Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines

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.Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines is written by Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez and published by Duke University Press Books. ISBNs for Unmaking Botany are 9781478060475, 1478060476 and the print ISBNs are 9781478031482, 1478031484. Additional ISBNs include 9781478028277.