ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“He sat like a Senegalese”: Acclimatizing Michel Adanson (1727-1806), a French Botanist in West Africa 1749-1753

• In Event: Plural Plant and Fungal Worlds

English Abstract

The French naturalist Michel Adanson (1727-1806) traveled to Senegal with the Compagnie des Indes in 1749. While there, he traveled extensively among native Wolof peoples, learned their language, and studied their cultural beliefs and habits. He also adopted their way of sitting cross-legged, a posture he continued to practice after his 1753 return to Paris. This bodily manifestation of Adanson’s experience in Africa hints at some of what was unique in his approach to natural history and taxonomy. Adanson came to apply African names to African plants in service of his staunch belief in priority as a scientific value. His use of phonetic French in his two volume Familles des Plants (1763) did not endear him to Parisian elites. His “natural” system of taxonomy was inclusive of numerous characteristics of plants and animals (including humans) unlike the simple binomial system of Carl Linnaeus which organized plants on the basis of reproductive organs and gave a confused account of foreign peoples. I suggest that Adanson’s identification with the Senegalese had an effect on how his ideas were received in France. It was one thing to discuss the effects of climate, understood at the time in the context of humoral theory; it was another to immerse oneself in a foreign culture as Adanson had done. The reforms of the French revolution drew on nature to justify political and moral change, but did not defer to outsiders like Adanson who had become acclimatized to foreign ways.

Author

• Tamara Caulkins, Central Washington University