Ethnoscientists play an invaluable role as exponents of biological and cultural diversity. This role has frequently been compromised, however, by the discipline’s close association with powerful imperial and colonial interests. This paper examines this tension in twentieth-century Philippines, with emphasis on the researches of two individuals: Elmer Drew Merrill (1876-1956), the most prominent botanist of the early years of American colonization; and Harold Conklin (1926-2016), the preeminent ethnoscientist after Philippine independence. The two represent vastly different ethnoscientific paradigms. Merrill’s primarily economic interest in indigenous botany, which took shape under the auspices of an aggressively expanding colonial bureaucracy, is epitomized in his encyclopedic effort to catalogue the vernacular names for useful Philippine plants from Spanish-language sources. Conklin’s research on Hanunó’o and Ifugao botanical classification, and on the connections between indigenous cultures and environmental knowledge, bolstered by facility in numerous indigenous languages, took shape in a vigorously nationalist postcolonial context. Yet the areas of overlap between the two men are equally intriguing: Conklin’s work drew upon military aerial surveillance photography, for instance, and he promoted his Ifugao studies as broadly relevant to projects of tropical “development”; while Merrill insisted on the ontologically stable character of indigenous plant classifications, and even patronized Conklin’s early ethnoecological research. In probing these connections and contrasts, this paper attempts a finely grained understanding of the spectrum of translational practices spanning apparently inconsonant frameworks for understanding differences between indigenous and Western patterns of environmental thought.
