In his 37-volume “Natural History,” first published in 77 C.E., the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder explored the minutiae of everyday life.
The encyclopedic work describes the places where people lived and worked, and the plants and animals they relied on for sustenance, shelter, and medicine. Pliny’s holistic approach served as a model for the field of natural history for more than two millennia until it succumbed to an era of scientific specialization.
In his new book, “Hearsay Is Not Excluded: A History of Natural History” (Yale University Press), Yale anthropologist Michael R. Dove argues that the modern rise of narrow, siloed scientific disciplines has created barriers between science and culture, and scientific knowledge and folk knowledge — wisdom and ideas embedded in local or indigenous communities. That divide is contributing to the skepticism of science we are seeing today, he said, including doubts about the reality of climate change.
Recovering Pliny’s unifying approach to studying the world, which combined folk and scientific knowledge, Dove argues, would help to address these pressing global challenges.
In making his argument, Dove examines the contributions of four eminent natural historians who, across four centuries, drew on folk knowledge while attempting to better understand the world: German botanist Georg Eberhard Rumphius, in the 17th century; Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus, in the 18th century; English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, in the 19th century; and the late Yale anthropologist Harold C. Conklin, in the 20th century.
Dove, the Margaret K. Musser Professor of Social Ecology at Yale School of the Environment and professor of anthropology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, recently spoke to Yale News about the accomplishments of these four celebrated natural historians and what could be gained by again incorporating folk and indigenous knowledge into the study of natural history. Dove is also curator of anthropology at the Yale Peabody Museum.
The interview has been edited and condensed.
The book’s title responds to a quote by historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, who wrote that “hearsay is excluded” from natural history beginning in the 17th century onward. What does “hearsay” refer to and how did the four individuals you profile approach it in their work?
Michael Dove: “Hearsay” refers to folk/local/indigenous knowledge, which Foucault saw as becoming distanced from science in the modern era. The four natural historians featured in the book — Rumphius, Linnaeus, Wallace, and Conklin — stand out for their valorization of folk knowledge: They each recognized its existence, valued it, and drew heavily on it in their studies of the natural world. And they did so in a matter-of-fact way: They did not see a dialogue between scholarly and folk observation as remarkable, although each was aware that the tides of academic opinion were beginning to turn in the other direction.
Your chapter on Rumphius opens with an excerpt of his description of the “poison tree” of the Indies, in which, drawing on local folk knowledge, he writes that nothing can grow within a stone’s throw of the tree and that the air around it is so tainted that birds resting on its branches soon become dizzy and fall dead. How should a reader today understand this account, which seems so apart from modern scientific standards?
Dove: The famous “poison tree” of the Indies (Antiaris toxicaria) yielded a poison that the peoples of the region used in hunting and warfare — mostly when smeared on blowpipe darts — and for this reason it riveted the attention of the colonial powers for multiple centuries. In the long battle over control of the natural resources of the Indies, especially its spices, this was the single native weapon that the European powers did not understand and so they feared it most, disproportionately so.
It is no accident that a woodcut depiction of this tree, with two dead Europeans beneath it, found its place on the cover of the first printed natural history in Europe. (It’s also the cover of my book.) There was a politics to this fear: Tropical disease killed many more Dutch soldiers than poisoned blowpipe darts, but it was not seen as a weapon wielded by the natives. Antiaris toxicaria was indeed dangerous, but the stories about the tree killing everything within a stone’s throw around it was pure myth: It was a myth perpetuated by both natives and colonists — the natives to strengthen the psychological power of the weapon, and the colonists because their premise of epistemic superiority left them vulnerable to these beliefs.
Linnaeus is best known today for formalizing the modern system of naming organisms, but you explore his ethnographic work and appreciation of traditional rural livelihoods. What’s an example of this lesser-known portion of his legacy?
Dove: The best example comes from Linnaeus’ ethnographic fieldwork with the Sami (then called Lapp), a transhumant, minority ethnic group in Northern Sweden who lived by reindeer husbandry. In his account of the Sami, Linnaeus devotes page upon page to meticulous descriptions of their lives, livelihoods, and especially material culture. For example, he gives page upon page of detailed descriptions of locally varying ways of producing drinks and foods from milk from reindeer, including descriptions of 19 different “uses of milk” in one region alone. The subtext of these descriptions was that the 19 uses of milk mattered, and that the Sami themselves mattered. Linnaeus even had his portrait painted while attired in Sami garb, in effect saying to his elite Swedish audience, “We can become the Sami” and “The Sami can become us.”
Alfred Russel Wallace’s 1869 book, “The Malay Archipelago” [an expansive and highly detailed account of the geography, plant and animal life, and human cultures of the islands he visited] is often characterized as a travelogue? Is that fair? If not, why not?
Dove: In Foucault’s study of the history of science, he suggests that changing paradigms make it almost impossible to read older scientific literature, they “blur” it to modern eyes. Since the 19th century, the practice of writing about nature and culture as a unity has fallen out of favor, being replaced by narrow studies of topics in the realm of nature or culture but not both. This is why many scholars today cannot fathom “The Malay Archipelago” — which treats equally and fluidly both people and environment — except as a travelogue. This, one of the greatest works of the co-discoverer (with Darwin) of the principle of natural selection, and one of the leading natural historians of the 19th century, is literally beyond reach for many modern scholars.
You write that Wallace, Linnaeus, and Rumphius helped set the stage for the field of ethnography and note that Harold C. Conklin became a legendary practitioner of ethnographic research. What makes his work stand out?
Dove: Long-time Yale Professor Harold C. Conklin, one of the greatest anthropologists of the 20th century, had what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called a “preternatural” gift of observation. His discovery that the Hanunóo of Mindanao, in the Philippines, could identify and name 1,652 different plants in their lands — 1,524 of which had specific uses — initiated a sea-change in our view of the complexity of the tropical rainforest and the knowledge of it possessed by those who dwell in it. His informants also appreciated his work: The Hanunóo adopted Conklin’s name into their language as a term for “things related to knowledge;” and when Conklin passed away in 2016, an Ifugao priest living in Connecticut performed a traditional mortuary rite at his bedside.
What would be gained by returning to a more holistic approach to studying natural history that combines folk knowledge and scientific knowledge in studying nature and culture?
Dove: Two millennia ago, the great botanist and physician Dioscorides explicitly listed the epichōrioi, “those who live in the region, the inhabitants” — thus, the natives — as one of his sources of information. This stance persisted into the 19th century when, for example, scholars and farmers in the United States still exchanged observations on weather and climate. This came to an end with the rise of narrow, siloed scientific disciplines, a dichotomization of the natural and social sciences, and an atrophy in communication between the scientific community and the lay public, which has contributed to the science skepticism that we see today.
The online credo of science skeptics — “Do your own research” — is a product of this historic development; it reflects the reemergence of a type of folk knowledge, but one no longer in a constructive interplay with the academy. It also reflects a divide, a suspicion, a paranoia that is impossible to imagine in earlier eras: None of Dioscorides’ informants said anything like this to him, nor the informants of Rumphius, Linnaeus, Wallace, or Conklin. Importantly, this divide co-developed between the public and the academy, so there is shared responsibility for it.
As the French philosopher Paul Virilio said, when you invent the airplane, you invent the airplane crash: Science is the airplane, and science skepticism is the airplane crash. The national organizations in the United States addressing climate change skepticism only see the public half of this dyad, not their own, so their only solution is to gather and disseminate more data, which does not address the root of the problem.
