Geoff Bil
University of Delaware, History, Faculty Member
- History, Art History, Gender Studies, Cultural History, British Imperial and Colonial History (1600 - ), History of Science, and 9 moreHistorical Epistemology, Pacific History, History of New Zealand, History of Anthropology, Postcolonial Studies, History of Botany, Pharmacy and Medicine, History of Botany, Catriona Sandilands, and Traditional Ecological Knowledgeedit
- Historian of science. Specialist in 19th- & 20th-century ethnobotany. Interests: botany, anthropology, intellectual p... moreHistorian of science. Specialist in 19th- & 20th-century ethnobotany. Interests: botany, anthropology, intellectual property, colonialism & indigenous history. Please see my personal website (http://www.geoffbil.com) for the latest information.edit
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This essay examines how Indo-Pacific indigenous plant names went from being viewed as instruments of botanical fieldwork, to being seen primarily as currency in anthropological studies. I trace this attitude to Alexander von Humboldt, who... more
This essay examines how Indo-Pacific indigenous plant names went from being viewed as instruments of botanical fieldwork, to being seen primarily as currency in anthropological studies. I trace this attitude to Alexander von Humboldt, who differentiated between indigenous phytonyms with merely local relevance to be used as philological data, and universally applicable Latin plant names. This way of using indigenous plant names underwrote a chauvinistic reading of cultural difference, and was therefore especially attractive to commentators lacking acquaintance with any indigenous language or culture. When New Zealand anthropologists embraced this role for Māori phytonyms in the 1890s, however, they did so possessed of a relatively in-depth understanding of Māori culture and the Māori language. This discussion has three primary aims: to illuminate nineteenth-century scholarly engagements with Indo-Pacific plant classifications, in contrast to a prevailing historiographical emphasis on European disregard for this subject; to analyse how indigenous phytonyms acted as 'boundary objects' interfacing between cultures and disciplines; and to illustrate the politics of scientific disciplinarity in a colonial context.
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That Romantic botanists tended to view the systematizing, disenchanting aspects of Enlightenment epistemology in a critical light is well known. What has been less thoroughly explored, however, is the relationship between Romanticism and... more
That Romantic botanists tended to view the systematizing, disenchanting aspects of Enlightenment epistemology in a critical light is well known. What has been less thoroughly explored, however, is the relationship between Romanticism and indigenous knowledge. One reason for this omission, I suggest, is that historians of botany have formed a more or less totalizing impression of the discipline’s imperial significance from the predominance of Linnaean binomial species names in published botanical writings. My analysis, on the other hand, contrasts the marginality of indigenous plant names in published texts with their far greater prominence in unpublished materials. Given this discrepancy, I argue for a figurative interpretation of indigenous plant names in early- to mid-nineteenth-century Romantic botanical writings, as implicit gestures toward knowledge-making floral and cultural domains beyond the printed text. By extension, the limited – albeit suggestive and strategic – placement of indigenous plant names underscores the colonial botanist’s position as an expert, almost occult intermediary between European cultural words and indigenous natural worlds. I examine this tendency in two mid-nineteenth-century Romantic botanists: William Colenso in New Zealand, and Berthold Seemann, who collected plants in Fiji, Hawai’i, Panama and elsewhere. My intention is threefold: to contrast the botanists’ print personas with their assumed private domains of mystery and expertise; to augment a growing scholarly awareness of indigenous knowledge-making contributions to imperial botany; and finally, to reflect on Romantic natural history’s self- reflective, critical stance toward its own writerly containment.
Research Interests: Print Culture, Romanticism, Ethnobotany, History of Natural History, History of Science, and 12 moreColonialism, Indigenous Knowledge, Literature And Science, Nature Culture, History of New Zealand, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, History of Indigenous Peoples, Imperialism, Maori history, History of Botany, science and Empire, and Colonialism and Imperialism
The delocalizing, expropriatory intent behind the Linnaean taxonomical enterprise is well known. Among other things, Linnaeus rejected indigenous plant names in favor of names that decontextualized plants and reinserted them into a... more
The delocalizing, expropriatory intent behind the Linnaean taxonomical enterprise is well known. Among other things, Linnaeus rejected indigenous plant names in favor of names that decontextualized plants and reinserted them into a European classificatory framework for the purposes of categorizing, acclimatizing and exploiting them. What has been largely overlooked, however, is the extent to which late-Enlightenment Linnaean botanists themselves continued not only to rely on indigenous knowledge and guidance in their colonial fieldwork, but also to actively cultivate a knowledge of indigenous languages – especially indigenous plant names – for themselves. One reason for this omission, I suggest, is that historians of botany have formed a more or less totalizing impression of the discipline’s late eighteenth-century cultural significance from published flora and other writings in which Linnaean binomial species names predominate. My own line of inquiry, on the other hand, contrasts the marginality of indigenous plant names in published texts with their far greater prominence in unpublished materials. For the purposes of this paper I draw particularly on Daniel Solander’s Plantae Otaheitensis, a manuscript virtually ignored by historians. The intention is threefold: to draw attention to a heretofore underutilized resource for Cook voyage historians; to augment a growing scholarly awareness of indigenous knowledge-making contributions to Enlightenment botany; and finally, in highlighting the disjuncture between exoteric print conventions and esoteric plant-collecting practices, to shed further light on the oft-observed correlation between botany and early Romantic epistemology.
