepting folkloric information.” While

18

Introduction

acknowledging that “folklore was an important source for natural history,” Egerton claims that “Arabic authors on animals could not discriminate between sophisticated science and folklore, and their writings contain both.” He continues, “There was clearly an increase in information on animals during almost six centuries between al-Jahiz [?–868] and alDamiri [1341–1405], but no one separated the gold of science from the dross of folklore—an impossible task at the time.”31 This task was “impossible” because there was no ontological distinction between science and folklore at the time: there was only knowledge. Even into the modern era, scholarly and folk sources of knowledge are often intermingled. The environmental historian Richard Grove was one of the first contemporary scholars to argue that the encounter between colonial European science and indigenous systems of knowledge was much more complex and multidirectional than long thought. As the anthropologist Hugh Raffles writes in his study of the nineteenth-century work of the entomologist Henry Walter Bates in the Amazon: “Reliant on local familiarity with the properties of individual species, the naturalist, restricted by classificatory lacunae, had little alternative but to begin work by recording vernacular names, traits, and meanings (assigned by local people according to both their own priorities and their strategic understandings of the scientist’s needs).” The encounter between the colonial scientist and the local informant was not easily categorized; it was a “tangle of science, space, and affect.” It was, Raffles goes on to say, a sort of negotiation: “Scientific practice turns out to be a negotiation of local knowledges of conjunctural context. Amazonians’ understandings of the forest mediated by their assessments of the institutional resources and priorities of the visitor enter into a fluid dialogue with Bates’s own conflicted allegiance to natural historical systematics as mediated by all the complications stirred up in his Amazon experience.”32 As practitioners of increasingly narrow disciplines, demanding specialized training, some colonial field naturalists could not help but be troubled by this negotiation. As Raffles writes: “Not surprisingly, Bates understood his science as being of a different order of rationality from what is now often called indigenous knowledge. Although his collecting relied on local expertise and his future career rested on the ability of informants to trap large numbers of diverse organisms, he was confused by any sign of native familiarity with the science of physiological process. . . . Applied

I n t r o d u c t i o n 19

local knowledge formed an intellectual resource of which he was fully aware and a pool of commercial data to which he was directed by metropolitan demand. Yet it was methodologically treacherous.” The solution for some naturalists, Raffles suggests, was to obscure any reliance on local knowledge: “It is in the ‘intersubjective space of ethnographic encounters’ (Thomas 1994:7) that explanations for the specific logic of practice emerge. Bates, like so many fieldworkers since, masks his inhabiting of this space— denying its potency by asserting his mastery within it. But its effects on him and his science are far-reaching.”33 There was less perceived need for such masking during the preceding centuries of natural history research and writing, because the more holistic view of the world more easily encompassed folk knowledge or hearsay. In keeping with their use of folk knowledge, much of the data that natural historians gathered over the ages pertained to everyday, mundane topics, the topics that “folk” would customarily be discussing. Pliny’s Natural History, which was the model for two millennia of work in this field, is not about arithmetic, geometry, or harmonics but rather “subjects more directly related to everyday life, such as the study of places, where man lives and works, and of the animals and plants that surround him and provide him with the most urgent necessities of his existence—shelter, food, drink, and medicines.” Pliny’s exploration of the minutiae of everyday life is insightful and charming: writing of emotions, and of people who purportedly never laughed or cried, he writes: “These small indications of nature are known to vary in many people; for example, Drusus’ daughter Antonia never used to spit, and Ponponius, an ex-consul and poet, never belched.”34 The same devotion to detail can be found in the natural histories of the modern era. Gilbert White focuses much of his attention on birds, and in one part of Selborne he lists birds according to the following categories: Summer birds of passage. Year round birds. Winter birds of passage. Birds that sing in the night. Birds that sing till after Midsummer. Birds that cease to sing at or before Midsummer. Birds that sing for a short time very early in the spring. Birds that are hardly to be called singing birds.

20

Introduction

Birds that sing as they fly. Birds that breed most early.35

White was a follower of Linnaeus, but this schema seems less Linnaean and more reminiscent of the famous list that the writer Jorge Luis Borges purported to take from an ancient Chinese encyclopedia entitled “Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge,” writing, “On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into: (a) Those that belong to the emperor. (b) Embalmed ones. (c) Those that are trained. (d) Suckling pigs. (e) Mermaids. (f) Fabulous ones. (g) Stray dogs. (h) Those that are included in this classification. (i) Those that tremble as if they were mad. (j) Innumerable ones. (k) Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush. (l) Others. (m) Those that have just broken the flower vase. (n) Those that resemble flies from a distance.36

While writing that Borges’s list is “probably spurious,” Huot suggests that the list “does have resonance with Chinese classification because of the nature of Chinese writing.” Be that as it may, Borges seems to have presented his list as an illustration of how classification can be subjective and contingent. Foucault regards Borges’s list as a statement of what can and cannot be thought of within a given linguistic worldview: “In the wonderment of this taxonomy . . . is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.” He continues, “The animals ‘(i) frenzied [trembling], (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush’—where could they ever meet?” Perhaps they could meet in Selborne, because White apparently could conceive of placing a meta-entry like “summer birds of passage” on an equal footing with “birds that are hardly to be called singing birds.”37 White observes that “the wonders of the Creation [are] too frequently overlooked as common occurrences,” and then he gives the annual rainfall

I n t r o d u c t i o n 21

totals for his parish for eight years, the average depth of the village’s wells and the fact that their water does not lather well with soap, and the hourly output in gallons of one of the village’s springs. In a pioneering insight into the perverse economies of the poor, White devotes several pages to the use of rushes instead of candles for lighting, how they are prepared, how long they last, and how much they cost, concluding that because the very poor cannot buy in bulk but can only afford a halfpenny’s worth every evening: “Thus they have only two hours’ light for their money instead of eleven.” White is aware of the mundane character of these data, which he introduces by writing: “I shall make no apology for troubling you with the detail of a very simple piece of domestic œconomy, being satisfied that you think nothing beneath your attention that tends to utility.”38 A further example of the scope of White’s curiosity was his study of echoes on the rural landscape: “In a district so diversified as this, so full of hollow vales and hanging woods, it is no wonder that echoes should abound. Many we have discovered that return the cry of a pack of dogs, the notes of a hunting-horn, a tunable ring of bells, or the melody of birds, very agreeably: but we were still at a loss for a polysyllabical, articulate echo, till a young gentleman, who had parted from his company in a summer evening walk, and was calling after them, stumbled upon a very curious one in a spot where it might least be expected.” White traces this polysyllabic echo to a stone-built, tiled, hop kiln, which suggests to him how a gentleman of fortune might build an echo on his grounds, adding, “Nor need the gravest man be ashamed to appear taken with such a phænomenon, since it may become the subject of philosophical or mathematical inquiries.” In a similar vein, White reports that the musical pitch of the owl hoots in his district is “the common London pitch,” writing: “A friend remarks that many (most) of his owls hoot in B flat, but that one went almost half a note below A. The pipe he tried their notes by was a common half-crown pitch-pipe, such as masters use for tuning of harpsichords; it was the common London pitch. . . . A neighbour of mine, who is said to have a nice ear, remarks that the owls about this village hoot in three different keys, in G flat, or F sharp, in B flat and A flat. He heard two hooting to each other, the one in A flat, and the other in B flat. Query: Do these different notes proceed from different species, or only from various individuals?”39

22

Introduction

Henry David Thoreau also was an exacting observer of fine-grained detail in his environment. Thus, one spring he measured the temperature of the water in the middle of Walden Pond and near its shore, and he did the same in nearby Flint’s Pond, as a way of predicting when their ice covers would break up; and he reported the dates when Walden became ice-free each year over the course of a decade. Thoreau stands out for directing his gaze not merely close to home but actually at home. Thus, he gives the cost of constructing his house, explaining, “I give the details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials which compose them.” Similarly, he enumerates the expenditures versus income of his garden, and his overall household expenses and income during his two years at Walden Pond.40 Aldo Leopold made customary natural history observations, timing the daily dance of the woodcock and banding chickadees and counting how many survive after year 1, 2, 3, and 4. He problematizes conservation orthodoxy by his decade-long record of wild plant species that bloom on his “backward farm” as compared with the University of Wisconsin campus and suburbs. The “total visual diet” of the two locales is 226 and 120, respectively, to which he concludes, “So we are confronted by the two alternatives already mentioned: either insure the continued blindness of the populace, or examine the question whether we cannot have both progress and plants.”41

Travel Early on it was a given that natural history observations came from travel, although the relationship has always been a conflicted and contested one. Classical-era scholars saw travel as essential to the study of natural history, to study plants in their native environments, to gather the data for comparative analyses across wide regions, and to interview local peoples about historiae or remarkable things. Strictly library-based research was looked down upon. For example, the great Greek botanist Dioscorides lists three sources of information for his major work De Materia Medica: “I have . . . got to know most of my subject through observation (di’autopsias), and got to understand thoroughly the rest through what is universally accepted in the written record (ex historias), and in making enquiries (anakriseo¯s)

I n t r o d u c t i o n 23

of the natives (epicho¯rio¯n) in each case/region.” Of these three sources, the written record was deemed least important: Hardy and Totelin write that Dioscorides “is dismissive of historia, that is, enquiry as contrasted to autopsia, personal observation. In other words, Dioscorides is criticising other scholars for reading instead of doing fieldwork.”42 The colonial era had a centrifugal dimension much like that of classical Greece and Rome: distant lands acquired not only economic and political but also scientific importance. Whereas in the classical era distant lands were where historiae could be found, now they became more generally identified with nature: that is where nature could be found and studied. Thus, regions like the Amazon became closely associated with “a certain idea of nature.” Indeed, due to the work of scholars like Humboldt, Wallace, and Darwin, among others, the tropics acquired a dominant importance in the development of new ideas about nature.43 Rumphius, Wallace, and Conklin worked in the tropics; Linnaeus did not, but he sent many of his students to the tropics, and he himself worked in regions of Scandinavia that were similarly peripheral to the colonial world system. The colonial era sharpened a differentiation between armchair and field, which has been remarkably persistent, echoing through the ages.44 On the one hand, Linnaeus developed a unique professional travel model, exemplified in his expeditions around Sweden, which he drew on in his life-long rivalry with Buffon to disparage the latter’s lack of field experience. On the other hand, Linnaeus also valorized botanists over mere plant collectors; and in his Philosophia Botanica, he refers to the great Rumphius as simply a “Traveler” (aphorism no. 18) and a “Describer” of “exotic vegetables” (aphorism no. 12), which is deprecating and also inaccurate given that Rumphius, once he was established on the island of Ambon in the East Indies, stayed put for nearly fifty years.45 The Rumphian model of study was also pilloried by René Descartes, who privileged reason over experience and abstract thought over fieldwork. Descartes mocked “les sciences curieuses” in his dialogue from 1701, entitled La recherche de la verité par la lumière naturelle. A spokesman for Descartes defined the “curious sciences” as “simple forms of knowledge which are acquired without any recourse to reason, such as languages, history, geography or generally anything that depends merely on experience,” the shortcomings of which he illustrated as the felt need to examine “all the plants and stones that come from the indies.” Rumphius, as the

24

Introduction

preeminent scholar in Descartes’s time of those same “plants and stones,” said that he was skeptical about the “new philosophers.” Descartes distinguished between theory and practice, whereas Rumphius worked within an older tradition in which no such distinctions were made. Writing of the Greeks and Romans, Hardy and Totelin say, “All ancient writings that deal with plants insist on their utility. In this context, drawing a distinction between ‘pure’ [theoretical] botany (i.e. the study of plants for their own sake) and ‘applied’ [practiced] botany (i.e. the study of plants for practical purposes) is almost meaningless for the ancient world.” Hardy and Totelin feel obliged to comment on this fact, because the distinction is central to modern thinking on the subject.46 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the theoretician who stayed at home was often privileged over the collector who traveled to provide him or her with objects to study. As Hugh Raffles writes: “Marooned in the field with few reference books and incomplete knowledge of the most recent work in systematics, naturalists (no matter how skilled) were often unable to make the fine judgments that enabled species to be described, classified, and slotted into a Linnaean grid. Instead, they supplied the metropolitan expert who, like a bourgeois Adam in his paneled library, simultaneously named and brought the natural world into being, occasionally acknowledging the collector with a Latinate flourish.” Regarding the entomologist Henry Walter Bates, Raffles writes: “Field-naturalists like Bates were infantrymen in the taxonomic war on natural disorder, their spoils supplying armchair savants with the exotic specimens that crowded the natural history cabinet.” Bates himself argued the other wide of the coin. In an 1862 letter to Darwin, Bates writes of his friend Edwin Brown, a banker: he “is amassing material (specimens) at a very great expense. He has never traveled: this is a great deficiency for the relations of species to closely allied species & varieties cannot, I think, be thoroughly understood without personal observation in different countries.”47 Some observers have suggested that the greater fame of Darwin relative to Wallace is due to this distinction between armchair (Darwin) and field (Wallace). Classical-era accounts are silent on the logistics of natural history travel, but for the colonial era we know more. During this period many natural historians went into the field by themselves, but they were generally far from alone. Hugh Raffles, writing about Henry Walter Bates’s nineteenth-­ century expedition to the Amazon, mentions the “bonds of dependency

I n t r o d u c t i o n 25

that tied him to his Amazonian porters, guides, cooks, canoeists, pilots, nurses, hunters, collectors, protectors, translators, advisors, informants, companions, hosts, and local experts. . . . Bates’s ability to travel was wholly predicated on the availability of people prepared to fulfill the overlapping functions of crew member, porter, and guide.”48 At least as important were those supporters not in the immediate company of the natural historian. Referring to Wallace, Camerini emphasizes the importance of colonial European society: “He could not have started on his career as a tropical collector had there not been in place a heterogeneous society of collectors, agents, naturalists, editors and publishers, and Europeans settled sparsely in Brazil and much more extensively in the East Indian archipelago. The networks of colonial culture, in all their religious, economic, and military complexity, were as necessary to Wallace’s scientific achievements as were his scientific forebears.” As the anthropologist Erik Mueggler says of the botanical expedition to China early in the twentieth century by the English botanist Francis Kingdon-­ Ward and the Earl Cawdor: “The two Brits had little to do in the way of obtaining passage, transport, lodging, and food; they were free to walk, botanize, photograph, experiment with plane table and theodolite, and write.”49 This wider society not only made Wallace’s fieldwork possible, but it connected him back to his home country as well as the global scientific community. Camerini writes, “Each favor granted him by a European constituted a piece of his [Wallace’s] fieldwork. In effect, Europe in the Malay Archipelago functioned as an institution, validating and assisting his work. Colonial trade and industrial development provided resources that made it possible for him to send the fruits of his labors in the field, the animal specimens and scientific articles, back to England.” Costa similarly writes: “Although Wallace was a lone traveler in one sense, he was very much a part of the Victorian collective enterprise of fieldwork. . . . The interpersonal relationships and communal nature of the scientific collecting enterprise were central to Wallace’s success in the field.”50 Camerini, intent upon “reversing the standard figure-ground relationship between product and process in the history of science,” suggests that Wallace’s eccentric career can “illuminate central themes in the history of fieldwork.” She suggests that Wallace developed the requisite meth­ odological skills during his early fieldwork in Brazil: “Grappling with the

26

Introduction

practical demands of collecting in Brazil, Wallace developed skills he would later build on in the Malay Archipelago. Many of these skills—using letters of introduction to find lodgings and collecting sites, facing the material and social obstacles to locating, collecting, and transporting specimens back to England, and overcoming the practical exigencies of surviving in dangerous and isolated places—indicate the importance of handling the complex human infrastructure entailed in carrying out fieldwork.”51 Natural historians in the modern era like Wallace not only traveled, they gave their travels a prominent place in their narratives.52 Wallace and also Linnaeus give blow-by-blow accounts of their travels. The design or “aesthetic” of Rumphius’s The Ambonese Herbal is also that of a journey, as Rumphius writes: In order to describe the wild Plants we will maintain somewhat the same order one would find if one went straight across the Land of Amboina, from one shore to the other. For example, when we first set foot outside the house, we will be met by grass first, growing around the dwellings of people, in gardens, along roads, and along the edges of tilled land. If we keep walking, we will meet the fields and hills with their plants, and while gradually climbing to the top of the mountains, as well as in the valleys below, we will discover what the Ambonese wilderness has hidden there; then quickly descending in Book eleven, we will come out on the beach on the other side, near the mouth of a large River, and consider such plants that grow in swamps and wet places, even in Water itself, be it the River or the outermost Seashore, wherefore they grow even in Sea-water, at which point we will take our leave of the Ambonese land-plants, and in the next Book venture a little further out at Sea, and see what sort of plants of a different nature rest in her bosom.

Gilbert White, who stayed closer to home in his village of Selborne, gathered his data while walking or horseback riding: “For many months I carried a list in my pocket of the birds that were to be remarked, and, as I rode or walked about my business, I noted each day the continuance or omission of each bird’s song; so that I am as sure of the certainty of my facts as

I n t r o d u c t i o n 27

a man can be of any transaction whatsoever.” Thoreau also made his observations while surveying or on walks.53 Mueggler describes how the method of the natural history walk evolved in the early twentieth-century writing of Kingdon-Ward in China: “The book by Kingdon-Ward runs through a number of experiments with what this world is to be to the writer. It settles, eventually, upon wandering as a model for the way to move through the world and on an ‘eye for plants’ as the way to see it.” This echoed Wallace’s description of the fieldwork upon which The Malay Archipelago is based as “eight years of wandering [emphasis added] throughout the Malay Archipelago.”54 The maps that illustrate Wallace’s routes through the archipelago show, indeed, an abundance of serpentine, crisscrossing lines. In the nearly half century that separates Kingdon-Ward from Wallace, however, new norms of scientific rigor were being developed, to which Kingdon-Ward responded with a style of writing that sought to “scientize” his natural history walks. Thus, Mueggler writes: “At the end of each day, Kingdon-Ward wrote the walk in memory, submitting it to the slow, even discipline of his steel-nib pen. Walking as perceptual experience and writing as multiple, layered acts of memory in relation to a dense but distant intersection of social relations each lent the other its form. In his diary writing, Kingdon-Ward sought to assert rigorous control over this process. He sought to reconstitute the walk as merely perceptual and as subject to definite rules for perception. He sought to hammer it out into two elements: the world as a single, extended, continuous, and visible surface, representing nothing and concealing nothing.” The new norms of science also emphasized the removal from research of the scientist as a subject, making a first-person narrative style suspect and personal notes on travel delegitimizing. As a result, scholars like Kingdon-Ward responded by removing themselves from their narratives, again unlike Wallace. Mueggler writes that Kingdon-Ward sought to present himself as “a solitary seeing body, unencumbered by sociality, admitting to no debts and no claims—a structure that echoed that of a steel nib scratching its way across a sheet of notebook paper. . . . The few references to bodily fatigue, illness, disability, and want that remain in his diaries disappear from the articles and books. Sounds and voices—the noxious crows and barking dogs, the birds that wake him up too early— disappear as well.”55 The efforts of scholars like Kingdon-Ward notwithstanding, the in-

28

Introduction

tellectual loading of the natural history walk in particular, and travel in general, has not always been positive, which again reflects the tension between the field and the armchair. For J. J. Tewksbury and his co-authors, the association of the walk with natural history is a handicap to the field’s modern development: “One of the fundamental roadblocks to a vibrant and contemporary natural history movement is the broad perception that natural history consists only of walks in the woods.” The travel that is manifest in Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago leads the historian of science Jeremy Vetter to describe it as “widely acclaimed travel narrative,” which would be praise for a travel book but not for the scholarly monograph that it is; even more startling, it leads the anthropologist James Boon to call it a “bizarre” “first person travel narrative” replete with “adventure stories.”56 The negative loading of travel leads some scholars to differentiate between reasonable versus outlandish travel. For example, Rumphius writes in his preface to The Ambonese Herbal, directed to the reader: “So I present your Worship with something new, not a monster dragged from the wilds of Africa, but rather a pleasing, indeed useful History or description of the youthful vegetation one may behold in this outermost corner of the world, heretofore not known to our Europeans.”57 Thus Rumphius presented not a monster but something new, something not from the wild but pleasing and useful, something from an outermost and unknown corner but yet not from as truly “other” a place as Africa. As the colonial era progressed, there was pushback against the study of distant nature, which, although it did not eliminate natural historical study in the tropics, did establish a competing model in which nature was not distant and exotic but near and familiar. For example, when Linnaeus was admitted to the “royal and ordinary profession of physic” at the University of Uppsala in 1741, he gave an oration “concerning the necessity of traveling in one’s own country.” The studying-at-home model is also epitomized by White’s parish and the shacks of Thoreau and Leopold. White writes in the “Advertisement” at the start of his book, speaking in the third person: “He is also of opinion that if stationary men would pay some attention to the districts in which they reside, and would publish their thoughts respecting the objects that surround them, from such materials might be drawn the most complete county-histories, which are still wanting in several parts of this kingdom, and in particular in the county of Southampton.” White believed in the virtues of a narrow focus: “Men that

I n t r o d u c t i o n 29

undertake only one district are much more likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted with: every kingdom, every province, should have its own monographer.”58 He believed that the data from such studies are more trustworthy than data from afar, as illustrated by his comment on the “brood parasitic” habits of the cuckoo: “This proceeding of the cuckoo, of dropping its eggs as it were by chance, is such a monstrous outrage on maternal affection, one of the first great dictates of nature, and such a violence on instinct, that, had it only been related of a bird in the Brazils, or Peru, it would never have merited our belief.”59 Aldo Leopold takes White’s admonition even further, finding nature that is worthy of study not in a district but in a single farm in Wisconsin: “Every farm is a textbook on animal ecology; woodsmanship is the translation of the book.” Further, Leopold’s site was not simply a farm, it was a run-down “sand farm.” Finch writes in the introduction to the 1987 edition of A Sand County Almanac: “The fact that these discoveries take place, not in some unspoiled Edenic wilderness but on a run-down sand farm that has been abused and misused through human greed and ignorance for over a century, makes his achievement even more impressive.” Leopold argues against the single-minded pursuit of the exotic, invoking the common shibboleth of the South Seas: “The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.”60 The American transcendentalists advocated study of home and also self. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who owned the fourteen-acre woodland plot on which Thoreau lived for two years and two months, wrote that “the soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home. . . . Travelling is a fool’s paradise.” Thoreau took these teachings to heart; he was disdainful of the information acquired through travel: “He who is only a traveller learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is a poor authority.” Nor does Thoreau think that a locally focused study is limiting, without wider relevance. He carried out a number of measurements of Walden Pond and concluded: “Given, then, the length and breadth of the cove, and the character of the surrounding shore, and you have almost elements enough to make out a formula for all cases. If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point.” As Pearson writes in the

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Introduction

introduction to Walden or Life in the Woods, for Thoreau “the experience of the race is recapitulated in the experience of a single man, the scope of the globe concentrated in the microcosmography of a few acres.”61 Thoreau’s ability to find the universal significance of the particular is what Pearson calls the “pleasant paradox” of Walden: “This apparently most parochial of nineteenth-century American writings has been accepted as a dramatic metaphor of universal forces.”62 The challenge for Thoreau was to get nearer not farther away: “Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here! When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here.” Thoreau is explicit about the difference between the two stances and his personal preference. Thus, instead of an expedition to the South Seas, Thoreau says, it would be better to explore one’s self, alone: What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone. Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos. Plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille viae. [Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians. I have more of God, they more of the road.]63

Instead of an expedition to Africa, he urged an exploration of the undiscovered regions of the mind: “One hastens to southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one’s self ”: Direct your right eye inward, and you’ll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them and be Expert in home-cosmography.

I n t r o d u c t i o n 31

The new worlds that we should explore, he said, are worlds of thought: “Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes—with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.” When Thoreau famously and slyly critiqued the travel trope at the beginning of Walden by writing, “I have travelled a good deal in Concord,” the small town near Walden Pond, this is the sort of travel he was proposing instead.64

Historic Shifts in Natural History Analogous to the role of travel in studying differences between the human self and human “other,” and perhaps partly supplanting it in natural history scholarship, is the use of other methods to study the differences between humans and nonhumans and the differences between flora and fauna. Foucault writes that “historians of ideas or of the sciences . . . credit the seventeenth century, and especially the eighteenth, with a new curiosity: the curiosity that caused them, if not to discover the sciences of life, at least to give them a hitherto unsuspected scope and precision.” Roy F. Ellen suggests that this “Foucauldian moment or transition,” between the epistemes of natural history and biology, is “when traditional knowledge or scholastic knowledge becomes science.” The modern idea of natural history emerged at the point when natural history became the history of nature. Foucault writes, “For natural history [in this new sense] to appear, it was not necessary for nature to become denser and more obscure . . . it was necessary—and this is entirely the opposite—for History to become Natural.” Raymond Williams suggests that the rise of evolutionary science led to historical analysis first being applied to nature. Counterintuitively, the application of a historical lens to nature required their conceptual separation—the separation of nature and history as distinct specializations: today as a result, according to Donald Worster, “There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history.”65

32

Introduction

Foucault argues that this historic transition represented not a new desire for knowledge but rather a new way of arranging existing knowledge, which emphasized visibility: “Natural history is nothing more than the nomination of the visible. . . . One has the impression that with Tour­ nefort, with Linnaeus or Buffon, someone has at last taken on the task of stating something that had been visible from the beginning of time, but had remained mute before a sort of invincible distraction of men’s eyes. In fact, it was not an age-old inattentiveness being suddenly dissipated, but a new field of visibility being constituted in all its density.” Foucault continues, “The naturalist is the man concerned with the structure of the visible world,” and he concludes, “the blind man in the eighteenth century can perfectly well be a geometrician, but he cannot be a naturalist”—the glaring exception to which was the preeminent naturalist of the prior century, Rumphius.66 To make visible is not necessarily to reveal, however; paradoxically, to see in this way is also to not see. In order to observe systematically, Foucault says, the gaze must be restricted: “To observe, then, is to be content with seeing—with seeing a few things systematically. . . . Natural history did not become possible because men looked harder and more closely. One might say, strictly speaking, that the Classical age used its ingenuity, if not to see as little as possible, at least to restrict deliberately the area of its experience.” In particular, Foucault writes, the emphasis on visibility is an emphasis on the surface, the exterior versus interior: “At the institutional level, the inevitable correlatives of this patterning were botanical gardens and natural history collections. And their importance, for Classical culture, does not lie essentially in what they make it possible to see, but in what they hide and in what, by this process of obliteration, they allow to emerge.”67 This emphasis on exteriority versus interiority affected what natural historians studied, in particular whether they studied flora versus fauna. Egerton argues that until the 1700s, naturalists understood plant physiology much less well than animal physiology, and so studies of animals predominated. But then, Foucault writes, things changed: All this is of great importance for the definition of natural history in terms of its object. . . . The plant and the animal are seen not so much in their organic unity as by the visible patterning of their or-

I n t r o d u c t i o n 33

gans. . . . Hence the epistemological precedence enjoyed by botany . . . in so far as there are a great many constituent organs visible in a plant that are not so in animals, taxonomic knowledge based upon immediately perceptible variables was richer and more coherent in the botanical order than in the zoological. We must therefore reverse what is usually said on this subject: it is not because there was a great interest in botany during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that so much investigation was undertaken into methods of classification. But because it was possible to know and to say only within a taxonomic area of visibility, the knowledge of plants was bound to prove more extensive than that of animals.68

In short, Foucault is saying that plants came to reign supreme in natural history because their surface or exterior was so accessible. Foucault’s view of plant exteriority versus interiority is historically and culturally and perhaps also scientifically contingent.69 Theophrastus, with whom plant geography begins, regarded plants as “volitional, minded, intentional creatures that clearly demonstrate their own autonomy and purpose in life.” He treated flora and fauna evenhandedly—in a way that is difficult for a modern audience to comprehend—as is evident in his analogy regarding the annual shedding of parts: “Again many plants shed their parts every year, even as stags shed their horns, birds which hibernate their feathers, four-footed beasts their hair: so that it is not strange that the parts of plants should not be permanent, especially as what thus occurs in animals and the shedding of leaves in plants are analogous processes.” Regarding mutilation he writes: “We must now consider whether a tree, like animals, becomes unproductive from mutilation or removal of a part.” And regarding domestication he writes: “For, as with animals which do not submit to domestication, so a plant which does not submit to cultivation may be called wild in its essential character. . . . Wherefore we must make our distinction and call some things wild, others cultivated—the latter class corresponding to those animals which live with man and can be tamed.” The similarities between flora and fauna lead Theophrastus to comment on plant “behavior” in a way that has come back into fashion in the twenty-first century: “For they say that the [grape] vine scents the cabbage and is infected by it. Wherefore the vine-shoot, whenever it comes near this plant, turns back and looks away, as though the smell were hostile

34

Introduction

to it. Indeed Androkydes used this fact as an example to demonstrate the use of cabbage against wine, to expel the fumes of drunkenness for, said he, even when it is alive, the [grape] vine avoids the smell.” Hardy and Totelin suggest that Pliny was even more prone than Theophrastus to anthropomorphism in his descriptions of plants. For example, Pliny writes, “What is most surprising is that although the trees can sometimes be persuaded to live and to bear transplantation, and occasionally even the soil will grant the request to nourish foreigners and give food to immigrants, the climate is absolutely unrelenting.” Hardy and Totelin suggest, “Pliny’s vocabulary to describe transplanted plants is the one he would have used to describe human slaves. For him plants are like vanquished foreigners who refused to be taken away from their native country in servitude. They have human-like feelings, and in particular pride, their will can usually be bent, whereas a hostile environment will remain so.”70 Aristotle, one of Theophrastus’s teachers, also drew comparisons between plants and humans in terms of morphology, their exterior: in Meteorology, Aristotle quotes this verse of Empedocles: “The same are hair and leaves and thick feathers of large birds, and scales upon sturdy limbs.” But he distinguishes plants and humans in terms of their interior: in his Metaphysics he wrote: “If one has no belief of anything, but is equally [homoio¯s] thinking and not thinking, how would one differ from a plant?”71 Aristotle finishes Book 1 of The Generation of Animals with the suggestion that simple sensation in animals is preferable to a mere plant-like life, for sensation is a kind of knowledge. Theophrastus’s other teacher, Plato, according to Marder, was responsible for initiating a fundamental restructuring of the relationship of people to plants, as an “inversion of the earthly perspective of the plant, a deracination of human beings uprooted from their material foundations and transplanted into the heavenly domain, and the correlative devaluation of the literal plant, mired with its roots in the darkness of the earth as much as in non-conscious existence.” During the ensuing two and one-half millennia, this view of plant interiority by Plato and Aristotle completely dominated that of Theophrastus. The result was the “profound obscurity, which, throughout the history of western philosophy, has been the marker of their life.” Even scholars like Marder, who are attempting to penetrate this obscurity, still insist on the “radical alterity” of plants. Peter Wohlleben, in his The Hidden Life of Trees, suggests that the challenge is biological: “Why do we find it so much more difficult to

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understand plants than animals? It’s because of the history of evolution, which split us off from vegetation very early on. All our senses developed differently, and so we have to use our imaginations to get even the slightest idea of what is going on inside trees.” In one such act of imagination, if overly literal, John Hartigan addresses some of the methodological challenges for social scientists in his article “How to Interview a Plant.”72 However, new research on plants resonates more with the approach taken by Theophrastus. Whereas some still insist on the fundamental ways that plants are unlike humans, scholars like Holdredge (2014), Trewavas (2009), and Chamovitz (2012) are emphasizing similarity rather than difference.73 It is most notable in work on plant communication, sentience, and intelligence—and perhaps even work on movement. Although Aristotle regarded lack of locomotion as a defining characteristic of plants, Pliny thought that trees might have a nature “greedy for novelty and travel.” A modern biogeographer interviewed by Hartigan flips the premise of flora as sedentary and fauna as mobile: “Plants are better dispersers than animals. They move around very easily. . . . Animals are good survivors, and they’re able to adapt and change, but they’re not that great in moving.”74 This new work on plants is contributing to an incipient revival of the field of natural history. According to Google’s Ngram research tool, use of the English term “natural history”—which first dates to the early 1500s— reached a peak around 1850, then precipitously dropped off to low levels until the present day—notwithstanding its inclusion in the name of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, founded in 1874, and in the name of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History founded in 1910.75 However, in a chapter titled “The Slow Death (and Resurrection) of Nature History” in his 2013 book Deep Things out of Darkness: A History of Natural History, John G. T. Anderson writes: “Natural history’s decline in the academic world has lasted for more than a century, but there is evidence that this trend may be changing. . . . The first decade of the twenty-first century saw a growing call for a renewal of the practice of natural history.”76 Similarly, Hampton and Wheeler write, “A rebirth of natural history across disciplines is on the horizon.” Proponents formed a Natural History Network 2007 and published the Journal of Natural History Education and Experience between 2007 and 2020.77 The publication of articles like one by Kearns and Schmitz, “Flourishing: Outline of an

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Introduction

Aristotelian Natural Philosophy of Living Things,” explicitly addresses the “renewed interest in natural philosophy within the contemporary academy,” to use the term often applied to the classical work of the Greeks and Romans.78 This revival is producing a diverse literature beyond the obvious conservation topics, including such disparate works as Michael Pollan’s 2007 The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Richard J. King’s 2019 Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby Dick, Ben Goldfarb’s 2018 Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, and perhaps even autobiographical works like Renkl’s 2019 Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. Indeed, the argument could be made that the label “natural history” could be applied to works of fiction, like Richard Powers’s acclaimed 2018 work The Overstory: A Novel, suggesting that when the vision of natural history was waning in the sciences, it was waxing in the arts and letters—to which it “migrated.”79 Not all of these new efforts in natural history emulate the holism of the classical model, however. For example, the celebratory article by Hampton and Wheeler focuses entirely on conservation; there is no straddling of nature and culture, no human-environment relations, and no folk knowledge.80 These topics were also missing from the fourteen-year run of the journal published by the Natural History Network. Some of the most effective efforts to revive a more expansive, classical model of natural history come out of the “post-humanist turn” in the social sciences and humanities, which focuses on the ontological gulf between humans and nonhumans. As Gan, Tsing, and Sullivan summarize this development: “Recent anthropological attempts to include nonhumans in the study of social relations (e.g., Haraway 2008; Kohn 2013) have renewed attention to natural history field observations in the study of landscape (Mathews 2017; Tsing 2013); in this, anthropologists join a related movement in ecology to restore the professional status of natural history, which has fallen out of regard in the last century (Anderson 2017).”81 The posthumanist-inspired studies initially focused on fauna, seeking to redress the long-established Cartesian view of animals as machine-like, mindless, and lacking an interior.82 More recent work, like the earlier-cited studies of plant sentience, has addressed the interiority of flora, including The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate by Peter Wohlleben (2015), Gary P. Nabhan’s study Mesquite: An Arboreal

I n t r o d u c t i o n 37

Love Affair (2018), Eduardo Kohn’s book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (2013), and two works on mushrooms, Anna Tsing’s work The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015) and Michael J. Hathaway’s What a Mushroom Lives for: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make (2022).83 The ruins that Tsing studies are the product of industrialization, which has so alienated local communities from their ecologies that they have little knowledge of them: “As more and more of the planet is subjected to industrial destruction, the ethnographic and ecological study of ruins becomes urgent. Yet, unlike peasant and indigenous landscapes, where ethnobiologists turn to skilled interlocutors whose knowledge of local organisms is often broad and deep, industrial ruins are often made through the evacuation of earlier residents and the site’s eventual abandonment or replacement with development or restoration projects whose participants and ecologies are quite different from those that proceeded them.”84 Another noteworthy example of this new work is Hartigan’s application of Foucauldian ideas of “care” to plants: “In terms easily applicable to geneticists’ work with maize, Foucault describes care of the self as an ‘art of existence,’ a ‘grid of analysis,’ and an ‘ethics of control.’” As Hartigan carried out his research on corn breeding, he comes to a realization: “I begin to recognize a continuity of botany . . . with preclassical knowledge systems such as those focused on medicinal herbs. Before, I had only regarded taxonomy as a ‘break,’ in a Foucauldian sense, with less scientific approaches.”85 In short, through his ethnographic study of botanists and corn breeders, Hartigan suggests that he is able to reach back through the “blur” to an earlier tradition of natural history, to the tradition from which “hearsay was not excluded.”

O ne

The Seventeenth Century, Rumphius “I Would Rather Be Astounded”

G e o r g i u s E v e r h a r d u s R u m p h i u s , one of the greatest natural historians of the seventeenth century, gave the following description of the “poison tree” (Antiaris toxicaria) of the East Indies: “Neither grass nor leaves grows under this tree, nor for a stone’s throw around it, or any other trees, and the soil remains barren, russet. As if scorched. And under the strongest kinds one will find the telltale signs of bird feathers, for the air around the tree is so tainted that if birds want to rest on the branches, they soon become dizzy and fall down dead.” E. M. Beekman, the modern translator and editor of Rumphius’s works, and the person most responsible for the effort to reacquaint contemporary audiences with his works, nonetheless writes: “Some of Rumphius’ details are, for once, in error. . . . The only hyperbole for which one can fault Rumphius . . . was the notion that the tree was so noxious just growing there that it extended a lethal circumference both on the ground and in the air within which no living creature could survive. This is clearly a myth.”1 Rumphius’s passages on the poison tree seem to stand out from his otherwise more prosaic and meticulous descriptions of the region’s flora and fauna in his voluminous writings on the East Indies, which prompts 38

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the charge of “error” from his editor Beekman. But this is both more and less than an error. It opens a window into the politics of knowledge in the colonial era, the co-production of discourses of natural history by audiences in both East and West, and the ambivalent role of the scholar in that era. Rumphius’s accounts of the poison tree are a classic example of natural historical “hearsay.” The seeming departure from empirical observation for imaginative renderings in this account “blurs” it for Beekman. This is another case of difficulty in rereading historic natural history for even the most astute and sympathetic of scholars. Georg Eberhard Rumpf, Georgius Everhardus Rumphius in the Latinate, and generally referred to today as Rumphius, was born in 1627 in Wölfersheim in central Germany. He sailed for the East Indies in the employ of the United Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie), or VOC, at the end of 1652. He arrived in Java in 1653, and Ambon, in the eastern part of the archipelago in 1654, where he died in 1702. He devoted his life to the study of the region’s natural history, treating his official VOC duties as a “cover”—he said that he was a “spy”—which he sustained by cultivating his superiors while developing local, regional, and even global networks of collectors and collaborators to furnish him with specimens and information. His most comprehensive and well-known works, both published posthumously, are The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet first published in 1705, which is focused on marine life and terrestrial minerals, and The Ambonese Herbal, which is focused on plants, first published in 1741–50. Rumphius worked on the many-volumed Herbal from 1660 to 1686. It describes approximately 1,200 plant species, covering the Ambonese isles, the Moluccas, Banda, and Java.2 When Rumphius lived and worked in Ambon, it was at the center of the Dutch spice trade and, thus, at the center of a great deal of global colonial economics and politics. As Boon has written, Ambon “epitomized the Indian Archipelago according to its favored locale: scene of cloves, mace, paradise birds, and proper kingship.” As the global significance of the spice trade waned, the weight of political power and attention shifted to Java in the western part of the archipelago, and today Ambon is a quiet backwater; its change in status does not characterize Rumphius’s work, which has waxed in importance. Beekman writes, “His formidable Herbal was the first pioneering work which sought to explore and describe systematically the plants of the East Indies.” Merrill writes that the officially

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The Seventeenth Century, Rumphius

recognized types for many plants today date to the Herbal: “The Herbarium Amboinense is a classical work on the Malayan flora, and one that is absolutely essential to the systematist today. . . . The great importance of the work is due to the fact that later authors have made the Rumphian descriptions and figures the actual ‘types’ of many binomials. . . . In botanical literature there are scores of species whose only published descriptions are the brief general statements compiled from the Herbarium Amboinense.”3 Beekman claims that the Herbal is relevant to many contemporary fields: “After three-and-a-half centuries, the Ambonese Herbal is modern again: an important text for ethnomedicine, ethnobiology, ethnography, ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, and any of the other ethnographic specializations.” Beekman cites as an example the fact that the Mayo College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota, found a plant in one volume of the Herbal that has an antibacterial effect on Staphylococcus aureus: “It is just one instance of how Rumphius and his Ambonese Herbal still has much to offer to the present age.” This is a limited way of measuring the importance of Rumphius’s work, however. The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet and The Ambonese Herbal are works of scholarship, of natural history, that are of historic dimension: As Beekman writes, “Rumphius’ published work surpasses in volume, accuracy, information, and beauty anything that came before and was never really equaled, not even in the modern era.” ­Rumphius’s work speaks to the importance of the relationship between humans and nature, which has been central to natural history studies for millennia: “More than at any other time, his work has come into focus as a bridge between the daily use of common people who lived in a vernacular world, and the modern world that has run out of options. Rumphius is modern.” There is a historical asymmetry at play here: the colonial spice trade brought Rumphius and his extraordinary skills to Ambon and supported his half century of work there, but today it is Rumphius who brings scholarly attention to bear on the island, long after political-economic attention has moved elsewhere.4 The titles to Rumphius’s books are startling in their scope. The full title for the Cabinet is The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, Containing a Description of all sorts of both soft as well as hard Shellfish, to wit rare Crabs, Crayfish, and suchlike Sea Creatures, as well as all sorts of Cockles and Shells, Which one will find in the Ambonese Sea; Together with some Minerals, Stones, and kinds of Soil, that are found on the Ambonese and on some

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of the Adjacent Islands. And the full title for the Herbal is The Ambonese Herbal: Being a Description of the Most Noteworthy Trees, Shrubs, Herbs, Land- and Water-Plants Which Are Found in Amboina and the Surrounding Islands According to their Shape, Various Names, Cultivation, and Use: Together with Several Insects and Animals. Beekman writes regarding The Ambonese Herbal: “The Herbal is not only a botanical document. It pre­ sents linguistic information of Maluku’s dialects and languages, the history of eastern Indonesia, local customs and beliefs, history of the Dutch East India Company, meteorological information, geographical data, and medical intelligence of just about every plant discussed. The Ambonese Herbal is an invaluable ethnobotanical text, a repository of centuries-old received medical knowledge of local plants and instruction that had not been influenced by Western investigations.”5 All who read these works are struck by Rumphius’s broad scope. As M. J. Sirks writes of Rumphius, “His approach to science was extraordinarily versatile. Everything which nature offered held an attraction for him.” Beekman resorts to Isaiah Berlin’s famous 1970 essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, which has roots in classical Greek poetry, to characterize Rumphius: But his investigations were hardly systematic at first. Like the coral reefs of this region, separate observations were recorded according to the individual necessity, and slowly, over time, an aggregate form began to insinuate itself. Rumphius’ writings were part of a dynamic process, not a methodological fulfillment of a prior assignment. Rumphius belongs with Isaiah Berlin’s foxes: those people “who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle; . . . their thought seizes upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing . . . unitary inner vision.”

Beekman points out that in modern terms, Rumphius had no identifiable discipline: “According to the tenets of modern scientific hagiocracy, Rumphius was a rank amateur, though in the seventeenth century the term

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‘naturalist’ was one of distinction. One is grateful for the omission of specialization, because it allowed the registration of a wide spectrum.” The absence of a specialization in the modern sense freed Rumphius to compose works with a breadth that is unimaginable today: Beekman writes, “He had what the British novelist, John Fowles, in his eloquent essay about ‘seeing nature whole,’ described as the ‘green man’ still in him; when in that long night of more than three decades [during which he was blind] Rumphius could escape to a ‘mental greenwood’ which was undoubtedly flooded with light.”6 What was nonsense from the modern perspective was integral to the holistic vision of Rumphius. Beekman writes that Rumphius would have met the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s wish “that every ethnologist was also a mineralogist, a botanist, a zoologist and even an astronomer.” Rumphius followed this dictum four centuries before Lévi-Strauss lived, and he was following the lead of someone who lived more than 1,600 years earlier, the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder. Rumphius referred to his research and writing as “lucubrationes,” following Pliny (see epilogue). As Beekman writes, “Rumphius had Pliny’s sense in mind, and it must have been in Hila [on the Island of Ambon] that he was seduced by the possibility of completing a natural history of the Moluccan islands in imitation of his Roman avatar.” Natural history was the avocation not vocation for both Rumphius and Pliny, and Rumphius kept this in mind when he evaluated his own efforts: “If Pliny, while commanding the Roman fleet, could still find time to complete his laudable work, of which the world still profits to this very day, I surely had more time and opportunity in my tranquil Prefecturae [with the VOC] to describe the plants of these Islands.” Pliny defined his subject expansively as “the natural world, or life,” which made his Naturalis Historia the touchstone for holistic studies of society and environment for two millennia and, Beekman says, inspired Rumphius’s own design for his Herbal. This affinity was expressed when on his election in 1681 to the prestigious Academia Naturae Curiosorum in Vienna, Rumphius was given the title of Plinius Indicus, which he proudly displayed ever after on the title pages of his works. One of Rumphius’s greatest modern admirers, E. D. Merrill, has acknowledged this by writing that Rumphius was well named the “Pliny of the Indies.”7 All commentators on the life and work of Rumphius grapple with the fact that he carried out his research a century before Linnaeus, and even

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with considerable delays his work was still published before the Linnaean revolution in biological classification. As a result, the system of plant nomenclature to which Rumphius devoted so much labor was pre-Linnaean: “Each particular entry described the plant or tree in detail, followed by its names in various languages, always including its Dutch, Latin, Malay and Ambonese names, while Rumphius often provided Javanese, Hindostani, Portuguese or Chinese nomenclature. These names were not derived from Linnaeus but were either invented by Rumphius himself or transcribed from native appellations.” As Merrill writes, “Rumphius’s idea of the species was not at all that of the species as understood today,” but was informed by native identifications and classical scholarship, including Aristotle’s divisions of trees, shrubs, and herbs. Sirks notes that the books in Rumphius’s Herbal have titles like “Trees producing resin, showy flowers, or injurious latex,” which, although having a “natural charm,” “lack all scientific principle” because of the ensuing Linnaean revolution in nomenclature.8 Rumphius’s editor, E. M. Beekman, sees this as crippling: “Rumphius is a ‘pre-Linnaean’—in one fell swoop his great achievement was declared null and void after the taxonomic axe came down in 1753 with the publication of Linnaeus’ Species Plantarum, and the coup de grace the next year with the printing of the 5th ed. of Genera Plantarum (1754).” An attempt was made to bring Rumphius’s work within the Linnaean fold, but it failed. As Sirks writes: “Otto Kuntze made an effort to have the year 1737 considered as the beginning of priority in nomenclature, so that Rumphius’ names would also be included, but he was unsuccessful. The officially accepted date is that of Linnaeus’ Species Plantarum, 1753. Consequently the designations in the Herbarium Ambonense will always be excluded from consideration in questions of nomenclature.”9 Alice Peeters, however, reverses this problematic. She writes that “Rumphius’ Herbarium Amboinense is without doubt the most extensive exotic flora written in pre-Linnaean times,” and she sees it as valuable precisely for this reason. She critiques the fact that interest in pre-Linnaean botany is devoted to simply translating that work into Linnaean terms: “Modern botanists, even those interested in the history and development of their own science, have almost completely neglected the classification of plants as conceived before Linnaeus devised his system of classification. When dealing at all with this question, they are mostly concerned with

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identifying and then naming plants described by earlier naturalists in terms of binomial nomenclature.” In short, the Linnaean revolution erected a singularly influential temporal schism, before which all work became instantly illegible in the new hegemonic botanical language, which thus erected a screen in front of all prior work. Peeters suggests this schism is a subject of interest in its own right: “Let us just suggest that a study should be made on the manner in which post-Linnaean botanists interpret classifications (inasmuch as they recognize any) built by pre-Linnaean botanists.”10

Folk Knowledge As a foreigner in Ambon, and even more so after he lost his sight, Rumphius depended upon what the local people told him about its flora and fauna; he depended, in short, upon hearsay. Beekman characterizes Rumphius’s work as a bridge to “the daily use of common people who lived in a vernacular world.” Indeed, his interest in the knowledge and practices of common people is equal to that of Theophrastus or Gilbert White. Rumphius is one of the examples cited by Ellen of a colonial-era European scholar whose “publication of scientific accounts of new species and revisions of taxonomies which, ironically, depended upon a set of diagnostic and classificatory practices which, though represented as ‘Western science,’ had been derived from earlier codifications of indigenous knowledge.”11 Rumphius’s works are not simply a collation of material available in other published sources, which distinguishes them from the work of Pliny. Although Rumphius did solicit material from other scholars, most of the material in The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet and The Ambonese Herbal is primary data, based on Rumphius’s own investigations with native informants. Regarding Rumphius’s field method, Beekman writes: “There was a large natural apothecary readily available to anyone with the necessary knowledge, but to become skilled in the use of Indonesian herbs and simples one had to be instructed by local experts. Rumphius had no problem with that.” Rumphius was unusually outspoken in acknowledging and praising his native sources, something that became increasingly rare over the succeeding centuries as this came to be seen as a threat to academic authority. Beekman points out numerous instances of this: “He never mocked them [native herbalists] but treated their knowledge with respect.

