ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Garden Waste: How Modernity Discarded Gardeners’ Knowledge in 18th Century Treatises on Agriculture

• In Event: Practitioners, Artisans and Instruments in the Making of Premodern Science, I

English Abstract

This paper seeks to reassess the authority of Modernity which has generated material and intellectual waste by antagonizing the past with the present, and by discarding other discourses, in order to strengthen its hold on knowledge and practices, in effect carrying out what Bruno Latour has called the work of “purification critique”. Our aim is to show that the discourse of modernity permeated gardening treatises in which dismissals of local forms of resistance, usually staged as conflicts between knowledge and ignorance, abound. Peasants or practitioners’ knowledge was invariably depicted as poor, erroneous, and irrational, and allowed by contrast the rise of the figure of the expert, whose scientific knowledge is supported by institutions, legitimized by authorities, and backed up by experiments. On very few occasions did authors include the views of the invisibles and alluded to muted dissensions. Drawing on subaltern studies, environmental humanities, and epistemology, this study will focus on Le Lorrain de Vallemont Curiositez de la nature et de l'art sur la végétation (1705) ; Dezallier d’Argenville’s La Théorie et la pratique du jardinage (1709), and Pluche’s Spectacle of Nature, or Nature Display’d.

Author

• Sarah Benharrech, University of Maryland