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Scholars, whenever they have occasion to write about plants in myth, lore, ritual, history, or elsewhere, often gloss the plant's cultural name with a botanical name provided in parentheses. The practice, no doubt, is intended to promote intelligibility and allow readers to identify the exact plant being spoken of. Yet, unwittingly it reproduces a problematic divide--that between "nature" as an ahistorical universal and "culture" as a historical and geographic variable. The botanical name therefore seems to be a valid and legitimate gloss for any and all plant identities, irrespective of when and where the other, "non-botanical" name derives from. It will therefore, in most cases, be considered perfectly legitimate to gloss a discussion of, say, flowers in Sanskrit kavya, medieval Persian qasida, Greek myth, early Chinese bencaos, or Thai temple gardens with the suitable botanical names of the flowers being referred to.
Historians of science, however, have long established that botany--just like any other form of human knowledge--is also historically contingent. Its knowledge is marked, like all scientific knowledge, by historical specificities. Moreover, like other forms of human knowledge, the acceptance of its accuracy or precision is as much a political question as it is an epistemic one. Yet, when scholars gloss discussions of plants with botanical names, they overlook both the complicated ways in which scientific knowledge has been validated, and indeed, its historical specificities. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in discussions of the histories of medicinal plants. Plants, such as Cinchona, are mentioned as having been used and exchanged among multiple communities existing in distinctive historical and geographical moments, and yet the botanical name "Cinchona" remains ahistorically fixed, stable, and unproblematic.
My intention in this article is to pry open the gap between "cultural" and "botanical" names of plants. By demonstrating the political, contested, and technologically specific ways in which botanical names and cultural ones come to be equated, I want to reintroduce an element of contingency in the very act of equating. By insisting that the "natural" and the "cultural" are both historical, I want to open up the seemingly automatic, predetermined gesture of glossing a cultural identity by a botanical one to historical inquiry. I want to reclaim the possibility...