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. . . Rumphius confessed with commendable honesty and grace that local experts taught him about plants and their uses. . . . He refers to ‘my Master . . . a Moorish priest from Buro’ and ‘a Regent or Orangkay . . . a Man experienced in the knowledge of plants.’ Here we have this remarkable man in a nutshell. This European colonial does not condescend. Quite the contrary, he has no hesitation in calling a native informant his “Master” and telling his readers that he could not have achieved what he did without the help of people he could easily have left unmentioned.”12 Rumphius adopted many of the beliefs of his informants. He writes of “hot” versus ”cold” illnesses as dukun or native healers do, and he agrees with the native belief that the powers of a magical object apply only to the one who initially finds or is given it and not to any second party who might purchase it. Beekman writes, “One could not ask for more authentic material unless it had been compiled and written by a local dukun (shaman),” and even, “He became so much part of the Moluccan world that dukuns came to ask him for advice or to take herbs from his garden.” The nineteenth-century British resident in the East Indies, John Crawfurd, relates the story that Rumphius taught the natives an improved method for preparing sago flour from the palm Metroxylon sagu: “Rumphius was evidently a man of talents, sound sense, and indefatigable industry. Much of his information was obtained through the natives of the country, and his work affords ample evidence of his familiarity with their language. It was he that taught the natives of Amboyna the improved process for preparing sago, which is still followed by them, and for which his name is still remembered.” Beekman initially endorsed Crawfurd’s story, saying, “The last is true and is described in the first volume of his Herbal.” But sub­ sequently Beekman attributes the story to an earlier authority, F. V. A. de Stuers (1846), and evinces more skepticism: “A scholar in the nineteenth century made the surprising Allegation that it was Rumphius who taught the Ambonese the simple procedure to separate the ela [pith of the tree] from the sago meal, thereby obtaining a purer meal.” He quotes de Stuers at length: “It is noteworthy that this purely native way [of harvesting] that is completely within the grasp of every native, was taught to the Ambonese by Rumphius, who they knew so well; before that time the Ambonese used the sago still mixed with ela which today [1846] is still done in various places on Ceram and Buru, and everywhere else, such as Sumatra’s westcoast. . . . All Ambonese remember Rumphius, a memory joined to a true

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appreciation by the natives for this very useful preparation of the food, that kind nature bestowed on them.” The great antiquity and ubiquity of sago processing and consumption in the region suggest that de Stuers’s claim reflects the orthodox European view of themselves as teachers and the natives as students, which was directly contradicted by what Rumphius himself had to say.13 Rumphius’s treatment of folk knowledge ran counter to orthodoxy, and he knew it. For example, in his remarks on Ficus benjamina, Rumphius reports the Balinese belief that once in your life you might find a flower on it made of gold, but then he adds: “I have to protest here once again that when I refer to such fabulous stories in my writings, it does not mean that I believe in them in any way; but because I know and have often discovered, that they always contain some kernel of truth, and to spur on Liefhebbers [amateurs] to more diligent scrutiny, while assuring them that in these countries one is confronted every day with many secrets of nature that are unknown to Europeans, and seem unbelievable; on the other hand I disdain the ignorant mockery of many who cast doubt on my writings, saying they are filled with trifles and old wives tales.” Rumphius was addressing a real and enduring criticism that is leveled against natural histories, he was criticized for including such material in his writing, and similar materials were stripped out of other works at the time—but what he was doing came to be a staple of twentieth-century anthropology.14 An important and much-discussed element in Rumphius’s work is his stance on native magic. As Yoo writes, “tales of magical objects reached Rumphius from islands near and far,” which could only be because Rumphius had demonstrated an openness to receiving them. Yoo con­ tinues, “Significantly, belief in legends and tales did not disqualify his intermediary as a trustworthy source. In fact, these tales became a part of Rumphius’s modus operandi.” Rumphius himself wrote, “One ought to follow the sensibility of the Indian [East Indies] healers if one wants to avail oneself of their help.” This meant above all respecting the beliefs of those with whom he interacted, just as a “trained anthropologist or ethnographer” would do.15 Some of Rumphius’s modern commentators are anxious to assert that this does not mean he could not separate fact from fiction. Beekman writes, “Rumphius made sure that his readers knew he was fully aware of

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reporting things which could be misconstrued.” And Sirks notes, “He also communicated everything relating to the manners and customs of the people; for example, what superstition prevailed there about a definite plant, constantly separating legend from truth.” However, these overly apologetic comments miss the point of what Rumphius was doing.16 Rumphius was honoring an anthropological or ethnographic ideal of accurately reporting what one hears from one’s informants. As he writes regarding stone amulets believed to confer invincibility in warfare: It is true that the common people tell of many strange events, that they have seen people, who could not be killed with any kind of weapon, until one or more of those little stones had been cut out of their bodies, where the same had been pushed in; our people have confronted such cabalized people in war, and these things have been said by honest officers, so that I do not care to contradict the same: But every healthy Christian knows full well, that such powers cannot be produced naturally by a stone or a piece of wood, but only by the devilry of the children of ignorance (be they moors or nominal Christians): Therefore, when we proceed to write such things about some Mesticae, it does not mean that one should believe them, for it was only done to show what the natives say about them, and why such stones of which we disapprove are so valuable to this nation; for all of it exists in the imagination and whimsy of certain people.17

As suggested previously, Rumphius conducted himself in the field much as an anthropologist would, especially with regard to his relations with native peoples and informants. Although anthropology as a distinct and recognized field only dates to the second half of the nineteenth century, it claims many earlier forbears, and Rumphius is one of them. His explicit regard for indigenous knowledge and its practitioners, four centuries before the study of indigenous knowledge became a recognized field, alone makes him a pioneering figure. Beekman highlights the breadth and depth of Rumphius’s studies: “It is also obvious that he was fluent in the language and knew the customs, religion, lore, and skills of the local peoples. He knew their food and medicine, their weapons and dress, their superstitions and stories. He was without a doubt the first (and for a long

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time the only) significant ethnographer of Indonesia. Not until the nineteenth century will one find a comparable description of an Indonesian region, though I doubt there was ever one as detailed.”18 As is still the case today, Rumphius’s success in ethnographic or anthropological fieldwork is partly based on his personal affinity for the cultures he studied. In local terms, as Beekman writes, “It is also clear that Rumphius cocok with his Ambonese environment, a verb that means ‘to agree’ or ‘fit,’ perhaps better translated with our vernacular ‘to click.’” Even Rumphius’s superiors in the Dutch East India Company acknowledged this: in 1660 the then-governor of Ambon, Jacob Hustaerdt, wrote that Rumphius “suits himself to the temper of the Ambonese,” which he thought fit to remark upon because it was a rare trait among VOC employees. Other VOC officials regarded this trait in a different light: a subsequent governor of Ambon, Robert Padtbrugge, wrote of Rumphius, though still respecting his work and securing a burial plot for him after his death: “He is in everything hostile and prejudicious to the Company’s methods. Because in his pursuit of curiosities he is ruled by an uncommon desire, one that is often quite contrary to the Company’s interests, as for instance in locating land for the Company, as other instances, as we experienced often enough already.” As happens with many anthropologists, Rumphius’s sustained study of the Ambonese and other communities imbued him with political sympathies toward them as opposed to their colonial overlords for whom he worked: “Rumphius often took the side of the local people against his powerful employer, nor did he scruple to lecture and criticize his European superiors.” The fact that Rumphius was able to maintain this balancing act for fifty years is remarkable, and it testifies to the impact that his extraordinary devotion to his natural history research must have had even on his superiors in the colonial Dutch government, some of whom shared his interests.19 Rumphius’s ethnographic studies drew heavily on his linguistic expertise. He was a polyglot, who knew Dutch, German, Malay, Portuguese, Ambonese, Hebrew, ancient Greek, and local Chinese, and he drew on all of these languages, as well as a number of different native languages, in his research: “Not only does he give nomenclatural information in at least six languages (Latin, Dutch, Ambonese—usually being careful to distinguish between the languages spoken on Ambon’s two peninsulas, Hitu and Leitimor—Macassarese, and often Chinese) but his descriptions are exten-

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sive, detailed, and delicate, followed by medicinal information and by what we would call ethnographical data.” As Rumphius himself writes: “The names of the plants are given at times in seven or ten languages, though mostly only three or four, to wit, Latin, Dutch, Malay, Ambonese, the language from Ternate, Bandanese, Macassarese, Balinese, Javanese, and for some also Arabic, Chinese, and, if fitting, Portuguese and Hindustani.” Rumphius’s profligate citation of names in different languages for a given plant is a method of triangulation, an effort to bring as much information as possible to bear on an identification.20 When in doubt, Rumphius privileged local names and identifications: “Rumphius knew that the information he obtained was traditional and ancient. He trusted it and he trusted the people who told him about it. Whenever he was in doubt about the accuracy of the information, he would still give the local name first and then modify or correct it with his Latin name. He will follow the ‘common feeling’ first as describers of herbs should do ‘if they want to be understood.’” Rumphius’s systematic attention to local names for plants and thus their classifications, which was made possible by his extraordinary grasp of not just global but also local languages, was a foundational effort in the development of the field of ethnobotany in general and native plant taxonomies in particular: “He laid the foundation in The Ambonese Herbal for collecting native names of plants, particularly for two classes: the names used for cultivated plants as well as agricultural products which were current throughout the archipelago (mostly Malay), and the even larger group of local names.” Beekman says that most of the plant names Rumphius gathered are still in use: “The number of Rumphian plant names can be estimated at 8,000. Among them are names no longer in use, even those from extinct peoples, such as the Bandanese. But the majority are still important and need only a linguistic adjustment for them to be used at the present time.” Herman L. Strack mounted the Rumphius Biohistorical Expedition to Ambon in 1990 and proved “the great accuracy and reliability of Rumphius’ work.” As Beekman reports: “Strack’s 1990 expedition to Ambon proved the astonishing accuracy of Rumphius’ information. After the passage of nearly three centuries, his matching of specimens and locations turned out to be nearly infallible, and Strack makes the important observation that ‘of all [the] vernacular names recorded by the expedition, about one third appeared to be identical to those recorded by Rumphius,’ yet another validation of this

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remarkable man, who was as great an ethnographer as he was a botanist and zoologist.”21

The Poison Tree E. M. Beekman, who devoted much of his life to translating, annotating, and publishing Rumphius’s materials, almost never utters a critical word regarding his work. The most prominent exception concerns Rumphius’s commentary on the “poison tree” of the East Indies, the pohon upas (Antiaris toxicaria), regarding which Beekman says, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, Rumpius fell prey to “error” and “hyperbole.” This tree furnishes the title of Beekman’s first book on Rumphius, The Poison Tree, and it is also the part of Rumphius’s scholarship that has circulated most widely around the world (figure 1.1).22 The historical context for Rumphius’s study of the poison tree was the greatly intensifying colonial European intervention in the political economy of Southeast Asia during the seventeenth century. Some of the fiercest resulting conflicts were the spice wars of the East Indies, from the 1640s to the 1660s, in the middle of which Rumphius arrived in the region. On one side were the Dutch, who were determined to establish exclusive control over the production and trade in cloves, nutmeg, and mace in the eastern part of the archipelago; and on the other side were the local trading kingdoms, who were equally determined to preserve their right to trade with other European and non-European powers. This contest was eventually decided by the technological superiority of Dutch ships and cannon and the greater mobility that this afforded their forces.23 The most powerful native citadel in the region, Macassar, in southern Sulawesi, finally fell to the Dutch in 1667. Notwithstanding their decisive technological advantage, the Dutch were initially unnerved by the use in battle against them of poisoned blowpipe darts, and later of poisoned musket balls.24 Fear of these poisoned darts dwarfed fear of the much greater threat from tropical diseases, which typically killed or made seriously ill more than half of the Dutch troops. As Rumphius writes: “Up to now I have never heard of a more horrible or more villainous poison from plants, than that which is produced by this kind of Milk Tree. I call it a Milk Tree because it yields a reddish-brown sap, the way the previous trees [described in The Ambonese Herbal] have a

Figure 1.1. A branch of the upas tree (Antiaris toxicaria), the source of the blowpipe poison. Rumphius, Ambonese Herbal, vol. 2, plate LXXXVII.

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white milk; and this sap is the pride of the Indians throughout the Water-­ Indies, and with it they dare provoke Dutch arms. The Soldiers were erstwhile more afraid of this than they were of Canon or Musket, but since its nature and antidotes are better known now, it is no longer quite feared nor esteemed as much.”25 Dutch fear of the poison prompted many inquiries into its nature, leading to many fantastic accounts, including by Rumphius himself: “Everything perishes that is touched by its wind, and all animals avoid passing by, or the birds to fly over it. . . . And so it seems that death has pitched his tents near this tree.”26 Because of his scholarly reputation and the evocative imagery he provides, Rumphius’s description of the tree was influential, circulating in derivative accounts for centuries to come, notwithstanding the fact that Beekman calls it his biggest scholarly mistake. Before the upas tree entered into the colonial discourse, it was subject to indigenous beliefs and practices. As part of his account of the poison tree, Rumphius wrote of its use by native rulers on convicts: “The strongest kind of this poison will inevitably result in death within half an hour, sometimes even within a quarter of an hour. . . . No remedies had been discovered as yet, though the Kings of Macassar often experimented on criminals. Since they wanted to discover more about the villainy of this venom, they ordered some criminals to be stabbed with a dart in a toe or thumb, whereafter the wounded part was immediately chopped off, and [the man] properly bandaged, in order to see if a person would survive.” This account, further dramatized by François Valentijn, who plagiarized a great deal of Rumphius’s material, fascinated the European audience. These accounts may have had some basis in “judicial” uses of the poison. Carey writes: “Within Makassarese society itself, blowpipes and poisons played an important role. In the sixteenth century, royally sponsored blowpipe makers were established during the reign of Tunipalangga (1548–66). . . . It [the blowpipe poison] was also employed in judicial executions, with an acute awareness that its disturbing power exercised considerable social control.” Visitors to the region reported such executions from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Carey continues: “It appears that the Makassar kings deliberately staged judicial events of this kind in order to emphasize their power, often for the benefit of foreign visitors. By doing so they dramatically alerted their audience to the kind of military and judicial potency of the commodity they possessed.” Embellished accounts of the poison tree would thus have served native interests well.27

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Figure 1.2. Magic bracelets (mamacur). Rumphius, Curiosity Cabinet, plate LII.

Poisons and other natural as well as manufactured products of use in political contests were always objects of great interest within the native societies of the archipelago. As Yoo writes, regarding the magical mamacur bracelets that conferred invincibility and foreknowledge in warfare (figure 1.2): “Indeed, it was not just naturalists in Europe who were interested in buying what were considered rarities of nature; an active indigenous trade in these objects existed within the archipelago, one that was sharply defined by class differences. ‘The common man may not possess them, at least not openly,’ a man from the neighbouring island of Ceram (present-day Seram) told Rumphius, but he ‘must be a great Radja’ or, at least, a man of property and wealth.” One of the reasons “the common man” does not want to openly possess objects with potency in warfare is because they become objects of conflict, with entire villages fighting over them. Sometimes the colonial and native trades in precious goods intersected. In The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, Rumphius relates the story of the magic rings, said to confer protection against venomous pests and opponents in war, conferred upon the faithful by the Panembahan of Giri on the east coast of Java. Yoo writes of Rumphius, “He learned that the Panembahan had created these rings out of ‘rusted nails’ from his own ‘temple.’ These nails were made of iron said to be called bessi keling (literally ‘Keling iron’) originating from the Coromandel Coast. Such information must have sounded familiar to Rumphius. During the 1660s and 1670s, there was a dramatic increase in VOC imports of iron from the

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Coromandel Coast, as the company found their existing supply insufficient for manufacturing weapons.” Rumphius did not ignore the local trade in the objects for which he traded himself; indeed, he made this into part of the story he told about them: “By the same token, as a mediator between the commercial and discursive economies in which these objects ‘travelled,’ Rumphius made their local significance essential for their interpretive value as a curiosity. Through these conversions, these regal and supernatural objects acquired added layers of meaning.”28 As part of his account of the poison tree, Rumphius writes: “The only thing that lives beneath it is a horned snake that cackles like a hen or, as others are wont to say, crows like a cock, and by night has fiery eyes. . . . Other Inhabitants of Celebes have told me that the form of this snake, that lives under the Poison Tree, is that of a Basilicus, being a small animal with two short legs in front, which allows it to go with its head raised up, with a comb or horn on the same, poisoning People and Birds with its breath, wherefore it is killed from afar with arrows.” Carey sees a strategic interest in such stories: “Stories of this basilisk seem to have come from local sources, but whatever their provenance, they would seem to have given pause to anyone contemplating a mission to secure their own sample. These and other accounts ensured that control of the substance was likely to remain in native hands.” To this day, Dayak tribesmen in Borneo wield tales of blowpipe poisons as rhetorical weapons to keep threatening but credulous coastal peoples at a safe distance.29 The colonial European stance toward such beliefs was a mixture of fascination and disdain. The French botanist and ornithologist Jean Baptiste Louis Théodore Leschenault de la Tour, who published a paper on the poison tree in 1810 based on his own fieldwork in Java, stated: “The famous poison which the Indians of the archipelago of the Moluccas and the Sunda Isles make use of, known by the name of ipo and upas, has excited the curiosity of Europeans beyond every other, because the accounts given of it have been exaggerated, and accompanied by the marvellous with which the people of India like to adourn their narratives.”30 Characteristic of many scholars of his time, Leschenault de la Tour ignored not only the role that the “marvellous” played in native society but also, and more importantly, the appetite of his fellow Europeans for the marvelous. The most widely read and cited account of the poison tree in Europe was published in London in 1783 in a penny dreadful periodical, The Lon-

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don Magazine. The magazine represented it as the translation from a Dutch account published a few years previously, written by a former surgeon in the service of the Dutch East India Company by the name of N. P. Foersch.31 Foersch’s account of a poison tree on the island of Java runs, in part, as follows: I had procured a recommendation from an old Malayan priest to another priest, who lives on the nearest habitable spot to the tree, which is about fifteen or sixteen miles distant. The latter proved of great service to me on my undertaking, as that priest is employed by the Emperor to reside there, in order to prepare for eternity the souls of those who, for different crimes, are sentenced to approach the tree, and to procure the poison. Malefactors, who, for their crimes, are sentenced to die, are the only persons to fetch the poison; and this is the only chance they have of saving their lives. . . . The worthy old ecclesiastic has assured me, that during his residence there, for upwards of thirty years, he has dismissed above seven hundred criminals in the manner which I have described; and that scarcely two out of twenty returned.

Foersch’s elaboration of the convict element in the poison tree story—a favored element in European accounts—is strong evidence that he had read the accounts by Rumphius or Valentijn or derivations thereof. Beekman’s comment “a veritable tanglewood of lore and legend has grown up around this toxic tree, most of it preposterous but marvelous as fiction” is amply attested to by its remarkable percolation through English arts and letters. The poison tree is mentioned in Erasmus Darwin’s (1789) poem “Loves of the Plants,” William Blake’s (1794) poem “The Poison Tree,” Byron’s “Childe Harold” (1812–18)—“This boundless upas, this all-­blasting tree”—Pushkin’s (1828) “The Upas Tree,” and Ruskin’s (1839) “Scythian Banquet Song,” among other notable places. The poison tree was welcomed into English language and literature, as Yule and Burnell write, as a “customary metaphor to indicate some institution that the speaker wishes to condemn in a compendious manner.” In nineteenth-­ century America, for example, it became a prominent image for alcoholism (figure 1.3) and the institution of slavery.32 Not only did tales of the poison tree impact the arts and letters, they also had an impact on government: remarkably, Foersch’s fantastic version

Figure 1.3. The poison tree as a metaphor for alcohol, etching by George Cruik­shank, c. 1842. Wellcome Collection.

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prompted a number of official bodies to investigate its veracity. Bastin writes, “Sometime after its publication the Directing Members of the Bata­ vian Society of Arts and Sciences (Bataviaasch Genootschap van Künsten en Wetenschappen) in Jakarta instigated enquiries through two of its members, Jan Matthijs van Rhijn, Chief Resident at Jogjakarta, and Willem Ardiaan Palm, Chief Resident at Surakarta, whose principal findings were published in 1789.” Then in 1793, the first British diplomatic mission to China, led by George Macartney, made further inquiries about the upas tree when they stopped in Java en route.33

Reading Early in the following century, in 1810, William Marsden, who worked for the East India Company in Sumatra, wrote the following assessment of Foersch’s account for Sir Thomas Raffles, lieutenant governor of the East Indies during the 1811–15 British interregnum in Dutch rule: “It did certainly make a great sensation amongst the generality of readers, who are disposed to be credulous and to prefer what is wonderful to what is true, and especially as it answer’d Dr Darwin’s purpose to adopt and personify it (as a Malignant Spirit) in his Loves of the Plants; but it must not be understood to have imposed upon such persons as had any claim to the character of Philosopher.”34 The official take on Foersch’s account, and even the less exaggerated accounts from an observer in the region like Rumphius, were marked by the absence of any recognition of the existence of a discourse or how to interpret one—leaving only two alternatives, either credulity or philosophy. Beekman himself offers a third alternative, a physical handicap: he attributes Rumphius’s fantastical account to blindness, from glaucoma, which befell Rumphius in 1670, just 16 years into his nearly half-century stay in Ambon: “Some of Rumphius’ details are, for once, in error, due to the fact that he never got to see the tree itself but had to rely on samples and reports. . . . I am quite sure, however, that if Rumphius could have seen the tree for himself—and one should note that the dates in the text argue that he wrote this after he had gone blind—he would have dismissed the fabulous details on grounds of simple observation.” It is noteworthy that of the approximately 1,200 entries in The Ambonese Herbal, the poison tree is the only one that Beekman claims to have been affected by

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Rumphius’s blindness. Further, although Rumphius lost his powers of sight, he did not lose his sense of touch, and yet he writes, “The branches that were sent to me from Macassar in a large Bamboo that was tightly shut, were still so powerful that if one stuck one’s hand in there one felt a tingling as one feels in frozen limbs after returning to a warm place” (figure 1.4).35 Beekman’s thesis that Rumphius’s account of the poison tree was due to his blindness also is undercut by the fact that Rumphius’s sighted contemporaries in the East Indies were making similar observations, including the governor general of the Indies, Admiral H. Cornelis Speelman. He wrote in his journal, “From the princes (or Rajas) I have understood that the soil in which the trees affording the poison grow, for a great space around about produces no grass nor any other vegetable growth.” And as Beekman himself notes, “One should not forget that the tree’s reputation had been established long before Rumphius.” Prior and similar accounts came from Friar Odoric of Pordenone in the fourteenth century, Sir John Mandeville in the fourteenth century, and the Dutchman Jacobus Bontius and Englishman Sir Thomas Herbert in the early seventeenth century.36 Heightened interest in the poison tree during the colonial era, especially in the wake of Foersch’s publication, did lead to some empirical studies of it. For example, the aforementioned government missions produced these linguistic data: “Barrow arrived at the somewhat negative conclusion that Upas was ‘the appellative’ for every poison tree in the island and that the word was applied equally to the poison plants as well. ‘In this sense,’ he wrote, ‘the Bohun or Boon Upas of Foersch would imply neither more nor less than a poisonous tree, and not any particular species of tree, much less an unconnected individual sui generis, bearing the name of Upas.’” These missions also confirmed the use of these poisons with weapons: “Sir George Staunton (1737–1801), Secretary to the embassy, found that at Batavia Foersch’s account was compared with the fictions of Baron Munchausen, but that the common opinion there was that there existed in the island a vegetable poison which on a Javanese kris rendered wounds incurable. . . . More positive results were achieved by the French naturalist, Louis Auguste Deschamps (1765–1842). . . . During his extensive travels Deschamps came upon the Upas tree growing in the forests of Balambangan in eastern Java where he was able to confirm the deadly ef-

Figure 1.4. Rumphius, after becoming blind, feeling specimens of natural history. Rumphius, Curiosity Cabinet, frontispiece.

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fects that the resin had when used as a poison on weapons.” Some of these official studies tempered the more imaginative details associated with the poison tree: “Marsden cites from a report by Dr. Charles Campbell of the East India Company’s Fort Marlborough medical establishment in west Sumatra: As to the tree itself, it does no manner of injury to those around it. I have sat under its shade, and seen birds alight upon its branches; and as to the story of grass not growing beneath it, every one who has been in a forest must know that grass is not found in such situations. . . . He [Deschamps] rejected, however, the fiction that the tree poisoned the atmosphere as alleged by Foersch, attributing the story to the fact that there was a high death rate among those persons exiled to the marshy and unhealthy regions of eastern Java.”37 These analyses focus on the poison tree and not on its imaginative or discursive dimension, other than critiquing the empirical content of the accounts. Thus, Bastin writes, “The publication of the book, The Poison Tree by E. M. Beekman . . . provides a suitable occasion to re-open, and hopefully close, the vexed subject of the authorship of the sensational account of the Upas or poison tree of Indonesia published in The London Magazine of December 1783.” And Beekman himself writes of that account, “The narration is such a tall tale that one is surprised by its subsequent notoriety.” But Bastin does not ask why the subject was so long “vexed,” and Beekman does not ask why the notoriety is a “surprise.” These analyses are overly literal and non-sociological in their approach: they focus on whether the poison tree stories are true or not; they do not ask what is the source of their appeal and why they so resonate with audiences.38 To answer these latter questions, the poison tree stories may be studied in the same way that Lévi-Strauss studied the myth traditions of the Bororo and other groups in the Amazon, by carrying out a structural analysis of many different variants of the myths to discern common underlying principles. To that end, Rumphius himself offers something of a pathway. Centuries before the development of anthropological theory on this topic, Rumphius suggested that there was some sort of intratextual truth in these folk stories. In the introduction of the Herbal to his readers, Rumphius cites classical precedent: “There is something else that might occasion Cavilations [petty objections], to wit that this work is filled with fables, superstitions, and old wives’ tales. I account for this by saying that I wanted

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to enter them here, not because I believe them entirely, or wanted to force the Reader to believe them, but because there is always a modicum of truth and latent characteristics of nature among those tales, as is true of the fables of Ovid and other Poets.” For example, regarding “idolatries” about human descent from bamboo, Rumphius writes: “I protest once more, that such stories are incorporated in my writings not because I put much faith in them, or that I amuse myself by covering paper with pointless stories, but because there is always a hidden purpose in nature.”39 It can be no coincidence that the most imaginative passages in all of Rumphius’s work concern the poison tree, and that this plant alone of all of the subjects of the Herbal played a prominent and controversial role in the seventeenth-century spice wars. Carey properly grounds European obsession with the poison in the simple but overlooked fact that the poison from this tree was used as a weapon in a battle over control of what was then the richest trade good in the world. As he writes, “The attention given to Makassar poison in the seventeenth century testifies to its destructive effects and the sometimes extravagant rumours surrounding its operation. . . . But these accounts proliferated for another reason, namely the importance of the Makassar sultanate in the period and its role in international trade.” This necessarily affects, as he goes on to argue, how we view Rumphius’s research into the poison tree: “What made this inquiry more than purely academic, of course, was the use the Makassarese made of the poison in military conflict. Rumphius’ chapter was framed by this concern.”40 There is another reason that these extravagant passages from Rumphius focus on a tree. At a material level, the power and wealth of the Dutch East India Company—and subsequently the Dutch colony—were based on understanding and controlling the plant production of the Indies, so a misunderstood and uncontrolled plant like the upas tree was disturbing. Moreover, in Rumphius’s account, the upas tree is not merely uncontrolled, it is positively hostile. It is significant that the poison tree provides one of the most powerful images from the era of the spice wars. As part of the Dutch effort to establish an unquestioned monopoly on the trade of cloves and other spices in eastern Indonesia, they systematically felled all clove trees everywhere except those on the four islands whose trade they directly controlled. This policy led to Rumphius’s famous remark that the Dutch seemed to “wage war on trees rather than men.” In

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Rumphius’s account of the upas tree, he presents the mirror image of this: a tree that wages war on men. As part of the Dutch campaign to eliminate the clove trees in regions they did not control, they burned some islands to the waterline. This presents another parallel in Rumphius’s account of the poison tree. He depicts the ground under the upas tree as a burnt waste: “The soil remains barren, russet, as if scorched.”41 The poison tree was situated, therefore, at ground zero in a protracted battle between the Dutch carrying out a scorched-earth policy of monopoly enforcement, and the native resistance using poisoned weapons. These are precisely the connotations that accompanied the imagery of the poison tree as it traveled from the East Indies to Europe and beyond. An example is William Blake’s 1794 poem “The Poison Tree”: I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow. And I waterd it in fears, Night & morning with my tears: And I sunned it with smiles, And with soft deceitful wiles. And it grew both day and night. Till it bore an apple bright. And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine. And into my garden stole, When the night had veild the pole; In the morning glad I see; My foe outstretched beneath the tree.42

Blake’s poem and the many other similar examples in western literature represent a structurally insightful rereading of the poison tree stories; they relate to those stories in the same way that each one of the Bororo myths studied by Lévi-Strauss relates to another. They are “correct” in a sense in which the official critiques of the poison tree beliefs are not—although those critiques also make sense within the larger discursive structure.

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Conclusions The poison tree, and Rumphius’s account of it, seem exotic to a modern reader, beyond reach. This is a quintessential example of Foucault’s challenge of reading back, of reading older natural history. Beekman suggests that what sets Rumphius’s work apart from our modern sensibilities is aesthetics, that the Herbal and the Cabinet depict an Indies that is “alive and sensual.” Beekman argues that the sentiment and emotion in Rumphius’s work does not, however, detract from its scholarly quality: “Claude LéviStrauss called this a ‘connaissance concrète’ (concrete knowledge), which demonstrates that ‘theoretical knowledge is not incompatible with sentiment and that knowledge can be both objective and subjective at the same time . . . .” Beekman links the emotion in Rumphius’s writings to “a spirit of sympathy” with the natural world, an urge to affiliate with nature that E. O. Wilson termed “biophilia,” and adds, “His work is a perfect example of Wilson’s contention that poetry and science are linked.” Indeed, Beekman unabashedly calls Rumphius a poet and characterizes his writings as a “third voice”: “Rumphius’ writings are neither science in the modern sense nor religion. Perhaps one might characterize them as a third voice, a mode that can partake of both but that, as science, is ready to impart information yet is more interested in understanding, while as religion, it aspires to a sense of rapture but does want to impose orthodoxy or ideology. This voice, as Schopenhauer knew, is the voice of the poet. As mentioned before, he will never be dismissed as a naturalist, yet if it were to happen, Rumphius would still survive as a great ethnographer. But he can forever be read as a poet.” Beekman’s analysis is supported by the fact that poets have been drawn to, and made such insightful use of, his poison tree imagery.43 Rumphius is also set apart from modern readers simply by time. As Beekman writes, one advantage that Rumphius had that no modern scholar of natural history can ever have is that he was not modern himself: “Since he was premodern, his antique set of values made him far more sympathetic to Indonesian culture and magic than a more ‘modern’ intellect would have been. Perhaps aided by the relative isolation and lack of intellectual intercourse with Europe, Rumphius had a greater incentive to become intimate with what was in so many ways an alien world.” Ellen writes, “While Rumphius could be critical of some of the claims of his informants,

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his brilliant work reflected a set of essentially seventeenth-century European world-framing assumptions that, in terms of perception of the natural world, overlapped with the cosmologies of the cultural others with whom he lived (and even married), and from whom he obtained his specimens and contextual data.” Beekman suggests that Rumphius may have been sympathetic toward native magical beliefs because he was a follower of Paracelsus (1493–1541), who argued that magic and science are parallel forces. Rumphius himself notes that Europeans are not as far removed as they might like to think from the people of the East Indies in terms of some beliefs: “We Europeans should not mock the Natives, because we too have been infected at times by the same disease: For how else did the Bezoar come to be esteemed so highly in the past and is now so much despised.”44 This is not just about belief or disbelief in bezoars, however; it is about something more fundamental, it is about an openness to other world­views, which was historically a characteristic of natural history. In “Chapter 9 Ceraunia Metallica Thunder Shovel” of the Third Book of The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, Rumphius writes: “But the big problem lies in the question how this kind of thunder stones, which I call Thunder Shovels because of their shape, acquired the amazing shape of our domestic Instruments; but I confess that I would rather be astounded by the unfathomable powers of nature, than to lapse into some kind of error because of too punctilious a scrutiny.”45 This statement exemplifies Rumphius’s philosophic stance as a natural historian, one that emphasized being curious about the world, being ready to see the marvels in the world. “I would rather be astounded” literally means he wanted to be open to engaging with other, different ontologies. And in this sense, Rumphius was not pre-­ Linnaean; in this sense, there is a continuity with Linnaeus.

Interlude

Imagination

R

umphius’s account of the poison tree of the Indies, and sub­ sequent iterations of the account by others, is a story about plants, the imagination, and the East-West politics of the spice trade. Spices and the poison tree are two sides of the same coin: both traveled from East to West during the colonial era. The two sides of the coin are linked, since it was desire for and contest over spices that was ultimately responsible for the fear of the poison tree and the attendant desire to understand it—thus linking desire, fear, conflict, and the imagination. Rumphius’s work problematizes the role of the imagination in the colonial era. A premise to colonial ideology in the East Indies, as elsewhere, was a dichotomy between the assumed rationality of the rulers and the irrationality of the ruled. Native populations were thought to have a monopoly on imaginative thinking, an appetite for the “marvelous,” as reflected in deprecatory comments by European scholars and officials (e.g., Leschenault de la Tour) regarding native accounts of the poison tree. This colonial premise is completely belied, however, by the long history of European preoccupation with the poison tree. This history is about imagination in the West, which is exemplified by the extreme account of the poison tree from Foersch and its enthusiastic embrace by western audiences. Nor is this an isolated case. The historic spice trade that provided the political-economic con-

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text for the poison tree story is a case in point. Homegrown spices had always been available in Europe, but precisely because they were proximate, known, and familiar, they were less valuable and desirable. Spices from the Orient, in contrast, exemplified the unknown. As they traveled from their mundane agrarian origins in the Orient to Europe, they became mystified, and this added value. As Freedman writes of the spice trade, “The producers and most of the middlemen had no idea of the end user, while the European consumers thought that these treasures came from a magical far-off realm, perhaps the lands of the monstrous races,” which represented a “conjunction of the alluring with the frightening.” He continues, “There is a long-standing association of precious substances with dangerous creatures,” which resurfaces in the story of the poison tree with its exuding menace.1 The distances and discontinuities in knowledge associated with these ancient commodity chains did not pose obstacles to them; on the contrary, they actually drove the trade because they allowed for the development of myths regarding the rarity of these goods and the perils involved in their collection or production, which heightened their perceived value. It was a similar discontinuity in knowledge regarding the poison tree that enabled the stories about this tree to travel so effortlessly through the western world. With both spices and stories, their value was ultimately rooted in the imagination; it was the imagination that drove the trade from the Indies. Rumphius—and Beekman—knew this: as noted in the reference in chapter 1 to magic rings, “Rumphius made their local significance essential for their interpretive value as a curiosity” for his European audience.2 Imagination also played a role at the other end of this East-West relationship, but it was an imagination having to do with threat, not desire. The spice black pepper (Piper nigrum) was the dominant product of international trade from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, and it played a pivotal role in the rise of the European colonial project.3 One of

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the most important native pepper producers involved in the colonial trade was the kingdom of Banjarmasin in southeastern Borneo. Pepper attracted the attention of both the Dutch and English early in the seventeenth century, leading to a number of political and military interventions by the Dutch to evict the English and other traders and enforce a monopoly on the Banjarese, much as they did in the eastern end of the archipelago where cloves and nutmeg were grown. These interventions so troubled the founder and ruler of the Banjar Kingdom, King Ampu Jatmaka, that he issued an injunction against any further involvement in pepper production and trade on his deathbed: And let not our country plant pepper as an export-crop, for the sake of making money, like Palembang and Jambi [two kingdoms in Sumatra]. Whenever a country cultivates pepper all food-stuffs will become expensive and anything planted will not grow well, because the vapours of pepper are hot. That will cause malice all over the country and even the government will fall into disorder. The rural people will become pretentious towards the townsfolk if pepper is grown for commercial purposes, for the sake of money. If people grow pepper it should be about four or five clumps per head, just enough for private consumption. Even four or five clumps per head will cause much vapour, owing to the great number of people involved, let alone if it is grown extensively as a crop; the country inevitably would be destroyed.4

This native document of fear regarding pepper is analogous to the European documents regarding fear of the poison tree. In the case of the Banjar Kingdom, the imagination was a conceptual tool that the ruler could employ to political ends, just as the application of the imagination to the Orient was a tool for the conduct of colonial rule by the Occident. The two examples, pepper and the poison tree, demonstrate what an important role the imagination played in the history of East-West relations. Even in the realm of the imagination, however, the playing field was not level. Whereas the West exaggerated desire and threat through

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imaginative means, the East used the imagination to give substance to actual threats. Whereas the poison tree did not actually kill that many Europeans—certainly not when compared to the toll taken by tropical diseases—involvement with pepper actually led to the downfall of native kingdoms.5 The political dimension of imaginative thought is reflected in the starkly different histories in this regard of the poison tree versus tropical disease: there were no sensational articles, poems, or theatrical productions in Europe regarding the diseases of the Indies. Imagining disease would not forward the colonial project; imagining the violent “otherness” of the natives did. In relating the native folklore regarding the poison tree in the same register in which he related information from natives regarding coconuts or mangoes, Rumphius was in effect saying that his readers in Europe needed to take folklore seriously. As he wrote regarding his inclusion of these materials: “There is always a modicum of truth and latent characteristics of nature among those tales, as is true of the fables of Ovid and other Poets.”6 Through these remarks, Rumphius was putting the poison tree on the same ontological level as the literature of classical Greece and Rome, which would have resonated with European audiences, and on the same ontological level as the most banal botanical information about plants, which would also have resonated with botanists and other interested parties in Europe. He was effectively telling his readers, if you want to appreciate the knowledge that the people of the East Indies have about plants, you must also appreciate their beliefs about plants. He was telling them that they needed to be willing to make an ontological leap, to be willing—as he was—to be “astounded.” It was an effort by Rumphius to level the playing field of the colonial politics of knowledge.

Two

The Eighteenth Century, Linnaeus “The Laps Are Our Teachers”

T h e a n t h r o p o l o g i s t J o h n H a r t i g a n writes: “With Linnaeus’s focus on sex, the plant lore that constituted most species description through the Middle Ages falls to the wayside. Contrary to the herbals and medical treatises, in which plants were subjects of written accounts but rendered in terms of their uses and folklore, the Linnaean system starts from the plant itself and arguably its principal interests in sexual reproduction and evolutionary fitness.” In the oration Linnaeus gave on his admittance to the faculty at the University of Uppsala in 1741, he addressed the global trade in spices and other goods, discussed in chapter 1, saying: “What are those famous exotic remedies brought from either Indies, and purchased at so great a price. . . . What are all these, I say, but remedies approved by long use amongst the vulgar, and are not innumerable remedies used among our own country people of the same nature? Were not all those I enumerated found out by barbarians, and when experience had shown, that they were useful, and efficacious in many diseases, were they not thought worthy to be communicated to the rest of mankind? Let our young physician then learn, not to condemn, but accurately to remark those remedies, which are cried up amongst the common people.”1 69

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Hartigan’s comment on Linnaeus is not atypical for the modern scholar, who sees folklore as having fallen victim to Linnaean classification. The lines from Linnaeus’s oration are also not atypical for the eighteenth century in their use of terms like “vulgar” and “barbarian,” but they are atypical in the about-face in which the peoples so named are then praised for their knowledge. The lines from Linnaeus, delivered in a public and prestigious venue, explicitly extol the value of folklore, or hearsay. This stance is not part of his public persona today, it is not accessible to contemporary audiences; it is “blurred,” another example of the difficulty that modern scholars have in reading older natural history. This blurring has contributed to Linnaeus’s polarizing reputation, exemplified by the writer John Fowles’s acerbic comment: “I am a heretic about Linnaeus, and find nothing less strange, or more poetically just, than that he should have gone mad at the end of his life. I do not dispute the value of the tool he gave to natural science . . . but I have doubts about the lasting change it has effected in ordinary human consciousness.”2

Introduction Carl Linnaeus (1707–78), born in Småland in southern Sweden, is gen­ erally considered to be one of the two most influential naturalists of the eighteenth century, along with the Comte de Buffon. Linnaeus himself adds the modifier “historian” to this label: the title of his report to his donors on his first major expedition, in 1732 to Sápmi (Lapland), reads “A Brief Narrative of a Journey to Lapland, Undertaken with a View to Natural History . . . by Charles Linnæus, Student of Physic and of Natural History.” Further testifying to his stature as a natural historian, he has been likened to Pliny, as was Rumphius before him: Broberg calls him “the Pliny of the North.”3 Linnaeus is most well known for establishing the modern sexual system of biological classification and binomial nomenclature for flora and fauna, and for taking an important step toward formalizing the modern discipline of ecology based on his concept of oeconomia naturae or the “economy of nature.” First proposed in 1749, this latter concept was subsequently embraced by scholars as disparate as Gilbert White, Charles Darwin, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and Henry David Thoreau, the last of whom was said to regularly copy out long extracts from it. There is

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a direct lineage from Linnaeus’s phrase “economy of nature” to the modern term “ecology,” which Ernst Haeckel introduced as its replacement in the 1860s.4 These two subjects constitute just a small portion of the corpus of Linnaeus’s work, but they demand almost all of the scholarly attention devoted to him—“the reduction of ‘Linnaeus’ in most histories to his sexual system of classification and binomial nomenclature.” Largely unexamined are his extensive ethnographic field studies and appreciation of traditional rural livelihoods, including reindeer herding and “burn-beating” or swidden agriculture. His observations of local peoples and livelihoods shed new light on the development of his concept of the economy of nature; and the insight shown by his “thick descriptions” of traditional lifeways, with subjects that were often politically sensitive, depict a scholar quite different from the popular image.5 As noted in chapter 1, Linnaeus’s development of the binomial system of biological classification, and its publication in Species Plantarum in 1753, instantly dated the nomenclature in Rumphius’s The Ambonese Herbal published just a few years earlier (1741–50). The extent to which Linnaeus respected and utilized the work of his illustrious predecessor is a contentious one. E. M. Beekman, Rumphius’s editor, whose dislike for Linnaeus is manifest in his introduction to the Herbal, quotes the German botanist O. Warburg saying in 1902 that Linnaeus intentionally ignored Rumphius’s work. Beekman writes: “One strange fact is Linnaeus’ scant mention of Rumphius’ Kruidboek [Herbal] in his Species Plantarum of 1753. There are only twenty references.” But Beekman insists that Linnaeus must have been acquainted with both The Ambonese Herbal and The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet. Regarding the latter, Beekman writes: “Eight of Rumphius’ names were retained by Linnaeus, who, altogether, based the names of twenty-three crustaceans on Rumphius’ work,” and “Linnaeus transferred thirty-two unaltered names of mollusks from Rumphius’ Rariteitkamer [Curiosity Cabinet] to the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae (1758).” Beekman notes that in the second edition of Species Plantarum Linnaeus refers to Rumphius as a “fundadores” or founder, but in Philosophia Botanica he calls him just a “traveler” who has gone to remote regions to investigate exotic plants.6 The great Pacific botanist E. D. Merrill is more forgiving than Beekman, writing: “Citations of Rumphian synonyms are found in the first pub-

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lished work on the binomial system [Linnaeus 1753], but these are few and of slight importance, as Linnaeus did not secure a copy of The Herbarium Amboinense until his manuscript was completed.” He continues: “Linnaeus realized the great importance of Rumphius’s work and at once assigned to one of his students, Olaf Stickman, a study of The Herbarium Amboinense. In the following year, 1754, Stickman’s dissertation on The Herbarium Amboinense was printed, this being probably the first work published utilizing the binomial system of nomenclature after the system was proposed.” This led, according to Merrill, to a speedy and systematic effort to incorporate Rumphius’s work into the emerging Linnaean corpus: “The first attempt to interpret the species described and figured in the Herbarium Amboinense as a whole in terms of the binomial system of nomenclature was made one year after the system was proposed. This was nominally the work of Olaf Stickman, one of Linnaeus’s pupils, but it is manifest that the actual work was largely that of Linnaeus himself.” This effort led, Merrill says, to including about 275 references to Rumphius’s Herbal in the 1753 second edition of Species Plantarum and additional references in Linnaeus’s later works.7

Travel Linnaeus’s career to a great extent revolved around a series of expeditions he made to different parts of Sweden: Sápmi (1732) in northern Sweden, Dalarna/Dalecarlia (1734) in the center of the country, the two Baltic islands of Öland and Gotland (1741) off the eastern coast, Västergötland (1746) in the southwest, and Skåne (1749) in the south. These expeditions were central to his development of what came to be recognized as the Linnaean model of “professional travel,” which collapsed the dichotomy of amateur field collectors and professional armchair botanists. Regarding Linnaeus’s account of the expedition to Sápmi, Anderson writes: “Lachesis Lapponica . . . is a truly remarkable document, in some ways comparable to Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle.”8 Note that “Lapp” and “Lapland,” which were names given by Linnaeus and other outsiders to this people and their homeland, respectively, today have pejorative connotations and so they are replaced here, except in direct quotations, with the names used by the people themselves, Sámi and Sápmi. Whereas the later tradition of scientific travel writing sought to re-

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move the scholar from the account, that was not the case when Linnaeus was writing. Linnaeus places himself in his accounts at the very start by providing an unusual level of detail regarding his personal accoutrements. On the first page of his account of his expedition to Sápmi, Linnaeus provides this itemization of his equipment: I prepared my wearing apparel and other necessaries for the journey as follows: My clothes consisted of a light coat of Westgothland linsey-woolsey cloth without folds, lined with red shalloon, having small cuffs and collar of shag; leather breeches; a round wig; a green leather cap, and a pair of half boots. I carried a small leather bag, half an ell in length, but somewhat less in breadth, furnished on one side with hooks and eyes, so that it could be opened and shut at pleasure. This bag contained one shirt; two pair of false sleeves; two half shirts; an inkstand, pencase, microscope, and spying glass; a gauze cap to protect me occasionally from the gnats; a comb; my journal, and a parcel of paper stitched together for drying plants, both in folio: my manuscript Ornithology, Flora Uplandica, and Characteres genericii. I wore a hanger at my side, and carried a small fowling-piece, as well as an octangular stick, graduated for the purpose of measuring. My pocket-book contained a passport from the Governor of Upsal, and a recommendation from the Academy.9

Linnaeus also embellished the travails of his journeys, in keeping with the popular appeal of accounts of such travels. For example, he writes at various times during his Sápmi expedition: Had our sufferings been inflicted as a capital punishment, they would, even in that case, have been cruel, what then had we to complain of ? I wished I had never undertaken my journey, for all the elements seemed adverse. It rained and blowed hard upon us. I wondered that I escaped with my life, though certainly not without excessive fatigue and loss of strength. . . . The whole landed property of the Laplander who owns this tract consists chiefly of marshes, here called stygx. A divine could never describe a place of future punishment more horrible than this country, nor could the styx of the poets exceed it. I may therefore boast of having visited the Stygian territories. . . . By this time I became almost starved, having

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had nothing fit to eat or drink for four days past, neither boiled provision of any sort, nor any kind of spoon-meat. I had chiefly been supported by the dried flesh of the reindeer above mentioned, which my stomach could not well digest, nor indeed bear except in small quantities. The fish which was offered me I could not taste, even to preserve my life, as it swarmed with vermin. At length I happily reached the house of the curate, and obtained some fresh meat. . . . At length we arrived at Quickjock, after having been four weeks without tasting bread. Those who have not experienced the want of this essential support of life, can scarcely imagine how hard it is to be deprived of it so long, even with a superfluity of all other kinds of food.

He sums up by writing, “There is scarcely any considerable province of Sweden, which I have not crawled through and examined; not without great fatigue of body and mind.”10 In keeping with this tone, and also with the common practice of naturalizing colonial or neo-colonial administrative structures to such an extent that they become invisible, Linnaeus downplayed the assistance that he receives along the way. He provided little information on the actual logistics of his travels: he may say that he was hungry or cold, but he says little about how he came to be in a particular place at a particular time. As Eliasson writes of his 1732 expedition to Sápmi: “Linnaeus used the existing logistical infrastructure of northern Sweden, but from his travelogue it is difficult to find out exactly in what way he used it. He visited some local administrators and members of the clergy and he used local guides and carriers during his wanderings. His journey was undertaken within a then long-established colonial network, a network he could benefit from all the time. Linnaeus seldom gave any credit to his helpers along the way.” When reading the accounts of Linnaeus’s expeditions, it often seems that he is alone—he gives scant mention to the students he brought with him on his expedition to Dalarna in 1734 and to Öland and Gotland in 1741. But as Eliasson writes, “Solo travelers such as Linnaeus . . . were . . . not at all alone during their travels.” In his official report on his Sápmi expedition, Linnaeus is more forthcoming than usual on this score, first noting that “the famous wife of the curate Mr. Grote” gave him provisions for eight days, and then writing:

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After several days traveling, on the evening of July 6th I ascended Wallavari, the first mountain of the alps on this side, which is indeed of very considerable height. My companion was a Laplander, who served me both as servant and interpreter. In the latter capacity his assistance was highly requisite, few persons being to be met with on these alps who are acquainted with the Swedish language; nor was I willing to trust myself alone among these wild people, who were ignorant for what purpose I came. I had already suffered much in the Lapland part of Umoea for want of knowing the language. Nor was my companion wanted less to assist me in carrying what was necessary, for I had sufficient incumbrances of my own, without being the bearer of our provisions into the bargain.11

Linnaeus regarded such travels, for all their privations, as a necessity: “Ye who intend one of these days to cultivate your native soil with advantage, and profit, may be assured that you will find nothing in all the books of husbandry, that will be of such assistance to you in that art, as travelling thro’ the different provinces of this kingdom. . . . Yet I will venture to say one could scarcely travel a day in any of our countries without learning something of use in economy. Many things that will occur, may appear trifling at first sight, which yet upon a more mature consideration, you will own may be turned to very great advantage; such as the various ways of cloathing, preparing victuals, feeding cattle, not to mention the manners, commerce, and numberless other particulars.” He saw these expeditions within Sweden as preferable to the foreign expeditions of countries with overseas empires, although he did send many of his students or “apostles” on expeditions to foreign lands. Anticipating the later critique of traveling “away” versus “near” by Thoreau, Linnaeus states in his 1741 lecture on “The Necessity of Travelling in One’s Own Country”: “Good God! How many, ignorant of their own country, run eagerly into foreign regions, to search out and admire whatever curiosities are to be found; many of which are much inferior to those, which offer themselves to our eyes at home.” Sörlin argues that there was a nationalist dimension to this: Linnaeus was helping to develop a narrative that “Sweden was a country with a northern heritage and a northern scientific mission.”12 Linnaeus’s own fieldwork in Sweden’s northern regions makes his dichotomy between “foreign” and “home” somewhat problematic. As

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Sörlin writes, “The regions of the far north were subject to a kind of scientific exoticism that in certain respects is reminiscent of the scientific curiosity about distant continents.” This exoticism had a political dimension, given efforts by the Swedish government in the eighteenth century to keep Sámi and Swedish citizens apart. Indeed, Linnaeus’s own likening of Sápmi to other global peripheries occasionally surfaces in his prose: “When I reached this mountain [in Sápmi], I seemed entering it on a new world; and when I had ascended it, I scarcely knew whether I was in Asia or Africa, the soil, situation, and every one of the plants, being equally strange to me. Indeed I was now, for the first time, upon the Alps!”13 Some of Linnaeus’s critics depict his expeditions to the northern margins of the Swedish kingdom as not an intellectual but a cameralist project. Sörlin writes that “the mercantilist, or cameralist, tendency in Linnaeus was strong, and goes a long way to explain his and his contemporaries’ interest in northern science.”14 The state sponsors of Linnaeus’s expeditions, tasked with developing Sweden’s economy in the aftermath of debilitating wars and the collapse of its foreign empire, did indeed instruct him to investigate the potential for developing local economic resources and activities. And Linnaeus dutifully recorded mineral wealth and other natural resources likely to be of interest to a nation that was no longer an empire and had no overseas colonies to draw upon. But these records are few and far between, and Linnaeus’s heart is clearly not in them, compared to, for example, describing a Sami reindeer harness. There is far more in his expedition accounts of ethnographic than cameralist interest.

Ethnographic Studies The view of Linnaeus as a preeminent botanist, but nothing more, is belied by his expedition reports, which exhibit an ethnographic interest in human society and the value of local, or folk, or indigenous knowledge (hearsay), which was unusual for his era. Thus, when in Gotland he wrote: “The farmers’ botany is not to be despised, and the farmers at least here, have their own names for almost all plants. I brought a good-natured farmer with me to the meadows, and he knew far more plants than I would ever have expected, and his names for them had often very nice origins.” As Sörlin writes, “Linnaeus and his eighteenth-century traveling contemporaries, few as they were, practiced in essence an ethno-natural history,

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clearly depending on local informants of various kinds.” Eliasson notes that “Linnaeus asked the Sámi people about their knowledge of the local flora during his Lapland journey of 1732.” Ralph Waldo Emerson weighed in with his famous admonition, that if Linnaeus “makes botany the most alluring of studies, it is because he wins it from the farmer and the herbwoman.”15 Linnaeus’s studies of folk knowledge did not have anything like the longevity of his other work. Eliasson writes: “In the beginning of the nineteenth century the fellows of the [Swedish] Academy of Sciences argued that it was only scientifically experienced people who were to be believed in matters of natural history. The uneducated locals had nothing to contribute to the advancement of learning. . . . Linnaeus’ interest in indigenous natural history knowledge was a thing of the past, as most contemporary botanists did not discuss practical matters in their floras anymore; it was now a concern of horticulturalists.” Sörlin attributes this dramatic shift to the fact that “transportation and scientific infrastructure was improved and the network of collectors and official representatives tightened.” But this overlooks the shifts in scientific paradigms, discussed in the introductory chapter, that were taking place at the same time. Because this expansive vision of natural history fell out of favor, scholars of Linnaeus’s work have neglected his ethnographic studies, although modern observers increasingly value them for the insight that they yield into the conditions at the time.16 In his travels Linnaeus paid close attention to the everyday technology of rural, agrarian folk, showing an interest in the mundane topics that often pass beneath the radar of scholars. He provides detailed descriptions of the technology of tribal and peasant snowshoes, ploughs, sledges, and scythes. In his expedition to Sápmi, for example, he reports on how the Sámi make thread from the tendons of reindeer legs and how they make rope from the roots of the spruce fir. He is enchanted by the use of a fibrous moss for bedding, and he uses it himself: The bountiful provision of Nature is evinced in providing mankind with bed and bedding even in this savage wilderness. The great Hair-moss (Ploytrichum commune) called by the Laplanders Romsi, grows copiously in these damp forests, and is used for this purpose. They choose the starry-headed plants, out of the tufts of which they

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cut a surface as large as they please for a bed or bolster, separating it from the earth beneath. . . . This mossy cushion is very soft and elastic, not growing hard by pressure; and if a similar portion of it be made to serve as a coverlet, nothing can be more warm and comfortable. I have often made use of it with admiration; and if any writer had published a description of this simple contrivance, which necessity has taught the Laplanders, I should almost imagine that our counterpanes [quilts] were but an imitation of it.

Linnaeus illustrates his expedition reports with detailed sketches, often with numbered keys to the parts described therein, of many of the objects that drew his attention. For example, he presents a description and sketch of a grouse trap, a Finlander’s scythe, different types of plows, a small Sámi boat being carried upside down, and a complex Norwegian crossbow with bolt (figure 2.1).17 The Sámi are traditionally a pastoral, reindeer-herding people, which was recognized by Linnaeus: “The riches of the Laplanders consist in the number of their reindeer, and in the extent of the ground in which they feed.” Linnaeus accords the reindeer commensurate attention, covering all aspects of their husbandry: their “disorders and afflictions,” their reproduction, castration, birthing, slaughter, skinning, and so on. In one place Linnaeus gives the names for each age cohort into which reindeer are born: “The fawn, whether male or female, is called the first year mesk; the second season the male is called orryck, and the female whenial. In the third year the latter, if she has been covered, is known by the name of watja or waja, which means a wife; if otherwise, she goes by the name of whenial-rotha, the three-year old male being called wubbersa. In his fourth year the male is termed koddutis; in the following one kosittis, in the sixth year machanis, and in the seventh year namma lappotachis.” As Wikman writes, “Linnaeus had all the equipment of a good ethnographer.” His fine-grained ethnography suffers little by comparison, for example, to Evans-Pritchard’s ethnography of the Nuer, a cattle people in the Sudan, two centuries later, not excepting the appearance and names of the livestock. Linnaeus talks about the personal names that the reindeer are given as well: “I could not help wondering how the Laplanders knew such of the herd as they had already milked, from the rest, as they turned them loose as soon as they had done with it. I was answered that every one

Figure 2.1. Norwegian crossbow. Linnaeus, Lachesis Lapponica, vol. 2, 93. Key: a—steel bow, b—hemp cord, c—wood stock ornamented with bone, d—iron catch and pulley, h—foot strap. Linnaeus, Lachesis Lapponica, vol. 2, 93.

