| significant that elements of discrete knowledge do not usually disclose how they were arrived at. In other words, their `epistemic origins’ are hidden. Sometimes they are of European folk origin, but from the sixteenth century onwards they incorporated medicines of Asian and American origin. It was this anonymousness which helped to define an emergent scientific practice in opposition to folk knowledge. Even after scientific discourse and practice had become distinct, methodologically self-conscious and discriminating, it continued to draw on practical folk experience. Darwin, for example, depended extensively on the knowledge of pigeon fanciers in working out the details of natural selection [Secord 1981, 1985; Desmond and Moore 1991: 425-30]. Indeed, more generally we can see that modern natural history arose through a combination of such indigenous scholarship and field studies [Zimmermann 1995: 312], and field studies themselves often in turn drew heavily on the knowledge of local experts. Some have argued that the phylogenetic taxonomies of contemporary post- Linnaean biology are based on a European folk template [Knight 1981, Ellen 1978, Atran 1990] and, arguing a rather different tack, others have gone further by claiming that the European folk scheme and that of modern biology are no more than variants on a single cognitive arrangement to which all humans are predisposed through natural selection [Atran 1990, Boster 1996]. What we now recognise as scientific knowledge of the natural world was, therefore, constituted during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a way which absorbed such preexisting local folk knowledge as was absorbable and, ultimately, confined what was not to oblivion; being at best of some antiquarian interest, at worst denied any existence as a meaningful and credible set of practices, precisely because of the inability of the new paradigm to absorb it. Part of this residue reemerged as recognised folk knowledge in the late twentieth 9 |
| century and has been subjected to the kind of cultural revival we have already referred to. The rest, unlabelled and unloved, continues as that vast body of tacit knowledge which is necessary to operationalise book and theoretical knowledge, and which continues to inform the practical engagement of ordinary skilled people: the informal un-codified knowledge of house workers, of Durrenberger and Palsson’s [1986] Icelandic fishing skippers, or of any number of skilled professionals who take their cue from real life situations unmediated by books. Unfortunately, nowadays the economic pressures of publishing and the demand for useful information are leading us to the further codification of the hitherto uncodified, of the `1001 handy household hints’ and `tips from the greenhouse’ variety, thus giving the appearance of removing even more from the realm of IK. Impact of Asian folk knowledge on the development of Western scientific traditions As we have seen, much Western science and technology emanates from indigenous European folk knowledge (e.g. herbal cures), but from the earliest times ideas and practices were flowing into Europe from other parts of the world, and vice versa. By the later middle ages, however, and the beginnings of modern European global expansion, there emerged a self consciousness about the desirability of obtaining new knowledge. We can see this process at work by examining some recent scholarship relating to European scientific interests in India and Indonesia. As early as the sixteenth century, travellers were being advised to observe indigenous practices and to collect material with a view to extending European materia medica. For example, Garcia da Orta, a Portuguese physician living in Goa, provides us with a description of plants of the east which formed the basis of medicines available in Europe and Portuguese colonies, and from which they could be 10 |
| extracted. Orta relied on personal medical experience, fieldwork and indigenous knowledge, and initially depended on Arabic sources, thus reflecting the centre of gravity of the international trade in materia medica. Orta’s Coloquios dos simples e drogas he cousas medicinais da India, published in Goa in 1563, was translated into Latin in 1567 by Charles d’Ecluse (Clusius) who went on to establish the Hortus Medicus in Vienna and, in 1593, the Leiden botanic garden.2 In turn, Jacob Bondt relied heavily on the Coloquios for his pioneering book on tropical medicine, De Medicina Indorum , published in Leiden in 1642) [Grove 1996: 125, 129, 131, 133].3 The decline of Portuguese power in Goa and the establishment of the Dutch in Cochin was marked in botanical terms by the project of the Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, initiated by Hendrik van Rheede tot Drakenstein (1636-1691) in response to the medicinal needs of the Dutch East India Company4 [Grove 1996: 126, 134]. We can thus see a remarkable chain linking Indian medical ethnobotany, compilations of Middle Eastern and south Asian knowledge organised on essentially non-European precepts, Portuguese and Dutch political interests, and the formative period of modern scientific botany and pharmacology. But this is only the beginning. What makes this story of knowledge transformation of particular interest here, is that in both the Coloquias of da Orta and the Hortus of van Rheede, contemporary Hippocratic emphases on accuracy and 2 Published in English as Colloquies on the simples and drugs of India by Garcia da Orta, trans. Sir Clements Markham (London: Henry Southern, 1913). 3 See An account of the diseases, natural history and medicine of the East Indies, translated from the Latin of James Bontius, Physician to the Dutch settlement at Batavia, to which are added annotations by a physician (T. Noteman, London 1769). 4 Continans Regioni Malabarici apud Indos celeberrims omnus generis Plantas rariores, 12 vols. Amsterdam, 1678-1693. 11 |
| efficiency tended to privilege strongly local medical and biological knowledge, and to lead to effective discrimination against older Arabic, Brahminical and European classical texts and systems of cognition in natural history. Because van Rheede, in particular, was unable to rely on any preexisting European template for south Asian plant knowledge, he was largely responsible for elevating Ezhava knowledge above that of the dominant Ayurvedic schemes, with the aim of acquiring the highest quality indigenous expertise. The Ezhavas were a Sudra caste whose traditional occupation was toddy-tapping, but many were also Ayurvedic physicians who were highly regarded. They produced texts which were often written in the Kolezuthu script of lower castes, and were prevented from using the more Sanskritised Aryazuthu script. As Brahmins were forced to rely on their low caste servants for detailed field knowledge of plants, it made sense for van Rheede to by-pass `academic’ Brahmin knowledge [Grove 1996: 136-7, n52]. He, thus, went through the same process of rejecting Arabic classification and nomenclature and European knowledge as da Orta, in favour of a more rigorous adherence to local systems. The perfection of European printing, the establishment of botanic gardens, global networks of information and materia medicinal transfer, together with the increasing professionalisation of natural history facilitated the diffusion and dominance of an Ayurvedic and Ezhava medico-botanical knowledge and epistemological hegemony, and imposed an indigenous technical logic on subsequent `European’ texts of south Asian botany. These retain the essentially indigenous structure of the Coloquios and the Hortus, thereby transforming European botanical science through contact with south Asian methodologies of classification, rather than the other way round. But given the long history of mutual knowledge transfer going back to ancient times, any division between European and Asian botanical systems might be 12 |