ABSTRACTS: 13 FEBRUARY WORKSHOP

“An Ocean in Mind: Pacific Islanders, Navigational Knowledge,

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”

Londa Schiebinger, Stanford University

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.

"Science and African Cultures"

Barry Hallen, Morehouse College and W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University and
Kwasu Wiredu, University of South Florida, Tampa

It's an interesting question why science did not flourish in African culture until the encounter with colonialism. It is not because of any incompatibility between the culture and the scientific enterprise, as can be seen by an examination of Akan and Yoruba conceptual frameworks. The requirement for scientific thinking seems to be present in both cultures.