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of them had an appropriate name, which the owners knew perfectly. This seemed to me truly astonishing, as the form and colour are so much alike in all, and the latter varies in each individual every month. The size also varies according to the age of the animal. To be able to distinguish one from another among such multitudes, for they are like ants on an anthill, was beyond my comprehension.” Linnaeus suggests that a kind of identity exists between the Sámi and their reindeer, much like that described for the Nuer by Evans-Pritchard: “A Laplander never remains more than a week on one spot, not only because of seeking fresh pasture for his reindeer, but because he cannot bear to stay long in a place.”18 Linnaeus devotes considerable attention to the three staple foods in the northern regions—milk, bread, and fish. He gives page upon page of detailed descriptions of locally varying ways of producing drinks and foods from milk from both cows and reindeer, including a description of nineteen different “uses of milk” in one region alone. Linnaeus details several different types of bread made from grains like barley and rye, but his attention is especially drawn to breads made from what are to him less conventional sources, especially the bark of fir trees and even fish. Finally, he gives detailed descriptions of the many different ways of salting and storing herrings.19 Having both practiced and taught medicine at various points in his career, Linnaeus was interested in the illnesses and cures of the people in the regions he studied. Among the coastal peasants in East Bothnia, he writes, “The rustics here trust to three doctors, Beaver’s-gall, Bear’s-gall, and Pallavinus [brandy].” He devotes a number of pages to the various maladies of the Sámi as well as their remedies. He writes that a fine fungus from the south side of the birch tree is their “universal medicine”: “It may be called their little physician.” In Gotland Linnaeus writes, “When the farmers have warts on their hands, they take such a grasshopper and put the wart to its mouth; the grasshopper bites the wart and spits a black corrosive liquid into it which makes the wart disappear.”20 Linnaeus is particularly interested in how plant lore of midwives and herbalists was used to treat the maladies of the local people, proclaiming that the best medicines are based on the accumulated knowledge of the “common people” and the “barbarians” of the world, from whom our young physicians should learn. Linnaeus’s stance toward folk medicine is affected by some shared cultural background. Thus when confronted with

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a “woman supposed to labour under the misfortune of having a brood of frogs in her stomach,” he advises her to “try tar,” and when presented with a child with ill-sight, he attributes it to her mother having seen someone like that when pregnant.21 Linnaeus’s ethnographic bent also can be seen simply in the observations that he makes of everyday material culture. Thus, he describes the waterproof half-boot or Kängor of the Westbothland peasants and the caps and jackets of the Sámi. In the Sápmi alps he describes and sketches a reindeer-skin infant cradle. Elsewhere, after the fashion of any anthropological study, he gives the Sámi terms for religious holidays, the days of the week, and the times of day: Midnight kaskia Midnight to dawn pojela kaskia Dawn theleeteilyja Sun-rise peivi morotak 2–3 hours after sunrise areiteet Hour of milking reindeer arrapeivi Midday kaskapeivi Late afternoon eketis peivi Sunset peiveliti Night iä

Linnaeus also describes Sámi marriage customs and gender roles and identity: “The women here, as well as the men, smoke tobacco, and indeed do almost every thing but actually wear breeches.” The scope of his observations is reflected in his description of traditional Sámi amusements, including a ball game called spetto with its “rules,” and the dozen “laws” governing a board game called tablut that pits “Swedes” against “Muscovites,” complete with a sketch of the board and three of its pieces. The keen eye that Linnaeus cast on his surroundings as he traveled is reflected in his observation in Westbothland, “The women wash their houses with a kind of brush, made of twigs of spruce fir, which they tie to the right foot, and go backwards and forwards over the floor.”22 Linnaeus delves deeply into material culture but not, by comparison, into belief systems, perhaps owing to language obstacles. He does not speak Sámi, although this did not keep him from gathering extensive native terminology for flora, fauna, and everyday items.

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Much has been written about Linnaeus’s botanical field methods, but much less about the methods that he employed in making his observations of tribal and peasant societies in Sweden’s northern regions. Central to Linnaeus’s ethnographic field methodology was a painstaking scrutiny, an exquisite eye for detail—termed “thick description”’ in the introductory chapter—which he expresses in the best cases with detailed sketches and closely worded texts. He lavishes attention on the exotic; he takes his readers inside Sámi kodda or huts and their mountain tents (figure 2.2). Similarly, Linnaeus dissects the minutiae of the complex Sámi reindeer gear, which he refers to as “the whole caparison of a reindeer,” including the bridle, saddle cloth, harness, reins, and stick used to drive it (figure 2.3). But he also describes and obviously respects the purposeful and elegant design of seemingly mundane articles like Sámi belts, bags, and walking staffs. Linnaeus also paid extraordinary attention to culturally marked lifeways that typically escape notice, such as the directionality of rocking of infants in different places he visited: he differentiates rocking perpendicularly up-and-down, versus side-to-side, versus head-to-foot.23

Native Peoples Linnaeus’s close study of native knowledge and practices reflects the positive stance that he assumes toward these communities. He is sympathetic toward the rural communities he studies, especially the Sámi, the most distant ethnically, culturally, and politically. For example, Linnaeus writes: “The poor Laplanders find the church festivals, or days of public thanksgiving, in the spring of the year, very burthensome and oppressive, as they are in general obliged to pass the river at the hazard of their lives. . . . They must either undergo this hardship, or be fined ten silver dollars and do penance for three Sundays, which surely is too severe. . . . It is certainly unjust that these people [peasants from a nearby town], settled more than eight miles down the country on either side of Lychsele church, should drive the native Laplanders away, and be allowed to fish in these upper regions, which have no communication with the sea, and this without paying any tax to the crown or tithe to the curate of the parish, which the fishermen of the country are obliged to do.” He is also generous with his praise: his long hikes with Sámi guides lead him to ask the question, “Why are the Laplanders so swift-footed?” And he enumerates eight reasons over

Figure 2.2. View of floor and roof of Sámi mountain tent. Key: top: a—fireplace, b—reindeer skins, c—firewood, d—cheese-­ vessels, e—kettle, f—harness, g—barrel or cask, h—reindeer skins and hair, i—milk strainer; bottom: a—cheese racks, b—smoke outlet, c—curdled milk bags, d—milk strainer of  reindeer tail hair, e—cover for milk strainer. Linnaeus, Lachesis Lapponica, vol. 2, 15–16.

Figure 2.3. Sámi reindeer bridle. Key: a—leather embroidered with tin foil; b and c—fabric fringes; f, k, and l—ropes. Linnaeus, Lachesis Lapponica, vol. 1, 105.

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the ensuing eight pages, following which he tackles the question, “Why are the Laplanders so healthy?” And he comes up with another nine reasons. He idyllically sums up the life of the Sámi thusly: “I witnessed with pleasure the supreme tranquility enjoyed by the inhabitants of this sequestered country. After they have milked their reindeer, and the women have made their cheese, boiled their whey to the requisite consistence, and taken their simple repast, they lie down to enjoy that sound sleep which is the reward and the proof of their innocent lives. There is rarely any contention among them.” This is not a facile noble savage stereotype but serious admiration based on in-depth study of these communities.24 Comments such as these typify Linnaeus’s views of the Sámis. Accounts of cross-cultural differences that distress him represent the exception to the rule: “My hosts gave me missen to eat; that is, whey, after the curd is separated from it, coagulated by boiling, which renders it very firm. Its flavour was good, but the washing of the spoon took away my appetite, as the master of the house wiped it dry with his fingers, whilst his wife cleaned the bowl, in which milk had been, in a similar manner, licking her finger after every stroke.” Also anomalous is his unflattering descriptions of one old woman he encountered, which has received a disproportionate amount of attention from commentators: “It might truly be imagined that she was of Stygian origin. . . . Her face was dark brown from the effects of smoke. . . . She had a grey petticoat; and from her neck, which resembled the skin of a frog, were suspended a pair of large loose breasts of the same brown complexion, but encompassed, by way of ornament, with brass rings.”25 Linnaeus’s only sustained criticism of rural peoples concerns not the Sámi but the peasants and immigrant Finns in Bothnia and Småland, and their management of heat and smoke in their dwellings, which he facetiously terms “smoke huts” or “stove huts”: All the smoke mounts to the ceiling, and finds its way out by a hole made for the purpose in the centre; but this renders the ceiling perfectly black. When the smoke does not escape readily, it is necessary to make a draught by opening the door of the house. The reason given for this contrivance is, that if there were a regular chimney, too much heat would escape that way. But surely such an excuse is very lame, for much more heat must escape by opening the

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door. . . . They were all blear-eyed to such a degree as to be nearly blind. . . . It seems in vain to prescribe any remedy for this evil, so long as its cause is every where so prevalent. This consists in their smoky dwellings. If I had the management of these Finlanders, I would tie them up to the wall and give them fifteen pair of lashes apiece till they made chimneys to their huts, especially as they have such plenty of fire-wood. . . . The people think them selves the warmer because the smoke can escape by the door only, and are persuaded that they should be frozen to death if they had a chimney; which opinion seems to me altogether absurd. . . . The inhabitants were in their smoky huts, with their eyes full of smoke, and the tears running from them. Nevertheless they seemed more studious of warmth than careful of their eyesight.

Linnaeus seems to have been so incommoded by the atmosphere in these dwellings that he does not ask his usual questions about the utility of what he sees. Modern scholars of cookstoves would ask about the role of heat and smoke in preserving food and inhibiting vermin, for example, although they would also ask questions about the impact not just on eyesight but also the respiratory tract, which Linnaeus does not mention.26 Linnaeus’s views of the Sámi and other peoples he encounters on the margins of the Swedish state involved an implicit and sometimes explicit comparison of these communities with metropolitan Swedish society. The state deemed the Sámi, in particular, so different, and incompatible in their livelihoods with national development plans, as to justify an explicit policy of separation. In 1747 the Swedish government passed a law instructing Swedes to stay away from Sámis and their “primitive” habits and vice versa, a stance that was rearticulated a century and a half later by the linguist Karl Bernhard Wiklund as the “Lapp shall remain Lapp” doctrine. Sörlin says that this policy “formed a powerful element in a narrative of hegemony over the native population,” a narrative that was troubled by Sámi who abandoned reindeer-based subsistence to try to straddle the two worlds. A tension over this boundary is reflected in Linnaeus’s comparison of alpine versus lowland Sámi: “Here I think it worthwhile to observe, that the alpine Laplanders are more honest, as well as more good-­ natured, than those who dwell in the woodlands. Having acquired more polish from their occasional intercourse with the inhabitants of towns, the

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latter have, at the same time, learned more cunning and deceit, and are frequently very knavish.”27 Part of the reason Linnaeus did not want Sámis to become acculturated was because he admired them as they were. He was fascinated by their cultural differences, and he labored to commend these differences in their own right and make them not just intelligible to his metropolitan Swedish audience but praiseworthy: “I found with pleasure that these poor Laplanders know better than some of their more opulent neighbors, how to employ the good things which God has bestowed upon them. . . . I never met with any people who lead such easy happy lives as the Laplanders. In summer they make two meals of milk in the course of the day, and when they have gone through their allotted task of milking their reindeer, or making cheese, they resign themselves to indolent tranquility, not knowing what to do next.” In some respects, Linnaeus suggests that the Sámis are the Swedes’ superiors and the latter can actually learn from the former: “They line their shoes with this moss, a practice which might with advantage be adopted by soldiers on a march. . . . The Laplanders consult several natural objects by way of compass as they travel. . . . By such marks as these they are able to find their way through pathless forests. Have we any guides so certain?” Linnaeus did not refrain from making direct comparisons that must have been challenging to his readers: “In the morning we arrived at the abode of Mr. Kock, the under bailiff, where I could not but admire the fairness of the bodies of these dark-faced people, which rivalled that of any lady whatever. . . . To show to what a high degree of perfection these people have arrived in the art of making such thread [from tendons of reindeer fawns], I brought away a sample of it, which I believe none of our ladies could match.”28 Linnaeus also made other efforts to bridge the difference between the Sámi and mainstream Swedish society. This included his simple yet powerful close observation and recounting of their lives, a good example of which is his sketch of an “apparatus for boiling the kettle” accompanied by a detailed description of how it worked and an enumeration of its six distinct advantages (figure 2.4). For a prominent scholar from Sweden’s metropole, on a government-sponsored expedition, to devote such attention to the mundane, everyday technology of an ethnic minority at Sweden’s margins was remarkable. Historically, only people “that matter,” and

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Figure 2.4. Sámi apparatus for boiling the kettle. Key: a—square beam with pivoting base, b—transverse beam with pivoting base, c—forked beam with pivoting base. ­Linnaeus, Lachesis Lapponica, vol. 1, 198.

only non-mundane technologies, receive this kind of attention.29 Linnaeus’s attention to the detail of Sámi lives elevated their visibility, their comprehensibility, and their importance. Most dramatically, Linnaeus depicted himself as a Sámi. He commissioned a portrait of himself dressed in the ethnic attire of the Sámis, which he often wore to social gatherings (figure 2.5). All scholars of Linnaeus have remarked on this portrait but few have analyzed it; those that have view it askance. Lisbet Koerner critiques the accuracy of his attire and calls it “reflexive exoticism.” Roy F. Ellen writes: “Linnaeus, for example, self-consciously drew on the traditions of the Sámis in order to promote his scientific work, to the extent that he had his portrait painted wearing Sámi costume, even though—and revealingly—the details of the clothing are ethnographically questionable. Seeing Linnaeus dressed as a Sámi in early eighteenth-century Sweden conveyed much the same impression and authority as the proverbial photograph of the anthropologist’s tent in the con-

Figure 2.5. Portrait of Linnaeus in his Sápmi dress, 1737, by Martin Hoffman. Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, Leiden.

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text of ethnographic writing.” The photograph to which Ellen, and Clifford, refer is “The Ethnographer’s Tent on the Beach of Nu’Agasi,” which shows the tent of the pioneering anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski next to several dwellings of Trobriand Islanders. Malinowski does not depict himself in Trobriand attire, however, nor does Linnaeus ever depict himself and/or his tent in the field, so the parallel is not exact.30 Linnaeus’s Sámi attire must be seen in the context of the eighteenth century; it must be read against the pervasive colonial-era discourse that “they,” the colonial subjects, must become like “us,” not the reverse. But nowhere in Linnaeus’s writings is there any discourse of modernizing or developing the Sámi. When Linnaeus, one of the most celebrated scholars of his age, studied and displayed the dress, language, and beliefs of an ethnic minority, and when he dons that dress himself, he is saying something very different, and very radical; he is saying, “We can become them,” “we can become the Sámi.” Both Ellen and Koerner point out that the Sámi attire worn by Linnaeus is not exact. Instead of being flawed, however, this can instead be read as an effort to not exaggerate but to blur the differences between Sámi and Swede, to suggest that they are all the same, or at least similar. As Linnaeus averred in a famous speech to Swedish royalty in 1759, “Wild Peoples, barbarians, and Hottentots, [and Sámi] differ from us only because of sciences.”31

Swidden Among the non-Sámi peasants studied by Linnaeus in the course of his various expeditions, the analog to reindeer herding—as the central, live­ lihood-defining subsistence system—is long-fallow, forest-based shifting cultivation, or slash-and-burn agriculture, or “swidden,” as anthropologists prefer to term it.32 As with reindeer herding, Linnaeus’s analysis of this system of agriculture exemplified his talents as a close observer of human society and his predilection to defend marginal communities against metropolitan Swedish culture and politics. Linnaeus’s insights into Swedish swidden cultivation have been ignored or misunderstood for two hundred and fifty years. Most studies of swidden have focused on late developing regions of the tropics, which contributed to a kind of amnesia regarding the long history of swidden in Western Europe and North America. In North America,

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a swidden system based on a melding of European and Native American practices dominated the southern uplands through the nineteenth century and persisted in remnantal form well into the twentieth century. Swiddening thrived in parts of France until around 1890; and pockets of swidden cultivation remained in Germany, Austria, and northern Russia until the 1950s and 1960s. European swiddening may have survived longest in some of the least populated and least industrialized parts of Scandinavia; and it was certainly still widely practiced in Sweden in the mid-eighteenth century when Linnaeus was in the field.33 Linnaeus observed swidden cultivation in many parts of Sweden, but his most detailed observations of the practice are contained in his account of his expedition to Skåne or Scania in southern Sweden, which also encompassed neighboring Småland where he was born, undertaken at the behest of the Swedish government in 1749. The landscape in these regions was a pastoral one, a setting that personally pleased Linnaeus. In his 1751 account of this trip, Linnaeus provided detailed descriptions of land use, in particular the practice of swiddening. As he writes, “Burnbeaten areas, which are everywhere seen among the forests here in Småland, and which are looked upon by some as profitable, by others as rather deleterious, were closely examined and the benefit and the injury done to the countryside were weighed against one another.” The term “burn-beating” is a translation of the Swedish term for swidden cultivation, svedjebruk. Linnaeus saw distinct advantages of burn-beating in districts unsuited for more intensive agriculture: “When the farmer here cuts down the trees and burns the land by burn-beating, he obtains from his otherwise quite unprofitable forest and soil, a mostly fine grain, and for several years after that a good pasture of grass, which comes up between the stones, until the heather once more chokes the grass. Pine and spruce soon re-establish themselves, so that after 20 to 30 years they are ready for new burn-beating. In this way the farmer gets an abundance of grain from otherwise quite worthless land.” Linnaeus concluded with an unqualified endorsement of the economic importance of burn-beating for the rural populace of the region: “If the inhabitants of Småland were not allowed to have burn-beating, they would want for bread and be left with an empty stomach looking at a sterile waste.”34 The Swedish botanist Gunhild Weimarck carried out extensive studies of environmental history in northeast Skäne in the mid-twentieth cen-

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tury, and she observed, “All naturally well-drained mineral soils within these investigated areas have on some occasion been subject to burn-beating.” Based on her analysis of archival forestry records, Weimarck finds that in 1842, almost a century after Linnaeus’s observations, burn-beating was still the “principal livelihood” of the rural inhabitants and remained so until the end of the nineteenth century.35 Burn-beaten lands were subjected to a multiyear cycle or rotation, with the land uses that were more demanding of soil nutrients staged earlier and the less demanding ones staged later. The cycle consisted of (1) clearing and burning the forest, (2) cultivating turnips, (3) cultivating rye, (4) cultivating hay, (5) managing the land as pasture, and then (6) relinquishing the land to a natural forest fallow. Linnaeus put the average fallow period at twenty to thirty years; his contemporary J. Krook put it at thirty years. At the end of this fallow period, the burn-beating cycle would be started anew.36 The productivity of this agricultural system was high. One late ­eighteenth-century report cited a return to sown seed in burn-beating that ranged from 16:1 to 24:1, which far surpassed the contemporaneous yields of 2–5:1 in permanently tilled fields. With such yields, burn-beating was an attractive way of obtaining a livelihood. As Krook put it, “They in this way got a greater yield with comparatively little work.” Weimarck noted that even in the mid-twentieth century, “Old people say that burn-beating was a labour-saving cultivation method.”37 Burn-beating was one component in a complex agroecological system comprising both “infields”—referring to the arable fields and meadows— and “outlands”—referring to the surrounding woods. The infields were kept under continuous cultivation or use. As described by Linnaeus: “The agriculture here in Småland was usually organized in such a way that the one-field system was used in the tilled fields, which were sown each year without rest, either with rye or barley.” The challenge of this one-field system is to maintain the productivity of the continuously tilled fields year after year by annual applications of manure. Feeding the cattle that produced this manure was another function of burn-beating. As Weimarck writes: “Burn-beating offers an important yield of grain and straw, turnips, potatoes and hay and after that a good grazing, making cattle-breeding possible in these districts. Burn-beating was carried out in connection with the one-field system and, consequently, manure from the cow house could be

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obtained for the tilled arable fields, making this yearly cultivation possible [emphases in original].” In short, the burn-beaten outlands sustained the cattle that, in turn, sustained the infields. As Krook wrote, “The tilled fields are nowadays not manured [by cattle fed] from the hay-crop but instead chiefly with straw from the harvested burn-beaten areas and grass from the abandoned burn-beaten land.” The requisite proportion of outland to infield area averaged about 4:1 from the end of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. This combination of permanent-field agriculture at permanent settlements, with distant forest burning, farming, and grazing at summer shielings, dates from the origins of Swedish agriculture in the Roman iron age. It may have developed partly as a strategy of colonizing empty lands, but by Linnaeus’s time its purpose seems to have been to alleviate fodder shortages at the permanent settlement.38 Linnaeus’s work on burn-beating was at the center of one of the most celebrated and least understood controversies of his career. Opinions at the time in Sweden were divided about the merits of burn-beating. As J. Faggot, a contemporary of Linnaeus, wrote, “The great problem at this time was whether burn-beating was beneficial or injurious to the country.” There was no question on the part of the government, which had been prejudiced against the practice since the mid-seventeenth century. Many forest regulations in Sweden at the time of Linnaeus’s study prohibited burn-beating, as a result of which the practice was often carried on clandestinely.39 The publication of Linnaeus’s Skäne travels brought the conflicting views of burn-beating to a head. Baron Carl Hårleman, one of the sponsors of Linnaeus’s Skåne expedition, saw a draft of his report and was highly critical of his passages on burn-beating. The baron, who had criticized the practice in print himself, complained that Linnaeus “not only had not condemned burn-beating, so pernicious for the country, but even contrary to his better judgement justified and sanctioned the undertaking.” Linnaeus complained about the baron’s criticism in a letter to the secretary of Sweden’s Royal Academy of Sciences, saying that “troublemakers had been at work,” and he dis­ ingenuously disclaimed any vested interest in the matter, writing that he “cared as little whether or not a farmer burnt his land as whether or not he smoked a pipe.” But in the end Linnaeus was obliged to replace the page containing his most positive remarks on burn-beating with, as Sernander writes, “harmless notes on manure,” but this bore a personal cost. As Blunt .

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writes, “The book [on Skåne] was well received and Linnaeus was urged to undertake further journeys; but he had had enough. As he told the Secretary of the Royal Academy of Sciences, ‘Many a time have I set sail to bring back gold from Ophir, only to come home a broken man, my ship disabled and her sails in tatters. Another voyage might well be the end of me.’”40 Almost all scholars of Linnaeus’s work, ignorant of the ecological and political dynamics of burn-beating, have regarded his disagreement with the baron as a trifling matter. For example, Jackson writes, “A slight misunderstanding arose between him and his patron, Baron Hårleman, as to the account given of paring and burning the turf.” Blunt writes of an “exchange of bitter letters and . . . good deal of unpleasantness” that ensued because Linnaeus “gave his blessing to the old Swedish custom of cleaning the ground by setting fire to the stubble.” Blunt seems to be referring to the common practice of post-harvest burning of stalks on agricultural fields, and Jackson perhaps is referring to the historic Northern European practice of burning peatlands—but neither is referring to burn-­ beating of forest lands. Since the post-harvest burning of stubble is not contentious, and since Linnaeus himself criticized burning of peatlands, this leaves little basis for the controversy with the Baron, which is why some scholars have attributed it to Linnaeus’s supposedly sensitive nature. For example, Lindroth attributes the disagreement to the fact that Linnaeus was a “clamoring, egocentric, and unpolished genius.” It was not a question of turf, stubble, or personality, however. As Weimarck writes, it was a “grave conflict . . . concerning the question whether burn-beating was to be considered useful or injurious to the country.”41 The seemingly “harmless” passage on manure that Linnaeus substituted in his report is, upon closer inspection, revealing. In it he advised the farmers how to augment their supplies of cattle fodder by gathering it in the forests, but he specified plant types that were peculiar to burnbeaten forests. In his replacement passage, therefore, Linnaeus in effect says that the best material to feed cattle to produce manure comes from burnbeaten forest lands. So even though he dropped the passages explicitly supporting the practice of burn-beating, Linnaeus still made the case for it, albeit indirectly. As Weimarck writes: “In my opinion Linnaeus has chosen to write his article on manure as a matter of grave necessity, intending to draw attention to the importance of special activities in order to save

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Figure 2.6. Under the Yoke (Burning the Brushwood), 1893, by Eero Järnefelt, a painting of Finnish burn-beating, depicting secondary burning. Ateneum.

the small, yearly cultivated fields becoming poor. Suffering from the want of fertilization, until this time procured principally by burn-beating, the fields gradually lose their potential productiveness, reducing their fertility and size of yield.”42 The Swedish kingdom had historically encouraged burn-beating, especially by immigrant “forest Finns,” as a way of opening up the country’s vast, unpopulated tracts of forest (figure 2.6). By Linnaeus’s time, however, the state was less interested in colonizing the forest frontier than in obtaining revenue, which is problematic with burn-beating. Swidden agriculture is inherently resistant to extraction of revenue by central state authorities, due to the spatial scattering of fields, the mixture of crops, the staggering of harvests, and the general “illegibility” of the system, along with the mobility and thus independence of its practitioners. As Weimarck astutely notes, “The negative attitude to burn-beating, shown by several authorities, might be due to several different reasons, but in my opinion the most material cause was the fact that this large production and this impor-

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tant activity was without profit for the political economy of Sweden, since it was not assessed for taxation.”43 Linnaeus deserves credit for recognizing the existence and value of burn-beating, notwithstanding its official nonrecognition by the Swedish state. As the work of Agamben and others has shown, one of the most powerful tools of governance of the modern state involves reclassifying subjects and behaviors that displease it as beyond state support and vulnerable to state sanctions. This has been the fate of systems of swidden agriculture in many times and places, and it was so in Linnaeus’s era. Analysis of archival sources shows that whereas quantitative data on the continuously tilled infields were routinely gathered in the first half of the eighteenth century, the practice of burn-beating was often simply not recorded; sometimes it was referred to but no quantitative data were provided; and when data were provided, the extent of the practice was generally underestimated.44

Nature Linnaeus’s ethnographic fieldwork on swidden agriculture, reindeer herding, and related topics illuminates his signature works on the economy of nature and biological classification. His development of a system of a hierarchical, binomial biological classification was incredibly successful. As Müller-Wille writes: “Within two decades of their introduction in Philosophia Botanica (1751), the two innovations that formed the cornerstones of Linnaeus’s self-styled ‘reform’ of natural history—the naming of plant and animal species by ‘trivial’ names composed of genus name and specific epithet (as in Homo sapiens) and their ordering by variety, species, genus, order (or family), and class, the so-called Linnaean hierarchy of taxonomic ranks—had been universally adopted by naturalists, even by prominent opponents of Linnaeus like Buffon or Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck.” Although the Linnaean system subsequently came under withering criticism as a mere registrar as the initial excitement over its introduction waned, it remains to this day solidly in place as one of the most significant paradigm shifts in the biological sciences.45 Some of the principles of the binomial system of classification can be seen in Linnaeus’s earlier fieldwork, especially in his sensitivity to difference. Foucault suggests that a scientific emphasis on difference is a modern

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invention: “In the sixteenth century, the identity of plants or animals was assured by the positive mark (sometimes hidden, often visible) which they all bore: what distinguished the various species of birds, for instance, was not the differences that existed between them but the fact that this one hunted its food at night, that another lived on the water, that yet another fed on living flesh.” Starting in the seventeenth century, however, the positive mark or “stigma” of the organism began to receive less emphasis, and how it differed from other organisms began to receive more: “From the seventeenth century, there can no longer be any signs except in the analysis of representations according to identities and differences. . . . An animal or plant is not what is indicated—or betrayed—by the stigma that is to be found imprinted upon it; it is what the others are not.” This shift in emphasis was institutionalized in the Linnaean system of classification, which is based on difference not similarity: “The character that distinguishes each species or each genus is the only feature picked out from the background of tacit identities.”46 Beginning in 1732 with his first expedition to Sápmi, Linnaeus was attracted by variety, not by the similar but by the dissimilar. In his travel notes, Linnaeus continually writes entries like “I never saw anything like X before” or “I saw X, which is not like Y.” Linnaeus saw variety as worth noting, he did not see it as a problem, he was not concerned with generalizing. Indeed, the “fine” description in which he liked to indulge was inimical to generalization. For example, Linnaeus made no effort to define the “typical” Sámi bread; rather, he comes across a different local variant practically within every day’s walk, and his energy did not flag at recording them all. This also applies to types of scythes, ploughs—“I had observed a kind of plough in use, different from any I had before seen”—and even sheaves of rye.47 There is more than one way to bind together reaped sheaves of rye, so that it can remain in the open but be protected from the rain, and Linnaeus is attentive to the many local variations, which are so numerous and varied that they resemble differences in dialect as a marker of locality. Far from being flummoxed by such diversity, or feeling challenged to reduce it to an “average” variant, he dotes on the variation. His close interest in the different varieties of breads, tools, and even sheaves anticipates his work on his system of biological classification. There is a relationship between what Linnaeus observed in the world and the linguistic structure by which he described it. Foucault suggests that

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the ordering of “the botanical calligrams dreamed of by Linnaeus” is designed to reproduce the plant being described: “His wish was that the order of the description, its division into paragraphs, and even its typographical modules, should reproduce the form of the plant itself. That the printed text, in its variables of forms, arrangement, and quantity, should have a vegetable structure.” Accordingly, the plant becomes the book and the book becomes the plant: “The plant is thus engraved in the material of the language into which it has been transposed, and recomposes its pure form before the reader’s very eyes. The book becomes the herbarium of living structures.”48 Following Foucault’s analysis of how plant diversity gets expressed in the texts of Linnaean classification, the diversity of Sweden’s northern landscapes similarly got expressed in the texts of his expedition reports. Just as his binomial nomenclature expressed his vision of flora and fauna, so too did the accounts from his expeditions express his vision of the landscape. To a modern reader, no longer accustomed to reading natural history with its holistic vision, Linnaeus’s prose reads oddly: in particular, he does not separate nature and culture. His accounts of his journeys continuously alternate, without transition, between passages on plants, the physical landscape, and the everyday lives of its indigenous inhabitants. As Anderson writes: “Where else can one find several pages on the marriage customs of the Lapps followed without a pause by a discussion of local names for Angelica and other species of plants?” To return to the example discussed in the introductory chapter, in six successive paragraphs stretching across four pages, Linnaeus discusses in turn: how Sámi roast fish back-­ to-belly on a spit, how they make glue for their bows by boiling perch, how they carry gear in a girdle between their inner and outer jackets, the beauty of the Willow-herb and Golden-rod, the impact on reindeer of drought, and the milky appearance of a rivulet.49 The absence of transitions between these passages reflects the fact that Linnaeus did not feel the need to mark these transitions for his readers. Indeed, he did not see them as transitions in the first place because he made no ontological distinctions among the topics involved. This jumbled prose reflected the jumbled world as Linnaeus saw it. Linnaeus’s non-differentiation between nature and culture in his texts is integral to his concept of the economy of nature. The environmental historian Donald Worster writes: “In the eighteenth century, one of the

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most widely admired of Linnaeus’ works was his essay The Oeconomy of Nature. It was written in 1749 as an academic thesis that was then translated into Latin and defended by one of his students at Uppsala. It quickly became the single most important summary of an ecological point of view still in its infancy.” According to Linnaeus, “By the Oeconomy of nature we understand the all-wise disposition of the Creator in relation to natural things, by which they are fitted to produce general ends, and reciprocal uses.” He considered humans to be part of nature’s economy, which was so arranged by the Creator as to benefit them. As Linnaeus says: “All these treasures of nature, so artfully contrived, so wonderfully propagated, so providentially supported throughout her three kingdoms, seem intended by the Creator for the sake of man. Every thing may be made subservient to his use; if not immediately, yet mediately.”50 The central principle in Linnaeus’s concept of the economy of nature is that it operates so as to guarantee abundance to all, such that there are no scarcities. Linnaeus gives the example of pasture management, which shows the importance of species differentiation and the existence of ecological niches: “When eight cows have been in a pasture, and can no longer get nourishment, two horses will do very well there for some days, and when nothing is left for the horses, four sheep will live upon it.” Another example involves nutrient cycling. In the chapter on “Destruction” in The Oeconomy of Nature, Linnaeus gives what Egerton calls two of the earliest accounts of food chains, one terrestrial and one aquatic: “Thus the treelouse lives upon plants. The fly called musca aphidivora lives upon the tree-­louse. The hornet and wasp fly upon the musca aphidivora. The dragon fly upon the hornet and wasp fly. The spider on the dragon fly. The small birds on the spider. And lastly, the hawk kind on the small birds. In like manner the monoculus delights in putrid water, the knat eats the monoculus, the frog eats the knat, the pike eats the frog, the sea calf eats the pike.”51 Linnaeus’s work on the principles of the economy of nature helps to explain his appreciation of the practice of burn-beating. The cycling of nutrients between burn-beaten outlands and permanently cultivated infields, through the alimentary processes of cattle, is an elegant example of the principle of conservation through recycling of matter. The ultimate act of recycling in the economy of nature is death and rebirth, as Linnaeus writes, “The death and destruction of one thing should always be subservient to the restitution of another.” The burning of the forest and growing

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of plants in its ashes is a dramatic instance of this. The key dictate from nature’s economy for the human economy is that the latter should not battle but cooperate with nature. Burn-beating, given that the cropping mimics the forest, and given also that the system depends on the natural regrowth of the forest following each period of cropping, honors this principle more than perhaps any other major system of agriculture in human history.52 Linnaeus thus found in burn-beating an economy of agriculture modeled on the economy of nature. Linnaeus’s thesis of the economy of nature—in particular the principle that different organisms have different niches and thus different points of view—was aligned with his view of the differences in livelihoods and worldviews around the world: “The Laplanders have one way of living; the European husbandmen another; the Hottentots and savages a third, whereas the stupendous oeconomy of the Deity is one throughout the globe, and if Providence does not always calculate exactly according to our way of reckoning, we ought to consider this affair in the same light, as when different seamen wait for a fair wind, every one, with respect to the part he is bound to, who we plainly see cannot all be satisfied.” Linnaeus articulates this point when he says, in effect, that what constituted a “fair wind” for the reindeer herders or burn beaters, and a fair wind for the Swedish state, was not the same.53 Linnaeus’s concept of the economy of nature does not reify the boundary between nature and culture. Reindeer herding and burn-beating are quintessential examples of hybrid systems, which sit at the intersection of nature and culture, drawing upon energy and resources from both sides and relying on landscapes that cycle back and forth between more natural and more cultural states. The countryside in which Linnaeus was born and raised, around Stenbrohault in southern Sweden, and which made him “giddy at the Creator’s magnificent arrangement,” was one of “pastoral grace: rich, level farmland dotted with pines and firs and flowery meadows.” He did not idealize pristine wilderness with no human presence or imprint: as Koerner says, he preferred “bucolic culturescapes.” When he invokes metaphors of ideal landscapes in his expedition to Sápmi, they are classical ones of clearly peopled places: I seemed to have reached the residence of Pan himself, and shall now describe the huts in which his subjects the Laplanders contrive

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to resist the rigours of their native climate. . . . Ovid’s description of the silver age is still applicable to the native inhabitants of Lapland. Their soil is not wounded by the plough, nor is the iron din of arms to be heard; neither have mankind found their way to the bowels of the earth, nor do they engage in wars to define its boundaries. They perpetually change their abode, live in tents, and follow a pastoral life, just like the patriarchs of old. . . . The tranquil existence of the Laplanders answers to Ovid’s description of the golden age, and to the pastoral state as depicted by Virgil. It recalls the remembrance of the patriarchal life, and the poetical descriptions of the Elysian fields.

When Linnaeus journeys to the “wild alps” far to the north in Sápmi, where “no road, tracks, nor any signs of inhabitants were visible,” he seems discomfited, writing: “When I cast my eyes over the grass and herbage, there were few objects I had seen before, so that all nature was alike strange to me.”54 The fact that there is no human presence, the possibility that Linnaeus might be, if not the first person to travel there, certainly the first scientist from metropolitan Sweden to do so, does not strike him the way that it strikes Wallace, a century later, in the East Indies. Linnaeus’s veneration of the familiar versus the strange was different.

Conclusion The valorization of folk knowledge, or hearsay, in Linnaeus’s research is missing from modern commentary on his work. This absence is all the more remarkable given the connections that could be drawn between Linnaeus’s study of folk classifications—for example, of nineteen different uses of milk—and the development of the system of biological classification for which he is famous. His work on indigenous systems of knowledge pertaining to natural resource management contributed to his championing of these systems; it enabled him to read these “fugitive” systems against the grain of contemporary Swedish politics.55 The misunderstanding of Linnaeus’s dispute with Baron Hårleman over burn-beating demonstrates how poorly modern commentators understand this aspect of Linnaeus’s work. These aspects of Linnaeus’s work did not vanish on their own into historical obscurity. It is the modern worldview, in particular its non-­

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holistic character, that actively puts Linnaeus’s work out of reach—or puts some of it out of reach. Not all of Linnaeus’s work has fallen victim to Foucault’s historical blur, most notably his system of biological classification. Thus, the modern scientific worldview illuminates some aspects of Linnaeus’s work while blurring others. There may be aspects of his work that are blurred but that none­ theless are still with us. Müller-Wille suggests that “the infrastructure of ‘labels’ and ‘containers’ that was created by Linnaean paper tools . . . acquired a life of its own,” which has political implications: “The urge to document everything in writing, some anthropologists have claimed, is at the heart of the difference between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest.’ A cultural history of natural history that attends to this aspect of scientific practice, therefore, has the potential to reveal that natural history, its techniques, and the affects and aspirations associated with these, form a central element of modernity despite their enduring antiquarian image.”56 The search for the enduring influence of natural history is a salutary one; however, a reading of Linnaeus’s work suggests that far from wanting to differentiate the West from the rest, Linnaeus was trying to show that the rest—the reindeer herders and burn beaters—were more like than unlike metropolitan Swedish society.

Interlude

Contradiction

O

n some university campuses today, the work of Linnaeus is held in disrepute because of statements that he made in some of his works, in particular his 1758 Systema Naturae, regarding differences between the peoples of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. It is indeed difficult to reconcile those statements with his remarks in a 1759 speech to the Swedish royal family: as quoted in chapter 2, he said, “Wild Peoples, barbarians, and Hottentots, differ from us only because of sciences.” The text of Systema Naturae seemed to emphasize difference and erect barriers, whereas the speech the following year seemed to do just the opposite.1 These perceived contradictions characterize the modern view of Linnaeus. Thus, his system of biological classification is critiqued today for being reductionist and for erasing folk knowledge. As Foucault writes: “The descriptive order proposed for natural history by Linnaeus . . . is very characteristic. According to this order, every chapter dealing with a given animal should follow the following plan: name, theory, kind, species, attributes, uses, and, to conclude, Litteraria. All the language deposited upon things by time is pushed back into the very last category, like a sort of supplement in which discourse is allowed to recount itself and record discoveries, traditions, beliefs, and poetical figures.” Foucault’s point is well-taken, yet the descriptive order he critiques was cre-

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ated by the same scholar who was one of the foremost defenders of his era of Sámi reindeer herding and peasant burn-beating.2 Linnaeus’s scholarship and life was characterized by a radical agrarian politics. He saw clearly the politics of peasant and tribal livelihoods in his contemporary Swedish countryside. This included the politics of swidden agriculture, of which most modern observers are ignorant, which helps to explain why Linnaeus gets so little credit for his stance. As noted in chapter 2, swidden remained a feature of land use in Europe and North America into the twentieth century. But acknowledgment of this history was suppressed in colonial contexts, which made it possible to regard swidden in tropical lands as a quintessential “primitive” practice. The “amnesia” on the part of the West regarding its own swidden history made it possible to use swidden as a potent colonial tool of “othering.” Linnaeus fought against this: he identified the presence of swidden cultivation on Swedish soil, he described it, he explained it, and he defended it. His depiction of swidden in eighteenth-century Europe puts in a new light the colonial tirades against this practice in the tropics. Linnaeus’s insights into swidden were based on good ethnography, which was also manifested in his studies of Sámi reindeer herding. Mobile, transhumant peoples—like the Sámi—were objects of as much ­colonial-era suspicion and discipline as swidden cultivators, and for similar reasons: both systems of livelihood were problematic for centralized political control and economic extraction. A measure of Linnaeus can be taken from his sketches of Sámi technology (and that of other groups as well). He was less systematic than Rumphius in sketching, and there is more serendipity in his selection of subjects, but he does the sketching himself—whereas Rumphius often commissioned his illustrations by others. Although Koerner refers to Linnaeus’s “clumsy hand,” his sketches— especially of items of indigenous manufacture—are marvels of detail and— greatly adding to their value—he attaches in many cases a numbered key to the parts explaining their uses. An example is his sketch of the appa-

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ratus for suspending a kettle over a fire (figure 2.4). This illustrates his unexpected love of the elegance of mundane, everyday technology. But this love, this respect, also had a political side to it. Whereas E. F. Schumacher wrote that “small is beautiful” and celebrated appropriate technology—like this kettle hook—celebrating technology belonging to an oppressed ethnic minority, as the Sámi were in eighteenth-­century Sweden, is another matter entirely. It was politically radical.3 With his detailed descriptions and sketches, Linnaeus celebrated the lives of the Sámi and their herding culture. In a direct challenge to the official policy “the Lapp shall remain Lapp,” Linnaeus wore Lapp or Sámi tribal attire both within Sweden and abroad, and he sat for various portraits thus dressed, something mentioned only in passing by most of his biographers—and something that no other Swede of his stature was doing. The 1737 frontispiece to his Flora Lapponica is an engraving of a mountain Sápmi landscape, with Linnaeus in the foreground. As described by Koerner: “The Lutheran pastor’s son appears outside his tent in a Sami costume, cross-legged and smiling, banging a shaman’s drum [figure 2.7]. In the foreground the artist has added vignettes of the changeling’s drum, his floral talisman Linnaea borealis, and an intelligent-­ looking reindeer.” Koerner is critical of what Linnaeus “vaguely understood as Lapp,” writing: “Linnaeus in his so-called Lapp costume cut a poor figure. His beret, which a Swedish tax collector had given him, was part of Ume women’s summer clothing. His reindeer fur livery was a Torne man’s winter garment bought in Uppsala after the trip. His reindeer leather boots were of a type the Sami manufactured for export and did not wear themselves. And his shaman’s drum—an artifact illegal to own in Lapland itself—had been presented to him by an Uppsala professor as he packed for Holland.” More famous is the previously mentioned formal portrait of Linnaeus in Sámi attire (figure 2.5), of which Koerner is equally critical: “Depicting a smiling Linnaeus wearing his Sami ­woman’s fedora—rakishly, at an angle—the portrait reflects the problem of veracity

Figure 2.7. “Viro Nobilissimo et Consultissimo” (Most Noble and Very Much Advised Man), showing Linnaeus in a Sápmi landscape. Linnaeus, Flora Lapponica, frontispiece.

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for a struggling explorer of the Enlightenment, forced to transform himself into a noble savage, since he could not afford to bring a real one home with him.”4 Linnaeus devoted a great deal of painstaking effort to representing the Sámi people and environment through his texts, sketches, and collections. Koerner suggests that Linnaeus only “vaguely” understands Sámi attire, but his dense descriptions and detailed sketches clearly show otherwise. The pseudo-Sámi attire that he sometimes donned was not his effort to represent the Sámi or Sámi attire; it was his effort to represent his own partiality with respect to the Sámi. It was a statement about how a scholar in the European metropole at that time could represent his work with an ethnic minority at Europe’s margins, and it draws our attention to his own voice and positionality in his expedition reports. As these examples suggest, there were many different dimensions to Linnaeus’s work, some of which appear contradictory from a modern standpoint and make it challenging to read him. Modern readers can’t reconcile the scholar who devised a reductionist system of biological classification with the championing of the folk knowledge—the hearsay—of tribal reindeer herders. Modern readers can’t accommodate his statements on race in Systema Naturae with those on the equality of humankind to the Swedish royal family. This speaks to his complex, holistic worldview and the difficulty of comprehending it from essentializing, discipline-based contemporary perspectives.

Thr ee

The Nineteenth Century, Alfred Russel Wallace “Not Merely the Journal of a Traveller”

A l f r e d R u s s e l W a l l a c e ’ s The Malay Archipelago, perhaps the most important scholarly work on the region in the nineteenth century, has been widely described by modern scholars as a “travel narrative” or “meandering natural history.” John G. T. Anderson writes that it is a “travelogue . . . clearly intended for a popular audience,” and even one of the contributors to the Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, James T. Costa, characterizes it as a “travel memoir” full of “adventure narratives.” Costa elsewhere refers to it as “his tour-de-force memoir . . . that went to ten editions and has never been out of print,” and he pointedly notes that “beyond the travelogue, he published a host of scientific books.”1 Wallace himself seems to have disdain for some of the tropes of Oriental travel. For example, regarding traditional punishments for adultery on the island of Lombok: “More serious infidelity is punished still more cruelly, the woman and her paramour being tied back to back and thrown into the sea, where some large crocodiles are always on the watch to devour the bodies. One such execution took place while I was at Ampanam, but I took a long walk into the country to be out of the way till it was all over, thus missing the opportunity of having a horrible narrative to enliven 108

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my somewhat tedious story.” Wallace does not dispute the facts of this tradition, but he pushes back against the expectation that he will report on it to “enliven” his text. Remarks like this suggest that Wallace was not writing a travelogue but an anti-travelogue. That impression is deepened by his famous remarks in the final pages of The Malay Archipelago: Before bidding my readers farewell, I wish to make a few observations on a subject of yet higher interest and deeper importance, which the contemplation of savage life has suggested, and on which I believe that the civilized can learn something from the savage man. . . . I have lived with communities of savages in South America and in the East who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion of the village freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place. In such a community, all are nearly equal. There are none of those wide distinctions, of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and servant, which are the product of our civilization; there is none of that wide-spread division of labour, which, while it increases wealth, produces also conflicting interests; there is not that severe competition and struggle for existence, or for wealth, which the dense population of civilized countries inevitably creates. All incitements to great crimes are thus wanting, and petty ones are repressed, partly by the influence of public opinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of justice and of his neighbour’s right which seems to be, in some degree, inherent in every race of man. . . . Our vast manufacturing system, our gigantic commerce, our crowded towns and cities, support and continually renew a mass of human misery and crime absolutely greater than has ever existed before. They create and maintain in life-long labour an ever-increasing army, whose lot is the more hard to bear by contrast with the pleasures, the comforts, and the luxury which they see everywhere around them, but which they can never hope to enjoy; and who, in this respect, are worse off than the savage in the midst of his tribe.2

This suggestion that the tribal “savage” was better off than many workers in England’s industrial cities was not what the average reader of a colonial-­ era adventure narrative was expecting to hear. As much as Wallace may have flummoxed his nineteenth-century readers, this is even more true of

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contemporary ones. It is hard for modern scholars to read back to Wallace. Like Linnaeus and Rumphius, his work seems blurry and indistinct from a modern vantage point, owing to his holistic vision, his politics, and his reflexivity.

Introduction Alfred Russel Wallace was born in 1823 in Llanbadoc, Wales, of an English mother and Scottish father, and he died in Dorset, England, in 1913. In his two-volume, 899-page autobiography, Wallace says that he recalls the physical surroundings of his childhood much better than the people in it, which gives insight into his worldview: “During the very same period at which I cannot recall the personal appearance of the individuals with whom my life was most closely associated, I can recall all the main features and many of the details of my outdoor, and, to a less degree, of my indoor, surroundings. The form and colour of the house, the road, the river close below it, the bridge with the cottage near its foot, the narrow fields between us and the bridge, the steep wooded bank at the back, the stone quarry and the very shape and positions of the flat slabs on which we stood fishing.” Wallace explains this “psychological peculiarity” or “deficiency” in terms of his own phrenology: “I cannot find any clear explanation of these facts in modern psychology, whereas they all become intelligible from the phrenological point of view. The shape of my head shows that I have form and individuality but moderately developed, while locality, ideality, colour, and comparison are decidedly stronger.” Wallace enumerates other deficiencies, such as a difficulty in acquiring foreign languages, “total absence of wit or humor,” and lack of physical courage and a “disinclination to much exertion.” This explains, he suggests, “That shyness, reticence, and love of solitude which, though often misunderstood and leading to unpleasant results, have, perhaps, on the whole, been beneficial to me. They have helped to give me those long periods, both at home and abroad, when, alone and surrounded only by wild nature and uncultured man, I could ponder at leisure on the various matters that interested me.”3 Many commentators on Wallace’s work have depicted him as someone who had to overcome lower-class origins and economic privations. In fact, these are distinct issues: the editor of The Annotated Malay Archipelago, John van Wyhe, writes that in Great Britain at that time class was

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based not just on wealth but birth, and Wallace was the son of a gentleman, as his baptism record notes. His father lost the family’s wealth, however, and this was indeed a factor in Wallace’s life. As he writes: “Had my father been a moderately rich man and had he supplied me with a good wardrobe and ample pocket-money; had my brother obtained a partnership in some firm in a populous town or city, or had he established himself in his profession, I might never have turned to nature as the solace and enjoyment of my solitary hours, my whole life would have been differently shaped.” While enjoying nature in his solitary hours, Wallace had to earn his living, and so he worked as a surveyor for his brother for eleven years (1837–48), much of it for the new rail lines that were then being built all over England. His economic circumstances affected the next stage of his career as well: during the four years (1848–52) that he spent in the Amazon with the entomologist Henry Walter Bates, as well as the subsequent eight years that he spent in the Malay Archipelago (1854–62), Wallace amassed huge collections of flora and fauna, which served both his research and, when they were sold to institutions and private collectors back in Britain, his pocketbook.4 Wallace’s fame today rests on independently developing the theory of evolution through natural selection and co-authoring with Charles Darwin the first scientific paper on this topic; for pioneering work on biogeography that led to his delineation of “Wallace’s Line,” which bisects the Malay Archipelago; and for his work on insect mimicry, among other topics. The twentieth-century biologist E. O. Wilson regards his work as foundational for modern science: “The vastness of the tropical archipelagoes also provided the knowledge Wallace needed to conceive the biological discipline of biogeography, which has expanded during the late twentieth century into a cornerstone of ecology and conservation biology.” Wallace is also famous, ironically, for not being as famous as Darwin. His scholarly output was huge, including 22 books and more than 1,000 papers. The biologist Mark V. Lomolino writes, “Throughout the history of the natural sciences and, in particular, during the ages of Enlightenment and European exploration (fifteenth through eighteenth centuries), few if any individuals possessed a knowledge of the diversity and geography of life in its natural state that rivaled that of Wallace’s.”5 Wallace’s work places him among the most important nineteenth-­ century forebears of modern anthropology: he gave a lecture in 1887 to the

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Woman’s Anthropological Society in Washington, D.C., titled “The Great Problems of Anthropology,” which he identified as the division of the races and the origins of language. The anthropologist K. B. Lowrey, advocating for Wallace as an “ancestor-figure for contemporary anthropology,” writes: “Wallace’s tone and observations are more in keeping with anthropology as we now know it than are Darwin’s. Wallace was by far the superior fieldworker. . . . Darwin’s attitudes were far more racist and sexist than were Wallace’s.” Wallace does not pay as much attention to native technology as Linnaeus, and The Malay Archipelago is curiously thin on native stories, folklore, myth, ritual, augury, even regarding the animals of keenest interest to him, like the orangutan and bird of paradise. But observations on human society are sprinkled throughout his works, and The Malay Archipelago ends with a thirty-five-page appendix, “On the Human Crania and the Languages of the Races of Man in the Malay Archipelago,” which includes a list of nine common words in fifty-nine different languages.6 Less well known today is the work that Wallace undertook in his capacity as one of Britain’s foremost public intellectuals of his time. He believed that it was the duty of the scientist to publicly contribute to discussions of the issues of the day. He published articles in favor of nationalization of land in England, in support of women’s suffrage, against the popular belief in Martian canals, and critical of capitalism, industriali­ zation, and government vaccination campaigns. His writings on these and other topics had a passion that was unusual coming from the pen of a scholar, and they sometimes got him into more trouble than it was worth. For example, Wallace engaged in a fifteen-year legal battle over a wager to prove that the surface of a lake was convex and, by inference, that the earth is round. He calls this “the most regrettable incident in my life,” which “cost me fifteen years of continued worry, litigation, and persecution, with the final loss of several hundred pounds.” And he blamed himself: “It was all brought upon me by my own ignorance and my own fault—ignorance of the fact so well shown by the late Professor de Morgan—that ‘paradoxers,’ as he termed them, can never be convinced, and my fault in wishing to get money by any kind of wager.”7 The breadth of topics that drew Wallace’s interest reflects his holistic view of the world. Charles H. Smith writes, “One is struck first by the sheer range of subjects he took up, extending from evolutionary theory to economics, biogeography to socialism, astronomy to descriptive statistics,

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physical geography to spiritualism, and beyond.” Wallace was committed to this stance from early in his career. In 1843, when he was but nineteen or twenty, he gave a public lecture titled “The Advantages of Varied Knowledge,” which he summarized as being “in opposition to the idea that it was better to learn one subject thoroughly than to know something of many subjects. In the case of a business or profession, something may be said for the latter view, but I treated it as a purely personal matter which led to the cultivation of a variety of faculties, and gave pleasurable occupation throughout life.” The editors of An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, Smith, Costa, and Collard, call Wallace “one of the last great polymaths” and suggest, “from the perspective of modern workers, with their trajectory toward ever greater levels of specialization, a generalist of the likes of Wallace seems unthinkable.”8 This is not hyperbole but is literally true for many modern readers: it is hard to think of the wide compass of Wallace’s work. A year after giving his lecture “Varied Knowledge,” Wallace read Thomas Robert Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principles of Population, which proved to be one of the most important influences on his scholarship: “It was the first work I had yet read treating any of the problems of philosophical biology, and its main principles remained with me as a permanent possession, and twenty years later gave me the long-sought clue to the effective agent in the evolution of organic species.” He is referring to the year 1858, when he was in Ternate in the eastern part of the archipelago and suffering a fever from a bout of malaria. Wallace’s thoughts returned to Malthus, and he is finally able to work out his theory on the role of natural selection in evolution: At the time in question I was suffering from a sharp attack of intermittent fever, and every day during the cold and succeeding hot fits had to lie down for several hours, during which time I had nothing to do but think over any subjects then particularly interesting me. One day something brought to my recollection Malthus’ Principles of Population, which I had read about twelve years before. I thought of his clear exposition of “the positive checks to increase”—disease, accidents, war and famine—which keep down the population of savage races to so much lower than that of more civilized peoples. It then occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are

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continually acting in the case of animals also; and as animals usually breed much more rapidly than does mankind, the destruction every year from these causes must be enormous in order to keep down the number of each species, since they evidently do not increase regularly from year to year, as otherwise the world would long ago have been densely crowded with those that breed most quickly. Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction which this implied, it occurred to me to ask the question, Why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, that on the whole the best fitted live. From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped; from enemies, the strongest, the swiftest, or the most cunning; from famine, the best hunters or those with the best digestion; and so on. Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain—that is, the fittest would survive.

