Desislava Todorova Dimitrova: Der Reisebericht des Anders Sparrman. Eine wissenschafts- und ideenhistorische Untersuchung

The very nature of Carl Linneaus’s system of taxonomy inspired the need to travel and explore. The famous ‘father of modern taxonomy’ encouraged some of his more talented students to set sail to the far corners of the globe and collect botanical and zoological data and specimens. The objective was to map and describe God’s creation in all its richness and diversity. The religious underpinnings of Linnaeus’s program were reflected in the name given to his elite students traveling the world: his so-called Apostles were furthermore tasked to spread their master’s teachings to all corners of the globe, thus establishing it as a veritable paradigm within the natural sciences. These travels were not without risk. The first to leave Sweden was also the first to never return: after the wife of this Christoffer Tärnström, who had died of illness in Vietnam, accused Linnaeus of carelessness, the Uppsala professor decided to from here on out only select unmarried students without children. Of these, seven others would succumb to illness in far-off places.

One of the Apostles who was spared this cruel fate was Anders Sparrman (1748–1820). After an earlier journey to China in the late 1760s, Sparrman in early 1772 set sail for South Africa with the assignment to study the local flora and fauna, stones and minerals, as well as the culture and lifestyle of the local populace. In November of the same year, he decided to interrupt his studies and join James Cook’s second expedition across the South Atlantic and South Pacific. Like Captain Cook and the young German natural scientist Georg Forster, who had joined the expedition together with his father, Sparrman would write and publish a lengthy travelogue, which also included his experiences in South Africa: Resa till Goda Hopps-Udden, södra Polkretsen och omkring Jordklotet, samt till Hottentott- och Caffer-Landen Åren 1772–1776 (Resa hereafter). Although this report in posterity has always stood somewhat in the shadow of the two others, it was at the time quickly translated into German, English, French, and Dutch, and earned its author an international reputation.

Historians have taken an interest in Sparrman and his engagements overseas before, gratefully using his travel account as a valuable source, but the book in its entirety has never been the subject of a substantial critical analysis. It is this gap that Desislava Todorova Dimitrova has aimed to fill with her doctoral thesis, a thorough and insightful close reading of the Resa, which minutely dissects its author’s views and convictions regarding the three main scientific areas he engaged in during his travels: natural history, then generally called historia naturalis (which in turn can be divided into botany, zoology, and geology), ethnography, and medicine. Of course, through Sparrman’s thoughts on these subjects, we simultaneously gain insight in the state of the art of the sciences in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Resa in fact forms an excellent source in this regard, as Sparrman published his account in three volumes. The first part dealt primarily with his time in South Africa and came out in 1783; the other two volumes covered the travels with Cook and appeared in 1802 and 1818 respectively. Dimitrova convincingly demonstrates that the second and third volumes do not simply concern postponed publications of older material but were written and finalized by Sparrman at a later date, making it possible to trace various developments in the author’s thinking.

The work’s publication history thus straddles the period in which Foucault in his The Order of Things (1966) discerned a transition from the episteme of the Classical era to that of the Modern era, in which the Enlightenment’s preoccupation with ordering and classification, of which Linnaeus’s taxonomy is such a prominent example, was steadily replaced by an epistemology in which time, history, change, continuity, evolution took center stage. This development was accompanied by a growing process of professionalization, or specialization, that for instance saw historia naturalis develop into the modern discipline of biology in which zoology and botany were now firmly established as autonomous fields of scientific inquiry.

Foucault’s work, and especially his influential conceptualization of discourse, forms an important theoretical framework in the part of the study that deals with natural history. But somewhat surprisingly Dimitrova does not operationalize or even mention Foucault’s reflections on the epistemic break between the Classical and Modern era as described above. Instead, she takes as a starting point Thomas Kuhn’s related, but not fully synonymous definition of paradigm, including a focus on the notion of scientific revolutions. This is in and of itself a defensible decision, but one that had required further justification.

The paradigm Sparrman answered to was of course the system of taxonomy of his mentor. It formed the scientific doctrine that predisposed his perceptions of the natural world. Dimitrova sharply observes that Sparrman, confronted with the immense botanical diversity in South Africa, actually started to doubt his master’s teachings and the possibility to systematically categorize this wealth of new species. Or, to use Kuhn’s terms: Sparrman encountered many anomalies that were incommensurable with the paradigm. Yet, Sparrman was not in any way a scientific revolutionary and there is no sign that he ever abandoned Linnean taxonomy: he doubted it but did not reject it. He also had no eye for possible alternative paradigms, such as Lamarck’s ideas about evolution; of Buffon he was viciously rejective. Finally, Sparrman’s practices during his journeys in the 1770s reveal that he perceived of natural history as a singular whole of which zoology, botany and geology formed integrated parts. In short: he was fully and wholly a man of the Classical era.

