Volume 29, Empires and Science, Fall 2009 - Community College ...

COMMUNITY COLLEGE 

HUMANITIES REVIEW 

Volume 29 SPECIAL ISSUE Fall 2009 

EMPIRES AND SCIENCE 

Papers from a workshop sponsored by 

The Hill Center for World Studies 

and 

Community College Humanities Association 

funded by 

The National Science Foundation 

Edited by 

Lou Ratté, Program Director 

Ned M. Wilson, CCHR Editor


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i

About the cover: 

An illustration by Isabella Sinclair in Mrs. Francis Isabella Sinclair, 

Indigenous Flowers of the Hawaiian Islands 

(London 1885) 

©Copyright 2009 


ISSN 0748-0741 

ii

COMMUNITY COLLEGE HUMANITIES REVIEW 

Volume 29 SPECIAL ISSUE Fall 2009 

EDITORIAL BOARD 

Editor: Ned M. Wilson, Ph.D. 

nwilson@ccha-assoc.org 

Central Division 

Richard Kalfus, Ph.D. 

St. Louis Community College 

Kirkwood, MO 63122 

Robert Sessions, Ph.D. 

Kirkwood Community College 

Cedar Rapids, Iowa 54206 

Raymond Smith Pfeiffer, Ph.D. 

Delta College 

University Center, MI 48710 

Eastern Division 

Scott Ash, Ph.D. 

Nassau Community College 

Garden City, NY 11530-6793 

Emily S. Tai, Ph.D. 

Queensborough Community 

College, CUNY 

Bayside, New York 11364-1497 

George L. Scheper, Ph.D. 

Community College of Baltimore 

County—Essex 

Baltimore, Maryland 

Pacific Western 

Jeffrey Clausen 

Green River Community College 

Bonney Lake, WA 98391 

Donald J. Foran, Ph.D. 

Centralia College 

Olympia, WA 352 5733 

Southern Division 

Ted Wadley 

Georgia Perimeter College, 

Decatur Campus 

Decatur, Georgia 30034 

Southwestern Division 

Rebecca Li Balcárcel 

Tarrant County College— 

Northeast Campus 

Hurst, TX 76054, 

Jane England 

North Central Texas College 

Gainesville, TX 76240-4699 

Frank Perez 

Tarrant County College 

Hurst, TX 76054-3299 

iii


Volume 29 EMPIRES AND SCIENCE Fall 2009 

Empires and Science 

Guest Editor and Seminar Director 

Lou Ratté 

Ned M. Wilson, Editor CCHR 

Essays by participants in the Empires and Science Workshop 

sponsored by the 

Hill Center for World Studies 

and the 


funded by contributions from the 

Department of History, Brown University 

Science and Technology Studies Program, Brown University 

Watson Institute for Inter-National Studies, Brown University 

John Carter Brown Library, Brown University 

Department of Africana Studies and History, Brown University 

Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University 

Jukowsky Family Foundation 

Generous Donors to The Hill Center for World Studies 

and the 

National Science Foundation 

David A. Berry 

Executive Director 


iv


Volume 29 EMPIRES AND SCIENCE Fall 2009 

Table of Contents 

Introduction 1 

Lou Ratté, Project Director 

Science as Imperial Bio-Power: Taxonomy and Toxicology 

in Indian Colonial Encounter 9 

David Arnold 

Implementation Project 19 

Thomas Mazurek 

The Golden Age of Islam: Course Module 23 

Jayne Yantz 

The Spanish American Empire: Nature and the 

Emergence of Empiricism in the Sixteenth Century 

Atlantic World 30 

Antonio Barrera 

Teaching the Latin American Survey 37 

William Paquette 

Who is Responsible for the Limits of Jesuit Scientific 

and Technical Transmission from Europe to China 

in the Eighteenth Century? 55 

Benjamin Elman 

Polynesian Technologies in Oceanic Voyaging 

and Navigation 57 

Douglas Rosentratter 

Discovering Oceania: Accessing Art to Make 

Connections and Create Context 63 

Lynn Dole 

v

Understanding “Pacific Epistemology” as a New Knowledge 

System 71 

John Ratté 

The Flea and the Hairy-Nosed Armadillo: Darwin, 

Collecting, and Colonial Networking in the Pacific 78 

Lou Ratté 

Simulated Travel: Cultural Theme Parks, Hyperreality, 

and Reality 89 

Terri Hasseler 

Water, Water Everywhere 100 

James Dutcher 

Bibliography for the Study of Empires and Science 121 

Workshop Presenters and Lou Ratté 

Contributors to this Issue 130 

vi

Introduction 

Lou Ratté 

The Workshop 

The Hill Center for World Studies, a teacher-scholar collaborative run by 

two independent historians, Lou and John Ratté, in consultation with 

Professor Nancy Jacobs, historian at Brown University, and Professor 

David Berry, Director of the Community College Humanities Association, 

submitted a grant to the National Science Foundation in 2007. We 

submitted under the NSF’s heading History and Philosophy of Science, 

Engineering, and Technology. We received the grant, which helped to 

fund a three-day workshop at Brown University in March 2008. 

Additional funders for the workshop were the Department of History, the 

Science and Technology Studies Program, the Watson Institute for 

International Studies, the John Carter Brown Library, the Department of 

Africana Studies and History, and the Cogut Center for the Humanities, 

all at Brown University; the Jukowsky Family Foundation; and generous 

donors to the Hill Center. The workshop was co-sponsored by the 

Community College Humanities Association. 

The aim of the workshop was to introduce new scholarship in the 

history of science to two and four year college teachers and to encourage 

integration of the scholarly materials into survey courses in world history 

and world studies. The stellar group of scholars we assembled for the 

workshop brought their expertise in Arabic Studies (George Saliba, 

Columbia University), Chinese Studies (Benjamin Elman, Princeton 

University, and Fa-ti Fa, Suny Binghamton), Latin American Studies, 

(Antonio Barrera, Colgate University), the history of India (David Arnold, 

Warwick University), African Colonial History (Nancy Jacobs, Brown 

University), and the history of the Pacific (Damon Salesa, University of 

Michigan, and Matt Matsuda, Rutgers University) to bear on issues of 

how we can understand the history of science in global perspective today. 

NSF granting guidelines in our category pertinently ask how is scientific 

knowledge produced and what are its effects? What choices influence 

knowledge production? How did science develop in the past? How was 

scientific knowledge transmitted and received? What does it mean to be a 

scientist in a particular place and time? These and other questions that 

arose during and after the workshop inform the following collection of 

papers. 

New Directions in the History of Science 

Once a separate discipline, focused on the narrative of great discoveries 

and heroic European discoverers, the history of science is now practiced 

by humanities and social science scholars with quite different interests and 

research specialties. Recognizing that modern science in the West has 

grown out of practices begun in the Renaissance when Europeans first 

Published in the Community College Humanities Review, Vol. 29 Fall 2009

2 Lou Ratté 

learned that the world was bigger than they had imagined, these scholars, 

working with global consciousness, now regularly ask questions about 

how knowledge of the natural world has been gathered and organized, by 

whom, and for what purpose; how that knowledge, once formulated, 

circulates, and by and for whom; how such knowledge gains authority; 

and how knowledge systems from one part of the world differ from and 

are similar to knowledge systems from other parts of the world. Scholars 

are asking about the role that governments play in connection with 

scientific knowledge, about the role that power and the exercise of power 

have played when two knowledge systems are competing, and about why 

some knowledge systems seem to have disappeared only to reappear again 

in different historical circumstances. What have been the effects of 

European colonial expansion on the development of scientific knowledge? 

What role do native informants play in making scientific knowledge and 

why is their role in knowledge production often neglected? 

Do scientists care about any of these new directions in the history of 

science? Perhaps not, but as historian of science Paula Findlen has 

remarked, doing the history of science is the work of historians, not 

scientists. Findlen has described some of the changes she has observed in 

the work of her colleagues. Having abandoned the Eurocentric narrative, 

with its trajectory from Newton to Einstein, historians of science adopt 

approaches more in tune with contemporary historical practice. 

Intellectual history, focusing on great men and their great ideas, is out. In 

its place are the multidisciplinary approaches we label social and cultural 

history. Instead of ideas, scholars pay attention to the social, cultural and 

economic contexts in which scientific work was practiced; the 

contributions of artisans to the emergence of modern science; the many 

ways in which ordinary people, or subalterns, aid in making the work of 

specialists possible; the history of how authority is established in science; 

and how the products of scientific inquiry become represented and 

institutionalized. 

Findlen notes that in order to follow out this more complex research 

agenda, historians of science have been producing almost unmanageable 

numbers of microstudies rather than making contributions to a general 

narrative. Much of this work, however, is still European focused. Imagine 

the scope of the problem when we inquire into the global history of 

science. 

It may be that it is simply too early to ask how new scholarship in a 

very complex field can be worked into our general historical vision, 

especially since as yet we seem to have no clear directive from historians 

of science about how to proceed. On the other hand, if we waited until 

specialists turned their attention to the needs of generalists and the 

undergraduate students they teach, we might be waiting a very long time. 

Community College Humanities Review


Some Cautionary Suggestions from Workshop Presenters 

For a full list of readings provided by the Brown workshop presenters, 

please consult the Bibliography, included as one of our selections. Here I 

wish to call attention to two points raised in the workshop on which our 

scholars agreed. 

(1) The Eurocentric narrative In general, those of us who are not 

specialists know little of the history of science as presented in new 

scholarship today, not because we are ignorant of the history of science, 

but because what we do know, and have been taught, is now under 

question. Arabic scholar George Saliba presented the most memorable 

example of this condition. Saliba chided workshop participants for 

holding onto what he calls the “refrigerator theory” of scientific 

transmission across linguistic and cultural borders. He asks: How did 

scientific knowledge of the ancient world reach the intellectual 

community of the Italian Renaissance? That is the kind of question to 

which even the proverbial school child knows the answer: the Arabs 

preserved Greek learning by translating great Greek and Latin works into 

Arabic; once Europeans emerged from the slumber of the Dark Ages and 

learned how to translate, all they had to do was open the Arabic door to 

ancient Greek learning. This, says Saliba, constitutes the “classical 

narrative” of the development of early modern science. 

There are two problems with the classical, or refrigerator, theory, says 

Saliba: (a.) is it plausible to assume that one group of language users 

would be able to translate complex learning in another language into their 

own if they did not know what the subject being translated was about? 

And (b.) since there is evidence to show that Arabic mathematicians made 

corrections in the work of Greek and Roman mathematicians, shouldn’t 

we admit that non-European scientists, working outside Europe, made 

major advances in knowledge on their own? 

A second example of an historiographical tradition that favors 

Western Europe and especially England at the expense of other places of 

scientific knowledge production is in the work of Latin American 

historian Antonio Barrera. Recall a once popular version of the European 

narrative survey: Spain led the countries of Western Europe in the 15 th 

and 16 th centuries in the development of navigation and navigational 

technology; as a consequence of that skill, Spain inaugurated the age of 

European expansion. Once silver was discovered in the New World, 

Spain emerged as the wealthiest nation in Europe. Spain’s ability to 

maintain its lead among European nations was hampered, however, by 

two institutional handicaps: the decadent and extravagant Spanish court, 

and the adherence in spite of the Reformation to Roman Catholicism. The 

narrative of Spain’s decline and the “Black Legend” of its merciless 

treatment of non-Catholics are criticized today as tropes invented by the 

emerging and newly sea-worthy and imperially competitive British and 

Fall 2009

4 Lou Ratté 

French states. The popularized view of Spain was as a state that tried but 

failed to enter the modern age. 

Once the historical myths of Spanish incompetence are swept away it 

is possible to look afresh with Barrera at what 16 th century Spanish, in the 

colonies and at home, actually did do, and who knew about these Spanish 

accomplishments. 16 th and 17 th century Spanish rulers and colonial 

administrators invented sophisticated methods of information gathering, 

training, and licensing, which together make up institutionalization, or 

what Barrera calls the “early scientific revolution. Other European 

intellectuals eagerly devoured whatever reached the wider European 

audience from Spain through publication in Latin. Dutch, French and 

British travelers, government official and colonial administrators 

incorporated Spanish information and information technologies into their 

own science practice as they extended their colonial reach. Only later was 

Span written out of the narrative of European progress. 

(2) If careful observation of natural phenomena characterized the first 

stages in the development of modern global science, we need to remember 

that the 18 th century was the age of classification. For understanding how 

it came to be that the work of some was regarded as more significant than 

the work of others, we need to remember that along with Linnaeus and his 

system for organizing plant life were those who classified human beings 

into racial categories, ranking some above others. Did heroic Europeans 

actually march across vast expanses of the world and hack their way 

single-handedly through tropical jungles collecting insects and animals 

that local people had either not noticed or paid little attention to? Or were 

they at every step of the way guided and helped by local people who made 

their journeys and their work possible? Historian of Colonial Africa 

Nancy Jacobs has explored the role of the native informant in great detail 

in her scholarly work, helping her readers to formulate questions about the 

role of racism and race science in the elimination of the native informant 

from the annals of Nineteenth Century science. David Arnold has shown 

how British colonial officials and medical personnel were dependent on 

Indian helpers, especially in locating and identifying natural history 

specimens and making illustrations. When it came to publishing, though, 

native helpers disappeared from the texts. Historian of China, Fa-ti Fan, 

studies the making of botanical knowledge among British botanists and 

Chinese horticulturalists and collectors in Nineteenth Century Canton. In 

the first half of the Nineteenth Century British naturalists were confined 

by the Chinese to the coastal region around Canton, and hence completely 

dependent on the good will of Chinese botanists for the specimens people 

like Joseph Hooker at Kew Gardens in London were urging them to 

acquire and send on. Even so, Chinese are not named when the scientific 

materials are published. In scientific circles and popular culture, only 

Europeans had and were capable of having “science.” 



Workshop Papers 

The people who have the power get to make the knowledge. This 

statement, in vastly oversimplified form, was the great insight of French 

philosopher Michel Foucault. Though Foucault himself only studied 

Western Europe, his views on the nature of power and the relationship 

between power and knowledge have been widely applied by scholars in 

several fields, including those who study areas outside Western Europe 

and the U.S. 

In his paper for this collection, historian of India David Arnold, a 

pioneer in introducing the study of science into the study of the British 

Empire in India, uses Foucault’s notions of power and knowledge to write 

about botany in British India. Arnold coins the term “bio-power,” or the 

more witty “flower power” to talk about some of the ways the British in 

India used information they acquired about plants in India to exercise 

colonial control. Information about plants was useful economically, 

medicinally, and culturally, says Arnold. Once the British had alienated 

large segments of Indian land, knowing about plant productivity was 

useful for levying taxes and organizing agricultural and forest production 

for export; knowing about medicinal plants was useful in building the 

large Medical Service in which the British in India took great pride; and 

knowing about plants, even if the information was later proven wrong, 

was useful in representing India and Indians to the British back home as 

inferior to themselves. Botany, in this sense, was a useful tool for 

legitimizing empire to the anti-imperialists in England. British botanists 

acquired information about plants in India from Indians with practical 

knowledge, says Arnold: they hardly consulted the large body of Sanskrit, 

Persian and Arabic textual knowledge on plants. Distinguishing 

themselves because of their reliance on the classification systems of 

Linnaeus and Jussieux, from those Indians with practical knowledge and 

no system, or as Arnold summarizes, no science, the British in his view 

appropriated what they learned about Indian plants into European 

knowledge systems, contributing to the view of European sense of 

superiority. 

Arnold’s essay provides a model for how the history of science can 

be integrated into history, but it is not an easy model to follow. As an 

historian of colonial India, Arnold is able to place us in the complex world 

where British colonials have work to do in India but their eyes are on 

Britain, where they have to gain recognition if they are to advance their 

careers and where the empire itself has to be accepted as a legitimate 

expense. Indians themselves linger in the margins of Arnold’s essay, but a 

reader who can make use of the place markers he gives about the East 

India Company, the practice of thugee, and the founding of the Calcutta 


6 Lou Ratté 

Botanical Garden will have a richer reading experience than one who 

cannot. 

Teachers attempting to integrate history of science materials into 

general historical survey courses have to deal with people, places and 

events outside their area of expertise, and building a context that squarely 

locates the subject in time and place may be difficult. Several papers have 

made attempts to suggest how such work might be done. 

In his “Implementation Project” for the Empires and Science 

workshop, Thomas Mazurek proposes an approach that sets the usual 

textbook presentation of the rise of science in the West against 

possibilities presented by Islamic scholar George Saliba at the Brown 

University workshop. Mazurek, dealing with the survey format and 

developing his own pod casts, proposes that students first become familiar 

with the Eurocentric narrative of Western science and then listen to a 

second pod cast in which he will use materials presented or suggested by 

Saliba to introduce sources relating to the impact of Arabic science on the 

development of European science. In a homework assignment, students 

are required to analyze the two accounts and describe how they differ. 

Like Mazurek, Jayne Yantz deals with materials presented by George 

Saliba in the workshop. Yantz’ focuses on the Abbasid Empire (750- 

1258), also called the “Golden Age of Islam,” and she is attentive to the 

needs of students and teachers who may know little about the Islamic 

world during this time period. She is well aware that even if today’s 

students know little Islamic history, many of them have taken in the 

stereotypes that circulate in popular culture since 9/11. Her aim is to 

challenge those stereotypes indirectly by providing an extensive summary 

of Muslim achievements in economy, technology, geography, astronomy, 

medicine, and the arts during the Golden Age. 

Antonio Barrera takes us through the stages of information gathering 

that made it possible for the Spanish to maintain a long distance empire. 

The state, through its governing institutions, began the systematic 

collection of information that enables the production of charts and training 

for pilots, facilitating safe travel from Spain to the American colonies and 

back again. Humanists were charged with responsibility for collecting 

knowledge of all aspects of the natural world. Many worked with and 

independent of the state to development ways to gather reliable 

information, and one of the most dependable means was the 

questionnaire, a fixture in information-gathering techniques from then on 

in the natural and social sciences. The actors in Barrera’s analytic 

narrative are officials in Spain, who realize the depth of ignorance about 

these new possessions and the need for accurate information, hundreds of 

explorers, colonial officials, and helpers who gather the information, and a 

handful of scholars who synthesize the information and publish it in a 

form that can be used by others. The genius of the Spanish system, says 



Barrera, was to develop questionnaires that could be sent through the 

imperial network to every part of the empire with instructions to gather 

information on all manner of things having to do with the natural and 

social world. 

Like Arnold, Barrera is a specialist in the study of the area he is 

writing about. How can his material be integrated into survey courses? 

William Paquette provides a full syllabus for a Latin American 

history course in which students are encouraged to conduct research on a 

range of topics including Maya, Aztec, and Inca scientific and 

mathematical systems; geography and plant life in the Spanish colonies; 

and Spanish navigational knowledge, as part of their survey. The value of 

this general approach, with its focus on pre-Columbian America, lies in 

Paquette’s announcement to students through the syllabus that people 

other than Europeans had the kinds of disciplined inquiry that we have 

come to call “science.” In ways such as these, students will be prepared to 

question why and under what conditions earlier scholars have claimed that 

science spread from the West to the rest of the world. 

Workshop presenter Benjamin Elman provides an outline of his 

workshop presentation for inclusion here. His contribution shows the 

benefit of the good question: why didn’t the Chinese learn about Newton 

and mathematical reasoning until after the Opium War? From the outline 

we are led to assume that there must have been opportunities for the 

Chinese to learn about the state of European mathematics and Newton’s 

advances before they actually did. Elman hints in that the older history of 

science narrative held the Qing state responsible for scientific 

backwardness. He suggests that the historical context is a good deal richer 

than Qing backwardness implies, and we would do well to look for deeper 

levels of historical complexity. 

Three workshop participants responded directly to the opportunity to 

explore workshop related questions by concentrating on the Pacific 

region, and workshop planners are proud to have made this important area 

of scholarly research available for further study here. Douglas 

Rosentratter contributes a class project on Pacific navigation, which 

introduces students to the two themes of expert knowledge independent of 

the West, and the historical silencing of that knowledge in the Western 

history of science narrative. After noting how students can learn about 

Pacific navigational skills in the pre-contact period, and how Islanders 

themselves have rediscovered these traditions during the 1970s, 

Rosentratter reminds readers that Europeans assumed the peoples who 

settled the Pacific must have drifted there by accident. Only with Europe’s 

own Prince Henry does it become possible from the European perspective 

to sail to a planned destination. Two additional papers suggest ways to 

introduce the Pacific and to engage with issues of contemporary interest to 

Pacific Islanders. 


8 Lou Ratté 

Lynn Dole, in a carefully thought out class module, takes a long, hard 

look at where students (and their teachers) who know nothing about the 

Pacific might begin to study this region. The module introduces art and 

museum related web sites, critical sources for using visual materials, and a 

selection of other readings to steer students toward ways of understanding 

the Pacific region today. John Ratté takes up the important question of 

choice in postcolonial situations when different knowledge systems 

coexist and perhaps compete. Ratté’s focus is on how Pacific intellectuals 

are dealing with these and related issues, how such issues are played out 

in the lives of ordinary people in the islands, and how educators respond 

to the demands awareness of these issues pose 

Our last three selections include two essays and a class syllabus. Lou 

Ratté’s essay suggests possibilities for starting with something that 

catches one’s attention, in this case a flea supposedly collected by Charles 

Darwin in 1832, and using it to imaginatively explore some of the themes 

in history of science. Terri Hasseler’s essay introduces today’s global 

traveler, the tourist, to hint at some of the ways that misrepresentation of 

places, too easily assumed to be a colonial practice, continues today. 

Hasseler takes us to popular tourist sites, Big Ben in London, THE MOST 

PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA, and the Polynesian Cultural 

Center on Oahu, to look closely at some of the things we are not supposed 

to see. She provides a critical vocabulary that facilitates analysis. 

James Dutcher, an English professor, has provided a syllabus for a 

class he teaches with a chemistry professor, on the subject of water. A 

student who enters Dutcher’s “learning community” can expect to emerge 

at the end with a much more complicated view of water than she or he 

brought to the class. That student will have heard water represented in 

music, discovered water’s role in literature, analyzed water in the 

laboratory, contemplated water’s role in religion, and worried over global 

water battles today. The syllabus is designed to encourage critical 

thinking, and it does so by bringing together an array of literary, 

philosophical, scientific and political position papers to help students 

appreciate the ubiquity and necessity of water while leading them to take 

responsibility for taking care of this invaluable natural resource. 

The final contribution to the collection is the bibliography prepared 

for the Brown University workshop. It includes the readings assigned by 

the workshop presenters and additional materials in the history of science, 

including Pacific Studies references. 


Science as Imperial Bio-Power 

Taxonomy and Toxicology in India’s Colonial Encounter 

David Arnold 

When the French philosopher (and part-time historian) Michel Foucault 

wrote about “bio-power” he had in mind the ways in which, in a modern 

society, the human body was managed and controlled or brought under 

various forms of self-discipline. For Foucault “power” and “knowledge” 

were intimately connected but also indicative of the manner in which, in a 

modern society, power is diffused and not simply concentrated in the state 

and its immediate agencies. 

In this paper I want to employ the term “bio-power” somewhat 

differently—to talk about the “bio-power” of plants rather than that of 

bodies, but I still want to utilize some of the ideas that informed 

Foucault’s approach. I want to consider how a knowledge and use of 

plants—“flower power” if you need a catchy phrase—formed part of a 

modern regime of power, not in the France or Europe of Foucault’s 

analysis but half a world away in the increasingly colonized society of 

19 th century British India. How and why did plants contribute to the power 

that the British increasingly exercised over their colonial subjects or over 

the landscape and physical environment they aspired to dominate? 

Foucault has little to say on Europe’s colonies, but was colonial India a 

“modern society” and was there something particularly significant about 

the way in which plant knowledge was accumulated and deployed? And 

how far was this not only a British (“colonial”) exercise of knowledge and 

power but also an Indian (or “indigenous”) one in ways that affect how we 

think more generally about the nature of India’s colonial encounter? 

Given the vastness of this topic, my answers will need to be rather 

schematic, but I hope nonetheless suggestive. 

The Utility of Plant Knowledge 

Why was a knowledge of plants so important to the British as the 

incoming colonial power in India from the late 18 th century onwards? I 

see at least two kinds of answer to this question. The first relates to 

practical knowledge and the utility of “useful” plants. 

British power in India was established in the first instance through the 

English East India Company, which had been trading with India from the 

start of the 17 th century and which, by the late 18 th century, had very 

extensive commercial interests in India. As, by warfare and diplomacy, 

the Company gained territorial control over large parts of India between 

the 1750s and 1820s, so its economic interests expanded from trade to 

land taxation and an interest in increasing the productivity of first peasant 

agriculture and later a plantation economy. In this connection plant 

knowledge was primarily of importance because of its economic value 


10 David Arnold 

and the potential botany offered for further developing the exploitation of 

“useful plants.” 

Until the 1820s India’s cotton textiles were a leading export 

commodity of the East India Company, and so its agents were eager to 

know more about the varieties of cotton plants that existed (and whether 

they could be “improved” to produce a better quality cotton) and keen to 

know what kinds of plant dyes were used to give chintzes their rich and 

vibrant colors. Until its demise in 1858 (when India passed into direct rule 

by the British Crown) the Company was interested in the various kinds of 

fibers, resins and gums the country produced (and which might be of 

industrial as well as commercial value), in the wealth of its timbers, 

especially the teak and other hardwoods that were valued for ship 

construction, the making of gun carriages and from the 1850s as railroad 

sleepers. In other words, economic botany gave the study of plants and 

trees a privileged position among early colonial sciences: it was infinitely 

more “useful” than many others scientific fields (such as astronomy or 

chemistry). 

In consequence, the East India Company, through its Court of 

Directors in London, was prepared to allocate significant funds to pay the 

salaries of its botanical servants, for the collection and compilation of 

botanical information and the publication of often sumptuously illustrated 

botanical works in the belief that this was a worthwhile investment in the 

Company’s commercial prospects, but also in the belief that in making its 

Indian empire appear a scientific enterprise they would add to its 

international prestige and still the voice of those domestic critics who 

regarded it as excessively revenue-hungry and rapacious. Investing in 

science, in botanical science, seemed a profitable enterprise though not 

one the Company was prepared to bankroll indefinitely. 

Added to this, although the famine that devastated eastern India in 

1770 and cost millions of lives could be seen primarily as a result of 

British greed, it was taken by contemporaries as a sign that India was 

deficient in many life-sustaining staples and that new foodstuffs and 

agricultural crops were needed to be introduced to prevent further food 

shortages and to make the economy more productive. With the founding 

in 1787 of a botanic garden at Calcutta (followed by similar botanical 

institutions in other regions and provinces) a policy was adopted of trying 

to develop India as a “tropical estate” where various plants, introduced 

from the Caribbean, Central and South America, from the Malay 

peninsula or elsewhere in Asia (such as cinnamon, or “improved” 

varieties of sugar and cotton), could be grown, enabling the Indian 

economy to flourish and British trade and industry to flourish. The 

diversity of India’s climate and its vegetation zones (especially once 

British rule was extended by the 1820s from the tropical plains to the 

temperate lower slopes of the Himalayas) encouraged the idea that India 


Science as Imperial Bio-Power 11 

could produce almost any useful crop (tropical or temperate), and for a 

while attempts were made to introduce familiar British fruit trees and 

vegetable crops to further add to the country’s natural diversity. 

But colonial commerce and agricultural “improvement” were not the 

only aspect to plant “utility.” The scale of mortality and morbidity among 

the British inhabitants of India, especially the white soldiers of the British 

and East India Company armies, and the eruption of devastating 

epidemics of cholera and malaria, also made the provision of medical 

relief a high state priority. From the botanical point of view, there was a 

double significance to this. From the 18 th century onwards the Company 

maintained a large European medical establishment in India, numbering 

several hundred men, most of them trained in medicine at British 

universities. The members of what in time became the Indian Medical 

Service (Indian in its location not in its personnel) constituted one of the 

largest scientific establishments to be found anywhere in the colonial 

world. Although they were primarily employed to minister to the health of 

British and Indian soldiers, many of these physicians (“surgeons” as they 

were called) served in a variety of scientific roles (as botanists, geologists, 

astronomers, meteorologists and ethnographers). Having been trained in 

botany as part of their medical education, many of them developed a 

passion for plants, and, as I have tried to argue in The Tropics and the 

Traveling Gaze, these often lonely and isolated surgeon-botanists formed 

an emotional attachment to the plants they studied (or the “dark-eyed 

beauties” for which they went in quest) that substituted for their want of 

European female companionship. When not excitingly exotic, the 

familiarly “European” looking plants found around Himalayan hillstations 

inspired homesick recollections of English, Welsh or Scottish 

childhoods. Science wasn’t always a dispassionate activity, and there was 

about botany an intimacy few other scientific pursuits could match. 

The study of botany was also itself an important medical matter. At a 

time when a majority of medicines were drawn from plants, botany was 

responsible for identifying Indian plants that might have medicinal 

properties and so either substitute for expensive imported drugs or add 

something new to European pharmacology. Reverting for a moment to the 

“toxicology” of my title, surgeon-botanists also had to establish which 

plants were poisonous or those whose medicinal use required extreme care 

lest the wrong root were used or seeds employed in quantities more likely 

to kill than cure. The exploration of India’s materia medica was, then, 

bio-power in its starkest sense. An accurate knowledge of plants 

represented the power of life or death over those on whom it was 

administered. 



Systems of Knowledge 

I said earlier that there were two ways in which plant knowledge can be 

said to be important: utility (economic botany and medicinal use of plants) 

represents one of these. The other relates more specifically to the nature of 

“colonial knowledge.” Botany was a way of thinking, not just the 

utilitarian servant of trade and physic. Under the influence of Linnaeus 

and other late 18 th and early 19 th -century pioneers of modern plant 

science, botany was a primary vehicle for the scientific ordering of 

knowledge (and here I’m following Foucault). Given the prominence of 

botany within the scientific establishment and the colonial order in India it 

was one of the main ways in which knowledge about India was gathered, 

collated, and systematized. Again, there are several strands to this. 

The first is European botanists in India employed the kinds of 

scientific methods they had learned from Europe: they didn’t primarily 

learn these from India. They loyally followed Linnaeus’s binominal 

system of plant taxonomy and into the 1830s employed his sexual system 

for the classification of plants before switching to the more reliable 

Natural System. They read Europe’s botanical authorities (when they 

could obtain their books and articles) and they collected, pressed, dried 

and labeled their specimens in the approved European manner. Some even 

became experts in the use of microscopes and in plant anatomy. When 

they could, they contacted British and other European experts to seek 

recognition for their botanical labors and to crave publication of their 

findings in Europe’s scientific journals. The methodological orientation of 

their scientific practice was undoubtedly to Europe: in this respect 

colonial botany was essentially an extension of Europe’s own botanical 

enterprise. 

