ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Portable Practices: Linnaean Instructions and Colonial Fieldwork

• In Event: Problematising Colonial Instructions: The Global Context of Scientific and Medical Information, 1650-1850

English Abstract

Mid-eighteenth-century Sweden was a pivotal setting for the development of natural history instructions. Central to this was Carl Linnaeus, whose field expeditions within Sweden and Sápmi (then referred to as “Lapland”) in the 1730s and 1740s laid the groundwork for a tradition of instructed travel. Linnaeus produced widely translated fieldwork guidelines that shaped the persona of the travelling naturalist and influenced European colonial expeditions throughout the eighteenth century I will examine how Linnaean instructions structured relationships between naturalists, colonial settlers, and Indigenous knowledge holders. These instructions reflected ambitions to incorporate Sápmi, a contested frontier, into an expanding Swedish state. Although part of Sweden, Sápmi was treated as terra incognita to be explored and exploited. I argue that travel there became an educational rite for naturalists and helped establish a replicable model of instructed natural history, later applied in extra-European colonial contexts by Linnaeus’s students and followers.

Author

• Linda Andersson Burnett, University of Uppsala