The Historical Present (Episode 3)
Welcome back to the Coloniality, Western Science, and Critical Ethnic Studies in STEM Education dissertation!
In this episode, I use a critical transdisciplinary approach to explore how the colonial history of Western Science impacts science practices today. Three theories, Black geographies, settler colonialism, and decoloniality are woven together to demonstrate how Western Science grew to what it is today. Botany, and specifically the history of quinine from the Cinchona bark, are used to exemplify the historical present.
TRANSCRIPT
Episode Three: The Historical Present
If we do not do this work, if we do not collaboratively call into question a system of knowledge that delights in accumulation by dispossession and profits from ecocidal and genocidal practices, if we do not produce and share stories that honor modes of humanness that cannot and will not replicate this system, we are doomed. (McKittrick, 2020, p. 74)
And so begins the journey to Critical Ethnic Studies. In this episode I’m gonna connect Western Science to its culture by exploring the history that birthed it. I’ll be using examples of modern botany in this episode and modern medicine in the next episode to tease things out.
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Hey listeners!
I'm LaToya Strong and I'm a doctoral candidate at The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York.
You are listening to my dissertation!
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The historical present is a grammatical tense that uses the present tense to talk about past events. In essence, the historical present tense brings the past to the present; making the past come alive.
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I think it's important for us to consider, not just to consider, but to really have a deep historical context at all times to recognize like whatever's happening today is always a part of things that have been happening in times past.
When we think about institutional power, when we think about racism, anti-blackness when we think about, you know, what bell hooks rest and power called interlocking systems of domination or Patricia Hill Collins called interlocking systems of oppression. But it like, I think when we do this historical look, we look, we also look at the spaces for resistance. And so looking at the past, doesn't just help us to recognize the foundations of forms of domination today. But it also helps us to look at narratives of resistance, narratives of rebellion, narratives of the radical imagination and process. (Robinson, 2022)
That’s Dr. Robert P. Robinson, Daygo’s finest, and an assistant professor and academic counselor at John Jay.
Robert brings up an additional point, which is resistance, which I do not touch on. I’mma be talkin ‘bout the past and only focusing on the colonizers not because they more important, but because it’s their actions that shaped Western Science.
Just know resistance by all people subjugated by Europe’s collective viral spreading of itself around the globe has been ongoing. There was resistance then and there is resistance now. And not just resistance but active building.
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The world could have taken many paths in regards to how we understand and explore natural, social, and biological phenomena, but because Western Science was so entangled with colonialism and imperialism, we’ve had only one trajectory in which we consider a legitimate way to produce knowledge or to understand the world (Akena, 2012).
Listen, I think about this daily. Humans are without a doubt thee worst species to ever exist on this Earth. And while I’ve never traveled to any other planet, let alone another planet with life, can’t nobody tell me we not the worst in the universe. But we could have created any society. Any. Society. And this is what we did. It’s embarrassing. I am embarrassed. We should all be embarrassed.
Back to the topic.
I’ve been using the term Western Science, others may call it Western Modern Science (Kim & Dionne, 2014). I use Western Science to refer to a specific system of knowledge production that is rooted in a very particular culture. But unlike other knowledge systems it does not have to contend with the culture that it is embedded in. And all knowledge systems are embedded in a particular culture. Cultures around the world historically and presently all produce knowledge, study the natural, biological and social world, but these practices are sometimes, not always, connected to the needs and wants of that particular culture or society. But these practices, historically and currently, aren't considered “real science.”
For example, healing practices that use plants get labeled as traditional healing practices, as something that is subjective or culture-based. This, we call ethnobotany. However, isolating a molecule from a plant to create a treatment gets to be objective and doesn’t ever have to contend with the culture in which it exists and perpetuates. This we call botany. Ethnomathematics vs mathematics. Ethnomusicology vs musicology.
This is important because deepening our understanding of a Western Science rooted in its culture creates space for new possibilities for the sciences and for STEM education.
Okay, let us talk more about the phrase “Western Science.” The use of the word Western, at least in today’s times, really denotes Europe and its settler-state descendents such as the United States and Canada. This erases the contributions that other regions and countries of the world have made to our collective understanding of this world. It also erases the Indigenous communities that exist and existed in this so-called West.
