10:00 – 11:30
Meeting-ID: 957 5849 5352
Kenncode: 316834
Wir freuen uns auf unseren abschließenden Keynote Vortrag von Linda Andersson Burnett verweisen zu können, den wir zur unserer Freude am 18.06. über Zoom nachholen können!
Es ist die finale Keynote der diesjährigen GRACEH-Konferenz die von 7-9.April an der Uni Wien stattgefunden hat.
Über Ihre Teilnahme und Beteiligung an der Diskussion freuen wir uns sehr!
Liebe Grüße
Florence Klauda (Institut für Zeitgeschichte), Lisa Hoppel, Nora Lehner, Nedzad Kuc und Gernot Hausar
Veranstalter:innen der diesjährigen GRACEH-Konferenz
Abstract
In the summer of 1732, the Swedish botanist and physician Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) travelled in Swedish and Norwegian Sápmi (then refered to as 'Lapland'). Linnaeus's book about his expedition, Flora lapponica (1737), was one of the world's first scientific flora but also contained primitivist celebrations of the Indigenous Sami people ('Laplanders') as innocent, simple and enjoying a natural existence in a landscape pregnant with possible natural resources. His expedition provided a model of domestic exploration in which naturalists produced inventories of regions and their inhabitants previously relatively unmapped by the state. Linnaeus's writing fascinated in particular British naturalists who carried out inventories of the Scottish Highlands in the second half of the eighteenth century. Taking Linnaeus's expedition as my case study I will in my lecture discuss transnational approaches to the study of local nature during the Enlightenment. I will also demonstrate how prominent natural-history books such as Flora lapponica (Fl) were the results of communicative processes, which included a range of knowledge actors (in the case of Fl ranging from Indigenous Sami people to Dutch patrons and British translation agents). I will trace the planning of the book's publication through its transit across national borders to audience reception in Holland and Britain. Following James Secord's suggestion that we 'give interaction between agents a central role in epistemology' ('Knowledge in Transit'), I want to illustrate how scientific knowledge is always mobile, transiting in speech or sign between agents who actively impart and imprint it in often unexpected ways. Rejecting the assumption that knowledge circulation is frictionless, this approach takes into account the uncertainties of encounters and the asymmetries of agency.
Linda Andersson Burnett is a Wallenberg Academy Fellow at the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University in Sweden. She researches the movement of ideas, people and material objects across different strata of society and across national boundaries. Her particular focus is on the flow and entanglement of scientific ideas, objects and practices between Sweden and Britain in national and colonial settings.
Linda holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, which was followed by the Simon Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities also at Edinburgh. In her previous position, at the Linnaeus University, she convened an interdisciplinary research group on Nordic Colonialism. She is currently co-editing a special issue on movement and colonialism for Intellectual Global History and has also edited a recent issue on colonial discussions of 'savagery' for The History of the Human Sciences and a special issue on Nordic Colonialism for Scandinavian Studies. She is the author of a number of articles and chapters on Enlightenment natural history, scientific networks and ethnographic collections and exhibitions. linda.andersson-burnett@idehist.uu.se
