ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Empirical Aims, Empire Gains: Knowledge regimes in the Madagascar herbarium collection at Marseille’s Colonial Institute

• In Event: Roots and Remedies: Global Histories of the Pharmaceuticalization of Herbal Knowledge I

English Abstract

The Colonial Institute of Marseille, founded by Dr. Édouard Heckel in 1893, was created as a scientific institution intended to classify and order information from France’s expanding colonial territories. Founded on the eve of the colonization of Madagascar where French troops faced formidable tropical diseases, the Institute turned its attention towards the medical potential of Madagascar’s flora. The Institute’s botanical knowledge production on Madagascar, which asserted Marseille’s scientific, medical, and industrial relevance within the French empire, was dependent on contributions from anonymous Malagasy informants. Despite the colonial order’s reliance on local knowledge production, Malagasy sources are systematically discredited or omitted in the archival record. As such, this paper offers a close reading of the Institute's herbarium and the corresponding periodical, Annales du musée colonial de Marseille, to demonstrate how the Institute acted as a filter imposing epistemic regimes, delineating what counted as scientific knowledge and what did not, thereby reinforcing hierarchies between colonists and the colonized. Beyond reading natural history archives for presences and absences, this case study focuses explicitly on the mechanisms by which Malagasy knowledge was simultaneously relied upon and discredited. In conclusion, this paper’ case study suggests natural history collections might be used to detail the mechanics through which epistemic contributions of the Malagasy were simultaneously absorbed, absented and devalued in French natural history and tropical medicine.

Author

• Chanelle Adams, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte