Tangled compositions: Botany, agency, and authorship aboard HMS Endeavour.

By all accounts, James Cook's HMS Endeavour sojourn in Tahiti was a pivotal moment in Enlightenment engagements between Indigenous and European cultures. Among the voyage records that survive, the Endeavour draftsman Sydney Parkinson's Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (1773) is widely viewed as anomalous for the depth and breadth of its interests in Indigenous Tahitian culture and plant knowledge. This essay complicates that view, with emphasis on the contingencies peculiar to the Journal's publication and to Parkinson's own authorial biography. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of the rhizome, I analyze Parkinson's account alongside the botanist Daniel Solander's historiographically underutilized "Plantae Otaheitenses" manuscript. In so doing, I offer an alternative reading of the Journal as archetypal rather than exceptional in its attention to Indigenous cultures and knowledges. At stake, I suggest, is an enhanced appreciation for Indigenous-European botanical engagements and for Enlightenment print culture more broadly, as well as for the nebulously adisciplinary and collaborative nature of Enlightenment natural history field practices.

Imperial vernacular: phytonymy, philology and disciplinarity in the Indo-Pacific, 1800-1900.

This essay examines how Indo-Pacific indigenous plant names went from being viewed as instruments of botanical fieldwork, to being seen primarily as currency in anthropological studies. I trace this attitude to Alexander von Humboldt, who differentiated between indigenous phytonyms with merely local relevance to be used as philological data, and universally applicable Latin plant names. This way of using indigenous plant names underwrote a chauvinistic reading of cultural difference, and was therefore especially attractive to commentators lacking acquaintance with any indigenous language or culture. When New Zealand anthropologists embraced this role for Maori phytonyms in the 1890s, however, they did so possessed of a relatively in-depth understanding of Maori culture and the Maori language. This discussion has three primary aims: to illuminate nineteenth-century scholarly engagements with Indo-Pacific plant classifications, in contrast to a prevailing historiographical emphasis on European disregard for this subject; to analyse how indigenous phytonyms acted as 'boundary objects' interfacing between cultures and disciplines; and to illustrate the politics of scientific disciplinarity in a colonial context.