In:
History of Science, SAGE Publications, Vol. 60, No. 2 ( 2022-06), p. 183-210
Abstract:
By all accounts, James Cook’s HMS Endeavour sojourn in Tahiti was a pivotal moment in Enlightenment engagements between Indigenous and European cultures. Among the voyage records that survive, the Endeavour draftsman Sydney Parkinson’s Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (1773) is widely viewed as anomalous for the depth and breadth of its interests in Indigenous Tahitian culture and plant knowledge. This essay complicates that view, with emphasis on the contingencies peculiar to the Journal’s publication and to Parkinson’s own authorial biography. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, I analyze Parkinson’s account alongside the botanist Daniel Solander’s historiographically underutilized “Plantae Otaheitenses” manuscript. In so doing, I offer an alternative reading of the Journal as archetypal rather than exceptional in its attention to Indigenous cultures and knowledges. At stake, I suggest, is an enhanced appreciation for Indigenous–European botanical engagements and for Enlightenment print culture more broadly, as well as for the nebulously adisciplinary and collaborative nature of Enlightenment natural history field practices.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
0073-2753
,
1753-8564
DOI:
10.1177/0073275320971109
Language:
English
Publisher:
SAGE Publications
Publication Date:
2022
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2067298-6
SSG:
24
SSG:
19,2
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