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SUMMARY:Curating science in an age of empire: the Kew Museums of Economic 
 Botany - Caroline Cornish (Royal Holloway)
DTSTART:20120227T130000Z
DTEND:20120227T141500Z
UID:TALK35076@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Sophie Waring
DESCRIPTION:The first Kew Museum of Economic Botany was the idea of Willia
 m Jackson Hooker and opened in the grounds of the Royal Botanic Gardens in
  1847. Intended\naudiences were 'not only... the scientific botanist\, but
 ... the merchant\, the manufacturer\, the physician\, the chemist\, the dr
 uggist\, the dyer\, the carpenter and cabinet-maker\, and artisans of ever
 y description'. Its purpose was to inform British entrepreneurs of the wea
 lth of plant raw materials\navailable across the British Empire. To house 
 the growing collections\, a second museum opened in 1857\, a Timber Museum
  in 1863\, and a Museum of British Forestry in 1910. Having defined normat
 ive audiences\, and modes of collecting\, classification\, and display in 
 the Museums - in short\, their specificity - this paper then introduces an
  object which appears\nproblematic in the Kew context – a totem pole fro
 m British Columbia.  The pole's trajectory is traced from its original loc
 ation on Haida Gwaii to its current one in the British Museum\, and the kn
 owledges produced around the pole in various spatial and institutional con
 texts are examined.  This is situated within the broader field of totem po
 le discourse and display in the late nineteenth century\, and within the c
 ulture of 'salvage ethnography' which inflected the exhibitionary culture 
 of the period. At\nthe Kew Museum\, what emerges is the creation of a rang
 e of conflicting messages\, due in no small part to the multiple and ambiv
 alent interests held by those Kew actors who mobilised the acquisition of 
 the pole.\n\nThose interests were however not altogether inconsistent with
  the epistemology of economic botany as practised in the nineteenth centur
 y\, and the paper concludes by defining the rationality which permitted bo
 tany to develop in new and intriguing ways across Victorian sites of displ
 ay. 
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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