Description
Book SynopsisClaiming Indigenous Plant Knowledge: From Botanical Exchanges to Resource Extraction in the Indian Ocean World examines the collection and documentation of the natural world's development over the course of the nineteenth century into a vast network of scientists who attempted to categorize and understand nature, particularly in the botanically rich Indian Ocean. But the process of collecting plants and exchanging knowledge about the natural world went far beyond the labor of botanists and naturalists. Naturalists depended on many groups for regional knowledge and local information about the uses, names, and value of plants. Publications and archival materials included local and indigenous knowledge of nature, but as exploration led to colonial expansion and botany became a professional science, local and indigenous knowledge moved to the periphery of botanical writing. Local knowledge never stopped being important, but the act of discovery and the claiming (perhaps even colo
