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SUMMARY:What's in a name? William Jones\, 'philological empiricism' and bo
 tanical knowledge making in 18th-century India - Minakshi Menon (Max Planc
 k Institute for the History of Science)
DTSTART:20220131T130000Z
DTEND:20220131T140000Z
UID:TALK168209@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Olin Moctezuma
DESCRIPTION:'What is _Indian_ Spikenard?'\, asked the 18th-century orienta
 list Sir William Jones in a famous paper\, published in _Asiatick Research
 es_\, Volume II (1790). The question serves here as a point of entry into 
 Jones's method for creating culturally specific plant descriptions to help
  locate Indian plants in their Indian milieu.\n\nThis paper discusses Jone
 s's philological method for identifying the _jaṭāmāṁsī_ of the Sans
 krit verse lexicon\, the _Amarakośa_\, and _materia medica_ texts\, a flo
 wering plant with important medicinal properties\, as the 'Spikenard of th
 e Ancients'. Philology\, for Jones\, was of a piece with language study an
 d ethnology\, and undergirded by observational practices based on trained 
 seeing\, marking a continuity between his philological and botanical knowl
 edge making. The paper follows Jones through his textual and 'ethnographic
 ' explorations\, as he creates both a Linnaean plant-object – _Valeriana
  jatamansi_ Jones – and a mode of plant description that encoded the 'na
 tive' experience associated with a much-desired therapeutic commodity. The
  result was a botanical identification that forced the _jaṭāmāṁsī_ 
 to travel across epistemologies and manifest itself as an object of coloni
 al natural history. In the words of the medic and botanist William Roxburg
 h\, whose research on the spikenard is also discussed here\, Jones's metho
 d achieved what 'mere botany' with its focus on the technical arrangement 
 of plants\, could not do.
LOCATION:Zoom
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