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‘Giving Plants a Civil Status’: Scientific Representations of Nature and Nation in Costa Rica and Venezuela, 1885-1935

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Stuart McCook
Stuart McCook*
Affiliation:
The College of New Jersey, Ewing, New Jersey
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Extract

In a 1924 essay, the botanist Henri Pittier worried that many of Latin America's tropical products—particularly its plants—lacked a ‘civil status.’ By this, Pittier meant that they had not yet been identified and named scientifically. He likened the plants’ lack of a botanical ‘civil status’ to a person's lacking a passport or credentials that proved their citizenship. This was more than a casual analogy. Over the previous half-century, many states in Latin America had begun to take inventories of their plants, just as they had begun taking censuses of their citizens, and surveying and mapping their national territories. These botanical inventories helped states establish control over the natural world, just as censuses helped the state establish control over civil society. Between 1885 and 1935, governments throughout Latin America began to fund botanical research institutions and to finance the publication of national floras. Pittier had been actively involved in this process: he had helped establish national natural history museums in Costa Rica and Venezuela, and wrote or edited three national flora: the Primitiae Florae Costaricensis (1891-1901), the Ensayo sobre las plantas usuales de Costa Rica (1908), and the Manual de las plantas usuales de Venezuela (1926). National floras such as these were not simply ‘entertainment for intellectuals’ but also part of broader programs by Latin American governments to incorporate the natural world into the national political and economic order.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , April 2002 , pp. 513 - 536
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2002

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References

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3 Many of these foreign representations of Latin America are described in Salvatore, Ricardo “The Enterprise of Knowledge: Representational Machines of Informal Empire,” in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S. Latin American Relations,Google Scholar edited by Joseph, Gilbert M., LeGrand, Catherine C., and Salvatore, Ricardo D. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 69–104.Google Scholar

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16 For a more detailed account, see Gómez P. and Savage, “Searchers on that Rich Coast” and McCook, “Creole Science in Costa Rica.”

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18 Historians of Venezuela have had a long fascination with the Gómez regime. See Pacheco, Emilio, De Castro a López Contreras: proceso social de la Venezuela contemporanea (contribución a su estudio en los años 1900–1941) (Caracas: Editorial Domingo Fuentes y Asociados, S.R.L., 1984)Google Scholar; Caballero, Manuel, Gómez, el tirano liberal (Caracas: Monte Avila Editories, 1993).Google Scholar For a general discussion of science during the Gómez dictatorship, see Freites, Yajaira, “La ciencia en la época del gomecismo,” Quipu 4 (mayo-agósto de 1987), pp. 213–251.Google Scholar This essay has been extensively revised and updated in her essay “Auge y caida de la ciencia nacional: la época del gomecismo (1908–1935)” in vol. 1 of Perfil de la ciencia en Venezuela, ed. Roche, Marcel (Caracas: Fundación Polar, 1996).Google Scholar

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20 Pittier to Maxon, 17 November 1920; Pittier to Maxon, 17January 1921, Record Unit 223, United States National Museum, Division of Plants, 1899–1947, Records, Box 8 (hereafter cited as Division of Plants Records), Smithsonian Institution Archives (hereafter SIA).

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22 Like Pittier, many scientists in Latin America feared that their labors might be lost. See, for example, Susan Sheets-Pyenson's descriptions of the Argentinian natural history museums in Aires, Buenos and Plata, La in Cathedrals of Science: The Development of Colonial Natural History Museums during the Late Nineteenth Century (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

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30 Pittier to Maxon, 28 May 1921; Maxon to Pittier, 17 June 1921, Division of Plants Records, SIA; Pittier to Rose, 18 December 1925, PP-JBC.

31 Pittier to Gil Borges, 19 June 1925, PP-JBC.

32 Many of these articles have been reprinted in Texera, Yolanda, ed., La modernización difícil: Henri Pittier en Venezuela, 1920–1950 (Caracas: Fundación Polar, 1998).Google Scholar

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34 Pittier to Gil Borges, 19 June 1925, PP-JBC.

35 Alamo to Pittier, 10 September 1925; Alamo to Pittier, 28 September 1925, PP-JBC.

36 Pittier, , Manual de plantas usuales de Venezuela p. 13.Google Scholar

37 Alvarado, Lisandro, prologue to the Manual de plantas usuales de Venezuela, pp. 10–11.Google Scholar

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39 Irene Rodríguez Gallad, “Perfil de la economia venezolana durante el regimen gomecista” and Rodríguez, Luis Cipriano, “Gómez y el agro,” in Juan Vicente Gómez y su época Google Scholar, edited by Pino Iturrieta, Elías (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1993), pp. 81–107 Google Scholar and 109–138.

40 On the connections between the agricultural export economy and the fate of scientific institutions in Costa Rica, see Eakin, “The Origins of Modern Science in Costa Rica.” On the decline of the sciences in Venezuela during the 1920 Google Scholars, see Freites, , “Auge y caida de la ciencia nacional,” pp. 178–181.Google Scholar

41 Pittier, , Plantas usuales de Costa Rica, p. 1.Google Scholar

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