Malthus’s views had some deplorable political implications, for example, blaming the poor versus the wider society for their condition, but that is not something that Wallace took from him. Wallace dismissed as “unmitigated humbug” the idea that hereditary class distinctions in England were rooted in nature; he opposed the theories of Francis Galton; and he called his own published critique of eugenics “the most important contribution I have made to the science of sociology and the cause of human progress.”9 Linnaeus’s expeditions and scholarship would seem to have provided an obvious model for the work that Wallace undertook, but he does not cite them. Wallace does cite Linnaeus’s classifications, in particular when discussing the bird of paradise in The Malay Archipelago. When he was between nineteen and twenty years old, however, he gave a lecture on botanical classification in which he said of the Linnaean system, “For all purposes, except the naming of species, it was both useless and inconvenient.” Wallace acknowledges a much greater influence on his work from Humboldt, writing that his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent was “the first book that gave me a desire to visit the tropics.”10 Another likely influence on Wallace’s work in the Malay Archipelago, Rumphius, is similarly absent. As Rumphius’s modern editor, E. M. Beekman writes: “Neither Darwin nor Wallace ever mentions Rumphius’

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work. . . . Darwin never set foot in Asia. The ignorance of Darwin’s cofounder of the theory of natural selection [viz., Wallace] is more puzzling.” It is especially puzzling because Wallace actually covers some of Rumphius’s exact tracks in the eastern part of the archipelago from two centuries before. At one point, for example, Wallace writes, “There is perhaps no spot in the world richer in marine productions, corals, shells and fishes, than the harbour of Ambon.” To make this statement without referencing the one person in the world who had done the most to illustrate the riches of that harbor, who had lived there for nearly fifty years, is indeed puzzling. Rumphius also does not appear in Wallace’s 1905 two-volume, 899-page autobiography My Life.11

Travel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago raises a number of questions regarding the role of travel in natural history. It stands, along with Marsden’s 1783 The History of Sumatra, Raffles’s 1817 The History of Java, Rumphius’s earlier 1750 Amboinsch Kruid-Boek, and Burkill’s later 1935 Dictionary of the Economic Products of the Malay Peninsula, as one of the region’s great works of natural history. Wallace’s work is far and away the most read of these, and it has been read in widely different ways. The historian Frank N. Eger­ ton calls it a “magnet,” drawing scholars like the zoologist Ernst Haeckel to Southeast Asia. It has had popular appeal as well: reflecting the once wider appeal of natural history, it influenced everything from Joseph Conrad’s novels to David Attenborough’s nature documentaries. Some observers attribute the appeal of The Malay Archipelago to its style: one of Wallace’s editors characterizes it as “like a long letter written to an interested friend.” The anthropologist James Boon suggests that Wallace “stitched together The Malay Archipelago for popular consumption” and quotes Wallace himself as addressing his book “to the ordinary Englishman.”12 Some attribute the accessibility of The Malay Archipelago to their view of it as a travel book, which is a widespread characterization, as noted earlier. Even sympathetic scholars like the biologist James T. Costa, one of the contributors to An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, call it a “bestselling travel memoir.” Wyhe, one of Wallace’s editors, calls it “the greatest book of travel on Southeast Asia” and writes that when it was first published, one review stated that “a more interesting book of travel has not

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reached us since the appearance of Palgrave’s Arabia.” Wallace himself, who considered his eight years in the Malay Archipelago as “the central and controlling incident of my life,” and who cited as one of his chief inspirations Humboldt’s account of his travels in South America, had a different project in mind: he sought “to make my book not merely the journal of a traveller, but also a fairly complete sketch of the whole of the great Malayan Archipelago from the point of view of the philosophic naturalist.” In fact, as Wyhe notes, Wallace does not actually structure The Malay Archipelago according to his travels—whereas Linnaeus and most other natural historians did: “Rather than give a chronological account of his complex voyage, like Humboldt, Darwin, Bates and most other naturalists, Wallace, wisely adopted a more thematic organisation of his materials. He rearranged his complex travels to and from into geographical sections which he discussed in turn.” In Wallace’s own words: “My journeys to the various islands were regulated by the seasons and the means of conveyance. I visited some islands two or three times at distant intervals, and in some cases had to make the same voyage four times over. A chronological arrangement would have puzzled my readers. They would never have known where they were. . . . I have adopted, therefore, a geographical, zoological, and ethnological arrangement, passing from island to island in what seems the most natural succession, while I transgress the order in which I myself visited them as little as possible.”13 When Wallace said that he wanted The Malay Archipelago to be “not merely the journal of a traveller,” he was addressing a persisting dichotomy between the fieldworker and the armchair theoretician. The armchair scholars tended to be wealthy, whereas the collectors—whom they needed but scorned—had to work for their living. Wallace belonged to the economically challenged class of collectors—he refers to himself at one point as “a traveling naturalist of limited means.” He had no institutional sponsors for his expeditions, nor private income, but supported himself by the sale of duplicate specimens. Even Darwin implied at one point that Wallace was a collector of facts not a theorist, and he opined that ordinary entomologists “cannot be considered scientific men but must be ranked with collectors of postage stamps and crockery.” Wallace challenged this order of things, however. As Vetter writes, “Long before researchers gave field ethnography rather than armchair theorizing the highest prestige, Wallace was develop-

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ing a greater role for regional survey work.” Wallace was trying to make the case that there was more to his work than simply a traveler’s journal, but at the same time travel was integral to it.14 Wallace makes the claim that just being there, in the field, in the native land of scientifically important flora and fauna, was privileging. This is fundamental to Wallace’s claims to scientific authority: “As I lie listening to these interesting sounds [morning birds], I realize my position as the first European who has ever lived for months together in the Aru Islands, a place which I had hoped rather than expected ever to visit. I think how many besides myself have longed to reach these almost fairy realms, and to see with their own eyes the many wonderful and beautiful things which I am daily encountering.” He notes more than once that he is not looking at butchered bird skins at the end of a long commodity chain; rather he is looking at whole animals, often living ones, often even observing them in their native habitats. For example, Wallace writes that the king bird of paradise “had been described by Linnaeus from skins preserved in a mutilated state by the natives” and without legs, leading to Linnaeus naming one species Paradisea apoda (the footless paradise bird). Wallace continues, “I knew how few Europeans had ever beheld the perfect little organism I now gazed upon, and how imperfectly it was still known in Europe,” and he speaks of “being (as far as I am aware) the only Englishman who has seen these wonderful birds in their native forests.”15 Wallace elevates fieldwork and travel simply by describing it—in a way that Linnaeus had done but Marsden, Raffles, and Rumphius had not. He describes in detail his search for and capture of specimens, his interactions with the local peoples, and his observations of the countryside. And he does not neglect the dominant dimension and activity of his fieldwork, the arduous travel to remote places, which makes the collecting possible in the first place. In addition, Wallace does as good a job as has ever been done of describing the mundane details of how a natural his­ torian actually works in the field. He travels with a cane chair and either a table or a few boards with which to make one, and his first, and invariable, task when he arrives at a new research site is to secure a house, hut, or lean-to, within which he can set up his work space (figure 3.1):16 “It sometimes amuses me to observe how, a few days after I have taken possession of it, a native hut seems quite a comfortable home. . . . I had brought with

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Figure 3.1. Wallace’s house at Bessir, on Waigiou Island off the northwest coast of New Guinea, showing him seated at work in the space below the sleeping quarters while an assistant tends a fire on the ground beyond. Wallace, Malay Archipelago, figure 43, 535.

me a cane chair, and a few light boards, which were soon rigged up into a table and shelves. A broad bamboo bench served as sofa and bedstead, my boxes were conveniently arranged, my mats spread on the floor, a window cut in the palm-leaf wall to light my table, and though the place was as miserable and gloomy a shed as could be imagined, I felt as contented as if I had obtained a well-furnished mansion, and looked forward to a month’s residence in it with unmixed satisfaction.” Early in his stay in the Malay Archipelago, while still in Singapore, Wallace provides an example of his daily routine in a letter to his mother: “I will tell you how my day is now occupied. Get up at half-past five. Bath and coffee. Sit down to arrange and put away my insects of the day before, and set them safe out to dry. Charles [Allen] mending nets, filling pincush-

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ions, and getting ready for the day. Breakfast at eight. Out to the jungle at nine. We have to walk up a steep hill to get to it, and we always arrive dripping with perspiration. Then we wander till two or three, generally returning with about 50 or 60 beetles, some very rare and beautiful. Bathe, change clothes, and sit down to kill and pin insects. Charles ditto with flies, bugs, and wasps; I do not trust him yet with beetles. Dinner at four. Then to work again till six. Coffee. Read. If very numerous, work at insects till eight or nine. Then to bed.” Wallace’s systematic attention to these matters— to the “habitus” of the field scholar—his attention to the everyday matters that are essential to his productivity, are part of what made him such an excellent fieldworker, compared, for example, to Darwin. In describing his field habits, Wallace demystifies his research—by telling his readers all that is needed is a chair and a few boards for a table—but also mystifies it—by telling them that he achieved extraordinary results with just a chair and table.17

Nature/Culture Wallace’s account of his travels in The Malay Archipelago is noteworthy— as was also true with Linnaeus—for the way that he integrates or, to put it more accurately, does not dis-integrate—nature and culture. Wallace’s activity in the field was focused on finding, collecting, and identifying specimens, especially insects, especially those new to science. He lists the impressive total from eight years of collecting in the preface to The Malay Archipelago: “125,000 specimens of natural history.” A continued concern, which influenced where he went and how long he stayed, was how to augment his running total. To that end, he carefully tracked his daily collection rates: for example, at one site in New Guinea he averages forty-nine species a day, culminating with one day of seventy-eight species, “a larger number than I had ever captured before.” He is attentive to everything that affects his capture rates, including the seasons and the weather; he compiled a table of how daily weather variation in Borneo affected his moth captures.18 He is also attentive to the way capture rates vary at different sites, and he is continually shifting camp when what seemed to be promising sites do not pan out. Perhaps the single most important factor that differentiated good sites from bad ones for Wallace was the patchiness of the landscape. Thus,

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whereas the presence of some virgin forest is necessary for his collecting, if there is nothing but virgin forest, there is a dearth of insects. What is ideal, Wallace writes, is an area with undisturbed forest and some recently cleared spots—for it is on the felled trees that he finds many of his insects: “The quantity and the variety of beetles and of many other insects that can be collected at a given time in any tropical locality, will depend, first upon the immediate vicinity of a great extent of virgin forest, and secondly upon the quantity of trees that for some months past have been, and which are still being cut down, and left to dry and decay upon the ground.” Wallace writes, “During my whole twelve years’ collecting in the western and eastern tropics, I never enjoyed such advantages in this respect as at the Simunjon coal works” in Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, where the forest was being cleared to build a railway, and where he stayed for nine months. He writes, “When I arrived at the mines, on the 14th of March, I had collected in the four preceding months, 320 different kinds of beetles. In less than a fortnight I had doubled this number, an average of about twenty-­ four new species every day.” Another memorable collecting site is on the island of Batchian in the Moluccas, where Wallace chances upon “a place where a new clearing was being made in the virgin forest,” and where in just four days he collects “about a hundred species [of beetle], of which forty were new to me. He calls it “a glorious spot, and one which will always live in my memory as exhibiting the insect-life of the tropics in un­ exampled luxuriance.” Wallace explains this as follows: “If the forest is all cleared away, almost all the insects disappear with it; but when small clearings and paths are made, the fallen trees in various stages of drying and decay, the rotting leaves, the loosening bark and the fungoid growths upon it, together with the flowers that appear in much greater abundance where the light is admitted, are so many attractions to the insects for miles around, and cause a wonderful accumulation of species and individuals.”19 When he could not find a “patchy” landscape, he created one himself: on the island of Bouru in the Moluccas, he finds, “there were no new clearings; and as without these it is almost impossible to find many of the best kinds of insects, I determined to make one myself, and with much difficulty engaged two men to clear a patch of forest, from which I hoped to obtain many fine beetles before I left.” In stark contrast to the generations of conservation-oriented scientists who followed him, Wallace was not seeking a landscape with no human imprint. He recognizes that there

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is something counterintuitive in this, as he writes of his collecting failure at a different site in Batchian: “This is one of those spots so hard for the European naturalist to conceive, where with all the riches of a tropical vegetation, and partly perhaps from the very luxuriance of that vegetation, insects are as scarce as in the most barren parts of Europe, and hardly more conspicuous.”20 Wallace does not present in The Malay Archipelago a discourse about pristine tropical nature, to which the presence of humans is anathema.21 On the contrary, he developed an explicit thesis, based on his own empirical field observations, about the correlation between biodiversity and patchy, human-impacted landscapes. His view of an appealing versus unappealing landscape was based on whether it was rich versus poor in biodiversity, regardless of the presence of human activity. Wallace distinguished in this regard between the impact on biodiversity of permanent versus episodic human land uses. He does not bother to collect in places where permanent fields, plantations, or fruit groves predominate because for him they are “deserts” for insects. The quintessential example of episodic land use is swidden cultivation, otherwise known as shifting cultivation or slash-and-burn agriculture—as discussed in chapter 2 and further discussed in chapter 4. The forest clearings that Wallace came across in his travels in the Malay Archipelago were typically swiddens, and the ideal collector’s landscape was typically a swidden landscape. This involves cutting and burning small clearings out of the forest, inter-cropping them for a year or two, and then allowing them to revert to a long forest fallow. Wallace describes the swidden system of the Dayak of Borneo as follows: “The Dayaks get two crops off the ground in succession; one of rice and the other of sugar-cane, maize, and vegetables. The ground then lies fallow eight or ten years, and becomes covered with bamboos and shrubs.” He sees the swiddens not only as meeting subsistence needs but as driving a productive trade: “These Dayaks cultivate a great extent of ground, and supply a good deal of rice to Sarawak. They are rich in gongs, brass trays, wire, silver coins, and other articles in which a Dayak’s wealth consists.” Wallace says that because of this mode of livelihood, the Dayak are healthy: “The hill-Dayaks of Borneo, who grow rice and live well, are clean skinned.” Wallace’s account is notable for the absence of the usual colonial-era antipathy toward swiddens. Quite the reverse: he found the aesthetics of an upland swidden landscape—a patchwork of old forest,

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swiddens, and swidden forest fallows—not unpleasing because it supported the biodiversity that he was studying and collecting.22 Wallace’s stance toward swidden systems starkly contrasts with his stance toward the other principal system of traditional agroforestry in the archipelago, which was based on the sago palm Metroxylon sagu. Sago palms grow naturally, and they can be felled and made into a starch staple. Rumphius loved the tree, calling its starch “that wondrous meal,” “which the almighty creator gave to these natives instead of rice, or other grains, with which to make bread.” He says that “we should praise the wise Creator of nature that he gave these islands this tree-bread instead of rice or other grains.” Such praise had ended a century later, when the sago livelihood was no longer seen as fitting into the colonial project of socioeconomic development because it demanded so little labor, a view that Wallace shared. Wallace rants at length about sago cultivation, based on his perception that sago cultivators, because they can simply exploit naturally growing sago trees, do not have to work very hard. He claims that ten days of work suffices to provide food for an entire year. Although subsistence needs are thus met, the consequent lack of need for greater industry leads, Wallace claims, to a “poorer” and less developed society.23 For example, Wallace writes of the inhabitants of Waigiou Island off the northwest coast of New Guinea: “The people of Muka live in that abject state of poverty that is almost always found where the sago-tree is abundant. Very few of them take the trouble to plant any vegetables or fruit, but live almost entirely on sago and fish, selling a little tripang [sea cucumber, Actinopyga spp. and Holothuria spp.] or tortoiseshell to buy the scanty clothing they require.” Carrying out a similar analysis on the island of Ceram, he compares sago and swidden communities: “The effect of this cheapness of food is decidedly prejudicial, for the inhabitants of the sago countries are never so well off as those where rice is cultivated. Many of the people here have neither vegetables nor fruit, but live almost entirely on sago and a little fish. Having few occupations at home, they wander about on petty trading or fishing expeditions to the neighbouring islands; and as far as the comforts of life are concerned, are much inferior to the wild hill-Dyaks of Borneo, or to many of the more barbarous tribes of the archipelago.” Anticipating the famous sentiment by Nietzsche in 1874 that cattle “do not know what is meant by yesterday or today,” Wallace writes: “It seems clear that in this, as in other respects, man is not able to make a

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beast of himself with impunity, feeding like the cattle on the herbs and fruits of the earth, and taking no thought of the morrow.”24 In the nineteenth century most colonial governments in the region approved of neither swidden nor sago subsistence systems. Wallace discriminated between the two, however, based on the fact that the object of his collecting—insects—themselves discriminated: swidden creates habitat for insects, it creates spaces that attract and concentrate insect populations, sago does not. Thus, Wallace writes of a sago district on the island of Batchian in the eastern part of the archipelago: “I found in inquiry that the people here made no clearings, living entirely on sago, fruit, fish, and game . . . every little track I had attempted to follow leading to a dense sago swamp. I saw that I should waste my time by staying here and determined to leave the following day.” Of another district on the island of Ceram that also depends on sago, he writes: “This sago forms almost the whole subsistence of the inhabitants, who appear to cultivate nothing but a few small patches of maize and sweet potatoes. Hence, as before explained, the scarcity of insects. The Orang-kaya [‘rich man’ or headman] has fine clothes, handsome lamps, and other expensive European goods, yet lives every day on sago and fish as miserably as the rest. After three days in this barren place I left on the morning of March 6th.”25 To summarize Wallace’s point of view: sago landscapes lack human industry and, therefore, insects; permanently cultivated landscapes have too much human industry and, thus, no insects; swidden landscapes have the right amount of human industry to produce a patchy environment and an abundance of insect life. The absence of an anti-swidden, anti-deforestation discourse in The Malay Archipelago reflects the fact that too much forest frustrates Wallace’s endeavors just as much as too little. The only consistent subject of his ire is sago-based subsistence, and that is not because of its impact but rather its lack of impact on the forests, the absence of forest clearance. These views are congruent with Wallace’s academic and economic interests in collecting. Along with all other colonial observers, however, he underestimates the amount of human labor that goes into sago extraction.26 Wallace’s treatment of nature and culture in The Malay Archipelago is novel and challenging for modern readers. James Boon, as noted before, regards it as an odd, even bizarre work, which he thinks is misperceived as empirical because of its dedication to Darwin: “A crowning nineteenth-­

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century first-person narrative is Wallace’s Malay Archipelago (1869)—odd hybrid of a book, part natural history, part ethnology. . . . Wallace’s bizarre text has been conventionally construed as empirical. I seek instead to return it to an intertextual chain of reading.” Boon claims that The Malay Archipelago is not in fact empirical: “Nothing is less empiricist, more convention-laden, than certain components of ‘natural histories’ that once assumed responsibility for representing East Indies cultures. By seizing such works . . . at their somewhat obsessive digressions, we can better assess the source of their appeal, the oddness of their format, the complexity of their discourse, and the mythic categories they trail.”27 The obsessive digressions to which Boon refers involve Wallace’s discussions of the orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) of Borneo and Sumatra and the various species of birds of paradise (family Paradisaeidae) found in and around New Guinea. Both were central foci of Wallace’s field studies and collecting efforts and both are featured in the frontispieces at the beginning of his book, one titled “Orang-Utan Attacked by Dyaks” (figure 3.2) and the other titled “Natives of Aru Shooting the Great Bird of Paradise” (figure 3.3). Boon suggests that these two images represent for Wallace a contrast in the natures—the “excesses”—of the two species: degeneracy in the case of the orangutan and divinity in the case of the birds of paradise. Based on this difference, Boon argues, Wallace used the orangutan, which are found in the western end of the archipelago, and the birds of paradise, which are found in the eastern end, to characterize differences not just in the fauna of the two regions but their human populations as well: namely, Dayak of Borneo to the west versus Papuan or Aru of New Guinea and its proximate islands to the east. Boon suggests that Wallace was thereby trying to theorize an “affinity between man and nature,” presenting one as a simulacrum of the other: “It would seem that neither the Aru nor the Dyak emblem [bird of paradise and orangutan] simply identifies a population with its animal neighbors. Rather, each fauna pulls its human counterpart toward its extreme characteristics: lyrical divinity on the one hand, bestial might . . . on the other: avian grace versus animal urge.” Boon suggests that this is a totem-like analysis: “In comparing the difference between Dyak and Aru to the difference between mias [orangutan] and burung [bird of paradise], Wallace propounded, or rather committed, a totemism in western ethnological discourse under the sign of evolutionist science.”28 Wallace indeed devotes a great deal of attention to the orangutan and

Figure 3.2. “Orang-Utan Attacked by Dyaks.” Wallace, Malay Archipelago, frontispiece.

Figure 3.3. “Natives of Aru Shooting the Great Bird of Paradise.” Wallace, Malay ­Archipelago, frontispiece.

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birds of paradise: he mentions them on the first page of The Malay Archipelago, along with the flower Rafflesia and a group of butterflies (Ornithop­ tera), in his introductory sketch of the archipelago—but travelers had been mentioning the orangutan and birds of paradise for centuries preceding Wallace. Furthermore, Wallace does not characterize Dayak versus Papuan as degenerate versus divine, but just the reverse. He thinks the Dayak have the potential to develop and survive colonization, whereas he thinks the savagery of the Papuan dooms them to extinction: The precept and example of higher races will make the Dyak ashamed of his comparatively idle life. . . . It is to be hoped that education and a high-class European example may obviate much of the evil that too often arises in analogous cases, and that we may at length be able to point to one instance of an uncivilized people who have not become demoralized and finally exterminated by contact with European civilization. . . . If the tide of colonization should be turned to New Guinea, there can be little doubt of the early extinction of the Papuan race. A warlike and energetic people who will not submit to national slavery or to domestic servitude must disappear before the white man as surely as do the wolf and the tiger.

As for Boon’s thesis that the orangutan served as a totem for the Dayak, in modern times it is the Papuan whose “primitiveness” is publicly associated with primates.29 Further, Boon does not address one of the most important differences between the orangutan and the birds of paradise: namely, the latter has been the contested subject of an internal as well as external and state-regulated trade for centuries if not millennia, the former has not. Boon derives his totemism thesis from Wallace’s delineation of his famous “line” on the second page of The Malay Archipelago: “From many points of view these islands form one compact geographical whole, and as such they have always been treated by travellers and men of science; but a more careful and detailed study of them under various aspects reveals the unexpected fact that they are divisible into two portions nearly equal in extent, which differ widely in their natural products, and really form parts of two of the primary divisions of the earth.” Wallace’s division is based on his observation of a dramatic difference in faunal assemblages between the western and eastern parts of the archipelago. The dividing line runs

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roughly northeast to southwest, passing to the east of the Philippine Islands in the north, between Borneo and Celebes (Sulawesi) in the center, and between Bali and Lombok in the south, although later in life he moved the line from west of Celebes to east of it (figure 3.4). As he writes in his autobiography: “In this Archipelago there are two distinct faunas rigidly circumscribed, which differ as much as do those of Africa and South America, and more than those of Europe and North America; yet there is nothing on the map or on the face of the islands to mark their limits.” Wallace terms the faunal assemblage in the west “Indo-Malayan”—which includes elephant, tapir, rhinoceros, wild cattle, monkeys, and wild cats—and that in the east “Austro-Malayan”—which includes none of these mammals. His line of demarcation has been the object of great debate; it continues in popular usage, and it continues to be of importance in zoology, although this is less true in botany.30 Wallace argues that the difference in faunal assemblages between the western and eastern regions of the archipelago cannot be explained by differences in environment: “Nowhere does the ancient doctrine—that differences or similarities in the various forms of life that inhabit different countries are due to corresponding physical differences or similarities in the countries themselves—meet with so direct and palpable a contradiction. Borneo and New Guinea, as alike physically as two distinct countries can be, are zoologically wide as the poles asunder; while Australia, with its dry winds, its open plains, its stony deserts, and its temperate climate, yet produces birds and quadrupeds which are closely related to those inhabiting the hot, damp, luxuriant forests which everywhere clothe the plains and mountains of New Guinea.” The explanation for these differences is rather, he says, geological, involving changing land and sea levels and connections: “Now the study of the distribution of animal life upon the present surface of the earth causes us to look upon this constant interchange of land and sea—this making and unmaking of continents, this elevation and disappearance of islands—as a potent reality, which has always and everywhere been in progress, and has been the main agent in determining the manner in which living things are now grouped and scattered over the earth’s surface.”31 In the case of the western part of the archipelago, Wallace argues that the principal islands were formerly connected to the Asian mainland: “At a very recent geological epoch the continent of Asia extended far beyond

Figure 3.4. Wallace’s Line dividing the Indo-Malayan biome to the west and the Austro-Malayan biome to the east. Wallace, 1863, “On the Physical Geography of the Malay Archipelago.” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 33, facing 217 and 218.

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its present limits in a south-easterly direction including the islands of Java, Sumatra, and Borneo, and probably reaching as far as the present 100­fathom line of soundings.” In contrast, he suggests that the islands in the eastern part of the archipelago were once connected to continental lands to the south or east: “The whole of the lands eastwards beyond Java and Borneo, with the exception, perhaps, of Celebes, do essentially form a part of a former Australian or Pacific continent, although some of them may never have been actually joined to it.”32 So close is the association between faunal distributions and geological history, Wallace argues, that study of the former can illuminate the latter: “We may see how important a supplement to geological evidence is the study of the geographical distribution of animals and plants in determining the former condition of the earth’s surface; and how impossible it is to understand the former without taking the latter into account.”33 Recent work in geology using methods and theory unavailable to Wallace—for example, regarding plate tectonics—confirms that during the Pleistocene era, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra were joined to the Asian mainland in a continental land mass called Sunda; whereas New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania were similarly joined in single continent called Sahul—which generally supports Wallace’s inferences from faunal distributions. Boon’s totemism thesis emphasizes the fact that Wallace’s Line divides the archipelago into not just two different faunal assemblages but also two different cultural complexes. Modern discussions of Wallace’s Line generally focus just on the biological division, reflecting the loss of the natural history perspective that encompassed society as well as environment. But Wallace writes that his discovery of a division of peoples actually preceded his discovery of the division of fauna: “Before I had arrived at the conviction that the eastern and western halves of the Archipelago belonged to two distinct primary regions of the earth, I had been led to group the natives of the Archipelago under two radically distinct races.” The two races Wallace identified were Malays to the west and Papuans to the east: If we draw a line, commencing to the east of the Philippine Islands, thence along the western coast of Halmahera, through the island of Buru, and curving round the west end of Flores, then bending back by Sandalwood Island to take in Rote, we shall divide the archipelago into two portions, the races of which have strongly marked dis-

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tinctive peculiarities. This line will separate the Malayan and all the Asiatic races from the Papuans and all that inhabit the Pacific; and though along the line of junction intermigration and commixture have taken place, yet the division is on the whole almost as well defined and strongly contrasted, as is the corresponding zoological division of the archipelago, into an Indo-Malayan and Austro-­ Malayan region.

Wallace devotes ten pages to a comparison of Malays and Papuans and sums up what he sees as the behavioral or cultural differences: “The Malay is bashful, cold, undemonstrative, and quiet; the Papuan is bold, impetuous, excitable, and noisy. The former is grave and seldom laughs; the latter is joyous and laughter-loving—the one conceals his emotions, the other displays them.”34 Wallace writes that this ethnological division within the archipelago largely correlates with the faunal division: “It is important to point out the harmony which exists between the line of separation of the human races of the archipelago and that of the animal productions of the same country. . . . The dividing lines do not, it is true, exactly agree; but I think it is a remarkable fact, and something more than a mere coincidence, that they should traverse the same district and approach each other so closely as they do.” Wallace suggests that the geological events that separated the two distinct faunal assemblages were also responsible for this ethnological division: “If, however, I am right in my supposition that the region where the dividing line of the Indo-Malayan and Austro-Malayan regions of zoology can now be drawn was formerly occupied by a much wider sea than at present, and if man existed on the earth at that period, we shall see good reason why the races inhabiting the Asiatic and Pacific areas should now meet and partially intermingle in the vicinity of that dividing line.” He notes that the human and faunal lines cannot entirely coincide due to unique factors that affect the distribution of human populations: “The reason why exactly the same line does not limit both is sufficiently intelligible. Man has means of traversing the sea which animals do not possess; and a superior race has power to press out or assimilate an inferior one.” Recent archaeological, linguistic, and genetic research in the region suggests that about 50,000 years ago there was a migration from the Asian mainland of neolithic hunter-gatherers to New Guinea and Australia, followed 4,000

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years ago by a migration of neolithic Asian farmers and fishermen.35 The former, called Papuans today, could have benefited from the Sunda land bridges; the latter, called Austronesians, would have had to travel over water. The two peoples and migrations map neatly onto Wallace’s Papuan-Malay divide. Boon suggests that Wallace overcommitted himself to his thesis of division within the archipelago, leading him to essentialize the divides and ignore conflicting data: “Wallace notes the failure of distributions of flora, fauna, races, and cultures to respect boundaries nature seemingly intended. . . . His text illustrates with peculiar intensity that half hope by natural historians that things would divide neatly, coupled with repeated confirmations that—whether in matters of geological divisions and species, race, and region, or physical form and moral character—‘the same line does not limit both.’” Boon points to parts of the archipelago, like the Aru Islands south of New Guinea, where Wallace’s Line seems to be confounded by cultural mixtures: “Aru itself presents those mingled racial, linguistic, and cultural characteristics of the kind that both disturb and somehow attract Wallace. He observes that the complicated mixture of races would ‘utterly confound an ethnologist.’” Yet it is Wallace himself who admits this when confronting “the complicated mixture of races in Aru,” which he eventually attributes to intermarriage of the Papuans with Portuguese, Malay, Dutch, and Chinese traders. Boon concludes that Wallace’s narrative is characterized by “a continual tension between desired orderly divisions and their enticing chinks” and writes—in this case I think correctly—that “Wallace both resists and celebrates transgressed boundaries.” Recent research by J. Stephen Lansing and Murray P. Cox suggests that although the line between Malayan and Papuan is indeed “transgressed” in places, it is also more often not transgressed: the genetic differences between the two peoples are still quite marked. According to Lansing and Cox, this is due to a cultural barrier: the cultural differences, which so impressed Wallace, have kept these two peoples quite separate.36 Wallace’s observations were prescient not only in discerning these cultural differences but also in seeing their political significance: Wallace saw the Malays as being “in history” and potentially surviving colonization, but not the Papuan. During the colonial era, the island of New Guinea was variously ruled by German, English, Dutch, and Australian powers. In 1975, the eastern half of the island became the independent state of Papua

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New Guinea. When the Dutch left the East Indies following the Indonesian war of independence, they held on to West Papua, on the basis of its ethnic and geographic distinction from the rest of the archipelago. Following a disputed 1969 plebiscite, however, the Indonesian military took control of West Papua, and in the ensuing decades it has waged an unrelenting campaign to suppress political dissent and transform the West Papuan population through transmigration of millions of people from Java and Bali. In the years since Wallace first drew his line between Malay and Papuan, the difference that he was attending to has been persistently marked, contested, and transgressed.

Trade and Politics As reflected in his remarks on the futures of Malay versus Papuan, Wallace was attentive to political issues. He was a politically engaged scholar, and his own politics were clearly liberal. Wallace, born in Wales to an English mother and Scottish father, had Celtic roots. Commentators note that the surname Wallace traces back to the thirteenth-century leader of a Scottish revolt against the English, and in his autobiography Wallace comes out in support of greater independence for the Welsh as well: “We have ample proof that the Welsh are still a distinct nation with a peculiar language, literature, and history, and that the claim which they are now making for home rule, along with the other great sub divisions of the British Islands, is thoroughly justified.” Wallace had an independent streak: at the end of a year of teaching in the collegiate school at Leicester, he writes, “I felt myself out of place . . . mainly because a completely subordinate position was distasteful to me.” Wallace states in multiple places in his autobiography that he is a socialist: he was a prominent critic of absentee landlords in Wales and England, he criticized programs to enclose commons, and he publicly supported programs to nationalize land. Writing of plans to enclose common lands in Llandrindod, Wales, Wallace writes: “To those that had much, much was to be given, while from the poor the rights were taken away; for though nominally those that owned a little land had some compensation, it was so small as to be of no use to them in comparison with the grazing rights they before possessed.” Wallace was a critic of industrialization in Britain, writing: “Their hills and valleys become full of furnaces and steam engines; their green meadows are buried beneath heaps

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of mine-refuse or destroyed by the fumes from copper-works; their waving woods are cut down for timber to supply their mines and collieries; their towns and cities increase in size, in dirt, and in gloom; the fish are killed in their rivers by mineral solutions, and entire hill-sides are devastated by noxious vapours.” He was a critic of capitalism in general, bemoaning the gap between the lives of wealthy Victorians and the lives of millions of workers, and arguing for a more equitable division of wealth between capitalists and laborers. Collard observes, “Darwin’s version of natural selection sits more comfortably with capitalism as a struggle for survival than does Wallace’s.”37 Wallace’s politics are reflected in the many anti-colonial statements he made. He is attentive to the ill effects of colonial rule in the Malay Archipelago, believing that the character faults often ascribed to its natives were actually the results of their contact with the Europeans. In an 1864 article on zoological and botanical geography, Wallace writes, “Naturalists need not be bound by the same rule as politicians, and may be permitted to recognize the just claims of the more ancient inhabitants, and to raise up fallen nationalities. The aborigines and not the invaders must be looked upon as the rightful owners of the soil, and should determine the position of their country in our system of zoological geography.” In an 1865 letter to the editor of the journal Reader, he castigates the hypocrisy of the civilizing mission of colonial rule: “The practices of European settlers are too often so diametrically opposed to the precepts of Christianity, and so deficient in humanity, justice, and charity, that the poor savage must be sorely puzzled to understand why this new faith, which is to do him so much good, should have had so little effect on his teacher’s own countrymen.” And later in life, as he reflected on his years spent living with the peoples of the Malay Archipelago, Wallace vouchsafed that colonial rule was “an absurdity.”38 Nonetheless, when Wallace wrote The Malay Archipelago, which was published six years after his return to England, his attitude toward Dutch colonial rule was unfailingly positive: “I believe that the Dutch system is the very best that can be adopted, when a European nation conquers or otherwise acquires possession of a country inhabited by an industrious but semi-barbarous people.” He invokes the metaphor of parent-child relations to justify the disciplinary dimension of Dutch rule: “Now, there is not merely an analogy—there is in many respects an identity of relation,

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between master and pupil or parent and child on the one hand, and an uncivilized race and its civilized rulers on the other. . . . As the wilful child or the idle schoolboy, who was never taught obedience, and never made to do anything which of his own free will he was not inclined to do, would in most cases obtain neither education nor manners; so it is much more unlikely that the savage, with all the confirmed habits of manhood and the traditional prejudices of race, should ever do more than copy a few of the least beneficial customs of civilization, without some stronger stimulus than precept, very imperfectly backed by example.” Wallace says despotic means are sometime necessary: “If we are satisfied that we are right in assuming the government over a savage race, and occupying their country; and if we further consider it our duty to do what we can to improve our rude subjects and raise them up towards our own level, we must not be too much afraid of the cry of ‘despotism’ and ‘slavery,’ but must use the authority we possess to induce them to do work, which they may not altogether like, but which we know to be an indispensable step in their moral and physical advancement. The Dutch have shown much good policy in the means by which they have done this.” He defends the Dutch institution of debt slavery and suggests that slaves were treated so well after they were emancipated, which took place while he was in the East Indies, that most returned to their old service “owing to the amicable relations which had always existed between them and their masters.”39 Most of Wallace’s comments on Dutch rule deal with trade, which is not to be wondered at since his own collecting activities fitted him into the archipelago’s ancient system of trade, even though he seemed not to realize it. In particular, he comments on the Dutch effort to cultivate export crops on native lands. Early in the nineteenth century, straightened domestic finances led the Dutch to make greater efforts to exploit the existing agroecology of the East Indies, through the cultuurstelsel or “cultivation system” (1830–70). This was designed to promote greater production of export crops by requiring 20 percent of village lands to be devoted to export crops, to be paid to the government in lieu of taxes. Wallace acknowledges that the Dutch cultivation system was open to criticism: “No doubt the system here sketched seems open to serious objection. It is to a certain extent despotic, and interferes with free trade, free labour, and free communication. A native cannot leave his village without a pass, and cannot engage himself to any merchant or captain without a Government permit.

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The coffee has all to be sold to Government, at less than half the price that the local merchant would give for it, and he consequently cries out loudly against ‘monopoly’ and ‘oppression.’” Although Wallace was a critic of capitalism, he generally supported the price mechanism and thus free trade; and yet in spite of supporting free trade, he made an exception for the colonial Dutch monopolies.40 Wallace suggests that the ills of the Dutch cultivation system were outweighed by what it achieved, and he cited Minahasa in the highlands of northern Sulawesi as an example: “Forty years ago the country was a wilderness, the people naked savages, garnishing their rude houses with human heads. . . . Now it is a garden worthy of its sweet native name of ‘Minahasa.’ Good roads and paths traverse it in every direction; some of the finest coffee plantations in the world surround the villages, interspersed with extensive rice-fields more than sufficient for the support of the population . . . results which are entirely due to the system of government now adopted by the Dutch in their Eastern possessions.” The achievements of the cultivation system are so great, Wallace suggests, that they justify the long efforts by the Dutch to monopolize the spice trade. Wallace defends the notorious Dutch practice of destroying the spice trees on all of the islands outside their control, which led to Rumphius’s derisive comment that the Dutch “wage war on trees rather than men”: “Even the destruction of the nutmeg and clove trees in many islands, in order to restrict their cultivation to one or two where the monopoly could be easily guarded, usually made the theme of so much virtuous indignation against the Dutch, may be defended on similar principles, and is certainly not nearly so bad as many monopolies we ourselves have till very recently maintained.”41 Critical to the logic of Wallace’s defense of the Dutch cultivation system was his depiction of the prior state of affairs. For example, he paints an abject picture of Menado in highland Sulawesi prior to the Dutch introduction of coffee plantations: “Here we have a picture of true savage life; of small isolated communities at war with all around them, subject to the wants and miseries of such a condition, drawing a precarious existence from the luxuriant soil, and living on from generation to generation, with no desire for physical amelioration, and no prospect of moral advancement. Such was their condition down to the year 1822, when the coffee plant was first introduced, and experiments were made as to its cultivation.” Wallace

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argues that “uncivilized peoples” have no tradition of free trade, which renders them overly vulnerable to its ill effects, which justifies the Dutch policy of not engaging in free trade with them but instead imposing something very different in its place, the cultivation system: This brings us to the “culture system,” which is the source of all the wealth the Dutch derive from Java, and is the subject of much abuse in this country [viz., Britain] because it is the reverse of “free trade.” To understand its uses and beneficial effects, it is necessary first to sketch the common results of free European trade with uncivilized peoples. . . . The free competition of European traders, however, introduces two powerful inducements to exertion. Spirits or opium is a temptation too strong for most savages to resist, and to obtain these he will sell whatever he has, and will work to get more. Another temptation he cannot resist is goods on credit. The trader offers him gay cloths, knives, gongs, guns, and gunpowder, to be paid for by some crop perhaps not yet planted, or some product yet in the forest. He has not sufficient forethought to take only a moderate quantity, and not enough energy to work early and late in order to get out of debt; and the consequence is that he accumulates debt upon debt, and often remains for years, or for life, a debtor and almost a slave.42

After noting Wallace’s praise for the Dutch cultivation system, Wyhe, one of his modern editors, writes, “At the time and since, the system has been widely condemned as one of the most rapacious forms of colonial government.” It was the subject of a famous, semi-fictional 1859 exposé, titled Max Havelaar: or, The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, written by Multatuli, the pen name of the great Dutch writer Eduard Douwes Dekker. But Wallace found Dekker’s work “tedious”: “[Its] only point is to show that the Dutch Residents and Assistant Residents wink at the extortions of the native princes; and that in some districts the natives have to do work without payment, and have their goods taken away from them without compensation.” In any case, Wallace says that the British have done worse: “Even if not exaggerated, the facts stated are not nearly so bad as those of the oppression by free-trade indigo-planters, and torturing by native tax-gatherers under British rule in India, with which the readers of English newspapers were familiar a few years ago.”43

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The premise for Wallace’s defense of the cultivation system, the lack of a native tradition of free trade, is manifestly incorrect, as Wallace himself abundantly demonstrates. For example, he writes of the Aru Islands: “These islands are quite out of the track of all European trade, and are inhabited only by black mop-headed savages, who yet contribute to the luxurious tastes of the most civilized races. Pearls, mother-of-pearl, and tortoise-shell find their way to Europe, while edible birds’ nests and ‘tripang’ or sea-slug are obtained by shiploads for the gastronomic enjoyment of the Chinese. The trade to these islands has existed from very early times, and it is from them that Birds of Paradise, of the two kinds known to Linnæus, were first brought.”44 The fact that the colloquial Malay term for the bird of paradise throughout the archipelago was Burong mati or “dead bird” attests to the fact that these birds—their skin and plumage—were primarily known as a trade good. Throughout The Malay Archipelago, there is no aspect of native society that impresses Wallace as much as this trade, which long predated the colonial era.45 Wallace experienced an epiphany when he visited the Moluccan trading port of Dobbo, and he writes at length about his impressions (figure 3.5). I dare say there are now near five hundred people in Dobbo of various races, all met in this remote corner of the East, as they express it, “to look for their fortune”; to get money any way they can. They are most of them people who have the very worst reputation for honesty as well as every other form of morality—Chinese, Bugis, Seramese, and half-caste Javanese, with a sprinkling of half-wild Papuans from Timor, Babar, and other islands—yet all goes on as yet very quietly. This motley, ignorant, bloodthirsty, thievish population live here without the shadow of a government, with no police, no courts, and no lawyers; yet they do not cut each other’s throats; do not plunder each other day and night; do not fall into the anarchy such a state of things might be supposed to lead to. It is very extraordinary! It puts strange thoughts into one’s head about the mountain-load of government under which people exist in Europe, and suggests the idea that we may be overgoverned. Think of the hundred Acts of Parliament annually enacted to prevent us, the people of England, from cutting each other’s throats, or from doing to our neighbours as we would not be done by. Think of the thou-

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Figure 3.5. The entrepôt of Dobbo in the Moluccas, in the trading season. Wallace, Malay Archipelago, figure 36, facing 476.

sands of lawyers and barristers whose whole lives are spent in telling us what the hundred Acts of Parliament mean, and one would be led to infer that if Dobbo has too little law England has too much. Here we may behold in its simplest form the genius of Commerce at the work of Civilization. Trade is the magic that keeps all at peace, and unites these discordant elements into a well-behaved community. All are traders, and all know that peace and order are essential to successful trade, and thus a public opinion is created which puts down all lawlessness.46

Wallace, who writes at equal length elsewhere in The Malay Archipelago about how much the natives need the discipline of the Dutch, is confounded by commerce proceeding in the absence of that discipline at Dobbo—but he fails to confront the first thought with the second. Wallace appreciated the trade at Dobbo because he is essentially a trader too, though he disingenuously denies it, writing, “Almost all, or I may safely say all, the new arrivals pay me a visit, to see with their own eyes the unheard-of phenomenon of a person come to stay at Dobbo who does not trade!” Wallace is not interested in the tripang, dried sharks’ fins, or

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mother-of-pearl shells, which constituted the most common trade goods at Dobbo, but when staying there he does trade for insects and land shells, and he would have traded for birds of paradise if the ones offered him were not “so dirty and so badly preserved.” The fact that birds of paradise are being traded at all, however poor the specimens may be, places Wallace in the most unique position that he is ever in during his eight years in the Malay Archipelago: namely, he is just one collector among many (see chapter 1).47 Wallace sent his assistant Charles Allen, who accompanied him dur­ ing part of his travels in the Malay Archipelago, to the coast of New Guinea to acquire specimens of new species of birds of paradise. Allen was accompanied by a lieutenant and two soldiers sent by the sultan of Tidore, but the trip was not productive: “Mr. Allen met with difficulties in this voyage which we had neither of us encountered before. To understand these, it is necessary to consider that the Birds of Paradise are an article of commerce, and are the monopoly of the chiefs of the coast villages, who obtain them at a low rate from the mountaineers, and sell them to the Bugis traders. A portion is also paid every year as tribute to the Sultan of Tidore. The natives are therefore very jealous of a stranger, especially a European, interfering in their trade, and above all of going into the interior to deal with the mountaineers themselves.” This passage showed great insight into the politics and geography of trade in the region: if foreign traders, like Wallace and Allen, directly contacted the primary collectors in the mountainous interior, it would have been prejudicial to the long-­ established authority of the coastal natives, which was based on ensuring that no one but them had such access. Wallace suggests that these political dynamics affected even the species of bird of paradise that get traded, in particular why the rarer species were so hard to come by: I impute it principally to them [the rare species] having been sought after by the Dutch officials through the Sultan of Tidore. The chiefs of the annual expeditions to collect tribute have had orders to get all the rare sorts of Paradise Birds; and as they pay little or nothing for them (it being sufficient to say they are for the Sultan), the head men of the coast villages would for the future refuse to purchase them from the mountaineers, and confine themselves instead to the commoner species which are less sought after by amateurs, but are

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a more profitable merchandise. The same causes frequently lead the inhabitants of uncivilized countries to conceal minerals or other natural products with which they may become acquainted, from the fear of being obliged to pay increased tribute, or of bringing upon themselves a new and oppressive labour.

This is a remarkable insight on the part of Wallace into one of the defining, historic dynamics of trade in the archipelago and indeed elsewhere around the globe: natural resources that are in great demand by the wider society can bring unwanted attention to local peoples, whose only recourse may be to conceal or even destroy them, as indeed happened with black pepper, for example, in the eighteenth century (see interlude following chapter 1).48

Positionality Wallace’s writing is nearly unique among nineteenth-century natural histories of Asia in the way that it foregrounds his own role as observer and author. During an era in which Orientalist tropes were dominant in accounts of the Far East written by Europeans, not only does Wallace not make use of them but he recognizes their existence as such and rejects them. Wallace challenges many examples of Orientalist tropes concerning violence. One, concerning traditional punishments for adultery on the island of Lombok, has already been mentioned. Another concerns headhunting: in a letter from Sarawak in June of 1855, Wallace reports a comment from a newly arrived missionary, “I met a Dyak on the path with a long knife & I expected to have my head cut off,” to which Wallace adds, “Whereas the idea of cutting off the heads of Europeans is never for a minute imagined by these poor people.” In a letter in December of the same year, Wallace adds by way of further explanation, “I have been very much pleased with the Dyaks. They are a very kind, simple & hospitable people. . . . In moral character they are far superior to either Malays or Chinese, for though head-taking has been a custom among them it is only as a trophy of war.”49 Wallace devotes an extended comment to another trope of Oriental violence, the much-discussed Malay custom of amuk or amok—a term that has in fact entered the English lexicon: “Makassar is the most celebrated

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place in the East for ‘running a muck.’ There are said to be one or two a month on the average, and five, ten, or twenty persons are sometimes killed or wounded at one of them. It is the national and therefore the honourable mode of committing suicide among the natives of Sulawesi, and is the fashionable way of escaping from their difficulties. A Roman fell upon his sword, a Japanese rips up his stomach, and an Englishman blows out his brains with a pistol. The Bugis mode has many advantages to one suicidially inclined.” Thus, Wallace places the practice of amok in comparative perspective, suggesting that the English, in their own way, also run amok. He writes, with empathy: “And what that excitement is those who have been in one best know, but all who have ever given way to violent passions, or even indulged in violent and exciting exercises, may form a very good idea. It is a delirious intoxication, a temporary madness that absorbs every thought and every energy. And can we wonder at the kris-bearing, untaught, brooding Malay preferring such a death, looked upon as almost honourable, to the cold-blooded details of suicide, if he wishes to escape from overwhelming troubles, or the merciless clutches of the hangman and the disgrace of a public execution, when he has taken the law into his own hands, and too hastily revenged himself upon his enemy? In either case he chooses rather to ‘amok.’” Few other travelers to the Malay Archipelago challenged their readers in Europe to think of the native practice of amok not as the behavior of the quintessential Oriental other but as someone experiencing a “delirious intoxication” with which they might sympathize.50 Since Wallace was not the first traveler or scholar from Britain to go to the tropics or even to the Malay Archipelago, there were established expectations for what Wallace would do and what he would write, and Wallace was conscious of these. In one place in The Malay Archipelago he admits that the tropical forest is not as colorful as the home audience has been led to believe by the cultivation of tropical flowering plants in hothouses: “There was infinite variety in the colour and aspect of the foliage, there was grandeur in the rocky masses and in the exuberant luxuriance of the vegetation, but there was no brilliancy of colour, none of those bright flowers and gorgeous masses of blossom so generally considered to be everywhere present in the tropics.” Elsewhere, when visiting the rajah of Goa in the Celebes, he writes of the princesses of the court and what he might be expected to say of them: “And here I might (if I followed the

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example of most travellers) launch out into a glowing description of the charms of these damsels, the elegant costumes they wore, and the gold and silver ornaments with which they were adorned. The jacket or body of purple gauze would figure well in such a description, allowing the heaving bosom to be seen beneath it, while ‘sparkling eyes,’ and ‘jetty tresses,’ and ‘tiny feet’ might be thrown in profusely. But, alas! regard for truth will not permit me to expatiate too admiringly on such topics, determined as I am to give as far as I can a true picture of the people and places I visit.”51 This sort of reflexive self-awareness became common in late twentieth-century anthropology, but it was rare to nonexistent in mid-nineteenth-century natural history. Wallace can dispense with the sensationalism that might be gleaned from a cursory acquaintance with the Malay Archipelago because of the circumstances of his fieldwork. As James T. Costa notes, “Wallace was not an ‘expeditionary traveler,’ by which I mean he was not part of a sponsored program of exploration in the manner of Captain Cook’s voyages of the late eighteenth century . . . or the voyages of Darwin, Hooker, and Huxley for that matter. . . . Rather, Wallace traveled light, usually without fellow collectors . . . but always with hired assistants.” Wallace traveled both light and long: his eight years in the Malay Archipelago and four years in South America were unprecedented at the time. Sherrie Lyons writes, “Unlike Darwin, Wallace had lived among native peoples for extended periods of time; in fact he was one of the first Europeans of scientific bent to do so.” The sheer duration of these trips demanded great skill on Wallace’s part, including “a real knack for dealing with native peoples.” According to Costa, “His success in the field, particularly during his extended travels in extremely remote and isolated regions, was owed in no small measure to his facility with languages, his keen interest in the native cultures he encountered, and the evident fairness and respect he displayed toward his assistants.”52 Wallace was not entirely free of the biases of his era, but time and temperament left him open to surprise. An example is his appraisal of the wood carving and other artistic skills of the Papuans at Dorey on the New Guinea mainland. He implies that as an Englishman he does not expect to find there a high level of artistic skill, but he acknowledges: “If these people are not savages, where shall we find any? Yet they have all a decided love for the fine arts, and spend their leisure time in executing works whose

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good taste and elegance would often be admired in our schools of design!” At several points in The Malay Archipelago, Wallace compliments the systems of terraced and irrigated rice cultivation that he sees, for example on the island of Lombok, which he says equals anything in China and surpasses anything in “civilized” Europe: “It was now that I first obtained an adequate idea of one of the most wonderful systems of cultivation in the world, equalling all that is related of Chinese industry, and as far as I know surpassing in the labour that has been bestowed upon it any tract of equal extent in the most civilized countries of Europe.”53 Wallace’s immersive experience in native society in the Amazon and the Malay Archipelago undermined the ethnocentrism of his own culture: “Critical to understanding Wallace’s position is acknowledging that his extensive time spent living with native people resulted in his rejecting the racist thinking of the time, in spite of often referring to them as savages. He realized that at their core they were not different from Victorian gentlemen. They were just as intelligent, expressed the same range of emotions, and had the same moral capabilities.” As Wallace himself wrote in his autobiography: “The more I see of uncivilized people, the better I think of human nature on the whole, and the essential differences between civilized and savage man seem to disappear.” This insight differentiated Wallace from most other Europeans, including Darwin.54 On occasion, Wallace used native societies as a yardstick by which to measure his own. His appraisal of the “lawless” Dobbo trading entrepôt, from the standpoint of “overgoverned” Britain, has already been mentioned. Elsewhere in The Malay Archipelago, he invokes the behavior of “savages” to question the assumed superiority of the civilized English: “Savages often surpass us in this respect. They will often refuse to enter an empty house during the absence of the owner, even though something belonging to themselves may have been left in it; and when asked to call one of their sleeping companions to start on a journey, they will be careful not to touch him, and will positively refuse to shake him rudely, as an Englishman would have no scruple in doing. . . . There is in fact almost as much difference between the various races of savage as of civilized peoples, and we may safely affirm that the better specimens of the former are much superior to the lower examples of the latter class.”55 In the last few pages of The Malay Archipelago, Wallace famously uses the “ground” of the Malay Archipelago for an extended and pointed

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critique of England that was almost unheard-of for the time. He begins with these words: “Before bidding my readers farewell, I wish to make a few observations on a subject of yet higher interest and deeper importance, which the contemplation of savage life has suggested, and on which I believe that the civilized can learn something from the savage.” Wallace proceeds to draw an unflattering comparison between colonizers and colonized, which completely undermined the rationale for colonial rule and earned the book a mixed assessment in the British Quarterly Review, “utterly rejecting” Wallace’s “political theorizing.”56 In his critique, Wallace first paints an idyllic picture of native society in the Malay Archipelago and the Amazon, in particular with respect to equality as noted earlier: Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place. . . . There are none of those wide distinctions, of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and servant, which are the product of our civilization; there is none of that wide-spread division of labour, which, while it increases wealth, produces also conflicting interests; there is not that severe competition and struggle for existence, or for wealth, which the dense population of civilized countries inevitably creates. All incitements to great crimes are thus wanting, and petty ones are repressed, partly by the influence of public opinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of justice and of his neighbour’s right which seems to be, in some degree, inherent in every race of man.57

Referring to this “perfect social state” of the peoples he has lived with in the Malay Archipelago and South America, Wallace asserts that England falls short by comparison: “Although we have progressed vastly beyond the savage state in intellectual achievements, we have not advanced equally in morals.” The particular object of Wallace’s ire was the disparity in wealth that the industrial revolution had created in England, on the basis of which he judged England’s laboring class to be “worse off than the savage in the midst of his tribe.” As Wallace wrote when staying in the Dobbo in the Aru Islands: “In one of the most remote corners of the earth savages can buy clothing cheaper than the people of the country where it is made; that the weaver’s child should shiver in the wintry wind, unable to purchase articles attainable by the wild natives of a tropical climate,

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where clothing is mere ornament or luxury, should make us pause ere we regard with unmixed admiration the system which has led to such a result.” Until this injustice is rectified, Wallace writes, “we shall never, as regards the whole community, attain to any real or important superiority over the better class of savages. This is the lesson I have been taught by my observations of uncivilised man.”58 John van Wyhe, one of Wallace’s editors, writes that these final remarks in The Malay Archipelago are responsible for an unmerited liberal reputation toward native peoples: “The belief that Wallace was unusually sympathetic or empathetic towards other races is probably based on his remarks in the final chapter of The Malay Archipelago.” But Wyhe thinks this is a misreading: “Wallace’s intention was not to show that other races were equal to Europeans, but to criticize social institutions in his own country that he felt needed reform.” As evidence of this, Wyhe notes, “Wallace’s praise of the paternalistic Dutch Cultivation System in their colonies is curious.” The Malay Archipelago is indeed replete with favorable comments on the Dutch system, but it also contains many more insightful and favorable comments on native societies, and most observers would agree with Charles H. Smith’s comment that “no one in Wallace’s time was more vocal in insisting that culturally unsophisticated native peoples were yet our equals so far as intelligence and morality go.”59 Wallace had a very matter-of-fact approach to the belief systems of native peoples. Spirit beliefs were a lightning rod for colonial biases regarding nonwestern peoples, and for many of Wallace’s peers, the native mind on this subject was a true black box. Thus, Darwin likened native beliefs in invisible nature spirits to his dog’s belief that an umbrella being blown by the wind is being propelled by an invisible agent. Wallace was practically alone in his heuristic stance that native beliefs, myths, and legends should all be investigated for a basis in empirical facts. In a 1904 essay entitled “The Birds of Paradise in the Arabian Nights,” he argues that some of the particulars in these tales had a basis in the places and creatures of the Malay Archipelago, writing: “A considerable experience among savage and barbarous peoples, and some acquaintance with the records of past ages and the beliefs of unlettered peasants in all parts of the world, have convinced me that, in the great majority of cases, beliefs or legends referring to natural phenomena are founded on facts, and are for the most part

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actual descriptions of what has been observed, though often misinterpreted, and sometimes overlaid with supernatural accessories.”60 Wallace’s openness to a factual basis for native beliefs in the Malay Archipelago helps to explain one of the great, apparent paradoxes of his career: namely, his steadfast belief in English spiritualism, mesmerism, and séances. He devoted over seventy pages to a defense of these beliefs in his autobiography. This stance has struck many as out of keeping with Wallace’s reputation as one of the greatest scientists of the Victorian era, and it has been blamed for damaging his reputation among his contemporaries and also with historians of science. Sherrie Lyons raises the question of why Wallace was so taken with spiritualism, whereas Darwin and others in their circle were not, and she offers the intriguing theory that it is because only Wallace lived with native peoples. Charles H. Smith refers to “a continuation of observations from his Amazon days, during which he witnessed rituals performed by shamans and other medicine men. . . . While in the Malay Archipelago he encountered more phenomena of this kind.”61 The absence of a similar experience left Darwin with an impoverished idea of native belief systems, as exemplified by his analogy—to native spirit beliefs—of a dog barking at a wind-blown umbrella. Just as Wallace’s experience of nonwestern societies influenced his view of English spiritualism, so did the reverse occur. Another of Wallace’s contemporaries, Edward Burnett Tylor, called by some “the first great name in anthropology,” published his influential two-volume work Primitive Culture in 1871. One of his topics was werewolves, on which he wrote: “The relation of morbid imagination to myth is peculiarly well instanced in the history of a widespread belief, extending through savage, barbaric, classic, oriental, and mediæval life, and surviving to this day in European superstition. This belief, which may be conveniently called the Doctrine of Werewolves, is that certain men, by natural gift or magic art, can turn themselves into ravening wild beasts. The origin of this idea is by no means sufficiently explained. . . . The doctrine of werewolves is substantially that of a temporary metempsychosis or metamorphosis. Now it really occurs that, in various forms of mental disease, patients prowl shyly, long to bite and destroy mankind, and even fancy themselves transformed into wild beasts.” Wallace wrote a review of Tylor’s work in 1872, saying in part: “A recognition of the now well-established phenomena of mesmerism would

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have enabled Mr. Tylor to give a far more rational explanation of werewolves and analogous beliefs than that which he offers us. Were-wolves were probably men who had exceptional power of acting upon certain sensitive individuals, and could make them, when so acted upon, believe they saw what the mesmeriser pleased; and who used this power for bad purposes. This will explain most of the alleged facts without resorting to the short and easy method of rejecting them as the results of mere morbid imagination and gross credulity.”62 Wallace applies his belief in mesmerism to this case, but even more important, he looks for an explanation of this “primitive” belief in factual, social realities, which makes Tylor’s thesis look by comparison more simplistic and, indeed, less anthropological.

