Kategori: Writings

New(ish) book: Linnaeus, natural history and the circulation of knowledge

Linnaeus, natural history and the circulation of knowledgeAlthough six months late, here is a brief post to introduce a new(ish) book I am both excited and proud to be a part of: Hanna Hodacs, Kenneth Nyberg and Stéphane Van Damme (eds.), Linnaeus, natural history and the circulation of knowledge, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment 2018:1 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2018). Published last January, this volume – with contributions by ten scholars from almost as many countries – examines the circulation of knowledge about nature in the long eighteenth century. As the back cover puts it, in the book we ”argue for the need to re-centre Linnaean science and de-centre Linnaeus the man by exploring the ideas, practices and people connected to his taxonomic innovations”. (See below for the table of contents.) Apparently this is just what many people had been waiting for, because a few days ago I and my co-editors received word that the volume has already sold out of its (admittedly modest) first print run with a second printing now underway.

More information about Linnaeus, natural history and the circulation of knowledge is available on its page at the Voltaire Foundation’s website and in the blog post written by the volume editors at the time of the book’s release. Shortly after, both Dalarna University and the University of Gothenburg interviewed Hanna Hodacs and me, respectively, for online articles in Swedish on the aims and arguments of the volume. Finally, as a matter of historical record (as it were), I have also published blog posts here about the workshops in Stockholm in 2012 and Florence in 2014 where early versions of the contributions to the volume were presented and discussed. More than five years from first drafts to finished book is a very long time, but in this case it was definitely worth the wait.

Update 14 August 2018: If you want to order the book, the purchase link on the Voltaire Foundation page mentioned above does not work. Instead, go to this page at Liverpool University Press.

Contents

LNHCK contents

Text: You and I, we and they

Over the weekend I attended a conference in Lund called ”Encountering the ’Other’ – Understanding Oneself: Colonialism, Ethnic Diversity and Everyday Life in Early Modern Sweden and New Sweden”. It opened in the afternoon of 8 November, when an accompanying exhibition was also inaugurated at the Lund University Library, and continued for the next two days.

The conference and exhibition were organized on the occasion of the 375th anniversary of the shortlived Swedish colony of New Sweden in present-day New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania, with the aim to situate this enterprise in a global context of cultural encounters, colonialism and everyday material practices. The two days of individual sessions, some of them co-organized with a parallel conference at the University of Delaware, covered a very broad and diverse range of aspects related to these general themes. It was an intense schedule, full of interesting presentations and discussions, and when we finally reached the end of the event (and of the weekend) I think many were in the state one should be in after a good conference: exhausted but reinvigorated with new ideas and questions.

I had the privilege of delivering the opening address for the conference and exhibition. What follows after the link below is the full text of the keynote, which is also available here as a PDF (11 pp./96 Kb).

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A curious and useful life

What follows is an abstract of the research project I am currently working on. It is scheduled to run until early 2015 and is funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond). The preliminary title of the project is A Curious and Useful Life: Pehr Löfling and the Globalization of Knowledge, 1729–1756. If you read Swedish, there is more information on the project blog. And if you are working on anything even remotely related I would be happy to hear from you – please contact me!

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Pehr Löfling (1729–1756) was one of the most prominent students of naturalist Carl Linnaeus. During a brief life spent in Sweden, Spain and South America, he became deeply involved in the globalization of knowledge that Linnaean natural history represented from the middle of the eighteenth century. He was directly engaged in the formulation of some of his teacher’s new principles and methods; he contributed to spreading them in the European Republic of Letters; and he was given a rare chance of applying the Linnaean ideas in a colonial context, where they both challenged and were challenged by indigenous epistemologies.

The goal of my research is to understand how different stages and aspects of the globalization of knowledge impacted on and were affected by individual lives such as Löfling’s. Based on an approach that David Livingstone has called “life geography”, I will primarily analyse three encounters and the spaces (literally situations) in which they occurred: between Löfling as a young man and the Linnaean circle in Uppsala; between him as a Linnaean “apostle” and Spanish botanists in Madrid; and between him as a European colonial naturalist and the Amerindians of the Orinoco region in present-day Venezuela.

Some of the questions I hope to address are: What do these exchanges and their outcomes tell us about the theory and practice of Linnaean natural history? How did space, location, place affect the allegedly universal science that Löfling represented? Finally, what role did the motives of curiosity and utility play in his scientific work as it evolved over the years?