ABSTRACTS: 13 FEBRUARY WORKSHOP
“An Ocean in Mind: Pacific Islanders,
Navigational Knowledge,
and ‘Western’ Exploration”
Damon
Salesa, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Pacific Islanders were, for most of the last four thousand
years, the most expansive mariners in the world. Early Pacific Islanders found and settled
relatively small islands spread over roughly a quarter of the earth without
metals or written language, and have continued to voyage, on a smaller scale,
since. Using these traditions of
maritime knowledge as the centerpiece, this paper will examine the circuits of
knowledge and technologies that were active in the Pacific Islands, focusing on
‘Polynesia’ – particularly on the islands of Samoa – and their histories after
the arrival of colonialism, Christianity, steel and literacy.
Along with the manufacture of watercraft and fishing, foremost
in maritime knowledge was what might be called ‘navigation’. This was a knowledge that was learned,
transmitted, and practiced in ways that make it quite distinct from what is
understood by western ‘navigation’.
Incorporating all kinds of observational, theoretical, spiritual, and
analytical elements, the various navigation systems of Pacific Islanders were
understood to be powerful knowledge systems.
Their achievements certainly represent them to be as such.
Present in differing degrees and in different forms throughout
the Pacific region, it was for a long time considered by scholars unsurprising
that such navigational knowledge should disappear when ‘western’ alternatives
were made accessible and available.
Recent scholarship, which has developed our understanding of this
knowledge, suggests that asking why it fell into disuse in some places and not
in others is an interesting question. A
significant number of places in the Pacific still navigate using these kinds of
knowledge, and using no instruments, maps, or notions of
latitude/longitude. Why do not more
places still have this knowledge? Not
only was it ‘appropriate’ knowledge/technology, but in many ways it was
functionally equivalent, in some respects, even superior, to the western
knowledge that it encountered.
To help interrogate these questions contextually, this paper
will discuss different island examples, and also different knowledges. Though
the paper will concentrate on maritime knowledge, it will also discuss some
related contexts where other kinds of Pacific Island knowledge encountered
different and competing western knowledge, particularly Pacific Island healing.
“How
Derivative was Humboldt?
Microcosmic
Nature Narratives in Early Modern Mestizo Spanish America
and
the (Other) Origins of Humboldt’s Ecological Sensibilities”
Jorge
Canizares, SUNY-Buffalo
This
paper argues that important ideas attributed to Europeans were in fact
part
of larger Atlantic dialogues with settler mestizo (culturally mixed)
communities.
Without much sense of the intellectual milieu that greeted
Alexander
Humboldt upon arrival in Spanish America in the 1790s, for
example,
the history of science narrative that credits him (or his late
eighteenth-century
proto-Romantic German milieu) with having "invented" the
sciences
of bio-geography and ecological thought has gone unchallenged. But
Humboldt
arrived to a Spanish America humming with discourses of nature in
which
every mestizo patria was cast as a microcosm, a self-sufficient
economic
space wondrously endowed with an amazing variety of ecological
niches.
Clearly, Humboldt picked up new ways of reading nature after having
been
immersed for years in this culturally hybrid environment.
“Exotic Abortifacients:
The Gender Politics of Plants in the
Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World”
This paper explores the cultural history of a great plant, one of the forgotten glories that deeply affected many peoples' lives for untold centuries, until about two hundred years ago. This presentation forms a part of my larger project on "Gender in the Voyages of Scientific Discovery" exploring the movement, mixing, and extinction of botanic knowledge in early modern encounters between Europeans and the peoples of the Caribbean. I will discuss how gender relations in Europe and its West Indian colonies guided European naturalists as they selected particular plants and technologies for transport back to Europe. The plant whose history provides the leitmotif of my workshop contribution I will call the “peacock flower” or Poinciana pulcherrima, though it was known by many different names in the eighteenth century as today. I lavish attention on the peacock flower not because it is exquisitely beautiful, growing in stunningly inviting places, but because it was a highly political plant, deployed, as we shall see, in the struggle against slavery throughout the eighteenth century by slave women in the West Indies, who used it to abort offspring who otherwise would be born into bondage.