Conclusion Wallace and his works often prove challenging for modern readers. His belief in spiritualism is an obvious instance of this, but that is just one example of a more general hybridity in his career, and in his writings, that confounds the modern reader. Wallace studied the spiritualist beliefs of the English and also the myths and legends of natives in the Far East. In The Malay Archipelago, not only did he discuss both nature and culture, but he combined a natural history of the region with commentary on the political economy of England. This prompted James Boon to write that The Malay Archipelago contains multiple accounts of the same data from different perspectives, one being an “adventure story” and the other “a more conventional natural history”: “The work thus contains multiple—two— versions of the same ‘data.’”63 Boon is not incorrect in this assessment, only in its implications. There are shifts in perspective, positionality, and voice in The Malay Archipelago. Boon notes—but labels as “bizarre”—Wallace’s alternation between a first-person narrative of an adventure story and a third-person account of natural history. This shift is marked by the inclusion versus exclusion of third parties. As Jane R. Camerini writes, “The role of servants and other natives in the collection of birds of paradise was described openly by Wallace in his published accounts. . . . However, Ali’s [his primary field assistant] role disappears in a more formal discussion of paradise birds at the end of the book, even in the same narrative of his travels in which this event is described. In the technical account, Wallace described the bird as

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having been discovered by himself. Both his journal and his notebook reflect these two descriptive modes; when he was a naturalist describing the birds ‘philosophically,’ he is the lone observer, but when he is writing a narrative of travel and collecting, his account includes others.”64 In some respects Wallace demonstrates a degree of self-awareness of his positionality that was unusual for the time. For example, in the Aru Islands, when commenting on “the great concourse of visitors” who come to look at him every day, Wallace writes: “A few years before I had been one of the gazers at the Zulus and the Aztecs in London. Now the tables were turned upon me, for I was to these people a new and strange variety of man, and had the honour of affording to them, in my own person, an attractive exhibition, gratis.” Elsewhere in The Malay Archipelago, Wallace shows that he knows that he is but the latest in a long history of visitors, to even the most remote parts of the archipelago, which begins in the mythical past. For example, in a village in the Aru Islands he is told a murky story of abduction of some of their ancestors by foreigners with superhuman powers, a story that obviously still plagues the community, and which is part of a mythical tradition to which Wallace thinks he may be added: “It is not impossible that something similar to what they related to me really happened when the early Portuguese discoverers first came to Aru, and has formed the foundation for a continually increasing accumulation of legend and fable. I have no doubt that to the next generation, or even before, I myself shall be transformed into a magician or a demigod, a worker of miracles, and a being of supernatural knowledge.”65 The multi-vocality of The Malay Archipelago—the fact that it pre­ sents many Wallaces or at least many facets of Wallace’s personality and interests—was not uncommon in earlier natural history texts—for example, in Linnaeus and in works like Thoreau’s—but it became increasingly rare as the field itself waned in importance. At the same time, it became more common in literature, as noted in the discussion of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in the preface.

Interlude

Repatriation

I

n The Malay Archipelago, Wallace makes clear that part of the fascination for him of the birds of paradise is that they are physically and culturally so inaccessible, sequestered among “savages” in the interior of New Guinea: It seems as if Nature had taken precautions that these her choicest treasures should not be made too common, and thus be undervalued. This northern coast of New Guinea is exposed to the full swell of the Pacific Ocean, and is rugged and harbourless. The country is all rocky and mountainous, covered everywhere with dense forest, offering in its swamps and precipices and serrated ridges an almost impassable barrier to the unknown interior; and the people are dangerous savages, in the very lowest stage of barbarism. In such a country, and among such a people, are found these wonderful productions of Nature, the Birds of Paradise, whose exquisite beauty of form and colour, and strange developments of plumage are calculated to excite the wonder and admiration of the most civilized and the most intellectual of mankind, and to furnish inexhaustible materials for study to the naturalist, and for speculation to the philosopher.

The trope of discovery was integral to colonial projects; it erased existing systems of knowledge and use of natural resources and privileged those of colonial newcomers.1 But Wallace was actually looking beyond this colonial moment to what came next.

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Boon interprets this passage from Wallace as a statement about the relationship between value and rarity, but Wallace is not just saying that these creatures are precious because they are rare, but that they are doomed because of the colonial moment in which they are enmeshed. Having just obtained a specimen of the king bird of paradise (Paradesia regia) in the Aru Islands, he writes: The remote island in which I found myself situated, in an almost unvisited sea, far from the tracks of merchant fleets and navies; the wild, luxuriant tropical forest, which stretched far away on every side; the rude, uncultured savages who gathered round me—all had their influence in determining the emotions with which I gazed upon this “thing of beauty.” I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course—year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild, inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-­ balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy.2

His prophecy of extinction contributes to his emotions when gazing upon “this thing of beauty.” Wallace’s prophecy has been borne out since the time of his writing, with many of the objects of his study—like the birds of paradise and the orangutan—today having endangered status. Wallace intuited some of the factors that would bring this about, notably the political-economic asym-

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metry between more and less powerful societies. Thus, when assessing the eventual consequences of colonial rule, he sees societal destruction as inevitable, and this applies to the natural environment as well: “The true ‘political economy’ of a higher, when governing a lower, race has never yet been worked out. The application of our ‘political economy’ to such cases invariably results in the extinction or degradation of the lower race; whence we may consider it probable that one of the necessary conditions of its truth is, the approximate mental and social unity of the society in which it is applied.”3 Contradicting his statements in support of colonial Dutch rule in the East Indies, here Wallace essentially says that colonization destroys the colonized peoples. Wallace thus describes a true instance of the uncertainty principle or observer effect from physics: the same political-economic changes that bring the natural historian to the field also portend the destruction of the very world that he or she is observing, which turns the naturalist into a prophet of sorts. He or she obtains a glimpse of inaccessible beauty in the natural world while realizing that the very forces that can overcome that inaccessibility will place that beauty in peril. To overcome their inaccessibility is to doom them because that inaccessibility is part of their existence—a sentiment that anticipates what Aldo Leopold had to say about wilderness in the following century: “All conservation of wilderness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left. . . . It is the part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.”4 If this was prescient on Leopold’s part when he first wrote this in 1949, this is all the more true for Wallace writing eighty years before, in 1869. Wallace’s apprehension regarding what the future held in store for the East Indies may have been informed by the industrialization-driven changes that he had earlier observed in Britain. Before he took his first natural history expedition, to the Amazon, he had worked as a surveyor

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in rural England and Wales, in which he had seen firsthand the ravages wrought by the enclosure of common lands, the predatory policies of absentee landlords, onerous tithing by the church, and the construction of factories and rail lines. Some of the worst of these effects were visited upon the ethnic minority peoples of the British Isles, the Celts, with whom Wallace had a familial attachment. There was then a clear geographic boundary between the Celts and the dominant ethnic majority, of which Wallace must have been cognizant, as James Moore writes: The boundary of which Wallace was uniquely cognizant from early childhood is now called “the Highland Line.” It crosses the British Isles from northeast to southwest, diving the country into two distinctive zones. To the south and east lie rich clay and alluvial soils, well suited for intensive cultivation. To the north and west lies poor irregular terrain above six hundred feet, suitable mainly for grazing. The vast bulk of this highland region falls within the boundaries of Scotland and Wales. Here the Celtic peoples sought refuge from successive invaders, developing their own traditional economies, field systems, and social structures, The people who became the English occupied the rich arable lowland and created corresponding but alternative institutions. All the differences noted by Wallace, between Celt and Saxon, chapel and church, tenant and landlord, Welsh farmers and English laborers—all may be mapped along a line drawn from Sunderland in the north, through Sheffield and Bristol, to Exeter and the English Channel: the Highland Line (Hechter 1975).5

Moore propounds the intriguing thesis that Wallace’s understanding of this socio-ecological boundary in his homeland may well have contributed to his identification of an analogous boundary in the East Indies, “Wallace’s Line.” Based on his experience in Britain, Moore suggests, when Wallace starts to see the contrast between the eastern and western parts of the archipelago, it is one with which he is familiar: “He notes the ethnic differences, the agriculture, the poverty. He thinks of the dominant Ternate men and mentally draws a line, a racial boundary, between the

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islands. He falls ill. Life is fragile here. He wonders how the locals survive, provisioned from hill farms by primitives. He wonders how they survive, these “less civilised” tribes. The Owenite in him thinks of the Welsh farmers; of himself, the Saxon surveyor; of the tithes, the poor rates, the riots. War, famine, disease—these cut life off, check it . . . just as Malthus said. Only the fittest to forage remain.”6 If, as Moore suggests, “twenty years and half the earth away, surrounded by natives on a remote volcanic island, Wallace was reminded of the world that he had known,” this may help to explain why Wallace was so unlike many colonial observers. Joseph Conrad published his great novel The Heart of Darkness, regarding colonial relations in the Belgian Congo, in 1899. Conrad is said to have admired Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago, but his protagonist, the ivory trader Kurtz, was degraded by the colonial experience in a way that Wallace was not. Indeed, John G. T. Anderson characterizes the work of Wallace and his com­ patriot on his Amazon expedition, Henry Walter Bates, as an example of an “anti-Conrad” story: “civilized men who go into the jungle, up long rivers, through constant dangers, and emerge, if anything, more civilized than when they went in. Beyond this, each is able to carry with them not Kurtz’s ‘horror’ from the Heart of Darkness, but rather a deep appreciation and even empathy for the peoples and places they see.” On Wallace’s part, this appreciation informed the development of his ideas for political and economic reform in England. As noted in chapter 3, on more than one occasion Wallace compared the socioeconomic conditions of England’s commoners unfavorably with those of the native peoples in tropical colonies. In works like his two-volume Studies Scientific and Social, and in his Land Nationalisation, Its Necessity and Its Aims, Wallace draws on his knowledge of native society in the Amazon and East Indies to suggest what the laboring classes of England could aspire to and what they should aspire to.7 Conrad suggests that colonial actors in Africa projected onto the

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natives their own violent character in a project of mirroring. Something like this seems to have taken place with Wallace, but it was profoundly different: he seemed to see in the natives of the East Indies an image of humanity that he aspired to develop in his own home in Britain. The great historian E. P. Thompson famously problematized the gulf between the way scholars study human societies in nonwestern countries and the way they study their own countrymen: We know all about the delicate tissue of social norms and reciprocities which regulates the life of Trobriand islanders, and the psychic energies involved in the cargo cults of Melanesia; but at some point this infinitely-complex social creature, Melanesian man, becomes (in our histories) the eighteenth-century English collier who claps his hand spasmodically upon his stomach, and responds to elementary economic stimuli. To the spasmodic I will oppose my own view. It is possible to detect in almost every eighteenth-century crowd action some legitimizing notion. By the notion of legitimation I mean that the men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs; and, in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community. . . . I have tried to describe, not an involuntary spasm, but a pattern of behaviour of which a Trobriand islander need not have been ashamed.

In suggesting that we need to pay attention to the culture of the working classes in western countries, in the same way that we do with the peoples of nonwestern countries, Thompson was arguing for what came to be called the “repatriation” of anthropology.8 Wallace anticipated Thompson by a century, based on his intimate acquaintance with complex social creatures on the other side of the world.

F o ur

The Twentieth Century, Harold C. Conklin “A Word Having to Do with Knowledge”

Because ethnographers interact personally and socially with informants, they find themselves carrying on a unique type of natural history, in which the observer becomes a part of (and an active participant in) the observed universe. —Harold C. Conklin 1968:175

I b e g a n t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n t o t h i s volume with the following quotation from Michel Foucault: “Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. And that, if biology was unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history. . . . How was the Classical age able to define this realm of ‘natural history,’ the proofs and even the unity of which now appear to us so distant, and as though already blurred?”1 Foucault’s point is that there is a challenge to reading back into the history of science, crossing a chasm of time. But there are also challenges 156

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of reading different scientific fields in the present, crossing a chasm of interdisciplinary differences. In anthropologist Marvin Harris’s influential 1968 text The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture, there is a section titled “Emics and the Science of Trivia.” The terms “emic” and “etic” derive from Kenneth Pike’s drawing of an analogy with phonemic and phonetic, and they point to a distinction between internal and external explanation. Emic approaches in anthropology were associated with cultural idealism—and historical particularism—as opposed to cultural materialism; they came to be called the “new ethnography,” which originated at Yale. Harold C. Conklin and Charles O. Frake—the two studied together at Yale—along with Ward Goodenough, were identified by Harris as exemplars of the ills of emic approaches. Harris faults emic studies on the grounds that they do not account for actual as opposed to ideal behavior and also because “few if any of the ethnosemanticists have considered the question of how to distinguish important from unimpor­ tant ethnographic descriptions.” He charges the champions of emic studies with historical particularism at the expense of general theories with worldwide significance, whereas Harris’s aim was for nothing less than a “science of history.” Hence Harris’s charge that those wedded to emic approaches are engaged in the “science of trivia.”2 The two groups whom Conklin studied, the Hanunóo of Mindanao and the Ifugao of Northern Luzon, both in the Philippines, have a different perspective on this debate. The Hanunóo adopted Conklin’s name into their language as a term for “things related to knowledge,” from which Joel Kuiper and Ray McDermott conclude, “The Hanunóo seemed to have appreciated Conklin’s desire for specifics.” As for the Ifugao, they display Conklin’s great Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao in their museum in Banaue as a “celebration of Ifugao engineering skill and indigenous knowledge,” as noted by Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme, who writes, “Exhibited as a centrepiece of the local museum in Banaue, the Atlas has clearly been central to Ifugao ethno-political storytelling.”3 The Ifugao and Hanunóo do not, therefore, consider the subjects taken up by Conklin as “trivia,” and apparently they welcomed Conklin’s emic approach. Conklin’s interlocutors can “read” the work of Conklin and appreciate its significance, in a way that the anthropologist Harris cannot. This is another example of what is distinctive about natural historical scholarship and how its value can be seen by some but elude others—how it can be “blurred.”

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Introduction Harold C. Conklin (1926–2016) was born in Pennsylvania, grew up on Long Island in New York State, and spent most of his career teaching in the Anthropology Department at Yale University. He contributed to many different areas of study, including indigenous systems of agriculture and environmental relations, indigenous systems of plant knowledge and classification, the anthropological study of language and cognition, and the native peoples of the Philippines. He carried out two long-term, in-depth studies of the two aforementioned tribal peoples in the Philippines, the Hanunóo on the island of Mindanao (beginning in 1947), a classic swidden-­ cultivating society, and the Ifugao of Northern Luzon (beginning in 1961), who make swiddens but also make world-renowned mountain rice terraces— spending a total of over thirteen years at the two field sites over the course of twenty-five trips. Conklin’s research among the Hanunóo resulted in two major written works: his 1955 Yale University dissertation, “The Relation of Hanunóo Culture to the Plant World,” one of the foundational works in ethnobotany, and subsequently his 1957 Hanunóo Agriculture: A Report on an Integral System of Shifting Cultivation in the Philippines, probably the most important publication on this system of cultivation in the twentieth century. Conklin’s work with the Ifugao was published in the 1980 Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao: A Study of Environment, Culture, and Society in Northern Luzon, which is unequaled as a work of cartographic ethnography. Conklin also published extensive, book-length bibliographies on the Ifugao, on shifting cultivation, and on folk classification, in addition to many academic articles. An insightful festschrift on his body of work was published by Kuipers and McDermott in 2007.4 Conklin had a major impact on twentieth-century studies of society and environment, which is reflected in the breadth of his appeal, encompassing people and institutions with interests as disparate as those of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which published Hanunóo Agriculture, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the most important French anthropologist of his generation.5 Conklin taught at Columbia University from 1954 to 1962, where Lévi-Strauss met him and became acquainted with his work, which figured prominently in Lévi-Strauss’s influential 1962 La Pensée Sauvage,

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published in English in 1966 as The Savage Mind. This book is a call to anthropologists to study the nonmaterial dimensions of culture and, the title notwithstanding, a critique of the dichotomy between “civilized” and “savage” thought. The first chapter, titled “The Science of the Concrete,” thus the science of what Harris would call trivia—Harris pilloried LéviStrauss’s work as “Zen Marxism”—relies heavily on Conklin’s study of the Hanunóo.6 Conklin is cited a half-dozen times in the first eight pages— on Hanunóo knowledge of plants used in betel chewing, their extensive knowledge of local fauna and flora, and their terminology for plant parts and properties. Lévi-Strauss also quotes verbatim three pages from Conklin’s dissertation, with this preface: “Conklin quotes the following extract from his field notes to illustrate the intimate contact between man and his environment which the native is constantly imposing on the ethnologist,” the first few lines of which run as follows: At 0600 and in a light rain, Langba and I left Parina for Binli. . . . At Aresaas, Langba told me to cut off several 10 × 50 cm [4 × 20 inch] strips of bark from an anapla kilala tree (Albizzia procera (Roxb.) Benth.) for protection against leeches. By periodically rubbing the cambium side of the strips of sapanceous (and poisonous: Quisumbling, 1947, 148) bark over our ankles and legs—already wet from the rain-soaked vegetation—we produced a most effective leech-­ repellant lather of pink suds. At one spot along the trail near Aypud, Langba stopped suddenly, jabbed his walking stick sharply into the side of the trail and pulled up a small weed, tawag kugum buladlad (Buchnera urticifolia R. Br.) which he told me he will use as a lure . . . for a spring-spear boar trap. A few minutes later, and we were going at a good pace, he stopped in a similar manner to dig up a small terrestrial orchid (hardly noticeable beneath the other foliage) known as liyamliyam (Epipogum roseum (D. Don.) Lindl.). This herb is useful in the magical control of insect pests which destroy cultivated plants.7

Conklin was a pioneer in revealing the heretofore unexpected depth of knowledge of the natural world among nonwestern peoples. This kind of work is receiving a new reading today from those involved in multi­ species ethnography and post-humanist studies. For example, in his recent review of Conklin’s 1980 Atlas, the anthropologist Jon H. Z. Remme

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writes, “One sees clearly that from out of the cracks in the technical rhetoric, behind the constant enumeration, measurements and lists of vernacular categorisations, seeps a concern with the ways in which the Ifugao respond to and are attentive towards the plants and animals and other nonhuman beings that inhabit and take part in transforming the landscape.” Remme notes the special significance of Conklin’s unusual use of the term “pond-field” for the irrigated rice terraces of the Ifugao: “Conklin’s grasp of the multispecies quality of the landscape comes to the fore in various ways. One of them is that he insists on referring to the terraced fields not as rice terraces but as pond-fields. . . . Conklin took terms very seriously. As the Atlas clearly shows, these fields harbour much more than rice, and this assemblage of life forms is vital for their productivity. Weeds are cut and submerged in the mud, and the muddy water itself teems with snails, clams, shells, snails and mudfish. . . . Conklin notes that there is a strong emphasis on the rice farming aspect of these fields, but by consistently referring to them as pond-fields, he underlines their lively multispecies character.”8 Conklin’s holistic approach to society and environment work clearly places him in the natural history mold: as indicated in the epigraph to this chapter, he believed that as an ethnographer he was “carrying on a unique type of natural history,” and he referred to one of his field assistants as a “natural historian” (figure 4.1).9 It is surprising, therefore, that Conklin cites Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago in his bibliography on shifting cultivation but nowhere else in his work; he utilizes the Linnaean system of binomial classification throughout his works on plants but nowhere cites any of Linnaeus’s writings; and there are no references whatsoever in his works to Rumphius, notwithstanding the geographic and intellectual proximity of their studies.

Ethnography The study of the human dimensions of natural history, as illustrated by the work of Wallace, Linnaeus, and Rumphius, helped to lay the basis for the field of “ethnography,” and Conklin was a legendary practitioner of the art and science of this field. He defines ethnography as requiring “a long period of intimate study and residence in a small, well-defined community, knowledge of the spoken language, and the employment of a wide range

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Figure 4.1. Harold Conklin and Badu’ Ihuy, Hanunóo assistant and natural historian, in Parína, Yágaw, Mindoro, Philippines, May 25, 1953. Badu’ is using a knife to inscribe traditional poetry onto an internode of bamboo (Bambusa vulgaris Schrad.), using the native Indic-derived script. Reprinted with permission from the estate of Harold C. Conklin.

of observational techniques including prolonged face-to-face contacts with members of the local group, direct participation in some of that group’s activities, and a greater emphasis on intensive work with informants than on the use of documentary or survey data.” Conklin’s article “A Day in Parina,” which gives an hour-by-hour account of his ethnographic activities during a typical day of fieldwork among the Hanunóo, makes clear what exactly he means by “intensive.”10 Clifford Geertz, one of the most important anthropologists of the second half of the twentieth century, described Conklin as “careful, circumstantial, infinitely patient, preternaturally observant, focused almost to the point of obsession,” and his ethnography “as daunting as it is exemplary.” He tells of a visit by Conklin to his own field site in Morocco: I had been two or three years in the field in a small, middle Atlas Moroccan town, when Hal, whom I had known for years, wrote

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that he and Eric Wolf (another fine fieldworker) would be stopping in to visit. I was both pleased and expectant and thought about how I would show off what I had been doing—work on the bazaar, research into politico-religious changes, identification of tribal connections. Hal listened to all this and the first question he asked me was whether the bamboo he saw all around the edges of the olive groves was of the same species as that in Southeast Asia. I didn’t know. The second question had to do with some peculiarities in the construction of the enormous wall encircling this ancient town. I hadn’t even noticed them. The third was what various odd items— spices, certain sorts of small tools—being sold in the bazaar were and were for. I didn’t have a clue. This eye for the detail, for specificity, for exactness, for exhaustiveness . . . left me feeling I had three more years work ahead of me.11

When Geertz cannot answer any of his questions, Conklin said he will “take care of it” and sent Geertz home. He then got some paper from a butcher’s shop, exhaustively mapped the bazaar, and later presented Geertz with the completed map. As this anecdote illustrates, Conklin did not go looking for the strange or exotic, he took an interest in his immediate surroundings. Indeed, a defining aspect of Conklin’s research was a focus on everyday reality, on the “mundane.” He demonstrated the importance of studying topics that had long been thought unworthy of scholarly analysis. As Roy Ellen writes, he generated “an excitement . . . in a recognition that this work was evidently important, bringing a new degree of ‘seriousness’ to the task of ethnographic description and analysis of the ordinary.” Examples from Conklin’s work on the Ifugao include analyses of food and drink, and units and measures.12 Kuiper and McDermott write that “a Conklin ethnography starts where the people start—with their work primarily, and with the cultural materials they develop around work.” Conklin wrote a six-page description of rice planting in Hanunóo Agriculture. The primary tool that the Hanunóo use in planting is the dibble stick, and Conklin provides a lengthy description of their construction, the kinds of trees from which they are cut, and the distinction between sticks with concave versus symmetrical tips, and how and where the Hanunóo use one versus the other. Conklin shows the wonder of the world

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by revealing the complexity of the mundane.13 He does not suggest that we should be surprised that something like the digging stick is so complex— or that we should be surprised that the Hanunóo invest so much thought and skill in it—rather, he suggests that we should be surprised at ourselves for assuming otherwise. Conklin demonstrated that the everyday world of plant use was wondrous. Early on in The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss comments on an article that Conklin wrote on the custom of chewing betel nut: “Among the Hanunóo of the Philippines a custom as simple as that of betel chewing demands a knowledge of four varieties of areca nut and eight substitutes for them, and of five varieties of betel and five substitutes.” The areca palm (Areca catechu L.) is chewed as a stimulant along with a leaf from the betel pepper vine (Piper betle L.), some burnt-shell lime, and a strip of tobacco leaf (Nicotiana tabacum L.). In his 41-page article on betel chewing, Conklin unpeels layer after layer of complexity in the use of the betel nut to illustrate the depth of indigenous botanical knowledge. Frake describes the scope of this article as follows: Conklin’s betel paper covers the history of the use of betel; the physiology and botany of the chew; the Hanunóo ethnobotanical knowledge, taxonomy, and the terminology underlying the selection of ingredients; the behavioral procedures involved in the construction of a quid; the economics of the production and exchange of ingredients (with a comparative note on betel in the Manila market); the social interactional entailments of chewing, including hospitality, courtship, and chance meetings; betel-chewing paraphernalia as surfaces for the exercise of literacy in the Hanunóo script; the participation in betel chewing by supernaturals; Hanunóo attitudes about health and medicinal value of betel; and the symbolic significance of chewing for Hanunóo culture identity.14

Chewing betel produces a temporary coloration of the lips and teeth, which, coupled with erroneous beliefs in its deleterious impact on health, made it into a colonial trope for the practices of primitive peoples in the region. As Conklin notes, “In the older literature, and even today, one occasionally reads that constant chewing of betel causes rotting of the teeth, loss of appetite and salivation, and overall degeneration of the organism.”

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Figure 4.2. Mortar and pestle (made from an iron bolt) used to prepare a betel chew. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University.

To the contrary, the Hanunóo believe that chewing betel, in addition to the pivotal role it plays in social interactions, has a number of beneficial consequences for one’s health: 1. It sweetens the breath. One’s mouth is believed to have a naturally foul smell if not freshened with betel. 2. After meals the chewing of a fresh quid removes food particles stuck on and between the teeth. 3. It acts as a prophylactic in keeping the gums strong and in preventing excessive tooth decay. 4. It gives one a needed “lift” after periods of physical exertion or while still at work. 5. It keeps the chewer warm in cold or wet weather. 6. It keeps the mouth from drying out and allays hunger temporarily.

Conklin sides with the Hanunóo regarding the health benefits of betel chewing: “The betel chew is a tonic and gentle stimulant, the most active

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principles of which are the two toxic alkaloids arecoline and nicotine. The former, contained in areca seeds, reduces blood tension and hence betel is sometimes prescribed by physicians for cases of high blood pressure. The tanic acid present fortifies the gums and in some ways limits the number of bacteria in the mouth cavity. Hence, the chew does have certain antiseptic qualities. Insoluble calcium tannate is formed in large quantities, which, by collecting as a cement, helps to prevent caries. Both betel leaves and areca seeds are sialagogues [drugs that promote the secretion of saliva].” Rumphius wrote similarly three centuries earlier: “I will tell you that people generally agree that it gives your mouth a pleasant smell, that it makes you blush, paints your teeth and lips red, that it cleans all the filth from one’s teeth and gums that food left behind and which gives you a fetid breath: wherefore its use is wellnigh a necessity in order to cleanse the mouth, to bind the stomach very gently and prevent the nausea that is readily caused by the daily consumption of fish in the Indies: not to mention that it is also very good on ocean journeys, when one has to eat a great deal of salted food, because it keeps the mouth from getting scurvy.” Rumphius notes the initial impact of the custom on newcomers to the Indies: “It is quite hideous and disgusting to a newcomer when he sees people spitting out that bloody juice.” He continues that it is imperative for newcomers to acquire this habit, because “for those who have to deal daily with Indian Lords, it is quite necessary to learn to eat pinang, if he hopes to make himself and his commission agreeable to these people.” “They cannot acquire the name of Orang-lamma, or old Indies hand, until they have learned and accepted this public Indian Ceremony, otherwise they are jeered at, and greeted with the despised name or Orang-bara, or newcomer.”15 Conklin contributed as much as any other scholar of the twentieth century to the study of the breadth and depth of indigenous knowledge. He focused on indigenous botanical knowledge, in a tropical rainforest setting, at the very dawn of the global awakening of the imperiled biological riches of this ecosystem. In his Yale University dissertation, Conklin reports that the Hanunóo identify and name 1,652 different plants in their lands, and they consider 1,524 of these to be useful in one or more ways—a startling finding that is still cited today. This research contributed to a sea change in global understanding of the complexity of the tropical rainforest and the unique knowledge of this ecosystem held by the peoples who live within it. It was pivotal in the development of the new fields of ethnobot-

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any and ethnobiological classification, and remarkably it exerted this impact in spite of never being commercially published but available only as microfilm.16

Swidden Agriculture The ecological dynamics of swidden agriculture are fundamentally different from those of more intensive forms of agriculture: it is based on the nutrients extracted from biomass through fire, not on the nutrient load in soil or water, and it poses unique political-economic challenges to centralized state authorities. For these reasons, swidden agriculture has a reputation as one of the most widely disparaged natural resource use systems in history. It was the subject of near-universal condemnation during the colonial era, condemnation that extended into the postcolonial era in most cases, notwithstanding the fact that it was practiced by hundreds of millions of tribal and peasant peoples in Asia, Africa, and South America through most of the twentieth century—and in Europe well into the nineteenth century. Conklin’s 1957 monograph Hanunóo Agriculture, published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)—and thus with its imprimatur—was the first definitive defense of swidden agriculture. In defending a no-till system of agriculture that did not employ chemicals, mechanization, or improved seeds and was based solely on local knowledge, Conklin posed one of the first and most persuasive challenges to the hegemonic rationale of high-modern, western, agricultural development, which made his FAO monograph one of the most politically impactful works of mid-twentieth-century American anthropology. Conklin uses the term “shifting cultivation” in the title of his monograph, but on the very first page he points out that it is misleading: “In the literature, the rubric ‘shifting cultivation’ may refer to any one of an un­ determined number of agricultural systems within which the critical limits and significant relations of time, space, technique, and local ecology are rarely made explicit. Frequently, it implies an aimless, unplanned, nomadic movement or an abrupt change in location, either of which may refer to the cropping area, the agriculturists, or both.” After discussing various local terms for this system of agriculture, he writes: “The recently revived English dialect word for ‘burned clearing,’ swidden . . . is most appropriate

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for general discussions of shifting cultivation, which in turn may hereafter be interpreted more precisely as ‘swidden farming’ or ‘swidden agriculture.’” As Kuipers and McDermott write: “Conklin never met a received category he trusted. Some might want to call this science, others politics. Conklin calls it ethnography.”17 His ethnography, thus, drew our attention to the implicit political consequences of unexamined categories and labels. On the first page of Hanunóo Agriculture, Conklin crafts in a single sentence the most useful definition of swidden agriculture that has ever been written: “Minimally, shifting cultivation may be defined as any agricultural system in which fields are cleared by firing and are cropped discontinuously (implying periods of fallowing which always average longer than periods of cropping).” Having defined what all swidden systems have in common, on the next page he describes the most important ways in which swidden systems may differ: “Basically, swidden farming may involve relationships which either (1) reflect predominantly only the economic interests of its participants (as in some kinds of cash crop, resettlement, and squatter agriculture); or (2) stem from a more traditional, year-round, community-wide, largely self-contained, and ritually-sanctioned way of life. Reference may be made to instances of the former type as partial systems and of the latter type as integral systems of shifting cultivation.”18 As indicated by the use of the term “integral” in the subtitle to Hanunóo Agriculture, the Hanunóo practice an integral system. Before Conklin identified this systemic difference, outside observers had assumed, erroneously, that all swidden societies were the same: “Considerable confusion has resulted from failing to differentiate these major types of swidden farming in terms of cropping techniques, long-term land usage, concepts of crop and land alienation, settlement patterns, and related matters.” One of the most important differences between partial and integral systems is that the latter tend to be based on greater knowledge of the local environment; they tend to be more conservative in their use of natural resources, and they tend to be more sustainable. Therefore, Conklin’s distinction between partial and integral systems created a theoretical basis for differentiating between sustainable and unsustainable systems, thereby creating the first conceptual space for anything other than disparagement of all swidden systems. He notes that such nuance had been missing from government policy in the Philippines: “Unfortunately, much time has been wasted in establishing and revising elaborate ‘kaiñgin [swidden]

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laws’ (Nano, 1939; Cenabre, 1954) without differentiating types of ‘kaingin’ farming except on the basis of their legality. While partial supplementary swidden farming is often of the most destructive sort, it would be a completely useless approach to assume that all kaingin agricultural practices could be treated in the same manner.”19 Conklin further challenges essentialized views of swidden agriculture by noting that it is often practiced within a larger composite system of land use. For example, the Ifugao cultivate rice in pond-fields, tubers in mountain swiddens, and trees in woodlots. Composite systems were long ignored in the academic and policy literatures: the classic anthropological and human ecological literature on Southeast Asia drew a clear line between tribal peoples with hill swiddens and peasants with lowland paddy fields.20 The possibility that the same farmer was cultivating both swiddens and irrigated fields did not fit into the hegemonic, neo-evolutionary schema that posited backwards swidden farmers and progressive irrigated farmers, so it was not recognized. When Conklin published Hanunóo Agriculture, it was the single most important critique of the prevailing negative view of swidden agriculture. He noted that an emphasis on what is missing from swidden systems, compared with more familiar western systems of agriculture, “accounts for some of the inadequate treatment swidden farming systems have received in the literature generally.” To counter this bias, Conklin elected to highlight what Hanunóo swidden cultivators have that the majority of the world’s farmers do not, for example, an extraordinary diversity of cultigens: “During the first and most active year of the agricultural cycle, an average swidden may be planted in 100 to 125 separate specific crop types. The range is roughly 85 to 150; in other words, from 20 to 35 percent of the total number of known native varieties. The author has counted up to 40 different basic crops growing in one swidden at the same time.”21 Conklin was one of the first scholars to suggest that the seemingly disordered heterogeneity of the swidden system—multiple crops, multiple vertical stories, multiple fields—was not simply a poor effort to attain the ordered homogeneity of western mono-cropping, but was an alternative and in many respects preferable model in its own right. Conklin devoted one publication to a point-by-point refutation of ten of the “most frequent and problematic statements and assumptions” con-

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cerning swidden agriculture, which are responsible for it being “often categorically condemned as primitive, wasteful, or illegal”: (1) Swidden farming is a haphazard procedure. (2) Usually, and preferably, swiddens are cleared in virgin forest. (3) Swidden fires escape beyond cut-over plots and destroy vast forest areas. (4) Swidden techniques are everywhere the same. (5) Stoloniferous grasses such as “notorious Imperata” (Gourou, 1953:18) are abhorred as totally useless pests. (6) Swiddens are planted with a single (predominant) crop. (7) It is possible to gauge the efficiency of a given swidden economy in terms of its one-crop yield per unit of area cultivated. (8) Swiddens are abandoned when the main crop is in. (9) There is no crop rotation in swidden agriculture. (10) Not only is fertility lost, but destructive erosion and permanent loss of forest cover result from reclearing a once-used swidden after less than a universally specifiable minimum number of years of fallowing.

Conklin states that these criticisms, for which field evidence “are totally lacking,” reflect “an over-all assumption that the standards of efficiency in terms of agricultural economy in the United States or Western Europe are attainable and desirable among any group of swidden farmers.”22 Conklin devoted the remainder of that publication to a methodical rebutting of each one of those “problematic assumptions”: (1) Swidden farming follows a locally-determined, well-defined pattern and requires constant attention throughout most of the year. (2) Swidden making in second-growth forest areas is preferred. (3) Swidden fires are often controlled by firebreaks surrounding the plot to be burned. (4) Many details of swidden technique differ from area to area, and with changing conditions. (5) Even the most noxious weeds, in one context, may serve the local economy admirably in another. (6) Swiddens are rarely planted with single or even with only a few crops.

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(7) It appears that the efficiency of swidden farming can be ascertained only by taking into account the total yield per unit of labor, not per unit of area. (8) Because of intercropping, the harvest of one main swidden crop may serve only to allow one or more other crops to mature in turn. (9) Swidden intercropping, especially if wet season cereals are alternated with dry season leguminous crops, amounts to a type of crop rotation, even if on a limited scale. (10) It is difficult to set a minimum period of fallowing as necessary for the continued, productive use of swidden land by reclearing.23

Popular condemnation of swidden farming is often linked to the iconic imagery of the burning forest, which is interpreted as evidence of reckless and indiscriminate use of fire. However, Conklin’s research among the Hanunóo demonstrates that they burn exactly what they intend to burn, their swiddens, and “escape” fires are rare: “The record for 1953– 54–55 tu¯tud [swidden burning] seasons in the Yilgaw area shows that in the firing of more than 150 swiddens, a total of less than ½ hectare [1.23 acres] of adjacent underbrush was burned unintentionally, and there were no serious escapes. A typical Hanunóo comment on this low incidence is simply pasay yi may ka¯iyig ti buklid ta¯wu ‘All our swiddens have firebreaks.’” Indeed, Conklin argues that in the tropical rainforest environment, incomplete or failed burning is much more common than over-burning or uncontrolled burning—and a thorough burn is essential to a successful swidden. Conklin cites four separate benefits from a good burn: (1) Removal of unwanted vegetation, resulting in a cleared swidden. (2) Extermination of many animal and some plant pests. (3) Preparation of the soil for dibble planting, by making it softer and more friable. (4) Provision of an evenly distributed cover of wood ashes, which is good for young cultigens.24

Burning down the forest for swiddens has been widely blamed for the creation of one of the most contentious landscapes of Southeast Asia, expanses of land covered in homogeneous blankets of the pioneering, fire-climax sword grass Imperata cylindrica (L.), which was the dominant

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grass in the Hanunóo territory. But Conklin disputes the linkage between swiddens and Imperata: “Under terrain and wind conditions favorable for swidden agriculture, the initial firing of cut jungle is not sufficient to start a succession to grass land.” He also complicates our understanding of this grass—seen as a scourge for a century and dismissed by Clifford Geertz as a “green desert.” Conklin notes that whereas the Hanunóo regard Imperata as a pest in their swiddens and weed it out, in other parts of their territory they encourage its growth with fire, so that they can harvest it for roof thatch and graze their cattle on it. Periodic burning produces the younger/shorter grasses that can be used for cattle and thatching, and it gets rids of the older/taller grasses that cannot. The fact that some Imperata grasslands are intentionally maintained by fire for these economic purposes is the principal lacuna in official views of Imperata in the region and the principal reason why government programs to get rid of Imperata so often fail. Whereas local people regard Imperata as a manageable plant in their agroecological cycles, colonial and postcolonial central governments have been primarily acquainted with Imperata as a pest on export crop plantations. Imperata is a quintessential example of a plant with respect to which local communities and centralized authorities have opposing self-­interests, which are responsible for diametrically opposed attitudes.25 Before Conklin’s work, the basis for this difference was obscure and Imperata was simply an enigmatic part of the regional landscape. Conklin’s work provides some of the best empirical data ever gathered on the paradox of rice in Southeast Asia: this refers to the fact that the ubiquity and political and cultural importance of rice is out of keeping with its actual economics, agronomy, and indeed precarity. Conklin found rice to be culturally and ritually preeminent among both the Hanunóo and Ifugao, although in both cases other cultigens have greater economic importance. Thus, rice dominates Hanunóo life, as Conklin writes: “Rice is the crop of greatest concern to all. It is the most highly valued real food. In most ritual offerings, curing rites, and for major feasts it is an essential for which there is no substitute. The success or failure of one’s agricultural activities is gauged almost entirely in terms of harvested rice.” Yet the average Hanunóo household maintains two to three times as much farmland under root and tree crops as under rice; only 20 percent of their total swidden labor is devoted to rice; and root crops and bananas provide more than

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80 percent of their diet. Not only is rice more marginal in economic terms, it is a more difficult crop: Conklin says that rice is “ritually paramount but agriculturally delicate.” It requires more constant attention than root or tree crops, and it is more sensitive to fluctuations in rainfall, to weed penetration, and to destruction by pests. Precisely because rice is more “delicate,” the timing of the entire swidden cycle is geared to its needs, reflecting an association between agronomic precarity and cultural importance.26 Conklin found that rice plays a similar role, albeit in a very different agroecological setting, among the Ifugao. He refers to their “strong cultural bias emphasizing almost every aspect of rice farming” and says that in the life of the Ifugao, “rice requires the most elaborate round of calendric rituals.” However, Conklin notes that every Ifugao household, in addition to cultivating rice in pond-fields, and cultivating assorted tree crops in woodlots, also cultivates sweet potatoes and some other, lesser crops in unirrigated swiddens. Active and fallowed swiddens cover at least 15 percent of the Ifugao territory area surveyed by Conklin, which compares with 17 percent covered by pond-fields and 25 percent covered by woodlots. These swiddens are central to the Ifugao household economy: “Swiddens furnish the bulk of the food consumed by most families except the wealthy,” which is a startling statistic for a group that has long been represented as one of the region’s prototypical wet-rice societies. Pond-fields not only make a relatively small contribution to Ifugao subsistence, but it is a costly one. Annual production per acre averages 4.94 tons of unmilled rice in the Ifugao pond-fields but 16.06 tons of tubers in the swiddens. If productivity is compared in terms of unit of labor, the differential is greater yet because of the high inputs of labor required in the pond-fields. Thus, the return on labor is just 5.5 to 8.8 pounds of rice per work day in the pondfields, compared with a return of 57 pounds of tubers per work day in the swiddens.27 The explanation for this paradox may lie in the history of the terraces. Conklin suggests that they date back four to five centuries and their development was spurred in part by the introduction of the sweet potato and iron forging. Other scholars point to the arrival of the Spanish and the attendant displacement of the Ifugao from lowlands into the interior of the Cordillera. From this perspective, the onerous work of the pond-fields was an adaptation to a challenging terrain forced on the Ifugao by colonial rule. The historical contingency of this adaptation is reflected in the aban-

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donment of many pond-fields over the past few decades, due to Christianization, out-migration, the Green Revolution, and the introduction of cash crops.28 In any case, Conklin argues that the pond-fields cannot be understood except as part of a composite system that also includes swiddens and woodlots, which is based on a principle of spatial and temporal complementarity. Thus, the Ifugao locate their most intensive system of cultivation, rice pond-fields, on the land with the gentlest slopes most proximate to their settlement sites; the greater the distance from the settlements, and the steeper the slopes, the fewer the pond-fields and the more the swiddens and woodlots. In addition, many of the demands for labor in swiddens and pond-fields are not coincident, in particular during the peak demand periods of planting and harvesting. As a result, participation in swidden cultivation does not impact participation in pond-field cultivation, and the reverse is similarly true. Remme suggests that the “ecologically attuned management of fields” among the Ifugao reflects not a “building” perspective on the world, notwithstanding the global celebration of their terraces as an engineering marvel, but a “dwelling” perspective, in Tim Ingold’s sense, following Heidegger.29

Representation In the fourth quarter of the twentieth century, anthropology in North America experienced a so-called crisis of representation. One anthropologist, Stephen Tyler, suggested that “the point of discourse is not how to make a better representation, but how to avoid representation.”30 Conklin worried constantly about the incompleteness or limitations of his own representations of Philippine peoples and their environments. However, his response was not to avoid representation but to strive for ever more accurate representation. Some anthropologists attributed the crisis of representation to overgeneralization in ethnographic accounts, which was decried as a “language of power.” Conklin’s body of work represents a sustained critique of the ills of overgeneralization—which was one of his points of contention with Marvin Harris. Conklin’s suspicion of generalization is exemplified by the fact that as one of the world’s greatest authorities on swidden agriculture he nonetheless opens his 1961 review article, “The Study of Shifting Cul-

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tivation,” with the statement that “it is difficult to give a list of elements universally associated with this type of economy,” and then goes on to argue for detailed study of the entire range of cases.31 Early on in Hanunóo Agriculture, Conklin makes clear the extent to which he will or will not generalize from this case study: “It may be noted comparatively, without going into greater detail, that the Hanunóo share many widespread Malaysian culture traits with other upland farmers in and near the Sulu Sea basin. For the most part, however, this study is concerned with the way in which these elements are combined under certain particular ecological conditions by a closely observed segment of Hanunóo society. Much of this report can be considered a valid account of conditions among most segments of that society today, but detailed information— unless stated otherwise—refers specifically to that group which inhabits a geographically defined area, about 6 square kilometers [approximately 2.32 square miles] in extent, on the upper eastern slopes of Mt. Ya¯gaw, in the central eastern section of the Hanunóo territory.”32 In short, Conklin writes that although there are some shared similarities, his study does not hold for all Malaysian swiddeners around the Sulu Sea, nor even for all Hanunóo, but only for the Hanunóo inhabiting six square kilometers on one mountain slope. Careful circumspection regarding the general versus the particular extends throughout Conklin’s work. For example, he does not describe a “typical Hanunóo swidden cycle”; instead, he presents at least nine different patterns of swidden succession, one common one being PBDGT: Primary grain swidden (P). Root crop swidden (B). Tree crop swidden (D). Low fallow swidden (G). High fallow swidden (T).

Then Conklin notes that “The PBDGT succession alone is expandable into 176 different cycles, if the duration of D and T are considered as separate variables.”33 Much like Linnaeus, thus, Conklin is more interested in how things differ than in how they are the same. As indicated by the way that Conklin enumerates the endless variants of swidden succession among the Hanunóo, his methodology is based on exacting, extremely fine-grained analysis. Charles O. Frake in his foreword

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to the Kuipers and McDermott festschrift, coins the term “fine description” for this: “Ethnography so labeled is ‘fine’ both in the sense of ‘fine detail’ and ‘fine art.’ It is meticulous in construction, but it is also grand in design.” Frake apparently coined the term “fine description” in opposition to the term “thick description,” which refers to a method of observing and reporting made famous by one of Conklin’s peers, one of the most influential American anthropologists of the second half of the twentieth century, Clifford Geertz. Geertz elaborates on this concept in the introductory chapter to his 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures, titled “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” He illustrates an application of this approach in a chapter in the same volume, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” In this essay, Geertz focuses on the social dynamics of the cockfight—who fights and why, who bets and how, what winning versus losing means socially, and so on. However, the natural history of the event—the different varieties of fighting cocks, the different sorts of spurs and techniques of affixing them, how the cocks are trained, their physiology, and so on—which would have been Conklin’s focus—was missing from Geertz’s account.34 Conklin’s fine description involves numbers: he is a counter, in the same way that his informants are. He documents thirteen indigenous measures of volume among the Hanunóo. Also among the Hanunóo, Conklin measures the spacing between dibble holes for rice and dibble holes for different varieties of maize, and he counts the number of seeds per hole. Among the Ifugao, he identifies eleven different uses of the “carefully puddled top layer of soil in an inundated field”; among the Hanunóo, he identifies named distinctions among ten types and thirty subtypes of rocks and minerals associated with different soil formations.35 One of the principal ways that Conklin gets at the worldviews of the people he studies is through language. Thus, he documents the rich cultural domain of the rice plant among the Ifugao by systematically gathering “separate and specialized terms for distinguishing”: More than 50 parts of the rice plant. More than 70 specific uses of rice, other than as a food staple. More than 125 distinct techniques employed in cultivating, storing, processing, and handling rice. More than 250 characteristics of diagnostic importance in distinguishing among different rice varieties.