But, in a foreign land, standing (as it were) amidst alien corn, colonial 

surgeon-botanists also took upon themselves the task of cultural 

mediation, of trying to universalize in a world fraught with 

epistemological difference. From the outset colonial botany in India was a 

dual engagement—obviously, if at one remove, with European science but 

also with indigenous systems of knowledge. There are several interpretive 

possibilities here that go to the heart of much recent scholarship about 

“colonial science.” One possibility is that colonial plant knowledge 

rapidly asserted its epistemic dominance, appropriating and subsuming 

within itself whatever it valued in indigenous knowledge, while rejecting 

much of it as “unscientific” or, more simply, “junk.” An alternative 

interpretation is that western and Indian knowledge (themselves internally 

diverse and varied) co-existed and borrowed extensively from one 

another, knowledge circulated rather than flowing in a single direction 

towards Europe, so that what emerged was a significant Indian 

contribution to the emergence of a cosmopolitan (and not purely western) 

plant science. A third possibility is some variant of these two in which 



spatial diversity, temporal shifts and cultural hierarchies produced a more 

nuanced engagement and differentiated outcome. Personally, I favor the 

first of these. Let me try to explain why. 

Although there was some late 18 th and early19 th century engagement 

by the British with indigenous textual sources (mainly in Sanskrit and 

Persian), in the main these possible sources of plant knowledge were not 

highly regarded. They were thought to be too abstract or poetic, too 

flowery in their phrasing, to serve the practical needs of science. 

Taxonomy, the ability to systematically identity, name and classify plants, 

was a privilege Europeans reserved almost entirely to themselves. While 

the idea of a Hindu “system” or “science” of medicine was widely talked 

about before the 1840s, there was far less validation of Hindu or Muslim 

plant knowledge as a science, though for reasons I’ve already touched on 

(and will return to shortly) medicine and botany were not easily 

distinguished. More commonly, surgeon-botanists looked not to elite, 

literate plant knowledge to inform their botany, but to those who as 

practitioners of local crafts and trades made useful informants and a 

source of practical knowledge—those who knew from experience which 

tree-barks made good dyes, which timber was suited for carpentry, which 

drug might cure cholera or lessen fever. Rather than turn to pundits, 

itinerant botanists relied heavily on local and largely unnamed collectors 

and guides, or they enlisted the help of Indians, tutored in the western 

manner of drawing, to record and illustrate their plant specimens. But it is 

hard to see this as an equal exchange of knowledge. Although these 

indigenous practitioners and “native informants” were invaluable to the 

acquisition of botanical knowledge, their contribution was subject to 

constant scrutiny and skeptical evaluation—it was complained that 

Indians shown no consistency in the naming of plants, they failed to see 

the commercial potential or scientific significance of their rustic 

knowledge, or they failed to match up to exacting western standards of 

scientific classification and pictorial representation. They had knowledge 

it seemed, but no science. 

I want briefly to indicate a third aspect of what I think of as being 

systematic about the colonial acquisition of plant knowledge. For the 

British botanists of early and mid-19 th century India plant knowledge was, 

I would argue, a kind of capital. Plants (dried specimens, live cuttings and 

dormant seeds, richly colored, hand-drawn botanical illustrations) were 

commodities to be acquired, bought and sold. They were used to build 

professional careers and private fortunes; they were routes back from 

colonial obscurity to metropolitan fame. Objects of desire and status, 

plants and their literary and artistic byproducts were items fit to grace 

scientific libraries and please their earnest patrons; they were emblems of 

exotic beauty and romantic rarity suited to adorn the gardens and 

greenhouses of kings and princes. Moreover, plants helped to “sell” an 



idea of “India” (a term which botanically embraced Nepal, Bhutan, Sri 

Lanka and a large chunk of Southeast Asia) as rich, desirable, sensuous, 

ennobling that belied its half-ruined, famine-ravaged state: they made 

British rule in India appear worthy as well as pleasing. 

I could (if I had the time) demonstrate these aspects of “plant 

capitalism” through the career of the Danish-born botanist Nathaniel 

Wallich who had charge of the botanic garden in Calcutta for 30 years 

from 1815 onwards and who, in dominating India’s colonial botany for 

more than a quarter of a century, diligently exploited the “riches” and 

“treasures” of Indian botany to advance his own career and scientific 

reputation, to please the Company and his aristocratic clients, and to 

propagate (through the sumptuous books of botanical illustrations he 

produced) an idea of “India” as the one of the principal and most desirable 

botanical provinces of the globe. 

Pleasures and Poisons 

In this final part of my paper, I want to move to some more specific 

illustrations of what I’ve been talking about as “bio-power” but also to 

complicate the picture I’ve so far given by talking about plants that were 

(or were thought to be) either aphrodisiacs or poisons—and sometimes 

both. 

India has an extraordinarily rich history of poisons: they appear 

prominently in several of the earliest works of Hindu (or Ayurvedic) 

medicine—in part because it was one of the tasks of the physician to 

protect the king from being poisoned by his enemies. When the Muslim 

Unani system of medicine (which traced part of its origins to ancient 

Greece and the Hippocratic/Galenic tradition) began to spread and evolve 

in India from about the 13 th century onwards, it too included frequent 

references to poisons, including those more familiar to India than to the 

Middle East. Indeed, these Unani texts often provided extensive lists of 

medical substances arranged according to their various properties: some 

were said to be suited as tonics or emetics; others as poisons or 

aphrodisiacs. Among the poisons known to India was a root known 

simply as “bish”—simply meaning “poison” or, more emphatically, as 

“the poison.” It came to be widely identified in European botany with the 

Aconite plant family and known as Aconitum ferox from its extreme 

toxicity: indeed, so poisonous was it said to be that no insects and animals 

would go near it. 

The British encounter with this and other Indian poisons dates back to 

the early years of the 19 th century. “Bish” (Aconitum ferox) was known 

about in two ways: as a dried root sold in Indian bazaars for use as a 

poison and more generally as a powerful ingredient in different kinds of 

compound medicines. It was also reputedly an instrument of war, which is 

one of the ways in which it acquired its notoriety among the British. As 



well as being used to tip poisoned arrows to paralyze or kill game (or 

alleged to dispose of unfaithful wives), “bish” was also said to have been 

used by the Nepalese against advancing East India Company troops 

during the hard-fought war of 1814–15: wells were apparently poisoned 

by aconitum root being thrown in (though this may be a myth: later 

commentators doubted that Aconitum ferox was sufficiently powerful to 

poison entire wells). 

The aconites are a widely distributed family of plants, ranging from 

Western Europe to the eastern Himalayas, but the precise nature and 

source of this poisonous root was unknown to early European botanists. 

One of the first to investigate it was Francis Buchanan who visited Nepal 

in 1806: he sought samples of the notorious root but was confused by the 

apparent inability of his collectors to distinguish between varieties of 

aconitum root that were deadly poisonous and those that were virtually 

harmless. This seeming confusion seemed to him indicative of the more 

general state of confusion in Indian plant knowledge and of its potentially 

dangerous consequences. Given the restrictions placed on European 

travelers by the Nepalese government, Buchanan never saw the 

Himalayan aconites growing wild but he assembled parts of the plant from 

which he thought it came and which he duly labeled the “true” Aconitum 

ferox: it was later suggested that these elements actually belonged to 

different plants and that it was Buchanan who was confused in not being 

able to tell one species of aconitum from another. 

For decades after Buchanan other botanical travelers, including some 

of great distinction, like Joseph Hooker, recorded finding various species 

of Himalayan aconites, but they failed to agree on the name or number of 

different species and on which in particular was the source of the 

notorious “bish.” It was not until 1905, a full century after Buchanan, that 

Otto Stapf, a botanist at Kew Gardens in London finally drew up a 

definitive list of 22 species of aconites, at least 10 of which possessed 

toxic properties. But even he concluded that “Some of the poisonous and 

non-poisonous aconites of the Himalaya are so similar that even an 

otherwise untrained eye might be deceived.” Perhaps the final irony is 

that these days botanists seemed inclined to believe that the Himalayan 

aconites are no more or less poisonous than those long known to Europe 

as “Monk’s Hood” and long used there as poisons. The notorious “bish” 

was something of an Orientalist myth. 

One of the many Indian uses of bish was as an aphrodisiac, but what 

we are to make of this elusive category of materia medica? The Oxford 

English Dictionary encourages us to see an aphrodisiac as a drug or food 

intended to stimulate sexual desire in effect, a love potion. Perhaps 

therefore our associations are with pleasure, desire, sexual dalliance and 

indulgence. The medical texts themselves give no further explanation of 

how such substances were supposed to work and what their effects might 



be. But it is interesting that references to aphrodisiacs persist, even in 

colonial medical texts (which otherwise seem to eschew pleasure), well 

into the latter part of the 19 th century. Is this simply a reference to 

indigenous practice (i.e., “they use x in such-and-such a way), or did 

European physicians accept the validity of these early prototypes of 

Viagra? A more likely possibility is that so-called aphrodisiacs were 

intended less for pleasure than procreation and to meet the cultural 

imperative in particular for men to produce sons. This appears to be one 

reason why relatively poor people took drugs including “bish” and died or 

were severely incapacitated as a result. Whether used to poison or to aid 

procreation, Indian “bish” rapidly attracted the attention of colonial police 

and magistrates and entered the manuals of medical jurisprudence that 

began to be compiled and published in considerable numbers in India 

from the mid 19 th century onwards. 

I need, before going any further, to introduce you to another 

poisonous plant known as datura. This was slower than bish to enter 

British botanical, medical and judicial cognition. It was the product of the 

plant of that name: its seeds were its most toxic part. Unlike the 

Himalayan aconites, datura grew widely—as a weed—across most parts 

of India—indeed, it was so commonplace that it was rarely illustrated by 

botanists (there’s another reason for that which I’ll come to shortly). In a 

rare color illustration of datura, dating from the 1840s and drawn by an 

unknown south Indian artist, there’s a penciled note in the bottom left 

hand corner: “a plant that appears to follow man.” But from relative 

obscurity in the early 19 th century, datura suddenly seemed to be 

everywhere. Its leaves were sometimes smoked in hookahs as a mild 

narcotic: occasionally boys put it in the food of wedding parties to watch 

them sink into a state of soporific torpor. But its real notoriety arose from 

its supposed criminal uses. While bish could kill, datura could (in 

moderate doses) only stupefy. Datura began to be implicated in deliberate 

cases of drugging—particularly of travelers and prostitutes in order to 

render them helpless and rob them of their money and jewels. Before the 

infamous cult known as Thugi came to be associated with strangling it 

was identified with datura poisoners. Although poisoning seems to have 

been a common crime in Britain and elsewhere in the 19 th century, in 

India it was seen to be a sign of the particular perversity and callousness 

of the Indian criminal and one of those hereditary trades that typified the 

country’s “criminal castes.” (The association of the East in general and 

India in particular with poisoning was further reflected in 19 th -century 

literature, especially in such semi-Orientalist romances as Alexandre 

Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo in the 1840s.) 

Poisoning, if we are to believe the medical jurisprudence and police 

reports, became one of the tropes that identified India as a particularly 

barbaric and heathen place. But datura, this infamous drug, so associated 



with Indian criminality and duplicity, is a tricky plant. Taxonomically, it 

belongs to that sinister order of plants, the Solanaceae—which hovers in a 

kind of botanical liminality between pleasure and poison, counting among 

its number deadly nightshade, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and tobacco. 

Geographically, this is a widely dispersed family of plants, but datura is 

particularly problematic. As the origins of several of those other plants 

suggest—tomatoes, potatoes, tobacco—datura was a New World and not 

an Old World plant. According to botanists, before 1500 it was only to be 

found in the Americas, where it was such a plague to the English settlers 

at Jamestown that it became known as “Jimson weed.” So, one would 

have to assume that this vagrant American plant only entered India in the 

16 th century as part of that Columbian invasion of plants (potatoes, maize, 

tomatoes, chilies, pineapples, guavas, okra, tobacco) that transformed 

Indian culinary tastes and narcotic choices. Conceivably it entered through 

Portuguese Goa: datura poisoning is mentioned in Garcia d’Orta 

Colloquies of 1563. So what I have been presenting to you as a colonial 

history is in some ways part of a global history, of the world-wide 

dissemination of plants and their human uses, a movement only 

imperfectly traced (because they don’t adequately deal with India!) in 

Alfred W. Crosby’s two books, The Columbian Exchange and Ecological 

Imperialism. It should be noted, though, that 19 th century British botanists 

in India were aware of datura’s foreign origins (one reason why it seldom 

appeared in illustrations of Indian flora), but they still seemed to have 

regarded it as having medicinal and criminal uses that set it apart from its 

New World origins. I can only add that the plant also spread to Britain 

after 1500, where, known as “thorn-apple,” it was similarly used to spike 

drinks and reduce men and women to a stupefied state in which they 

might be robbed or sexually taken advantage of. 

Medical jurisprudence was one of the ways in which a knowledge of 

plants, allied to that of medicines and poisons, became vital to the British 

administration in India. Given the general lack of credibility given to 

Indian testimony, it was important to the British to find other ways of 

establishing the cause of death or the perpetrator of a crime. From early in 

the 19 th century the performance of post-mortems, for medical research to 

determine the cause of death or the effects of disease on internal organs, 

had become an exemplary practice, repeatedly contrasted with the 

Indians’ horror of messing with the dead. In fact, post-mortems were an 

unreliable means of detecting poisons. There were few western doctors in 

19 th century India and if the body of a suspected poison victim was found 

in a relatively remote place it was likely, even apart form the depredations 

of tigers and wolves, to have rapidly decomposed before it could be 

medically examined. Detecting poisons was anyway a highly technical 

science: there were so many different chemical and vegetable substances 

that needed to be tested for, and some were extraordinarily difficult to 



detect. Datura seeds were barely distinguishable from the seeds of the 

common chili or capsicum that might be found in almost any Indian gut. 

The difficulty of establishing such evidence encouraged investigators to 

look to the most likely poisoners and then try to find the evidence to 

demonstrate their likely involvement. In this way, the impression of the 

criminal propensities of certain castes and tribes was generally reinforced. 

Conclusion 

I hope I’ve said enough in this paper to suggest some of the ways in which 

a certain (essentially western) knowledge of plants and the ways in which 

that knowledge was utilized, practically and discursively, formed a 

significant part of the wider processes and powers associated with colonial 

rule. I’ve also tried to suggest that in many ways that knowledge was 

imperfect—it took more than a century to identify the notorious poison 

“bish”—but that didn’t prevent botany and those who practised it from 

assuming that their knowledge had an authority and a uniqueness that 

differentiated them from those Indians who might have some imperfect 

knowledge of plants but who had failed to see the true light of science. 

Botanical knowledge may have been flawed, but it was even so a 

significant form of colonial bio-power 


Empires and Science 

Implementation Project 

Thomas Mazurek 

The Early Modern and Modern European History (HIST 131 Early 

Modern Europe and HIST 136 Modern Europe) course series at our 

college has not been taught for many years. I have taken on the 

responsibility within our Social and Behavioral Science Department for 

reinvigoration of this series by offering each course exclusively as 

Distance/E-Learning courses. 

My project proposal is to a create unit/module within the Early 

Modern European History course syllabus focusing on the rise of science 

and the impact of eastern cultures on the development of science in the 

modern west. The unit/module will consist of two pod casts, three links 

and an essay assignment (these courses will consist, in part, of twelve 

mandatory essay assignments). 

Outline for the First Pod Cast 

The goal of the first pod cast will be to do a traditional overview of the 

birth and subsequent development of science in the west within the 

framework of the assigned course materials. 

1. Rise of “Science” Within Early Modern Europe 

a. Historical Setting: Copernicus v. the Aristotelian/ 

Ptolemaic Vision of the Cosmos 

b. Problem of Gravity and Projectiles and the Growing 

Limitation of the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic Systems 

c. Galileo/Bacon/Descartes and Beginnings of the 

Scientific Method and Modern Mathematics 

d. Evolution of the “Natural Philosopher” into the 

“Scientist” of the late 17 th century 

1. Significance of the Concept of “New Thinking 

Cap” and the Struggle to Gain a New Vision of 

the Cosmos 

2. Example of Brahe and Galileo Caught between 

Aristotelian/Ptolemaic System and an 

Emerging New Vision of Cosmos Significance 

of Alchemy in the Thinking of Natural 

Philosophers 


20 Mazurek 

e. Role of Liebnitz and Newton in Merging the New 

Mathematics of Calculus with Emerging “Scientific 

Method” 

f. Summing Up: West’s View of Science 

Outline for Second Pod Cast 

The goals of the second pod cast is to break down the traditional 

ethnocentric view still prevalent in early European and modern European 

course text materials which tend not to acknowledge, especially in the 

area of the history of science, the impact of eastern cultures stretching 

from the European Middle Ages to well into the early modern era. The 

links, which track the impact of Islamic scholars and thinkers from the 

middle ages to Renaissance (especially, George Saliba’s article) provide 

visual and text resources for students without them having to buy 

additional texts in what is a European (and not a world ) history course. 

1. Brief Overview of Islamic Golden Age 

a. Some Key Thinkers, e.g., Averroës, Avicenna, Idrisi, 

etc. 

b. Accomplishments in Mathematics, e.g., Al-khwarlzmi, 

etc. 

2. Impact of Book Trade Through North Africa, Spain and Then 

into Western Europe During Middle Ages: Catalyst of Islamic 

Thinkers in Flowering of Medieval Culture 

3. Continued Cross-Fertilization During Renaissance 

a. Impact of Fall of Constantinople 1453 and Impact of 

Byzantine Authors and Manuscripts 

b. Impact of Islamic Thinkers on West Through Byzantine 

Texts and Contemporary Book Trade, e.g., Nasir al-Din 

al Tusi, Ibn al-Shatir, etc. 

4. Response of Western Thinkers, e.g., Postel, Sangallo, Fabricu, 

etc. 

5. Summing Up 

a. Ways in which Islamic Thinks Directly Influence 

Renaissance Thinkers, esp. Copernicus 

b. Pattern of Development of Science: Zigzag, Backward, 

and then Forward 


Implementation Project 21 

c. Continual Pattern of Cross-Fertilization between East 

and West, especially in Fields of Mathematics, 

Astronomy, and Physics 

d. Reconsideration of Traditional Terms, e.g., “Copernicus 

Revolution” or nature of “Renaissance Science” or 

“Arabic/Islamic 

Science.” 

Links: 

“Seeding the 

Renaissance-Science, Technology and Islam” Kenneth Humphreys 

“How 

Islam kick started science” Keith Devlin 

“Whose 

Science is Arabic Science in Renaissance Europe?” George Saliba 

Assignments 

The assignment below is part of the overall course structure in which 

students will be required to write 12 weekly substantive essay 

assignments (along with three essay exams). The dual goal of the second 

assignment in this series is to test student knowledge of the conventional 

narrative of the history of western science and then to test students in their 

knowledge of a contrasting narrative based partly upon materials 

presented in the “Empires and Science” Workshop. The first two links 

provide students with two web resources that highlight the impact of 

Islam from the Middle Ages to the Early modern era, and the third 

encapsulated many of the ideas Dr. Saliba presented at the Workshop. 

HISTORY OF EARLY MODERN EUROPE (HIST 131) 

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT #2 

The traditional view of the development of science is a story of heroic 

thinkers, from Copernicus to Newton, struggling in isolation to unlock the 

secrets of the cosmos through the evolving tools in the new system of 

thought called “science.” Recent scholarship has seriously questioned the 

validity of this traditional historical narrative and now suggests a narrative 

that reveals a complex and subtle cross-cultural interaction between the 

western and Islamic cultures. Therefore, 

a) Based upon the “Rise of Modern Science” pod cast and From the 

Renaissance to the Present: Sources of the Western Tradition, 


22 Mazurek 

ed. Perry, et al., Chapter 2, select what you feel was the most 

decisive event in the birth of science in the west; and 

b) Based upon the “Impact of Islam on the West” pod cast and the 

three links provided, what role do you feel Islamic Thinkers 

played in the development of science in the west? 

Note: Be sure to select substantive and illustrative examples from the pod 

casts, course texts and documents, and links to demonstrate or verify you 

analysis. 


The Golden Age of Islam Course Module 

Jayne Yantz 

Introduction 

The Golden Age of Islam is a period of incredible achievements in the 

Muslim world, and a period that Muslims today still view with a great 

sense of pride. The Golden Age is generally dated to coincide with the 

Abbasid Empire, lasting roughly from 750 until 1258, when the Mongols 

conquer the Abbasid Caliphate. The Islamic empire of the Abbasids, 

described by George Saliba as the largest in human history, encouraged 

the spread of information and ideas through travel and trade, which 

promoted contact with multiple cultures and strengthened science and 

learning. Simultaneously, Muslim rulers became patrons of learning by 

supporting libraries, academies and scientific research. Although both 

scientific investigation and artistic achievements continue after the 

Mongol invasion, the Muslim world never recovers its position of 

leadership in the realm of intellectual discovery, and the Mongol conquest 

brings the Golden Age to a close. 

The Golden Age produced intellectual contributions in a variety of 

fields, including science, mathematics and medicine, as well as art and 

literature. Muslim science, in particular, was the most advanced in the 

world during the Golden Age of the Abbasid Empire. The overriding 

feature of the Golden Age was a belief in the importance of learning, 

which was based on empirical observation and the understanding that 

knowledge is cumulative. In the Muslim world, there was no conflict 

between science and religion. 

In the college classroom, the topic of the Golden Age is particularly 

important. It can be used to dispel stereotypes about Middle Eastern 

history, culture and religion. It can also show contributions made by the 

Islamic world to the West, and the way in which scholars have worked 

together, building on information that others—in other parts of the 

world—had developed before them. A study of the Golden Age reminds 

us that good science results from sharing information and assimilating 

past knowledge, without regard to political or geographic borders. 

A list of Muslim achievements during the Golden Age follows below. 

These can be used selectively to illustrate the sophistication of the Muslim 

world in a variety of fields during the Golden Age. Examples from this 

list can also show influences on the West which are now believed to have 

helped spur the development of the Renaissance. 

Examples of Advances in the Golden Age: Economy and Technology 

* Irrigation projects, cisterns and water wheels. As the population grew 

during the early Caliphates and people settled in larger towns or cities, it 

became necessary to provide them with water through large-scale 


24 Yantz 

irrigation projects and water storage systems, such as the large cistern 

built at Kairouan, located in North Africa, which provided people with 

water during dry periods of the year. Today a 44-foot water wheel still 

stands in Syria, evidence of how Muslims also harnessed water for 

manufacturing purposes in the Golden Age. 

*Experiments in Crop Production. To feed the growing population, food 

production increased. Scientific experiences in crop production and crop 

rotation are documented in farming manuals from the period. Based on 

such experiments, hard durum wheat was introduced, which could be 

stored well for fairly long periods. 

*Ice in the desert. Undergraduates may be impressed to know that ice was 

available in the Middle East during the Golden Age. By collecting ice 

when the temperature drops at night, particularly in the mountains, ice 

could then be stored in well insulated ice houses until it was required for 

use. There is a famous story about Saladin sending ice to King Richard 

during the Crusades, when Richard fell ill in the Hoy Land. Chances are 

good this really happened. 

*Fiber arts. Cloth production increased in quantity and variety in the 

Middle East, giving us in the West words like “taffeta” (the Persian word 

for spinning) or “damask” (from Damascus). These fine fabrics 

astonished the Crusaders when they arrived in the 11 th century and fabrics 

(including woven carpets) were often taken home as souvenirs. Once they 

arrived in Europe, fine eastern fabrics were often used to wrap relics (such 

as the bones of saints) and appreciated as luxury objects, often appearing 

in religious paintings of Mary and Jesus (sometimes even with copies of 

Arabic inscriptions). Painters like Holbein (German) and Lotto (Italian) 

both used Muslim carpets as painting props so frequently that carpet types 

are named after these painters, e.g., the “Holbeins” now refers to a 

specific carpet design. 

*Trade. Trade fosters economic growth and the exchange of ideas, 

including innovations and scientific advances. In order to encourage 

trade, the Muslim world established caravanserais along the trade routes 

(desert caravanserais) and inside major cities (urban caravanserais). 

Caravanserais were accommodations for caravan drivers, their animals 

and their trade goods—hotels that took camels. Inside the cities, souks, 

bazaars or markets were established to allow for the exchange of goods. 

These were often constructed near or around the local mosques. 

*Wheels? If the Muslim world was so advanced, why did Muslims not 

have wheels? The same question has been raised as a cultural indictment 


The Golden Age of Islam 25 

about the Inka in Peru. In both cases, these societies had little use for the 

wheel, because of the local terrain. Both, in fact, knew the wheel, but did 

not use it extensively, because the wheel was not practical. Still visible 

today in the old quarters , many early Muslim cites were constructed with 

twisting, narrow streets—allowing two camels to pass through and 

encouraging the breezes to flow while simultaneously blocking the sun 

from heating the building interiors. Camels, it appears, were more 

practical than wheels. 

Intellectual Advances in the Golden Age 

The Golden Age of Islam is best known for its intellectual contributions, 

including such achievements as “Arabic” numbers, copies of Greek texts, 

and the development of algebra. There are many, many other 

contributions. Here are some: 

*Increased literacy level. Because of the importance of words (spoken 

and written), literacy in the Muslim world surpassed literacy rates in the 

West during the Golden Age. The best evidence for this is the degree to 

which Arabic writing covers the surface of everything, from architecture 

to rugs to plates. Good examples to share with students include ceramic 

plates covered in proverbs, such as “If the soup be good, don’t complain 

about the bowl.” These common aphorisms teach and simultaneously 

spread literacy. 

*Libraries. It is generally accepted that the Muslim world had true 

libraries in the Golden Age, where scholars could meet, discuss and 

debate intellectual issues. These libraries were based on Sassanian 

academies with literary translators and copyists—the most famous was in 

Baghdad, called the “House of Knowledge.” These institutions far 

surpassed European book collections in quantity and quality of books. 

*Collection of Ancient Texts. The Muslim world is often credited with 

saving ancient Greek texts by copying, translating and disseminating 

them. Once translated into Latin, these texts, generally with updated 

Muslim revisions, made their way into Europe, often through Spain. As a 

result, works like Aristotle’s De Anima (with notations by the Muslim 

scholar Averroes) were basic reading that contributed to the emergence of 

the European Renaissance. Significantly, these ancient texts were 

annotated or revised by Muslim scholars, making Muslim copies of 

ancient texts the most current and comprehensive scientific texts 

available. 

*Mathematics. Muslim scholars develop algebra. Work in algebra led to 

further advances, including developments in trigonometry and geography. 


26 Yantz 

For example, “sine” used in Trigonometry is an Arabic word.. Muslim 

mathematicians also refine and pass to the West both Arabic numerals and 

the concept of zero. 

*Geography. Muslim scholars improve Ptolemy’s coordinate tables, 

improving on this Greek source, showing that Muslim scholars are 

dedicated to scientific inquiry and are not willing to accept data at face 

value; rather, they understand that data must be tested and that knowledge 

is cumulative. 

*Astronomy. Muslim scientists improved the astrolabe (used for plotting 

locations of heavenly bodies) and updated Greek astronomical texts, 

including Ptolemy. Rashid al-Sufi’s Book of Constellations, created in 

1009, draws from Greek sources but translates them into Islamic models 

(e.g., Andromeda becomes a clothed dancing girl and Sagittarius has a 

beard and turban). This is the earliest extent Islamic illustrated text, and 

was one of the sources that helped transmit Greek astronomical texts to 

the West, accounting for why we look at the sky today and see the same 

constellations that the Greeks did. 

*Medicine. Muslim scholars translate Galen and Hippocrates from the 

Greek originals, then analyze and update these medical texts, improving 

modern medicine. In the 9 th century in Baghdad, the first true hospitals 

were created, based on the concepts of wards, where patients are separated 

by illness, reflecting an early understanding of the concept of germs. In 

addition, Muslim physicians identify hay fever. 

*Pharmacology. Pharmacists were licensed and tested. Antique texts on 

herbal medicine were copied, updated and transmitted, such as 

Dioscorides’ herbal, known to have been copied in Baghdad in the 13 th 

century. 

The Literary Arts 

In the Golden Age, new literary forms emerged. Many of these new 

creations have remained an important part of both eastern and western 

culture today. Here are some samples. 

*1001 Nights. First compiled in the Golden Age, 1001 Nights is an 

example of popular literature that consolidated oral tales into book form. 

The setting is the Sassanian court, but the stories come from a wider 

geographic region, including India, and their origins are far from certain. 

The familiar plot revolves around a queen who must tell her king a story 

each night, with the goal of keeping the king interested enough to wait 

until the next day for the ending—or he would have her killed. Because 


The Golden Age of Islam 27 

these stories include Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and Aladdin, this is a 

natural topic for undergraduate courses. Students are often surprised to 

discover that some of their childhood tales come to them from the Muslim 

world. 

*Mirrors of Princes. Animal fables, such as stories of Kalila and Dimna, 

were written to entertain and teach. These are referred to as “mirrors for 

princes,” because they were intended originally to educate children at 

court, but their charm guaranteed that they became widely popular. Kalila 

and Dimna are two roguish foxes/jackals whose escapades appeal to 

students and illustrate the way literature can teach moral values. 

*Legal Systems. In the Abbasid period, the four schools of law were 

formalized. These schools of law continue today, profoundly influencing 

the Islamic world. 

The Visual Arts 

Samples from the decorative arts also illustrate the richness of the Golden 

Age. Masterfully glazed ceramics, ornate incense burners, inlaid bronze 

ewers, richly decorated copies of Qur’anic verse, decorative tiles and 

elaborately carved ivory containers all testify to the skills of Muslim 

artisans. There is no doubt that Islamic artistic achievements in the 

Golden Age were impressive. But did these wares influence Europe? 

*Glass and ceramics. It is increasing clear that the Muslim world exerted 

influence on the artistic awaking of the European Renaissance, notably in 

Italian glass and ceramic production. For instance, gilded and enameled 

glass made in Syria and Egypt during the Golden Age had a direct and 

significant influence on Venetian glass production. Venice is located 

between East and West, which allowed Venice to engage in trade between 

the two regions and provided opportunities for the Venetians to borrow 

from their Muslim trading partners. 

*Architecture. In architecture, Venice also reveals Eastern influences, 

particularly in the openness, delicacy and rhythmic details of Venetian 

facades along the Grand Canal. In addition, San Marco, one of Venice’s 

great churches, is decorated on the exterior with mosaics—as is done in 

the Mosque at Damascus and on the exterior of the Dome of the Rock, a 

major Muslim building. In contrast, in Christian sources, such as Hagia 

Sophia created by the Byzantines or the churches at Ravenna in northern 

Italy, the mosaics are generally inside. The Venetians may also have 

acquired a general love of rich colors and sumptuousness from both their 

Eastern neighbors, the Byzantines and the Muslims. 


28 Yantz 

*The pointed arch. A debate still exists about the source of the western 

Gothic (pointed) arch, which is one of the basic elements of design of 

Europe’s most famous 13 th century cathedrals, such as Chartres Cathedral 

or Notre Dame in Paris. What is certain is that Muslim architects had 

already invented the pointed arch by the 8 th century when it appeared in 

Syria. It is also clear that the pointed arch is first present in Europe after 

the beginning of the Crusades, when an increasing number of Western 

Christians were in the Middle East. It is thus quite likely that the Gothic 

arch has an Eastern origin. (Some scholars suggest it may also have 

spread to Europe from Muslim Spain.) If so, it can also be related to 

Muslim technological influences, because the pointed arch, in comparison 

to the earlier rounded arch, represents an advance in engineering, allowing 

for less lateral thrust and, consequently, a stronger arch that can support 

thinner and more open walls. Once in the West, of course, the pointed 

arch was quickly combined with other architectural elements, including 

flying buttresses and stained glass windows, creating a unique medieval 

style quite unlike any Islamic source. 

