Maria Quintana

May 11, 2009

Com 597

Mary Louise Pratt, “Science, Planetary Consciousness, Interiors,” in Imperial Eyes:

Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

-William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, pg. 80.

Overview

In Imperial Eyes, Pratt charts the advent of a new “planetary consciousness” in

Europe, which led to a major shift in the way European elites understood themselves and
their relations to the rest of the world. This planetary consciousness developed during the
turn to internal scientific land exploration and natural history as a field of study. Not only
did this “planetary consciousness” result in new ways of producing knowledge, it also
was the basic element in constructing modern eurocentrism, beginning with Linnaeus’
publication of The System of Nature. His hierarchical classification of species was
published in 1735, the same year of Europe’s first international scientific expedition. At
first, European countries feared collaborating with each other on scientific expeditions to
protect their colonial projects. In the case of La Condamine, they set aside their
protectionism for the economic and political advantages they saw in the expedition, each
in competition with the other for economic and political gain. Though the interior
exploration of La Condamine proved both a political and logistical nightmare, it was
largely successful in the production of scientific literature, which circulated widely.
These specialized forms of scientific travel writing served as ideological apparatuses
through which European citizens related to other parts of the world, popularizing the idea
of order in nature as well as the scientific expedition, which became Europe’s proudest
instrument of expansion and a new way of encoding Europe’s imperial ambitions.
Natural history served in tandem with the scientific expedition to change the way
Europeans made sense of their place on the planet. Students of Linnaeus sprouted all
over the planet and natural history collections became serious hobbies for people all over
Europe. It became a global classificatory project, comparable to Christianity in its
impact. As such, Linnaeus became an ambassador of empire. As Pratt states, “the
naturalist naturalized the bourgeois European’s own global presence and authority (p.
28).” Natural History not only manifested in language through travel writing, it was
realized in many aspects of social and material life as well. Zoological drawings
developed, watchmakers were in demand, jobs came into being for scientists on
commercial expeditions, natural history collections acquired commercial prestige and
value, and botanical gardens became large-scale public spectacles. Pratt uses these
examples to show that “knowledges exist as human activities, tangles of verbal and non-
verbal practices (p. 29).” Besides the systematizing of nature, other knowledge-making
apparatuses had formed, including circumnavigation (sailing the world) and the mapping
of the coastal lines. These planetary projects led to the formation of a European planetary
subject.
 The lettered, male, European eye that designed the “system of nature” composed
order through human intervention. In systematizing nature, they produced not only a
European discourse about non-European worlds, but an urban discourse about non-urban,
peasant worlds, worlds which seemed as primitive as the Amazon from this discourse
perspective. These systematizing principles caused the contiguous emergence of
standardized manufacturing, ordered military, and allowed for the creation of bureaucracy
and militarization, both central instruments of empire. Europe’s aggressive colonial and
imperial models were testing grounds for modes of social discipline; the systematization
of nature coincided with the slave trade, the plantation system, colonial genocide, slave
rebellion, etc. The goal of this chapter of Imperial Eyes is to reverse the direction of
Linnaeus’ gaze, looking out at Europe from the colonial frontier, to bring into view these
processes of standardization and systematization. Pratt asks, “For what were the slave
trade and the plantation system if not massive experiments in social engineering and
discipline, the systematization of human life, the standardizing of persons?” (p. 36) Her
analysis is post-colonial critique at its finest, questioning the universalizing presumptions
of an enlightened modernity that presumed to speak for others.

Key Terms

Planetary Consciousness
La Condamine
Inland exploration
Colonialism
Systematization
Natural History
Carl Linnaeus
European Expansion
Eurocentrism
Science (“Ways of Knowing”)

Questions

What does it mean to look through “Imperial Eyes?”

How might this knowledge and way of being in the world have been used to justify
colonialism?

How do post-colonial perspectives challenge or critique this “way of knowing?”

Post-Colonialism in the Reading:

As a critique of colonialism, post-colonialism calls into question the ways of knowing
produced by European nations to justify their expansion and the itinerant conquest of
native populations. The system of “ordering” nature discussed in Imperial Eyes created a
specific way of being in the world.
Further Reading

Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto
Rico. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Post-Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998).

McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle
East, 19945-2000. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Moraga, Cherrie. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
(New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1984).

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978.

Weber, David. Barbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Young, Robert C. Post-Colonialism: An Historical Introduction. Malden: Blackwell

Publishing, Inc., 2001.

Craniometry is the technique of measuring the bones of the skull. Craniometry was once intensively practiced in
anthropology/ethnology.
The practice of craniometry and the study of the morphology of human skulls was used in Natural History to
scientifically categories the “races” as different from one another.

Linnaeus, Anthropomorpha, in Amoenitates academicae (Stockholm: Laurentius Salvius, 1763).

Classification of humans, from left to right: “Trogloodyte,” “Lucifer,” “Satyr,” “Pygmee.”