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In addition to studying language, Conklin also studies behavior, and he does so more closely than many ethnographers had done before or since. Thus, he identifies named Hanunóo techniques for felling large forest trees with—versus against—the direction in which they are leaning, the terms for the deep versus shallow cuts that are made on opposite sides of the trunk, and the four named types of felling mishaps.36 If few studies of swidden cultivation have noted the intricacies of felling, fewer still note the importance to the swiddener of the brokenness or evenness of terrain and overall degree of slope. Conklin sums up Hanunóo calculations of a good swidden site with respect to these variables: “A very steep but single-planed slope of firm na¯puna¯pu? soil with a minimum of rock content rates higher than a gentle slope combined with less favorable variables of roughness, soil, or rock content.” Also unique to Conklin is his observation of the importance of the shape of the swidden: “Despite natural irregularities, a swidden is always conceptualized as a four-sided plot, the uphill-downhill dimension (kay suŋgu¯?an) of which is greater than its horizontal or contour-level width (kay balitda¯ŋan). This is reflected in the terminology used to describe the four margins of an ideally rectangular swidden: ?ulwan ‘top (from ?u¯lu “head”),’ buli?an ‘bottom (from buli? “buttocks, rear end, bottom”),’ and—for the two ascending margins—simply habı¯gan ‘side (from ha¯big “side of the body”).’”37 Finally, Conklin notes that when the Hanunóo harvest the rice from their swiddens, which is “demanding of certain forms of obligatory deference,” they do not move through the swidden in a haphazard fashion. Rather, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia (e.g., Central Java) albeit rarely documented, their movements are carefully prescribed: they use a team of people arrayed in a line, with a pu?an “leader” and suru? “end person,” and they move through the swidden according to one of three different named patterns—ha¯tay “straight or rib-fan patter,” bu¯yuŋ “arc-fan pattern,” or tukap “strip method.”38 Joel Kuipers and Ray McDermott write that Conklin “was skeptical about the capacity of any one form of representation—photography, film, drawing, or writing”—and so he experimented with many. The kind of creative effort that Linnaeus invested in his sketches, Conklin invests in figures that analyze various temporal and spatial dimensions of agriculture. He was perhaps without peer in his ability to succinctly and graphically

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Figure 4.3. Ten-year swidden cycle among the Hanunóo. Conklin, Hanunóo Agriculture, 141, figure 12. Reprinted with permission from the estate of Harold C. Conklin.

represent the complex spatial and temporal dimensions of indigenous land-­ use patterns. For example, a figure illustrating the ten-year swidden cycle in Hanunóo Agriculture contains three concentric rings: the outermost ring represents years 1–10, the middle ring represents the stages of the swidden cycle 1–10, and the innermost ring represents the five swidden types (P—grain, B—root crop, D—tree crop, G—low fallow, T—high fallow) (figure 4.3). The dotted lines indicate the end of rice planting and rice harvesting. This figure also contains several curved lines with arrows, which show how certain swidden types may be skipped or repeated. Such figures reflect the continual tension within Conklin’s work between the need to generalize sufficiently to give the reader some grasp of what is taking place on the ground, and his own recognition that generalization always does some violence to the diversity of human activity.39 Subsequently, among the Ifugao, Conklin devoted himself to cartography. His Atlas of Ifugao consists of a 40,000-word text, 184 black-and-

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Figure 4.4. Ambayawwon pond-field plots in Ifugao. Conklin, Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao, 94, plate 46.2. Reprinted with permission from the estate of Harold C. Conklin.

white photos, and 57 colored map plates, based on a total of more than 1,000 aerial photographs of a 96-square-kilometer area in the north-central Ifugao region. Maps 8 through 25 show every pond-field plot, each averaging just 270 square meters in area, and every house or hut, among other features, in the entire 96-square-kilometer survey area. Maps 26 through 37 show, among other things, the source, flow, and management of all irrigation and drainage water in an area of 18 square kilometers. Maps 38 through 47 document 1,946 individual pond-field plots in 33 pond-field sectors in one agricultural district, Baynı¯nan, covering 3.1 square kilometers. Two maps are presented for each of these sectors. One covers prop-

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Figure 4.5. Key to Plots maps 38a to 47a, showing the features mapped in the Ifugao pond-fields. Conklin, Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao, 86. Reprinted with p ­ ermission from the estate of Harold C. Conklin.

erty ownership. The other covers “artifactual detail,” which encompasses up to 26 different features, including the source and direction of flow of irrigation water; the presence of ritual markers, seed beds, fish pits, vegetable mounds, taro plants, and stone walling; and the distinction between outer and inner bunds (figures 4.4 and 4.5).

Reading Conklin In the continuum from generalization to particularization in Conklin’s body of work, Atlas of Ifugao is furthest toward the latter end of the spectrum. In his maps of the Ifugao rice pond-fields, in particular the most small-scale ones, Conklin came closest to his idealized goal of representing a livelihood system in one place and one time with the greatest degree of exactitude—down to the last boulder and submerged spring, without caveat.40 The exactitude is so great, however, that it challenged the reader and perhaps Conklin himself to draw wider meaning from the exercise. Examining Conklin’s ground-level, terrace-by-terrace maps of Ifugao is closer to the experience of being in the field in Ifugao than an actual analysis of Ifugao: some of the distancing that is a prerequisite to analysis has not yet taken place, which may have affected its impact on the field.41 The inverse relationship between exactitude and utility in maps— how the latter decreases as the former increases, which raises wider ques-

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tions about the nature of representation itself—has been taken up by a number of prominent writers and scholars. Lewis Carroll, who is still influential for his problematizing of everyday reality, writes in his story “The Man in the Moon” of a map that is made at scale of one-mile-to-one-mile, the accuracy of which is eclipsed only by its impossibility of use. Possibly inspired by Carroll is the one-paragraph short story by Jorge L. Borges “On Rigor in Science,” in which he cites a fictional 1658 account of “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” Borges’s story is cited in turn by Umberto Eco, who devotes an entire chapter in his collection How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays to an exploration of the logical implications of a oneto-one map. These implications are not reassuring, as the lack of wisdom reflected in making such a map seems to signal the end of the empire.42 In his research with the Ifugao and the Hanunóo, Conklin exhaustively depicts two impressive examples of cultural elaboration, but his approach to the two cases is not the same: with the Hanunóo he presents a text-based manual, and for the Ifugao he relies more on mapping. On the face of it, the manual seems to be closer to the everyday behavior of the people involved, whereas the mapping seems to be more removed. In any case, Conklin’s work with the Hanunóo was more generative of his theoretical development than his work with the Ifugao: the former spawned a period of incredible productivity in the 1950s and 1960s, during which Conklin made seminal contributions to a half dozen different fields, an effort that was not replicated with the Ifugao. Of Conklin’s dozen most highly cited publications on Google Scholar, all were published in the 1950s and 1960s: seven concern the Hanunóo, four are generic, and just one concerns the Ifugao. Of his sixteen papers included in the 2007 Kuipers and McDermott festschrift, ten focus on the Hanunóo, one on the Ifugao, one on both, and four are generic. Remme suggests that the impact of Conklin’s Atlas may have been constrained by the fact that “its dry and seemingly objective descriptions of human-nonhuman relations did not sit particularly well with the theoretical perspectives and thematic interests—interpretation, meaning, emotions and personhood—that came to dominate mainstream anthropology at the time.” As Lucien M. Hanks wrote in a 1982 review of the Atlas: “The stresses and strains on the architectural structures are clear, but the human

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drama can only be inferred. . . . Anyone wishing to do more than feast his eyes on the volume will often feel as if he were bushwhacking through long thorns.”43 The same could be said of his Hanunóo Agriculture, which appears at first glance to be a sort of how-to manual for swidden cultivation, brimming with technical directions, specifications, diagrams, alternatives, perils, caveats; it appears to have no agenda other than an exacting description of the on-ground reality. But exacting description was not Conklin’s only goal. As Renato Rosaldo writes, “Conklin’s neutrality and omniscience become a rhetorical strategic means for assuming the authoritative high ground of scientific knowledge divorced from human interests.” In the context of chronic tension between tribal swidden peoples like the Hanunóo and the central Philippines government, this high ground was a place of power: “Conklin uses self-effacing detachment and scientific authority on behalf of Hanunóo shifting cultivators.” Conklin’s language was intended to appeal to scientists and policymakers who held negative views of swidden cultivation: “Conklin has chosen a rhetoric designed to persuade an audience of ethnographers, botanists, and agronomists, who conceivably could in turn convince policymakers. He appears simply to report the facts, letting the chips fall where they may, but hoping in this manner to convince Filipino politicians to overcome their prejudice and vested interests.” Persoon, Ploeg, and Weerd similarly write, “It seems as if he relied completely on the quality of his writings to convince these actors [officials and policymakers] of the nature and value of the agricultural practices he described, and left them to draw the implications—which clearly followed from his demonstrations—that would help them avoid proposing policies based on false or inaccurate assumptions.” There is some evidence that this strategy was successful. To wit, “That Conklin has contributed to Ifugao cultural self-confidence and resilience against government-led development projects forces is beyond doubt,” and “In the Philippines a whole range of social forestry policies have, implicitly or explicitly, made use of Conklin’s insights, including those related to the country’s indigenous peoples.”44 The suggestion that there was an implicit agenda in Conklin’s writings is borne out by the occasional cracks in his technical prose, which reveal his emotional attachment to his interlocutors. Remme points to plate 52 on page 11 of the Atlas, which “shows a picture of a young girl

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Figure 4.6. Photograph of Maling, a Hanunóo girl. Conklin, “Maling, a Hanunóo Girl from the Philippines,” 101. Reprinted with permission from the estate of Harold C. Conklin.

squatting down and carefully putting, or rather, guiding a small chicken into a chicken coop that she will hang up under the house roof during the night to protect it against snakes and other predators. The care Conklin depicts in the picture of the little girl and her chicken also points to one of those cracks that reappear amidst Conklin’s technical writing.” There are many other indications of affect in Conklin’s work. When describing rice planting among the Hanunóo, which is carried out by large groups and is one of the more exciting stages of swidden work, Conklin makes note of the “jocular repartee,” “frequent laughter,” and rhyming couplets shouted out to spur on the dibblers that are—according to Conklin—“almost always amusing.” These are examples of what has been since identified as the performative dimensions of agriculture. Another example of Conklin’s at-

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tentiveness to the emotions of his subjects, noted by most commentators, is his article “Maling, a Hanunóo Girl,” which reports on a girl’s loss of a beloved newborn sibling (figure 4.6). As Geertz observed, the story “dem­ onstrates that this passionate attention to the concrete and the precise [by Conklin] does not come at the cost of insensitivity to the delicacies of human experience.”45 Conklin himself wrote: “In the field I have been inspired repeatedly by the intelligence, patience, and enduring friendship of many neighbors and friends, from small children to toothless elders. They have all served not just as respondents but as close coinvestigators of other cultural worlds. Often accompanied by zest, humor, and wit, their conduct, words, and shared understandings of ecological and cultural relations have made ethnographic field work a challenging and intellectually exciting enterprise.” Conklin uses the language of aesthetics rather than science to describe the ultimate object of this enterprise, which is “the beauty of the internal logic of many complex cultural systems and the universality of human creativity.”46

Conclusion One of the challenges that Conklin’s work has posed for contemporary readers is his apparent ability to perceive depths and complexities of systems of knowledge that others could not. Why could other anthropologists not do what he did? Eugene Hunn suggested one explanation, namely that the encounter between Conklin and the Hanunóo occurred at a unique historical moment, when the group lived in a still highly biodiverse environment upon which they almost entirely depended and when Conklin was lucky enough to be there to record it all: Was Conklin that much better in the field than we? That question, I suspect, has lurked in the backs of the minds of more than one dedicated ethnobiological researcher. However, I suspect it is not the whole explanation. Rather, the Hanunóo enjoy a territory that need rank second to none in the biodiversity it offers for human contemplation, and Conklin encountered them at a special historical moment. The Hanunóo then were as close to being economi-

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cally self-sufficient as perhaps any human community at any time in human history. They found all that they needed to sustain their lives within walking distance of their village and of their birthplace. . . . So the full powers of human observation and cultural elaboration were focused in the Hanunóo case on a bit of the earth’s surface fully endowed by nature. Future ethnobiologists cannot expect to find such a setting anywhere on earth.47

Thus, whereas Geertz was asking, Why can Conklin see what he (Geertz) does not see? Hunn asks, Why can Conklin see what no one sees? Hunn’s thesis is undercut by the fact that Conklin’s fieldwork with the Ifugao, although very different in time and place and topic, was no less astonishing in its depth and exactitude. But perhaps Hunn’s argument for the Hanunóo could be repeated for the Ifugao: namely, that Conklin arrived among them at a point when their system of rice terraces had reached its peak of development, before off-farm work and out-migration had started to sap the labor force, and when the means to map it all in detail were at hand for the first time. This is reminiscent of the argument made in the last chapter regarding Wallace’s work in the East Indies. Perhaps both Conklin and Wallace were in the field at a serendipitous moment when there was much to observe, and when conditions and resources made observation possible, and just before all of that changed. Alternatively, perhaps every time and place is unique in its own way, and Conklin was not simply “lucky” but had the insight to recognize when and where “the full powers of human observation and cultural elaboration were focused,” to use Hunn’s words, and to focus there himself. This is suggested by Clifford Geertz’s anecdote of Conklin’s visit to Morocco, during which he saw things that Geertz had simply not seen. Conklin visited one of my own field sites in Yogyakarta in Central Java in the 1980s. Busy with other matters, I dispatched Conklin alone to the central town market, from which he returned hours later with data on the many different types and sources of wax used in printing batik cloth, which was a complex local system of knowledge that I had not known even existed. There is a final example that is perhaps even more impressive because it is more proximate and familiar: Conklin’s wife, Jean, once told me a story about the day the doorbell of their family home near the Yale campus broke

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Figure 4.7. The doorbell to the former Conklin family home in York Square Place, New Haven, Connecticut. Author’s photograph.

(figure 4.7). A doorbell repairman came by to fix it, and Conklin started interviewing him about the universe of doorbells, whereupon Jean said, “For heaven’s sake, it’s just a doorbell!” For Conklin, however, nothing was just a doorbell.

Interlude

Preternatural

T

he work of Harold C. Conklin focuses our attention on the challenges of knowing another system of knowledge. One year after Conklin published his Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao, I reviewed it at his request for journals in both Indonesia and the U.S. In my reviews I discussed the “paradox” of rice cultivation that was discussed in chapter 4—on one hand, the cultural preeminence of rice, and on the other, its economic onerousness and precarity—my first insight into which was based on my analysis of Conklin’s data. I noted that not just the Ifugao but Conklin himself seemed to pay more attention to the rice pond-fields than the root crop swiddens. For example, the Atlas contains maps for individual pond-field plots for all twenty districts in the survey area but maps of individual swidden plots for only one district. Conklin suggests that not only are the pond-fields more important within the cultural system, but they are also more determinant within the agricultural system. The swiddens, he suggests, play more of a contingent role within the system: Conklin calls them insurance, supplementary, and complementary. He writes: “With respect to the entire agricultural system, the most important aspect of Ifugao shifting cultivation is the relative ease with which swiddens can be made and extended when there are signs that the rice crop [in the pond-fields] will be poor.” While noting how the swidden subsystem responds to failure in the pond-field subsystem, he does not mention whether the reverse also takes place. In short,

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Conklin’s treatment of the root crop swiddens versus rice pond-fields seemed to reflect the worldview of the Ifugao. After my reviews were published, Conklin questioned my analysis of swiddens versus pondfields, which he supported by saying that he had read my review aloud to the Ifugao and they had laughed at it. This is a classic case of the divide between an etic analysis and an emic one, with Conklin and the Ifugao sharing the emic viewpoint.1 In Bruno Latour’s 1987 work Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, he discusses another famous emic example, the classification of the cassowary (Casuariaus spp.) by the Karam of New Guinea as not a bird. Latour notes that Ralph Bulmer’s presentation of this case is an example of ethnotaxonomy or ethnozoology—both variants of ethnoscience—which is the ethnographic study of the system of knowledge of another people. Latour points out an asymmetry here: Bulmer is trying to explain why the Karam classify the cassowary as not a bird, not why naturalists classify it as a bird, and he calls the former ethnozoology but the latter merely zoology. Latour explores this asymmetry in a footnote: “The most complete work of ethnoscience is to be found in H. Conklin (1980) [the Atlas]. Unfortunately there is no equivalent of this on a Western industrialised community.”2 Thus, Latour is lamenting that the West has science but no ethnoscience of the West itself—no emic treatment of western belief systems, no treatment of them as beliefs. He is suggesting that it would be beneficial if we were able to think about western settings in the same way that we think about nonwestern settings. Latour’s own field of actor network study, as well as the field of science and technology studies more generally, is an effort to do just that. An example of ethnoscientific insight in the West, albeit focused not on what westerners know but what they don’t know, is the famous confession of lack of botanical knowledge by Elenore Smith Bowen, the pen name for Laura Bohannon, when she arrives for fieldwork among the Tiv of Central Nigeria: “These people are farmers: to them plants are as

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important and familiar as people. I’d never been on a farm and am not even sure which are begonias, dahlias, or petunias. Plants, like algebra, have a habit of looking alike and being different, or looking different and being alike; consequently mathematics and botany confuse me. . . . For the first time in my life I found myself . . . where every plant, wild or cultivated, had a name and a use, and where every man, woman and child knew literally hundreds of plants.” This passage has become a trope in ethnobotanical discussions. After noting the difference in botanical knowledge between the Tewa Indians and whites in New Mexico, Lévi-Strauss quotes Bowen’s passage, first writing: “E. Smith Bowen scarcely exaggerates in the amusing description she gives of her confusion when, on her arrival in an African tribe, she wanted to begin by learning the language. Her informants found it quite natural, at an elementary stage of their instruction, to collect a large number of botanical specimens, the names of which they told her as they showed them to her. She was unable to identify them, not because of their exotic nature but because she had never taken an interest in the riches and diversities of the plant world. The natives on the other hand took such an interest for granted.” After presenting the passage from Bowen, Lévi-Strauss then adds, “the reaction of a specialist is quite different,” and he quotes the medical doctor Wilhelm Gilges on how much his interlocutors in Northern Tanzania appreciated his interest in, and knowledge of, their medical botany. Then Lévi-Strauss presents the three-page extract from Conklin’s field journal with the Hanunóo, discussed in chapter 4.3 At the beginning of a chapter titled “Knowing Plants” in his book Care of the Species, Hartigan pairs Bowen’s famous passage with an equally famous passage from Lévi-Strauss himself: “The accurate identification of every animal, plant, stone, heavenly body or natural phenomenon mentioned in myths and rituals is a complex task for which the ethnographer is rarely equipped. Even this is not however enough. It is also necessary

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to know the role which each culture gives them within its own system of significances.” Lévi-Strauss calls this a “difficulty” and admits it is rarely overcome. In effect, therefore, Lévi-Strauss and Bowen are referring to the same thing—the challenge of trying to inhabit the botanical universe of another society. Lévi-Strauss’s copious citation of Conklin’s work suggests that he thinks that Conklin, with his “preternatural” powers of observation, is one of the rare scholars who have met this challenge.4 In his famous paper “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” Clifford Geertz writes that he borrowed the term “thick description”—the inspiration for Frake’s label of “fine description” for Conklin—from the English philosopher and classicist Gilbert Ryle. Ryle illustrates “thick description” with the case of two boys who are rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes. In one, it is an involuntary twitch, in the other a wink. Both look alike to the observer, but they mean vastly different things: unlike the twitcher, the winker is communicating (1) deliberately, (2) to someone in particular, (3) to impart a particular message, (4) according to a socially established code, and (5) without the cognizance of the rest of the company. Suppose that there is a third boy who wants to parody the first boy’s wink as amateurish. Here, too, a socially established code exists, which involves winking clumsily. Further, uncertain of his mimicking abilities, the would-be satirist may practice at home before the mirror, in which case he is not twitching, winking, or parodying, but rehearsing. Finally, the original winker might have been fake-winking, in which case the descriptions of what the parodist is parodying and the rehearser rehearsing shift accordingly. Ryle summarizes the differences: “A thin description of what the rehearsing parodist is doing is roughly the same as for the involuntary eyelid twitch; but its thick description is a many-layered sandwich.” Geertz adds: “Between what Ryle calls the ‘thin description’ of what the rehearser . . . is doing (‘rapidly contracting his right eyelids’) and the ‘thick description’ of what he is doing . . . lies the object of ethnography.”5

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In the same paper (“Thick Description”), Geertz applied Ryle’s concepts to an analysis of a 1912 sheep raid in central Morocco, of which he heard during his fieldwork in 1968: a Jewish merchant is robbed by Berbers and his friends are murdered; he asks the local tribal sheikh to go with him to demand the traditional indemnity ‘ar from the guilty parties; they do so and he is given 500 sheep; but when the merchant brings the sheep home, the French accuse him of being in league with the Berbers, put him in prison, and confiscate his sheep. As with Ryle’s “many-­layered sandwich,” Geertz suggests that the meaning of human behavior, like sheep stealing, “varies according to the pattern of life by which it is informed.” Thus, “Claiming his ‘ar, Cohen invoked the trade pact; recognizing the claim, the sheikh challenged the offenders’ tribe; accepting responsibility, the offenders’ tribe paid the indemnity; anxious to make clear to sheikhs and peddlers alike who was now in charge here, the French showed the imperial hand.”6 Ironically, the one layer missing from this “many-layered sandwich” are the sheep themselves—just as the cocks are missing from Geertz’s cockfight study—but after all it is a story about sheep. In the larger scheme of things, Geertz thinks that “no one really cares anymore, not even Cohen (well . . . maybe, Cohen), about those sheep as such.” But it seems likely that not only Cohen but also the Berbers cared very much about the sheep. In weighing the relevance for the sociological mind of “protracted descriptions of distant sheep raids,” Geertz admits that “a really good ethnographer would have gone into what kind of sheep they were.” Conklin would definitely have “gone into” the kinds of sheep, because the Berbers would have done so. It would have been impossible for Conklin to tell the story about the sheep raid without foregrounding the sheep. Anthropological “thick description” is often socially rich but materially thin. Conklin’s legacy has been to challenge anthropologists to take seriously the significance of the biotic world in the stories that they hear and retell.7

Epilo gue

“Lucubrationes”

I n 1 6 6 3 R u m p h i u s s e n t a l e t t e r t o his superiors requesting references works and instruments for his research, which he referred to as “lucubrationes.” Beekman says that Rumphius borrowed this term from Pliny: “In Roman times this wonderful phrase meant ‘study by lamplight,’ ‘nightwork,’ ‘nocturnal meditations,’ which later English usage reduced to the general meaning of ‘study.’” Beekman suggests that this “marvelous word” not only has literal reference to Rumphius working at night by lamplight, but it had the added benefit, by suggesting that Rumphius did not pursue his natural history studies during the day, of “slyly disarming any official objections” to his nonofficial activities. The term “lucubrationes” thus had multiple valences: it hearkened back to the classical era and its influence on Rumphius; it strategically addressed his official role in the Dutch East India Company, which he termed a “mask” for his real love, his research; and it ironically and tragically anticipated the “long sad night” of blindness (1670–1702), during which Rumphius produced his major works, “with borrowed eyes and pen.”1 This multivalent term is an apt title for the epilogue to this volume, which is intended to synthesize the multiple conceptions of natural history—what it appears to be today, what it once actually was, and what it might become again.

“Something Else” In response to a statement by the editors of the journal Hérodote about seventeenth-century travelers and nineteenth-century geographers “collecting and mapping information which was directly exploitable by colonial powers, strategists, traders, and industrialists,” Foucault wrote: “I can cite an anecdote here, for what it’s worth. A specialist in documents of the reign of Louis XIV [1643–1715] discovered while looking at seventeenth-­ 191

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century diplomatic correspondence that many narratives that were subsequently repeated as travelers’ tales of all sorts of marvels, incredible plants and monstrous animals, were actually coded reports. They were precise accounts of the military state of the countries traversed, their economic resources, markets, wealth and possible diplomatic relations. So that what many people ascribe to the persistent naïveté of certain eighteenth-century naturalists and geographers were in reality extraordinarily precise reports whose key has apparently now been deciphered.”2 Thus, Foucault suggests that seventeenth-century overseas accounts by travelers, geographers, and natural historians, which purported to be about “marvels,” were actually encoded political-economic reports. His implication is that these overseas accounts did not otherwise have political-economic content, that they were otherwise innocuous, and therefore they provided perfect cover for conveying confidential content on this subject. Indeed, Foucault seems to be saying that the very fantastic nature of such accounts served to direct attention away from more sensitive matters, compiled by natural historians who were not as “naïve” as they appeared to be. By introducing this account as an “anecdote” and by adding “for what it’s worth,” Foucault circumscribes its veracity, but he raises the possibility that it is true. An interest in “marvels, incredible plants and monstrous animals” was in fact in disrepute in some circles in France and elsewhere in Europe in the seventeenth century, given the Cartesian valorization of pure reason and deprecation of the “curious sciences.”3 So the idea that accounts of such things could have no value in and of themselves fits the era. In keeping with this fact, Foucault does not see this “anecdote” as irrational; he does not dismiss out of hand the suggestion that a narrative of natural history is really a narrative about something completely different, indeed that it only makes sense as a narrative about something else. Mary Pratt, writing about Linnaeus, his students, and other eighteenth-­ century travelers, takes a stance similar to Foucault’s. She writes: “The interests of science and commerce were carefully held distinct. Expeditions mounted in the name of science, like Cook’s to the South Seas in the 1760s and 1770s, often went under secret orders to look out for commercial opportunities and threats. That the orders were there, yet secret, suggests the ideological dialectic between scientific and commercial enterprises.”4 Thus, Pratt says that the works of natural historians like Linnaeus were often a cover for clandestine gathering of strategic political-economic in-

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formation. Again, natural history is seen as a cover for something else. And the implications are twofold: first, that this something else, the gathering of information with explicit political-economic value, needed a cover— Pratt emphasizes the secrecy involved, the fact that gathering such information on a scientific expedition could not be done openly—and second, that the manifest object of natural history could not possibly justify its activities. The argument by Pratt and Foucault that colonial-era natural history was not naïve but rather calculating speaks to the difficulty of reading past natural history from the vantage point of the present, with not just Pratt but Foucault himself falling victim to the very difficulty that he theorized. Pratt and Foucault are suspicious of interest in “marvels,” and suspicious of the “curious sciences,” in a way that is modern and Cartesian. They are suspicious of the very purpose of natural history, presuming that it only makes sense if it has ulterior, secret, political-economic motives. Ironically, Pratt and Foucault were correct in sensing some sort of secrecy and deception at the heart of colonial natural histories, but they misidentified its locus and purpose. The colonial powers did not even pretend a lack of interest in identifying and exploiting natural resources in their colonies; rather, deception and secrecy came into play in relations between colonial powers and native groups, as well as among the colonial powers themselves, involving efforts to obfuscate the nature and location of those resources. The Dutch, for example, made a sustained effort to suppress knowledge of and access to the spice-bearing plants in the eastern reaches of the Malay Archipelago. Indeed, mystification had characterized the spice trade between Asia and Europe from its beginnings, as noted in the interlude following chapter 1.5 Another example of the challenge of reading back, which also involves problematizing the manifest versus latent goals of natural history and confusing its political and scientific ends, comes from the biologist David Black, in his edits to Carl Linnaeus: Travels. He suggests that there are curious elements in Linnaeus’s account of his expedition to the islands of Öland and Gotland, which were due to government interests, not his own: “The purpose of his journey, made at the request of the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag, was chiefly economic. Sweden at that time was a poor country still recovering from the disastrous wars of Charles II and Linnaeus’s instructions concentrated on the agricultural methods, use of

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plants for food, medicine, dyes, etc.; that is why readers may find curious mentions of lime kilns, crops, and cattle. Of course Linnaeus, being at heart a naturalist, was more interested in the natural life.”6 In contrast to Pratt and Foucault, Black does not regard the study of natural history marvels or as he puts it “the natural life” as code for political-economic activity; rather, he sees political economic activity as the manifest goal of Linnaeus’s expedition, which he supposedly was obliged to pursue at the expense of his real interest in marvels. Black does not consider the possibility that Linnaeus defined “the natural life” as encompassing kilns, crops, and cattle. Black’s misreading, therefore, has to do with the strangeness to modern eyes of a holistic vision of natural history that straddles both nature and culture. Knowledge was suppressed and otherwise manipulated by both ruler and ruled during the colonial era, something that Foucault and Pratt ignore and thereby unduly privilege the powers of the Europeans. The peoples of the East Indies, for example, made systematic efforts to obscure from European traders the sources of their valuable resources. There was a long-running effort by the Banjarese Kingdom in southeastern Borneo to keep European traders away from the tribespeople in the interior who produced black pepper (Piper nigrum). The coastal Papuans obstructed efforts by Wallace to contact the natives in the interior who hunted and traded birds of paradise. And Rumphius suggested that the people living in the island interiors purposefully hid the source of the upas poison from outsiders. In a comment reminiscent of Wallace’s lament when trying to negotiate between coastal and interior communities in his search for the bird of paradise, Rumphius writes, “It is quite incredible how much they [the Mountain-people] will hide this tree from the Shore-dwellers and from strangers.” The Dutch Admiral Cornelis Speelman similarly wrote in 1685 that information on the poison tree was hard to come by because the Makassar princes were bound by oath not to divulge it. As reflected in these cases, there was secrecy, and agency, on both sides, Orient as well as Occident. There was also what might be called a hermeneutics of secrecy on both sides. The native societies of the East Indies were not passive, unthinking victims of colonial knowledge management. They were keen observers, and theorizers, of these management practices.7 As noted in chapter 3, when Wallace was in the Aru Islands, the natives pressed him for information on a possible historical encounter they

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had with Portuguese. When he could not provide any information, they pointed to “my asking them about birds and animals I have not yet seen, and showing an acquaintance with their forms, colours, and habits. These facts are brought against me when I disclaim knowledge of what they wish me to tell them. ‘You must know,’ say they; ‘you know everything . . . you know all about our birds and our animals as well as we do.’ Therefore every confession of ignorance on my part is thought to be a blind, a mere excuse to avoid telling them too much.” Wallace also was suspected of clandestine motives when living in the entrepôt of Dobbu: “Living in a trader’s house everything is brought to me as well as to the rest—bundles of smoked tripang, or bêche de mer . . . dried sharks’ fins, mother-of-pearl shells, as well as Birds of Paradise. . . . When I hardly look at the articles, and make no offer for them, they seem incredulous, and, as if fearing they have mis­understood me, again offer them.” Wallace’s rejection of these trade goods leads to other sorts being offered: “They have their own ideas of the uses that may possibly be made of stuffed birds, beetles, and shells which are not the right shells—that is, ‘mother-of-pearl.’ They every day bring me dead and broken shells, such as I can pick up by hundreds on the beach, and seem quite puzzled and distressed when I decline them. If, however, there are any snail shells among the lot, I take them, and ask for more—a principle of selection so utterly unintelligible to them, that they give it up in despair, or solve the problem by imputing hidden medical virtue to those which they see me preserve so carefully.” Thus, native “despair” regarding Wallace’s actual objectives leads them to believe the true objectives must be secret. For Wallace’s part, his bemused recounting of these interactions is another colonial trope, which emphasizes the gap between the understanding of the colonizer and the colonized, with the presumption that his view of his mission is objective and the natives’ view is not. However, this gap, this “unintelligibility” is more imagined than real: in the very same paragraph in which he talks about purchasing snail shells, Wallace refers to the native traders’ amazement at “the unheard-of phenomenon of a person come to stay at Dobbo who does not trade!”— which is a disingenuous effort to differentiate his trade from native trade and downplay the commercial dimension of his own work.8 Linnaeus encountered similar suspicions of the motives of natural historians during his expedition to Öland off the eastern coast of Sweden in 1841: “After church service, a man collected us together to enquire about

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us and our plans. He took us for spies and said that before the last war three spies had been there, who had been executed at Hulterstad; that we observed everything, investigated every situation; that the priest had given us information about the church’s means; that I had all the time counselled my company with the words that they should have eyes for everything; therefore we were advised to take with us a state attendant, which we did.”9 There are many reasons for natural history studies to seem suspicious. “Observing everything,” the holism of natural history, is one of them. Another is the inquiry into folk knowledge—the inquiry into what is commonly known to the folk but uncommon and unknown to the natural historian. Also confounding is when such inquiries focus on mundane matters, which are being studied for admittedly non-mundane—namely, academic—purposes. Finally, the formal inquiry itself is not in keeping with the fact that this sort of knowledge is typically not formally taught. This is not say that these suspicions cannot be overcome: in his research in the Philippines, Conklin was able to focus on domains of knowledge in which he and his interlocutors shared an equally intense and mutually intelligible interest, and his ability to do this was one aspect of the genius of his research. In the terms of Foucault and Pratt, Rumphius was a naïve naturalist, whose fantastic accounts of the poison tree must have disguised the secret gathering of information of political-economic importance. Yet Rumphius was hardly a naif: spending a half-century in Ambon, he likely knew more about the East Indies, including the Dutch government of the Indies, better than anyone else alive. The search for the key to deciphering Rumphius’s writings on the upas tree, to use Foucault’s terms, must begin with the fact that Rumphius’s writing on the poison tree involves the one weapon discussed in his entire corpus of work. Daniel Carey locates Rumphius’s study of the poison tree within “a rhetorical tradition identifying the productions of the East as marvels, although in this case they create something closer to terror than to wonder.” Carey sees Rumphius as writing very much in this tradition: “Rumphius’ report contains a mixture of fact with the fabulous, which suggests that understanding of the poison was still structured to some extent by the discourse of marvels, whether European or local in origin.”10 The modern Occident can still be astonished by the marvels and terrors of the Orient. Edward Said argued that “Orientalism” is a dimension

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of western political culture and has less to do with the east than with the west. This was demonstrated early in the twenty-first century in the Mideast, the petroleum reserves of which are the contemporary equivalent of the spices of the East Indies during Rumphius’s era. An implicit motivation for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2002 was these petroleum reserves; the explicit trigger for the invasion was the manufactured thesis that Saddam Hussain possessed “weapons of mass destruction,” both chemical and nuclear. Catherine Lutz among others argue that the U.S. belief in and fear of these fictional weapons was a contemporary Orientalist fantasy.11 According to Said, Orientalism manifests itself in the selective nature of western fears. The U.S. obsession, its own mighty nuclear arsenal notwithstanding, with the nonexistent nuclear arsenal of the Iraqis, recalls the Dutch in their massive gunships obsessing about the blowpipes of the Macassar natives. Regarding this western fixation with an “Islamic bomb,” Hugh Gusterson argues that “possible fears and ambivalences about Western nuclear weapons were purged and recast as intolerable aspects of the ‘Other.’” Gusterson, following Said, argues that fear of self becomes mirrored in fear of the other. As Gusterson says about the Islamic bomb, what the Dutch thought they saw on the upas-blasted landscape of the East Indies said as much about the Dutch and their own psyche as it did about the East Indies. As Walter Benjamin has written, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”12

Object of Study The landscape on which the scholarly gaze is focused is never flat or homogeneous: some things are in focus and some things are not; not everything gets studied. Moreover, this is dynamic: things come into and go out of focus, the scientific gaze moves around. The global or national margins, at which natural history once focused, shift. Ambon in the East Indies was a distant margin before the seventeenth century, when the spice trade made it into a center; Rumphius could say that it was “not known” but neither was it “a monster dragged from the wilds of Africa.” No longer a political-economic center today, Ambon became a center of botanical interest because of Rumphius’s work.13 Historically, what drew the focus of natural historians was the unusual. As Rumphius wrote, “I confess that I would rather be astounded by

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the unfathomable powers of nature, than to lapse into some kind of error because of too punctilious a scrutiny.” He reached his apogee of astonishment in the upas tree—but this reflected the tree’s imbrication in global politics, so it was an insightful error. A penchant for astonishment was a characteristic of natural historians, and it was one with an ancient pedigree: a distinction between the unusual “other” that needs to be studied, and the common and familiar that does not, has roots in the classical era. The Greeks referred to the things worthy of study in the natural world—the things that were remarkable as opposed to unremarkable, in the literal senses of the words—as historiae. Such things were the objects of research by both Theophrastus and Pliny. For Theophrastus, it might include a sweet pomegranate appearing on a tree that normally bore only acid fruit or the change of color of a fruit tree, such as a fig turning from white to black; for Pliny it would include elephants. Seneca the Stoic disdained the scholarly inclination to study the unusual but unimportant, as opposed to the important but everyday. His distinction ultimately raises an enduring question about the fundamental purpose of scientific inquiry: is its purpose to explain the normal or the abnormal? And how are the normal versus abnormal constructed in the very process of asking this question?14 Marvels have always had a spatial dimension: they are distant, not near. The historiae of the ancient world, like elephants, came from the edge of empire. As French writes, “Wonderful, historia-things were distant,” and “it was at the edges of that [Roman] world that things were strange and worthy of historia.” In contrast, and almost by definition, there were no historiae nearby nor, thus, any reasons to study nearby: “There would seem no reason for anyone in the ancient world to write a natural history of their own back garden.” Hardy and Totelin astutely point out that this principle is reflected in Theophrastus’s failure to refer to his own people, the Eresians or the Lesbians, in the Enquiry into Plants—his ethnobotanical informants always came from other peoples.15 The four natural historians who are the focus of this volume followed this same pattern: they all carried out their work in nonwestern settings, including Linnaeus in his work with the Sámi, who lived at the geographic, political, and cultural margins of the Swedish state. The implication is that natural history was only to be found in nonwestern settings, or was of greater interest there, or could be best studied there. Thus,

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East and West mapped onto scientific object versus scientist subject. In contrast today, or at least until recently, the ground of study is not based on a differentiation of East and West but of nature and culture, as research-­ worthy “otherness” shifted in the eyes of twentieth-century ecologists to “pristine” natural landscapes, whether in the Orient or Occident, notwithstanding the efforts of scholars like Thoreau and Leopold. There is a logistical challenge to studying far, which has, first, a domestic dimension. Whether thinking of Linnaeus and Wallace, both of whom traveled constantly, or Rumphius and Conklin, both of whom traveled far and then stayed put, their methods were based on a disciplined approach to the habitus of fieldwork. This involved establishing a “camp” or base that accommodated daily needs for food and shelter and provided a functional space in which to interview, take notes, process specimens, and so on—a space in which to be both “there” in the field but also “here” out of the field, and thus “distanced” from the field, which makes it possible to carry out the essential tasks of observing the field (figure E.1). Clearly demarcating this space, spatially, temporally, and perhaps in the scholar’s own mind as well, seems to have been one key to their productivity.16 There is also a political dimension to the logistics of distant study: who gets to do this, how they do this, and then, in consequence, who is in a position to move information from one place to another. French makes the self-evident point that “acquaintanceship with distant things implies travel, generally military or commercial.” Theophrastus drew on reports from Alexander the Great’s expeditions. Pliny, who held posts in the Roman military and navy, saw an explicit link between the growth of empire and botanical discoveries.17 This is not merely a matter of the logistics of gathering distant information: there was a close imbrication of science and power. Marvels of natural history had much to do with the dynamics of rule and the logic of empire. For example, the Roman triumphs, staged in Rome to celebrate military campaigns abroad, customarily featured marvels sent home for the event. As French writes: “Victorious generals often enough sent strange animals and even trees back for the Triumph. . . . To display strange and ferocious beasts in Rome was to display the power of Roman arms in distant places, and Roman commanders often promoted themselves in this way.” The marvels of natural history brought back to Rome by victorious

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Figure E.1. Thatched hut built for the bone bundles of the dead, occupied by Conklin during his initial several months’ residence among the Hanunó. Conklin, “Bamboo Literacy on Mindoro,” 5. Reprinted with permission from the estate of Harold C. Conklin.

generals symbolized Roman rule. They testified to the ability of the Roman empire to reach far enough into distant lands to grasp the unusual; and the degree of unusualness was indexical to the length of the reach. Transcending the familiar was, accordingly, a symbol of power. Whereas it was polit-

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ical power that made it possible to access distant marvels, these marvels themselves attested to and thus underwrote this power.18 This ancient association of political power and natural history supports but also undermines the modern anti-colonial critique of the field. The critique of natural history on the grounds of its place within the era of European colonialism has not been informed by this ancient history. Natural history has come to be associated with the colonial era because the scholars and expeditions of this time period are well known, but its classical predecessors are not. An exclusive focus on the last several centuries obscures the continuity with the preceding millennia and replaces an enduring universal politics with a more parochial colonial European politics. The idea of natural history, what it is about, and why and how it is carried out have been imbricated with relations of power for millennia—it is not simply a product of recent European colonial history.19 The modern critique of natural history also rests on an essentialist argument. Batsaki, Cahalan, and Tchikine acknowledge that botanists of the eighteenth century have been called “agents of empire” and botany has been seen as contributing to the rise of empire, but they also suggest that botany contained and botanists supported “a plurality of philosophical and social agendas.” In addition, Gan, Tsing, and Sullivan point out, “Although the term ‘natural history’ has often referred to a European colonial practice, ethnobiologists have shown that people all over the world are interested in the living world around them. Attention to living beings is not necessarily colonial.”20 To recognize the colonial setting for some natural history, but to also recognize the long precolonial history of the field, as well as its current postcolonial moment, amounts to a call for a new kind of, in effect, postcolonial study.

Lessons As I suggested in the introductory chapter, there are nascent signs of interest today in reviving natural history, with one of the most prominent proponents within anthropology being Anna L. Tsing. In her co-authored study of brownfield “ruins” in Denmark, Tsing, Gan, and Sullivan write that it “aims to show how natural history might expand studies of interspecies interactions that shape succession in anthropogenic landscapes.” They add that “in advocating the inclusion of natural history field obser-

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vations within ethnobiological research, we draw from a long legacy of just such practice.” They note inspiration in the work of Conklin: “Thus, for example, Harold Conklin (1959) pioneered the study of shifting cultivation as a set of assemblages, human and nonhuman, in which the agency of plants, as well as people, played a role in the dynamics of succession. This is the trajectory we pursued in studying industrial ruins—except that we could not rely so strongly on local residents as experienced guides.”21 Tsing and her co-authors clearly find the life of these ruins remarkable; the organisms they find there, especially the mycorrhizal fungi, fill the niche of marvels that was occupied by the exotic flora and fauna of historic natural historians. These modern landscapes collapse the nature-culture divide, and in this sense they are analogous to the pastoral landscapes studied by past natural historians like White, Linnaeus, and Thoreau. Equally, their analytic embrace of below- and above-ground life, industrial past and present, and diverse interests of a variety of public and private actors, rings true to the holistic vision of the natural history tradition. The “ruins” of Tsing and her colleagues, writ large, are the altera­ tions in the planet’s atmosphere producing global warming and the alterations in terrestrial (especially tropical) ecosystems producing worsening threats from emerging diseases. An unexpected dimension of these ruins involves the politics of knowledge: the threats to humanity associated with these global ruins are made near intractable by widespread public skepticism regarding scientific methods and findings concerning climate change and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic—including the reality of the virus, the efficacy of masks, and the safety of vaccines. The current public debates about science, in particular in the United States, are different in character from those of earlier eras. When reports on climate change are presented in online fora, for example, critics do not present contravening data from their own locales or histories; instead, they present “alternative climate science,” they assume not a folk stance but a pseudo-scientific stance. Current debates about COVID-19 are similar in tone: members of the public make presentations to local school boards regarding mask wearing, for example, not based on personal experience with masks by themselves or their families, but on personal epidemiological theories they have developed by studying social media sites.22 In the natural histories of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, debates like these would have been hard to conceive

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of. For example, Baron Carl Hårleman attacked Linnaeus’s description of burn-beating, but the burn beaters themselves did not propose alternative “economies of nature.” The modern academic community has been taken aback by these developments: it was unprepared for the character and efficacy of this assault. This failure is due to the absence of a “hermeneutics” in many of the modern natural sciences, referring to a self-reflexive and critical awareness of how they do what they do: as Gyorgy Markus writes, the modern sciences lack a “neurosis philosophicus.” In particular, the sciences have not thought enough about the consequences of the modern separation of scientific thought from popular thought. They have not studied the former closeness between scientific and folk knowledge systems, and so they were not sufficiently aware of the loss of this over the past century.23 This is reflected today in the near total lack of systematic academic study of popular “alternative” science. Scientists often cannot understand the skeptics; they see the skeptics’ theories about the world—including environmental change and pandemic disease—as an unfathomable blur. This is not unrelated to the blurring of historic natural history, in particular its valorization of folk knowledge. The difficulty in reading older natural history helps to explain the difficulty today in understanding or “reading” the science skeptics. Compared with the natural histories discussed in this volume, modern science is removed from everyday life and the realm of folk knowledge that makes life intelligible to ordinary people. In former eras, natural historians recognized the existence of folk knowledge, gave it due credence, and incorporated it into their studies. This is almost entirely untrue of the modern natural sciences. But whereas folk knowledge disappeared from science, it has not dis­ appeared from modern society: it has flourished as always but with much less of a link to academic production. This explains, at least in part, why folk knowledge today, as on the topics of climate change and COVID-19, so often takes on the guise of a critique of science. Hearsay was once not excluded from natural history; it has been excluded from much of modern science, and in consequence it is forcing its own entry into scientific debates. John Fowles writes: “Much of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science and erudition is obsolete nonsense in modern scientific terms: in its personal interpolations, its diffuse reasoning, its misinterpreted evi-

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dence, its frequent blend of the humanities with science proper—its quotations from Horace and Virgil in the middle of a treatise on forestry. But one general, if unconscious, assumption lying behind almost all pre-­ Victorian science—that it is being presented by an entire human being, with all his complexities, to an audience of other entire human beings— has been much too soon dismissed as a mere historical phenomenon, at best exhibiting an engaging amateurishness, at worst sheer stupidity, from neither of which we have anything to learn.”24 In short, three to four centuries ago, scientists recognized their own humanity with all of the shortcomings that entailed—and also that of their audience. Fowles’s fear is that this assumption of common humanity has come to be dismissed as a historical peculiarity that science has moved beyond, and that this comes at a cost. Both the dismissal and the cost are reflected in the contemporary battles over the science of environmental change and emerging diseases. What is at stake is not just power or politics. To study anyone or anything is to be elevated: it is distancing, privileging, and appropriating— all of this has been inherent in science for millennia. Therefore, the as­ sociation of power with science is not uniquely useful as an explanatory device—there is a real question whether some sorts of power relations are ever absent from science—so it cannot serve as the basis for either dismissing historic natural history or trying to resolve the modern science wars. The challenge is not to evacuate power from science; rather, the challenge is to recognize that power relations are inherent in science and to recognize both their consequences and their limits. The challenge is to balance the power of science with other, legitimate centers of learning and knowledge, like folk knowledge or hearsay—which, following Foucault, must not be excluded.

Notes

Introduction 1. Foucault 1973:127–128. By the “classical age” Foucault (1973:xxii) means not the Greco-Roman culture of two millennia ago, but the period from the mid-seventeenth century through the beginning of the nineteenth century. 2. Linnaeus 1811, 2:85–88. Cf. Moore (1971:726): “For Foucault, neither man nor society existed as objects of knowledge for the Renaissance episteme. At that time nature consisted of an unbroken tissue of signs to be interpreted.” 3. White 1937:139, 150–151, 161–162. 4. Boon 1990:14. In his introduction to a 2008 edition of Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago, Whitten (pp. xvi–xvii) offers an interdisciplinary array of attractions to the modern traveler to the region that is similar to those related by Wallace: “Anyone with some time and an adventurous spirit can share a great deal of this even today. . . . There are still Rajas on small islands in Maluku, there are still plenty of leeches, there are still innumerable butterflies to enjoy, and unique sights like the mating displays of the extravagant Wallace’s Standard Wing are still there to be seen in the forests of Halmahera.” 5. Aristotle 1952:5; Hine 2010:3. 6. Lee 1952:xi; Hine 2010:2; French 1994:xiii. 7. Lee 1952:xi, xxv–xxvi; Rackham 1952:ix; French 1994:231–232. Murphy (2008:671– 672) praises Pliny’s innovation of an index—“a universal taxonomy in miniature”— and adds, “Pliny is sometimes attacked for excessive credulity, since NH [Naturalis Historia] abounds in the surprising and the marvelous (mirabelia): fantastic animals, astonishing springs, and oddly-shaped peoples. But from an ancient perspective, mirabelia serve not only the recognized literary end of entertainment, they also illustrate the variety and power of Pliny’s chosen subject, Nature. Since the normal is understood by contrast with the strange, Pliny’s mirabelia work as limit-­ cases, demarcating the realm of accepted knowledge by tracing its periphery.” 8. Beekman 1999:xcvii; Beekman 1981:17–18. Cf. Thoreau’s (1964:82) comment two centuries later regarding the study of classical texts and languages, “We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.” During his expedition to Gotland in 1741, Linnaeus (1979:82) makes a joke at the expense of his idol, Pliny: “The inhabitants had a nice manner of covering their walls with yew twigs, starting from the floor and covering all the wall as with shingles, for which the soft needles made a delightful green wall cover. If Pliny had been invited into such a house, he would never have dared to sleep there one single night or to eat any food, since he believed that to sleep or eat under a yew tree was fatal; this makes people laugh here in Gothem.” 9. Benjamin 1968:263. 205

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10. Bates 1961:7, 247. 11. Most 2006:xx. 12. Marincola 2003:xix. 13. Healy 1991:xvii; French 1994:196. 14. Quoted in Gay (1969, II:152). 15. White 1937:13–14, 166, 290–291; Egerton 2012:89, cf. 92; Worster 1985:5, 14, 18. White, the curate with singular skills of observation, personifies the British tradition of natural history, which is central to its modern identity (see Allen 1976, 2002). Pilgrimages to White’s Selborne continue down to the present day (Anderson 2013:76). 16. Goethe 2009:xvi, xxiv, xxv; Worster 1985:132, 286; Egerton 2012:156; Humboldt 1849. The term “polymath” applies to a number of the scholars being discussed in these pages, which reflects the fact that because these scholars held a more holistic vision of the world, they worked in what—from the modern standpoint—look like many different fields. 17. White 1937:36; Koerner 1999:83; Thoreau 1964:238; Emerson 2003:40–41; Leo­ pold 1987:104–107. Benjamin Franklin drew attention to what happens when people unknowingly interfere in such cycles, as when shooting blackbirds leads to the proliferation of worms on crops (Glacken 1967:693). Egerton (2012:82) suggests that the principles in Linnaeus’s nutrient cycles are also expressed in the biblical book of Isaiah 40:6, “All flesh is grass.” 18. Glacken 1967:533, 534. 19. The recent challenge to “let anthropology burn” because of its presumed racist roots has been called “swidden anthropology” (Cantero et al. 2020). This pejorative construction of swidden is highly ironic given the near century-long efforts by anthropologists themselves to critique the grounds for this construction. See Barnes (2021) for an approach to swidden anthropology as autobiography. 20. E.g., Pelzer 1945; Izikowitz 1951; Freeman 1970; Condominas 1977; Conklin 1957; Geertz 1963; Burling 1965. Swiddens are still a focus of research on forest fallow management (Cairns 2007), the politics of upland-lowland relations (Scott 2009), biodiversity conservation (Padoch and Pinedo-Vasquez 2010), and the role of forest peoples in global trade (Dove 2011). See Jiang, Li, and Feng (2022) for a recent review of efforts to measure the current extent of swidden cultivation in the tropics. 21. Bates 1961:255. The loss of a holistic vision, and its cost, was recognized by scholars like Thoreau (Worster 1985:92). 22. Hardy and Totelin 2015:53, 58. 23. Goethe 2009:xiv; Glacken 1967:546; Rumphius 2011, 1:173–181; Wallace 2000:257– 258. Cf. Lomolino (2019:341) on Wallace’s “quasi-poetic musings on the place of nature.” 24. Worster 1985:314–315; Bates 1961:255; Beekman 1981:16; Snow 1998:69. Cf. Graef 2023. 25. Hardy and Totelin 2015:3, 41; French 1994:44; Rackham 1938:ix–x. 26. Theophrastus 1916, I.3:175, 179, 183, 207, 213, 217, 219, 231–232, 237. Hardy and Totelin (2015:43) write that Theophrastus sometimes identified especially talented categories of informants: “Thus Theophrastus wrote that experienced gardeners (empeirous to¯n ke¯ pouro¯n) recognised that vegetables were often hungry.”