Summary: Islam and the West 

In the period of the Golden Age, Muslim intellectual achievements were 

extraordinary and diverse. Muslim objects and ideas entered the West in a 

variety of ways, providing some of the pieces that became the foundation 

of the European Renaissance. Today, Islamic contributions are often 

misunderstood or overlooked, due to modern stereotypes about the Middle 

East. In reality, however, there once was a powerful exchange of ideas 

from East to West, which helped to form our western cultural heritage. 

Bibliography 

Bloom, Jonathan and Sheila Blair. “The Golden Age,” in Part II of Islam, 

A Thousand Years of Faith and Power, pp. 77-155, Yale, 2002. 

Hess, Catherine, ed. The Arts of Fire: Islamic Influences on Glass and 

Ceramics of the Italian Renaissance, Los Angeles, 2004. 

Howard, Deborah. Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World 

on Venetian Architecture, 1100-1500, Yale, 2000. 

Huff, Toby. The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the 

West, Cambridge, 2003. 

Morgan, Michael. Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim 

Scientists, Thinkers and Artists, National Geographic, 2008. 

Robinson, Francis. “Knowledge, its Transmission, and the Making of 

Muslim Societies,” in the Cambridge Illustrated History, Islamic 

World, pp. 208-249, Cambridge, 1998. 


The Golden Age of Islam 29 

Saliba, Geogre. Islamic Science and the Making of the European 

Renaissance, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007. 

Turner, Howard. Science in Medieval Islam, University of Texas, 2006. 


The Spanish American Empire 

Nature, and the Emergence of Empiricism in the 

Sixteenth Century Atlantic World 


My work argues that the encounter of the New World is one of the key 

elements in the emergence of empirical practices that shaped 16 th and 17 th 

centuries science in Europe. The encounter made possible both the partial 

rejection of classical authorities, the validation of personal experience as a 

source of knowledge, and the institutionalization of empirical practices in 

centers of information. I stress the significance of the Atlantic World in 

the consolidations of sixteenth and seventeenth-century empirical 

practices. 

These empirical practices emerged as part of the commercial and 

imperial activities surrounding the exploration and colonization of the 

New World. Most explorers sought to find “things of whatever name and 

value and quality” to trade, as the early Spanish contracts referred to 

commodities. The environmental historian, William Cronon, argues that 

seeing the nature of the New World in terms of commodities meant to see 

nature as a collection of isolated and extractable entities. It also meant, I 

argue, that empirical descriptions of these entities became the prevailing 

method for understanding them. In the Spanish case, the crown 

established “sites of knowledge production” at the Casa de la Contratación 

and Council of Indies to regulate and control the diversity and biased 

nature of empirical reports. This paper discusses the emergence of those 

practices in Spain and America. 

Observations, Reports, and Institutions 

In the early years of explorations, no one had specific knowledge about 

the New World. Early sixteenth-century commercial contracts between 

the crown and entrepreneurs refer to commodities in such general terms as 

precious metals, precious stones, plants, animals, fish, birds, medicines, 

and “any thing of any name and quality” of value. Some of these contracts 

referred to “monsters” and “serpents.” Knowledge about natural products 

of the Indies was vague in the early years of exploration. Following a 

practice that began with the first explorers, who reported back to the 

crown, the crown requested all explorers to send reports about their 

explorations. 

Christopher Columbus (1451–1506)’s letters are examples of this. 

Years later, the royal official, Alonso de Zauzo (fl. 1515) wrote a report 

(1518) on natural things from Hispaniola Island (today Dominican 

Republic-Haiti) to Charles V. Zauzo mentioned brazil wood (a red dye), 

guaiacum, and fragrant resins. His report contains more specific 


Emergence of Empiricism 31 

information than the rather vague list of commodities mentioned in the 

contracts above. 

By the late 1500s, the crown sought to create mechanisms to collect 

more and better information about the New World. It established the 

position of the chief pilot (1508) at the Casa de Contratación for the 

purpose of collecting information for making charts (and also for the 

training of pilots). The Casa became a veritable chamber of knowledge 

from this point on. The Casa became a model to be admired, in particular, 

by the English who tried to establish a similar institution in England, The 

appointment of the chief pilot helped to transform individual observations 

contained in the reports into valid generalizations about the New World— 

in the form of charts and books. 

In the 1520s, the crown continued to request information from 

explorers and merchants but it began to request more information from its 

officials in the New World. In 1530, the crown ordered the new president 

of the Audiencia of New Spain, don Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal, to 

send reports about the land and its topography together with information 

about its inhabitants. 

In 1532, the crown added a new mechanism for collecting 

information. It appointed a Cronista de Indias (Chronicler of Indies) at the 

Council of Indies to collect and organize information about the New 

World. The initiative came, again, from below. The humanist and natural 

historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (Madrid, ca. 1478-Santo 

Domingo, Hispaniola, 1557) was the first scholar to study the New 

World’s nature. His travels, contacts with humanists, and knowledge of 

court systems had fortuitously prepared him to fashion himself as a 

natural historian once he came into contact with the New World. After 

arriving at the New World, this self-fashioned natural historian wrote the 

first natural history of the New World, De la natural historia de las Indias 

(1526), known also as the Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias. 

Oviedo wrote his Sumario from memory, for he had left his notes in 

Hispaniola (They would later become the basis for the Historia general y 

natural de las Indias). Oviedo's Sumario discussed the navigation to the 

New World, described customs and ways of the indigenous people, land 

animals, birds, rivers, streams, seas, fish, plants, herbs, “and things that 

produce the land.” 

He wanted to expand the Sumario into a more complete work and so 

he proposed an expedition to collect information from areas he had not 

visited yet to complete a larger natural history. The council explained to 

the king that Oviedo had asked for a salary to visit, with an assistant, 

“those lands that he has not visited.” The council suggested that Oviedo, 

for his “skill and experience,” be granted a salary so that he could write 

his history and include it in the history of Spain. This was the first 

proposal for a natural history expedition to the Indies. Oviedo’s 


32 Barrera 

expedition to the New World never took place; however, Charles V 

granted Oviedo a salary to write a history of “the things of the Indies.” 

He was to stay in Spain while the crown sent decrees to its officials in 

America requesting information for Fernández de Oviedo. The royal 

decree sent to the governor of the Fernandina Island (Cuba) asked for 

information “about the island, its dwellers, and its conditions.” It 

explained that Fernández de Oviedo was writing a general history of the 

Indies as well as a natural history of the lands and islands, its animals, and 

“its strangeness.” Oviedo would have to provide, every year, a copy of 

his own writings to be added to the history of Spain. The governor would 

therefore have to send information, as promptly as possible, every time it 

was requested. In all cases, these reports would have to be signed by the 

people who provided them — a significant requirement, because it cast 

individual testimony into the circuit of knowledge-gathering practice. As 

a result of his work, Fernández de Oviedo published the Historia general 

de las Indias (Sevilla, 1535; expanded edition 1557). Pliny, according to 

Oviedo, might have read “two thousand million books” but “I 

accumulated all that I wrote here from two thousand million works and 

scarcities and dangers in twenty-two years.” His personal observations 

were controlled by reports from other witnesses and transformed into 

knowledge (natural history) by his book within the context of the Council 

of Indies. Oviedo’s standing as natural historian was validated by his 

office. 

The same year that Oviedo was appointed Cronista de Indias (1532), 

the crown commissioned the cosmographer Alonso de Santa Cruz (c. 

1500-1572) to produce new navigational charts. He needed information 

about the “grades of the lands and islands.” The crown sent a royal decree 

to the officials of the Casa de Contratación that required shipmasters and 

pilots to render to Santa Cruz all the information he needed. Santa Cruz’s 

and Oviedo’s task was to transform personal observation into knowledge 

useful to the empire and to commercial groups. 

Santa Cruz proposed (in the late 1550s) to ask specific questions to 

explorers and colonists arriving to Seville, rather than asking for general 

information about the land and its natural things. Santa Cruz proposed to 

ask specific questions from those coming back from the New World. 

Santa Cruz’s guidelines required to ask specific questions regarding 

the latitude and longitude of places and ports; the geographical 

characteristics and healthiness of the land; descriptions of rivers, 

mountains, lakes, and fountains; and information about mines, minerals, 

stones, pearls, animals, “monsters,” trees, fruits, spices, drugs, and herbs. 

Finally, there were questions concerning the indigenous people — their 

kingdoms and provinces, borders, towns and cities, costumes, rites, types 

of knowledge, books, arms, trade (in general), and items that they traded. 



Almost simultaneously, in New Spain (between 1558 and 1569) the 

Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagun (ca.1499-1590) elaborated a 

questionnaire to write his Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva 

España. Sahagún sent questionnaires (reconstructed from his book) to 

Indian villages, asking for information about aspects of their culture, 

society, and land. On natural history, the questionnaire included questions 

about names of animals, the history of the name, physical description of 

the animal, its environment, its activities, its food, ways of hunting or 

catching it if so, customs of the animal, popular histories about it, sayings 

related to it. Both Sahagun and Santa Cruz collected information intensely 

during the 1560s. They were not alone. A soldier in Peru, a certain Pedro 

de Osma, who had read Monardes’ book, was searching Peru for 

medicines and natural products. He sent his report, and samples, to 

Monardes who included it his second book on medicines. 

From the chief pilot at the Casa to Oviedo at the Council to soldiers 

in Peru, and Santa Cruz in Seville common empirical practices emerged. 

These practices consisted in personal observations collected in the form of 

reports and samples and, then, evaluation by experts (the natural historian, 

the cosmographer, and the physician) who transformed them into 

knowledge (books about natural history, medicine, and cosmography). 

This transformation took place at particular institutions: the Casa de la 

Contratación (chief pilot, Santa Cruz), the Council of Indies (Oviedo), and 

botanical gardens (Monardes, the Franciscans). 

In the 1540s, new elements emerged in the institutionalization of 

empirical practices with the promulgation of the New Laws in 1542. The 

main purpose of the New Laws was the legislation of the encomienda 

system, grants of Indian labor. The laws were the result of debates on 

Native Americans brought about by Las Casas. However, one of the laws, 

Law 39, ordered that the 

discoverer must return to give account 

to the Audiencia of what he may have 

done and discovered, and the 

Audiencia must send it with a full 

report therein to our Council of the 

Indies in order that what is fitting for 

the service of God and our own may 

be provided for.... 

In the context of long-distance empires, the relationship between 

information and government became the reason for the institutionalization 

of empirical practices. Reports became the basis for this empirical practice 

because they were the only sources of knowledge about the New World. 


34 Barrera 

The recasting of personal experience as a source of knowledge was a 

significant innovation in the configuration of knowledge practices 

compared to scholastic practices, in which personal experience was only a 

step in the systematization and universalization of first principles. Within 

the Spanish American empire, personal experience took the form of 

reports describing long-distance events and things; this practice was 

institutionalized at the Council of the Indies and House of Trade. Law 39 

linked information-gathering practices with the government of the empire 

as well. 

Questionnaires 

Between the mid-1550s and late 1560s there appeared a new phase in the 

institutionalization of gathering practices in the Spanish empire with the 

creation of questionnaires. This phase began with the Memorial of Alonso 

de Santa Cruz in the mid-1550s and ended in the late 1560s during the 

tenure of Juan de Ovando as president of the Council of the Indies. The 

memorial of Santa Cruz to the king, written in the mid-1550s perhaps just 

a year after the ascension of Philip II to the Spanish throne in 1556, 

elaborated questions for the explorers of the New World discussed above. 

During Philip II’s reign (1556-1598) and in the wake of Santa Cruz’s 

memorial, there appeared a new interest in the nature of the New World. 

This interest culminated in institutionalization of information-gathering 

tools at the Council of the Indies between 1571 and 1573. The person 

behind the institutionalization of information gathering and knowledge 

production at the Council of the Indies was Juan de Ovando (1515–1575), 

president of the Council of the Indies from 1571 to 1575. During his 

inspection of the Council in 1569, he reformed the council’s legislative 

and administrative activities and established a more systematic practice in 

order to collect information. 

Ovando identified two major problems with the Council. The first 

problem concerned the lack of systematic information available on the 

New World. The second problem related to the lack of a uniform legal 

structure in the American kingdoms (Schäfer 1935, I: 129; Jimenez de la 

Espada 1965, I: 59). Ovando’s report resulted in the statutes of 1571, the 

Ordenanzas Reales del Consejo de Indias. Among other changes, the 

statutes created the new office of the chief cosmographer-chronicler. From 

this office came questionnaires for gathering information about the New 

World and the first scientific expeditions of this period, those of doctor 

Francisco Hernández (1571–1577), and of the cosmographermathematician 

Jaime Juan (1583). 

The first chief cosmographer-chronicler appointed was Juan López de 

Velasco (1530–1598). His duties consisted of writing the history of the 

Indies, censuring proposed histories about the Indies, and collecting 

geographical and natural information about the New World for the 



government of the Indies. More generally, the statutes of 1571 provided 

for the continuous collection of information about the New World. 

Similarly, the statutes for new discoveries and settlements of 1573 

established that explorers should make daily reports and descriptions of 

“what they see and find, and of what happens during the discovery.” This 

1573 statute stipulated that all this should be written in a book that 

“should be read in public to better determine the truth.” In 1573, the 

crown also issued the statutes for the formation of a book that provided 

descriptions of the Indies, or Ordenanzas para la formación del libro de 

las descripciones de Indias. 

The officials in charge of making the descriptions were almost all 

engaged directly in the American enterprise. They included high-ranking 

members of society such as officials of the Council of the Indies, officials 

of the Casa, archbishops, bishops, clerics, viceroys, presidents of 

audiencias, officials of audiencias, governors, mayors, council members 

both Spanish and indigenous, caciques, treasury officials, captains and 

fleet admirals, pilots, shipmasters, and captains of provinces. 

These reports covered all aspects of the New World: cosmography 

(climates, longitudes, altitudes, eclipses, celestial marks); hydrography 

(coasts, longitude and latitude of geographical accidents, positions and 

characteristics of rivers, ports, weather conditions during the year); natural 

history “constantly of each region” (domestic and wild animals, uses of 

animals, hunting methods, breeding practices, types of fish, edible fish, 

methods of fishing, wild and domestic birds, hunting methods, breeding 

methods, trees, plants, crops, woods, fruits, domestic and wild herbs, 

useful herbs, metals, types of lands); as well as moral history. Royal 

decrees were dispatched to New Spain, New Galicia, Hispaniola, 

Guatemala, Panama, Quito, Kingdom of New Granada, Chile, and 

Charcas with the order to implement the statutes of the Book of 

Descriptions of the Indies. 

As part of this program for gathering information on the New World, 

the crown elaborated specific questionnaires culminating in the 

questionnaire of 1577. This constituted yet another systematic attempt, 

after the statutes of the Book of Descriptions, to collect information about 

the colonies with regard to human groups and the natural world. The 1577 

questionnaire, called the Relaciones Geográficas de Indias, contained 50 

chapters and was dispatched all over the New World in 1577 and again in 

1584. The rate and speed of response to the questionnaires varied. From 

Venezuela, the responses arrived between 1578–79; from New Spain, 

between 1579–81 and 1584-85; from Ecuador, in 1592; from Perú in 1583 

and later between 1585-86 (Cline 1972, 193f). The Relaciones constituted 

a unique source of information about the natural world of the Indies as 

well as about its inhabitants. 


36 Barrera 

Parallel to the 1577 questionnaire, the cosmographer-chronicler 

López de Velasco elaborated a set of instructions to collect information on 

lunar eclipses and to determine, with the information collected, altitudes 

and longitudes of American places. Once again, his instructions were the 

result of the statutes of 1571. But these books and questionnaires were not 

the only attempt to collect information from the New World; the crown 

also sent expeditions to the New World: a medical expedition in 1570 and 

a cosmographical expedition in 1583. These expeditions belong to another 

talk. 

The study of the Relaciones Geográficas shows the links between 

people on the ground and state agents as well as between empire and 

information. Colonial Latin American historians are familiar with the 

Relaciones but they have not interrogated their connections to the 

formation of the state and science. The establishment of the Spanish 

empire in the New World was possible not only because of diseases, 

navigational technology, and alliances with Native Americans but also 

because of the knowledge the Spaniards collected about the New World. 

This knowledge made possible the commercial and political control of the 

New World. 

The Spaniards did not arrive in the New World with the tools to 

understand that world: they built those tools as they created their New 

World empire. Eventually, the crown linked those information-gathering 

practices to the good government of the American kingdoms: for them as 

well as for merchants in the early modern period knowledge became a 

commodity and a tool to control nature. 


Teaching the Latin American Survey 

William Paquette 

Syllabus 

HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICAN CIVILIZATIONS I 

HISTORY 231 

Instructor: Dr. William Paquette 

Course Description 

History 231 (3 Credits) surveys Latin American History from the Pre- 

Columbian Era to the 20 th century. Units of Study will focus on Pre- 

Columbian Civilizations, European Colonialism, 19 th century 

Independence Movements, and 20 th Century National Development. 

Course emphasis will be directed to Argentina and Uruguay where 

students will travel and on the multicultural history of Uruguay and 

Argentina with Indian, Spanish, African, Italian, and German populations 

predominating. 

Required Textbook 

A History of Latin America by Benjamin Keen and Keith Haynes, 8 th 

Complete Edition 2009, Houghton-Mifflin (now Cengage). The textbook 

website, http://college.hmco.com/pic/keen8e provides a list of learning 

objectives per chapter. 

Course Requirements: 

History of Latin American Civilizations I is a hybrid course that includes 

selected face-to-face meetings, MERLOT assignments, Video/DVD 

assignments, map assignments, examinations, and either a final exam in 

lieu of participation in a ten-day trip to Montevideo, Uruguay and Buenos 

Aires, Argentina. History 231 is divided into four units: Unit 1: Pre- 

Columbian Civilizations; Unit 2: European Exploration of the Americas 

and Colonialism in Latin America; Unit 3: 19 th Century Independence 

Movements; and Unit 4: Latin America in the 20 th Century. 

Students are expected to complete all required assignments for geography 

exercises, MERLOT exercises, Video/DVD exercises, reading 

assignments, and examinations, which combined constitute 75 % of the 

course. If a student is traveling to South America, the final 25% of the 

grade, a travel diary will be due within two weeks of the group’s return to 

the United States. Students not going to South America will write a 12– 

15 page research paper on a topic agreed to by the student and the 

instructor. All papers and travel diaries will be graded and considered for 


38 Paquette 

inclusion in a student journal publication. Scheduled classes will meet 

once per week for two hours and forty minutes as listed below under 

Course Schedule. 

Research Paper (in lieu of travel diary) 

Students will complete a 12-15 page research paper as the culmination of 

their study in History 231. The topic will be selected in agreement 

between the student and the instructor. The tentative schedule for the 

research paper is as follows: 

Second Week: Topic agreed to by student and instructor. 

Fourth Week: 

Bibliography submitted for instructor approval. 

Sixth Week: 

Outline of paper submitted for instructor 

approval. 

Fifteenth Week: Research Paper due. 

Research Topics 

1. The Maya, Aztec, and Inca populations of the Americas 

developed advanced scientific and mathematical systems. Select ONE 

pre-Columbian civilization (either the Maya, Aztec, or Inca) and write a 

paper detailing their scientific and mathematical accomplishments. 

2. Research and write a paper describing the geography and the 

plant and animal life of either the New Spain or Peru Vice-royalties. 

3. Describe in detail the significance of the Columbian Exchange 

between either Spain and its Vice-royalties of New Spain and Peru or 

between Portugal and Brazil. 

4. Research and write a paper describing the navigational and 

scientific knowledge of the Spanish sea captains who sailed to the 

Americas in the late 15 th and 16 th centuries. 

5. In the 19 th Century, New Spain and Peru broke with Spain and 

became a series of independent nations. Select one revolutionary leader 

from among Father Miguel Hidalgo, Simon Bolivar, Bernardo O’Higgins, 

or José de San Martin and write a paper detailing that leader’s 

contributions to Latin American independence movements. 

6. Research and write a paper describing the emerging cultures of 

the Americas under the EITHER the Spanish or the Portuguese in the 16 th 

and 17 th Century Americas. 



7. Research and write a paper describing and evaluating how the 

African Slave Trade affected the economies of EITHER Brazil, Peru, or 

New Spain. 

Course Schedule (tentative): 

Week One: 

Classroom meeting, orientation session. 

Lecture on the Pre-Columbian Civilizations of the Americas. 

Orientation session. Distribution of syllabus, materials, and 

discussion of Study Abroad aspect to the course. Read Chapters 1, 2, 

and 3 in the text. 

Weeks two to five: Learning Resources Center (Students on their 

own): Students are to complete three assignments from the 

MERLOT or VHS/DVD/CD options with the answers emailed to the 

instructor. (No Class Meeting). 

The Olmec Art of Ancient Mexico, VHS, 23 minutes, National Gallery 

of Art, Washington, DC. 

Legacy Series: Central America: The Burden of Time, VHS, 60 

minutes, Michael Wood narrator. 

MesoAmerica, CD produced by Dr. William Paquette that includes 

both text and photographs of Maya and Aztec archaeological sites in 

Central and Southern Mexico, 75 minutes. 

Sipan, Discovery and Research, VHS, pre-Incan civilization along the 

west coast of South America, 60 minutes, National Geographic 

Society, 1993. 

Incas, VHS, 48 minutes, 1986, Creative Projects, Inc. Emphasis is 

placed on the Inca scientific and architectural achievements. 

MERLOT website and assignment for Los Incas. 

MERLOT website and assignment for Mesoamerican Ballgame. 

MERLOT website and assignment for Astronomy of Central and 

South America. 

MERLOT website and assignment for Geometry Step by Step from 

the Land of the Incas. 


40 Paquette 

Week Six: The Geography of Latin America. Read Chapters 4–7 

in the text. Class meeting: New Spain, Peru, and Brazil. Students will 

turn in a series of maps due January 26, 2009. The maps are: 

1. The geography and topography of Central and South 

America. 

2. The location of Pre-Columbian civilizations and major 

Indian tribes along with their major centers of population. 

3. The European Conquest of Central and South America 

indicating areas of Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, and 

Danish control along with major settlements. 

4. The Independence movements of Latin America in the 19 th 

century locating the boundaries of emerging nations, capital 

cities, and other major population areas. 

5. Modern Latin America with national boundaries, major 

cities, and capital cities. 

Week Seven: Unit 1 exam to be posted on Blackboard. No scheduled 

class meeting. 

Weeks Eight to Ten: Class meeting, lecture: 19 th Century Independence 

Movements in Latin America. Read Chapters 9-11 in the text. Three 

assignments are to be emailed by February 23. Students are to 

complete three assignments from the following: 

The Mission, Warner Brothers. Film stars Robert de Niro and Jeremy 

Irons and records the conflict the Indians of the Amazon faced as 

Portugal and Spain fought for control over the area politically, militarily, 

and religiously. 

The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World. 

Chicago: Public Media Video, 1991, 5 hours. 

Builders of Images. South Burlington, VT: Annenberg/CPB 

Collection, 1993, 60 minutes. 

MERLOT website and assignment: Voyages of Exploration, Spain 

MERLOT website and assignment for Voyages of Exploration, 

Portugal. 

MERLOT website and assignment: The Conquistadors. 



MERLOT website and assignment: Simultaneous View of History in 

16 th Century New Spain or Relaciones Geograficas de America. 

Week Eleven: Readings from the textbook, Chapters 13-15 in the text. 

The Unit 3 examination will be posted on Blackboard. 

Week Twelve: Class meeting, lecture: The 19 th century liberation 

movements of Central and South America. 

Weeks Thirteen to Fifteen: Readings on 19 th and 20 th century Latin 

America in the Text. 

Week Sixteen: 

Research Paper due. 

On Site Learning Activities in South America 

(Spring Semester only) 

Excursions will be scheduled taking students and instructors to 

Montevideo, Punta del Este, and Colonia in Uruguay and Buenos Aires in 

Argentina. Listed below are sites suggested for study: 

Uruguay 

1. Palacio Legislativo 

2. Catedral Metropolitana 

3. Montevideo Cabildo, government house during the Colonial 

period. 

4. Montevideo Metropolitan Museum 

5. Martiz Square, Constitution Square and 804 cathedral. 

6. Palacio Taranco, Decorative Arts Museum. 

7. Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes, National Art Museum. 

8. Teatro Solís, 1856 music theatre. 

9. Ciudad Vieja, oldest part of the city and its colonial heritage. 

10. Plaza Independencia, the blending of old and new Uruguay. 

11. Barrio Sur, blending of Uruguayan and African cultures. 

12. Museo de Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, major Uruguayan 

writer and poet. 

13. Museo Torres García, museum to Joaquin Torres Garcia. 

14. El Cabildo, original town hall. 

15. Museo del Gaucho y de la Moneda, gaucho and cowboy 

museum. 

Argentina 

1. Teatro Colón, 1908 Opera House. 


42 Paquette 

2. Barrio de San Telmo, mansions turned into tenements during 

the 1871 Yellow Fever epidemic. 

3. Plaza Dorrego, oldest street and site of the 1816 

independence movement. 

4. Obelisco, 1936 monument where political demonstrations 

occur and where Argentines celebrate national victories, 

particularly in sporting events. 

5. Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Museum 

of post modern art. 

6. Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1896, Fine Arts Museum 

with European collections going back to the 12 th century. 

7. Plaza de Mayo, heart of Buenos Aires history. 

8. Casa Rosada, government house particularly associated with 

the Perons. 

9. Catedral Metropolitana, 1862, burial site of the Great 

Liberator General Jose de San Martin. 

10. Iglesia de San Ignacio, 1719, oldest church in Buenos Aires 

in the shape of a Latin cross. 

11. Cementerio de la Recoleta, burial site of Eva Perón. 

12. Basílica de Santo Domingo, 1783, colonial architecture 

burial location of the creator of the Argentine flag. 

13. Teatro Cervantes, 1921, where Hispanic and Argentine plays 

are performed. 

14. Plaza de los Dos Congresos, National Congress Building. 

15. San Vincente Museum and Mausoleum of Juan Perón. 

Instructor Information 

Communications between the instructor and students will be based on 

email communication and scheduled office hours. The weeks when a 

face-to-face class is scheduled, the instructor will be available in his 

office, Room 203, two hours before the class begins. Office Hours will be 

posted on the office door and stated in the syllabus. Students should 

check Blackboard for weekly announcements when the class is not 

meeting on campus. 

Student Requirements 

Students are to complete all course work as scheduled in the syllabus. 

Students are to complete the Orientation Checklist and return it to the 

Instructor. The Orientation Checklist governs their course behavior and 

responsibilities. Students should also read the following sections of the 

TCC Student Handbook, VCCS Computer Ethics Guidelines, and 

Virginia State Law: Title 18.2-152 (Virginia Computer Crimes Act), Title 

18.2-152.3 (Computer Fraud), Title 18.2-152.5 (Computer Invasion of 

Privacy), Title 18.2-152.5:1 (Using a Computer to Identify Information), 



and Title 18.2-152.6 (Theft of Computer Services). The Orientation 

Checklist identifies specific course policies about academic honesty, 

cheating, and plagiarism. 

Selected Bibliography 

Pre-Columbian Americas 

Benson, Elizabeth P. and Beatriz de la Fuente, eds. Olmec Art of Ancient 

Mexico. New York: Harry Abrams, Inc. 1996. 

Schobinger, Juan. The Ancient Americans: A Reference Guide to the Art, 

Culture, and History of Pre-Columbian North and South America. 

Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference, 2001. 

The Maya 

Alonzo, Guadlberto Zapata. Descriptive Guidebook to Coba. Mexico 

City: copyrighted by author, n.d. 

Astronomy of Central and South America. 

. 

Chichen Itza. Panorama Guidebooks, S.A., annually revised. 

Demarest, Arthur, Andrew. Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a 

Rainforest Civilization. New York: Cambridge University Press, 

2004. 

Duran, Fray Diego. Book of the Gods on Rites and the Ancient Calendar. 

Trans. Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden. Norman: University 

of Oklahoma Press, 1975. 

Fash, William L. Scribes, Warriors, and Kings. London: Thames and 

Hudson, 1991. 

Freidel, David, Linda Schele, Joy Parker. Maya Cosmos. New York: 

William Morrow, 1993. 

Gallenkamp, Charles and Regina Elise Johnson, eds. Maya, Treasures of 

an Ancient Civilization. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1985. 

Herring, Adam. Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, AD 600-800. New 

York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 

McKillop, Heather Irene. The Ancient Maya: New Perspectives. Santa 

Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004. 

Mesoamerican Ballgame. . 

Miller, Mary and Simon Martin. Courtly Art of the Maya. San Francisco: 

Thames and Hudson, 2004. 

Molesky-Poz, Jean. Contemporary Maya Spirituality: The Ancient Ways 

are not Lost. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. 

Paris Codex. . 

Popol Vuh. Trans. Dennis Tedlock. New York: Simon and Schuster, 

1985. 


44 Paquette 

Reents-Dudet, Dorie. Painting the Maya Universe: Royal Ceramics of the 

Classic Period. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. 

Sandstrom, Alan R. and Valencia, E. Hugo Garcia, eds. Native Peoples of 

the Gulf Coast of Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 

2005. 

Tulum. Mexico City: Eiciones Alducin, annually revised. 

The Aztec 

Aguilar-Moreno, Manuel. Handbook to Life in the Aztec World. New 

York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 

Angulo, Jorge. Teotihuacan, City of the Gods. Florence, Italy: Casa 

Editrice Bonnechi, 1996. 

Aztec Calendar. Mexico City: Garcia y Valades, 1996. 

The Aztecs (Videorecording). Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities 

and Sciences, 2002. 

Baldwin, Neil. Legends of the Plumed Serpent: Biography of a Mexican 

God. New York: Public Affairs, 1998. 

Carrasco, David. Daily Life of the Aztecs: People of the Sun and Earth. 

Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. 

Knight, Alan. Mexico: From the Beginning to the Spanish Conquest. 

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 

Mann, Charles C. New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. 

New York: Knopf, 2005. 

Moetezuma, Eduardo Matos. Official Guide, The Great Temple. Mexico 

City: INAH-SALVANT, n.d. 

Miller, Mary Ellen. The Art of MesoAmerica: From Olmec to Aztec. 

London: Thames and Hudson, 2001. 

Townsend, Richard F. The Aztecs. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. 

Van Tuerenhout, Dirk R. The Aztecs: New Perspectives. Santa Barbara, 

CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008. 

The Inca 

Burger, Richard L. and Salazar, Lucy C., eds. Manchu Picchu: Unveiling 

the Mystery of the Incas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 

D’Altroy, Terence N. The Incas. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. 

Geometry Step by Step from the Land of the Incas. 

. 

Inca: Secrets of the Ancestors (videorecording). Alexandria, VA: Time- 

Life Video and Television, 1995. 

Incan Life. Lincolnwood, IL: Jamestown Publishers, 2001. 



Los Incas. . 

Malpass, Michael Andrew. Daily Life in the Inca Empire. Westport, CT: 

Greenwood Press, 1996. 

Stierlin, Henri. Art of the Incas and its Origins. New York: Rizzoli, 

1984. 

The Incas (videorecording). Alexandria, VA: PBS Home Video, 1995. 

The Incas. http://incas.homestad.com. 

Colonialism under the Spanish and the Portuguese 

Almeida, Onesimo T. “Portugal and the Dawn of Modern Science.” 

Portugal, The Pathfinder: Journeys from the Medieval toward the 

Modern World 1300-ca 1600. Madison: The Hispanic Seminary of 

Medieval Studies, Ltd., 1995. 

Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American 

Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. Austin, TX: University of 

Texas Press, 2006. 

Bleichmar, Daniela. “Books, Bodies, and Fields: Sixteenth-Century 

Transatlantic Encounters with New World Materia Medica. Colonial 

Botany: science, commerce, and politics in the early modern world. 

Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 

Boxer, C. R. The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695-1750, Growing Pains of a 

Colonial Society. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1962. 

Colonial Latin American Review, 15, no. 1, 2006. (Issue on Spanish 

Empire and Science). 

Columbus and the Age of Discovery (videorecording). Princeton, NJ: 

Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 1991. 

The Conquistadors. . 

De Las Casas, Bartolome. The Devastation of the Indies. Trans. Herma 

Briffault. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 

De Vos, Paula Susan. “The Science of Spices: Empiricism and Economic 

Botany in the Early Spanish Empire.” Journal of World History, 17, 

no. 4, 2006. 

Elliott, John Huxtable. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain 

in America, 1492-1830. New Haven: Yale University Pres, 2006. 

Fuentes, Carlos. The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New 

World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. 

Fuentes, Carlos. The Buried Mirror (videorecording). Chicago: IL: 

Public Media Video, 1991. 


46 Paquette 

Goodman, David C. Power and Penury: Government, Technology, and 

Science in Philip II’s Spain. Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 1988. 

Gomez, Nicolas Wey. The Tropics of Empire, Why Columbus Sailed 

South to the Indies.. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 

Kamen, Henry Arthur Francis. Philip of Spain. New Haven: Yale 

University Press, 1998. 

Kaplan, Gregory B., ed. Sixteenth Century Spanish Writers. Detroit: 

Thomson Gale, 2006. 

Knight, Alan. Mexico: The Colonial Era. New York: Cambridge 


Koch, Peter O. The Aztecs, the Conquistadors, and the Making of 

Mexican Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2006. 

Lamb, Ursula. “Cosmographers of Seville: Nautical Science and Social 

Experience.” First Images of America: The Impact of the New World 

on the Old. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. 

Marrin, Albert. Inca and Spaniard: Pizarro and the Conquest of Peru. 

New York: Athenaeum, 1989. 

Nesvig, Martin Austin, ed. Local Religion in Colonial Mexico. 

Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. 

Norton, Marcy. “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European 

Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics.” The American 

Historical Review, 111, no. 3, 2006. 

Simultaneous View of History in 16 th Century New Spain or Relaciones 

Geograficas de America. 

. 

Voyages of Exploration (Portugal). 

. 

Voyages of Exploration (Spain). 

. 

Wilford, John Noble. The Mysterious History of Columbus: An 

Exploration of the Man, the Myth, the Legacy. New York: Knopf, 

1991. 

19 th Century Latin America 

Barman, Roderick J. Citizen Emperor, Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 

1825-1891. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. 

Cambridge Histories Online: The River Plate Republics, 1870-1930. 

Cambridge University Press, 1986. 

Curto, Jose C. and Soulodre-LaFrance, Renee. Africa and the Americas: 

Interconnections during the Slave Trade. Trenton, NJ: Africa World 

Press, 2005. 



David, Darien J., ed. Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of 

Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean, Lanham, MD: 

Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. 

Davis, David Biron. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in 

the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 

Events Leading to Mexican Independence. 

. 

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. The General in His Labyrinth (Simon Bolivar). 

New York: Knopf, 1990. 

Horne, Gerald. The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the 

African Slave Trade. New York: NYU Press, 2007. 

Kinsbruner, Jay. Bernardo O’Higgins. New York: Twayne Publishers, 

1968. 

Lopez-Alves, Fernando. State Formation and Democracy in Latin 

America, 1810–1900. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 

Nugent, Walter T. K. Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 

1870-1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 

Weber, David and J. Barbaros. Spaniards and their Savages in the Age of 

Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 

Williams, Mary Wilhelmine. Dom Pedro the Magnanimous, Second 

Emperor of Brazil. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina 

Press, 1937. 

20 th Century Latin America 

Fishburn, Evelyn and Ortiz, Eduardo L. Science and the Creative 

Imagination in Latin America. London: Institute for the Study of the 

Americas, 2005. 

Hispanic and Latin American Heritage Video Collection. Bala Cynwyd, 

PA: Schlessinger Video Productions, 1995. 

Jaquette, Jane S. and Wolchik, Sharon L. Women and Democracy: Latin 

America and Central and Eastern Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns 

Hopkins University Press, 1998. 

Klaiber, Jeffrey L. The Church, Dictatorships, and Democracy in Latin 

America. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998. 

Payne, Leigh A. Uncivil Movements: The Armed Right Wing and 

Democracy in Latin America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins 


Peruzzotti, Enrique and Smulovitz, Catalina, eds.. Enforcing the Rule of 

Law: Social Accountability in the New Latin American Democracies. 

Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. 

Sullivan, Edward J. Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century. 

London: Phaldon Press, 1996. 


48 Paquette 

Wiarda, Howard J. Dilemmas of Democracy in Latin America: Crises 

and Opportunity. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 

2005. 

Yeatts, Guillermo M. The Roots of Poverty in Latin America. Jefferson, 

NC: McFarland and Co., 2005. 

Argentina 

Arditti, Rita. Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo 

and the Disappeared Children of Argentina. Berkeley: University of 

California Press, 1999. 

Feitlowitz, Marguerite. A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies 

of Torture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 

Foster, David William. Culture and Customs of Argentina. Westport, 

CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. 

Fraser, Nicholas. Evita. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. 

Marchak, M. Patricia. God’s Assassins: State Terrorism in Argentina in 

the 1970s. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. 

Page, Joseph A. Peron, A Biography. New York: Random House, 1983. 

Rodriquez, Julia. Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine, and the 

Modern State. 

Brazil 

Brazil Revealed (videorecording). Canada: Discovery Channel Canada, 

2006. 

Easkin, Marshall C. Brazil: The Once and Future Country. New York: 

St. Martin’s Press, 1997. 

Levine, Robert M. The History of Brazil. Westport, CT: Greenwood 

Press, 1999. 

Vincent, Jon S. Culture and Customs of Brazil. Westport, CT: 

Greenwood Press, 2003. 

Mexico 

Hamnett, Brian R. A Concise History of Mexico. New York: Cambridge 


Meyer, Michael C. and Beezley, William H., eds. The Oxford history of 

Mexico. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 

Shorris, Earl. The Life and Times of Mexico., New York: W.W. Norton, 

2004. 

Uruguay 

Uruguay: A Country Study. Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 

1992. 



Whitaker, Arthur Preston. The United States and the Southern Cone: 

Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 

Press, 1976. 

Course Outline 

I. The Americas Pre-Columbian Civilizations . 

A. The Geography of Central and South America. 

B. Location of major Pre-Columbian civilizations and 

population centers. 

C. The Mysterious Olmec. 

1. Theories about the origins of the Olmec. 

2. The Art of the Olmec. 

D 

The Maya 

1. Origins of the Maya. 

2. Religious Beliefs. 

3. Political System. 

4. Economic System. 

5. Literary and Scientific Writing System. 

6. Advances in mathematics, sciences, and 

astronomy. 

7. Art and Architecture. 

8. Reasons for Decline. 

E. The Aztecs 

1. Story of Creation. 

2. The Temples of the Sun and Moon. 



5. Economic System 

6. Advances in mathematics, sciences, and 

architecture. 

7. Art of the Aztecs. 

F. The Sipan 

1. Lowland civilizations in Peru. 

2. Reasons for their collapse. 

G. The Inca 

1. Origins of the Inca. 



4. Economic System. 

5. Advances in agriculture, mathematics, 

sciences, and astronomy. 


50 Paquette 

6. The art, architecture, and highway system of 

the Inca. 

II. 

The Age of European Exploration and the Colonization of Latin 

America. 

A. Spain and Portugal in 1492. 

1. Iberian political systems. 

2. The role of the Roman Catholic Church and 

religious orders. 

3. Iberian economies. 

4. Motivations for exploration. 

5. European scientific and navigational 

knowledge. 

B. Spanish and Portuguese Explorers. 

1. Prince Henry the Navigator 

2. Diaz and Da Gama 

3. The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus. 

4. Cabral finds Brazil. 

5. Magellan, Ponce de Leon, Coronado, Balboa, 

and Desoto. 

6. Cortes finds the Aztecs. 

7. Pizarro conquers the Inca. 

C. The Columbian Exchange: what Europe and the 

Americas borrowed from each other affecting the 

economies of both continents. 

D. The Spanish conduct a Census. 

1. What were the questions? 

2. What were the answers? 

E. A Conflict of Cultures: European versus Native 

American. 

1. The role of the Conquistadors. 

2. The creation of the Viceroyalties of New 

Spain and Peru. 

3. The role of Catholicism and Religious Orders 

in the New World. 

4. Intermarriage between Europeans and Indians. 

5. A new market economy. 

6. The introduction of Africans into the economic 

system. 

7. The geography of New Spain, Peru, and Brazil. 

III. 

19 th Century Independence Movements 

A. The Decline of Spain and Portugal. 



1. The Impact of the French Revolution and the 

Napoleonic Era on the fortunes of Spain and its 

colonial empire and on Portugal and its 

colonial empire. 

B. The Portuguese Royal Family flees to Brazil to escape 

Napoleon. 

1. The reign of John VI in Brazil. 

2. The delayed return of the Royal Family to 

Portugal. 

3. Pedro IV of Portugal becomes Pedro I, 

Emperor of Brazil. 

4. Pedro I’s abdication and return to Portugal. 

5. Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, monarch, scholar, 

and ecologist. 

6. Emancipation of Brazilian slaves overthrows 

the monarchy in 1889. 

C. Mexico 

1. The leadership of Father Miguel Hidalgo. 

2. The First Mexican Empire under Iturbide. 

3. The First Mexican Republic. 

4. The role of the Spanish aristocracy and the 

Roman Catholic Church in Mexico’s economy 

and politics. 

5. The Second Mexican Empire under 

Maximilian of Austria. 

6. An unstable Mexico 1867-1900. 

E. Simon Bolivar, José de San Martin, and Bernardo 

O’Higgins liberate South America. 

1. Emerging nations and changing boundaries. 

2 The role of native Americans in the emerging 

political system. 

3. Politics, Religion, Economics, and the Social 

Class system in Argentina and Uruguay. 

4. Mapping Latin America’s political, economic, 

and population centers. 

IV. 

20 th Century Latin America (emphasis on Mexico, Brazil, 

Argentina, and Uruguay). 

1. The role of the United States in Latin American Politics. 

2. The Latin American interpretation of Democracy. 

3. The role of the military in Latin American politics. 

4. The position of Native Americans in Latin American 

politics. 


52 Paquette 

5. New immigrants to Latin America from Europe. 

6. Latin America’s developing economies. 

7. The changing role of religion and the Roman Catholic 

Church in Latin American politics and economics. 

8. The integration of Latin America’s diverse populations. 

9. Catholic socialism and Soviet Communism compete 

with American capitalism. 

10. Latin America’s future! 

Study Guide, History 231* 

1. Name and locate the pre-Columbian civilizations of Central 

and South America. 

2. List the reasons for European voyages of exploration in the 

15 th and 16 th centuries. 

3. Compare and contrast Olmec, Maya, and Aztec civilizations 

based on political systems, religious beliefs, economic 

systems, art and architecture, mathematics and science, and 

social organization. 

4. Explain the declines of the Olmec ,Maya, and Sipan 

civilizations. 

5. Describe the civilizations of the Andes. 

6. Describe the conquest of Central and South America by the 

Spanish. 

7. Identify and give the significance of: Prince Henry the 

Navigator, Bartholomew Diaz, Vasco da Gama, Christopher 

Columbus, Mesoamerica, Olmec, Maya, Tikal, Chichen Itza, 

Aztec, Teotihuacan, pochteca, Nazca, Quechua, Machu 

Picchu, Cortes, Pizarro, Atahualpa, Montezuma, Incas, 

Cuzco, Quetzalcoatl, conquistadores. 

8. List and describe the methods used by the Spanish to 

conquer Central and South America. 

9. Describe the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the 

religious and social structures of Latin America. 

10. Discuss and evaluate Spain’s census of New Spain and Peru. 

11. Explain the political and economic significance of the 

Columbian Exchange. 

12. Identify and give the significance of: Bartoleme de Las 

Casas, Treaty of Tordesillas, fazendas, black legend, Casa de 

Contratacion, consulado, quinto, encomienda, the Portobello 

Fair, Prepartimento, hacienda, Potosi, creoles. 

13. Compare and contrast Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule 

in Central and South America. 



14. Describe the economic systems developed in Central and 

South America under the Spanish and the Portuguese. 

15. Detail the history of slavery in Central and South America. 

16. Compare and contrast the impact of slavery on Amerindians 

and Africans in Central and South America. 

17. List the reasons for the Wars of Independence in Latin 

America. 

18. Identify and give the significance of: San Martin, Toussaint 

L’Ouverture, Father Miguel Hidalgo, Simon Bolivar, 

Bernardo O’Higgins, Ilaneros, Father Jose Morelos y Pavon, 

Pedro I, caudillos. 

19. Compare and contrast the newly created Latin American 

nations of Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, and Uruguay. 

20. Describe the emerging Latin America after independence 

from Spain and Portugal. 

21. Describe the system of land ownership and the social class 

system. 

22. Explain the role of Africans in Latin America’s economic 

systems. 

23. Evaluate the political systems established in Latin America. 

24. Evaluate the importance of foreign influence on Latin 

America. 

25. Compare and contrast the development socially, 

economically, and politically in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, 

Peru, and Uruguay. 

26. List the problems historically confronting Latin America. 

27. Compare and contrast the Maya and Latin American 

perspectives or world views. 

28. List and give the significance of: Juan Manuel de Rosas, 

Bernardino Rivadavia, Justo Jose de Urquiza, nactionalismo, 

Eva and Juan Peron, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, La 

Reforma, Benito Juarez, Maximilian, Porfirio Diaz, 

Emiliano Zapata, Plan of Ayala, Pancho Villa, Institutional 

Revolutionary Party, Pedro II, Paraguayan Wars, Getulio 

Vargas. 

29. Explain the role of the United States in Latin American 

politics. 

30. Discuss the Latin American interpretation of democracy. 

31. Discuss and evaluate the role of the military in Latin 

American politics. 

32. Explain the significance of the native American and African 

politics in Latin American economies and social class 

system. 


54 Paquette 

33. Identify new European immigrate groups to Latin American 

arriving in the 20 th century. 

34. Explain the increasingly socialist role of the Roman Catholic 

Church in political, economic, and family issues. 

35. Identify Latin America’s greatest successes and biggest 

problems. 

*Unit I: 1-7. 

*Unit II: 8-16. 

*Unit III: 17-29. 

*Unit IV: 30-35. 


Who is Responsible for the Limits of Jesuit Scientific and Technical 

Transmission from Europe to China in the Eighteenth Century? 

Benjamin A. Elman 

The talk will focus on why the Chinese did not learn about the 

“Newtonian Century” in Europe and its analytic style of mathematical 

reasoning until after the Opium War (1839–1842). Some still contend that 

the Qing state in 1793, for example, was too closed-minded to learn about 

the emerging early modern world. With hindsight, such views appear 

incontrovertible, but there were many external factors to China that help 

explain why the Newtonian revolution came so late in Asia, and not in the 

eighteenth century. 

1. The Jesuit Legacy in Seventeenth Century China 

• The Late Ming Calendar Crisis 

• Sino-Jesuit Accommodations and the Copernican 

Controversy 

2. Chinese Rejoinders in the Eighteenth Century 

• Kangxi and the Academy of Mathematics in Beijing 

• Mensuration and Cartography in the Manchu Empire 

• Medical Works and the Recovery of Antiquity 

• Revival of Ancient Chinese Mathematics 

3. The Jesuit Role in Qing Arts, Instruments, and Technology 

• Clock making in the Kangxi Era 

• Imperial Factories for Glassware 

• Jesuits and Garden Architecture 

4. Porcelain Factories in China 

• Jingdezhen Porcelain 

• Techniques for Porcelain Production 

5. Printing Technology and Book Publishing 

• The Book Trade in the South and Beijing 


56 Elman 

• Imperial Support for Libraries and Publishing 

6. The Newtonian Century: An Analytic Style of Mathematical 

Reasoning in Europe 

• Newtonian Science in England 

• The French Century in Science and Engineering 

7. The Macartney Paradox 

Lord Macartney never presented the pulleys, air pump, chemical and 

electrical contrivances, or even the steam engine models that he had on 

board. Nor did the mission present the chronometer to determine 

longitude that Macartney also brought as a possible gift. The chronometer 

would have been more efficient than the Jesuit method for surveying that 

the Manchus used to appraise their domains. Instead the apparatuses were 

returned to the British East India Company or given to his ship's mechanic 

and mathematician cum astronomer, James Dinwiddie (1746–1815), who 

lectured on them and presented some experiments in Guangzhou to the 

English Factory, which was attended by Chinese merchants. Macartney 

remarkably noted: “Had Dinwiddie remained at Canton and continued his 

courses, I dare say he might have soon realized a very considerable sum of 

money from his Chinese pupils alone.” Chinese merchant interests in 

Dinwiddie's experiments and contrivances in 1793 suggest that we should 

not be surprised when many Chinese quickly took notice of the 

engineering fruits of the industrial revolution after the Opium War. 


“Empires and Science” Workshop Project 

Polynesian Technologies in Oceanic Voyaging and Navigation 

Douglas Rosentrater 

The cross-Pacific voyaging of Polynesian peoples is one of the great 

accomplishments of mankind, but still receives little acknowledgement as 

such. Through the late 1980’s these voyages were still diminished in 

history books as accidental incidents in which a few Polynesian canoes 

were greatly blown off course by storms to unknown islands, rather than 

the purposeful sailing and colonization of new islands and with return 

voyages to the original islands of departure. 

Larger than the North Atlantic that Columbus sailed, the Pacific 

represents ten million square miles of space, a bit larger than that of the 

continental United States. To miss any island by fifty miles, where its 

profile could not be seen on the horizon, could easily represent tragic 

disaster for any sailing ship in this immense space. Yet the important 

kahuna or expert role of the Polynesian navigator, who would have 

memorized generations of oral chants or meles which described the 

reaching of different islands, is profoundly different from that of the 

European navigator. 

In both outrigger and catamaran (double-hulled) construction and 

traditional navigation, these also represent totally different technological 

approaches than that of European sailing ships and compass related 

navigation. The ancient Polynesians accomplished these voyages without 

metal for the ship fittings, canvas or cloth for sails, and printed maps. In 

addition to stored food and water for the voyage, those sailing fished for 

additional food and caught rain water. 

While controversial as to carbon dating of the earliest archeological 

finds, it seems clear that the voyages began around 400 CE for the first 

wave of settlement and then followed with a second wave lasting until 

between 1300 and 1400 CE. After that the voyages mysteriously ended 

although the oral traditions of such sailings continued their record on both 

sides of the Pacific. Outside contact would not begin again until Captain 

Cook’s three voyages starting in 1776. 

While much of the original Polynesian knowledge has been lost 

through the democide of traditions by colonial powers in the Pacific, the 

1975 voyage of the Hokule’a from Hawaii to Tahiti which recreated 

Polynesian outrigger design and non-western navigation reinvigorated this 

achievement by Pacific peoples. Since then, the Hokule’a (the name of the 

Polynesian guiding star Arcturus) and its sister ship the Hawai’iloa (built 

totally with more traditional materials than the first ship) have sailed ten 

successful voyages throughout the Pacific, Australia, and Japan and have 

served as an important reaffirmation of Polynesian identity. It is through 

their realms of science, applied design, and technologies, as well as their 


58 Rosentrater 

determination, that history books must acknowledge these “starships of 

the Pacific.” 

In addition to research and insights gained by the author in living in 

Hawaii for six years, this paper refers extensively to the re-creative 

artwork of pre-contact Hawaii by Hawaiian artist and historian Herb 

Kawainue Kane (designated in 1984 as a Living Treasure of Hawaii), and 

is presented as a classroom modular unit to establish understandings of the 

different technologies of the Polynesians. Please refer to the attached 

Power Point on Polynesian navigation. “Polynesians were the only deep 

water sailors in the world for at least 2000 years,” Herb Kane, Ancient 

Hawaii 

Classroom Projects: 

1. Examine the many excellent illustrations by Herb Kane on 

Polynesian voyaging and culture. As a painter/illustrator what sources 

might he have drawn upon for authenticity? What references did Captain 

Cook make in regard to Hawaiian outriggers in his three voyages to 

Hawaii starting in 1768? Note the differences between the smaller and 

simpler outrigger to the more advanced catamaran designs. 

2. Notice that the sails of the original Polynesian outriggers are an 

inverted triangle—different from the more rectangular design of sails for 

western sailing ships. The concept of triangular sails for better control was 

brought back from the Middle Eastern dhows during the Crusades—but 

the Polynesian design reverses this. 

3. Using masking tape, outline the size of a Polynesian smaller 

outrigger or larger catamaran on an open space of the classroom floor. 

Although no original ships have survived, the double-hulled catamaran 

would have been at least sixty feet in length with a cross space and raised 

platform of about twelve to fifteen feet. Compare this to the approximate 

45 foot length of the two caravels, the Nina and the Pinta, that Columbus 

used on his first voyage and the hundredth foot length of the larger Santa 

Maria. Ask students to spend at least one class confined in that space. 

Assess their reactions in handling this, and also how would they handle a 

protracted voyaging time, night and day, on such a ship in which high seas 

would often leave the crew members wet? Columbus’ first voyage was 

125 days in length, his second 206 days and the third 250 days while the 

Polynesian voyaging times seemed to have ranged from three to seven 

weeks in length depending upon winds and currents. The Hokule’a’s most 

recent trip from Hawaii to the Marshall Islands started January 23, 2007 

and reached its destination on March 15. 

4. Research the traditional sailing ship approach of tacking in which 


Polynesian Technologies 59 

the ship can seemingly maneuver against the prevailing winds and 

currents. 

5. Including some live chickens (moa), dogs (ilio), and pigs (pua’a) 

along with the unintentional stowaway the Polynesian rat, what foods 

might have been stored on the Polynesian ships for the voyagers to eat? If 

they had included the bringing of seeds and plants for planting and crop 

growth in their new locations, what might have they been? Traditionally, 

they seemed to have brought coconut (niu), yam, banana (mai’a), 

breadfruit (ulu), sugarcane (ko), and taro (kalo). Research the staple of the 

taro plant which is found throughout the Pacific, and in Hawaii the taro is 

traditionally used to make poi. How much fresh water per person should 

have been carried on the outrigger and could rainfall have been counted 

on for sufficient replenishment of water? 

6. Research the mystery of the sweet potato (ipomoea batatas), 

which was originally developed in Peru and Columbia’s Andes but is 

found throughout Polynesia into South Asia, with its first identification 

around 300 CE in the Marquesas (rather than the closer to South America 

and Easter Island.) How might it have been spread across these immense 

distances (one example of distance is the 4,000 km from Easter Island to 

South America—Hawaii which is roughly in the middle of the Pacific is 

3,800 km west of San Francisco, 6,500 km east of Japan, and 7,300 km 

east of Australia)? Note that the Peruvian Quechua word for sweet potato 

is kumar and the sweet potato in Easter Island is termed kumara. 

7. Research the cultural diffusionist theory of Norwegian 

explorer/archeologist Thor Heyerdahl and others. What did Heyerdahl 

accomplish in his re-creation of ancient sailing ships (note: he used rafts 

and Polynesians never used rafts—he also had to hauled out off-shore at 

least 100 km to catch ocean currents rather than leaving from a reefencircled 

harbor—and relied predominantly on ocean currents rather than 

the wind.) Heyerdahl’s voyages such as Kon Tiki in1947 (101 day voyage 

of 4,300 miles from Peru to the Tuamoto Islands on a woven straw raft in 

the style of rafts from Peru/Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca), Ra and Ra II 

(Morocco to Barbados), and the Tigris (Pakistan to India by way of the 

Red Sea– although that voyage was not completed) evidenced that such 

voyages could be made. Why would the cultural diffusionist (all culture 

is originally generated from either South America or Atlantis) theory of 

Heyerdahl not hold true of supposed cross ocean voyages in the Atlantic 

(i.e. horses were not brought to the New World from the Old World, and, 

tobacco was not brought to the Old World from the New.) If there had 

been true two-way commerce in the ancient Atlantic these items and many 

more would be present on both sides of the Atlantic. Why might 



Heyerdahl’s now greatly discredited theories about South American 

cultural development and Polynesian sailing ships be particularly 

aggravating to both South Americans and Polynesians? 

8. What do the Maori of New Zealand meles or oral tradition chants 

tell us of their native origins? Despite British colonial rule, how have the 

Maori kept much of their culture intact and practiced into the 21st 

Century? How have the French approached Tahiti? What of American 

territories in the Pacific as well as the tragic history of the annexation of 

Hawaii? 

9. Locate an astronomy chart of the evening sky above the island of 

Hawaii. Compare it with a chart beneath the equator where the Southern 

Cross is visible. How might sightings of these and other stars, particularly 

in the rising points on the horizon, create navigational references for those 

sailing the Pacific? 

10. Research the construction and sailing in two voyages of the 

Hawaiian traditional outrigger, the Hokule’a (named after the traditional 

Polynesian navigation star known to us as Arcturus.). How did the 

Polynesian Voyaging Society handle in 1975 the actual non-western 

navigating with their navigation person, Mau Piailug, who remembered 

the traditional ways of navigation and who had to be brought in from the 

Caroline Islands of Micronesia as this knowledge had been lost among 

other contemporary Polynesians? Why was the second voyage of the 

Hokule’a a disaster in which one crew member drowned and the voyage 

aborted? How did this ship and its later sister ship the Hawai’iloa 

represent Polynesian pride for both Hawaiians and other Polynesian 

peoples (Marquesans, Tahitians, Cook Islanders, Maori, Tongans, and 

Samoans)? Polynesians continue to recreate these voyages today in the 

21st Century, even though for the Hawai’iloa there were no sixty foot koa 

trees available for the hulls (two hundred foot trees were donated by 

Indigenous people from British Columbia), no one remembered how to 

weave lauhala or pandanus leaves for the sails and sennit or coconut fiber 

into rope and cable for the outrigger. 

11. For non-western navigation, what could be predicted from the 

observation of ocean swells and currents both in open ocean and around 

islands, the rising points of the starts, the flight of sea terns and other 

birds, the reflection of land upon clouds, the saltiness of sea-water from 

fresh water flowing into it, etc. How could a course be kept consistent 

during cloudy or storm weather? Note that Captain Cook retained the 

services of the Tahitian Tupaia, a traditional navigator, who through his 

memorization of the ancient navigation chants knew how to sail to 75 


Polynesian Technologies 61 

different islands in the Pacific from Tahiti, even though he had never been 

to any of them? Captain Cook would die in a fracas at Kealakekua Bay on 

the Big Island of Hawaii itself, and per the vulnerable immune system of 

pre-contact Polynesians Tupaia would die on board the British ship en 

route back to England. 

12. How does the reaching of Tahiti from Hawaii, then back again, 

dispute the earlier held hypothesis of accidental voyaging by Sharp which 

discredited purposeful navigation by Polynesian ships? 

13. View the PBS film “Wayfarers: A Pacific Odyssey” by Gail 

Evenan that chronicles the saga of the Hokulea. How does it reflect 

frustration over lost traditions and technologies, as well as the many 

conflicts among the crew members? 

14. How might the reaching of the most remote islands in the Pacific 

such as Rapa Nui (Easter Island) have been accomplished, and the later 

settling by HMS Bounty mutineers of Pitcairn Island? How does the 

conflict between the short-ears and the long ears of Rapa Nui represent an 

ecological disaster for the biosphere of the island? What is known of the 

artificially created islands of Nan Madol and the Sadeleur Dynasty in 

Ponape, Micronesia? How did such locations seem to function as religious 

and pilgrimage centers? 

15. How does the Pacific voyaging compare with the cross-oceanic 

Atlantic voyaging of pre-Columbus sailors such as the Vikings and the 

more folkloric accounts of those like St. Brendan of Ireland? One radical 

revisionist theory evidencing cross-Atlantic exploring is that the huge 

round Olmec heads found in south Central Mexico have pronounced 

African features. What of the controversy of the pre-Columbus maps of 

Turkish admiral Piri Reis? 

16. What does genome tracking tell us of Pacific settlement, and then 

European RNA/DNA identified in pre-western contact indigenous 

remains (such as the supposed identification of Welsh genes in Mandan 

Native American skeletons)? Linguistic studies also identify Polynesian 

languages as part of the larger Indo-Pacific languages, thus linking them 

to central Asia. 

17. How were the compass and the astrolabe developed? Do 

contemporary sailing ships rely on satellite tracking gps systems for 

navigation? What navigation tools would Christopher Columbus have 

used in his five voyages? 



Resources 

Direct 

Kane, Herb Kawainue. Ancient Hawaii 

Finney, Ben R. The Hokulea: The Way to Tahiti 

Finney, Ben R. Voyage of Rediscovery: Cultural Odyssey through 

Polynesia 

Morrill, Sibley. Ponape—Where American Colonialism Confronts Black 

Magic, Five Kingdoms, and Nan Madol 

Indirect 

Bellwood, Peter. The Polynesians: Prehistory of an Island Culture 

Diamond, Jared. The Third Chimpanzee 

Heyerdahl, Thor. Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft. 

Heyerdahl, Thor. Fatu Hiva: Back to Nature. 

Heyerdahl, Thor. Aku Aku: The Secret of Easter Island. 

Kirch, Patrick. Feathered Gods and Fishhooks . 

Kirch, Patrick. On the Road of the Winds. 

Menzies, Gavin. 1421: The Year China Discovered America. 

Douglas Rosentrater taught at the University of Hawaii—Hilo Campus on 

the Big Island from 1970 to 1973 and followed his doctoral studies at the 

University of Hawaii—Manoa from 1977 to 1980. 


Discovering Oceania 

Accessing Art to Make Connections and Create Context 

Lynn Dole 

When you think of Oceania or the Pacific Region, what comes to mind? 

When I first ask my students this question the responses range from 

typical expressions of uncertainty to “big ocean.” When prompted to 

associate images with the region, students invariably think of tropical 

islands and some suggest scenes from musicals or travel brochures. As 

Pacific Studies scholars have noted, it is not surprising that these 

simplistic stereotypes are the predominant associations with a vast and 

diverse region. Even the world maps commonly used in classrooms bisect 

the Pacific so that its size is not readily apparent. 

All too often in the typical history survey course, the Pacific receives 

only passing attention. It wasn’t until historian Damon Salesa raised 

questions about the Pacific during his presentation at the Empires and 

Science workshop that I realized how thoroughly I have neglected this 

region in my own teaching. The experience prompted me to consider 

ways that I could more effectively incorporate study of Oceania into 

history or humanities courses. 

This curriculum unit could be used in a survey course not only to 

enrich the study of a frequently neglected region (Oceania) but also to 

introduce students to historiography, research methods, visual literacy, 

and contemporary scholarship related to the Pacific and to art. This unit 

emphasizes asking questions, engaging with contemporary theoretical 

perspectives, and challenging assumptions and stereotypes. It asks big 

questions such as: How do we know what we know? What is art? Who 

decides? How does the way information or ideas are organized influence 

our understanding? How is “history” constructed? Students examine the 

way the region is presented in common texts and then they create an 

alternative presentation while developing their visual literacy and research 

skills. Students will use a method of close analysis to examine an artifact 

from the region and ultimately pair this with work by a contemporary 

artist. 

