Botany's (Un)making: Vernaculars of Plant Knowing in the Early 20th-Century

Friday Lecture Series | Botany's (Un)making: Vernaculars of Plant Knowing in the Early 20th-Century Davao Gulf
Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez, University of California, Santa Cruz , Assistant Professor of History

Attend in person or via Zoom: http://myumi.ch/xwZ2d.

This talk addresses the first decades of U.S. colonization of the Philippines and institutions of botanical research aimed to scale up plantation-style production. It, however, extends beyond colonial conceits by offering a contrapuntal story by following a U.S. anthropologist conducting fieldwork among a Bagobo community in the Davao Gulf of Mindananao and the knowledge of weavers this anthropologist obtained. Combined, the narratives present vernaculars of plant knowing within and outside of botany's disciplinary bounds and their transformations found within colonial agricultural expansion. This talk draws from the recently published Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines (Duke, 2025) by Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez (History, University of California, Santa Cruz).

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