A01=Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez
Author_Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez
botanical illustrations
botanical nomenclature
botany
Category=JP
Category=NHF
Category=NHTQ
Category=PDX
Category=PST
colonial botany
colonial science
Elmer D. Merrill
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
eq_society-politics
floristic region
International Botanical Congress
Jardin Botanico de Manila
Jasminum sambac
Mary Strong Clemens
Mindanao
Philippines
plant collectors
plants
Regino Garcia
Sebastian Vidal
sovereign vernaculars
Spanish Colonialism
US Colonialism
ways of knowing
Product details
- ISBN 9781478031482
- Weight: 386g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Apr 2025
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Anglo-European botany, it is customary to think of the vernacular as that which is not a Latin or Latinized scientific plant name. In Unmaking Botany, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez traces a history of botany in the Philippines during the last decades of Spanish rule and the first decades of US colonization. Through this history, she redefines the vernacular, expanding it to include embodied, cosmological, artistic, and varied taxonomic practices. From the culinary textures of rice and the lyrics crooned to honor a flower to the touch of a skirt woven from banana fiber, she illuminates how vernaculars of plant knowing in the Philippines exposed the philosophical and practical limits of botany. Such vernaculars remained as sovereign forms of knowledge production. Yet, at the same time, they fueled botany’s dominance over other ways of knowing plants. Revealing this tension allows Gutierrez to theorize “sovereign vernaculars,” or insight into plants that made and unmade the science, which serves as a methodological provocation to examine the interplay of different knowledge systems and to study the history of science from multiple vantage points.
Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