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 5 – 2 4 207 27. Hort 1916:xxiv. 28. Sollenberger (2008:798); Theophrastus 1916, I.3:195, 209, 227, 231, 235; 4:359, 369. Hardy and Totelin (2015:53–54) suggest that Theophrastus and Herodotus both were engaged in a type of critical, comparative ethnography. 29. White 1937:67, 68, 75, 195, 265. 30. White 1937:69, 202–203, 246. 31. Egerton 2012:19, 21, 41. Egerton’s stance on folk beliefs is a common one among modern scholars. Ewen and Prime (1975:1, 3, 6), in their introduction to John Ray’s pioneering seventeenth-century Flora of Cambridgeshire, praise him for “freeing botany from folk lore and legend/setting it up as a pure science on its own.” 32. Raffles 2001:532, 533. 33. Raffles 2001:532, 534. Mueggler (2005:455) writes similarly of Kingdon-Ward’s work in the Chinese borderlands in the first half of the twentieth century: “This was not easy work. It required a rigorous system of exclusions that filtered out of the encounter between body and world the social conditions of perception: the labor of all those who accompanied and cared for him; the history of military incursions and political negotiations that established the border and made it pos­ sible for a British explorer to walk across it; the local institutions of the state that opened up the way before him; the social relations in which he was actually embedded on his expeditions, and all the exchanges, dialogues, claims, and recognitions these relations entailed.” 34. Healy 1991:xix; Pliny 1991:86. 35. White 1937:123–130. 36. Borges 1964a:103. 37. Huot 2015:591; Foucault 1973:xv, xvi. 38. White 1937:27, 19, 19n, 197–200. 39. White 1937:148–149, 220–224. White takes issue with Virgil’s claim that echoes are injurious to bees. 40. Thoreau 1964:39, 47–49, 134–135, 250, 253. See also Thorson’s (2017) account of Thoreau’s deep knowledge of the Concord, Assabet, and Sudbury rivers in Massachusetts. 41. Leopold 1987:30, 47, 89–90. 42. Hardy and Totelin 2015:3, 35, 38; French 1994:2. See Anderson (2018) on the “scientific voyage.” 43. Raffles 2001:514; Glacken 1967:544. Pratt (1992:27) writes that natural history “made contact zones a site of intellectual as well as manual labor.” 44. Cf. Steinbeck (1941:258) in his Sea of Cortez: “The true biologist deals with life, with teeming boisterous life, and learns something from it, learns that the first rule of life is living. The dry-balls [biologists who do not go into the field] cannot possibly learn a thing every starfish knows in the core of its soul and in the vesicles between his rays.” 45. Hardy and Totelin 2015:2. There is a difference of opinion as to whether Linnaeus ignored Rumphius’s work or not (see chapters 1 and 2). 46. Beekman 1999:cviii; Hardy and Totelin 2015:1–2. The power of the theory/practice distinction is reflected in this comment by the classicist Charles Singer (1927:1), in an otherwise generous and detailed review of ancient herbals: “The herbal is a

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collection of descriptions of plants put together for medical purposes. Most herbal remedies are quite devoid of any rational basis. It may be taken for granted that the writer of a herbal is unable to treat evidence on a scientific basis. He makes a ‘direct attack’ on disease, without any ‘nonsense about theories.’ The herbal is thus to be distinguished from the scientific botanical treatise by the fact that its aims are exclusively ‘practical’—a vain and foolish word with which, from the days of Plato to our own, men have sought to conceal from themselves and from others their destitution of anything in the nature of general ideas.” 47. Raffles 2001:515, 524; Stecher 1969:35, 45, 38. 48. Raffles 2001:530, 539. 49. Camerini 1996:64; Mueggler 2005:457. Camerini (1996:50) writes, “Wallace found nearly all of the 70 or more houses he inhabited during eight years of fieldwork through these interactions [with Europeans], which to a large extent determined the locations of his daily collecting sites.” Speaking from my own experience in the field in Borneo, twentieth-century anthropologists working in former colonial nations were generally much more alone, than Wallace, when in the field. 50. Camerini 1996:52; Costa 2019a:73–74. 51. Camerini 1996:45–46, 48. 52. Cf. Pratt (1992:27–28): “With the founding of the global classificatory project . . . the observing and cataloguing of nature itself became narratable. It could constitute a sequence of events, or even produce a plot. It could form the main storyline of an entire account.” 53. Rumphius 2011, 5:3; White 1937:130; Egerton 2012:156. See also Tim Ingold (2011) and Lye Tuck-Po (n.d.) on the role of walking/movement in life, scholarship, and cognition. 54. Wallace 1905, I:100. Descartes favored purposeful, linear movement over “wandering.” In order to illustrate his methods in his Discourse on Method, he wrote: “[To be] firm and resolute in my actions, imitating in this the example of a traveler who, upon finding himself lost in a forest, should not wander about turning this way and that, and still less stay in one place, but should keep walking as straight as he can in one direction, never changing it for slight reasons, even if mere chance made him choose it in the first place, for in this way, even if he does not go exactly where he wishes, he will at least end up in a place where he is likely to be better off than in the middle of a forest” (Sahlin 2017:327). Walking in a straight line as opposed to wandering about is an apt image for the difference between reason and experience, the armchair versus the field naturalist. The field is full of curves, the armchair is not. 55. Mueggler 2005:454, 457–458, 467. The book he refers to is Kingdon-Ward’s 1913 The Land of the Blue Poppy. 56. Tewksbury et al. 2014:306, box 2; Vetter 2006:107; Boon 1990:8, 14, 19. The titling of Steinbeck and Rickett’s first book (1941), “Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research,” would have both resonated with the natural history tradition of travel and offended those suspicious of it. 57. Rumphius 2011, 1:175. 58. White 1937:13, 138. I cited this line from White (p. 138) as the epigraph to my 1985 book, Swidden Agriculture in Indonesia: The Subsistence Strategies of the Kalimantan Kantu’.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 2 9 – 3 3 209 59. Linnaeus 1775a:3; Worster 1985:285; White 1937:132–133. 60. Leopold 1987:81, 174; Finch 1987:xviii. On the persisting preoccupation of natural scientists with Edenic versus domesticated sites, Anderson (1971:45–46) writes: “Follow in the taxonomist’s footsteps when he leads an expedition into the tropics or establishes a field station in Central America. There one meets with wide areas of thorn scrub and savanna used as range and pasture, considerable land in field crops and in gardens, and at higher elevations, wide expanses of pinewood, more or less pastured and more or less cut over. Very rarely a remote ridge rises to a peak and is clothed around the summit with a cloud forest. From the moment a taxonomist arrives in the area these tiny patches of cloud forest are the center of his interest; from his behavior one would suppose they were his main reason for being in Central America. Admittedly they are beautiful and biologically interesting in more ways than one. Scientifically they offer no more fundamental problems than do dump heaps or dooryards or maize fields or village gardens, all of which will be ignored by your true taxonomist.” 61. This principle is also illustrated by the evolutionary biologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson’s lifelong study of a single small pond in Branford, Connecticut (Skelly, Post, and Smith 2011). 62. Emerson 2003:197–198; Thoreau 1964:176–177, 242–243; Pearson 1964:v, vii. 63. Thoreau 2009:521; Thoreau 1964:268. “Iberos” would more commonly be translated as the natives of Spain and Portugal or their New World colonies. At the end of this passage Thoreau pillories global natural history expeditions, “It is not worth going round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.” The anthropologist Clifford Geertz who, unlike Thoreau, traveled far indeed, spending years in both Southeast Asia and North Africa, agrees with Thoreau. Quoting this line from Thoreau, Geertz (1973:16) writes that the purpose of going to Zanzibar (e.g.) is to exercise “the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers”—a sentiment with which Thoreau might agree. 64. Thoreau 1964:2, 267, 268. Mungo Park was a late eighteenth-century Scottish explorer of West Africa, and Martin Frobisher was an English seaman who explored northwest Canada in the sixteenth century. 65. Foucault 1973:125, 128; Ellen 2004:415; Williams 1980:73–74; Worster 1993:30. Worster (1993:20) claims that removal of history from natural history, and the modern balkanization of scholarship, is injurious to our intellectual and moral life, and to the natural world. 66. Foucault 1973:131, 132, 161, 133. Cf. Mueggler (2005:471): “Kingdon-Ward self-­ consciously made the lantern slide show the central condition of the botanical explorer’s experience, the condition that made it possible to reproduce experience and bring it home.” 67. Foucault 1973:132, 134, 137. Cf. Leopold (1987:158): “Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.” See also Sloan (1995) on the natural history gaze. 68. Egerton 2012:6; Foucault 1973:137. 69. There is a cultural dimension to ideas of exterior versus interior, as is evident from traditions of so-called X-ray painting and carving from Australia and New

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Guinea, which simultaneously depict both bodily surfaces and internal organs and skeletal structures (Wagelie 2002; Kjellgren 2014). 70. Cf. Hall 2011:71, 7–8, and Lewis-Jones 2016:1; Glacken 1967:19; Theophrastus 1916, I.1:7; 2:125; 3:167–168; 4:413; Hardy and Totelin 2015:126, 172; Pliny 1945, IV.16:477. Hardy and Totelin (2015:152–153) write, “as Pliny observed, plants suffer diseases. . . . Indeed, they were affected with, among other things, pains in the limbs, indigestion and obesity.” 71. Cited in Marder (2013:164); cf. Hall (2011). Theophrastus inherited the botanic garden that Aristotle founded in Athens and also succeeded him as head of the Lyceum there, a position that he held for 36 years (French 1994:83; Hartigan 2017:44). 72. Hardy and Totelin 2015:150; French 1994:59; Marder 2013:9, 57; Wohlleben 2015:227; Hartigan 2017. 73. Hartigan 2017:255–256. 74. Trewavas 2003; Marder 2011; Mancuso and Viola 2015; Myers 2015; Safina 2015; Schulthies 2019; Baker 2021; French 1994:205; Hardy and Totelin 2015:66; Hartigan 2017:209. 75. Oxford English Dictionary 1989; Google Ngram. The mission statement of the AMNH is “To discover, interpret, and disseminate—through scientific research and education—knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe” (https://www.amnh.org/about), whereas for the Smithsonian it is “To promote understanding of the natural world and our place in it. The museum’s collections tell the history of the planet and are a record of human interaction with the environment and one another” (https://naturalhistory.si.edu/about). 76. Anderson 2013:256. Anderson continues, “When E. O. Wilson chose Naturalist as the title of his autobiography, he was both making a clear statement about the importance of natural history in his personal career and making it respectable once more for other scientists to acknowledge its importance in their own.” 77. https://naturalhistoryinstitute.org/journal-of-natural-history-education-and -experience/. 78. Hampton and Wheeler 2012:162; Kearns and Schmidt 2021. French (1994:xi) refers to the work of the classical Greek and Roman scholars as “some kind of philosophy, most often natural philosophy.” 79. I am indebted to Jean Thomson Black for this suggestion. Indeed, Tallmadge (2011:51–52) suggests, “In the years since World War II, natural history became a preferred vehicle for American writers to address great issues of the day, including conservation, religion, politics, human rights, human health, industrial civilization, and the recuperation of traditional ecological knowledge.” See Reed (2018) for a review of new anthropological approaches to fiction. 80. Hampton and Wheeler 2012. 81. Viveiros de Castro 1998; Descola 2013; Kockelman 2013; Kohn 2013; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017; Gan, Tsing, and Sullivan 2018:39. 82. The earliest anthropological critique of Descartes’s view of animals may have been Lewis Henry Morgan’s mid-nineteenth-century study of the American beaver. He writes (Morgan 1868:248): “The popular mind has always been in advance of the metaphysicians with reference to the mental endowments of animals. For some rea-

N o t e s t o P a g e s 3 7 – 3 9 211 son there has been a perpetual hesitation among many of the latter to recognize, in the manifestations of the animal mind, the same characteristics that are displayed by the human intellect: lest the high position of man should be shaken or impaired.” Morgan (1868:263–264) cites the construction of beaver slides versus canals according to the topography of the country as evidence of the “free intelligence” and “progress in knowledge” of animals. He also gives the example of an animal erasing its tracks, the inability to do which is still asserted today as evidence of the lack of self-consciousness among animals. For example, Jacques Lacan (1977:305) wrote: “An animal does not pretend to pretend. He does not make tracks whose deception lies in the fact that they will be taken as false, while being in fact true ones, ones, that is, that indicate his true trail. Nor does an animal cover up its tracks, which would be tantamount to making itself the subject of the signifier.” But Morgan (1868:268–269) asserts, “The fox, when pursued, often takes to the bed of a shallow stream to conceal his footprints and suppress his scent; or runs back upon his own track for some distance, and then, making a long leap at a right angle, changes his direction. These devices were well adapted to embarrass and foil his pursuers. It seems to be an unavoidable inference that the fox understood the means by which he was followed, and that he possessed sufficient acuteness, as well as subtlety of mind, to counteract, in these ways, the danger.” 83. Cf. Kay E. Lewis-Jones (2016:1): “Plants have all too often been relegated to the margins—their diversity and vitality obscured within generic terms such as ‘habitat,’ ‘landscape,’ or ‘agriculture.’” Cf. the genre-defining works by Kimmerer (2013) and Simard (2021). Study of the nonhuman is also extending beyond the obviously animate world to things like rocks and stones (Povinelli 1995; Cohen 2015). 84. Gan, Tsing, and Sullivan 2018:39. 85. Hartigan 2017:95, 164.

Chapter 1. The Seventeenth Century, Rumphius 1. Rumphius 2011, 2:398; Beekman 2011, 2:399–400n15. The upas tree, Antiaris toxicaria (Pers.) Lesch, is a member of the Moraceae family. The active ingredient in its sap is a mixture of cardiac glycosides, which stop the heart of its victims when they get into the bloodstream (Carey 2003:522). Bisset (1989:26) states, “The main glycosides present in its latex are α and/or β-antiarin.” 2. Beekman 2011, 1:2, 95; Merrill 1917:14; Beekman 1999:lxxx, lxxxii, cviii; Yoo 2018. The official name of the Dutch East India Company (1602–1799) was the United East India Company, which in Dutch is Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, hence the acronym VOC. Rumphius titles The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet after the then-popular custom among collectors in Europe of purchasing curiosities from the East Indies and elsewhere and displaying them in cabinets in their homes. Thus, Rumphius presents his book as a literary equivalent to the physical cabinets. The Ambonese Herbal was originally published in seven volumes, each divided into books, each of which also was divided into chapters. The 2011 Yale University Press edition, translated and edited by E. M. Beekman, was published in six vol­

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umes, similarly divided into books and chapters (see Rumphius 2011, 1:xvii). References here will generally be to the 2011 edition, by volume and page number. Thus, “Rumphius 2011, 1:xvii” refers to page xvii in volume one of the 2011 edition. 3. Boon 1990:12; Beekman 1981:23; Merrill 1917:12, 13. 4. Beekman 2011, 1:1, 2, 109, 155. Contemporary familiarity with Rumphius’s work is spotty: for example, he is missing from Glacken’s (1967) comprehensive survey of nature and culture from ancient times to the end of the eighteenth century. On the other hand, there are many pilgrimages to the site of Rumphius’s labors: the natural historian Albert Smith Bickmore (2020:5) wrote in the preface to his 1868 account of his voyage to the East Indies, “The object of my voyage to Amboina was simply to re-collect the shells figured in Rumphius’ Rariteit Kramer [Curiosity Cabinet]”; the botanist David Fairchild (1943) visited Rumphius’s grave in Ambon during collecting trips in both 1899 and 1940; and Herman L. Strack (1993) led a biohistorical expedition to Ambon in 1990. 5. Beekman 2011, 1:1. 6. Sirks 1945:299; Beekman 1999:lxiii; Berlin 1970:1–2; Beekman 1981:16, 28. 7. Beekman 1999:xiv, ciii; Lévi-Strauss 1966:45; Rumphius 2011, 1:175–176; Pliny 1991:4; Beekman 2011, 1:103; Beekman 1981:17; Merrill 1917:15. The Academy to which Rumphius was elected, Academia Naturae Curiosorum, was founded in 1652; it was renamed by Emperor Leopold in 1687 as the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina; and then in 2007 it was renamed again as the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. The holistic vision of Rumphius is exemplified by the first four chapters of The Ambonese Herbal, all devoted to the coconut tree (Cocos nucifera L.), but each approaching it from different angles: chapter 1 The Cocos Tree, Calappa; chapter 2 Of the Kinds, Place, Ground, and Propagation of the Calappus Trees; chapter 3 Uses and Powers of the Calappus Tree; chapter 4 Miscreations and Monsters of the Calappus Tree. 8. Beekman 1981:12; Merrill 1917:41; cf. Beekman 1999:lxxx; Sirks 1945:302. 9. Beekman 2011, 1:139; Sirks 1945:302. Rumphius describes 1,700 individual named plants in the Herbal; modern botanists say these represent about 1,200 species (Merrill 1917:38). 10. Peeters 1979:145–146, 149. 11. Beekman 2011, 1:155; Ellen 2004:414–415. 12. Beekman 2011, 1:116, 138; Beekman 1999:xlviii, ciii, ciii–civ. 13. Beekman 1981:12; Beekman 1999:xciii, cv; Beekman 2011, 1:138, 301n5; Crawfurd 1856:370. 14. Rumphius 2011, 3:8. Even into the modern era, as Krikorian (1982) notes, Rumphius was being unfairly characterized as the source of botanical legends. 15. Yoo 2018:572; Rumphius 2011, 4:320; Beekman 2011, 1:138. 16. Beekman 1981:14; Sirks 1945:302. 17. Rumphius 1999:327. Meˇstika is the Malay term for a bezoar, or intestinal stone, with talismanic properties (Wilkinson 1959, 2:772–773). 18. Beekman 1999:ciii. 19. Beekman 2011:1, ciii, 67; Beekman 1999:lxxv–lxxvi, ciii.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 9 – 5 5 213 20. Beekman 2011, 1:59–60, 109; cf. Sirks 1945:302; Rumphius 2011, 1:176–177. 21. Beekman 2011, 1:138; Beekman 1981:16, 17; cf. Peeters 1979:147; Strack 1993:68; Beekman 1999:xcviii. 22. Two indigenous terms dominate the accounts by Rumphius and others of the poison tree and its poison: upas and ipo (or ipoh/ipuh). Upas is an old Javanese term for vegetable poison (Zoetmulder 1982:2135). This term also is found in contemporary Javanese, Indonesian, and Malay (Horne 1974:693; Echols and Shadily 1992:606; Wilkinson 1959:1270). In Indonesian, ipuh is a poison for weapon tips (Echols and Shadily 1992:226). Ipoh is found in Malay as a synonym for the Javanese/Sumatran upas and commonly refers specifically to Antiaris toxicaria (Wilkinson 1959:428). 23. Van Leur 1967:189. 24. Beekman 2011, 2:397n2. 25. Rumphius 2011, 2:397. By “previous trees” Rumphius is referring to trees with toxic white sap that he described in preceding pages of The Ambonese Herbal, including the Kaju-Mata-Buta tree or tree of blind eyes (Excoecaria agallocha L.) and the wild manga tree or the milkwood tree (Cerbera manghas L.). 26. Rumphius 2011, 2:398. 27. Rumphius 2011, 2:399–400n15, 405; Valentijn 1724–26; Carey 2003:524, 527. 28. Yoo 2018:574, 575, 579; Rumphius 1999:238–239. For another example of intersecting native and European trade activities, see the discussion of the trade in birds of paradise in chapter 3. Yoo (2018:563–564) notes that “A wide range of local actors participated in the collection, mediation and circulation of information and objects, especially in the context of commerce and war.” Subsequent to Rumphius, the field of natural history developed in such a way as to lose interest in this topic: until very recently, there was little interest in gathering the pre-acquisition “biographies” of the objects that wind up in natural history museums. 29. Rumphius 1999:277; cf. precious gems in Dove 2011; Rumphius 2011, 2:399; Carey 2003:531. Cf. Burkill 1966, 1:177: “To frustrate further inquiry [by outsiders] the statement was inserted [in native descriptions] that there was danger in going near the tree.” Cf. the comment by Jean Baptiste Louis Théodore Leschenault de la Tour (cited in Stockdale 1995:329, 332): “The orang-daias [Dayak], to check curiosity, or for some other reasons, talk much of the danger attendant on collecting the ipo [upas].” 30. Cited in Stockdale 1995:329, 332; cf. Bastin 1995. 31. Foersch 1783:512–513. John Bastin (1985:37), in his history of upas-related writing, cites sources suggesting that at the time Foersch wrote this account, he was a visitor at Sir Joseph Banks’s house in London. Banks took part in Captain James Cook’s first voyage (1768–71); was president of the Royal Society for over 41 years; advised King George III on Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; sent botanists around the world to collect plants; is credited for bringing 30,000 plant specimens home with him; and was the first European to document 1,400 of them. That setting may have inspired Foersch to write about plants, but in a very anti-Banksian fashion. 32. Beekman 2011, 2:399n15; Yule and Burnell 1903:952.

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The history of the mass circulation of the story of the poison tree in Europe can be contrasted with the history of the publication in which it originated, Rumphius’s Herbal (Beekman 2011, 1:96–98). After working on it for more than one-quarter century, Rumphius sent the manuscript to Holland by 1697, but in 1700 the VOC objected to its printing because of descriptions of cloves and nutmeg and their policies and practices pertaining to them. They relented at the end of 1702— Rumphius had died earlier that year—but would provide no financing. In 1736 Johannese Burman, editor of the first edition, submitted a publication plan to the VOC, which was eventually accepted, and the Herbal was printed one volume at a time between 1741 and 1750. The contrast between the publication history of Rumphius’s scholarship and the bowdlerized version of a native myth tells us much about the practice of natural history at the time: both academic and folk stories about the Indies circulated, at very different speeds and with halting official control, and reached very different audiences. 33. Bastin 1985:32. 34. Bastin 1985:37. 35. Beekman 2011, 2:398, 399–400n15. Beekman (1999:iv) used figure 1.4 for the frontispiece for The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, with these details: “This is the only known portrait drawn from life. Rumphius’ son, Paulus Augustus, drew the likeness sometime between October 1695 and July of 1696 in Kota Ambon, about six years before his father’s death. The print states that Rumphius was sixty-eight when he posed for this portrait, and that the governor then in office wrote the Latin encomium. This was Nicolaes Schaghen, who was Ambon’s governor from 1691 to 1696. The Latin verse reads in translation: ‘Though he be blind, his mental eyes are so sharp that no one can best him at inquiry or discernment. Rumphius is a German by birth but his loyalty and pen are completely Dutch. Let the work say the rest.’” 36. Yule and Burnell 1903:956; Beekman 2011, 2:400n15; Pigafetta 1969:99, 99n2. European anxiety regarding this native weapon prompted centuries of wild speculation concerning the poison and its antidotes. One of the earliest of these came from the aforementioned Friar Odoric, who gave perhaps the first reference in print to the antidote that has been recited by Europeans—but not natives—for 500 years: “The most deadly poison in all ye whole world: for against it there is but one only remedy: & that is thus: if any man hath taken of ye poison, & would be delivered from the danger thereof, let him temper the dung of a man in water, & so drinke a good quantitie thereof, & it expels the poyson immediately making it to avoid at the fundament” (Beekman 2011, 2:400n15). Belief in this antidote was widespread and enduring: a 1662 report to the Royal Society of London stated that Dutch soldiers were even required to carry their own excrement into battle for this purpose (Carey 2003:535). But it would have been completely ineffective, since the poison acts within the blood-stream not the digestive tract (Carey 2003:528–529). 37. Bastin 1985:32, 33, 36; Marsden 1966:110. The descriptions of miles of scorched earth in these accounts are reminiscent of the vast expanses of barren lava fields that mark the slopes of the many volcanoes that dot the landscape of Java. 38. Bastin 1985:25; Beekman 2011, 2:399–401n15.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 6 1 – 7 1 215 39. Lévi-Strauss 1964–1981; Rumphius 2011, 1:177; 3:198. 40. Carey 2003:518, 531. 41. Beekman 1981:149; Rumphius 2011, 2:398. 42. Blake 1967; cf. Nichols 1997:133. 43. Beekman 1999:civ, cix, cx; Beekman 1981:16; Wilson 1984. 44. Beekman 1999:cix; Rumphius 1999:327–328; Beekman 2011, 1:129; Ellen 2016b:16. 45. Rumphius 1999:246.

Interlude. Imagination 1. Freedman 2008:99–100, 108, 134; Osterhoudt et al. 2020. There are analogous dynamics in global trade even today—fair-traded coffee, artisanal foods, certified timber, bottled water, carbon credits, etc.—all requiring no less imagination (cf. Lyon 2004). The East-West trade was preceded by an intra-Asian trade that was characterized by some similar dynamics, as reflected for example in the marketing in the China trade of the sap of the rattan Daemonorhops draco (Willd.) Blume as “dragon’s blood” and the resin of the camphor tree (Dryobalanops aromatica Gaerts.) as “dragon’s brain perfume.” The trade to China of camphor, one of the region’s signature forest products, dates to before the sixth century and is the subject of Donkin’s (1999) exceptional book-length treatment of its history, beliefs, language, and botany. Borneo is the center of origin of the genus and family of Dryobalanops (Donkin 1999:51). 2. Yoo 2018:575. Yoo (2018:563–564) emphasizes that information about objects traveled along with the objects themselves: “Information was subject to multiple lines of mediation, through oral retellings, translations, and scribal summations from different islands. . . . His [Rumphius’s] writings demonstrate how ‘local’ knowledge produced on one island was the product of criss-crossing inter-island information networks that were both indigenous and imperial, cumulative and selective.” 3. Ricklefs 2008:18. 4. Ras 1968:265–267; Dove 2011:45. 5. Beekman 2011, 2:397n2; Andaya 1993. 6. Rumphius 2011, 1:177.

Chapter 2. The Eighteenth Century, Linnaeus 1. Hartigan 2013:46; Linnaeus 1775a:26–28. 2. Fowles 1979:50. 3. Egerton 2012:84; Linnaeus 1811, 2: appendix, 239; Broberg 2006. After he was knighted for his work, Carol Linnaeus became Carl von Linné; and when he wrote in Latin, he signed his name as Carolus Linnæus—always spelling his name with the æ ligature—or Carolus a Linné after his knighthood. Carl Linnaeus, which is the dominant form of his name in common usage, will be used in this volume. Like Rumphius, Linnaeus was named to the Academia Naturae Curiosorum, in 1736. 4. Worster 1985:xiv, 63, 192; Egerton 2012:xi, 80. Darwin (1887) famously wrote in a

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letter to Asa Gray in 1857/1858, “The varying offspring of each species will try (only a few will succeed) to seize on as many and as diverse places in the economy of nature as possible.” 5. Goodman 2020:69; Hodacs, Nyberg, and Van Damme 2018; Geertz 1973. 6. Beekman 2011, 1:142, 143; Beekman 1999:lxxxi, xcvi, xcviii; Linnaeus 2003:20–21. Elsewhere Beekman (1981:25) writes that Linnaeus “referred to the figures in that work [Curiosity Cabinet] to illustrate a part of his own writings.” 7. Merrill 1917:31, 32. 8. Eliasson 2002:134; cf. Goodman 2020:71; Anderson 2013:64–65. 9. Linnaeus 1811:1–2. Westgothland is a province in the southwest of Sweden; “linsey-­ woolsey” cloth is a cloth woven of a mixture of linen and wool; “shaloon” is a lightweight twilled woolen cloth used as a lining; a collar of “shag” likely means a fur collar; an “ell” is a measure of the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger; a “hanger” is a short sword; a fowling piece is a lightweight flintlock long gun used for birds. Cf. Linnaeus’s (2003) list of equipment for his students when they accompanied him on day-long “botanizing” excursions into the countryside around Uppsala University: “Very light and loose clothing, proper to botanists, (where circumstances permit), and the most appropriate for the business. Instruments: books, Systema Naturae [by Linnaeus], and the Flora and Fauna of the region. A microscope, a botanical needle, a botanical knife, and black lead. A Dillenian case [copper bowl with lid], and bound paper. A box with pins for insects.” Over a century later, the general silence on such matters echoes in the first line of the first chapter of Steinbeck and Rickett’s (1995:5) The Log from the Sea of Cortez: “How does one organize an expedition: what equipment is taken, what sources read; what are the little dangers and the large ones? No one has ever written this. The information is not available.” 10. Eliasson 2002:133; Linnaeus 1811, 1:141–142, 142, 160; Linnaeus 1811, 2: appendix, 267; Linnaeus 1775a:13. 11. Eliasson 2002:133, 149; Hodacs 2010:46–47; Linnaeus 1811, 2: appendix, 257–258. Bringing his students along on his expeditions was in keeping with Linnaeus’s well-known practice of taking his classes at Uppsala University out into the countryside on day-long collecting trips. 12. Linnaeus 1775a:14, 28–30; Rausing 2003:192; Sörlin 2002:76. 13. Sörlin 2002:79, 81–82; Linnaeus 1811, 1:283. Cf. Pratt’s (1992:35) comment on ­eighteenth-century natural historians: “The systems of nature were projected within European borders as well as beyond them. The herborizers were as happy in the countryside of Scotland or southern France as they were in the Amazon or southern Africa.” 14. Sörlin 2002:81; cf. Bravo and Sörlin 2002:18–19. 15. Linnaeus 1979:84; Sörlin 2002:85; Eliasson 2002:127–129; Emerson 2012:87. 16. Eliasson 2002:127–129; Sörlin 2002:85; Jackson 1923:208–209; Weimarck 1968:11. 17. Dove and Kammen 2008; Linnaeus 1811, 1:65–66, 97–98, 171–172, 180; Linnaeus 1811, 2:25–26, 59–60, 64, 92–97, 133–135, 161–164, 191–193, 194–195, 266–267. 18. Wikman 1970:57; Linnaeus 1811, 1:113, 118–19, 314; Linnaeus 1811, 2:37–46, 41–42. One of the most prominent anthropologists studying contemporary Sámi socie-

N o t e s t o P a g e s 8 0 – 9 2 217 ties, in Finland, is Tim Ingold 1976, 1980. For examples of more recent work on the Sámi, see Aubinet 2021; Buhre and Bjork 2021; Magnani and Magnani 2022. 19. Linnaeus 1811, 1:169, 242–244, 272–274, 348–349, 350, 352–353; Linnaeus 1811, 2:30, 148–151, 174–180. 20. Linnaeus 1811, 1:274–277; Linnaeus 1811, 2:31–35, 221; Linnaeus 1979:87. 21. Linnaeus 1775a:27–28; Linnaeus 1811, 1:111–112, 217–219. Linnaeus’s honoring of folk medicinal knowledge is illustrated by the famous case in which he named a Surinam tree (Lignum quassiae), whose bark was useful in curing fever, after a Surinam plantation slave named Qvassi who discovered it, over the protests of the Swedish-­ Dutch family who owned him (Rausing 2003:194). Another example of the influence of the cultural beliefs of Linnaeus (1811, 1:28) regarding human health is this declensionist belief: “I have a notion that Adam and Eve were giants, and that mankind from one generation to another, owing to poverty and other causes, have diminished in size. Hence perhaps the diminutive stature of the Laplanders.” 22. Linnaeus 1811, 1:74–75, 85, 132–133, 317, 318; Linnaeus 1811, 2:52–58, 61–62, 67–76. 23. Linnaeus 1811, 1:9–11, 63, 103–110, 125, 190, 197–199; Linnaeus 1811, 2:7–8, 14–16. 24. Linnaeus 1811, 1:157–158, 162–163, 314, 326–335. Elsewhere, Linnaeus (1811, 1:298) does invoke the loaded term ‘idleness,’ writing: “The Laplanders . . . when not occupied in following or attending the reindeer, they remain in idleness for whole days together, feeding on nothing but milk, and the dishes prepared from it.” 25. Linnaeus 1811, 1:144–145, 293; e.g., Blunt 2001:50. 26. Linnaeus 1811, 1:356, Linnaeus 1811, 2:132–133, 154, 202–203; cf. Linnaeus 1811, 2:229; Chatti et al. 2017. 27. Sörlin 2002:79, 80, 96–98; Linnaeus 1811, 2:8. 28. Linnaeus 1811, 1:78, 260; Linnaeus 1811, 2:18, 26–27, 65, 170–171. 29. Linnaeus 1811, 1:198; Kammen and Dove 1997. 30. Koerner 2003:200; Ellen 2004:414–415; Clifford 1986:1–2; Malinowski 1961: plate I. Ellen (2004:434–436) suggests that depictions of Linnaeus evolved over the course of his career: “There is a striking difference between two portraits of Linnaeus: a contemporary likeness commissioned by Linnaeus himself as a Lapp . . . and a painting of Linnaeus in Thornton’s Temple of Flora, published in 1807. In the latter Linnaeus has been deified, consistent with the enlightenment idea of science as the new religion.” 31. Rausing 2003:193. 32. Conklin 1957:1–2. 33. Otto and Anderson 1982; Sigaut 1979; Lehtonen and Huttunen 1997; Emanuelsson and Segerström 2002; Myllyntaus et al. 2002; Kunnas 2005. 34. Worster 1977:31; Koerner 1999:84; Linnaeus 1751:26 cited in Weimarck 1968:56. Linnaeus’s inclination toward the pastoral versus wild is reflected in his endorsement, cited by Koerner (1999:84), of a program to “exterminate all wolves in Sweden within a year.” The passages by Linnaeus cited in Weimarck were all translated from the original Swedish by Weimarck. 35. Weimarck 1968:7, 35, 37, 52. 36. Weimarck 1968:52; J. Krook 1765 cited in Weimarck 1968:43.

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37. Weimarck 1968:46, 49; Krook 1765 cited in Weimarck 1968:43; cf. Dove 1983. 38. Weimarck 1968:13, 21, 25–26; Linnaeus 1751:423 cited in Weimarck 1968:56; Krook 1765:11, 12 cited in Weimarck 1968:13; Emanuelsson and Segerström 2002; but cf. Karlsson, Emanuelsson, and Segerström 2010. The relationship among these different land uses and vegetative covers is reflected in Linnaeus’s (1811, 1:355) observation in Norway, “There is no distinction between the meadow or pasture grounds and the forests.” 39. Faggot 1750 cited in Weimarck 1968:40; Weimarck 1968:16. Even one of Linnaeus’s own students, Pehr Kalm, condemned swidden, as cited in Koerner (1999:128): “There would be no ‘mildening of these cold winters and the frequent summer frost nights until we change this custom, so common in this country, but most destructive, to practice swidden farming’ or burn wildwoods to grow rye in the resulting ash fields.” 40. Blunt 2001:213–214; Hårleman quoted in Weimarck 1968:40; Sernander 1926:82– 83 cited in Weimarck 1968:40. This was not the only time that Linnaeus crossed swords with the Baron. Linnaeus prescribed special sailor-like dress for students on their famous day-long excursions from Uppsala University, but Carl Hårleman made him tone down the dress and accompanying merriment, making them more “Swedish” (Hodacs 2010:45). A small number of copies of “Scanian Travels” with the unexpurgated original text survived (Blunt 2001:213–214), and the complete edition of the Scanian Travels was not altered. The 1884 edition by Martin Weibull (Lund: Gleerup) and the 1940 facsimile edition (Malmo: John Kroon) contain both the original and amended texts. Ophir is an Asian port, mentioned a number of times in the Christian Bible, whose location is unidentified, but some of the context suggests India. 41. Jackson 1923:208–209; Blunt 2001:213; Kunnas 2005:433; Lindroth 1983:61; Weimarck 1968:40. 42. Weimarck 1968:41. 43. Dove 1983; Dove 2011; Scott 1998; Scott 2009; Weimarck 1968:46–47. 44. Agamben 1998; Weimarck 1968:24, 30, 44. 45. Müller-Wille 2017:114, 119–120. Pratt (1992:15) suggests that the development of Linnaean classification had implications far beyond biology, that it was one of the most important factors in “the emergence of a new version of what I like to call Europe’s ‘planetary consciousness’, a version marked by an orientation toward interior exploration and the construction of global-scale meaning through the descriptive apparatuses of natural history.” 46. Foucault 1973:142, 144–145. 47. Linnaeus 1811, 2:158–161, 204–205, 221. 48. Foucault 1973:130, 135. 49. Broadbent 2013; Anderson 2013:64–65; Linnaeus 1811, 2:85–88. 50. Worster 1985:33; Linnaeus 1775b:39, 123. Note: the dissertations written by Linnaeus’s students, including the one on the economy of nature, were typically based on his own research findings, which his students organized into formal Latin (Egerton 2012:82). 51. Worster 1985:35; Egerton 2012:83; Linnaeus 1775b:99–100, 114. 52. Linnaeus 1775b:40; Vickers 1983.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 0 0 – 1 1 2 219 53. Linnaeus 1775b:120–121. 54. Worster 1985:31; Koerner 1999:84; Linnaeus 1811, 1:124, 131–132; Linnaeus 1811, 2:132, appendix:258–259. 55. Scott (2009) used the term “fugitive” for swidden systems in Southeast Asia. 56. Müller-Wille 2018:219.

Interlude. Contradiction

1. Linnaeus 1758; Rausing 2003:193. 2. Foucault 1973:130. 3. Koerner 1999:65; Schumacher 1973. 4. Koerner 1999:65, 65–66, 67. Ume is a regional center in northern Sweden, Torne is a river in northern Sweden.

Chapter 3. The Nineteenth Century, Alfred Russel Wallace 1. Boon 1990:8; Vetter 2006:107; Moore 2008:296; Anderson 2013:159; Costa 2013:4, 9; Costa 2019a:71. 2. Wallace 2000:134, 455–457. 3. Wallace 1905, 1:25, 24–26, 224–226. Cf. Wallace’s comment in The Malay Archipelago, when rejecting a house offered him as a base, “I should have to live in public, a thing I much dislike” (2000:250). 4. Wyhe 2015:2; Wallace 1905, 1:197; Costa (2019a:67) writes, “He collected to travel rather than traveling to collect, as the income from the sale of his collections back in Britain financed his explorations.” Note: whereas the phrase “the East Indies” was used in chapter 1 to refer primarily to the former Dutch colony, in this chapter, following Wallace, the phrase “the Malay Archipelago,” which subsumes the Dutch East Indies but also includes territories to the east (New Guinea) and west (Singapore, Sarawak, Sabah, Brunel), will be used. 5. Wilson 1999:xii, cited in Lomolino 2019:341; Shermer 2002; Smith, Costa, and Collard 2019a:381; Lomolino 2019:344. Costa (2013:x) writes that Wallace was “not only the co-discoverer of one of humanity’s greatest insights into the workings of nature—evolution by natural selection—but also the founder of the modern discipline of zoogeography. He made fundamental contributions in evolutionary biology, biogeography, ornithology, and entomology, and weighed in on a host of social issues of his day in a continuous stream of scientific papers, essays, interviews, and books.” The plates that Wallace created for his work The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876) are credited as inspiring the grouping together of different animal species in natural history museums and even in zoological parks (Costa 2019a:8). 6. Wallace 1905, 2:128; Lowrey 2010:19, 21. Wallace (2000:434) periodically makes reference to native knowledge of natural history, as in this comment on the nesting habits of the long-tailed bird of paradise (Epimachus magnus): “I was several times assured by different natives that this bird makes its nest in a hole under ground, or under rocks, always choosing a place with two apertures, so that it may enter at one and go out at the other. This is very unlike what we should suppose to be the habits

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of the bird, but it is not easy to conceive how the story originated if it is not true; and all travellers know that native accounts of the habits of animals, however strange they may seem, almost invariably turn out to be correct.” Measurement of human skulls was a common element in nineteenth-century anthropology and natural history, and it often contributed to racial stereotyping, but Wallace (2000:459, 462) begins the appendix to The Malay Archipelago by writing, “A few years ago it was thought that the study of Crania offered the only sure basis of a classification of man. Immense collections have been formed; they have been measured, described, and figured; and now the opinion is beginning to gain ground, that for this purpose they are of very little value. . . . No approach to a theory of the excessive variations of the cranium has been put forth, and no intelligible classification of races has been founded upon it.” Wallace then presents his own data, at the end of which he does nothing more than conclude that the Malays and Papuans are radically distinct races. 7. Fichman 2019:193; Smith, Costa, and Collard 2019b:5–6; Wallace 1905, 2:381. Fichman (2019:216–218), who shares Wallace’s stance on this issue, writes, “Antivaccination science had credibility in the public realm, and to be an antivaccinationist was not seen as being anti-science.” 8. Smith 2019a:11; Wallace 1905, 1:201; Smith, Costa, and Collard 2019a:382. 9. Wallace 1905, 1:232, cf. 240, 361–362; Wallace 1905, 2:209. Note: Wallace says “twenty years later” and “twelve years before,” but he read Malthus in 1844 and had his epiphany in 1858, so the interval was actually fourteen years. Worster (1985:149) suggests that Malthus also had a great impact on the development of Darwin’s thinking regarding natural selection. 10. Wallace 2000:339, 420; Wallace 1905, 1:199–200, 232; cf. Wyhe 2015:20. 11. Beekman 1999:xcv; Wallace 2000:226. Modern works like the 2019 An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, with contributions by ten different scholars of Wallace’s work, also do not mention Rumphius. 12. Egerton 2012:199; Costa 2019a:71; Wyhe 2015:37; Whitten 2008:xiv–xv; Boon 1990:16; Wallace 2000:1. 13. Costa 2019:71; Berry 2020; Wyhe 2015:27–28, 36, 37; Wallace 1905, 1:336, 386; Wallace 2000:x. Wyhe (2015:20) notes that “writing an account of travels to faraway lands is a practice that goes all the way back to classical times. European authors from Marco Polo to Francis Drake published writings on their travels which included information on the peoples and plants and animals of the places visited.” Elsewhere, Wallace sometimes referred to himself as a traveler: he began a letter to Darwin by writing “Like every other traveller I suppose, I feel dreadfully the want of copious notes on common every day sights & sounds and incidents.” In his biography he wrote that Herbert Spencer had solicited his advice “alike as naturalist, anthropologist, and traveller” (Wyhe 2015:21; Wallace 1905, 2:27; cf. Wallace 2000:434). 14. Vetter 2006:94, 98; Endersby 2003:387, 398; Wallace 2000:123; Durant 1979:33. 15. Wallace 2000:339, 341, 419. Wallace (2000:423–424) not only observes the birds of paradise in their native habitat, but he brings live specimens back to England by dint of loving care: “I had great difficulty, however, in supplying them with insect

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 1 7 – 1 2 1 221 food, for in the Peninsular and Oriental steamers cockroaches were scarce, and it was only by setting traps in the store-rooms, and by hunting an hour every night in the forecastle, that I could secure a few dozen of these creatures—scarcely enough for a single meal.” 16. Although Wallace faced more sustained hardships in the field than Linnaeus ever did, he complained about them less, except obliquely in this letter to his sister, describing what anyone applying for the position of his field assistant would have to put up with (Marchant 1916, 1:57): “Ask him whether he can live on rice and salt fish for a week on an occasion—whether he can do without wine or beer and sometimes without tea, coffee or sugar—whether he can sleep on a board—whether he likes the hottest weather in England—whether he is too delicate to skin a stinking animal—whether he can walk twenty miles a day—whether he can work, for there is sometimes as hard work in collecting as in anything.” Wallace 2000:297, 327–328. Figure 3.1 shows one of Wallace’s field camps, with sleeping quarters above and his working space below (2000:406): “By bending double and carefully creeping in, I could sit on my chair with my head just clear of the ceiling. Here I lived pretty comfortably for six weeks, taking all of my meals and doing all my work at my little table, to and from which I had to creep in a semi-­ horizontal position a dozen times a day; and after a few severe knocks on the head by suddenly rising from my chair, learned to accommodate myself to circumstances.” 17. Marchant 1916, 1:49; Bourdieu 1977; Lowrey 2010:19. Wallace describes his field paraphernalia in a note published in the Zoologist (cited in Costa 2019a:75–76): “My equipment is, a bag-net, large collecting-box hung by a strap over my shoulder, a pair of pliers for Hymenoptera, two bottles with spirits, one large and widemouthed for average Coleoptera, &c., the other very small for minute and active insects, which are often lost by attempting to drop them into a large mouthed bottle. These bottles are carried in pockets in my hunting-shirt, and are attached by strings round my neck; the corks are each secured to the bottle by a short string.” Whitten (2008:xiii) notes that “Wallace had one or two assistants but unlike Raffles [Thomas Stamford Raffles, lieutenant-governor of the East Indies], who travelled through Sumatra with dozens of bearers and others to transport the chairs, French wine, and other ‘necessary’ accoutrements, he didn’t travel with the entourage normal for the Victorian traveller. Wallace was content with the bare essentials—clothing, bedding, and of course the collecting boxes, the pins to lay out his specimens, the preserving spirit, and knives for skinning the mammal and bird specimens.” 18. Wallace 2000:xii, 66, 389. 19. Wallace 2000:28, 248, 260–261. Wallace thus anticipates the development in bi­ ology a century later of the intermediate disturbance thesis by Joseph Connell (1978) among others, which demonstrated that highest diversity is reached in non-­ equilibrium (viz., disturbed) states. 20. Wallace 2000:260, 296. 21. What is anathema to tropical nature, Wallace (2000:340) says, is western, industrialized civilization. He believed that if “civilized man” ever reached and transformed these lands, it would disrupt the balance of nature and bring about the

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extinction of the very biological life that had attracted scholars there in the first place (see Interlude: Repatriation): “This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man.” 22. Wallace 2000:52, 54; cf. Wallace 2000:343. 23. Rumphius 2011, 1:295, 294, 302–303; Wallace 2000:292, 344, 363. Strickland (1986:117) rebuts Wallace’s critique of sago by pointing out that it is 2–4 times as energy efficient as rice. Beekman (2011:301n1; cf. Dove 2021) suggests why sago/ sagu is problematic from the standpoint of central state government: “Rice has to be cultivated and shipped, hence can be controlled for political purposes; sagu is a gift of nature and, unless the trees are deliberately destroyed, is free from government control.” Humboldt expressed sentiments, identical to Wallace’s critique of sago, regarding bananas in South America (Glacken 1967:643). Wallace’s colleague, Henry Walter Bates, also drew a similar, more general conclusion regarding societal decadence and the fertility of the Amazon (Raffles 2001:520). 24. Wallace 2000:292, 343, 404; Nietzsche 1997:60. 25. Wallace 2000:275. 26. Ellen (1988, 2006) argues that sago palm agroforestry demands much more active management than Wallace and his contemporaries imagined. Wallace also appears to be ignorant of the ongoing human industry, or disturbance, that is required to maintain tropical grasslands. Wallace writes in his Species Notebook on 20 January 1858 (cited in Costa 2019b:329): “Ground once taken possession of by grasses cannot be reconquered by forest even if surrounded by it. A clearing for a few years only, will if left become forest, from roots & seeds left in the earth, but if once covered with grass all woody growth is kept down.” This was a common misapprehension: these grasslands will spontaneously revert to brush and then forest unless they are continually disturbed by fire, cattle, or other means (Dove 2008). 27. Boon 1990:14, 24. 28. Boon 1990:22, 23. 29. Wallace 2000:70, 71, 455; Chao 2021. 30. Wallace 2000:2; Wallace 1910; Wallace 1905, 1:358–359; George 1981; Whitmore 1981. Wallace first mentions his thesis regarding a line bisecting the Malay Archipelago in a letter to Henry Walter Bates in 1858 (George 1981:3). The British biologist/ anthropologist and admirer of Darwin, T. H. Huxley, coined the name “Wallace’s Line” in 1868. Subsequently, the classificatorily problematic region right on top of this line became known as “Wallacea.” George (1981) discusses the evolution of Wallace’s thinking regarding this line over the course of his career. Costa (2019b) reviews current thinking regarding Wallace’s Line. 31. Wallace 2000:12–13, 443. 32. Wallace 2000:10, 12. 33. Wallace 2000:373. 34. Wallace 2000:15, 452–453, 446–455. 35. Wallace 2000:15, 454; Lansing and Cox 2019:26–29. 36. Wallace 2000:344; Boon 1990:15, 19, 23; Lansing and Cox 2019. 37. Wallace 1905, 1:151, 167, 240; Wallace 1905, 2:286, 292; Wallace 1879:641; Fichman 2019:196, 214; Collard 2019:270. See Wallace’s 1882 Land Nationalisation, Its Ne-

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 3 4 – 1 4 2 223 cessity and Its Aims, in chapters 2 and 3 of which, for example, he describes the eviction of tenants in Ireland and the depopulation of the Highlands of Scotland. 38. Wallace 1864:118–119; Smith 2019b:50–51; Lyons 2019:185. 39. Wallace 2000:72, 195–196, 240, 311. In his autobiography Wallace (1905, 1:382) writes, “Personally, I do not much like the Dutch out here, or the Dutch officials; but I cannot help bearing witness to the excellence of their government of native races, gentle yet firm, respecting their manners, customs, and prejudices, yet introducing everywhere European law, order, and industry.” 40. Wallace 2000:196; Collard 2019:261, 263. 41. Wallace 2000:194–195, 221, 222. Wallace is referring to the salt monopoly that the colonial English government imposed in India. 42. Wallace 2000:186, 73, cf. 196–197. 43. Wyhe 2015:32; Wallace 2000:74. Wallace (1878) also lambasts the British for establishing their plantations in India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) at the cost of degrading both land and climate. 44. Wallace 2000:309. 45. Wallace 2000:309, 420. Wallace (2000:164) says he was served a “detestable” cup of coffee in Macassar in Sulawesi, and observes that “I have never tasted good coffee where people grow it themselves”—implying that coffee, like the bird of paradise, is primarily a trade good. Wallace (2000:419–420) notes that trade in the skins of the birds of paradise predated the arrival of the first Europeans in the Moluccas seeking spices. Camerini (1996:56) writes that “Chinese and Arab merchants traded for paradise bird feathers long before Wallace came on the scene. When the Portuguese set up shop in the islands of the Malay Archipelago in the early sixteenth century, the feathers of the bird of paradise were more valuable than gold.” 46. Wallace 2000:335–336. 47. Wallace 2000:329–330. 48. Wallace 2000:437–440; Dove 2011. Camerini (1996:58) writes: “Unlike in other parts of the archipelago, local hunters, traders, and rulers, as well as Dutch sailors and officials, were well-established competitors in this most promising of collecting regions.” 49. Wyhe and Rookmaker 2015:50, 55–56. 50. Wallace 2000:134–135. The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) gives two primary definitions for amok: (1) Originally and chiefly in the Indonesian archipelago and southwest India: a person (chiefly male) in a violent or murderous frenzy. Formerly also (in southwest India): a warrior who has pledged himself to die while avenging an injury to his master; and (2) A violent or murderous frenzy; (also) the action of running amok. Crawfurd (1856:12) defines “amuk” as follows: “The muck of the writers of Queen Anne’s time, who introduced the word into our language. In Malay it means a furious and reckless onset, whether of many in battle, or of an individual in private. The word and the practice are not confined to the Malays, but extend to all the people and languages of the Archipelago that have attained a certain amount of civilization. Running a-muck with private parties is often the result of a restless determination to exact revenge for some injury or insult; but it

224

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also results, not less frequently, from a monomania taking this particular form, and originating in disorders of the digestive organs.” Wilkinson (1959:25) defines “amok” or “amuck” as “Furious attack; charge”; and “running amuck” as “indiscriminate murder by a desperate man who neither expects nor desires mercy.” Yule and Burnell (1903:18–23) give a six-page entry on “a muck,” which includes the suggestion by W. W. Skeat that it is due to the “monotonous heat” of Malaya. 51. Wallace 2000:168, 182. 52. Wallace 2019a:72; Lyons 2019:168; Smith, Costa, and Collard 2019b:4; Costa 2019a:72. 53. Wallace 2000:126, 389. 54. Lyons 2019:174, 175; Wallace 1905, 1:342–343. 55. Wallace 1905, 1:62; Wallace 2000:282. 56. Wallace 2000:455; Wyhe 2015:36. 57. Wallace 2000:456. 58. Wallace 2000:364, 456, 457. Use of the terms “uncivilized” and “savage” was prevalent at the time but did not have the negative connotations of the modern era, as reflected in Wallace’s frequent laudatory statements regarding these peoples. 59. Wyhe 2015:32; Smith 1998b cited in Lomolino 2019:342. 60. Lyons 2019:179; Smith 2019b:57–58. For example, whereas many Western observers attributed the wilderness skills of natives to mysterious instinct, Wallace insisted that it was a matter of studying one’s environment—an early argument for indigenous knowledge (Wallace 1870c, cited in Costa 2019c:128). 61. Fichman 2004; Wallace 1905, 2:293–367; Costa 2019c:126; Lyons 2019:182; Smith 2019b:43–44. 62. Tylor 1958, 1:307–308; Smith 2019b:57. 63. Boon 1990:19. Boon (1990:16) and Whitten (2008:xiv–xv) suggest that there was a more general divide in Wallace’s work, with his scientific studies published in academic outlets and his “popular” material published in The Malay Archipelago. 64. Boon 1990:19, 144; Camerini 1996:61–62. 65. Wallace 2000:348–349, 359.

Interlude. Repatriation 1. Wallace 2000:439. See Tsing 2000 on mining in Indonesian Borneo. The allure of the bird of paradise was long-lasting: in 2009, a century and a half after he collected them, some of Wallace’s bird of paradise specimens were stolen from the British Museum of Natural History, for use in tying salmon flies (Kirk 2018). 2. Boon 1990:20; Wallace 2000:339–340. 3. Wallace 2000:223. 4. Leopold 1987:101, 141. Cf. Steinbeck and Ricketts (1995:2–3): “We could not observe a completely objective Sea of Cortez anyway, for in that lonely and uninhabited Gulf our boat and ourselves would change it the moment we entered. By going there, we would bring a new factor to the Gulf. Let us consider that factor and not be betrayed by this myth of permanent objective reality. If it exists at all, it is only available in pickled tatters or in distorted flashes. ‘Let us go,’ we said, ‘into the Sea of Cortez, realizing that we become forever a part of it; that our rubber boots slog-

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 5 3 – 1 6 3 225 ging through a flat of eel-grass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool, make us truly and permanently a factor in the ecology of the region. We shall take something away from it, but we shall leave something too.’” 5. Moore 2008:304. 6. Moore 2008:306. As evidence that Wallace had this association in mind, he suggested (1857) that place names in Borneo and Wales had common linguistic antecedents. 7. Conrad 1899; Moore 2008:306; Tsao 2008; Anderson 2013:146; Collard 2019:237, 244; Fichman 2019:204–205. Anderson (2013:168) suggests that Wallace, like Humboldt, was “struck by some of the contrasts in outlook and prospect of the tribes they had encountered overseas and the people whom they saw in the streets on their return home.” 8. Thompson 1971:78, 131; Taussig 1987; Fox 1991; Ong 1999.

