Knowledge Generation, Education
and Careers – the Role of Travelling
in Linnaean Natural History
Hanna Hodacs
h.hodacs@warwick.ac.uk
(University of Warwick & Centre for the History of
Science, Swedish Academy of Science)
Carolus Linnaeus 1707 -1778
Westward Science Between 1760-1810:
On Social Mobility and the Mobility of Science
(Swedish Research Council, Vetenskapsrådet). Center for History of Science, Royal
Academy, Stockholm
Adam Afzelius
1750-1837
“The landscape is written as an uninhabited, unpossessed,
unhistoricized, geography and identifying flora and fauna
structures an asocial narrative in which the human presence,
European or African, is absolutely marginal, though it was, of
course, a constant and essential aspect of the traveling itself.
In the writing, people seem to disappear from the garden as
Adam approaches – which, of course, is why he can walk
around as he pleases and name things after himself and his
friends back home. At one point, on a deserted islet,
Sparrman describes himself “a-botanizing … in the same dress
as Adam wore in his state of Nature.” As embodied in the
naturalists, European authority and legitimacy are
uncontested, a vision undoubtedly appealing to European
readers.” (Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 53)