Afterword: Ani Choki, Indian Exploration, and the Work of Invisibility

Abstract

Taken together, the articles in this special issue can be understood as an appeal to re-articulate the “margins” in the history of science. These margins have been energetically excavated by historians studying scientific knowledge production in colonies or plantations and, more generally, in the non-West. However, the articles collected here show us how to interrogate the power and authority wrapped up in the work of natural history in the eighteenth century, even when the margins are located geographically within Europe, whether on a peasant farm outside Zürich or in the workrooms of a London naturalist. This scientific work can be manual or mental, skilled and unskilled; it can be routine, often invisibilized, and yet central to knowledge production. It reminds us that marginality is relational, and it is the margin that repeatedly requires articulation. When writing from the margins, then, new histories of natural history can emerge that rethink the relationship between Europe and its different colonies when it comes to the work of science. I extrapolate from the lessons learned in this issue to talk about a gentlemanly pursuit very much linked to natural history, namely geographic exploration. There was great overlap between the material, social, literary, and bodily practices of both natural history and exploration, perhaps best exemplified in the figure of Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt, who makes a cameo in Anna Toledano’s article here as a naturalist, was also the archetype of the “scientific explorer.” These men of science roamed the so-called terra incognita, the “unknown” places in the world, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and made them known to European metropolitan audiences through personal observation from the field. Making his way up the Oronoco and through Spain’s American colonies at the turn of the nineteenth century, Humboldt contributed not only to natural history and geography, but also to related fields of geology, chemistry, botany, and meteorology. The