And my problem is, I’ont got no solution for this Nelly and Kelly Rowland Dilemma that I have. Do we say European traditional knowledge systems? I’ve seen colonial science, but that keeps it in the past as if it isn’t ongoing. Maybe colonially derived science? I’ve heard Western knowledge systems. I don’t know, y'all. Am I going to keep saying Western Science, yes, yes I am because as I said I do not have a better word! I know, the culture of academia says, I should coin a term here, but the shoes ain’t fitting and the dogs is barking. So just know, when I say Western Science, it carries the aforementioned tensions and contradictions.
To be clear, things I’m not saying: I am not saying that this notion of testing and verifying is unique to Europe. But I am saying that the way it is used in these times as an objective and more valid way of producing knowledge is. And that it has a particular culture that must be teased out because this culture has caused significant harm to many communities and continues to do so.
There wasn’t a singular framework that would have allowed me to understand the processes that gave rise to Western Science so I used a critical transdisciplinary approach.
Okay so we gon’ start with discipline and make our way to transdiscipline.
discipline (noun.):
Punishment
Field of study
3a) Control gained by enforcing order or obedience.
3b) Orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior.
3c) A rule or systems of rule governing conduct and behavior.
A rule or systems of rule governing conduct and activity
Discipline (verb.)
to punish or penalize for the sake of enforcing obedience and perfecting moral character.
to train or develop by instruction and exercise especially in self-control.
3a: to bring (a group) under control.
3b: to impose order upon. (Merriam-Webster)
We gon’ zoom in on field of study because it encompasses all of the other definitions.
Disciplines are self-organized institutions that rely on rules, processes, and trainings that help to perpetuate each discipline (Pratt-Clark, 2010). In academia, disciplines require you to follow certain rules or face the consequences if you do not. For example, in the sciences, while you do have to publish, that is write an article, that gets peer reviewed and then accepted into a journal, you are generally not required to write a book.
For the social sciences, academics are generally expected to write a book and publish articles in order to get tenure.
Disciplines discipline people into the norms of that particular field of study which occurs through various trainings (Pratt-Clarke, 2010). Cough. Cough. Graduate school. Then followed by your first years as junior faculty.
These norms, these disciplinary norms get reproduced, as does the type of knowledge valued and produced within these silos. Consequently, disciplines can be self-limiting in regards to knowledge production as they are restricted by their own rules. So the ability to answer questions and address societal issues are stifled by the limits of disciplinary research because rarely are societal issues unidimensional and defined by one discipline (Pratt-Clarke, 2010).
Now, this is where transdisciplinarity comes in. Transdisciplinarity breaks the boundaries of the disciplines by using multiple disciplines to approach a problem. People theorize it differently, or contextualize it differently, but, you know, I think that’s true to the nature of transdisciplinarity.
Alright y'all listen, the way this word got my vocal cords in a choke hold means I got like one more full pronunciation left in me. So we gon’ shorten this to transdisc. And also y’all, for my entire life, until I had to actually write out pronunciation in this transcript, I been saying pronounciation. Like how did we even go from pronounce to pronunce? That ‘o’ ain’t do nothing to nobody.
Okay, there are different ways that transdisc gets taken up, but I draw from two discourses. The first is transdisciplinarity as the production of knowledge produced in contexts of application; and the second is transdisciplinarity as a collaborative research methodology (Osborne, 2015). I think I just used my last full pronunciation.
Taken together this means that transdisc is an “applied, problem-solving, and heterogeneous approach” (Pratt-Clarke, 2010, p. 23) that attempts to see what emerges outside of homogenous approaches to research. But all is not solved because, although transdisc research aims to move above the confines of the disciplines to answer research questions, it still accesses the knowledge and approaches from within individual disciplines.
So, I’mma read some quotes.
“...the academy was created as the epicenter of colonial hegemony, indoctrination, and mental colonization” (Shizha, 2010, p. 115).
“Discipline is empire” (McKittrick, 2020, p. 36).
“...the disciplinary domain is designed to perpetuate, advance, and institutionalize relationships of power, privilege, dominance, and advantage” (Pratt-Clarke, 2010, p. 31).
