2015-09-01-Abend

Proposal for Project in Science Studies

I would like to examine two (or maybe three) different very important locations for the history of botany. Namely:

1. Kew Gardens near London
2. The Jardin du Roy and the Muéum d’Histoire Naturelle (both in Paris)
3. (that’s a maybe and I didn’t incorporate it in my proposal here) The “Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum” in Berlin

What I would like to find out is, if and how these botanical gardens and museums worked, how they differed in their approach as regards to the gift economy that is thought of as central to the botanical world of Linnaeus and after.[^1] I think it would be very interesting to look at the history of botany in the age of the moderns, because this offers us a fruitful venue for all sorts of questions pertaining to the enlightenment and the concept of nature, power and imperialism, globalization and western exceptionalism, science and materialism, sexuality in early modern europe and so much more. As regards to the actual writing of history, the history of botany enables historians of science to work transnationally, actor-network oriented, anthropologically and epistemologically (in the sense of historical epistemology).[^2] Basically the whole “settlement of the moderns” can be described from a botanical angle, which makes it a very useful tool to historiographicaly examine the socialogical and philosophical description that Bruno Latour proposed in the beginning of the 1990s and reformulated in a very useful way just recently with his "An Inquiry of Modes of Existence".[^3]

Since this topic is much to broad (it’s more of a field, really), I’ve tried to limit it to a very specific subtopic, which will not necessarily be that innovative, but hopefully interesting enough to warrant independent work.

I would like to compare and contrast the two institutions of modern botanical science on the basis of three books and maybe a handful of articles.[^4] Here are the three books:

1. Richard Harry Drayton, Nature’s government: science, imperial Britain, and the „Improvement“ of the World, New Haven (Yale University Press) 2000.
2. E. C. Spary, Utopia’s garden: French natural history from Old Regime to Revolution, Chicago (University of Chicago Press) 2000.
3. Londa L. Schiebinger, Claudia Swan (Hg.), Colonial botany: science, commerce, and politics in the early modern world, Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press) 2005.

If we would think of this project as a preliminary to my stated bigger topic, we could unterstand this proposed effort as an initial sampling of how botany and botanical gardens in imperial Britain and France would’ve looked in the past, how they worked, who was involved, and so on. This investigation could also double as a sampling of (more or less) recent english language historiography in the field.

Timeframe

The timeframe for the project would be this and the next quarter. I would divide my workload as follows:

• End of September 2015: Reading drayton2000
  • writing about five pages on the book: main topics, important findings, etc.
  • discussing the book with you
• End of October 2015: Reading spary2000
  • writing about five pages on the book: main topics, important findings, etc.
  • discussing the book with you
• End of November 2015: Reading schiebinger2005
  • writing about five pages on the book: main topics, important findings, etc.
  • discussing the book with you
• Mid of December (before Christmas): Finishing a preliminary sketch of the report (about 10 pages, will probably more look like an outline), also finishing any additional reading on the subject, that I deem important
  • discussing my findings with you
• End of December until end of January: Finishing the report (~30 Pages)
  • further discussions, if needed

[^1]: Staffan Müller-Wille, Nature as a Marketplace: The Political Economy of Linnaean Botany, in: History of Political Economy, 35/Suppl 1, 2003, 154–172.

[^2]: Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, On historicizing epistemology: an essay, Stanford, Calif (Stanford University Press) 2010 (Cultural memory in the present).

[^3]: Bruno Latour, We have never been modern, Cambridge, Mass (Harvard University Press) 1993. and Bruno Latour, An inquiry into modes of existence: an anthropology of the moderns, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Harvard University Press) 2013.

[^4]: I will reserve the right to use more books and articles.