What's in a name? William Jones, 'philological empiricism' and botanical knowledge making in eighteenth-century India.
'What is Indian Spikenard?', asked the eighteenth-century orientalist, Sir William Jones (1746–1794), in a famous paper, 'On the Spikenard of the Ancients,' published in Asiatick Researches, Volume II (1790). The question serves here as a point of entry into Jones's method for creating culturally sp...
| Publicado en: | South Asian History & Culture Vol. 13; no. 1; pp. 87 - 112 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Taylor & Francis Ltd
Jan2022
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=156443474&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 156443474 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 19472498 B7KP jtl: South Asian History & Culture issn: 19472498 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Jan2022 vid: 13 iid: 1 pid: 377 pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd artinfo: ui: 156443474 10.1080/19472498.2022.2037826 ppf: 87 ppct: 25 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T db: hlh ui: 156443474 – @attributes: type: P db: hlh ui: 156443474 tig: atl: What's in a name? William Jones, 'philological empiricism' and botanical knowledge making in eighteenth-century India. aug: au: Menon, Minakshi affil: Research Group Krause, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany su: India Orientalism Plant classification sug: subj: India Orientalism Plant classification keyword: British orientalism colonial botany Linnaeus plant nomenclature Sanskrit William Jones British orientalism colonial botany Linnaeus plant nomenclature Sanskrit William Jones ab: 'What is Indian Spikenard?', asked the eighteenth-century orientalist, Sir William Jones (1746–1794), in a famous paper, 'On the Spikenard of the Ancients,' published in Asiatick Researches, 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. This paper discusses Jones's philological method for identifying the jaṭāmāṁsī of the Sanskrit verse lexicon, the Amarakośa, and materia medica texts, a flowering plant with important medicinal properties and great commercial value, as the 'Spikenard of the Ancients'. Philology, for Jones, was of a piece with language study and ethnology, and undergirded by observational practices based on trained seeing, marking a continuity between his philological and botanical knowledge 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 'native' 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 colonial natural history. In the words of the medic and botanist, William Roxburgh (1751–1815), whose research on the spikenard is also discussed here, Jones's method achieved what 'mere botany' with its focus on the technical arrangement of plants could not do. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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