Beginning with what students know, I start with the question that 

opened this article: When you think of Oceania or the Pacific Region, 

what comes to mind? When pressed, my students generated references to 

some specific locations (Hawai’i), a few commented on historical events 

such as World War II or the voyages of Magellan and Cook, and several 

noted exotic images of island paradise. Pausing to look at the region on a 

Pacific-centered world map, we ask why we know so little about this vast 

area and what the implications of this lack of awareness might be. We 

will return to these essential questions throughout the unit. Revisiting the 

short list of what my students know of the Pacific, I ask them to consider 


64 Dole 

where their ideas came from. My students identified these sources of 

information: history textbooks, magazines such as National Geographic, 

tourism advertisements, and the musical South Pacific. 

In Reading National Geographic (1993) Catherine A. Lutz and Jane 

L. Collins demonstrated that the Pacific region is over-represented in 

National Geographic coverage and certain persistent images and themes 

have dominated its presentation. Closely examining a specific issue of the 

magazine gives students an introduction to the content analysis research 

method; students can explore patterns by individually examining an 

article, noting the content of photographs and captions, and comparing 

their findings. After they have made their own observations, students can 

more fully appreciate the analysis of “The National Geographic’s Pacific” 

in Lutz and Collins, pages 133–150. Other articles that provide models of 

this kind of analysis include David Hyndman’s work on the 

“representation of the Melanesian Other” (2000) and Max Quanchi’s “The 

Euro-American Psyche and the Imaging of Samoa in the Early 20th 

Century” (at the Japan Focus website). 

In contrast to the popular culture of National Geographic magazine, 

what references to the Pacific appear in history textbooks? Using the 

same content analysis skills students practiced with the National 

Geographic, they examine a variety of history textbooks. They explore 

questions such as: When and how is the Pacific presented? What images, 

including maps and photographs, accompany this coverage? How much 

information is provided about the Pacific? Using the analysis approaches 

they saw modeled by Lutz and Collins and Hyndman, students can discuss 

the implications of these representations. This then leads to inquiry into: 

What is missing? What are the effects of this limited coverage? Whose 

voices do we hear and whose don’t we hear? 

The Historic Waikiki website (http://www.downwindproductions. 

com/) produced by Downwind Productions provides a model for 

exploring these questions in more depth. Students can explore the 

contrast between the images cultivated through tourism and the reality as 

expressed by people who live in Waikiki, Hawai’i. The interactive project 

asks viewers to confront their own stereotypes. Given the earlier steps in 

this curriculum unit students will have some sense of where their 

stereotypes come from and through discussion of this website they can 

discuss some of the implications of these stereotypes. 

At this point I challenge students to think about how they would 

improve representation of the Pacific. Having critically analyzed the 

coverage in the National Geographic and history textbooks, what might 

they recommend doing differently? To support students as they reflect on 

their experience with the Historic Waikiki website, and particularly as 

they consider the contrast between stereotypical representations and 

alternative interpretations of events, I recommend the essay “Ways of 


Discovering Oceania 65 

Seeing: Evidence and Learning in the History Classroom”, in which five 

historians share their experience with the Visible Knowledge Project 

(VKP). This article is a useful resource for the instructor as Coventry et 

al. (2006) discuss ways to engage students in using visual resources to 

develop a more sophisticated understanding of history. 

To prepare students for the transition from being passive consumers 

of history to developing their own constructions as historians, they begin 

by generating questions that they will answer through more research. The 

Secretariat of the Pacific Community (http://www.spc.int/AC/region.htm) 

provides a brief introduction to the region’s geography, including 

identifying member states of the organization. The commonly used 

categorizations of Micronesia, Polynesia, and Melanesia should be 

addressed: what are the implications of grouping islands into regions 

denoted as “small islands”, “many islands”, and “black islands” 

respectively? How does this terminology influence perceptions? Students 

can pause to consider how these terms came into use. 

As students begin to consider how language structures thinking, I 

recommend two articles that explore how the very notion of the Pacific 

region is a contested space. In his influential essay “Our Sea of Islands” 

(1993) Epeli Hau’ofa examines the significance of the terms Pacific and 

Oceania. As he writes, “There is a world of difference between viewing 

the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands.’” (a distinction 

of terminology that Hau’ofa credits to Eric Waddell). Pausing to reflect 

on the way these two phrases shape our understanding of the region, and 

reading Hau’ofa’s insightful discussion of the term Oceania provides 

students with a perspective from a scholar in the region. In an article for 

the American Historical Review Matt Matsuda discusses the construction 

of the Pacific as a region (2006). An additional resource is the January 

2005 issue of Common-Place (http://www.common-place.org/vol-05/no- 

02/) which focuses on the Pacific and provides additional accessible 

essays on the historical construction of this region as an area of study. 

Having established some of this theoretical background, I challenge 

students to think about what a museum exhibit from the region might look 

like. Would you use the term Oceania or Pacific? Why? What would 

you include in an exhibit on the region? How would you provide context 

for visitors who may not be familiar with the area? If this is the first time 

students have considered museum exhibits as a means of representation, I 

engage them in reflection about their own experiences in museums and 

what factors shape the visitor’s response to a display. 

Several museums feature virtual exhibits online: the Auckland 

Museum’s Te Kakano Pacific People Information Center has a virtual 

gallery (http://tekakano.aucklandmuseum.com/virtualgallery_pacific.asp? 

database=pacific&subhead=Virtual%20Gallery) and the Metropolitan 

Museum of Art offers several gallery tours on YouTube, including Views 


66 Dole 

of the New Galleries for Oceanic Art. As students “tour” these exhibits I 

encourage them to generate comments and questions and then share their 

observations. We discuss initial impressions and then consider what 

contextual information is needed to more fully appreciate these artifacts. 

Once students have “toured” the Met’s exhibit I recommend that they hear 

the curator’s interpretation through the YouTube video Curatorial 

Perspective from Eric Kjellgren, Evelyn A.J. Hall and John A. Friede 

Associate Curator, Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas 

Metropolitan Museum of Art. This also provides an opportunity for 

discussing the role of the curator in selecting, presenting, and organizing 

artifacts for an exhibit. I emphasize that there are many choices that 

contribute to the final product. 

I explain that students will be developing their own small exhibits by 

selecting an artifact from the region, examining it closely, conducting 

research to develop context, and presenting it with an interpretative 

explanation. To prepare students for closely examining an artifact, I 

introduce them to Jules Prown’s methodology as outlined in his essay 

“Mind in Matter: An introduction to material culture theory and 

method”(1982). This multi-step process from description through 

deduction and speculation helps viewers examine an object closely. 

Prown has provided instruction in his method to teachers at the Yale-New 

Haven Teachers Institute (http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/ ) who have prepared 

curriculum units incorporating this approach to object analysis. Two 

examples from the website include the curriculum units “African Art and 

Aesthetics” by Val-Jean Belton and “Artifacts: Bringing the Past Back to 

Life—the Mexican Case” by Luis Recalde. 

I model Prown’s methodology by selecting one of the three artifacts 

on display at the Smithsonian Museum’s Pacific Cultures exhibit at the 

National Museum of Natural History (http://www.mnh.si.edu/museum/ 

VirtualTour/Tour/First/Pacific/): a statue from Easter Island, a stone 

valuable from Yap, and a stick navigational chart from the Marshall 

Islands. The thematic essay on art from Easter Island by Eric Kjellgren 

and Jennifer Wagelie from the Metropolitan Museum 

(http://www.metmuseum.org/TOAH/HD/eais/hd_eais.htm) provides the 

instructor with valuable background information to support a more 

thorough presentation about the Easter Island statue. 

The first step in Prown’s approach is a detailed description of the 

piece based on what can be observed, including its physical dimensions, 

the material it is made of, and descriptions of details such as color, 

texture, any design and decorative features, etc. I display the image for 

the whole class to see and I ask each student to comment on something 

that he or she observes about the object; as each student contributes 

another observation we go beyond the obvious to noting details that were 

not noted by the first students. 



The second step of Prown’s methodology is deduction, which refers 

to the relationship between the object and the perceiver. I begin by asking 

students: What would it be like to interact with the object? If they could 

handle or use the object, what would they experience? Prown refers to 

sensory engagement (How does the object feel, taste, smell, sound? How 

does the object feel?), intellectual engagement (What does the object do? 

How does the object perform? What role might we play with the object? 

Who would use the object and how?), and emotional response (What is 

our emotional response to the object? Curiosity, indifference, fear, delight, 

etc.) As we discuss these responses we consider our cultural biases, 

reflecting on how we make associations with the familiar and the 

unfamiliar. The third step is speculation, which takes place in the mind of 

the perceiver. This includes creative imagining and free association, then 

reviewing what is known to develop hypotheses and plan a program of 

research to investigate questions that emerged from the analysis of the 

material evidence. 

Having modeled this process with one of the artifacts from the 

Smithsonian site, I have students work in small groups to apply Prown’s 

methodology to one of the remaining objects. Within the small groups 

one student records all the questions while another records the answers. 

As teams present their work to the class, we develop a series of questions 

that can guide their individual work. We also discuss how an object in 

isolation is hard to understand and the importance of finding context. 

Students now begin the individual research phase of the unit. Their 

task is to locate an artifact from the region, apply Prown’s methodology to 

closely analyze it, conduct research to provide context, and create a 

display that features the artifact, with textual support. The final display 

will include an informative caption, the text of their questions and 

answers using Prown’s method, a locator map, and a well-written 

explanation of the context of the piece modeled on the thematic essays in 

the Timeline of Art History section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

(http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hi/te_index.asp?i=26). 

In addition to the Auckland Museum (http://tekakano.aucklandmuseu 

m.com/virtualgallery_pacific.asp?database=pacific&subhead=Virtual%20 

Gallery) and Metropolitan Museum of Art (http://www.metmuseum.org/ 

special/new_galleries/oceanic_images.asp), other sources of images of 

Oceanic art include the Fowler Museum at UCLA (http://collections.fow 

ler.ucla.edu/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=hiersearch;id=21000;type=801) 

and the materials linked to the Art History Resources on the Web site 

maintained by Professor Christopher Witcombe at Sweet Briar College 

(http://witcombe.sbc.edu/ARTHamericasoceania.html#oceania). The 

British Museum features two online exhibits: “Power & Taboo: sacred 

objects from the Pacific” and “The Pacific: Gods and People” 

(http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/online_tours/pacific.aspx). 


68 Dole 

As students prepare to put their artifacts into cultural context by 

conducting further research on the society where it originated, I suggest 

that they explore the Pacific Worlds website http://www. 

pacificworlds.com/ that features a virtual tour of some communities. The 

Special Collections website at the Libraries of the University of Hawai’i 

Manoa features a number of links to regional resources 

(http://libweb.hawaii.edu/libdept/pacific/html/cultural.html). 

When students have prepared their displays (which may be in poster 

form or PowerPoint presentations), I suggest that the class engage in a 

gallery walk, taking in all of the exhibits. To prepare students for class 

discussion I ask them to reflect on why they selected the artifact they 

chose and what they learned about the piece and the specific island where 

it originated through their research. To the whole class I pose the 

question: How did these artifacts come to be included in a museum? 

Since all of the artifacts they have selected came from museum collections 

online, they have participated in choosing from artifacts that have already 

been archived. I ask students to consider how this artifact came to be part 

of a museum collection. This leads to the larger questions: What is art? 

Who decides? Students may notice that in many cases the original 

captions associated with the artifact often reveal very little about the artist 

who crafted the piece, but may indicate the name of the collector. We 

consider how these artifacts can appear to be out of context and out of 

time in many exhibits. This theoretical discussion provides the basis for 

asking additional questions: What more can we do to contextualize and 

bring these artifacts to life? 

For this component of the lesson I am inspired by the Intersections: 

Native American Art in a New Light exhibit at the Peabody Essex 

Museum in Salem, Massachusetts; the exhibit pairs contemporary art with 

historic artifacts. Laurie Beth Kalb, who co-curated the exhibition with 

Karen Kramer, explains that the Intersections exhibit “focuses on 

connections––between the traditional and the personal, the present and the 

past, the Native and the non-Native, and Indigenous and Western media. 

It emphasizes the creative possibilities and the dynamic tensions that arise 

from aesthetic, cultural, and political influences” (Kalb). I ask students to 

find another source or artifact that they can pair with their original object 

to provide additional perspective on the artifact. I encourage students to 

consider potential companion pieces that are works of contemporary art, 

literature, poetry, or music. We discuss how a thoughtful selection can 

enhance how each piece is viewed and interpreted. As a model I show 

students art historian Dana Leibsohn’s examination of two images at the 

World History Matters website http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources/ 

analyzing/mcimages/mcimgsq9.html. Although her focus is another 

historic era and region, the opportunity to hear an art historian discuss the 

specific details of a work and the interaction of pieces is instructive. 



Another resource for preparing students to discuss connections between 

two works of art is the Double Vision activity at the Eyes on Art website 

http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/art2/double/double.html. 

Students can look for sources of potential companion artifacts at a 

number of websites, including the Paradise Now? Contemporary Art from 

the Pacific exhibit at the Asia Society and Museum 

(http://www.asianart.com/exhibitions/paradise/index.html), the Tautai 

Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust (http://www.tautaipacific.com 

aboutus.html), Out of the Blue: Contemporary Maori and Pacific Art 

(http://www.pacificart.co.nz/), and arTok Pacific Arts Online (http:// 

www.abc.net.au/arts/artok/default.htm), an ABC Online-Radio Australia 

initiative. I encourage students to consider other media, including music 

at the Oceania music site at National Geographic (http://worldmusic. 

nationalgeographic.com/worldmusic/view/page.basic/region/content.regio 

n/oceania_5) and literature such as the Literature of the Pacific Islands 

website (http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/emd23/Pacific/LPI.html 

#12). As students are making their selections I engage them in discussion 

and reflection about how this choice will interact with their original 

artifact. Students apply Prown’s methodology to examining the second 

work and prepare a display that partners with the work they produced for 

their first object. They link the two through a reflective essay that 

discusses their choices and the themes that they develop through the 

pairing. After a gallery walk of the paired presentations I engage students 

in reflecting on the process of this unit. Returning to the initial question 

about What do you know about the Pacific/Oceania? I ask students to 

comment on what they want visitors to their exhibits to know about the 

region. 

Works Cited 

Coventry, Michael, Peter Felten, David Jaffee, Cecilia O'Leary, Tracey 

Weis, and with Susannah McGowan, “Ways of Seeing: Evidence and 

Learning in the History Classroom.” The Journal of American 

History 92.4 (2006): 77 pars. 20 Aug. 2008 . 

Downwind Productions. Historic Waikiki. 

. 

Hau’ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” We are the Ocean: Selected Works. 

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press 2001: 27–40. 


70 Dole 

Hyndman, David. “Dominant Discourses of Power Relations and the 

Melanesian Other: Interpreting the Eroticized, Effeminizing Gaze in 

National Geographic.” Cultural Analysis, vol. 1, 2000. 

. 

Kalb, Laurie Beth, quoted in press release for Intersections, Native 

American Art in a New Light. Peabody Essex Museum. May 8, 

2006. . 

Kjellgren, Eric. Curatorial Perspective from Eric Kjellgren, Evelyn A.J. 

Hall and John A. Friede Associate Curator, Arts of Africa, Oceania, 

and the Americas Metropolitan Museum of Art. Metropolitan 

Museum of Art. YouTube. 

Kjellgren, Eric, and Jennifer Wagelie. "Easter Island". In Timeline of Art 

History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–October 

2002. 

Leibsohn, Dana. “Analyzing Images.” World History Matters. Center for 

History and New Media. 

. 

Lutz, Catherine A. and Jane L. Collins. Reading National Geographic. 

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 

Matsuda, Matt K. “AHR Forum: The Pacific.” The American Historical 

Review 111.3 (2006) 

. 

Prown, Jules. “Mind in Matter: an introduction to material culture theory 

and method”, in Susan M. Pearce, (ed.), Interpreting Objects and 

Collections, London and New York, Routledge, 1994, pp.133 –138. 

Quanchi, Max. “The Euro-American Psyche and the Imaging of Samoa in 

the Early 20th Century.” Japan Focus. 

. 


Understanding "Pacific Epistemology" as a New Knowledge System 

John Ratté 

This brief paper is intended to introduce teachers and students of global 

knowledge systems, comparative studies in humanities and the social 

sciences, and world history to a current movement in thought among 

academics in the Pacific Islands. * The topic is of great significance for 

Pacific Island studies; it has much to offer teachers of world history. The 

discussion can be followed in the pages of The Contemporary Pacific 

(University of Hawaii) where the articles discussed below offer 

substantial case studies of Pacific knowledge systems at work in rural 

communities, businesses, and church communities, and extensive 

bibliographies in aid of the study of sources and influences. 

Preceding, in some cases, and perhaps inspiring works in various 

fields of social science and education are Pacific Island writers who have 

called for both the recognition and further development of unique Pacific 

way of knowing. In 2001, and again in 2003 and 2006, the Fijian writer 

Subramani, professor of literature at the University of the South Pacific in 

Fiji was a leading voice calling for a coherent approach to south pacific 

knowledge systems, both at conferences and in published essays. “What I 

propose," he wrote, 

is the construction of a body of knowledge encompassing 

the kaleidoscope of Oceanic cultures and tracing diverse 

and complex forms of knowledge—philosophies, 

cartographies, language, genealogies and repressed 

knowledges. Such a mammoth project would blur the 

usual disciplinary boundaries, including the divisions of 

oral speech from written materials and of visual imagery 

from music and performance. And it would juxtapose the 

popular, commonsensical, and personal with the 

scientific. Such work would treat Oceania as a 

complicated, multilayered stage on which island scholars 

would reinscribe the new epistemologies—their own 

epistemologies. 

Subramani saw the proposed project as both critical and constructive. 

These new epistemologies "would at once involve the critique of 

oppressive systems of thinking—enlightenment’s assumptions about 

* In writing this paper I have benefited immeasurably from Lou Ratté’s knowledge and 

critical readings of these texts and from her constructive criticism, over several rewrites, of 

my argument. 


72 John Ratté 

modernization as well as Oceania’s patriarchal conventions and invented 

traditions—and entail an exploration into ‘Oceania’s library’ (the 

knowledge its peoples possess)." 

Such an assignment would be deconstructive and thereby 

reconstitutive, its task would be to establish a set of 

problematics rather than to advance any ideological 

position, grand narratives, or complete theories. The 

project would avoid dreams of completion, it would allow 

impurities and accommodate important flaws. In such an 

arena “literature” could begin to play its role, for 

“literature” is a critical site of oceanic imaginary, and this 

work of reimagining includes the outlines of new 


Subramani, in spite of key phrases like "the new epistemologies" and 

"their own epistemologies" warned against the temptation to essentialize 

Pacific knowledge in a "reverse orientalism": 

The Pacific region is already too diverse, has always been 

diverse, and cultural homogeneity is neither possible nor 

desirable. No one believes that our cultures can be 

restored in their pristine identity. In order to reclaim 

discourses and to reconstitute an appropriate language 

that reflects oceanic cosmologies, Pacific islands scholars 

and researchers need great intellectual flexibility and 

vitality to negotiate between co-existing cultural 

practices. Reverse orientalism is as dangerous for Pacific 

societies as allowing present hegemonic structures to 

continue. 

Nonetheless, "Pacific Island writers and scholars are justified in regarding 

western intellectual traditions as barriers to understanding the 

contemporary Pacific, specially the claim of universalism that works 

against minorities and serves the interests of established subject positions, 

thus reinforcing the structures of domination. Here Edward Said’s 

warning is relevant when he says that not many Western intellectuals and 

theorists are “reliable allies in the resistance to imperialism—on the 

contrary, one may suspect that they are part of the same ‘universalism’ 

that connected culture and imperialism for centuries." (Subramani; Said 

278.) 

The work of a number of social scientists published in The 

Contemporary Pacific, some prompted by Subramani's paper, can help us 


Understanding "Pacific Epistemology" 73 

to understand the project Subramani proposed. Their arguments for a 

Pacific epistemology can be located on a spectrum ranging from the kind 

of "reverse Orientalism" against which Subramani issues a warning, to the 

identification of the pragmatic utility of tradition and custom in the 

modern, or post-modern, moment which both rejects some, and embraces 

other, aspects of Euro-American social science, philosophy, and religion. 

These scholars make two arguments. First, they offer examples of 

individual behavior and social action in which they see ways of knowing, 

thinking and problem solving by island peoples which owe little or 

nothing to western modernity, even though these people live in a complex 

world where custom or tradition co-exist with modern institutions. These 

ways of reasoning really work: they enable islanders to relate to the 

cosmos and to their people, and to resolve, drawing on wisdom traditions, 

hard matters like land and dowry disputes, and, in the case of the young 

men of Kwara'ae David Welchman Gegeo and Karen Watson-Gegeo 

study so closely, to undertake environmentally sensitive limited programs 

of economic development that fit the resources and needs of island 

ecologies and economies. (The Kwara‘ae Genealogy Project, West 

Kwara‘ae, Malaita, Solomon Island. Gegeo and Watson Gegeo, 2001.) 

Second, they argue that these native ways of knowing, long regarded 

as inferior by westerners, actually correspond in their workings to the 

methods used in describing and analyzing human behavior put forth by 

the newest western natural and social science. Post-modern science, they 

say,—using the term to include physics, medicine, social science, 

particularly anthropology, and epistemology—has superseded the 

mechanistic, dualistic, scientism of Euro-America in the 17 th to 19 th 

centuries with its claim to universal derivation and applicability. 

They further argue that the new pragmatic Euro-American science 

can be seen as complementing and confirming, the "always already" 

meaningful, fitting, useful, appropriate character of Pacific thought. It is 

the old science, the science of positivism, insistent always that the 

European way of knowing is superior and universal, that condescended 

and deemed "native" thought to be "merely cultural"(Darcy 11,12 ) and 

not effective, constructive, and 'true' in the way in which truth is assessed 

in American pragmatism. 

Pacific epistemology is not just tradition rediscovered, reasserted, 

defended, although, as Subrmani insisted, it is part that. It is tradition 

shown to be up-to-date, fresh, current, useful in approaching religion 

(Huffer and Qalo 90–99) politics, and economic and social growth, or 

diflopmen, [pidgin for development] (Gegeo and Watson-Gegeo 389: 

"Diflopmen is seen as 'alive in contrast to bisnis, which is seen as 'dead.'") 

as opposed to national, bureaucratically directed development or western 

modernization. And finally, it is tradition reimagined for education, both 

in academic study of Pacific cultures and societies, and for the formation 



of youth in new schools based on indigenous ways of knowing. (Meyer; 

Nee Benham). 

In these texts there is also a dialectic with Euro-American ways of 

knowing in which parallelism can be displaced by rejection. Thus 

Manulani Aluli Meyer writes: "Like any definition of culture put forth by 

indigenous practitioners and scholars, it pushes the envelope of what it 

means to think, exist, and struggle as a nonmainstream 'other,' and as it 

details the liberation found in identity, it must also, inevitably, outline the 

system that deters its full blossoming." (Meyer) For Meyer, who is at the 

‘strong’ end of the spectrum of arguments for uniqueness, there is no 

question that in its fundamental principles Pacific epistemology must 

displace, or take precedence over, Euro-American ways of thinking. 

Meyer presses the point of difference that comes as an ancillary to the 

argument for a uniquely Hawaiian way of knowing to a full-blown 

relativism of knowledge, place and culture when she writes: 

Empiricism claims that all knowledge is derived from 

experience and that this experience is a product of our 

five senses….I believe that a farmer from Iowa will have 

an empirical understanding of his cornfield that is far 

different from mine, a girl born on the shore of Mokapu. 

The fundamental notion that our very senses are culturally 

educated has become the 'situational' and 'relativistic' 

argument in philosophy, and, because of this, the 

universalizing of Hawaiian epistemology is not possible." 

(Op cit, Note 3, 147) 

Similarly, Huffer and Qalo, commenting on the work of Gegeo and 

Watson-Gegeo on the Kwara'ae, make a sharp distinction between the two 

knowledge systems: "In addition," they write, referring to the work of the 

Gegeos, "the Kwara'ae concepts have a strong aesthetic quality because 

they are closely tied to the senses, unlike many western philosophical 

concepts, which have become much more disconnected from both the 

subject and the senses." Some even see vital traditional ways of doing 

mathematics which owe nothing to the West as do Meyer (op cit) and 

Huffer and Qalo (Huffer and Qalo). 

Also at the strong end is the assertion made by Maenette 

Kape'ahiokalani nee-Benham, the new director of the School of Hawaiian 

Knowledge at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who announced at the 

recent Pacific Alternatives Conference (East West Center, March, 2009): 

"Western science and medicine are seeing that what they are now 

knowing and how they are now knowing we have always known." And 

yet Nee-Benham also calls for hana (convergence, in Hawai'ian) of 



traditional and western ways of knowing. There is here a deft linking of a 

soft approach to scholarly research and a strong approach to teaching 

young Hawaiians to be confidant in their culture. 

Manuka Henare, associate dean for Maori and Pacific Development 

at the University of Aukland Business School argued, in his presentation 

at the same conference, for a "Pasifika business and economic 

epistemology," "economies of affection," and a "pluralism ethics"—all to 

be found in a "Maori cosmology" and all contrasting with western ideas of 

the "self-regulating market," and the "unitary self-interest[ed] ethics of 

capitalism.". Pacific islanders are able to grasp the world, nature and 

culture, with a kind of one-on-one correspondence, and also enables them 

to manage global modernity (Pacific Alternatives Conference, March 25, 

2009). Huffer and Qalo, in their arguments for the validity of local 

knowledges for Fiji also seek "a body of Pacific thought should contribute 

to the establishment or affirmation of a Pacific philosophy and ethic—a 

set of applicable concepts and values to guide interaction within countries, 

within the region, and with the rest of the world. The ethic must be 

acknowledged, understood, and respected by all who interact with Pacific 

communities."(Elise Huffer and Ropate Qalo, 2004) 

The weak end of the spectrum is represented in the course description 

for the first-ever Pacific Studies course offered in a South pacific 

university, Pacific Studies 103: "Indigenous Knowledge and Western 

Science: Perspectives from the Pacific" (University of Aukland, from the 

Fall, 2007 on-line course description.). The course, the authors write: 

Examines the relationship between “Pacific indigenous 

knowledges” and “Western science”, and their accounts 

of the natural world, specifically the islands of the Pacific 

including New Zealand. Topics will be examined using a 

bicultural approach, involving experts in both aspects of 

traditional knowledges and Western scientific paradigms. 

Echoing Subramani's caution again "reverse Orientalism," they go on: 

Decolonization theories sometimes unwittingly promote 

the assumption that indigenous Pacific knowledges are 

premised on absolute differences. The course explores 

where these inherent differences might lie and where it is 

more a matter of difference in approach or thinking than 

substance. Assumptions about science and indigenous 

knowledges are challenged by encouraging critical 

reflection on the relationship between them and their 

applications in Pacific societies (including New Zealand 

and Australia) today. 



"A matter of difference in approach or thinking than substance" is sharply 

different from the claim that "Pacific knowledges are premised on 

absolute differences," a claim that is readily made by some of the writers 

on the strong end. 

In summary, first, the claim for a Pacific epistemology comes in weak 

and strong forms. The strong view is typified by Maulani Meyer. The 

weak view, as found in the research and writing of Gegeo and Gegeo 

Watson, could do without the term 'epistemology;' ways of knowing 

would suffice, and these ways, or kastom are indeed shown at work in 

native minds on specific social problems, like land use, title settlement, 

and the settlement of marriage disputes. The same could be said for the 

literature on natural science and navigation. (In the strong form, there is a 

politico-rhetorical dimension here as well, as in the educational projects of 

Meyer and Nee-Benham.) 

Second, the argument is made that traditional knowledge in the 

Pacific seems to be confirmed by much contemporary science, and social 

science in particular. Gegeo and Watson-Gegeo cite western and nonwestern 

critiques of the allegedly dominant philosophies and in particular, 

epistemologies, of Europe and America which are seen as fundamental to 

challenging postcolonial power: specifically, post-colonial indigenous 

socialism (Julius Nyerere's movement, ujamma, is much cited); cognitive 

psychology (Lakoff and Johnson), and feminisism. ("In agreeing with the 

need to transcend the Anglo-European perspective on epistemology raised 

by postmodernists, we are guided by the notion of standpoint 

epistemology as developed by feminists, which recognizes that 

'[k]nowledge claims are always socially situated' rather than 

universalistic" (Harding). Manuka Henare's presentation of Maori 

business practices seems just right for the current environmental crisis and 

the crisis in world capitalism revealed by the events of 2007–2009.Gegeo 

and Watson-Gegeo argue that these frameworks provide key concepts for 

understanding events in the Pacific, and stand parallel, in their newer 

methodologies, to independently emergent Pacific epistemologies. Here 

further study would suggest attention to the impact of modernity and 

western thought on the critque of "Oceania’s patriarchal conventions and 

invented traditions" which Subramani also invites. The knife can be used 

to cut both ways. 

Finally, these parallels between Pacific knowledge systems and 

contemporary western science and post-modern epistemology can be read 

either as confirming the strong argument, with its sundering implications, 

or the weak argument for seeing Pacific epistemology as an umbrella 

concept pointing to the convergence—hana—and mutual interpenetration 

of systems of thought, Euro-American and Pacific, in the period known as 

both post-colonial and post-modern comes to an end. 



Bibliography 

The Contemporary Pacific, University of Hawaii Press. This handsomely 

produced journal deals with every aspect of Pacific life— 

contemporary politics, the arts, and literature—and publishes 

scholarly articles and book reviews from every discipline. Teachers 

seeking to introduce Pacific studies into their world history courses 

will find it indispensable. 

Darcy, Paul, The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in 

Oceania. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006 

Gegeo, David Welchman and Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo, The 

Contemporary Pacific, 2001, "'How we know: Kwara'ae rural 

villagers doing indigenous epistemology," The Contemporary Pacific, 

Volume 13, No. 1, 2001. 

Gegeo, David Welchman and Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo ,"Whose 

Knowledge? Epistemological Collisions in Solomon Islands 

Community Development," The Contemporary Pacific, Volume 14, 

Number 2, Fall, 2002. 

Harding, Sandra, 1993 "Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: “What Is 

Strong Objectivity?” in Feminist Epistemologies, edited by Linda 

Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, 49–82.New York: Routledge. 

Henare, Manuka, "Regional and Local Economics of Mana: Indigenous 

Business, Economic Development, and Well-Being in Oceania," 

Pacific Alternatives Conference, East-West Center, March 25, 2009 

Huffer, Elise and Ropate Qalo, "Have We Been Thinking Upside-Down? 

The Contemporary Emergence of Pacific Theoretical Thought," The 

Contemporary Pacific, Spring, 2004 

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The 

Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: 

Basic Books, 1999 

Meyer, Manulani Aluli, "Our Own Liberation: Reflections on Hawaiian 

Epistemology". The Contemporary Pacific, Volume 13, No. 1, 2001. 

