In Anglo-European botany, it is customary to think of the vernacular as that which is not a Latin or Latinized scientific plant name. In Unmaking Botany, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez traces a history of botany in the Philippines during the last decades of Spanish rule and the first decades of US colonization. Through this history, she redefines the vernacular, expanding it to include embodied, cosmological, artistic, and varied taxonomic practices. From the culinary textures of rice and the lyrics crooned to honor a flower to the touch of a skirt woven from banana fiber, she illuminates how vernaculars of plant knowing in the Philippines exposed the philosophical and practical limits of botany. Such vernaculars remained as sovereign forms of knowledge production. Yet, at the same time, they fueled botany’s dominance over other ways of knowing plants. Revealing this tension allows Gutierrez to theorize “sovereign vernaculars,” or insight into plants that made and unmade the science, which serves as a methodological provocation to examine the interplay of different knowledge systems and to study the history of science from multiple vantage points.

Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

A Note of Orthography, Terms, and Formatting  ix
Introduction. Sovereign Vernaculars  1
Part I. A Botany at Its Most Defined
1. An Asymptotic Taxonomy  29
2. Scientific Statecraft  55
Part II. Science in a Place of Flux
3. Ubiquitous Sampaguita  85
4. Woven Transformations  107
Part III.  Assembling a Wider Expanse
5. Field Labor’s Menace  135
6. The Latin Babble  159
Conclusion. Of Place, Moment, and Source  183
Acknowledgments  199
Notes  205
Bibliography  235
Index