So people got some things to say!
When we look at disciplines in this way, we see clearly there is a problem that not only perpetuates the status quo but also contributes to the silencing of the subaltern (Spivak, 2010), les damnes (Fanon, 2004), or marginalized and historically oppressed peoples (Chilisa, 1995). So many words that have been developed to speak about people that’s been subjugated by Europe. So a transdis approach does not remove this facet of disciplines or the academy. In fact, it could continue to reproduce this hegemony. That is why Chilisa Bagele (2017) calls for a decolonized approach to transdisc research in which the perspectives, knowledges, and thoughts of colonized and formerly colonized folk are centered.
A decolonial transdiscplinary approach to theory is not a prescription for a specific theoretical framework to be used as much as it provides a process to use various theories to come to a historical present understanding of the problem being addressed so that solutions can be developed.
Okay, what does that mean, ‘cause that was a lot of words. It helps to build an understanding of the coloniality rooted in particular institutions under investigation or that we are interested in. At least that is how I am taking it up. While colonization in its original form is no longer in place, coloniality is alive and well and how do we get at that.
And so, coloniality is a power structure that controls how the world operates (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). This control is based on the central tenets of race, land (Wynter, 2003; Dei, 2017) and racial capitalism (Robinson, 2001). If we want to get to the root of this coloniality we gotta go to the past.
For this, I plaited three theories together: Black geographies, settler colonialism, and decolonial thought.
Black geographies is a branch of human geography that concerns itself with the racialized production of Black space. It employs an interdisciplinary approach in order to avoid the pathologizing of Blackness and its intersection with space (McKittrick & Woods, 2007). An important crux to Black geographies is the understanding that the plantation is entrenched in Black ontology (Woods, 2017) and consequently, “Black matters are spatial matters...and geographies of the diaspora are accentuated by racist paradigms of the past and their ongoing hierarchical patterns” (McKittrick, 2006, p. xii).
Black geographies forefronts both the struggle and the resistance that Black people have had in regards to space and place over time (McKittrick, 2006; Shabazz, 2015). Black geographies help conceptualize the processes that create unequal geographies that determine which bodies belong where.
Decolonial theory or decoloniality posits modernity as a time of imperialism, colonialism and epistemicide when Europe violently imposed itself on the world and created a matrix of power that has had ongoing effects (Quijano, 2007; Mignolo, 2011).
Those ongoing effects are what theorists call coloniality or “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243). Colonial expansion coincided with the rise of Man, which is Europe's descriptive statement of what it means to be human (Wynter, 2003). When I say Man, think “mankind” or “all men are created equal”.
Wynter (2003) argues that this conception of Man, the Euro-American, white, bourgeois, ethnoclass, overrepresents itself as if it itself were the human. Every culture has its own descriptive statement of what it means to be human meaning there are different genres of humanness or different ways to be human (Wynter, 2003). Remember when I had said, Sylvia Wynter had my synapses malfunctioning, this is from that article.
Colonial expansion combined with the overrepresentation of Man as human collapsed these other genres of humanness and created a racial hierarchy. Decoloniality recognizes that we are not in a post-colonial world as demonstrated through coloniality and many of the world’s struggles are because of the Man as Human vs Other dichotomy.
Settler colonialism is a phrase coined by Patrick Wolf (2006), however, the concept of settler colonialism has been described by many folks before him through their own-lived experiences. For example, Fayez Sayegh (2012) introduced settler colonialism in his 1965 work, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. He argued that the presence of the Arab people of Palestine, on their homeland, prevented Zionist from realizing their goal of a nation state in both size and self-segregation. So, “Zionist colonization of Palestine was essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the "native population" in the coveted country” (p. 5).
Settler colonialism requires the aboriginal population to be removed in order for the settlers to gain access to the land (Sayegh, 1965). As Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) tells us that “for settlers to live on and profit from land, they must eliminate Indigenous peoples, and extinguish their historical, epistemological, philosophical, moral and political claims to land” (p. 74).
And you know, once eliminated or eliminated enough, the settlers replace what was there with settler institutions and settler ways of being and knowing. Settler colonialism is not just a historical event, it is and will forever be ongoing because the settler state must maintain and uphold its claim and legitimacy as the rightful owners of stolen land.