Nee-Benham, Maenette Kape'ahiokalani, "Educational Alternatives: 

Native Education for the 21 st Century," Pacific Alternatives 

Conference, East-West Center, March 25, 2009 

Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 

1993 

Subramani, “The Oceanic Imaginary”, The Contemporary Pacific, Vol 13, 

No 1, Spring 2001 (This issue also contains responses to Subramani 

by leading South Pacific scholars.) 


The Flea and the Hairy-Nosed Armadillo 

Darwin, Collecting, and Colonial Science Networks 

Lou Ratté 1 

The young Charles Darwin, age 22, left London on board the Beagle in 

December 1831. In August 1832 he was in Bahia Blanca, walking from 

where Captain Fitzroy left him off on the Brazilian coast to Buenos Aires, 

several days’ distance away. Darwin traveled with gauchos who helped 

him hunt and collect. 2 He talks about his discovery of the fossil remains 

of large animals and about all the different kinds of birds he encounters. 

Almost in passing, he introduces armadillos. He mentions four species of 

armadillos, noting that only three of them come as far south as Bahia 

Blanca, describes what they look like and their behavior when threatened, 

and then comments “It seems almost a pity to kill such nice little animals, 

for as a Gaucho said, while sharpening his knife on the back of one, ‘Son 

tan mansos’ (they are so quiet).” The gauchos served up some of these 

quiet creatures for dinner and it seems from a later report that Darwin 

packed up one of the hairy nosed variety to send home. On that carcass, 

we have to guess, was a flea, and that flea is now a treasure in a museum 

in Sydney, Australia. 

I learned about the flea from an essay on the entomology collection at 

the Macleay Museum, where it shares space with a couple of lice: 

In January 1984, two lice from an albatross, taken during 

Cook’s second voyage were found. A flea from Bahia 

Blanca, Argentina, collected from a hairy-nosed armadillo 

by Charles Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle, is 

also held in the Museum. 3 

Of course Captain Cook, the albatross, and the lice were all very enticing, 

but I chose Darwin, the flea and the armadillo for further consideration 

when I found another reference. In February 2009 the University of 

Sydney announced on its web site that a Macleay Museum exhibition 

would include the flea: 

The Macleay Museum will display, for a limited time 

only, a flea that was collected by eminent evolution 

scholar Charles Darwin in Argentina to commemorate the 

200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. The flea was known 

to be given to naturalist and collector William Sharp 

Macleay and, due to its delicacy, will be on display—with 

William Sharp Macleay's original label—for a short time 

only from Thursday, 12 February, 2009 to 26 February, 

2009. 4 


The Flea and the Hairy-Nosed Armadillo 79 

I was at the Macleay Museum in March 2009 so just missed the flea, but I 

think it reasonable to guess that when exhibited the flea was safely behind 

glass and protected from potentially damaging light so its survival through 

the exhibition in its delicate condition would never really have been in 

question. 5 Why, then, this special notice? Is it because it was Darwin’s 

flea? Could this have been a draw to get people to come in to the show? 

Does William Sharp Macleay grow in our estimation because he came into 

possession of a flea collected by Darwin? Or is this flea the secret to 

something we ought to know about? 

Natural history museums today employ some of the same practices 

that art museums have been using throughout the 20 th century for 

displaying collections and mounting exhibitions. They make use of lighting 

and other techniques to produce what André Malraux called the “museum 

effect.” The museum effect alerts us, even before we begin to look, that 

here is something to which we should pay special attention. But what sort 

of attention? The museum effect can generate feelings of awe that require 

nothing more from the audience than dumb admiration. 

Still, I think the flea sends a mixed message: “Here I am, with my 

pedigree traced back to Darwin, but what do I mean? I may be the species 

Phthiropsylla agenoris, but might not my history be just as interesting as 

my classification?” 6 Can a flea, I ask, and a delicate one at that, bear the 

weight of almost 200 years of history? 

The Macleay Museum is part of the museum complex at the 

University of Sydney and it is an institution closely connected to the 

Macleay family in the 19 th century. William Sharp Macleay (1792-1865), 

the man who got the flea that Darwin collected, was the son of the first 

scientifically inclined Macleay. Alexander Macleay (1767-1848), an 

enthusiastic collector of insects who delighted especially in beetles, had 

started collecting in England well before he migrated to Australia in 1825. 

It was Alexander who inadvertently acquired Captain Cook’s pair of lice 

when he bought items at a London auction in 1806 that could be traced 

back to Captain Cook. Like many of his social class, Alexander Macleay 

joined and shouldered responsibilities in the scientific societies of the early 

19 th century, the Linnaean Society and the Royal Society, and knew some 

of the worthies in that small club of gentlemen scientists who regularly met 

to exchange ideas and treasures. Joseph Banks headed the Royal Society 

when Alexander Macleay joined, and Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of 

Singapore, was a member. 

Alexander Macleay did what other enthusiastic gentlemen collectors of 

flora and fauna did in the early 1800s: he collected, exchanged specimens 

with other collectors, and bought items from other collections when they 

came on sale in London auction houses. According to one recent source, 

Alexander Macleay was that sort of collector who simply wanted to 


80 Lou Ratté 

possess as many examples of what he liked as he could afford, and in his 

case, even more than he could afford; throughout his adult life he had 

financial problems associated with his compulsion for collecting. 7 These 

problems may have been part of his reason for migrating. 

In 1825, when he was 58 years old, Alexander Macleay accepted a 

position as colonial secretary in Australia, and set sail with his wife, 

several children, and his insect collection. His son William Sharp, already 

age 33 and employed by the government, stayed behind. William Sharp 

served as an attaché in Paris, where he met the French scientist Georges 

Cuvier, and, as Commissioner of the Slave Trade, in Cuba, collected 

insects in his spare time. 8 Like his father, William Sharp was an avid 

collector, but unlike Alexander, he had a great interest in classifying. He 

invented a system called the Quinary System, and published it in two parts 

in a book titled Horae Entomologicae (1819-21). 9 Like many of his 

contemporaries, including the younger Darwin (1809-1882), William Sharp 

wanted to answer, or at least address, the big question of the day: how are 

all life forms related? His system, visually represented in a series of 

interlocking circles, showed that everything was related to everything else, 

a model that differed from early evolutionary models in which one thing 

was transformed into another in ascending order. William Sharp and the 

Quinary System were well known in London scientific circles in the 1820s 

and 1830s. 

In 1837, a year after Darwin had returned from the four-year voyage of 

the Beagle, he got word that William Sharp Macleay thought he ought to 

publish materials about his zoological collection. Perhaps in appreciation, 

Darwin gave the senior and scientifically established William Sharp 

Macleay the flea. 10 

What interests me about this story is not so much the flea itself, but 

rather the longevity of the flea, what Arjun Appadurai would call its social 

life. 11 This flea, after all, has been around for nearly the whole of the two 

hundred years since Darwin’s birth; Darwin was a young man of 23 when 

he supposedly collected it. Darwin may not have thought anything 

particular of the flea, since it apparently arrived back in London nestled in 

the nose hairs of a hairy-nosed armadillo sent home from Bahia Blanca in 

Argentina. Was the flea even from Bahia Blanca? We can be assured that it 

was indeed an armadillo flea, since they are distinctive and the flea has 

been duly classified. 12 How did it get from London to the Macleay 

Museum in Australia? And where has it been all this time until the moment 

it was put on exhibit to celebrate Darwin’s 200 th birthday? 

At least one of these questions is easy to answer. We don’t know 

exactly how the flea changed hands from Darwin to William Sharp 

Macleay, but it could have been when Darwin went to Cambridge to have a 

look at Horae Entomologicae in the Cambridge University Library. It is 

possible that the younger Darwin dined with the then more eminent 



Macleay on that visit, probably in London on his way to Cambridge. 13 

Darwin was initially interested in Macleay’s Quinary System, but later 

referred to Macleay’s “vicious circles” and “rigamaroles” as he moved off 

in his own direction. 14 William Sharp migrated to Australia in 1839, and 

took his collection, including the flea, with him. There he combined his 

own and his father’s collections. 

The third Macleay, William John (1820-1891), cousin of William 

Sharp, took charge of William Sharp’s collection after his cousin’s death. 

Like the other Macleays, he was a collector, a member of scientific 

societies, and a supporter of museums. He enlarged the collection by hiring 

professional collectors to collect for him. He even funded and led an entire 

collecting expedition to New Guinea in 1875, the Chevert Expedition. 15 

And he engaged a curator to bring order into the greatly expanded 

collection. William John was a supporter and patron of the University of 

Sydney, and he eventually chose that institution for the collection. 16 The 

flea remained with the collection of over 600,000 insects, pinned to its tray 

and stored in a wooden cabinet. 17 

I think of the flea as a kind of emblem of continuity, bearing the 

burden of nearly a hundred years of Macleay family collecting, insistent by 

its very presence and endurance, that everything in this collection has value 

and must be preserved. But what is valuable about this flea, and why 

should it be preserved? What should today’s audience derive from viewing 

the flea, now safely removed from the indignity of being pinned and gently 

affixed to a glass slide for viewing with a microscope? 

Scholarly interest in collection histories today remind us that the 

meanings of collected objects change over time. After 1859, when Darwin 

published The Origin of the Species, natural history collections gradually 

acquired a focus they didn’t have before. Renaissance cabinets of 

curiosities, where collected objects might be put together for any number 

of reasons that appealed to the aristocratic collector, had already been 

supplanted by principles of display drawn from the classifying work of 

Linnaeus. Imagine the impact evolutionary theory must have had on 

museum display in the second half of the 19 th century, especially when 

museums open to the public were replacing private institutions. It is not 

difficult to surmise that the fleas on their own did not play a very large role 

in explaining evolution to public audiences. In any case, the three 

generations of Macleays were not evolutionists. 18 The flea remained safely 

in storage, achieving a semblance of immortality, but I wonder: what had it 

come to mean during all those years? 

We can ponder the long life in museum storage rooms of objects 

collected since the beginnings of natural history museums in the 19 th 

century, imaginings that have recently triggered two Hollywood movies 

about what happens in the American Museum of Natural History in New 

York and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington at night after all the 


82 Lou Ratté 

people have left. Real events that take place in curatorial conversations in 

museums may reflect just as much imagination as did these movie 

versions, however. 

What did inspire Macleay natural history curators to include Darwin’s 

flea in the 200 th anniversary celebratory exhibit? What did they want to 

accomplish? Explanatory materials for the exhibit are not so much 

directive as suggestive. When it was exhibited in February 2009, natural 

history curators attached the original label in William Sharp Macleay’s 

handwriting to the slide on which it was mounted: 

“Flea on Dasypus minutus Bahia Blanca N. Patagonia Darwin” 19 

What catches your attention? Darwin in 1832 when he collected the flea 

was not yet the Darwin we know in the history of science, since that 

Darwin only emerges in 1859 with the publication of The Origin of the 

Species. 20 Nor was the Darwin of 1837, when William Sharp got 

possession of the flea, that mythical Darwin, but he was just a young man 

with promise but not yet great achievement. Are we meant to focus on the 

mythic reputation rather than the history of collecting? Is William Sharp 

meant to be subordinated to the mythic Darwin here, or is this move to 

enhance his prestige by association? Is the history of science in Australia 

clashing with another narrative of the history of science as the story of 

great discoverers? 

Darwin, of course, actually did make the four-year voyage on the 

Beagle, and he did record his observations in notebooks that he later 

published. For understanding scientific knowledge production in the 19 th 

century, though, we have to remember who was with him. When Darwin 

collected he had local helpers who fed him and enabled him to travel safely 

and comfortably, and who pointed out the flora and fauna that they thought 

would interest him. He had his textual authorities either with him or 

certainly with him when he wrote up his field notes, enabling him to 

engage in that mysterious but necessary process of providing a binomial 

Latin name, many of which originated with Linnaeus, for every natural 

specimen seen or collected on the voyage. Darwin maintained a regular 

correspondence with his mentor and friend J. S. Henslow, to whom he sent 

crates of specimens as well as his observations, and Henslow took care of 

the specimens and saw to the publication of parts of Darwin’s letters so 

Darwin’s name would be before the scientific public. 21 We know 

Henslow’s name, but we do not know the names of the many people who 

made the boxes for the specimens to be packed in, the packers who had the 

demanding task of ensuring the safe journey of the specimens, and the 

sailors who stowed them on board and managed the trip from foreign 

places to Britain. Nor do we know the names of the ships’ captains who 

took on this valuable cargo and saw to its safe delivery. We do know that 

Darwin was tapping into a colonial and trading network that had been in 



existence for centuries, making it possible for things as well as people to 

travel. 22 

One thing Darwin did not do in his journal was mention the flea or, 

indeed, the hairy-nosed armadillo. At what point in the story did the flea 

surface, and what ever happened to the hairy-nosed armadillo? 

Of course not all of such questions, serious or flippant, can be 

answered, and the story of scientific knowledge production is not a 

continuous narrative. William Sharp’s Quinary System was itself not a step 

toward something else, but a hypothesis of no scientific interest today, 

although it remains historically significant. Is this the case with the flea? 

Had the Quinary System triumphed, would we think about fleas differently 

today? The longevity and renewed vigor of the flea is worth our attention, 

not only for what it might have been able to tell us about the development 

of a scientific understanding of the natural world, but for what it can 

suggest to us today about museum practice, the social practices of 

collecting and their relation to knowledge-making processes, and the global 

networks that the braiding together of scientific collecting and colonial 

expansion brought into existence. 

The flea, after all, was both a scientific and a colonial traveler. Let us 

assume that it did make the trip on the armadillo from Bahia Blanca to 

London. There it could have expected to enjoy a privileged position at the 

center of scientific knowledge production, but it was not to be. Instead, it 

migrated to the colonial periphery, where three generations of Macleays 

attempted the impossible task of making colonial outposts the equal in 

scientific prestige to metropolitan centers in Western Europe. 

Woody Horning, entomologist at the Macleay in 1988, wrote that 

European entomologists simply forgot about the Macleay collection for 

160 years because of Australia’s remoteness. 23 He also gives an 

explanation internal to the workings of the museum. When George 

Masters, the curator hired by William John, died in 1912, “the state of the 

collections became grim indeed.” 24 Fifty years later, a new curator, 

Elizabeth Hahn, began the work of restoring the collection. Somewhere 

between these two extremes of imperial indifference and institutional 

neglect must lie a more complex and up to date story that would invite us 

into those curatorial discussions about the flea and the 200 th anniversary 

celebratory exhibition. Who knows, we might even learn the whereabouts 

of the hairy-nosed armadillo. 


84 Lou Ratté 

Endnotes 

1 I want to thank Milton Osborne, who first told me about the Macleay 

Museum; Jude Philp and Rebecca Conroy, who took me around on my 

first visit and told me about the Macleay family; and Jim Specht, who 

accompanied me on visits to the Macleay and helped me in so many ways 

while I was in Sydney. Special thanks also to Elizabeth Jefferys, Curator 

of Natural History at the Macleay, whom I have only met through email 

exchanges and who told me many things about the flea, and once again to 

Jude Philp. Both Jude and Elizabeth made very helpful comments on an 

earlier draft of this paper. They have increased my appreciation for the 

Macleays, the Museum, and, of course, the flea. 

2 Charles Darwin, “ Chapter 5 - Bahia Blanca”, The Voyage of the 

Beagle, http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/Freeman_ 

ZoologyOfBeagle.html Accessed Sept 22 2009. This is a lengthy chapter 

and the reference to armadillos occurs near the end: 

I have already mentioned nearly all the mammalia 

common in this country. Of armadilloes three species 

occur namely, the Dasypus minutus or ‘pichy’, the D. 

villosus or ‘peludo’, and the ‘apar’. The first extends ten 

degrees further south than any other kind; a fourth 

species, the ‘Mulita’, does not come as far south as Bahia 

Blanca. The four species have nearly similar habits; the 

‘peludo’, however, is nocturnal, while the others wander 

by day over the open plains, feeding on beetles, larvae, 

roots, and even small snakes. The ‘apar’, commonly 

called ‘mataco’, is remarkable by having only three 

moveable bands; the rest of its tesselated covering being 

nearly inflexible. It has the power of rolling itself into a 

perfect sphere, like one kind of English woodlouse. In this 

state it is safe from the attack of dogs; for the dog not 

being able to take the whole in its mouth, tries to bite one 

side, and the ball slips away. The smooth hard covering of 

the ‘mataco’ offers a better defence than the sharp spines 

of the hedgehog. The ‘pichy’ prefers a very dry soil; and 

the sand-dunes near the coast, where for many months it 

can never taste water, is its favourite resort: it often tries 

to escape notice, by squatting close to the ground. In the 

course of a day's ride, near Bahia Blanca, several were 

generally met with. The instant one was perceived, it was 

necessary, in order to catch it, almost to tumble off one's 



horse; for in soft soil the animal burrowed so quickly, that 

its hinder quarters would almost disappear before one 

could alight. It seems almost a pity to kill such nice little 

animals, for as a Gaucho said, while sharpening his knife 

on the back of one, "Son tan mansos" (they are so quiet). 

3 Woody Horning, “Entomology,” Peter Stanbury and Julian Holland, 

eds., Mr. Macleay’s Celebrated Cabinet, (Sydney: The Mcleay Museum, 

1988), 1. 

4 The University of Sydney at http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/84.html? 

newsstoryid=3035. Accessed Sept. 21 2009. 

5 Jude Philp, Head Curator at the Macleay Museum, very kindly 

supplied me with information about the lighting (email message, Oct. 11, 

2009). 

6 Natural History Curator Elizabeth Jefferys very kindly responded to 

my request for more information about the flea and the exhibit. “The 

species of flea,” Dr. Jefferys writes, “is Phithiropsylla agenoris 

(Rothschild 194). It is a female specimen that was originally mounted on 

a pin. Now it is mounted on a proper microscope slide” (email message, 

Wednesday, 23 September 2009). 

7 Robyn Tacey and Ashley Hay, Museum: the Macleays, their 

collections and the search for order, (Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 2007). Excerpts from this book are available on line at 

http://books.google.com/books?id=cSElAFnbkocC&dq=Museum:+the+M 

acleays,+their+collections+and+the+search+for+order&printsec=frontcov 

er&source=bl&ots=fMofI0CPBr&sig=1nHL8nR97BaNpHHIdi09TKf1F 

Us&hl=en&ei=TaPESrasHsPklAf8zNWSAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct 

=result&resnum=2#v=onepage&q=&f=false and you can read about its 

launching at http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=2016. 

8 

Thanks to Elizabeth Jefferys for these details. 

9 For a description of Macleay’s Quinary System with attention to the 

scientific debates in the early 19 th century in which he participated, see 

Tony Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism, 

(London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 15-19. 

10 According to Elizabeth Jefferys at the Macleay, there is no 

evidence for precisely how or when William Sharp acquired the flea 

(email Oct. 11, 2009). 

11 Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in 

Social Perspective, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 

12 Curator Jude Philp informed me that the flea had been checked and 

classified as an armadillo flea (email Oct. 11, 2009). 


86 Lou Ratté 

13 Robyn Tacey and Ashley Hay, 52. See also Letter 413—Darwin C. 

R. to Darwin S. E., 15 May 1838. Darwin is writing to “My dear old 

Granny” and describes all his activities while in Cambridge. The editor of 

the Letters notes: “one purpose of this visit to Cambridge was to consult 

William Sharp Macleay’s Horae entomologicae (1819–21) in the 

University Library.” See . 

14 Tony Bennett, 19. 

15 See http://www.usyd.edu.au/museums/whatson/exhibitions/ 

cchevert.shtml for information on the expedition. 

16 According to Jude Philp, William Sharp Macleay had willed the 

collection to either Sydney University or Cambridge, and William John 

chose University of Sydney (email, Oct. 11, 2009). 

17 Thanks to Elizabeth Jefferys and Jude Philp for these details. 

18 Thanks again to Jude Philp for clarification. 

19 Thanks again to Elizabeth Jefferys for this information. 

20 Thanks to John Ratté for suggesting I talk about two Darwins to 

differentiate between the historic man and the mythic character. 

21 Letter 192, Darwin, C.R. to Henslow, J.S., (26 Oct-) 24 Nov 1832. 

http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry192.html 

My dear Henslow, 

[….] 

I have been very lucky with fossil bones; I have fragments 

of at least 6 distinct animals; as many of them are teeth I 

trust, shattered & rolled as they have been, they will be 

recognised. I have paid all the attention, I am capable of, 

to their geological site, but of course it is too long a story 

for here.—1st. the Tarsi & Metatarsi very perfect of a 

Cavia: 2nd the upper jaw & head of some very large 

animal, with 4 square hollow molars.—& the head greatly 

produced in front.—I at first thought it belonged either to 

the Megalonyx or Megatherium.—In confirmation, of 

this, in the same formation I found a large surface of the 

osseous polygonal plates, which ``late observations'' 

(what are they?) show belong to the Megatherium.— 

Immediately I saw them I thought they must belong to an 

enormous Armadillo, living species of which genus are so 

abundant here; 3d The lower jaw of some large animal, 

which from the molar teeth, I should think belonged to the 

Edentata: 4th. some large molar teeth, which in some 

respects would seem to belong to an enormous Rodentia; 



5th, also some smaller teeth belonging to the same order: 

&c &c.—If it interests you sufficiently to unpack them, I 

shall be very curious to hear something about them:— 

Care must be taken, in this case, not to confuse the 

tallies.—They are mingled with marine shells, which 

appear to me identical with what now exist.—But since 

they were deposited in their beds, several geological 

changes have taken place in the country.— 

[….] 

I think the dried plants nearly contain all which were then 

Bahia Blanca flowering. All the specimens will be packed 

in casks—I think there will be three: (before sending this 

letter I will specify dates &c &c).—I am afraid you will 

groan or rather the floor of the Lecture room will, when 

the casks arrive.—Without you I should be utterly 

undone.—The small cask contains fish; will you open it, 

to see how the spirit has stood the evaporation of the 

Tropics.— 

[….] 

I purchased fragments (Nors: 837 & 8) of some enormous 

bones; which I was assured belonged to the former 

giants!!—I also procured some seeds.—I do not know 

whether they are worth your accepting; if you think so, I 

will get some more:—They are in the box: I have sent to 

you by the Duke of York Packet, commanded by Lieu: 

Snell to Falmouth.—two large casks, containing fossil 

bones.—a small cask with fish, & a box containing skins, 

spirit bottle &c & pill-boxes with beetles.— Would you 

be kind enough to open these latter, as they are apt to 

become mouldy.—With the exceptions of the bones, the 

rest of my collection looks very scanty. Recollect how 

great a proportion of time is spent at sea. I am always 

anxious to hear in what state my things come & any 

criticisms about quantity or kind of specimens.—In the 

smaller cask is part of a large head, the anterior portions 

of which are in the other large ones.—The packet has 

arrived & I am in a great bustle: You will not hear from 

me for some months: 

Notes to this letter inform readers that “passages from this letter 

were extracted by Henslow and published in the Cambridge 

Philosophical Society pamphlet….” 


88 Lou Ratté 

Notes also mention Macleay: “In his Horæ entomologicæ (Macleay 1819– 

21), he propounded the Quinary System of classification in which the five 

main animal groups are represented by `circles of affinity'. To represent 

the continuity of forms the circles are arranged in a larger circle in which 

each is contiguous or ìnosculant' with two others. Loren Eiseley cited 

CD's use of ìnosculating' as evidence of an early, unacknowledged debt 

to Edward Blyth, but Macleay's system and its vocabulary were well 

known to CD long before he knew of Blyth. See Eiseley 1959 and S. 

Smith 1968. The inosculating bird is identified as Tinochorus rumicivorus 

in Birds, pp. 117–18. 

For the full Darwin Correspondence consult: http://www.darwinproject. 

ac.uk/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/ 

22 There is a vast literature in the new history of science on shipping 

networks across which natural history specimens traveled. A convenient 

place to make a start with this literature is Harold Cook, Matters of 

Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age, 

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 

23 Woody Horning, p. 129. 

24 Horning, p. 129. 


Simulated Travel: Cultural Theme Parks, Hyperreality, and Reality 

Terri A. Hasseler 

At some point in my cultural studies courses, I ask students if they have 

ever taken their picture at a famous tourist site just so they can 

demonstrate to others that they have been there. I admit that I must have 

about 500 pictures of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament: Me, alone 

with Big Ben rising up over my shoulder; My husband and me, with Big 

Ben behind us; My husband, alone, with Big Ben lit up; Big Ben, alone 

artfully angled; Me, with a group of students; Me, with another group of 

students; And another set of students; A younger me, smiling and 

pointing. Every time I go to London, to visit, to teach, I take another 

picture and add it to the increasing pile. 

“Of course,” my students reply to my question. In fact, the picture-asproof 

of their travels lends authenticity to their comments about the 

culture of the place they have visited: Yes, I have been there. 

Sadly, I tell my students that I think I am much like Clark Griswold in 

National Lampoon’s European Vacation. Trapped in the traffic loop 

around Westminster, he points out Big Ben with less and less excitement 

as it zooms past in their endless circling of the site: “Look kids, Big Ben.” 

If there was something ritualistic in my picture taking, it would perhaps be 

a more profound practice. But if there is anything of ritual in it, it is an 

empty ritual—a marking that I have been there, yet again: “Look kids, Big 

Ben.” 

Nevertheless, these pictures seem to lend authenticity to my travels 

and to my ability to comment upon those travels. As the tourist, who 

smiled in front of Big Ben, I can speak about London culture with 

“experience,” a quality that students revere. Many tourists are looking for 

a portable record of their experience. These artifacts demonstrate that the 

tourist has been there, but say little about what she has learned. This type 

of travel mimics the experience of travel, but of a simulated, artificial 

form, reduced to the vacuous act of taking a picture, or worse, of buying a 

postcard. 

In this lesson plan, I would like to map out the ways in which 

simulated travel occurs. My purpose is to propose a series of activities to 

help students talk about simulated reality, cultural theme parks, and travel. 

The goal is to equip teachers with activities that will help students pose 

critical questions about themselves-as-tourists. I will provide several 

sample activities, followed by a case study of the Polynesian Cultural 

Center. The readings I suggest are drawn from John Storey’s Cultural 

Theory and Popular Culture reader published by Pearson/Prentice Hall 

(Jean Baudrillard’s “The Precession of Simulacra,” Cornel West’s 

(interviewed by Anders Stephanson), “Black Postmodernist Practices,” 

and Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life) and from Aimé 


90 Hasseler 

Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. In addition, I make use of popular 

Web sites, such as Yelp, and a lengthy passage for Don Delillo’s White 

Noise. 

Theoretical Background 

Jean Baudrillard’s essay, “The Precession of Simulacra,” is a constructive, 

though challenging essay to use with students to discuss experiences of 

tourism. I ask students to work through several particular concepts 

(simulation, hyperreality, and nostalgia) to build the groundwork for 

discussing tourism and connections with authenticity. Baudrillard argues 

that “the age of simulation […] begins with a liquidation of all referentials 

[…] It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even 

of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the 

real itself” (351). Taking apart this process of thinking, I ask students to 

think about how imitation, reduplication, and parody function in different 

ways than what Baudrillard is getting at: Eventually, we talk about how 

“imitation” is an attempt at a copy of some “original”; “reduplication” 

appears to be much like Xeroxing, in which the “original” remains, 

though it is perhaps mechanically duplicated; and “parody” is an attempt 

to distort or transform the “original” through comedy or comparison. 

These initial definitions help us, as we think about what it is that 

Baudrillard finds so disturbing about “simulation” and the resulting 

“hyperreality.” They notice that simulation has a different relationship 

with the “original,” one in which the “original” and the “copy” are 

confused and conflated with each other. Storey writes in his introduction 

to the essay, that hyperrealism is when “the real and simulated are 

experienced as without difference” (347). Baudrillard argues that 

“nostalgia” emerges “when the real is no longer what it used to be . . . 

There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of secondhand 

truth, objectivity and authenticity” (354). His argument follows that 

when we lose connection with the “real,” we panic and are nostalgic for 

the “origin.” 

For Baudrillard, the cultural theme park is the perfect example of the 

process of hyperreality and nostalgia. Disney, Baudrillard argues, 

reinforces the imaginary; it is “presented as imaginary in order to make us 

believe that the rest is real” (355). It plays to our childish fantasies and 

wishes, dreams and imageries. It relies upon the cultural nostalgia of 

childhood: “It is meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us 

believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal 

the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly amongst those 

adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their 

real childishness” (355). Aimé Césaire develops this point more 

compellingly when he makes a similar observation about Empire: that the 

Imperialist left home to use his colonial or imperial location as a type of 


Simulated Travel 91 

playground or theme park; there he could let go of all the behaviors of 

civilization and engage in monstrous behaviors. Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz in 

Heart of Darkness is a literary example of such behavior. For Césaire, the 

colonialist makes himself a Thing and is only shocked by his behaviors 

when those same horrific practices done in colonial settings are used on 

white people, as in the case of Hitler’s actions towards other European 

nations (42). As long as the colonialist can separate home (civilized) from 

colony (uncivilized), he can preserve the illusion that he himself is 

civilized. 

Cornel West places Baudrillard’s observations within the framework 

of race and class: “Baudrillard seems to be articulating a sense of what it 

is to be a French, middle-class intellectual, or perhaps what it is to be 

middle-class generally. Let me put it in terms of a formulation from Henry 

James that Frederic Jameson has appropriated: “There is a reality that one 

cannot not know. The ragged edges of the Real, of Necessity, not being 

able to eat, not having shelter, not having health care, all this is something 

that one cannot not know” (388). For West, hyperreality is a neurotic 

luxury of the middle-class, those who can afford to preserve the illusion. 

Others, who live with the all-too-real cannot afford such escapist luxuries. 

Hyperreality is a luxury of the comfortable. A case study in this is Six 

Flags Amusement Parks. Consumers pay to be returned to the nostalgic 

world of the county fair—with rides, games, prizes and country foods. 

People go to be children again and experience the thrills. For many, the 

county fair, itself, is a referent whose origin is lost. Nevertheless, the 

hyperreality of such places, the childishness, forgives participants from 

understanding the reality of the place itself. As the New York Times has 

reported, places like Six Flags recruit their labor from a particular 

vulnerable population—foreign guest workers. These young people from 

regions such as Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America come under false 

pretenses and end up working under terrible conditions: long hours 

without overtime pay or fewer hours than promised, isolated (rural) and 

overcrowded living conditions, increased indebtedness when overcharged 

for rent, and deception about the work they would actually do. For these 

workers in the world of cultural amusement, hyperreality is meaningless: 

Indeed, a young woman from Taiwan described the experience as 

“painful” (NYT) 

Case Study: Polynesian Cultural Center 

I visited the Polynesian Cultural Center, owned and operated by the 

Mormon Church, over the heavy protest of a friend I was traveling with. 

This friend and I generally go on a biking, snow-shoeing, or some such 

trip. So Hawai’i for her was all about the hikes we could find, but I really 

wanted to go to the Polynesian Cultural Center and demanded that we pay 

the substantial entrance fee. The PCC, located on Oahu, covers 42 acres. 


92 Hasseler 

According to their official Website, they provide “recreated island 

villages, theaters, dining, and show facilities.” They are particularly wellknown 

for the Rainbows of Paradise canoe parades, as well as their major 

tourist attraction, their luau and evening show. The facility is nearly 

completely staffed by students, many of whom come from Polynesian 

islands; they attend the local branch of the Mormon Church’s Brigham 

Young University. In "Oahu's Polynesian Cultural Center: Aiding and 

Abetting the LDS Missionary Effort," Bill McKeever, writing on the 

Mormon Research Ministry Website, states that, “A great portion of the 

employees at the PCC are Pacific island natives. The LDS Church recruits 

these young people to attend the nearby Brigham Young University- 

Hawaii campus. In turn, these students pay for their tuition by working at 

the center. Since many of these students are not American citizens, normal 

circumstances would demand that they have special permission from the 

Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to work in the US. 

