3 - Making Enlightenment Local

Summary

Chapter 3 explores the promises and contradictions inherent in the information drawn from these local and global knowledge networks. There were tensions that were never quite resolved between the production of locally relevant knowledge that rejected theoretical approaches and a global intellectual movement that praised universal knowledge. The Economic Society responded to this by carefully negotiating the sources of knowledge which it received from its networks, especially on the topics of natural history and medical botany, and building up its own epistemologies and definitions of practical Enlightenment that made the local applicability of any information the ultimate test of its value. Frameworks of knowledge with universal aspirations, such as Linnaean taxonomy, were not welcome when local descriptions would be more translateable within Central America. I argue that these stubbornly local conceptualisations of knowledge became problematic when a comparison with other places was required, for instance in the context of attempting to export plants from Guatemala to other places, and in debating the merits of plantain trees with scholars in other parts of the empire.