Research Interests: Romanticism, Ethnobotany, Transnational and World History, World History, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and 27 moreBritish Empire, Global History, British Imperialism, Linguistic Imperialism, Local knowledge systems, Pacific History, History of Indigenous Peoples, History of the British Empire, Local Ecological Knowledge, Biopiracy, Bioprospecting, Collectors and Collecting, History of Botany, Indigenous History, Natural History Museum, Ethnobotany, Ethnobiology, Ethnoecology, Systematic Botany, Taxonomy, History of Botany, Historical ethnobotany, Phytonymy, Local Knowledge, Global/local, Captain James Cook 1728–1779, Tahiti, Botanical Nomenclature, History of Botany, Pharmacy and Medicine, Tradtional Environmental Knowledge, and Indigenous Plant Medicines
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The role played by late nineteenth-century anthropologists in promulgating racist stereotypes, and as instruments of colonialism, is well known. Less understood is how the "disenchanted nature," against which anthropologists like Elsdon... more
The role played by late nineteenth-century anthropologists in promulgating racist stereotypes, and as instruments of colonialism, is well known. Less understood is how the "disenchanted nature," against which anthropologists like Elsdon Best measured the "primitive superstition" of indigenous peoples, played out in colonial knowledge-making contexts. My own point of entry into this question is the overlap between botany and ethnography in colonial New Zealand. Specifically, this paper considers the European compilation of Maori and Polynesian plant names; the shift in European perceptions of this knowledge from the 1840s to the 1900s, and the ways in which botanical and anthropological ideas and practices during this period - of which Best was well aware - complicated any such rigidly dichotomous, modernist view of nature and scientific knowledge.
Research Interests: History of Science, Indigenous Knowledge, British Imperial and Colonial History (1600 - ), Modernism, History of New Zealand, and 7 moreNature/culture Dichotomization, Maori history, Disenchantment, History of Botany, Enchantment, Ethnobotany, Ethnobiology, Ethnoecology, and History of Anthropology and Anthropological Theory
For better or worse, historians of science have tended to adopt latter-day disciplinary boundaries in defining their objects of study. While this approach has yielded useful histories of botany, anthropology, geology, physics and the... more
For better or worse, historians of science have tended to adopt latter-day disciplinary boundaries in defining their objects of study. While this approach has yielded useful histories of botany, anthropology, geology, physics and the like, it also obscures the extent to which these areas of inquiry overlapped in other times and places. My research on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century botany and ethnography in New Zealand, on the other hand, asks how boundaries between knowing plants and knowing peoples were both constructed and contested in a colonial context. In eschewing any a priori distinction between botany and ethnography for an examination of how they intersected both within and outside the bounds of published botanical, ethnographic and literary writings, this working paper hopes to shed new light on the threefold historical contemplation and (at times) juxtaposition of Europeans, Maori and nature.
Research Interests: Romanticism, Environmental History, History of Science, History of Anthropology, Colonialism, and 15 moreModernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Virginia Woolf, British Empire, British Imperial and Colonial History (1600 - ), History of New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield, Historical Epistemology, Nature/culture Dichotomization, History of Indigenous Peoples, Maori history, History of Botany, Local Knowledge, History of Ethnology, History of Objectivity, and Joseph Dalton Hooker
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The full abstract for this thesis is available in the body of the thesis, and will be available when the embargo expires.
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By all accounts, James Cook’s HMS Endeavour sojourn in Tahiti was a pivotal moment in Enlightenment engagements between Indigenous and European cultures. Among the voyage records that survive, the Endeavour draftsman Sydney Parkinson’s... more
By all accounts, James Cook’s HMS Endeavour sojourn in Tahiti was a pivotal moment in Enlightenment engagements between Indigenous and European cultures. Among the voyage records that survive, the Endeavour draftsman Sydney Parkinson’s Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (1773) is widely viewed as anomalous for the depth and breadth of its interests in Indigenous Tahitian culture and plant knowledge. This essay complicates that view, with emphasis on the contingencies peculiar to the Journal’s publication and to Parkinson’s own authorial biography. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, I analyze Parkinson’s account alongside the botanist Daniel Solander’s historiographically underutilized “Plantae Otaheitenses” manuscript. In so doing, I offer an alternative reading of the Journal as archetypal rather than exceptional in its attention to Indigenous cultures and knowledges. At stake, I suggest, is an enhanced appreciation for Indigenous–European bot...
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This essay examines how Indo-Pacific indigenous plant names went from being viewed as instruments of botanical fieldwork, to being seen primarily as currency in anthropological studies. I trace this attitude to Alexander von Humboldt, who... more
This essay examines how Indo-Pacific indigenous plant names went from being viewed as instruments of botanical fieldwork, to being seen primarily as currency in anthropological studies. I trace this attitude to Alexander von Humboldt, who differentiated between indigenous phytonyms with merely local relevance to be used as philological data, and universally applicable Latin plant names. This way of using indigenous plant names underwrote a chauvinistic reading of cultural difference, and was therefore especially attractive to commentators lacking acquaintance with any indigenous language or culture. When New Zealand anthropologists embraced this role for Māori phytonyms in the 1890s, however, they did so possessed of a relatively in-depth understanding of Māori culture and the Māori language. This discussion has three primary aims: to illuminate nineteenth-century scholarly engagements with Indo-Pacific plant classifications, in contrast to a prevailing historiographical emphasis on...