However, a provision in the law allows a non-American student the ability 

to work if the student has on-campus employment. Since the LDS Church 

claims the Polynesian Cultural Center is part of their BYU-Hawaii 

campus, the students comply with those guidelines.” Frank Salamone 

writes that, “The goal of the center, then, can be summed up as portraying 

an authentic view of Polynesian culture while benefitting students through 

allowing them to complete their educations, visitors through adding love 

to their lives and the Mormons through spreading their message” (57). 

Thus, the PCC appears to transcend the standard cultural theme park 

because it provides authentic Polynesians performing authentic activities 

in order to educate, nay bring "love" to, the tourist, all while subtly, as 

McKeever, writes, "aiding and abetting" the Mormon agenda. 

Salamone problematizes this agenda by stating, “Such a bald 

statement of the situation leads one to ask the disturbing question of 

whose version of authenticity is being presented at the Polynesian 

Cultural Center” (57). Indeed, the PCC’s promotional video on their 

Website boldly asserts, “Why come thousands of miles to Polynesia, and 

then never really see it?” Such commentary is more than a little 

disquieting. Most tourists, who comment on review sites such as Yelp, 

speak also to these questions of authenticity. As Wayne Fife argues, 

cultural theme sites require a tourist, who believes “modernist conceits 

such as the notion that ‘true history’ or ‘authentic reconstructions’ are 

within the realm of human attainment” (65). A glimpse at some of the 

comments helps to put the tourist experience in context. The following is 

a comment posted in July, 2009. 

Made it in time for the boat parade, which was incredibly 

awesome. Tahitian women are amazing. After taking my 

upper division course on Anthropology of Pacific Islands 



I fell in love with Aotearoa, so it was awesome getting a 

glimpse of their culture like that. And their hakas, 

rawr.[…] I loved PCC because everyone was very 

genuine, natural, and pure about their culture, as exposed 

to glitzy luaus. I enjoyed being a part of different 

polynesian cultures with their beautiful music and dance. 

I just had a worthwhile experience. Exhausted at the end 

of the day so I slept great! PCC makes me want to live in 

Hawai'i and hang out with the locals. 

Another posted in January, 2009, follows: 

This place is awesome! You are immersed in the 

Polynesian culture. Don't expect any roller coasters or 

rides. It's all about learning/feeling the culture, which was 

all new to me. You get a whirlwind cultural tour through 

the island villages of Samoa, Aotearoa, Marquesas, Fiji, 

Hawaii, Tahiti and Tonga. This place is non profit and 

provides scholarships for the workers attending BYU 

behind the center. Our guide was peppy in teaching us the 

villages. Did some hula, spoke a couple of Polynesian 

words, nice canoe ride around the villages, learned to play 

tititorea, watched the opening of coconut with a small 

stone, and enjoyed the whiff of noni. The center has so 

many lush trees and blossoming flowers, reminds me of 

walking through hiking trails. 

References to the student workers, as in the one listed above, are 

numerous on the site, with one reviewer writing in May, 2009: “The 

performances are amateurish since they are mostly students, but this adds 

to the impressiveness of the adventure. Year after year, BYU Hawaii is 

able to produce wonderful performances by STUDENTS that are paying 

their way through college.” Another in February, 2009 writing, “I really 

enjoyed the tour with the college student as a guide. I learned more at the 

Maori village than I did in New Zealand.” I recall one telling moment of 

my experience at the PCC: We talked with a young couple who were 

demonstrating a dance for the tourists. They were not a part of a staged 

show, but were one of a series of “instructive” activities outside of the 

performance “venues.” In the seclusion of a comfortable tree lined 

meadow, we asked a number of pressing questions about their dance, the 

authenticity of the experience, and their relationship to the Center; they 

eyed us with distrust and with a slight disdain. 

A second incident is one that all who have attended the PCC will be 

familiar with—the Rainbows of Paradise canoe parade through the 


94 Hasseler 

lagoon, made famous by Elvis. As the music started, I felt like I was 

observing the floating version of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; at 

any moment Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira would jump out to comment 

upon the costuming and performance. I turned to my friend and said, 

“Okay, you’re right, Let’s go.” Because of the many influences, 

particularly the business of Hollywood, Salamone finds a number of 

fundamental artificialities in the PCC’s performances, particularly in the 

dress and construction of the bodies of the student performers. 

Constrained by Mormon and American cultural perspectives on bodily 

appearance and presentation, the Polynesian students often resort to subtle 

forms of “play” to resist these limitations (54): “Both men and women 

seek to subvert the restrictive rules that on one level they have accepted 

but on another attack their self-identity. Open rebellion is out of the 

question, for it would jeopardize their income and education as well as 

any future advancement which the Mormon Church would offer them” 

(68). Such behaviors fall in line with Michel de Certeau’s observations on 

the “tactics” of resistance that those without power use to attack power 

though not ultimately harm nor derail it. The students’ discomfort with 

our questions, perhaps, comes from the fact that we recognized such 

tactics-in-practice, and the students, not knowing who we are and our 

ability to manipulate their circumstances, looked at us, understandably, 

with uncertainty. More pointedly, they looked at us with disdain, perhaps, 

because of our feeble attempts to understand the complexity of their 

situation and their subtle rebellion. 

I am not sure what I was hoping to find at the PCC. I am a rather 

practiced traveler, often aware of what Wayne Fife calls the 

“postmodernist form of tourism,” a situation in which one is not interested 

in the “modernist projection of authenticity at all but rather about poking 

fun at the idea that such authenticity is actually possible” (64-65). It is, 

perhaps, this postmodernist perspective, which can make simulated travel 

acceptable. One experiences the place with the off-kilter perspective of 

camp and humor, like getting married in Vegas, which is something my 

husband and I did because it was a chance to both poke fun at the 

institution of marriage, while participating in it. But this makes me think a 

great deal about what is so compelling about these experiences, how even 

knowledge of the hyperreality is not enough to fight its affect, or the 

degree to which the hyperreality provides the excuse for the educated 

traveler to make fun of oneself in the act of participating in the institution 

(marriage) or action (tourism). 

One reviewer in July, 2008 spoke to the complexity of simulated 

travel: 

I'm really split between liking the fact that this center 

supports Polynesian students and hating the fact that this 



is where Mormon missionary brainwashing and white 

North American fetishism collide. 

I enjoyed myself (although the luau was kind of a hoax), 

despite the fact that it was like going to Disneyland. You 

know, except for cultural exploitation and what not. I 

learned a bit about Polynesia (and Melanesia, which, I 

have to admit I didn't realize existed), but overall, the 

whole center was problematic. Polynesian culture really 

shouldn't be put on display like this, particularly the parts 

that played up to North American stereotypes of islanders. 

Moreover, anything Mormon is questionable. 

Generally, Hawai'i is nearing a very sad place where we 

have to learn about cultures through theme parks. 

Whatever happened to the Hawai'i independent of 

tourism? More and more, places like the Polynesian 

Cultural Center will replace the rich cultures of Hawai'i 

(and Samoa, Tahiti, Tonga, etc...)—a farcical testament to 

them. I beg anyone that reads this and visits Hawai'i to 

keep it real, keep it local! Hawai'i is more than a vacation 

spot. Stay away from the tourism! 

This reviewer’s strong admonition to, “Stay away from the tourism!” 

hits at the heart of Fife’s observations on modernist tourism—as if there is 

a way to escape the inauthentic and find the local. However, this 

commentary puts into relief the actual dangers of such simulated travel. 

Recently, I took my 10-month old son for his first hayride at one of the 

many local farms open for business in the fall. My older stepsons had run 

through corn mazes and played on the carnival rides at this place for 

years, but I had never gone beyond the “front” stage—of the shop with 

pumpkins, flowers and fresh produce. On the return trip from behind the 

façade of the store, the tractor paused as a group of migrant workers 

quickly loaded a pickup truck with baskets that they would take to the 

fields; everyone grew silent, reality under our noses. The invisibility of 

the labor that went into making the pumpkin on our front porch possible, 

the hayride enjoyable, was made visible: “A reality that one cannot not 

know.” Simulated travel allows for the escape, but really seeing the 

migrant workers, for instance, requires that I understand their presence in 

my community and that I have to think about this issue and speak to it. 

Many students might argue, based on this comment, that thinking 

about these things makes travel no longer “fun.” But who said that travel 

was essentially about “fun”? Perhaps, travel could be more about 

hypervigilance, rather than hyperreality, when the traveler recognizes the 


96 Hasseler 

seductive quality of the modernist search for authenticity and rejects the 

free pass offered by the postmodernist self-ironic posture. Psychological 

literature speaks of the anxiety inherent in the hypervigilant’s constant 

responsiveness to her environment. If hypervigilance is understood to 

include an ethical responsiveness to the environment one travels in, it 

counters what one normally associates with travel, which is often about 

freedom. What that vigilant travel might look like is hard to know; it is 

probably more of a process of constant assessment, self-questioning, and 

self-commentary and critique, rather than a completed state. And this may 

not be “fun,” but it is certainly a more self-aware perspective. 

In-class Activities 

In order to start the discussion, I find it helpful to have students theorize 

tourism and then to discuss personal touring experiences. For the first, I 

ask students to discuss a passage from Don Delillo’s White Noise. This 

passage about the Most Photographed Barn in America is wonderfully 

wicked, and it brings up crucial questions about the way that tourism 

confounds the real and the simulated: How the ubiquitous signage for the 

barn precedes the actual barn; how the experience is already framed for 

the tourist aesthetic; how the spirituality of tourism is a surrender to the 

collection of artifacts, basically, consumption; how hype makes it 

impossible to see a thing in and of itself; and how a site ostensibly persists 

as a tourist site because of the presence of tourists. Also, it is not 

surprising that Delillo’s referent is a barn: what could be more 

representative of the image of a simpler America than a nostalgic old 

barn? Activities could then encourage students in an exploration of local 

or not-so-local cultural theme parks and locations, and end with a 

discussion of a more vigilant form of tourism. 

Activity #1: Have students read the following section from Don Delilo’s 

book White Noise and address the questions at the end of the excerpt .This 

scene is set early in the book when the narrator takes his new colleague 

Murray to experience a local tourist site. Students could be asked to 

consider a number of questions. (Also, please reference the questions 

offered by the Penguin Modern Classics Library edition.) 

Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist 

attraction known as the most photographed barn in 

America. We drove twenty-two miles into the country 

around Farmington. There were meadows and apple 

orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. 

Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST 

PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted 

five signs before we reached the site. There were forty 



cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along 

a cow path to the slightly elevated spot set aside for 

viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; 

some had tripods, telephoto lens, filter kits. A man in a 

booth sold postcards and slides—pictures of the barn 

taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of 

trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained 

a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in 

a little book. 

“No one sees the barn,” he said finally. 

A long silence followed. 

“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes 

impossible to see the barn.” He fell silent once more. 

People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at 

once by others. 

“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to 

maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can 

you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.” 

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth 

sold postcards and slides. 

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see 

only what the others see. The thousands who were here in 

the past, those will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be 

part of a collective perception. This literally colors our 

vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.” 

Another silence ensued. 

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said. He 

did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant 

clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of 

levers that advanced the film. 

“What was the barn like before it was 

photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was 

it different from other barns, how was it similar to other 

barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve 

read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We 

can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re 

here, we’re now.” 

He seemed immensely please by this. (12-13) 

1. How is the tourist experience of the Most Photographed Barn similar 

to our experiences of picture-taking while traveling, my Big Ben 

experience? 

2. How is the Most Photographed Barn an example of hyperreality? 


98 Hasseler 

3. Why does Murray conclude that once one has bought (consumed) signs 

and representations of a thing, one can longer experience the thing itself? 

Is that an apt explanation of the experience of tourism? 

4. How do tourists help to maintain an image as opposed to the “thing” 

itself? 

Activity #2: Have students share travel experiences—starting with 

childhood experiences with places such as Disney or amusement parks. I 

have found that many students in a range of socio-economic positions 

have had Disney experiences. If not, many have very good ideas of what 

Disney is like and images drawn from Websites are helpful to make the 

place concrete. Expand the discussion to include cultural parks that 

students with more international travel might have experienced—such as 

The Tower of London. Or include travel students may have had to resort 

communities in the Caribbean and Mexico. Ask students what they can 

recall of those who worked in these locations? Ask students whether they 

live or have lived in a tourist spot, worked in one? Discuss how working 

in a tourist site is a very different experience than traveling to a tourist 

location. In New England, students from Vermont often talk about the leaf 

watchers who invade their homes during fall weekends. It is interesting to 

hear the frustration present in their voices. International students have 

interesting stories to share about American tourists in their countries. 

Similarly, international students often have initial experiences with 

America through Disney and/or Las Vegas, and it is useful to discuss how 

these experiences frame their understanding of America. 

Activity #3: Have students research a cultural location. Most have a local 

site fairly close by. For instance, both Plimoth Plantation and Old 

Sturbridge Village are within driving distance of my location. Similarly, 

more overtly theme-based locations, such as Six Flags Amusement Park 

are within a day’s driving distance. Have students think about the kinds of 

questions raised about simulated travel, authenticity, hidden labor, 

hyperreality, and hypervigilance. 

Activity #4: Have students construct a definition for an alternative form of 

travel, based on greater vigilance. 

Works Cited 

Bauman, Valerie. “Investigations Show Cheating of Foreign Workers in 

New York.” New York Times. New York Times, 3 November 2008. 

Web. 29 September 2009. 

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. 1955. Trans. John Pinkham. 

New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Print. 



DeLillo, Don. White Noise: Text and Criticism. 1984. Ed. Mark Osteen. 

New York: Penguin, 1998. Print. 

Fife, Wayne. “Semantic Slippage as a New Aspect of Authenticity: 

Viking Tourism on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland.” 

Journal of Folklore Research. 41.1 (2004): 61-84. Print. 

McKeever, Bill. “Oahu’s Polynesian Cultural Center: Aiding and 

Abetting the LDS Missionary Effort.” Mormonism Research 

Ministry. Web. 29 September 2009. 

National Lampoon’s European Vacation. Dir. Amy Heckerling. Perf. 

Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1985. 

Film. 

Polynesian Cultural Center. Yelp. Web. 29 September 2009. 

Polynesian Cultural Center. Web. 29 September 2009. 

Salamone, Frank. “The Polynesian Cultural Center and the Mormon 

Image of the Body: Images of Paradise on Laie, Hawai’i.” Religion, 

Dress, and the Body. Ed. Linda B. Arthur. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Print. 

Storey, John, ed. and intro. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A 

Reader. 2 nd ed. New York: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 1998. Print. 


Water, Water Everywhere 

A Learning Community 

James Dutcher 

Professor of English Professor of Chemistry Librarian 

Course descriptions 

LC 101, Water, Water Everywhere: This Learning Community will share 

in the wonder of water, learning about its unusual chemical and physical 

properties and why it is essential to life. Water is everywhere and without 

water, we die within a week. Water is absolutely indispensable for all the 

forms of life that have evolved on Earth and is the most important 

compound on the face of the Earth. Where does water come from? Who 

owns the water? How severe is the threat of acid rain? Why is water a 

liquid when it should be a gas? How is water able to absorb enormous 

amounts of energy without significantly raising its temperature? What 

will happen if we continue our present patterns of water use? Will there 

always be enough water for everyone, everywhere? How are these issues 

represented in literature? What are the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions 

of water? Some of the works discussed may include: Yann Martel’s Life 

of Pi, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on 

the Voyage, Hermanne Hesse’s Siddhartha, Philip Ball’s Life’s Matrix: A 

Biography of Water, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Shakespeare’s 

King Lear, “Onondaga Lake: A Case Study” Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, 

David Christner’s Let it Rain, Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action, Vandana 

Shiva’s Water Wars, and the film The Milagro Bean Field War. 

Prerequisites: ENG 101 and permission of the instructors. 

The Class 

In addition to the exploration into the intellectual and technical aspects of 

literature and science, the aim of this course is to encourage critical, i.e. 

analytical, thinking and to develop scientific, reading, research, and 

writing skills. The course is designed to develop your ability to think in a 

variety of academic disciplines: to understand, to intuit, and to reason as 

well as to introduce you to inductive and deductive reasoning and to 

problem solving. Essay assignments, reading and writing assignments, 

problem-solving exercises, lab work, and exams will be directed toward 

all of these goals. Students should be willing to use one of the larger 

academic libraries in the area if the HCC Library is unable to provide 

sufficient research materials. The class will consist of lecture, discussion, 



group work, and student presentations. Active student participation is 

required. 

Papers and Assignments 

Your writing is expected to be clear, well-organized, and free of 

errors in grammar, spelling, and mechanics. We will be happy to help 

anyone with writing difficulties, so please ask for help. You are always 

welcome to ask for help with research, outlines, rough drafts, or any other 

aspect of your work. 

Laboratory Policy 

It is anticipated and encouraged that lab students interact with one 

another and with the laboratory instructor in order to thoroughly 

understand how to successfully complete the lab reports. 

Required Equipment 

OSHA-approved safety glasses. 

Scientific calculator (strongly recommended). 

Required Texts 

Ball, Philip. Life’s Matrix: A Biography of Water. Berkeley: University 

of California Press, 2001. (Provided to students by the Honors 

Program.) 

Christner, David W. Let it Rain. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing 

Company, 1980. 

Findley, Timothy. Not Wanted on the Voyage. Toronto: Penguin, 1984. 

(Provided to students by the Honors Program.) 

Haar, Jonathan. A Civil Action. New York: Vintage, 1996. 

Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. Trans. Hilda Rosner. New York: New 

Directions, 1951. 

Hogan, Linda. Solar Storms. New York: Scribner, 1995. 

Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. 25 th Anniversary Edition, New York: Vintage 

Books, 1997 

Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. New York: Harcourt, 2001. 

Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 

1980. 

Schwartz, A. Truman, et al. Chemistry in Context: Applying Chemistry to 

Society. 2 nd ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 1997. 

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Stephen Orgel. New York: 

Oxford UP, 1998. 

Shiva, Vandana. Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit. 

Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002. 

Vonnegut, Kurt. Cat’s Cradle. New York: Delta, 1963. 


102 Dutcher 

Bibliography 

Barrett, Andrea. The Forms of Water. New York: Washington Square 

Press, 1993. 

———. Ship Fever. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. 

Bohjalian, Chris. Water Witches. New York: Scribner, 1995. 

Bruchac, Joseph and Michael J. Caduto. Native American Stories. 

Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1991. 

Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. 1993. New York: Aspect, 1995. 

Coffer, William E. (Koi Hosh.) Spirit of the Sacred Mountains: Creation 

Stories of the American Indian. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 

1978. 

Conway, Jill Ker et al., eds. Earth, Air, Fire, Water. Amherst: University 

of Massachusetts Press, 1999. 

Davies, Stevie. The Element of Water. London: The Women’s Press, 

2001. 

De Villiers, Marq. Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource. 

Boston: Mariner Books, 2001. 

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper & Row, 

1974. 

Duncan, David James. My Story As Told By Water. San Francisco: Sierra 

Club Books, 2002. 

Duxbury, Alison B., Alyn Duxbury, and Keith Sverdup. Fundamentals of 

Oceanography. 4 th ed. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002. 

Fagan, Brian. The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and 

Fall of Civilizations. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. 

Flannery, Tim. The Weather Makers: How Man is Changing the Climate 

and What it Means for Life on Earth. New York: Atlantic Monthly 

Press, 2006. 

Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. 

Gleick, Peter H. The World’s Water 2006-2007: The Biennial Report on 

Freshwater Resources. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006. 

Hatton, John and Paul Plouffe, eds. The Culture of Science. New York: 

Macmillan, 1993. 

Kunzig, Robert. Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean 

Science. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. 

Lee, Jeffrey. The Scientific Endeavor. Reading, MA: Benjamin 

Cummings, 2000. 

Lembke, Janet. Skinny Dipping and Other Immersions in Water, Myth, 

and Being Human. New York: Lyons & Burford, 1994. 

Marks, William E. The Holy Order of Water: Healing Earth’s Waters 

and Ourselves. Great Barrington, MA: Bell Pond Books, 2001. 

McComas, William F. “15 Myths of Science.” Skeptic. 5.2 (1997): 88– 

95. 



Mitchell, John G. “James Bay: Where Two Worlds Collide.” Water: The 

Power, Promise, and Turmoil of North America’s Fresh Water. 

National Geographic Special Edition. 184.5A (1993): 66–75. 

Montgomery, Carla. Environmental Geology. 5 th ed., rev. Boston: 

McGraw Hill, 2000. 

O’Connell, James C., ed. The Pioneer Valley Reader. Stockbridge, MA: 

Berkshire House, 1995. 

Orr, David W. Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the 

Human Prospect. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994. 

Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to 

Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage, 1990. 

Pearce, Fred. When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—The Defining Crisis of 

the Twenty-first Century. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007. 

Rushdie, Salman. “On Leavened Bread.” The New Yorker. 30 December 

1996: 45. 

Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its 

Disappearing Water. New York: Penguin, 1993. 

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Lear. Ed. Jay L. Halio. 

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. 

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. 1977. New York: Penguin, 1986. 

Singh, Simon. Fermat’s Enigma. New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1998. 

Slovic, Scott H. and Terrell F. Dixon. Being in the World: An 

Environmental Reader for Writers. New York: Macmillan, 1993. 

Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. New York: North Point Press, 

1990. 

Steingarten, Jeffrey. The Man Who Ate Everything. New York: Vintage, 

1997. 

Vidal, John. “Liquid Assets.” The Manchester Guardian Weekly. 

August 2002. 

Water: The Power, Promise, and Turmoil of North America’s Fresh 

Water. National Geographic Special Edition. 184.5A (1993). 

Wetherell, W. D., ed. This American River: Five Centuries of Writing 

about the Connecticut. Hanover: University Press of New England, 

2002. 

Wise, Donald U. “Creationism’s Geologic Time Scale.” Geology: 

Annual Editions, 1999/2000. 2 nd ed. Ed. Douglas B. Sherman. New 

York: Duskin, 2001. 

Water, Water Everywhere 

A Learning Community 

Assignments are listed on the days they are due, so look—and plan— 

ahead. 


104 Dutcher 

Syllabus 

The liquid of which seas, lakes, and rivers are composed, and which falls 

as rain and issues from springs. When pure, it is transparent, colorless 

(except as seen in large quantity, when it has a blue tint), tasteless, and 

inodorous. 

Popular language recognizes kinds of ‘water’ that have not all these 

negative properties; but (even apart from any scientific knowledge) it has 

usually been more or less clearly understood that these are really mixtures 

of water with other substances. (OED2) 

And the Albatross begins to be avenged. 

Water, water, every where, 

And all the boards did shrink; 

Water, water, every where, 

Nor any drop to drink. 

The very deep did rot : O Christ! 

That ever this should be! 

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs 

Upon the slimy sea. 

About, about, in reel and rout 

The death-fires danced at night; 

The water, like a witch’s oils, 

Burnt green, and blue and white. 

from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 

Rime of the Ancient Mariner 

“Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.” 

Mark Twain (1835–1910) 

“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” 

W.H. Auden 

The ocean is a body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made 

for man—who has no gills. 

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914), The Devil's Dictionary 



Getting Our Feet Wet 

Week 1 

Mon. 

Wed. 

Fri. 

Monday Music: “Rolling Thunder/Shoshone Invocation, 

The Main Ten.” 

Bread and Water, a tasting. 

Small Group work (each group should choose a 

different member to record the group’s work and to 

report to the rest of the class): 

1. discuss a meaningful water event in each of 

your lives; 

2. discuss possible answers to the question, 

“where does water come from?” 

Class covenants distributed: please read, sign, and return 

next class. 

Begin reading Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the 

Voyage. 

Salman Rushdie, “On Leavened Bread” (booklet). 

Jeffrey Steingarten, “Water” (booklet). 

“Sweathouse Ritual No. 1” (booklet). 

Book of Genesis, 1:1–2, Creation (booklet). 

Water Use and Water Quality: Chemistry in Context: 

Applying Chemistry to Society ch. 5, section 5.1 

(pp. 150–53); exercise 35, p. 182. 

Covenants due: read and signed. 

Findley Not Wanted on the Voyage pp. 3–61. 

LAB: Graphing (see lab schedule for more details). 

Film: Plato’s Cave, followed by group discussion. 


Book of Genesis, chs. 6–10, Noah and the Great Flood 

(booklet). 

“Leda and the Swan” (booklet). 

Paper due: 1-page essay on the metaphysical 

properties of water (some research might be helpful). 

Sign up for first project (due Monday, week 5). The 

first project will be a group effort on one of the 

following topics: 

1. Spiritual qualities of water 

2. Chemical and/or physical qualities of water 

3. Political qualities of water 

4. Cosmological qualities of water 


106 Dutcher 

5. Mythic qualities of water. 

Four people may sign up for each topic. That team 

will then collaborate on research, brainstorming, and 

writing to produce a researched and documented 5- 

page paper. Each group will give a 10-minute 

presentation on their work in class. 

Epistemology: how do we know what we know? In this section of the 

class we explore how and why information is sought and obtained as well 

as strategies to determine whether information is valid and reliable. We 

will discuss questions such as what is knowledge and how do we 

distinguish one form from another? How do we acquire and use 

knowledge? What is scientific knowledge? What is the relationship 

between myths and theories? What is the difference between inductive 

and deductive reasoning? Why are these questions important? 

Solve the riddle: H _ _ _ _ _ _ O 

(clue on last page) 

Week 2 

100% Chance of Rain 

Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit. 

The conscious water saw its God, and blushed. 

(Richard Crashaw, 1612?–1649, Epigrammata Sacra. Aquae in Vinum 

Versae. (His own translation.) 

Mon. 

Wed. 

Monday Music: Creedence Clearwater Revival, 

“Who’ll Stop the Rain?” 


What is Science? 

Lee, “Introduction,” ch. 1 in The Scientific Endeavor, 

pp. 1–10 (booklet). 

Lecture on critical essays, the MLA style, and 

research. 

Wynn, “Does Theory Ever Become Fact?” in Science 

and Its Ways of Knowing, pp. 60–62; 

questions for discussion 1–2, p. 63 (booklet). 

“Laws and Theories” exercise (booklet). 

Definition and definition of “myth.” 

Dylan Thomas, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, 

By Fire, of a Child in London” (Booklet). 


LAB: Inductive Reasoning (see lab schedule for more 

details). 



Fri. McComas, “15 Myths of Science” in Skeptic, pp. 88– 

95 (booklet). 

Findley Not Wanted on the Voyage pp. 242–-301. 

Full Moon 

Fhairshon has a son, 

Who married Noah’s daughter, 

And nearly spoiled ta Flood, 

By trinking up ta water. 

Which he would have done, 

I at least pelieve it, 

Had the mixture peen 

Only half Glenlivet. 

(W.E. Aytoun, 1813 – 1865, from 

“The Execution of Montrose,” vii) 

Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and 

thine often infirmities (King James Bible, 1 Timothy 5:23). 

And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine, ‘I don’t care 

where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.’ (G. K. Chesterton, 

1874–1936, Wine and Water.) 

What is a “clepsydra”? 

A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well, but will sometimes strike 

on a rock, and go to the bottom; a republic is a raft which will never sink, 

but then your feet are always in the water. (Fisher Ames, 1758–1808, 

House of Representatives, 1795) 

Week 3 

Limits to Conclusions? 

Mon. 

Wed. 

Monday Music: Eric Clapton, “Let it Rain.” 

Ball, “Pride, Prejudice, and Pathology—The Allure of 

Weird Water,” ch. 10 in Life’s Matrix, pp. 

271-79. 

Findley Not Wanted on the Voyage pp. 301-352 (end). 

1-page “critical reaction” paper due on Not Wanted. 

Guest lecturer: Dr. Marion Copeland. 

Ball, “A Drop of Something Stronger—Water as 


108 Dutcher 

Savior,” ch. 11 in Life’s Matrix, pp. 293-310. 

Piet Hut, “Structuring Reality: The Role of Limits” 

(handout). 

LAB: Properties of Water (boiling point, density vs. 

temperature, cooling curve—temperature vs. 

time, surface tension). 

Fri. 

Christner, Let it Rain. 

Ball, ch. 11 continued. 

Begin reading Life of Pi. 

The Wonder of Water: our learning community will share in the wonder 

of water, learn about its unusual physical and chemical properties, trace its 

movement about the Earth and why it is essential to life. Life originated 

in water yet this vital resource is being threatened by living beings. Water 

has been a compelling image in literature, and issues ranging from “Who 

owns the water?” to “Is there enough water for everyone, everywhere?” 

will be considered from both scientific and literary perspectives. 

I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life 

freely. (Bible, Revelation 21:6) 

From the waterfall he named her, 

Minnehaha, Laughing Water. 

(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807 – 1882, iv. Hiawatha and 

Mudjekeewis) 

CXXIII. 

There rolls the deep where grew the tree. 

O earth, what changes hast thou seen! 

There where the long street roars, hath been 

The stillness of the central sea. 

The hills are shadows, and they flow 

From form to form, and nothing stands; 

They melt like mist, the solid lands, 

Like clouds they shape themselves and go. 

But in my spirit will I dwell, 

And dream my dream, and hold it true; 

For tho’ my lips may breathe adieu, 

I cannot think the thing farewell. 

(Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, 1833) 


Week 4 

Raining Tigers and Hyenas 


Mon. 

Wed. 

Fri. 

Monday Music: Bap Kennedy, “Mostly Water.” 

H 2 0: Surprising Stuff. 

Chemistry, ch. 5, § 5.2, pp. 154-55. Refer to ch. 1, § 

1.8, pp. 16-18, for “Chemical Change: 

Reactions and Equations.” 

Martel, Life of Pi, chs. 1-33. 

The Anomalous Liquid. 

Ball, “Between Heaven and Earth—Why Water 

is the Weirdest Liquid,” ch. 6, pp. 151-57. 

Martel, Life of Pi, chs. 34-66. 

In-class writing on Life of Pi. 

LAB: an Energy Conservation problem dealing with 

hot water. There are no instructions, procedures, or 

data sheets for this lab. There is simply a problem to 

solve that requires reasoning skills and creativity. 

Molecular Structure and Physical Properties. 

Chemistry, ch. 5, § 5.3 – 5.4, pp. 156-59. Refer to ch. 

1, § 1.5, pp. 10-13, for “Classifying Matter: 

Elements, Compounds, and Mixtures” and § 

1.6, pp. 13-14, for “Atoms and Molecules.” 

Martel, Life of Pi, chs. 67-100 (end). 

1-page paper due on the nature of knowledge. 

I got this powdered water; now I don’t know what to add. 

Steven Wright 

Evil is like water: it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of 

taint. 

Samuel Butler 

I never drink water. I’m afraid it will become habit-forming. 

W. C. Fields 

I never drink water; that is the stuff that rusts pipes. 

W. C. Fields 

You can’t trust water: even a straight stick turns crooked in it. 

W. C. Fields 

Buoyed by water, he can fly in any direction—up, down, sideways—by 

merely flipping his hand. Under water, man becomes an archangel. 

Jacques Cousteau 


110 Dutcher 

Week 5 

Water Magic 

Mon. 

