ABSTRACT
Before Charles Darwin became the epitome of what it meant to be a naturalist and before Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau established that the “proper” way to engage with nature was through spiritual communion, there was the Enlightenment with its armies of collectors and classifiers who were eager to collect and name every species of botanical and zoological life. The Enlightenment’s project, which has been characterized as the disciplining of Nature, has received attention of late, and most of it negative. Londa Schiebinger in her Plants and Empire has argued that Linnaean systematics, the cornerstone of Enlightenment classification, can be viewed as a form of “linguistic imperialism,” with Linnaean nomenclature evincing “a politics of naming that accompanied and promoted European global expansion and colonization” (Schiebinger 2004, 195). Susan Parrish has portrayed the impact of metropolitan Enlightenment rationalism with its goal of “imperial imposition of an abstract system” on American naturalists, whom she depicts as a feisty heterogeneous bunch of individuals who held their own against Britain’s monolithic but impotent Royal Society and its desire to subsume the natural world under its scientific gaze (Parrish 2006, 315). Moreover, some cultural historians (Tobin 2005) have suggested that such Enlightenment scientific practices as classification were mechanisms by which plant life was stripped of local cultural legibility, a process that enabled the commodification of plant matter and its circulation in a globalized economy. These anti-Enlightenment positions share the Romantic and Transcendentalist critique of the Enlightenment’s mechanistic and systematizing approach to nature, and imply that the Enlightenment, with its strategies of collection and classification, was responsible for, or, at least, set the stage for what Carolyn Merchant has called “the death of nature” (Merchant 1989).