These three theories tie in well to the idea of the historical present because they each focus on the past and present. They recognize how some historical events are not a one off occurrence that gets stuck in the past, but that these things have ongoing effects. Alone, they do not tell the complete story of Western science, but when woven together can paint a picture of Western Science in relation to the culture that created it.
What they make clear is that colonization was a necessity for Western Science to “modernize” as it did. Specifically, the following four phenomena were integral to Western Science.
Racial chattel slavery
Theft and/or occupation of Indigenous land across the globe
Access to resources in these lands including actual humans and other organisms.
Europeans imposing their restrictive concept of what it means to be human on other cultures and societies.
These will show up in various ways throughout the next several episodes as we start to put Western Science in the hot seat.
Please note, that my focus is heavier on the Americas and the Caribbeanthe academy was created as the epicenter of colonial hegemony, indoctrination, and mental colonization. This focus makes sense because that’s my context. But there are many places that we could center and tell another piece of this story. So basically what I’m saying is that I’m not telling thee story of Western Science, I am telling a part of the story of Western Science.
I am going to contextualize these theories and the historical presence of Western Science through modern botany in this episode, as I said, and modern medicine in the following episode.
I am not claiming that botany or the study and exploration of plants and flora did not exist before colonization, because it did. But I am saying that it proliferated and expanded to the botany that we know of today because of colonization.
Botany is the study of plants. Plants are vital to our existence. Plants feed us. What’s your favorite fruit? Plants clothe us.
What’s your favorite hoodie? Plants give us medicine. Aspirin.
Plants house us. 90% of newly constructed houses in 2019 in the United States used a wood-frame (Semuels, 2021).
Plants are used in different cultural practices. Shout out to High John.
Plants help the environment. They sequester carbon dioxide out of the air to perform photosynthesis. Plants keep us alive. They release oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis. Like candles, we need oxygen. As do plants. And as a former biology teacher I would like to remind everyone, because we often forget, that plants also require oxygen for cellular respiration, the process used to create adenosine triphosphate, aka ATP. The molecule we need for energy. Hello mitochondria.
The diversity of plants helps to maintain the diversity of animals. This biodiversity is important for a well balanced Earth.
It comes as no surprise then that plants were an essential component to colonial expansion by various European countries. Expeditions in the name of scientific curiosity allowed the natural and biological sciences to flourish (Schiebinger & Swan, 2004).
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European countries created a positive feedback loop between scientific curiosity and expansionism. A positive feedback loop is where one variable, say variable A, causes the increase in another variable, say Variable B, which then causes an increase in the first variable, variable A. And this keeps going and going.
As Europe sailed to these new-to-them lands scientists such as cartographers and astronomers were able to refine their instruments which in turn enhanced Europe’s ability in navigating longer and further (Adas, 2008). This enabled scientists to explore more, which contributed to the growth of their fields. So these expeditions of discovery and conquest were essential for scientists to fulfill their scientific curiosity. (Adas, 2008). Positive feedback loops will go on forever unless something interrupts the system. For colonization, this is where that resistance that Robert mentioned comes back in.
Botanic gardens in pre-colonial Europe were generally attached to universities and used to grow medicinal plants (Baber, 2016). The growth of botanical gardens beyond this is inextricably linked to European expansion because they generated crops, particularly plantation crops, which fueled the economy and global trade (Brockway, 1979). At first, the collection of flora was about studying, cataloging, and classifying flora (McClellan & Regour, 2001). The interest in natural history exploration was energized by the taxonomic classification system developed by Carl Linneus. This classification system also fueled a lot of race based science.
Botanists and collectors from European countries such as England, Spain, France, and the Netherlands traveled on voyages throughout their colonies to collect flora. When I use flora, it’s a general use, meaning the plant life present in an area. When I say plant or plants, I am talking about a specific plant.
In England, specimens were placed in the royal gardens at Kew (Brockway, 1979). This garden was eventually turned over to the government who turned it into an institution for the public, called the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew (Evans, 2021). Britain established botanical gardens in many of the places it colonized creating a network with Kew at the center; this network facilitated the exchange of plants between Britain and its colonies (Mogren, 2013). It wasn’t just Britain.
