A Lecture (via Zoom) by Dr. Kathleen Gutierrez | Thursday, April 28, 6:00pm EDT
Abstract:
Plant varieties can be tricky. To botanists, they’re different enough from their “species parent” to warrant notice and naming but similar enough so as not to be considered new species altogether. In the nineteenth-century Spanish colonial Philippines, botany personnel attempted to catalog all known rice varieties growing on the archipelago that, by the century’s close, amounted to 177. What colonial botany records reveal, however, is an epistemological jostling—one that attempted to fit dozens of rice varieties, locally differentiated along distinct sensory and agricultural parameters, under a single species designation, Oryza sativa.
In this talk, I will provide an overview of nineteenth-century Spanish botany operations in the Philippines and the wider intellectual and political currents that transformed how botany was conducted in the islands. These set the stage for more earnest investigations of plant varieties, which became a philosophical concern for European naturalists. An investigation of Philippine rice varieties opens a rich conversation on the multiplicity of local taxonomies that may have existed alongside Latin European systematics. I term the interaction between European botanical taxonomy and vernacular modes of distinguishing rice “asymptotic taxonomies” to refer to colonial botany’s far—but never complete—reach into varied ways of knowing plants. I argue that as the international machinery for codifying botany standards in the science were set in motion in the latter half of the nineteenth century, plant varieties continued to present constellations of knowledge that needed to be reconciled with the science’s theoretical limits.
About the Presenter:
Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches courses on modern Southeast Asia, the Philippines, colonial science, and plants. She completed her Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and her dissertation on the international consolidation of botany in the Philippines was shortlisted for Best Dissertation in the Humanities by the International Convention of Asia Scholars in 2021. She is completing her first book manuscript, tentatively titled Sovereign Vernaculars at the Dawn of New Imperial Botany, while in residence at the Humanities Institute at the New York Botanical Garden.
