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Article ID: CBB001024013

From Rustics to Savants: Indigenous materia medica in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (2011)

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Volume: 42
Pages: 275--284

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Materia medica Transmission of ideas Translations Natural history Medicine, traditional Indigenous peoples; indigeneity Collectors and collecting Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence Native American civilization and culture 18th century Mexico Central America Léon y Gama, Antonio de

This essay explores how indigenous knowledge about plant and animal remedies was gathered, classified, tested, and circulated across wide networks of exchange for natural knowledge between Europe and the Americas. There has been much recent interest in the bioprospecting of local natural resources---medical and otherwise---by Europeans in the early modern world and the strategies employed by European travellers, missionaries, or naturalists have been well documented. By contrast, less is known about the role played by indigenous and Creole intermediaries in this process. And yet, the transmission of knowledge between indigenous communities and the European cabinet was neither transparent nor natural, and often involved epistemological, linguistic, and religious obstacles. Drawing on printed and manuscript collections of indigenous remedies, written in colonial Mexico between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, I focus on how local intermediaries, like creoles scholars, sought to overcome such obstacles by observing indigenous uses of remedies, by studying indigenous languages and by producing natural histories and pharmacopoeias in indigenous languages. Ultimately, behind the Creole participation in the transmission of indigenous remedies, one can point to political and cultural interests and to inclusive definitions of knowledge, which cut across oppositions between science and superstition, cabinet and field, centre and periphery.

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Description “Explores how indigenous knowledge about plant and animal remedies was gathered, classified, tested, and circulated...between Europe and the Americas.” (from the abstract)

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