Black and Indigenous Collectors in the Material and Digital Archive at the Linnean Society of London

对于一个民族植物学家来说，通过植物收藏进行研究提供了一个机会，通过历史的镜头来反思和分析人类与植物的关系，并将植物收集实践置于特定的社会政治和社会经济背景下，这些背景构成了早期英国植物学的框架，以及植物作为博物馆文物被储存和展出的话语类型。18世纪晚期，植物收藏开始形成，这是欧洲人在全球航行以寻找新贸易、材料和象征性财富和统治地位的时期，也是非洲人和其他土著人民被迫流离失所、被奴役、被纠缠和相互依赖于大英帝国的时期。我的研究实践包含了收集研究制裁的持久性和灵活性的串联；对包括生物在内的过去物质的召唤，以及对依附于并通过其殖民历史的认识论投射出来的各种“真理”的重新建构。通过简·贝内特对物质性的激进视角来看，植物收藏不仅仅是知识生产的场所（就像过去某种程度上被认为的那样），而且也是情感集合和拥有代理的“重要物质性”（简·贝内特2010年，第21页）。考虑藏品的代理是一个有趣的想法，它可能有助于颠覆博物馆的实践，为研究人类与植物之间的关系提供了必要的开端，而这种关系正是博物馆的定义。例如，解决馆藏研究中存在的把关和其他可访问性问题，挑战科学分类本身的刚性，或者为更少的提取和更多元的背景创造空间或可能性——博物馆的实践可能会被颠覆的方式有很多。研究黑人和天才对18世纪和19世纪英国植物学实践的贡献，不仅是为了发掘与这种合作有关的证据，也是为了重新评估证据在林奈收藏中被定义的方式。我的目标是识别和审视科学知识和实践的定义所证明的主观性，并与其他研究人员（特别是BPOC遗产的研究人员）进行对话（并记录），讨论、挑战和跨藏品产生知识的方式。指导本研究的将是Donna Haraway的关键接近概念，该概念鼓励创造情境知识，作为识别我的研究方法特有的主观性的一种方式（Donna Haraway, 1991）。除了展示和分析我与伦敦林奈学会的档案资源合作的发现之外，我还将制作一份感官人种志——将视觉和声音为基础的研究成果结合起来的工作，作为最适合获得上述关键接近度的实践，并促进非殖民化植物收藏所必需的位置知识类型的生产。

To an ethnobotanist, conducting research across botanical collections offers an opportunity to reflect on and analyse human-plant relationships through a historical lens, and to situate plant collecting practices within the particular sociopolitical and socioeconomic context that framed early British botanical science, as well as the types of discourse by which plants came to be stored and exhibited as museum artefacts. The late 18th century, when botanical collections came into being, is part of a period of Europeans navigation across the globe in search of new trades, material and symbolic wealth and dominance, and the context in which Africans and other Indigenous people were forcefully displaced, enslaved,entangled and made inter-dependent to and within the British Empire.My research practice embraces the tandem of permanence and flexibility that collections research sanctions; the summoning of past materialities including living beings, and re-framing of the kinds of "truths" attached to, and projected via the epistemologies of their colonial pasts. Botanical collections, seen through Jane Bennett's radical lens on materiality, are not simply sites for knowledge production (as they were somehow considered in the past), but also affective assemblages and "vital materialities" with agency in their possession (Jane Bennett 2010, p.21). Considering the agency of the collection is an interesting idea that can perhaps aid in subverting museum practice, in providing the necessary opening from which to examine the kinds of human-plant relationships that come to define it as such. For example, addressing gatekeeping and other accessibility issues existing across collections research, challenging the rigid nature of scientific classifications themselves, or creating the space or possibilities for a less extractive and more multiverse context-there are many ways by which museum practices might be subverted. Researching Black and Ingenious people's contributions to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British botanical scientific practices is as much about unearthing evidence pertaining to such collaborations, as it is about reassessing the ways in which evidence becomes defined within the Linnean collections. My aim is both to identify and scrutinise the subjectivities evidenced by and in definitions of scientific knowledge, and practices, and to engage in dialogue with (and make a record of) the ways other researchers, particularly those of BPOC heritage negotiate, challenge and produce knowledge across collections. Guiding this research will be Donna Haraway's concept of critical proximity which encourages the creation of situated knowledge as a way of identifying the subjectivities particular to my research approach (Donna Haraway, 1991). Aside from presenting and analysing my findings from working with and through the archival resources available at the Linnean Society of London, I will produce a sensory ethnography-a body of work that will combine visual and sound-based research findings, as the practice best suited to accessing the critical proximity mentioned above, and facilitating the production of the type of situated knowledge necessary for decolonising botanical collections.