Typical for this era of undiversified science is that Linnaeus instructed his students to also gather ethnographical information during their excursions, (correctly) convinced as he was that humans formed part of the animal kingdom. In this part of her dissertation, Dimitrova shifts to a comparative approach, contrasting Sparrman’s rather unsystematic and biased modus operandi to the modern discipline of anthropology such as it began to develop around 1900. Careful to avoid the pitfalls of presentism, Dimitrova stays true to her devotion to New Historicism and analyses Sparrman and his world on the basis of their own premises. The contrast with scientific mores that seem more familiar and ‘right’ in the eyes of the modern reader in fact serves to bring to the fore with greater clarity the epistemological presuppositions typical of the eighteenth-century study of non-western cultures, in which objectivity was not yet a central value and a judgmental eurocentrism tainted scientific observation. A wealth of insightful case-studies (perhaps too great a wealth, see below) show how the application of this etic perspective led Sparrman and his peers to time and again misunderstand Oceanian practices, habits, norms, and values. Western notions about private property, to mention a particularly striking example, made the European crew see theft where there was none, often leading to violent altercations with the local populace and a conviction of the islanders’ ingrained criminal disposition.

A commendably strong part of this study is the comparison Dimitrova executes between Sparrman’s Resa and the travel accounts of Cook and Forster. It is cogently shown that the Swedish man of science outdid his fellow travelers in eurocentrism. Sparrman stands out as a stern adherent of the so-called Stufentheorie which put the Europeans on the highest stage of human development, while all the others took up a lower spot on the ladder of civilization. Remarkable furthermore is that Sparrman spent lengthy passages on disproving the at the time fashionable idea of the Pacific islands as a kind of earthly paradise inhabited by noble savages; he was notably more negative about the Oceanian societies than Cook and Forster and in contrast to his shipmates championed western presence – in the form first and foremost of missionary work – as something beneficial and desirable for all parties involved. This naturally raises the question in how far Sparrman can be considered complicit in the colonialist project in general. Ever since Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), we know that the sciences contributed to creating a discourse that demoted the Orient to the passive object of the western gaze. Although she does not refer to Said (again somewhat perplexingly given her reliance on Foucault’s notion of discourse), Dimitrova comes to a similar verdict, stating that Sparrman’s involvement can be considered ‘indirect’, seeing that Sweden had no sizeable colonial empire; he however contributed to perpetuating the colonialist discourse and its implicit power disparity through his travel account.

Although Sparrman in general gave expression to a Eurocentric worldview, he at times also expressed more relativistic standpoints that challenged ideas of western superiority and throughout his life he was a convinced abolitionist. One area in which he was inclined to be open to learn from native practices was Medicine, the subject of the third and final part of Dimitrova’s analysis. Sparrman was a physician by education, and he would continue to practice this profession after his return to Sweden. Despite his interest in the treatments practiced by South African tribes, he was otherwise remarkably conservative in his medical methods. He remained a firm proponent of the humoral theory based on the writings of Hippocrates and Galen, and the passages in the Resa dealing with the medical profession betray little interest in alternative methods, with the sole exception of magnetism (a treatment he later in life would perform on none other than king Christian VII of Denmark).

A recurring, more social-historical theme throughout the study is that of scientific capital and the status of the scientist or physician in society. Dimitrova points out multiple excerpts from the Resa in which Sparrman asserts his position as a scientific authority for his readership by underscoring his university education and his scientific achievements. However interesting, these sections of the thesis often suffer from overcautiousness and the use of overtly hedged language. As many of Sparrman’s textual decisions are explained based on his supposed intentions towards his readers, these readers could have been given more attention in the research, but apart from a scattered remark here and there, we in fact learn very little about the reception of Sparrman’s Resa: who were these readers? Who got inspired by these volumes? And was the work at all reviewed?

A critical note must be dedicated to the length and overall structure of the study. With 702 pages, of which about 650 constitute the main body of text, the thesis is long – too long, as the text could have been shortened easily. This is most evident in the sections on ethnography, in which the author draws roughly the same conclusions for each aspect of the indigenous societies she addresses (religion, social relations, governance, handicrafts and so on): Sparrman’s account radiates eurocentrism, and his understanding is impaired by a lack of time and knowledge of the local languages. Such unnecessary repetitions could have been avoided by structuring the study differently. Considering its impressive size, it is curious that the text is divided in just four chapters. Apart from the clear and concise introduction and summary, and a short and insightful biographical sketch, the analytical part of the thesis is contained to a single chapter of no less than 550 pages, which in turn is divided into a rhizome of paragraphs, sub-paragraphs, sub-sub-paragraphs, and so on (there is a chapter 3.1.3.4.5). This interesting study had deserved a more elegant solution. Another peculiar space-consuming feature is the use of lengthy citations from the secondary literature, in most cases containing information that could have been paraphrased in two or three sentences.

Studies such as these ideally offer a form of hermeneutic reciprocity, in which the contextualization allows for a deeper understanding of the subject in question, while the case study in turn shines a new light on the bigger picture. This book certainly succeeds in giving a rich, detailed and enlightening portrait of Sparrman, firmly placing him and his travels in the scientific paradigms of his day. Whether it teaches the informed reader something new about scientific history at the close of the Enlightenment, on the other hand, is doubtful. It nonetheless offers a thorough, well-documented, theoretically-sound and learned analysis of this highly complex period in the history of science.