ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Rooted in Soil, Fixed on Paper: Hybrid Knowledge Exchanges in The Greenland Herbarium

• In Event: Natural Extraction: Shifting Epistemic Hierarchies Within the Danish Atlantic Empire, 1770–1940

English Abstract

From 1920 to 1937, Inuk Johan Eugenius and his family collected and pressed Arctic plants, wrote field notes in Kalaallisut (Greenlandic) and sent the collections northward to the Danish Arctic Station on Disko Island in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). Here, the Danish botanist, Morten P. Porsild, the initiator and leader of the station, received the collections and mounted the specimens, thereby situating them as a part of his herbarium and botanical research. In this paper, I approach The Greenland Herbarium, now located just outside of Copenhagen, together with its digitised counterpart, in order to render the exchanges between Eugenius and Porsild visible. I engage the herbaria sheets as layered archives – temporal and relational in character – where epistemic, political and material processes intersect. Through this lens, the case can be understood as a hybrid site of co-production in which botanical practices and knowledge were constituted through asymmetrical yet mutually shaping material entanglements forged between Denmark and Kalaallit Nunaat. As I shift the perspective towards the natural archives’ ‘paper technologies’, I am able to identify Eugenius’ plant gathering activities and link these to related sources generated by colonial administrators and scientists, such as accounting books and scientific reports. Through my analysis, I demonstrate how Porsild used Eugenius’ local collections and knowledge in ongoing scientific questions of plant taxonomy. In this way, the herbaria sheets signify the layered and shifting authority in which both actors become present and are represented. Engaging with current historiographical reflections in the history of science on the role of the intermediary or go-between actor, this collection-based research allows for reflections on the actors’ own interests, ambitions, and terms of participation, thus substantiating a recontextualisation of their position in the production of knowledge.

Author

• Olivia Trude Struve, Aarhus University