[Sehefac] NEW BOOK: 'Unmaking Botany' by Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez

[Aaron Gregory]

Greetings all!

For those interested in Science & Technology Studies (STS), histories of
science, political ecology, botany, and postcolonial studies, we are
excited to announce the publication of *Unmaking Botany* by Kathleen Cruz
Gutierrez (UC Santa Cruz). Dr. Gutierrez explores the making and unmaking
of botanical and taxonomic practices in the Philippines to theorize
'sovereign vernaculars' in this carefully crafted and beautifully written
book. Please see the attached flyer for a discount on the text through Duke.

*Abstract*:
In Anglo-European botany, it is customary to think of the vernacular as
that which is not a Latin or Latinized scientific plant name. In *Unmaking
Botany*, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez traces a history of botany in the
Philippines during the last decades of Spanish rule and the first decades
of US colonization. Through this history, she redefines the vernacular,
expanding it to include embodied, cosmological, artistic, and varied
taxonomic practices. From the culinary textures of rice and the lyrics
crooned to honor a flower to the touch of a skirt woven from banana fiber,
she illuminates how vernaculars of plant knowing in the Philippines exposed
the philosophical and practical limits of botany. Such vernaculars remained
as sovereign forms of knowledge production. Yet, at the same time, they
fueled botany’s dominance over other ways of knowing plants. Revealing this
tension allows Gutierrez to theorize “sovereign vernaculars,” or insight
into plants that made and *un*made the science, which serves as a
methodological provocation to examine the interplay of different knowledge
systems and to study the history of science from multiple vantage points.

/Aaron

Aaron Gregory PhD
Science & Technology Studies (STS)
Department of Society, Environment, and Health Equity (SEHE)
University of California, Riverside
Editor, Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) <https://4sonline.org/>
Backchannels <https://4sonline.org/backchannels_editorial_team.php>
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