Föreläsning - Lecture: Linnaeus’s Laplandic Journey (1732) - Guides, Hosts and Freeloaders

Public Lecture by Staffan Müller-Wille and Elena Isayev

Föreläsningen ges på engelska/ The lecture is held in English.

Abstract/ Sammanfattning

SV:

Linnés lappländska resa (1732) - Guider, värdar och snåljåpar

Historikerna Staffan Müller-Wille och Elena Isayev har gjort en omläsing av Carl von Linnés dagbok från sin resa genom Sápmi 1732 (Iter Laponicum) och lyfter fram de människor som hjälpte honom på vägen. Dagboken visar att Linnés kunskap byggde på samiska och andra lokala människors erfarenheter, vägledning och gästfrihet, inte minst från renskötare, fiskare och kvinnor. 

ENG:

Linnaeus’s Laplandic Journey (1732) - Guides, Hosts and Freeloaders

Join us for a rereading of the naturalist Carl Linnaeus’s diary of a trip through Sápmi  in the summer of 1732 (Iter Laponicum). The diary has been celebrated as pioneering the methods of scientific and ethnographic fieldwork.

Historians Staffan Müller-Wille and Elena Isayev, who have re-tracked some of the journey, propose to read it against the grain. While in later writings Linnaeus created an image of Lapland as a stagnant and desolate region, waiting to be explored and exploited, his diary documents how people there knew very well how to make a living, and were the ones on whose expertise and hospitality he depended.

Linnaeus relied on multiple actors who also moved across cultural and political borders, usually were multilingual, and helped him find his way and acquire knowledge. This included reindeer herders, fishermen, Swedish settlers, clerics, bureaucrats, and notably not only men but often women as well. The knowledge Linnaeus gathered was generated collectively and “in transit” at intersections of diverse communities that were affected by frameworks of hospitality and hostility.

SV:

Staffan Müller-Wille

är professor i historia och filosofi i ämnet Life Sciences vid Cambridge University. Han har särskilt undersökt Linnés arbetsmetoder och hur han använde olika former av anteckningar, listor och register för att ordna sin kunskap om växter och läkekonst.

Elena Isayev 

Tillsammans driver Müller-Wille och Isayev projektet Knowledge in Transit: Linnaeus in Lapland (1732). 

ENG:

Staffan Müller-Wille

is Professor in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences at the University of Cambridge. His research focusses on the production of biomedical knowledge as a geographically, socially, and culturally distributed process. He is particularly interested in the "paper technologies" that scientists use to record their observations. Linnaeus's manuscripts reveal how he experimented throughout his life with a number of paper-based information tools – lists, tables, book annotation, index cards – in order to collect and integrate information about plants and their medicinal uses.

Elena Isayev 

is Professor of Ancient History and Place at the University of Exeter. She has been developing the journey as a discursive tool. As a historian and practitioner, she is focusing on migration, hospitality and exceptional politics in contexts of displacement. Investigations drawing on ancient contexts and material remains address dichotomies of public and common space, counter-cartographies and relational approaches to place. She is interested in how Linnaeus navigated various kinds of borders and hospitality regimes.

Together, they direct the project Knowledge in Transit: Linnaeus in Lapland (1732).

Läs mer nedan/ Read more below:

https://linnaeus-in-lapland.net/

https://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/people/muellerwille 

https://www.exeter.ac.uk/staff-profile/index.php?username=eisayev

SV:

Föreläsningen ges som fördjupning till höstens utställning på Ájtte av Linnea Johnels

Tre verk som reflekterar över Linnés lappländska resa visas i Gamla hallen 19 september – 28 november

Efter en lång färd från Uppsala anlände Carl von Linné till Jokkmokk den 29 juni 1732. Blott 25 år gammal var han utsänd på en expedition av Kungliga Vetenskaps-societeten för att inventera arter, men också för att förstå levnadssätten i det lappländska klimatet. Det var en resa präglad av koloniala anspråk — hur kunde markerna och kunskapen i området vara till mer nytta för Sverige?

I utställningen Den linneanska blicken tar konstnären Linnea Johnels avstamp i Linnés Lapplandsresa. Genom skulptur, film och bildtryck undersöker Johnels hur expeditionen lade grunden till Linnés ekonomiska natursyn, och utforskar vad som händer med relationen till omvärlden när en naturvetenskap som distanserar, delar upp och objektifierar blir förhärskande.

ENG:

The lecture is given as an introduction to the autumn exhibition at Ájtte by Linnea Johnels

Three works reflecting on Linnaeus's Lapland journey are on display at Gamla Hallen, Ájtte museum, September 19 - November 28

After a long journey from Uppsala, Carl von Linné arrived in Jokkmokk on June 29, 1732. Only 25 years old, he was sent on an expedition by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to inventory species, but also to understand the ways of life in the Lappish climate. It was a journey marked by colonial claims — how could the lands and knowledge in the area be of more use to Sweden?

In the exhibition The Linnaean Eye, artist Linnea Johnels takes Linnaeus's Lapland journey as her starting point. Through sculpture, film and printmaking, Johnels examines how the expedition laid the foundation for Linnaeus' economic view of nature, and explores what happens to the relationship to the outside world when a science that distances, divides and objectifies becomes dominant.