Wed. 

Fri. 

Monday Music: DMB, “Don’t Drink the Water.” 

Project Presentations. 

Molecular Structure and Physical Properties 

continued. 

Harr, A Civil Action, pp. 3–105. 

Why Water is Crooked. 

Ball, “Between Heaven and Earth—Why Water Is the 

Weirdest Liquid,” ch. 6 in Life’s Matrix, pp. 

167–74. 

Project Presentations. 

Pizza. 


***** 

LAB: Fluoridation. Bottles of sodium fluoride have a 

skull and crossbones emblem on them to warn that the 

substance is a dangerous poison and is sometimes 

used to kill rats. Yet, sodium fluoride is added to 

public drinking water. Is fluoridation part of an evil 

plot to poison us? You will determine the fluoride 

content of a water sample using spectrophotometry, a 

technique based on measuring the concentration of a 

colored solution based upon its ability to absorb light. 

You will compare your results with the fluoride limits 

set by public health standards. 

Water and Life. 

Guest Lecturer: Prof. Kate Maiolatesi. 

Crisis: there are numerous water issues that threaten the planet. Who 

owns the water? How severe are the effects of acid precipitation on 

materials, visibility, and human health? Is acid rain a major contributing 

cause to fish kill, damage to lakes and streams, and unhealthy forests? Is 

acid rain a scientific issue or a political issue? (Or a spiritual issue?) 

Why has Onondaga Lake, in Syracuse, become so polluted? How do 

deforestation and construction of dams contribute to environmental 

contamination of water? What can be done to minimize the threat of 

destroying much of the biodiversity of the coral reefs? 



Water has inspired great poetry and literature. Our language is full of 

allusions to springs, depths, currents, rivers, seas, rain, mist, dew, and 

snowfall. To a great extent our language is about water and people in 

relation to water. We think of time flowing like a river. We cry oceans of 

tears. We ponder the wellsprings of thought. . . . Our relation to water is 

fundamentally somatic, which is to say it is experienced bodily. The brain 

literally floats on a cushion of water. The body consists mostly of water. 

We play in water, fish in it, bathe in it, and drink it. Some of us were 

baptized in it. We like the feel of salt spray in our faces and the smell of 

rain that ends a dry summer heat wave. The sound of mountain water 

heals what hurts. We are mostly water and have an affinity for it that 

transcends our ability to describe it in mere words. (Orr, 1994, p. 54) 

Week 6 

Bottoms Up! 

Mon. 

Wed. 

Fri. 

Monday Music: Frank Black & The Catholics: St. 

Francis Dam Disaster.” 

Water and Energy. 

Chemistry, ch. 5: § 5.8, pp. 165–68. 


Sign up for second project (due Monday, week 10). 

Water and Energy, continued. 


LAB: Properties of Water (see lab schedule for more 

details). 

Potability and Purification of Water. 

Chemistry, ch. 5: § 5.9–5.14, pp. 170–77. 

Harr, A Civil Action, pp. 405–502 (end). 

Guest Lecturer: Jonathan Harr. 

1-page “critical reaction” paper due on A Civil Action. 

Full Moon 

Week 7 

Who Owns It? 

Mon. 

Monday Music: Handel, “Water Music.” 

Hour Exam I. 

Samual Taylor Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient 

Mariner.” 

Read this online at: 

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poe 

ms/Rime_Ancient_Mariner.html (If you are 


112 Dutcher 

Wed. 

Fri. 

 

not able to read the poem online, let us 

know.) 

Hogan, Solar Storms, pp. 11-59. 

Shiva, Water Wars, “Introduction: Converting 

Abundance Into Scarcity,” pp. 1–17. 

Ball, “Epilogue: Blue Gold,” in Life’s Matrix, pp. 

337-72. 

Hogan, Solar Storms, pp. 60-113. 

LAB: Properties of Water—Heat of Fusion. 

Shiva, Water Wars, “Water Rights: the State, the 

Market, the Community,” ch. 1, pp. 19–37. 

Hogan, Solar Storms, pp. 114–144. 

John G. Mitchell, “James Bay: Where Two Worlds 

Collide” (booklet). 

1-page “critical reaction” paper due on the wonder of 

water 

Spring Recess 

Film: The Milagro Beanfield War (118 mins). Please view this film 

before Week 8. You may borrow the HCC copy (on reserve) overnight 

for free or you may be able to rent it from your local video store. It is 

wonderful! 

Week 8 

It Calls for Stormy Weather 

Mon. 

Wed. 

Music: Peter Gabriel, “Red Rain” and B.B. King, 

“Stormy Monday.” 

Shiva, Water Wars, “Climate Change and the Water 

Crisis,” ch. 2, pp.39–51. 


Shiva, Water Wars, “The Colonization of Rivers: 

Dams and Water Wars,” ch. 3, pp. 72–82 

only. 

Learning Communities Midsemester Evaluation 

(SGIFS). 


Field trip to Quabbin Reservoir, 12:30 – 3:00 (to be 



confirmed). 

LAB: Field Trip to Quabbin Reservoir (lecture and 

picnic by the water). 

Fri. Shiva, Water Wars, “Food and Water,” ch. 5, pp. 107– 

117. 

Hogan, Solar Storms, pp. 313–351 (end). 

1-page “critical reaction” paper due on Solar Storms. 

Guest lecturer: Prof. Patricia Kennedy. 

Week 9 

The Threat of Acid Rain 

Mon. 

Wed. 

Fri. 

Monday Music: Beth Orton and William Orbit, 

“Water from a Vine Leaf.” 

Acids, Bases, and pH. 

Chemistry, ch. 6: § 6.1 – 6.3, pp. 184-88 and § 6.6, pp. 

193-96. 

Chaucer, “The Miller’s Tale” (booklet). 

Acid Rain, Combustion of Coal, and Effects of Acid 

Precipitation. 


Tennyson, from In Memoriam (booklet). 

LAB: Water Purification and Determination of Water 

Hardness. 

Damage to Lakes, Streams, and Forests: Politics of 

Acid Rain. 


Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning” (booklet). 

1-page “critical reaction” paper due on Water Wars. 


114 Dutcher 

Week 10 

Onondaga Lake: A Case Study 

Mon. 

Wed. 

Fri. 

Monday Music: Poco, “Blue Water.” 

Risks and Benefits of Industrialization. 

Chemistry, ch. 7: § 7.1 – 7.4, pp. 220-30. 

Presentations: abstract (written and oral) of final 

paper. 

○Full Moon 

Pollutants and Mercury Toxicity Found in Onondaga 

Lake. 


Presentations: abstract of final paper. 

Pizza. 

Individual conferences in Jim’s office. 

LAB: Vernal Pools (We will explore the HCC campus 

to find and analyze the biotic population in emergent 

vernal pools. Dress appropriately.) 

Technical, Political, and Economic Barriers to 

Cleaning Onondaga Lake. 

Chemistry, ch. 7: § 7.8, pp. 237–41. 

Schedule final presentations (during Finals week). 

Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act. 1. 

Week 11 

Water Pollution 

Mon. 

Wed. 

Monday Music: Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, “Ripplin’ 

Waters.” 

Marks, “Dead Fish,” ch. 9 in The Holy Order of Water 

(booklet). 

Montgomery, “Water Pollution,” ch. 6 in 

Environmental Geology, pp. 385–410 

(booklet). 


Water Pollution, continued. 

Nichols, “Keep It Simple” in Slovik and Dixon, Being 

in the World, pp. 679–83 (booklet). 


LAB: Aquatic Ecosystems and the impact of human 

activities. 



Fri. 

Music: John Hiatt, “The Tiki Bar is Open.” 

Film: Understanding Oceans. Meet Thor Heyerdahl 

who sailed his balsa-wood raft, Kon Tiki, from Peru to 

Polynesia to prove his theory of ancient ocean 

migration. Learn how the ocean and air work together 

to create the disastrous El Niño. Trace the path and 

motion of currents, the winds of the ocean. Monitor 

ocean pollution. Consider the effects of global 

warming. 

Shakespeare, The Tempest, Acts 4–5. 

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” 

(John Keats, 1795–1821: epitaph composed for himself, qtd. 

in Lord Houghton, Life of Keats, ii.91) 

I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years 

washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down 

by water. 

Amy Tan (b.1952) US novelist 

Week 12 

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! 

Mon. 

Wed. 

Shakespeare, from King Lear 

Monday Music: Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer 

Band. 

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (entire). 

Guest Lecturer: Dr. Xian Liu. 

Coral Reefs. 

Duxbury, et al., “The Ocean Basin Floor,” § 4.3 in 

Fundamentals of Oceanography, pp. 81–82 

(booklet). 

Duxbury, et al., “Tropical Coral Reefs,” § 12.10, pp. 

309–12 (booklet). 

Robinson, Housekeeping, pp. 3–59. 

LAB: Coral Reefs. 


116 Dutcher 

Fri. 

Hour Exam II. 

John Tallmadge, “In the Mazes of Quetico” (booklet). 


3-page critical, researched paper due on The Tempest. 

Saturday: Field Trip to Mystic Aquarium (mark your 

calendars!) 

Origins of Water: how did Earth become a water planet? The Earth’s 

solar orbit, its rotation, and the atmospheric gases above the Earth’s 

surface produce surface temperatures that allow water to exist as liquid 

water. Infant Earth was a world without water. How do we know that 

Earth was not originally formed with continents, oceans, and atmosphere? 

Is it possible that a rain of comets may have brought the Earth its water? 

What is the total amount of water on Earth? Is it constant? How reliable 

are the scientific theories about water? Does water speak to us in spiritual 

ways? Is water myth water truth? Do Sumerian writings, Egyptian 

writings, Greek philosophy, and Genesis accounts of water’s creation 

provide insights to its origins? How are our human bodies connected with 

water and water healing? What are the aesthetic dimensions of water? 

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment....We are 

told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a 

drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this 

greatest science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it. 

Whitehead, Alfred North (1861–1947) 

An Introduction to Mathematics 

Hence in a season of calm weather 

Though inland far we be, 

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 

Which brought us hither, 

Can in a moment travel thither, 

And see the children sport upon the shore, 

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. 

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English poet 

Ode, Intimations of Immortality, 9 



Week 13 

Origins 

Mon. 

Wed. 

 

Monday Music: Julie Miller, “Out in the Rain.” 

Film: Celestial Earth (based on current scientific 

theory, Celestial Earth represents 6 billion years in 

only 10 minutes. In this proportionally condensed 

time-scale, each film minute represents 600 million 

years). 

Time Perspective (booklet). 

Drill exercise dealing with time (booklet). 


Ball, “The First Flood—Water’s Origins,” ch. 1 in 

Life’s Matrix, pp. 1–21. 

“How Thunder and Earthquake Made Ocean” (a 

Pacific Northwest Native American legend) 

in Bruchac, Native American Stories 

(booklet). 

Marvin Bram, “Commencement Speech” (booklet). 


LAB: Planning and beginning the Experimental 

Design Lab scheduled for next week. 

Fri. 

“The First Flood—Water’s Origins,” continued. 

Robinson, Housekeeping, pp. 193–(end). 

Guest Lecturer: Dr. Kim Hicks, Director of the HCC 

Honors Program. 

1-page critical reaction paper due on Housekeeping. 

One may not doubt that, somehow, good 

Shall come of water and of mud; 

And, sure, the reverent eye must see 

A purpose in liquidity. 

(Rupert Brooke, 1887–1915, The Hill) 


118 Dutcher 

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean. 

G. K. Chesteron 

Beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no 

explanation. It is one of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or 

springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the 

moon. 

Oscar Wilde (1856–1900), Anglo-Irish 

playwright, novelist 

Week 14 

Water as Hope 

Merses profundo: pulchrior evenit. 

Plunge it in deep water: it comes up more beautiful. 

(Horace, 65–8 BCE, Ars Poetica, iv. 65) 

Mon. 

Wed. 

Fri. 

Monday Music: Cry, Cry, Cry, “Down By the 

Water.” 

Marks, “Is Water Myth Water Truth?” in The Holy 

Order of Water, pp. 77–100 (booklet). 

Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, chs. 1–33. 

Full Moon 

Marks, continued. 

Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, chs. 34–66. 

LAB: Scientific Hypothesis and Designing an 

Experiment—Be creative! You will have the 

opportunity to design your own experiment. Think 

of a problem that you want to investigate. Develop 

a hypothesis and then design an experiment to test 

it. Collect and analyze your data and make 

conclusions. 

Wise, “Creationism’s Geologic Time Scale,” 

(booklet). 

Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, chs. 67–100 (end). 

1-page critical reaction paper due on Cat’s Cradle. 

“The last thing I have to say is that ice is the past tense of water. I've 

always wanted to write that sentence and now I have.” (Rita Mae Brown) 



The King over the Water. (Jacobite toast, 18 th century). 

The sound of water escaping from mill-dams, etc., willows, old rotten 

planks, slimy posts, and brickwork. I love such things. . . . those scenes 

made me a painter and I am grateful. (John Constable, 1776–1837, from 

Leslie, Life of John Constable, 1843, ch. 5, letter to John Fisher, 13 Oct. 

1821.) 

A “clepsydra” is a water clock that measures time by the flow of water 

(from kleptein, to steal, and hudōr, water). 

Clue to riddle: it has something to do with water. 

But somewhere, beyond space and time, 

Is wetter water, slimier slime! 

(Rupert Brooke, 1887–1915, The Hill) 

From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic 

or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. 

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), Scottish author, physician 

Sherlock Holmes in "A Study in Scarlet," pt. 1, ch. 2, 1887. 

He’d be sharper than a serpent’s tooth, if he wasn’t as dull as ditch water. 

Charles Dickens (1812–1870), English novelist, dramatist Our 

Mutual Friend," Bk. III, Ch. 10 

Week 15 

Reflections 

Mon. 

Monday Music: Neil Young, “Down By the River.” 

Wise, continued. 

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (entire). 

Wed. 

Reflections on the origins of water. 

Quabbin Reservoir and the Connecticut River. 

Thomas Conuel, “Quabbin: The Lost Valley” and 

James Tate, “Quabbin Reservoir” (booklet). 

1-page paper due: reflections. 

Final Exam: Presentations of final papers (5 pages), with food. 

Date: 


120 Dutcher 

Time: 

Saturday: kayaking on the Swift River. Hurray! 

Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. 

It’s called ‘rain’. 

Michael McClary 

The best [man] is like water. Water is good; it benefits all things and does 

not compete with them. It dwells in [lowly] places that all disdain. This 

is why it is so near to Tao. 

Lao-tzu (604 BC–531 BC), The Way of Lao-tzu 

You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever 

flowing on to you. 

Heraclitus (540 BC–480 BC), On the Universe 

My empty water dish mocks me. 

Bob the Dog 


Bibliography for Empires and Science Workshop 

Workshop presenters and Lou Ratté 

Workshop Readings Suggested by Presenters 

George Saliba 

Professor Saliba’s web page: . Under “recent research” you will find “Whose Science 

is Arabic Science in Renaissance Europe?” 

Saliba, George. Islamic Science and the Making of the European 

Renaissance. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. 

Benjamin Elman 

Professor Elman’s web page: 

You will find a 

link to E-Papers: . 

Elman, Benjamin. On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1500–1900. 

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. 

Elman, Benjamin. A Cultural History of Modern Science in Late Imperial 

China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. 


Onésimo T. Almeida. "Portugal and the Dawn of Modern Science," in 

Portugal, The Pathfinder: Journeys from the Medieval toward the 

Modern World 1300–ca. 1600, edited by George D. Winius. 

Madison: The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, Ltd., 1995. 

David C. Goodman. Power and Penury: Government, Technology, and 

Science in Philip II's Spain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 

1988. 

Ursula Lamb. "Cosmographers of Seville: Nautical Science and Social 

Experience," in First Images of America: The Impact of the New 

World on the Old, edited by Fredi Chiappelli, 675–686. Berkeley: 

University of California Press. 1976. 

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. Nature, empire, and nation : explorations of 

the history of science in the Iberian world. Stanford, CA.: Stanford 


Paula Susan De Vos. "The Science of Spices: Empiricism and Economic 

Botany in the Early Spanish Empire." Journal of World History 17, 

no. 4 (2006): 399–427. 

Daniela Bleichmar. "Books, Bodies, and Fields: Sixteenth-Century 

Transatlantic Encounters with New World Materia Medica," in 

Colonial botany : science, commerce, and politics in the early 

modern world, edited by Londa L. Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, 

83–99. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 


122 Lou Ratté 

Alison Sandman. "Mirroring the World: Sea Charts, Navigations, and 

Territorial Claims in Sixteenth-Century Spain," in Merchants & 

marvels : commerce, science, and art in early modern Europe, edited 

by Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, 83–108. New York: 

Routledge, 2002. 

Susana Gómez López. "Natural Collections in the Spanish Renaissance," 

in From private to public: natural collections and museums, edited by 

Marco Beretta. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History 

Publications/USA, 2005. 

Marcy Norton. "Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European 

Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics." The American 

historical review 111, no. 3 (2006): 660–692. 

The special issue of Colonial Latin American Review 15, no. 1 (2006): 

55–79: articles on the Spanish Empire and science. 

Antonio Barrera-Osorio. Experiencing nature : the Spanish American 

empire and the early scientific revolution. 1st ed. Austin, TX: 

University of Texas Press, 2006. 

David Arnold 

David Arnold. The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, 

and Science, 1800–1856, Seattle, 2006, chapter 5: “Networks and 

Knowledges.” 

Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan. 'Introduction', in Schiebinger and 

Swan (eds), Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the 

Early Modern World. Philaldelphia, 2005 (in fact, the essays in this 

book are worth looking at as well). 

Michel Foucault. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human 

Sciences, chapter 5 'Classifying’. 

Damon Salesa 

Darcy, Paul. The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in 

Oceania. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. 

Diaz, Vicente. Sacred Vessels: Navigating Tradition and Identity 

inMicronesia. Honolulu: Pacific Islanders in Communication, 1999 

[Film]. 

Hau'ofa, Epeli. "Our Sea of Islands." The Contemporary Pacific 6, no.1 

(1994): 147–61. 

Jolly, Margaret. "On the Edge? Deserts, Oceans, Islands." The 

Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 2 (2001): 417–66. 

Lewis, David. We, the Navigators; the Ancient Art of Landfinding in the 

Pacific. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1972. 

Salesa, T. Damon. ""Travel-Happy" Samoa: Colonialism, Samoan 

Migration and A "Brown Pacific"." New Zealand Journal of History 

37, no. 2 (2003): 171–88. 


Bibliography 123 

Tamasese, TuiAtua Tupua. "The Riddle in Samoan History: The 

Relevance of Language, Names, Honorifics, Genealogy, Ritual and 

Chant to Historical Analysis." Journal of Pacific History 29, no. 1 

(1994): 65–79. 

Turnbull, David. "Comparing Knowledge Systems: Pacific Navigation 

and Western Science." In Ocean and Coastal Studies: Science of 

Pacific Island Peoples Volume I, edited by Linda Crowl, 129–44. 

Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1994. 

Nancy Jacobs 

Beinart, William. "Men, Science, Travel, and Nature in the Eighteenth and 

Nineteenth-Century Cape." Journal of Southern African Studies 24 

(1998): 775–99. 

Camerini, Jane. "Wallace in the Field." Osiris 11 (1996): 44–65. 

Davis, Natalie Zemon. Women on the Margins. Cambridge, 

Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995. 

Harries, Patrick. "Field Sciences in Scientific Fields: Enthnology, Botany 

and the Early Ethnographic Monograph in the Work of H.-A. Junod." 

In Science and Society in Southern Africa, edited by Saul Dubow, 11– 

41. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2000. 

Jacobs, Nancy J. "The Intimate Politics of Ornithology in Colonial 

Africa." Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006). 

Raffles, Hugh. "The Uses of Butterflies." American Ethnologist 28 

(2001): 513–48. 

Sanjek, Roger. "Anthropology's Hidden Colonialism: Assistants and Their 

Ethnographers." Anthropology Today 9 (1993): 13–18. 

Schumaker, Lyn. Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and 

the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa. Durham: Duke 

University Press, 2001. Especially Chapter 7. 

Secord, Anne. "Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth- 

Century Lancashire." History of Science 32 (1994): 269–315. 

Shepherd, Nick. "'When the Hand That Holds the Trowel Is Black. . .': 

Disciplinary Practices of Self-Representation and the Issue of 'Native 

Labour in Archaeology." Journal of Social Archaeology 3 (2003): 

334–52. 

Fa-Ti-Fan 

"Science in a Chinese Entrepôt: British Naturalists and their Chinese 

Associates in Old Canton," Osiris 18 (2003): 60–78. 

Fan, Fa-ti, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and 

Cultural Encounter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. See 

especially chapter five. 



Supplementary Readings 

Lou Ratté 

Introduction 

The workshop sets up the possibility for comparative study but to be able 

to carry out comparison effectively we have to know what we are 

comparing. Much of the reading begins with the assumption that the 

reader knows about the area (some rough chronology, familiarity with 

major events, major scholarly moves, etc.) and hence will see how the 

new material fits with what we already know. This will present a problem 

(which we cannot solve here) for readers who are not equally familiar 

with all the specialized areas the workshop covers. 

At the current stage of scholarship, it seems that the most effective 

way to introduce the new material on science is to make the effort for an 

area with which you are already most familiar. However, another equally 

good approach might be to concentrate on one of the subjects that easily 

crosses the different areas, and thus enables you to raise interesting 

comparative questions. Some of the books listed under “General Works” 

belong to the new discipline of Science Studies. This is a sophisticated 

literature but by means of it a reader can see what kinds of issues are 

being raised through which the understanding of science can be brought 

into our general understanding of society. 

General Works 

Biagioli, Mario, ed., The Science Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 

1999. 

Biagioli, Mario, and Peter Galison, eds., Scientific Authorship: Credit and 

Intellectual Property in Science. New York: Routledge, 2003. 

Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human 

Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. First published 1970. 

Golinski, Jan, Making Matural Knowledge: Constructivism and the 

History of Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. 

Grove, Richard, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Edens 

and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1995. 

Latour, Bruno, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into 

Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 

Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard 


Sachs, Aaron, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration 

and the Roots of American Environmentalism. New York: Penguin 

Books, 2006. 

Shapin, Steven, The Scientific Revolution 



Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in 

Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 

1994. 

Collections 

Beretta, Marco, ed. From Private to Public: Natural Collections and 

Museums. Sagamore Beach, MA.: Watson Publishing International, 

2005. 

Jardine, N., J.A. Secord and E.C. Spary, eds. Cultures of Natural History. 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 

MacLeod, Roy, ed. Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial 

Enterprise, Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of 

Science sand its Cultural Influences Second Series, Volume 15, 2000 

Nussbaum, Felicity A., ed. The Global Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: 

The Johns Hopkins Press, 2003. 

Schiebinger, Londa, and Claudia Swan, eds. Colonial Botany: Science, 

Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia: 

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 

Smith, Pamela H., and Paula Findlen, eds. Merchants & Marvels: 

Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe. New York: 

Routledge, 2002. 

The British Empire 

Drayton, Richard. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and 

the ‘Improvement’ of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 

2000. 

O’Brian, Patrick. Joseph Banks, a Life. Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press, 1987. 

The Dutch Empire 

Cook, Harold J. Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science 

in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 

India 

Arnold, David. The New Cambridge History of India: Science, 

Technology and Medicine in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge 


Arnold, David. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic 

Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. Berkeley: University of 

California Press, 1993. 

Arnold, David. The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape 

and Science, 1800–1856. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 

2006. 



Raj, Kapil. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and Construction of 

Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. New York: 

Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 

Journals 

British Journal of the History of Science 

China Review 

Chinese Science 

Colonial Latin American Review 

The Contemporary Pacific 

East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine 

History of Science 

Isis 

Journal of the History of Biology 

Journal of Pacific History 

New Zealand Journal of History 

Osiris 

Science as Culture 

Addendum: Introducing Pacific Studies 

Lou Ratté 

Introduction 

Everybody knows something about the Pacific, but if you haven’t had the 

opportunity to look at the historical scholarship on the Pacific you may be 

in the dark about how this large area of the world is currently studied. If 

that is the case, you will not be able to extend questions about the 

integration of science studies into the general curriculum in a meaningful 

way, since the way that seems most practicable for that effort is to extend 

the ways of knowing about a particular area already developed in 

scholarship to include new material on science. For instance, the new 

science materials that can be grouped as cultural studies approaches will 

slide gracefully into appropriate niches in Pacific Studies. 

First, this bibliography provides you with ways of approaching the 

historiographical issues in an orderly way. The first European historical 

writing about the Pacific focused on the explorations of Europeans. In the 

period after World War II, James Davidson, Australia National 

University, launched a movement, known as the Canberra School, whose 

members focused on history in the islands. Here the focus still tended to 

be on Europeans and on Europeans speaking for Pacific Islanders. Some 

attempts were made, in journals like The Journal of Pacific History, to 

develop ways of approaching the Pacific that would make up for the lack 

of written sources for use by historians. One such way was to explore the 

possibilities in the new oral history approach, launched by Jan Vansina for 



the study of Africa. The move demonstrates the attempt by historians of 

the Pacific to make use of new scholarly techniques developed for the 

study of other areas, especially, as in Africa, where source problems are 

similar. With the launching of the Journal of the Contemporary Pacific 

historians of the Pacific integrated the multidisciplinary approaches to the 

study of colonial and postcolonial societies developed elsewhere into their 

own work. A strong focus in this journal has been on the issue of Pacific 


An understanding of contemporary historiographical issues opens up 

the way to explore the Pacific and its history by making use of 

multidisciplinary approaches that bring together history, ethnography 

(particularly rich for the Pacific), art history, visual studies, museum 

studies, literature, and performance studies. The study of the Pacific and 

its peoples, explored by Europeans from the early 16 th century on and 

colonized in the 19 th and 20 th centuries, shares some of the characteristics 

of other scholarship (and perhaps colonial practice as well). The Spanish 

and Portuguese exploration and colonization of the Pacific from the 16 th 

through the 18 th centuries remains largely unknown to readers of English. 

The two reasons given for this lack are: (1) that Spanish and Portuguese 

scholars have been slow in having their work translated; and (2) there are 

still remnants of the “Black Legend”, which effectively excised Iberian 

scholarship from the scholarship of Northern and Western Europe. 

Scholarship focusing on 19 th and 20 th century colonization reveals 

similarities to scholarship on Africa for the same period: race, 

exploitation, and the execution of the “civilizing mission” seem central to 

this scholarship. For these reasons, the interpretation of art objects, the 

methods of display in museums, and so on, are important sources for 

understanding the nature of contact as understood at the time of 

colonization. As scholarly interest moved from Europe, to the islands, to 

the ways in which Pacific people make sense out of their own lives, these 

earlier scholarly endeavors are useful for showing what people were up 

against. Use a cultural studies approach to get at what the people 

themselves make out of their lives, their past, and their expectations for 

the future. 

One will also find the issue of “difference” rearing its head in the 

study of the Pacific. Readers need to make an intelligent and informed 

decision about whether representations of difference are: (1) carry-overs 

from the racist scholarship of the 19 th and early 20 th centuries; (2) political 

assertions; (3) useful markers for dealing with the question of modernity; 

or other. 

[Editor’s note: What follows is a highly selective listing. Materials on the 

Pacific are coming out at such a fast pace that readers are better advised to 

search the offerings at the University of Hawaii Press, a major publisher 



of Pacific Studies materials, or on line at Pacific Studies centers in the 

Pacific, New Zealand, and Australia.] 

Cultural Studies and Art History 

Books 

D’Alleva, Anne. Arts of the Pacific Islands. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 

Inc., 1998. 

Hereniko, Vilsoni, and Rob Wilson, eds. Inside Out: Literature, Cultural 

Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific. New York: Rowman & 

Littlefield Pub., 1999. 

Wilson, Rob, and Arif Dirlik, eds., Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural 

Production. Durham: Duke University Space, 1995. 

Articles 

Allen, Ngapine, and Tim Barringer. “Maori vision and the imperialist 

gaze,” Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, eds. Colonialism and the 

Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum. New York: 

Routledge, 1998: 144–152. 

Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. “Perspectives on Hinemihi, a Maori Meeting 

House,” Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, eds. Colonialism and the 

Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum. New York: 

Routledge, 1998: 129–143. 

History and Historiography 

Books 

Hanlon, David, and Geoffrey M. White, eds. Voyaging Through the 

Contemporary Pacific. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Pub., 2000. 

Horne, Gerald. The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in 

the South Seas after the Civil War. Honolulu: University of Hawaii 

Press, 2007. 

Kame’eliehiwa, Lilikala. Native Land and Foreign Desires: Pehea La E 

Pono Ai? Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 2003. 

Meleisea, Malama, The Making of Modern Samoa: Traditional Authority 

and Colonial Administration in the Modern History of Western 

Samoa. Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the 

South Pacific, 1987. 

Munro, Doug, and Brij V. Lal, eds. Texts and Contexts: Pacific Islands 

Historiography. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. 

Salmond, Anne. Between Worlds: Early Exchanges between Maori and 

Europeans, 1773–1815. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997. 

Articles 

Wildenthal, Lora. “Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the German Colonial 

Empire,” Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds. Tensions of 


Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: 

University of California Press, 1997. 

Bibliography 129 

Literature and the Arts 

Kjellgren, Eric. Oceania: Art of the Pacific Islands in the Metropolitan 

Museum of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 

Melville, Herman. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life; Omoo: A Narrative 

of Adventures in the South Seas; Mardi: and a Voyage Thither, New 

York: Library of America, 1982. 

Paradise Now? Contemporary Art from the Pacific, exhibition catalogue. 

New York: The Asia Society, 2004. 

Stewart, Frank, et al., eds. Varua Tupu: New Writing from French 

Polynesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. 

Wendt, Albert, ed. Nuanua: pacific writing in English since 1980. 

Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. 

Science Related 

MacLeod, Roy, and Philip F. Rehbock, eds. Darwin’s Laboratory: 

Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific. Honolulu: 

University of Hawaii Press, 1994. 

Meier, Ursula H. Hawaii’s Pioneer Botanist, Dr. William Hillebrand, His 

Life and Letters. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 2005. 


EMPIRES AND SCIENCE 

Volume 29 Fall 2009 

Contributors 

David Arnold is Professor of Asian and Global History at 

Warwick University, Great Britain. 

Antonio Barrera is Associate Professor of History at Colgate 

University, New York. 

Lynn Dole is K-12 Director of Curriculum and Assessment at 

Mohawk Trail School District, Buckland, MA. 

James Dutcher is Professor of English at Holyoke 

Community College, Holyoke, MA. 

Benjamin Elman is Professor of East Asian Studies at 

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. 

Terri A. Hasseler is Professor of English and Cultural 

Studies at Bryant University, Smithfield, Rhode Island. 

Thoman Mazurek is Professor of History at Bucks County 

Community College, PA. 

William Paquette is Professor of History at Tidewater 

Community College, VA. 

John Ratté is an Independent Scholar and Associate Director 

of the Hill Center for World Studies, Ashfield, MA. 

Lou Ratté is an Independent Scholar and Director of the Hill 

Center for World Studies, Ashfield, MA. 

Douglas Rosentrater is Professor of Communications at 

Bucks County Community College, Newton, PA. 

Jayne Yantz is Professor of Art History at Burlington 

County College, Pemberton, NJ. 

Published in the Community College Humanities Review, Vol. 29 

Fall 2009 

130

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Humanities Association 



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