"Probably new to science," and other links

Sun, 05 May 2019 15:29:15 GMT

"Probably new to science": Locating Indigenous Knowledge in Colonial Archives, by Keri G. Lambert at Environmental History Now. I love this blog -- they do a wonderful range of posts from scholars working in environmental history. This essay about archival work on 1880s Gold Coast rubber plantations and how knowledge becomes "scientific" is definitely going into my file for the "worldbuilding politics of rubber in Discworld" piece I'm not writing, HBBO ... :)

"... If you skimmed that, I urge you to read it again. It’s just a short letter talking about plants you’ve probably never seen and a language you may never have heard of. But seriously, take a look at what is going on here: a reasonably powerful colonial official is drawing on indigenous botanical knowledge (as reflected in Twi nomenclature) to report to the metropole’s epicenter of imperial science what he believes to be a novel scientific discovery.

In one fell swoop, Tudhope recognizes a sophisticated knowledge regime that classifies plants by genus and sex… yet he defines that knowledge as not quite “science,” which he insinuates is that which is advanced by non-Africans. In much the same way, Evans, in his letter (above), had described coagulation-via-“Diecha” as a “new process”—but to whom was it new? It’s highly likely that he learned it from experienced Gold Coast rubber workers.

In four letters, exchanged over ten months, we see the extraction, exchange, and embrace of indigenous knowledge, as well as the delimitation of a narrow “scientific” knowledge."

Hermeneutical Injustice in Consent and Asexuality, by starchythoughts. Developed by philosopher Miranda Fricker in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, hermeneutic injustice is “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource.” This post is specifically about ace issues but this concept seems rich and powerful to me -- it makes it possible for me to recognize the extent to which, as a writer, I'm invested in the internal and external formations and effects of this kind of injustice. Fricker, via starchy: “The primary harm of hermeneutical injustice, then, is to be understood not only in terms of the subject’s being unfairly disadvantaged by some collective hermeneutical lacuna, but also in terms of the very construction (constitutive and/or causal) of selfhood. In certain social contexts, hermeneutical injustice can mean that someone is socially constituted as, and perhaps even caused to be, something they are not, and which it is against their interests to be seen to be.”

The Disability Gulag, Harriet McBryde Johnson. I wish Johnson were still alive; I wish I had found her work soon enough to put it on my syllabus. This piece is specifically about the harms and threats of institutionalization. Despite the pain of the subject matter, I find her to be an absolute pleasure to read.

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Digs

"Probably new to science," and other links