Organizer: Harvard University Asia Center
Type/Location: Virtual
Description:
Join the Harvard University Asia Center for a talk by Kathleen Gutierrez, Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Drawing on death notices, missing-persons reports, and other bureaucratic records, Dr. Gutierrez explores how the deaths of scientific workers and the efforts of their widows to document their lives generated an archive that offers a different view of colonial botany in the nineteenth-century Philippines. Victor Seow, John L. Loeb Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, will moderate the discussion.
Abstract:
Human death was common in colonial Philippine botany. In the second half of the nineteenth century under the Spanish regime in particular, cadres of men cycled through the Philippine service, confronting the unpredictability of travel, field research, and native hostility. Little primary and synthetic information exists on peninsular recruits who did not maintain prolific publishing careers. That is, except for men whose widows compiled extensive documentation on their deceased spouses’ lives with the intention of obtaining state pensions. Paradoxically then, for many of the rank-and-file of Philippine colonial botany, corporeal death meant bureaucratic accretion; loss predicated a paper trail.
This talk examines institutional documents on the rise of colonial botany in the Philippines alongside death notices, missing-persons reports, and bureaucratic documents assembled in order to document the life of employees of the Spanish scientific service. This archive develops a more detailed image of particular labors of colonial botany; of men, most vocationally trained and from provincial reaches of Spain, who journeyed to the Philippines and met tragic circumstance while in the colonial service. Their widows and the widows’ work to put the bureaucratic pieces in place, so to speak, open another way to consider those whose labors also contributed to colonial botany’s execution. These women formed a class of administrators upon whose work an archive exists and who therefore enable us to contemplate accretion—not just of plants or knowledge, but of archive—occasioned by losses immanent to the science.
About the Speaker:
Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Duke University Press published her first book, Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines, in 2025. Gutierrez writes broadly on plants, contemporary Southeast Asian studies, and Filipino farmworker history.
Registration:
To attend the event virtually, please register here.