ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Plural Plant and Fungal Worlds

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The three papers in this organized panel address the changing circumstances of plants, fungi, and the naturalists who studied them in three different centuries. Bringing together an eighteenth-century French botanist in Senegal, a nineteenth-century Japanese mycologist in Britain, and grafted plants – chimeras – in twenty-first-century botanical practice in the Netherlands, panelists look at changes wrought by travel, foreign correspondence, and shifting philosophical approaches to plant cultivation. This group of papers compares approaches to natural history and the authority of scientific knowledge on the edge, as class, education, and commercial concerns influence the kind of science that can be pursued in three different periods and settings.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• John Schaefer, University of Cambridge

Individual Presentations

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

• Big in Japan: Minakata Kumagusu and Britain - Nathan Smith, Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales

• Capitalist Chimeras: The Contemporary Commodification of Grafted Plants - Matthew Holmes

Session Organizer

• Tamara Caulkins, Central Washington University