France also established a network of botanical gardens that stretched from the Indian Ocean to the West Indies (McClellan & Regour, 2001). Another way to think about this is today, the United States has military bases across the globe in the same way that these European countries set up botanical gardens in the places they colonized. Both were or are used in the service of control over capital and power.
Okay, let’s put some numbers to this so it’s not so abstract. From 1770 to 1820, Britain had 126 collectors working in an official capacity to collect specimens as well as an informal network of suppliers and transporters (Batsaki et al., 2017). Hans Sloane, was a well known collector whose collecting was funded by his medical practice, sugar plantations and other connections he had with the slave trade (Delbourgo, 2018). He had a massive collection—334 herbarium volumes containing thousands of pressed plants from around the world, over 12,000 seeds in boxes, 1,882 quadrupeds, 1,555 fish, plus 173 starfish alone, and 5,000 insects—among many other things. (Delbourgo, 2018). His collection was the foundation for the British Museum, the British Library, and Natural History Museum, London.
The collection of plants served European empires in three ways. One. The identification and cataloging of plants in colonized territories were used as drugs, food, and luxury items (Scheibinger, 2004). Importing items such as tea and coffee was expensive so the second way that the collection of flora served these empires was finding substitutions for these items.
Thirdly throughout the botanical garden networks, botanists worked to transport, acclimatize, and cultivate crops with potential economic value (Scheibinger, 2004). Plants of bondage, such as sugarcane, cotton, rice, tobacco, cacao, and indigo are crops that generated wealth and grew the economy of colonial powers (Augusto, 2017).
Once these European empires found their crops of interest and established a technique to grow and harvest them, they needed a source of labor. The violent relocation of Indigenous Africans from the coast of West Africa to the Americas and islands in the Caribbean Sea provided this labor.
I want to zoom in on a specific plant to tease those ideas out a bit more.
The bark of the Cinchona tree, native to the Andes of South America, contains quinine. Quinine is an anti-malaria and the Indigenous populations used it to treat malaria and fever. The bark was sent back to Europe in the 17th century, but it wasn’t until 1820, that France isolated quinine and began producing it in a factory in Paris. This production still required the import of the tree in order to extract quinine (Eplett, 2015). The British began using quinine as a prophylaxis in 1848. Quinine is bitter! British colonials began mixing their quinine into a syrup and then combining it with gin, birthing the gin and tonic.
The import of the tree was expensive. The Republics of Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia were newly independent from Spain, and controlled the Cinchona tree market and they were strict with their exportation of the tree (Teel, 2020).
This was a problem for European colonial powers because the cinchona tree was in high demand. They were going into parts of Africa, Asia, the Americas, South America, essentially the rest of the world to colonize and military personnel, among others, were dying from malaria. So for the British and Dutch, the cultivation of Cinchona was imperative to the success of their military to expand their empire to secure their colonial lands and assert themselves as global powers (van der Hoogte, & Peiters, 2014).
Foreshadow alert, which isn’t really a foreshadow since I’m telling you it’s a foreshadow. But the foreshadow is that this focus on the military is something that shows up repeatedly in STEM education.
To sabotage and bypass the newly independent South American countries, the Europeans sent out expeditions to smuggle Cinconcha specimens so that they could cultivate it themselves in their botanic gardens. And they did. Smuggle it out. Which is not surprising. But still, wasn’t no shame nowhere to be found.
The botanic gardens and botanists played an intricate role as they analyzed specimens to identify the best cinchona species to use and to identify and create the cultivation conditions that would enable the Cinchona plant, and other plants to grow in its non-native habitat (van der Hoogte, & Peiters, 2014). The Dutch were the first to cultivate it in Java which is now called Indonesia. They established Cinchona plantations where they forced the Indigenous population to plant, maintain, and harvest the plantation (van der Hoogte, & Peiters, 2014).
The Dutch government established a laboratory specifically for manufacturing quinine alkaloids from the bark (Goss, 2014). This interplay of chemistry and botany eventually helped launch the first global pharmaceutical company and the industry at large (va der Hoogte & Pieters, 2014).
