Organizer: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan

Type/Location: Hybrid / Ann Arbor, MI

Description:

This talk addresses the first decades of U.S. colonization of the Philippines and institutions of botanical research aimed to scale up plantation-style production. It, however, extends beyond colonial conceits by offering a contrapuntal story by following a U.S. anthropologist conducting fieldwork among a Bagobo community in the Davao Gulf of Mindanao and the knowledge of weavers this anthropologist obtained. Combined, the narratives present vernaculars of plant knowing within and outside of botany's disciplinary bounds and their transformations found within colonial agricultural expansion. This talk draws from the recently published Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines (Duke, 2025) by Kathleen Cruz Gutierez (History, University of California, Santa Cruz).

About the Speaker:

Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work centers on the connections between plant species, politics, and modern history with a focus on the Philippines and greater Southeast Asia. Her writing and research to date have contributed to the history of science in the Philippines, weaving and textile studies, and the environmental humanities. Her work has been published in the Asian Review of World Histories and the Philippine Journal of Systematic Biology, with forthcoming contributions to the edited volumes Empire and Environment: Confronting Ecological Ruination in the Asia-Pacific and the Americas and Women in the History of Science: A Liberating the Curriculum Sourcebook. She has been a visiting faculty member and researcher in the International Studies Department at De La Salle University, Manila and the Facultad de Informática at Complutense University in Madrid.

Registration:

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