Empire, indigenous knowledge and the practice of recording and classifying the plants of New Zealand, 1769–1838

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• Edwin Rose (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
• Monday 26 February 2024, 13:00-14:00
• Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

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Understanding the natural history of the islands of the Pacific became a central feature of European voyages of exploration from the 1760s. Concentrating on successive botanical explorations of Aotearoa New Zealand from the activities of Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander and their team of field assistants in 1769 through to Allan Cunningham, the King’s Botanist of New South Wales, who visited Aotearoa New Zealand in 1826 and 1838, this talk explores the practices of integrating Māori knowledge when cataloguing and classifying species. This includes details of the physical characters of plants, their use in contemporary society and information on broader groupings of species that are systematically integrated into a diverse collection of manuscripts ranging from field notebooks to paper slips, interleaved books, polished manuscripts and publications. As such, this talk analyses the practices through which Māori knowledge on the plants of Aotearoa New Zealand was integrated into the advanced assemblages of paper technologies developed to keep these records in the field. It also shows how other information relating to the geographical distribution of species, the use of particular plants by the Māori and their approaches to classifying species became integrated with European classification systems, contributing to the breakdown of the Linnaean system and the emergence of so-called ‘natural systems’ of classification by the early nineteenth century.

This talk is part of the Cabinet of Natural History series.

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