The Dutch in their colonized land of Indonesia, which is referred to as the Dutch East Indies, provided over 90% of the world’s quinine between 1890 and 1940, but because there was an overproduction of the Cinchona tree from French occupied Algeria and British occupied India, the Dutch could not make a profit (Goss, 2014). Get this, to solve this issue, the Dutch essentially created a drug cartel between planters, manufacturers and the government in the 1913 Quinine Agreement. (Goss, 2014). This agreement did several things:
Set a minimum price for Cinchona bark,
It prevented manufacturers from buying cheaper bark from other countries by imposing penalties.
It also prevented planters from selling bark to any manufacturer except Dutch manufacturers (Goss, 2014).
The Dutch also developed the Quinine Bureau to monitor this process (Goss, 2014). So essentially, the Dutch essentially created a drug cartel and then established an organization to monitor the drug cartel.
The development of a reliable source of quinine from the Cinchona tree to combat malaria was a contributing factor to Europeans being able to penetrate and colonize the African continent to further their colonial expansion (Brockway, 1979; Okon & Okjakorotu, 2018).
The resources of the places that Europe colonized provided land, humans, and plants among other things that could help each country grow its economy and assert its global dominance by expanding its empire. Botany was essential for the growth of European empires and as the empires grew so too did various scientific fields such as botany, chemistry, cartography and astronomy.
So what does this mean for botany today?
Dispossession of land is one aspect of colonization. Epistemicide, the killing of knowledges, and linguicide, the killing of languages are other means that colonizers use to subjugate populations (Nodlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). For example, even though local plant experts had their own system of naming plants, all plants were renamed using the binomial structure developed by Carl Linneaus (Weber, 2019). The Cinchona tree was named after the countess of Chinchón, the wife of the Spanish Viceroy to Peru (Eplett, 2015).
New Caledonia, an archipelago in the Pacific was colonized by France in 1853 and still remains a French Overseas Territory. Of the 652 named vascular flora in New Caledonia, seven percent were named after New Caledonian born and 63% were named after other French citizens (Pillon, 2021).
The colonial botanic garden networks paved the way for what today is called parachute science. Parachute science is the practice of foreign scientists from wealthier universities and countries collecting research material from various countries, usually without input from the local community and then returning to their home institution and country to study the material (Olufadewa et al., 2020). The effects of parachute science can be seen in plant genomics. 56% of the domesticated crops were sequenced outside of their continent of origin and of that 56% only 13% included collaborators from the plants country or region of origin (Marks et al., 2021).
The growth of the field of botany as we know it today was made possible by Europe’s colonization of the world. The structures and processes that built botany are still present in research practices and in our day to day lives. If you are like me, then your apartment is probably full of plants, which adds another service that plants provide for us. Unfortunately, houseplants are not exempt from this colonial history. If you are looking for something to do, research the history of the various houseplants that you have.
Two quick things I want to point out but I will not go in depth because it takes us somewhere else, however, I think it’s important enough just to mention. When we’re thinking about the history of Western Science and coloniality, those processes and systems that shape how the world operates and how we live show up in other ways.
Thing one. What we’re also witnessing with the development of Western Science, is the science industrial complex which has been defined as “an intricate entwinement of university, government, and big business” (Connor, 2005, p. 473). I want to expand this definition to include technology, so we can think about it as the Science-Technology Industrial Complex.
We see the Science-Technology Industrial Complex in science education with priorities and funding for whatever program is deemed the next set of skills that students should know for whatever is necessary to support universities, the government, and big business.
Thing two. We’re also seeing the beginning of the destruction of ecosystems for profit and global status at the expense of the environment, people, and other animals. And while European colonizers are running out of places to colonize on Earth, other planets still exist.
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Next week, we gon’ look at another example, which is modern medicine, to see how the coloniality of Western Science is alive and well.
Thank you to Mathshoshi for reading the opening quote, to Makeba for reading the definition of discipline, and to Robert for his thoughts on the past and the present.
And thank you for listening!
For coherency and flow of narrative, I did not always name who I was citing or drawing from so please visit the transcript to see all citations and references.
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