Joining Lapland and the Topinambes in Flourishing Holland: Center and Periphery in Linnaean Botany

Abstract

Argument During the early modern period, European naturalists were confronted with a rapidly growing body of new objects due to the recent geographic discoveries. According to Bruno Latour's model of “action at a distance” naturalists managed this situation by mobilizing and stabilizing specimens and inscriptions at the periphery of the known world, as well as accumulating, reshuffling, and processing that material in “centers of calculation.” This paper tries to resolve an ambiguity that lies in this model: While the work of naturalists was clearly dependent on local institutions, collections, and botanical gardens in particular, they nevertheless claimed universality for the interpretations of the natural world they propounded. Analysis will be based on a case study: In the 1730s Carl Linnaeus produced a series of manuscripts and printed books that allow us to reconstruct the sequence of translations which led from the first encounter with a “new” plant at the periphery of the known world (in the case of Linnaeus, Lapland, which he visited in 1732) to a major botanical center (the botanical garden of George Clifford, former director of the Dutch East India Company, who employed Linnaeus in 1736 and 1737 to catalog his collection). I will argue generally that the abstraction process that was constitutive of Linnaeus' universal plant taxonomy – the separation of “constant” species and genera from local “varieties”- did not take place exclusively in the centers of knowledge production. This abstraction process was rather coextensive with the global network of translation and exchange that connected such centers with each other and with their peripheries. The “map” of the plant world outlined by Linnaeus did not represent “things drawn together,” but rather “things being exchanged,” and the global circulation of specimens and inscriptions was the foundation on which its claim to universality rested.

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