Chapter 4. The Twentieth Century, Harold C. Conklin 1. Foucault 1973:127–128. 2. Harris 1968:568–569, 580, 591, 592, 604; Pike 1954; Sturtevant 1964; Ellen 2016a:4. As examples of the type of anthropology he wants to see, Harris (1968:366) cites Andrew P. Vayda’s cross-cultural analysis of commonalities in tribal warfare, and Roy F. Rappaport’s (1966) study of ritual regulation of warfare in New Guinea. Harris’s (1966) own most well-known study is an energy-based explanation of the “sacred cow” of India. Harris’s critique of the “science of trivia” is reminiscent of Descartes’s attitude toward the “curious sciences,” as mentioned in chapter 1. 3. Kuipers and McDermott 2007:2; Miyamoto 1986; Ellen 2016a:3; Remme 2021:108. 4. Cf. Scott 1998:282; Conklin 1963, 1968b, 1972; Kuipers and McDermott 2007. 5. Lévi-Strauss 1966. 6. Ellen 2016a:2–3; Harris 1968:513. 7. Lévi-Strauss 1966:7. 8. E.g., Gan, Tsing, and Sullivan 2018:40; Remme 2021:99, 101. 9. Conklin 1968a:175. 10. Conklin 1968a:172; Conklin 1960a:125. 11. Geertz 2007:28. 12. Ellen 2016a:3; Conklin 1980:10–11, table 4, table 5, figure 25, photo 68, photo 72; Kuipers and McDermott 2007:5. The complexity of the everyday is borne out in Conklin’s discussion of Ifugao units and measures, which include separate but interlinked systems for enumerating (1) bundled rice, (2) chickens, (3) pigs, and (4) pond-­ fields. Chickens, pigs, and pond-fields each are associated with their own units of measure that, as Conklin notes, “designate, polysemously, concrete bundle masses and related attributes or activities, as well as abstract units of account and value.” 13. Conklin 1957:92–97; Kammen and Dove 1997. When I worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in Java, I attended a conference in the nation’s capital on development. Based on personal experience with the labor of dibbling swiddens in Borneo, I presented an idea for a detachable metal tip for a dibble stick, inspired by one I saw in Borneo made from ironwood. I saw the possibility of improving labor conditions for hundreds of millions of people who still used this implement. However,

226

Notes to Pages 163–174

my presentation drew zero interest compared with others on hydroelectric dams, high-tech plantations, swamp reclamation, and nuclear power. 14. Lévi-Strauss 1966:3; Conklin 1958; Frake 2007:xiv. 15. Conklin 1958:26–27, 27–28; Rumphius 2011, 1:233, 235. Rumphius (2011, 4:323) also wrote, “One will not likely see Europeans and Indians who chew Pinang, walk around here with weak and rotten gums, as others will do who do not indulge in this common habit.” 16. Ellen 2016a:2–3. 17. Conklin 1957:1–2; Kuipers and McDermott 2007:13. 18. Conklin 1957:1, 2. 19. Conklin 1957:3, 155. Hanunóo Agriculture concludes with a call by Conklin for field studies of different types of swidden systems, in particular “partial systems,” in the Philippines. 20. Conklin 1980; Burling 1965; Geertz 1963. Conklin (1968c) reviewed Geertz’s 1963 Agricultural Involution and cautioned against “the inherent danger of oversimplification in the use of such ideal types” and “avoidance of blurry intermediate cases.” 21. Conklin 1957:85, 149. 22. Conklin 1954:133–135. 23. Conklin 1954:140–141. 24. Conklin 1957:70, 71. 25. Conklin 1957:128; Geertz 1963:25; see Dove 2008; Conklin 1959:60; Dove 2019. 26. Dove 2021; Conklin 1957:30, 85, 145, 147, 151. 27. Conklin 1974:145; 1980:8, 12, 25, 35, 37, 82. In a review of the Atlas, Hanks (1982:207) notes that the labor demands in the Ifugao pond-fields are not typical for irrigated rice systems—being four times as great as in lowland Thailand—and the Ifugao devotion to them remains a puzzle unresolved in the Atlas: “We are helpless to evaluate the 630 man-days per hectare for terraced crops in comparison with 230 man-days per hectare of swidden, especially since both contribute approximately equally to Ifugao diet.” 28. Conklin 1980:38; Persoon, Ploeg, and Weerd 2021:8–10; Remme 2021:107–108; Acabado and Martin 2022. Conklin (1949) has suggested that another surprising consequence of Spanish colonial rule was to make the indigenous peoples of the Philippines less literate by undermining their use of an ancient, Indic-derived script. Remme (2021:107) writes that “Christianity was present in the region when Conklin conducted his fieldwork, although not yet with as much impact as it has had in the latest three decades. Leaving what was of Christian influence out of the account was probably a deliberate choice by Conklin as he saw, as many of my informants did too, Christian influence, particularly Pentecostalism, as a potential threat towards the ecological sensibility of Ifugao agricultural practices [Conklin, personal communication].” 29. Conklin 1980:25, 32, 36–37, 73–79; Remme 2021:103–104; Ingold 2000; Heidegger 1993. Cf. Remme 2021:104 on Conklin’s analysis of the temporal complexities of the Ifugao agricultural systems. 30. Tyler 1986:128. 31. Abu-Lughod 1991:149–151; Conklin 1961:27–28.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 7 4 – 1 7 9 227 32. Conklin 1957:11–12. McDermott (1997:258) has argued that Conklin’s philosophy of looking to the particular to discern the universal is the anthropological equivalent of James Joyce’s famous declaration “ab uno disce omnes [from one learn all].” 33. Conklin 1957:140–141. 34. Frake 2007:x; Ellen 2016a:4. Geertz first published “Deep Play” in 1972. Hartigan (2017:xvi, 253) introduces another alternative to thick description, namely “thin description,” from Jackson (2013): “As the adjective thin asserts, this alternative approach eschews hermeneutic models of depth and the interiority of our subjects— their occult, recalcitrant meanings must be revealed!—in favor of a flattening analysis that allows their forms of expertise to operate alongside our own. Jackson describes thin description as a gesture at ‘nonknowing that disentangles the ethnographer’s will to know everything from an interconnected will to disclose everything.’ I take this assertion of nonknowing as a stance of suspending the ethnographer’s analytic certainties—along with forgoing the ‘deep’ meaning toward which it is directed—in order to differently engage subjects’ sensibilities and practices. . . . It seems to me that multispecies ethnography fundamentally must narrate life— that is, describe and analyze life forms in their social relations. I attempt that here . . . by turning toward ‘thin description,’ an approach that shifts away from ethnography’s traditional investment in ‘thick description.’” To the contrary, I suggest that Conklin’s study of mundane systems of knowledge demonstrates that thick or fine description need not focus on “occult, recalcitrant meanings,” and that it is possible in the study of natural history to “allow the forms of expertise of others to operate alongside our own” without a “flattening analysis” or commitment to “nonknowing.” 35. Conklin 1957:23–27, 37, 88, 91, 94; Conklin 1974:142. 36. Conklin 2007:404–405; Conklin 1957:58–61. Conklin (1957:65, 102; 1958:14, 17; 1960a:121) uses Hanunóo and Ifugao taxonomies to best represent their worlds, and he also uses English in a way few others do. For example, he refers to “defiladed” or protected parts of Hanunóo swiddens; “scandent” or climbing bamboos; “pulverulent” or dusty lime that is chewed with the betel nut; “opercula” for the plate that closes the aperture of the shell when the mollusk within retracts itself; and a “fast duple rhythm,” meaning two beats to the bar, being kept by two Hanunóo women beating cotton. 37. Conklin 1957:38, 48. 38. Conklin 1957:115. 39. Kuipers and McDermott 2007:17; Conklin 1957:141. Conklin commissioned penand-ink drawings of paraphernalia for betel chewing, for example, that surpass those of Linnaeus, equaling in artistry those commissioned by Rumphius. For renewed interest in ethnographic drawing, see Kashanipour 2021a, 2021b (cf. Mathews 2018). Fifty years ago Geertz (1973:19n3) wrote, “Most ethnography is in fact to be found in books and articles, rather than in films, records, museum displays, or whatever; but even in them there are, of course, photographs, drawings, diagrams, tables and so on. Self-consciousness about modes of representation (not to speak of experiments with them) has been very lacking in anthropology.” 40. There is a mimetic quality to the maps in the Atlas, which represents something of a through-line in natural history. As Foucault (1973:135) suggested of Linnaeus,

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“His wish was that the order of the description, its division into paragraphs, and even its typographical modules, should reproduce the form of the plant itself.” 41. Ellen (1982:171) observes: “One is left feeling that an opportunity for a brilliant analysis based on exceptionally rich and novel data has been missed.” And Remme (2021:108) notes, “The Atlas had a quite limited impact on anthropological method, writing, or theorising.” 42. Carroll 1893; Borges 1964a; Eco 1994. 43. Remme 2021:108; Hanks 1982:207. 44. Rosaldo 1993:185, 186; Persoon, Ploeg, and Weerd 2021:5, 27; Remme 2021:108. 45. Remme 2012:99; Conklin 1957:94; Richards 1993; Conklin 1960b; Geertz 2007:29. Cf. Remme 2021:98: “Conklin’s no-nonsense, almost technical, style should, however, not be taken as an indication of theoretical ignorance or non-engagement with the lives of his informants and their social and political difficulties. Conklin was fully aware of the theoretical controversies that infused anthropology at the time and his emotionally sensitive portrait of Maling, a 7-year-old Hanunóo girl who lost her younger brother clearly attests his ability to write sympathetically about lived life.” 46. Conklin 1998:xvii. Although Conklin’s essay “A Day in Parina” was reprinted in 1960, Ellen (2016a:5) notes that Conklin first published it in his 1953 report to his funding agency, the SSRC. Ellen observes: “It is difficult to imagine including such prose in the kinds of reports that we are today expected to submit for audit to funding bodies, but in this piece we find a truly ‘Conklinesque’ combination of humanity and consummate professionalism. Hal showed us how new ways of thinking about how ethnographic practice might contribute to anthropology as a science, not only of comparative social systems and the universal character of cultural cognition, but also to an understanding of what makes us human(e) as well.” 47. Hunn 2007.

Interlude. Preternatural 1. Dove 1983a; 1983b; Conklin 1980:1, 24, 25. Conklin (1974:145) writes of “the strong cultural bias emphasizing almost every aspect of rice farming” among the Ifugao. Conklin regarded his work with the Ifugao as collaborative: he acknowledged his principal informant on the title page of the Atlas—“With the special assistance of Puggu¯won Lupa¯ih”—as many have noted (Ellen 1982:170; Remme 2021:98). A final commentary on the nature of Conklin’s relationship with the Ifugao was the traditional ritual that Ifugao priests carried out for him in New Haven the day after he passed away. 2. Latour 1987:199, 199n12. The cassowary is a large flightless bird belonging to the genus Casuarius, which is native to New Guinea and Australia. Latour’s point is similar to that of Thompson in the Interlude following chapter 3. 3. Gilges 1955. 4. Hartigan 2017:145; Geertz 2007:28. 5. Ryle 2009; Geertz 1973:7. 6. Geertz 1973:7–9, 14, 18. 7. Geertz 1973:21, 23.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 9 1 – 1 9 8 229

Epilogue

1. Beekman 1981:5–6; Beekman 1999:lxix; Rumphius 2011, 1:176, 180. 2. Foucault 1980:75. 3. Descartes 1952. 4. Pratt 1992:34. 5. Mystification also characterized the even more ancient spice trade in the Mediterranean. A picturesque example is the story by Philostratus in the Life of Apollonius, asserting that monkeys cultivated pepper trees in India and warded off lions with dogs and weapons. Theophrastus dismissed as “fables” similar stories about cinnamon, and Pliny later suggested that merchants invented such stories to increase the price of their wares—which, if not literally true, was correct in making a link between value and fable (Hardy and Totelin 2015:48, 157). 6. Black 1979:40. 7. Dove 2011; Rumphius 1981:127; Rumphius 2011, 2:397; Carey 2003:529. Colonial flows of knowledge were complicated by a variety of other factors besides secrecy, including time. For example, Rumphius took twenty-six years to write his Herbal; the VOC delayed its publication for five years because of worries regarding material on spices and native labor; and then its final publication was delayed a further thirty-nine years because of the cost of publication. In addition, as the time Rumphius devoted to the Herbal illustrates, study of the natural resources of the East Indies, including native knowledge of these resources, and mastery of the native languages needed to understand that knowledge, required inordinate amounts of time. In short, there were a variety of factors that both smoothed and impeded the road along which natural history knowledge traveled. For their part, the natives did their best to make the upas tree into an even more inaccessible, incomprehensible, and forbidding resource by exaggerating and dramatizing its potency. 8. Wallace 2000:329, 359. 9. Linnaeus 2007:88. 10. Carey 2003:524, 530. 11. Said 1978; Lutz 2002. 12. Gusterson 1999:115, 125; Said 1978; Benjamin 2009:256. Bisset (1989:5) reminds us that poisoned arrows were in use in Western Europe through the mid-seventeenth century, which suggests that a recent European history of use of such weapons was being willfully forgotten just as their use by non-European “others” was being discovered and obsessed over. This was not simply discovery of difference, therefore, but construction of difference. 13. Rumphius 2011, 1:175. 14. Rumphius 1999:246; French 1994:1, 2, 92–93, 206, 217; Seneca 2010:115. Hardy and Totelin (2015:54) put floral marvels in context: “Even though plant stories had the potential to amaze people, or to inform them as to the strange habits of foreigners, one should not trivialise their role in historical narrative. Plants were extremely important from an economic point of view in the ancient world, and could even be listed as a reason for attempting the conquest of a land.” Cf. Cooley’s (2021) study of the engagement of both local natives and colonial Spanish with the fossils of extinct megafauna in Mesoamerica.

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Notes to Pages 198–204

15. French 1994:3, 209–210, 217; Hardy and Totelin 2015:42. 16. Rumphius established his family home, administrative office, and research base first in 1657 in Larike, on the west coast of Hitu, on the northern peninsula of the island of Ambon, moving in 1660 to Hila on the peninsula’s northern coast. When struck with blindness he moved a final time, in 1670, to Kota Ambon on the southern peninsula of Leitimor, where he lived until his death in 1702 (Beekman 2011). During the eight years that Wallace traveled through the East Indies, he stayed in at least seventy-six different places, for durations ranging from a day to several months; and anywhere he stayed for more than a day or two he set up his simple but highly prescribed camp quarters (Wyhe 2015:39–42). Wallace was particular about his family home in England, moving periodically in a continuing quest to achieve the domestic equivalent of what Rumphius established in Ambon. Conklin spent his field career essentially at two sites in the Philippines, one with the Hanunóo in Mindanao and one with the Ifugao in Northern Luzon. He had his own house during each of his stays in the Hanunóo settlement of Par¯ına (see figure E.1). In the Ifugao settlement of Bayn¯ınan, where his wife and two sons accompanied him during part of his fieldwork, he had a more elaborate setup comprising a house, cookhouse, and field lab. No such details are available regarding Linnaeus’s field conditions during his major expeditions around Sweden. His expedition itineraries resemble those of Wallace, and although Linnaeus often details his personal privations in the field, he says next to nothing about how he does his work under these circumstances. 17. French 1994:3, 91, 103; Theophrastus 1916, I.4:339; Hardy and Totelin 2015:34. 18. French 1994:105, 143, 216. French (1994:253) adds that Pliny “has a first-time-inRome story of big trees being used in exhibitions.” 19. For another precolonial case, see Glacken’s (1967:274) comment that the Crusades offered opportunities for comparing different environments. 20. Batsaki, Cahalan, and Tchikine 2016:4, 9; Gan, Tsing, and Sullivan 2018:51. 21. Gan, Tsing, and Sullivan 2018:39, 40, 50. They also reference my own work on Imperata in Southeast Asia, writing, “His advocacy depends on his own knowledge and observations of the grass, which allow him to craft a dialogue between elite and peasant assessments. Anthropological and ecological accounts are designed to embrace each other.” 22. The meme among these groups—“Do your own research, man!”—is simultaneously a critique of establishment science, a cry for an alternative science, and a political statement. 23. Markus 1987. In fact, some historians of sciences even celebrated the disappearance of folk knowledge as a sign of scientific progress. 24. Fowles 1979:53.

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. angel of history (Klee), 6. See also Benjamin, Walter anthropology: Amazonian study, 18; classical works and, 4, 8, 14; Doctrine of Werewolves, 147–48; emic and etic, 157, 187; environmental anthropology, 11; fine or thick description in, 71, 82, 175, 189–90, 227n34; holistic world view, 42; Linnaeus and documentation, 102; Malinowski and, 90; nonhuman study, 36; racism and, 206n19; repatriation, 155; representation and generalization, 173; Rumphius and, 46–48, 60; superstitions, 147; travel narratives, 28; Wallace and, 111–12, 115 Antiaris toxicaria, xi, 38, 50, 51, 211n1, 213n22. See also blowpipe poisons; poison tree; upas (poison) tree Arabian nights, 146 Aristotle, 4–7, 12, 14, 34–35, 43, 210n71 Aru Islands, 117, 124, 126, 132, 138, 145, 149, 151, 194. See also Dobbo, Moluccas Attenborough, David, 115   Badu’ Ihuy, 161. See also Conklin, Jean; Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao; Ifugao of Northern Luzon Banjarese Kingdom, 67, 194 Banks, Joseph, 213n31 Barrow, John, 58 Bastin, John, 57, 60, 213n31 Batchian, Moluccas, 120–21, 123 Bates, Henry Walter, 18–19, 24–25, 111, 116, 154, 222n23, 222n30 Bates, Marston, 7, 11, 13 Batsaki, Yota, 201 Beekman, Eric Montague: on Ambonese Herbal, 40–41; on Linnaeus, 71, 216n6; publication of, 211n2; Rumphius in Ambon, 48; on Rumphius’s ancient

Academia Naturae Curiosorum, 42, 212n7, 215n3 Agamben, Giorgio, 96 Agricultural Involution (Geertz), 226n20 agroforestry, 122–23, 222n26. See also burnbeating; sago palm; swidden agriculture Ahab’s Rolling Sea (King), 36 Airs, Waters, Places (Hippocrates), 7 Alfred Russel Wallace Companion (Smith, Costa, Collard), 108, 113, 115, 220n11 Allen, Charles, 118, 140 alternative climate science, 202–3 Amboinsch Kruid-Boek (Rumphius), 115. See The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet (Rumphius), 39–41, 44, 53, 63–64, 71, 211n2, 214n35. See also Beekman, Eric Montague The Ambonese Herbal (Rumphius): classification system of, 43, 49; coconut tree, 212n7; full title, 41; holistic view of, 212n7; Linnaeus and, 71–72; Malayan flora, 40; number of named plants in, 212n9; plant focus, 39; poetry in, 12; primary data, 44; publication history, 211n2, 214n32, 229n7; reasonable or outlandish, 28; sentiment and emotion in, 63; structured as a journey, 26; trees of, 213n25; upas (poison) tree in, 57, 60–61. See also Beekman, Eric Montague American Anthropological Association, 13 American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), 35, 210n75 amok/amuck/amuk, 141–42, 223n50 Ampu Jatmaka (Banjar king), 67. See also Banjarese Kingdom Anderson, John G. T., 35, 72, 98, 108, 154, 209n60, 210n76, 225n7 Androkydes, 34

251

252 Beekman, Eric Montague (continued) sources, 5–6, 42; Rumphius’s blindness, 57–58; on Rumphius’s errors, 38–39, 43, 52; Rumphius’s influences, 114–15; Rumphius’s magical beliefs, 64; on Rumphius’s native authorities, 44–47; on Rumphius’s plant names, 49; Rumphius’s request for lucubrationes, 191; Rumphius’s translator, 214n35; Rumphius the poet, 63. See also Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet; Ambonese Herbal; poison tree; Rumphius, Georgius Everhardus Benjamin, Walter, 6, 197 Berlin, Isaiah, 41 Betel nut (Areca catechu L.), 159, 163, 164, 165, 227n36, 227n39, 233 Bickmore, Albert Smith, 212n4 biodiversity, 121–22, 183, 206n20 bird of paradise (family Paradisaeidae): endangered status, 151; frontispiece of, 124, 126; inaccessibility of, 150, 152; Linnaeus’s classifications and, 114; live specimens of, 117; nesting habits of, 219n6; political dynamics of, 140; specimens to England, 220n15; trade in, 138, 194, 223n45; Wallace’s discussion of, 112, 127, 148–49 “The Birds of Paradise in the Arabian Nights” (Wallace), 146 Bisset, Norman Grainger, 211n1, 229n12 Black, David, 193–94 Blake, William, 55, 62. See also poison tree; upas (poison) tree blowpipe poisons, 50–52, 54, 197, 214n36. See also Antiaris toxicaria; poison tree; upas (poison) tree Blunt, Wilfrid, 93–94 Bohannon, Laura (Bowen), 187–88 Bontius, Jacobus, 58 Boon, James: on Ambon and Rumphius, 39; on The Malay Archipelago, 28, 148; on nature and culture, 123; totemism thesis, 127, 130; on Wallace, 115, 124, 127, 132, 224n63 Borges, Jorge Luis, 20, 180. See also maps The Botanic Garden (E. Darwin), 12

index botany: agents of empire, 201; Ambon and Rumphius, 197; anthropomorphism, 34; betel nuts, 163, 165; corn breeding, 37; folklore and, 207n31; native familiarity, 76–77; plant accessibility, 33; Pliny and, 5; pre-Linnaean, 43; pure and applied, 24, 207n46 Bothnia, 80, 85–86 Bouru, Moluccas, 120 Bowen, Elenore Smith (Bohannon), 187–89 British Quarterly Review, 145 Brown, Edwin, 24 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 8, 23, 32, 70, 96 Bulmer, Ralph, 187 Burkill, Isaac Henry, 115 Burman, Johannese, 214n32 burn-beating (svedjebruk), xi, xv, 71, 911–96, 100, 101, 104, 203. See also swidden agriculture Byron, George Gordon, 55   Cahalan, Sarah Burke, 201 Camerini, Jane R., 25, 148, 208n49, 223n45, 223n48 Campbell, Charles, 60 Campbell, John (Earl Cawdor), 25 Care of the Species (Hartigan), 188 Carey, Daniel, 52, 54, 61, 196 Carl Linnaeus (Black), 193 Carroll, Lewis, 180 “Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge” (Borges), 20 Ceram (Seram), 45, 53, 122–23 Chamovitz, Daniel, 35 “Childe Harold” (Byron), 55 China, 20, 25, 27, 57, 144, 207n33, 215n1 classification systems, 20–21 coffee plantations, 136 Cohen, Moroccan merchant, 190 Collard, David, 113, 134 Conklin, Harold C.: on betel chewing, 163–65, 226n15, 227n39; bio, 158; categories and label examination, 167; detailed observance by, 161; emic and etic view, 157, 187; emotions for his subjects, 182–83; ethnobiology of, 183–84;

i n d e x 253 ethnobotany and, 165; field living conditions, 230n16; field notes of, 159; fireclimax sword grass Imperata cylindrica, 230n21; on generalization, 174; Hanunóo hut, 200; holistic world view, 160, 173, 226n32; language and behavior study, 160, 174–75; Linnaeus and, 160; methods of description, 176, 227n39; in Morocco, 161–62, 184; new ethnography of, 157, 228n46; nonwestern world study, 159, 162; paradox of rice cultivation, 171–72, 186; in the Philippines, 173, 196; powers of observance of, 183; publications of, 158, 180; representation and generalization, 173–74, 176–77, 179–80; on rice planting, 172; on shifting cultivation, 202; thick description, 175, 189–90; tropics and, 23; Wallace and, 160; in Yogyakarta, Java, 184. See also Hanunóo of Mindanao; Ifugao of Northern Luzon; swidden agriculture Conklin, Jean, 184–85 Connell, Joseph, 221n19 Conrad, Joseph, 115, 154–55 Cosmos (Humboldt), 9 Costa, James T., 25, 108, 113, 115, 143, 219nn4–5 Cox, Murray P., 132 Crawfurd, John, 45, 223n50   Dalarna/Dalecarlia, Sweden, 72, 74 Darwin, Charles: chronological account, 116; collector and homestay, 24; Goethe influence, 9; Linnaeus and, 70; Malthus and, 220n9; native beliefs, 146–47; poeticism of, 13; tropics and, 23; Wallace and, 111–12, 115; White and, 8 Darwin, Erasmus, 12, 55 Dayaks (Dyaks), 54, 121–22, 124–25, 127, 141 “A Day in Parina” (Conklin), 161, 228n46 De Causis Plantarum (Theophrastus), 14 “Deep Play” (Geertz), 175, 227n34 Deep Things Out of Darkness (Anderson), 35 Dekker, Eduard Douwes (Multatuli), 137 De Materia Medica (Dioscorides), 22 Descartes, René, 23–24, 208n54, 210n82, 225n2

Deschamps, Louis Auguste, 58, 60 de Stuers, François Vincent Henri, 45–46 dibble sticks, Dove on, 225n13. See also Conklin, Jean Dictionary of the Economic Products of the Malay Peninsula (Burkill), 115 Dioscorides, 13, 22–23 Dobbo, Moluccas, 138–39, 140, 144–45, 195 Drake, Francis, 220n13 Dutch colonialism, 134–37, 139, 146, 193   Eager (Goldfarb), 36 Eco, Umberto, 180. See also maps economy of nature, 70–71, 96, 98–100, 216n4, 218n50. See also Linnaeus, Carl Egerton, Frank N., 8, 17–18, 32, 99, 115, 206n17, 207n31 Eliasson, Par, 74, 77 Ellen, Roy F.: agroforestry, 222n26; on Conklin, 162, 228n41, 228n46; “Ethnographer’s Tent,” 90; Foucault and, 31; on Linnaeus, 88, 217n30; on Rumphius, 44, 63 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 9–10, 29, 77 Empedocles, 34 Enquiry into Plants (Theophrastus), 14–15, 198 environmental history, 9 Essay on the Principles of Population (Malthus), 113 ethnobiology, 37, 40, 166, 183–84, 201–2 ethnobotany, 11, 40–41, 49, 158, 163, 165, 188–89, 198 “The Ethnographer’s Tent on the Beach of Nu’Agasi,” 90 Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao (Conklin): displayed in Banaue museum, 157; maps of, 177–78, 227n40; native assistance, 228n1; pond-field details, 179; publication of, 158; reviews of, 159–60, 180–81, 186, 226n27, 228n41; swiddens versus pond-fields, 187 ethnographic drawing, 227n39 ethnography: comparative, 207n28; definition of, 160–61; fine or thick description in, 175, 189–90, 227n34; hearsay and, 37; holistic world view, 42, 188; local

254 ethnography (continued ) knowledge and, 19; study of ruins, 37; western and nonwestern, 187 ethnozoology, 11, 187 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan, 78, 80 Ewen, A. H., 207n31   Faggot, Jacob, 93 Fairchild, David, 212n4 Finch, Robert, 29 Flora Lapponica (Linnaeus), 105, 106 Flora of Cambridgeshire (Ray), 207n31 “Flourishing” (Kearns & Schmidt), 35 Foersch, N. P., 55, 57–58, 60, 65, 213n31. See also poison tree; upas (poison) tree folklore and folk knowledge, 1–2, 5, 13–16, 18, 70, 203, 207n31, 207n39. See also hearsay; historia; indigenous knowledge Foucault, Michel: blurring of past, 1, 5–6, 102; Borges classification system, 20; classical age, 1, 205n1; folk knowledge and, 204; Linnaeus and, 97–98, 102–3, 205n2, 227n40; methods of study, 31–32, 63; paradox of science history, 1, 156; Rumphius and, 196; study of plants and animals, 32–34, 37, 96; travelers’ tales as subterfuges, 191–94 Fowles, John, 42, 70, 203–4 Frake, Charles O., 157, 163, 174–75, 189 Franklin, Benjamin, 206n17 Freedman, Paul, 66 French, Roger, 4–5, 8, 14, 198–99, 210n70, 210n78 Friar Odoric, 58, 214n36 Frobisher, Martin, 31, 209n64   Galton, Francis, 114 Gan, Elain, 36, 201 Geertz, Clifford, 161–62, 171, 175, 183–84, 189–90, 209n63, 226n20, 227n34, 227n39 Genera Plantarum (Linnaeus), 43 The Generation of Animals (Aristotle), 34 The Geographical Distribution of Animals (Wallace), 130, 219n5 George, Wilma, 222n30 Georgics (Virgil), 7, 12 Glacken, Clarence J., 212n4

index Goa, 142–43 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 9, 12 Goldfarb, Ben, 36 Goodenough, Ward, 157 “The Great Problems of Anthropology” (Wallace), 112 Grove, Richard, 18 Gusterson, Hugh, 197   Haeckel, Ernst, 71, 115 Hampton, S. E., 35–36 Hanks, Lucien M., 180–81, 226n27 Hanunóo Agriculture (Conklin): anti-­ generalization and, 174; description of rice planting, 162–63, 174; swidden agriculture, 166–68, 177, 181, 226n19; UN publication, 158 Hanunóo of Mindanao: betel chewing, 163–65; biodiversity of, 184–85; crop diversity, 168; field journal on, 188; fieldwork with, 161, 180; importance of rice, 170; integral swidden agriculture, 167; knowledge of plants, 159; measures and counting, 175; national politics and, 181; plant names, 165; rice planting, 171–72, 176, 182; swidden agriculture, 158, 168, 170–71, 174–76; taxonomies of, 227n36; term “Conklin” adopted into their language, 157 Hardy, Gavin, 12–13, 23–24, 34, 198, 206n26, 207n28, 229n14 Hårleman, Carl, 93–94, 101, 203, 218n40 Harris, Marvin, 157, 159, 173, 225n2 Hartigan, John, 35, 37, 70, 188 Hathaway, Michael, 37 hearsay: contemporary importance, 203, 204; dictionary definition of, xvi n1; Foucault on, ix; in history of science, 1, 19, 37; in Linnaeus’s work, 70, 76, 101, 107; and natural history, ix, xiv; in Rumphius’s work, 39, 44. See also folklore and folk knowledge; historia; indigenous knowledge The Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 154 The Hedgehog and the Fox (Berlin), 41 Heidegger, Martin, 173 Herbert, Thomas, 58

i n d e x 255 Herodote (journal), 191 Herodotus, 7–8, 12, 207n28 Hesiod, 7, 12 The Hidden Life of Trees (Wohlleben), 34, 36 Hippocrates, 7 historia, 8, 23, 198. See also folklore and folk knowledge; hearsay; indigenous knowledge Historia Naturalis (Pliny), 8, 42 Histories (Herodotus), 7–8 The History of Java (Raffles), 115 The History of Sumatra (Marsden), 115 Holdredge, Craig, 35 Homer, 12 Horace, 204 Hort, Arthur, 15 How Forests Think (Kohn), 37 How to Travel with a Salmon (Eco), 180 Humboldt, Alexander von, 9, 13, 23, 114, 116, 222n23, 225n7 Hunn, Eugene, 183–84 Huot, Claire, 20 Hustaerdt, Jacob, 48 Hutchinson, G. Evelyn, 209n61   Ifugao of Northern Luzon: cartography of, 177–78, 180; colonial rule and, 172; composite systems, 168; fieldwork with, 184, 230n16; government projects and, 181; method of study, 157; mountain rice terraces (pond-fields), 158, 160, 168, 171–73, 178–79, 186–87, 225n12, 226nn27–29, 228n1; plants and animals, 160; swidden agriculture of, 172; taxonomies of, 227n36; units and measurements, 225n12 Iliad (Homer), 12 Imperata cylindrica, 169–71, 230n21 India, British and, 223n41, 223n43 indigenous knowledge, 11, 18, 44, 47, 76, 157, 165, 224n60. See also folklore and folk knowledge; hearsay; historia industrial ruins, 37. See also Tsing, Anna Ingold, Tim, 173 intermediate disturbance thesis, 221n19 The Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz), 175

Jackson, Benjamin Daydon, 94, 227n34 Järnefelt, Eero, 95 Java, lava fields of, 214n37 Journal of Natural History Education and Experience, 35   Kalm, Pehr, 218n39 Kant, Immanuel, 10 Karam of New Guinea, 187 Kearns, Timothy, 35 King, Richard J., 36 Kingdon-Ward, Francis, 25, 27, 207n33, 208n54, 209n66 Koerner, Lisbet, 9, 88, 90, 100, 104–5, 107 Kohn, Eduardo, 36–37 Krikorian, Abraham D., 212n14 Krook, J., 92–93 Kuiper, Joel, 157–58, 162, 167, 175–76, 180 Kuntze, Otto, 43   Lachesis Lapponica, or a Tour in Lapland (Linnaeus), 1–2, 72 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de, 96 Land Nationalisation, Its Necessity and Its Aims (Wallace), 154 The Land of the Blue Poppy (Kingdon-Ward), 27, 208n55 Lansing, J. Stephen, 132 Lapp and Lapland. See Linnaeus, Carl; Sápmi and Sámi people Late Migrations (Renkl), 36 Latour, Bruno, 187 Lee, Henry Desmond Pritchard, 4 Leopold, Aldo, 7, 9–10, 22, 28–29, 152, 199 Leschenault de la Tour, Jean Baptiste Louis Théodore, 54, 213n29 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 42, 60, 62–63, 158–59, 163, 188–89 Life of Appolonius (Philostratus), 229n5 Linnaean classification, 24, 43–44, 69–72, 96–98, 102–3, 114, 160, 218n45 Linnaeus, Carl: agrarian politics, 104; assistance received, 74; bio, 70; citations of, 7; clandestine motives questioned, 106, 195; Conklin on, 160; disputes with, 203; economy of nature, 70–71; ethnographic field studies, 70–71, 76–78, 80–82, 85, 101,

256 Linnaeus, Carl (continued ) 117, 119; ethnographic sketches, 78–79, 83–84, 87–88, 104–5; ethnography of, 71, 76–78, 81–82, 96, 104; on folk medicine, 217n21; knighthood, 215n3; methods of study, 32, 73; on nutrient cycles, 9, 206n17; in Öland and Gotland, Sweden, 72, 74, 76, 80, 193, 195–96, 205n8; pastoral landscapes, fondness for, 202; pastoral versus wild, 217n34, 218n38; on plant reproduction, 69–71; “Pliny of the North,” 5–6, 70; poeticism of, 12; portraits of, 88–89, 105, 217n30; Pratt on his expeditions, 192–93; Rumphius and, 42–43, 64, 71–72, 207n45; in Sámi attire, 88, 90, 105, 107; Skåne expedition, 93; smoky huts and, 86; students and, 23, 99, 192, 216n9, 216n11, 218n40, 218n50; Swedish nationalism and, 74, 76; Swedish travel, 1–2, 23, 26, 28, 70, 72–76, 95, 98, 100–101, 194, 198, 218n40; thick description, 71, 82; tropics and, 23; Wallace and, 112; in Westgothland, Sweden, 73, 216n9; White and, 20. See also economy of nature; Sápmi and Sámi people; swidden agriculture Lomolino, Mark V., 111 The London Magazine, 54–55, 60 “Loves of the Plants” (E. Darwin), 55 Lowrey, Kathleen Bolling, 112 Lutz, Catherine, 197 Lye Tuck-Po, 208n53 Lyons, Sherrie, 143, 147   Macartney, George, 57 Makassar: amuk (suicide), 141–42; poison blowpipes, 52, 61; poison tree and, 194 The Malay Archipelago (Wallace): biodiversity and, 121; birds of paradise, 127, 138, 150; Conklin on, 154, 160; critique of England, 144–46; on Dutch colonial rule, 134–35, 139; on English political economy, 148; fieldwork as wandering, 27; forestry in, 123; human society observations, 112; natural history and ethnography, 3; on nature and culture, 121, 123, 124; on Oriental travel, 109,

index 115–16; on “savages,” 144–45; scholarly importance of, 108; Southeast Asia travel, 115–16; specimens collected, 119–20, 123; style of, 115; on terraced rice cultivation, 144; thematic organization, 116; travel in, 28, 109, 205n4; on tropical forest, 142; Wallace as object of local interest, 149; Wallace’s liberal reputation, 146; Whitten’s introduction, 205n4; Wyhe and, 110, 205n4. See also bird of paradise; orangutan Malays and Malay Archipelago: amuk (suicide), 141–42, 223n50; definition of, 219n4; generalization and, 174; native society in, 145, 147; race distinctions in, 220n6; swiddens in, 121; Wallace in, 111, 116, 118, 140, 143–44. See also Wallace, Alfred Russel; Wallace’s Line “Maling, a Hanunóo Girl” (Conklin), 181–82, 183, 228n45, 230n16. See also Conklin, Jean; Hanunóo of Mindinao Malinowski, Bronislaw, 90 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 70, 113–14, 154, 220n9 Mandeville, John, 58 “The Man in the Moon” (Carroll), 180. See also maps maps, 178, 179, 186, 227n40. See also Borges, Jorge Luis; Carroll, Lewis; Eco, Umberto Marder, Michael, 34 Marincola, John, 7 Markus, Gyorgy, 203 Marsden, William, 57, 60, 115, 117 Max Havelaar (Dekker), 137 Mayo College of Medicine, 40 McDermott, Ray, 157–58, 162, 167, 175–76, 180 Menado, Celebes (Sulawesi), 136 Merrill, Elmer Drew, 39–40, 42–43, 71–72 The Metamorphosis of Plants (Goethe), 12 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 34 Meteorologica (Aristotle), 3–5, 7, 34 Minahasa, Celebes (Sulawesi), Indonesia, 136 Moffett, Thomas, 17 Moore, James, 153–54 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 210n82

i n d e x 257 Morocco, 161, 184, 190 Mueggler, Erik, 25, 27, 207n33 Müller-Wille, Staffan, 96, 102 Murphy, Trevor, 5, 205n7 The Mushroom at the End of the World (Tsing), 37 My Life (Wallace), 115, 133, 144, 220n13, 223n39   Nabhan, Gary P., 36 natural history: ancient meteorology, 3–5; Aristotle’s definition, 4; astonishment and, 80, 196, 198; brownfield “ruins” and, 201–2; classical Greek and Roman scholarship, 210n78; distance, political power, and natural history, 199–201; folk knowledge and, 230n23; hearsay and, 39; holistic view, 7, 9, 11–12, 194, 196, 206n21, 209n65, 209n67, 210n79, 216n13; humanities and, 12–13; lantern slide shows, 209n66; methods of study, 31–32, 199; morphology and, 9; museums, 213n28, 215n2; natural historians as polymaths, 9, 113, 206n16; new natural history and nature-culture divide, 202; nonwestern settings, 198–99, 209n60, 209nn63–64; nutrient cycles, 9; object of study, 197; plant stories and, 229n14; study of, 8; study of plants and animals, 32–36, 156, 210n82, 211n83, 229n14; theory and practice, 24; theory of natural history as colonial subterfuge, 192–194, 201 Natural History (Pliny), 4–5, 14, 19 “Natural History, the Forgotten Science” (Leopold), 9 Natural History Network 2007, 35–36 The Natural History of Selborne (White), 2–3, 8, 12, 16, 19–20 Naturalis Historia (Pliny), 42 Naturalist (Wilson), 210n76 Natural Questions (Seneca), 4 natural selection, theory of, 111, 113–15, 134, 219n5. See also Darwin, Charles; Wallace, Alfred Russel The Nature of Natural History (Bates), 7, 11 New Guinea: 150; birds of paradise in, 124, 150; cassowary classification, 187; colo-

nial rule and trade, 127, 132–33; life forms in, 128, 130; prehistoric migration to, 131; savages in, 150; Waigiou Island, 122; Wallace in, 119, 140, 143; X-ray painting and carving, 209n69 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 122 nutrient cycle, 9–10, 206n17   Odyssey (Homer), 12 The Oeconomy of Nature (Linnaeus), 99 The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Pollan), 36 “On Rigor in Science” (Borges), 180 orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), x, xvi, 112, 124, 127, 151. See also Boon, James; Wallace, Alfred Russel Orientalism, 141, 197 The Overstory (Powers), 36 Ovid, 61, 68, 101   Padtbrugge, Robert, 48 Palm, Willem Ardiaan, 57 Papua and Papuans: artistic skills, 143; birds of paradise and, 194; differences from Dayaks, 124, 127; Wallace’s Line, 130–33, 220n6 Paracelsus, 64 Park, Mungo, 209n64 Pearson, Norman Holmes, 29–30 Peeters, Alice, 43–44 Pepper, black (Piper nigrum), 66–68, 194, 229n5 Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions (Humboldt), 114 Persoon, Gerard A., 181 Philippines: betel chewing, 163; Conklin in, 157–58, 230n16; literacy in, 226n28; Pentecostal Christianity, 226n28; swidden agriculture in, 167, 181, 226n19 Philosophia Botanica (Linnaeus), 23, 71, 96 Philostratus, 229n5 Pike, Kenneth, 157 plant classification. See Conklin, Jean; Linnaeus, Carl; Rumphius, Georgius Everhardus Plato, 34 Pliny the Elder: criticism of, 5; empire and botanical discoveries, 199; invention of

258 Pliny the Elder (continued ) index, 205n7; Linnaeus’s joke regarding, 205n8; lucubrationes, 191; plants and anthropomorphism, 34–35, 210n70; and Rumphius, 6, 42, 44; science and folk knowledge, 14; scope of work, 4, 8; student of rhetoric, 12; study of everyday life, 19; on superstitions, 229n5; things worthy of study, 198 Ploeg, Jan van der, 181 Poetics (Aristotle), 12 poison arrows, 229n12. See also Antiaris toxicaria; poison tree poison tree, 51; accounts of, 63; active ingredient, 211n1; European interest in, 61–62, 65, 214n36; Foersch’s account of, 55, 57, 213n31; in Java, 58, 60; metaphorical use, 55–56; native folklore and, 38–39, 60, 68, 213n29, 229n7; role of imagination in trade, 66–67, 215n1; Rumphius’s description of, 52, 214n32; Rumphius’s purported errors, 50, 198; secret of, 194, 196; upas and ipo terms, 213n22. See also Antiaris toxicaria; blowpipe poisons; poison tree; upas (poison) tree The Poison Tree (Beekman), 50, 60 “The Poison Tree” (Blake), 55, 62 Pollan, Michael, 36 Polo, Marco, 220n13 Powers, Richard, 36 Pratt, Mary Louise, 192–94, 196, 207n43, 216n13, 218n45 Prime, C. T., 207n31 Primitive Culture (Burnett), 147 Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich, 55   Rackham, Harris, 5, 14 Raffles, Hugh, 18–19, 24–25 Raffles, Thomas, 57, 115, 117, 221n17 Ray, John, 207n31 Reader (journal), 134 “The Relation of Hanunóo Culture to the Plant World” (Conklin dissertation), 158–59, 165–66 Remme, Jon Henrik Ziegler, 157, 159–60, 173, 180–81, 226n28, 228n41 Renkl, Margaret, 36

index Rickett, Edward E., 208n56, 216n9 The Rise of Anthropological Theory (Harris), 157 Rockefeller Foundation, 225n13 Rome, classical, 23, 68, 199–200 Rosaldo, Renato, 181 Rumphius, Georgius Everhardus: about, 39; aestheticism and, 13; Ambon focus, 197; ancient sources and, 6; anthropo­ logical fieldwork, 47–48; on betel chewing, 165; blindness, 57–58, 60, 214n35; classification systems, 43–44, 49; Conklin on, 160; ethnography of, 47–50, 63; field living conditions, 230n16; imagination and, 65, 68; linguistic expertise, 48–49; Linnaeus and, 64, 71–72; local folk knowledge, 45–46; lucubrationes, 191; Mesticae, 47, 212n17; methods of, 23–24; modern relevance, 40; native magic and, 46–47, 53–54, 64, 212n14; “Pliny of the Indies,” 5, 42; portraits of, 59, 214n35; praise for, 41–42; preeminent naturalist, 32; premodern values, 63–64; on Ambon versus Africa, 28; sago preparation, 45–46; scholarly familiarity with, 212n4; science and poetry, 12; on spice trade and Dutch, 136; swidden systems and, 11; Wallace and, 115, 117. See also poison tree Rumphius, Paulus Augustus, 214n35 Rumphius Biohistorical Expedition, 49 Ruskin, John, 55 Ryle, Gilbert, 189–90   sago palm, 45–46, 122–23, 222n23, 222n26 Said, Edward, 197 A Sand County Almanac (Leopold), 29 Sápmi and Sámi people: comparison to metropolitan Sweden, 86, 102; diminutive stature, 217n21; everyday life and, 81–82, 98, 100–101; everyday technology, 77–78; gender roles, 81; Linnaeus expedition, 1–2, 70, 72–76, 97, 198; Linnaeus’s Sámi attire, 88; Linnaeus’s sympathy and praise, 82, 85; local food and drink, 80; maladies and remedies, 80–81, 85; modern study of, 217n18; mountain tents,

i n d e x 259 83; reindeer bridle, 84; reindeer herding, 78, 104, 217n24; Sápmi dress, 89, 90, 107; Sápmi landscape, 106; Swedish separation policy, 86–87, 105 Sarawak, Borneo, 120–21, 141 The Savage Mind (Lévi-Strauss), 158–59, 163 Schaghen, Nicolaes, 214n35 Schmitz, Oswald, 35 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 63 Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich, 105 Science in Action (Latour), 187 science skepticism, xiii–xiv, xvi, 202–204 “Scythian Banquet Song” (Ruskin), 55 Sea of Cortez (Steinbeck, Rickett), 208n56, 224n4 Seneca, 4, 7, 12, 198 Sernander, Rutger, 93 shifting cultivation, 10, 90, 121, 158, 160, 166–67, 186–87, 202. See also burn-­ beating; swidden agriculture Singer, Charles, 207n46 Sirks, M. J., 41, 43, 47 Skåne, Sweden, 72, 91, 93–94 Småland, Sweden, 70, 85–86, 91–92 Smith, Adam, 70 Smith, Charles H., 112–13, 146–47 Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, 35, 210n75 Snow, Charles Percy, 13 Sörlin, Sverker, 75–77, 86 Species Plantarum (Linnaeus), 43, 71–72 Speelman, Cornelis, 194 Spencer, Herbert, 220n13 spice trade, 65–66, 69, 136, 193, 229n5 Spielman, H. Cornelius, 58 Staunton, George, 58 Steinbeck, John, 207n44, 208n56, 216n9, 225n4 Stickman, Olaf, 72 Strack, Herman L., 49, 212n4 Strickland, Stanford S., 222n23 Strindberg, Johan August, 12 Studies Scientific and Social (Wallace), 154 “The Study of Shifting Cultivation” (Conklin), 173–74 Sullivan, Daniel, 36, 201

Sultan of Tidore, East Indies, 140–41 Surinam, 217n21 Sweden: agriculture of, 93, 218n38; Öland and Gotland, 193–94; one-field system, 92–93; swidden agriculture in, 91–93, 95–96; Ume, 105, 219n4 Swedish Academy of Sciences, 77, 93–94 swidden agriculture: in Borneo, 121–22; condemnation and defense of, 166–70, 218n39; controversy over, 93–95; definition of, 90; escape fires, 169–70; European and Native American, 90–91; as “fugitive” systems, 101, 219n55; indigenous knowledge and, 11; Linnaeus and, 71; modern practice and research, 206n20; multiyear cycle, 92, 99–100; painting of, 95; partial versus integral systems, 167–68; in the Philippines, 158, 181; rice planting and, 172; study of, 10, 96, 104; in Sweden, 91–93, 95–96. See also burn-beating; shifting cultivation Systema Naturae (Linnaeus), 71, 103, 107, 216n9   Tallmadge, John, 210n79 Tchikine, Anatole, 201 terminology: amok, 141, 223n50; burn-­ beating (svedjebruk), 91; ecology, 71; emic and etic, 157; epicho¯ rioi, 13; history and historia, 8; Lapp and Lapland, 72; lucubrationes, 191; “natural history,” 35; term “Conklin” in Hanunóo language, 157; upas and ipo terms, 213n22 Tewksbury, Joshua J., 28 Theophrastus: Alexander the Great’s expeditions and, 199; comparative ethnography of, 207n28; fables and, 229n5; father of botany, 14, 210n71; local folk knowledge, 15–16, 206n26; plant knowledge of, 12; plants and anthropomorphism, 33–35; remarkable and unremarkable things, 198 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 6 “Thick Description” (Geertz), 175, 189–90 Thomas, Lewis, 13 Thompson, Edward Palmer, 155

260 Thoreau, Henry David: on classical languages, 205n8; fellowship with nature, 13; holistic world view, 7, 206n21; human-­ centric view of creation, 10; Linnaeus and, 70, 75; local details, 22; natural history walk, 27; nutrient cycles, 9; pastoral landscapes of, 202; poeticism of, 13; study at home, 28–31, 198, 209n61, 209n63; White and, 8 Tiv of Central Nigeria, 187–88 Totelin, Laurence, 12–13, 23–24, 34, 198, 206n26, 207n28, 229n14 totemism thesis, 124, 127, 130 Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de, 32 travel: Amazon and tropics, 23, 207n43; to China, 25; collectors and, 24; colonial European society, 25; narratives of, 26; natural history study and, 22–23, 207n44; natural history walk, 27–28, 208nn53–54, 208n56; reasonable or outlandish, 28; study at home, 28–29. See also Linnaeus, Carl; Wallace, Alfred Russel; White, Gilbert Trewavas, Anthony, 35 Tsing, Anna, 36–37, 201–2 Tyler, Stephen, 173 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 147–48   United Dutch East India Company (VOC): The Ambonese Herbal and, 41; colonial power of, 61; cultivation system, 135–138, 146; official name, 211n2; Rumphius employee of, 39, 42, 48, 191; studies of poison tree, 57; Wallace’s praise for, 134–38 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 158, 166 upas (poison) tree: Baston on, 60, 213n31; foreign beliefs regarding, 54, 57, 58, 211n29; in literature, 55; native beliefs regarding, 52, 229n7; native terminology, 213n22; political economy of, 61–62, 196, 197; Rumphius on, xv, 50, 198; secrecy, 194; toxicology of poison, 211n1. See also Antiaris toxicaria; blowpipe poisons; poison tree “The Upas Tree” (Pushkin), 55

index Valentijn, François, 52–53 van Rhijn, Jan Matthijs, 57 Västergötland, Sweden, 72 Vetter, Jeremy, 28, 116 Virgil, 7, 12, 101, 204, 207n39   Waigiou Island, 118, 122 Walden or Life in the Woods (Thoreau), 30–31 Wallace, Alfred Russel: anti-colonialism of, 134, 152; anti-vaccination views, 220n7; in the Aru Islands, 194–95; bio, 110–11; in Borneo, 194; on British industrialization, 152–53; clandestine motives imputed, 194–95; colonial networks and his research, 25; colonial rule and trade, 139, 141, 223n45, 223n48; comparison of English and tribal society, 225n7; Conklin on, 160; Darwin and, 24, 220n13; on colonialism, 134; Dutch cultivation system, 135, 137–38; economic circumstances of, 111; ethnography, 110, 116–17, 127; European ethnocentrism, 144; field conditions, 221nn16–17; field living conditions, 208n49, 230n16; field skills, 26; holistic world view, 7, 111–13; human skull measurement, 220n6; on indigenous knowledge, 224n60; influences on, 114–16; Linnaeus and, 114; Malthus and, 220n9; modern reader and, 109–10; native beliefs, 146–48; natural history walk, 27–28; natural selection theory, 111, 113–14, 219n5; in New Guinea, 118; orangutans, 112, 124, 125, 127, 151; on Orientalism, 141, 142; Papuan artistic skill, 143–44; Papuan-Malay racial division, 130–32; poeticism of, 12–13; political issues and, 133–34, 148, 152, 222n37; positionality, 148–49; Rumphius and, 115; sago palm, 122–23, 222n23, 222n26; savages, 224n58; scholarly versus popular work, 224n63; swidden agriculture and, 11, 122–23; travel of, 108–9, 111, 116–19, 140, 142–43, 151, 205n4, 208n52, 219n4, 220n13; travel skills, 26; western civilization’s impact, 221n21; zoogeography,

i n d e x 261 219n5. See also bird of paradise; orangutan Wallace’s Line, 111, 129, 130, 132, 153–54, 222n30 Warburg, Otto Heinrich, 71 Weerd, Marlijn van, 181 Weibull, Martin, 218n40 Weimarck, Gunhild, 91–92, 94–95, 217n34 What a Mushroom Lives for (Hathaway), 37 Wheeler, Terry A., 35–36 White, Gilbert: bathing in sand, 3; British tradition of natural history, 206n15; datagathering methods, 26–27; focus on birds, 19–20; folk knowledge, 2–3, 207n39; human-centric view of creation, 10; on Linnaean categories, 20–21, 70; local folk knowledge, 16–17; on mundane reality, 20–21; pastoral landscapes of, 202; poetry and poeticism of, 12–13; Rumphius comparison, 44; on studying near versus far, 28–29; study of natural history, 8–9; on

superstition, 17; Whitten, Tony, 205n4, 221n17, 224n63 Wiklund, Karl Bernhard, 86 Wikman, Rob K., 78 Williams, Raymond, 31 Wilson, Edward O., 63, 111, 210n76 Wohlleben, Peter, 34, 36 Wolf, Eric, 162 Woman’s Anthropological Society, 112 Works and Days (Hesiod), 7, 12 Worster, Donald: on aesthetics, 13; environmental history and, 9; on Linnaeus, 98–99; on nature/history divide, 31, 209n65, Wyhe, John van, 110, 115–16, 137, 146, 220n13   X-ray painting and carving, 209n69   Yoo, Genie, 46, 53, 213n28, 215n2   Zoologist (journal), 221n17

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The Agrarian Studies Series at Yale University Press seeks to publish outstanding and original interdisciplinary work on agriculture and rural society—for any period, in any location. Works of daring that question existing paradigms and fill abstract categories with the lived experience of rural people are especially encouraged. —James C. Scott, Series Editor James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States Jamie Kreiner, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West Christian Lund, Nine-Tenths of the Law: Enduring Dispossession in Indonesia Shaila Seshia Galvin, Becoming Organic: Nature and Agriculture in the Indian Himalaya Michael R. Dove, Bitter Shade: The Ecological Challenge of Human Consciousness Japhy Wilson, Reality of Dreams: Post-Neoliberal Utopias in the Ecuadorian Amazon Aniket Aga, Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India Ruth Mostern, The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History Brian Lander, The King’s Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire Jo Guldi, The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights Andrew S. Mathews, Trees Are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Create Landscapes Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy, and Tiago Saraiva, Moving Crops and the Scales of History Deborah Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History Brooks Lamb, Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place Michael R. Dove, Hearsay Is Not Excluded: A History of Natural History For a complete list of titles in the Yale Agrarian Studies Series, visit yalebooks.com/agrarian.