A Philippine Asphyxia

Gutierrez, Kathleen Cruz

doi:10.1215/10418385-8955878

Cited by 1 publication

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“…The botanist who discovered the lily named it after First Lady Imelda Marcos. The choice to do so was politically cunning: as a government scientist, he was well aware that ingratiating himself with the Marcoses could help him secure research support even though such an act did not prevent him from future redbaiting or surveillance (Gutierrez, 2021). Political detractors of the Marcoses later used the Tricyrtis imeldae against the First Lady herself: the people among whom the lily was found used the plant's flowers to gummy up their hands with sticky sap in order to catch frogs for consumption.…”

Section: The History Of Botany: What Could Bementioning

confidence: 99%

From objects of study to worldmaking beings: The history of botany at the corner of the plant turn

Gutierrez

2023

History Compass

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The “plant turn” of recent years has surfaced as an interdisciplinary position that sees plants as more than inert, passive objects subject to the whims of humans and of more charismatic animal life. Recent research in STEM, the social sciences, and the humanities, alongside scholarly publishing pursuits, have opened a field in which a small yet expanding community of scholars are proposing the worldmaking and agential capacities of plants. While the field of environmental history has already spent decades centering vegetal life and its profound impact on human societies, this essay considers what the plant turn might look like for the history of science and more specifically, the history of botany. What might it mean for plants to transform from objects of study to worldmaking beings in histories of the science? Drawing on two brief historical case studies from the Philippines, the essay invites consideration of plant worldmaking, understood in tandem with alternative ontologies, and of theorizing with plants. Though it may be much too soon to draw conclusions about what the plant turn may portend for the history of science (and the writing that may come from it), historians may have something to offer the plant turn—in discipline and method—in order to make this promising bed of scholarship rigorous and accessible.

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Section: The History Of Botany: What Could Bementioning

confidence: 99%