17 - A World of Distinctions: Pehr Löfling and the Meaning of Difference

Summary

Pehr Löfling (1729–56) was a Swedish botanist who studied with Carl Linnaeus in Uppsala and worked in Spain and South America. In the course of his short life he had to navigate a remarkable sequence of new social, cultural and intellectual contexts that confronted him with the challenges of diversity. Meanwhile, as a Linnaean naturalist, making distinctions and producing difference became his preeminent task. Using the example of Pehr Löfling, this chapter explores the many ways in which Linnaeans encountered and defined racial, ethnic/national, biological, social, linguistic, religious and intellectual dimensions of otherness.

In January 1729, the wife of a bookkeeper at the Tolvfors ironworks in northern Sweden gave birth to a son. Barbro Strandman came from a family of clergymen, so it is not surprising that she and her husband Erik Löfling planned for their boy, Pehr, to train for the priesthood when he came of age. The chances were that if he had done so, he would have been able to live out his life in relative comfort as a minister of some rural Swedish parish. But this was not to be. Instead, Pehr Löfling became a botanist in the service of the king of Spain, travelled to the province of New Andalusia in what is today Venezuela, and died at 27 years of age from a tropical fever. At that time he was the leading naturalist in a major expedition tasked with settling a long-standing border dispute between Spanish and Portuguese colonies.

Löfling was one of the so-called “apostles” of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, a group of 17 or 18 young men who travelled beyond Europe between 1746 and 1799 in order to collect and describe plants, animals and other specimens of natural history. These travels engendered many encounters with “the other” in different contexts around the world, and like few other Swedes at the time the students of Linnaeus were confronted with their own notions of identity and belonging in a multitude of ways. As a group, they were also responsible for a significant share of original Swedish printed travel accounts of non-European regions in the latter half of the 18th century.