‘Giving Plants a Civil Status’: Scientific Representations of Nature and Nation in Costa Rica and Venezuela, 1885-1935
In a 1924 essay, the botanist Henri Pittier worried that many of Latin America's tropical products—particularly its plants—lacked a ‘civil status.’ By this, Pittier meant that they had not yet been identified and named scientifically. He likened the plants’ lack of a botanical ‘civil status’ to a person's lacking a passport or credentials that proved their citizenship. This was more than a casual analogy. Over the previous half-century, many states in Latin America had begun to take inventories of their plants, just as they had begun taking censuses of their citizens, and surveying and mapping their national territories. These botanical inventories helped states establish control over the natural world, just as censuses helped the state establish control over civil society. Between 1885 and 1935, governments throughout Latin America began to fund botanical research institutions and to finance the publication of national floras. Pittier had been actively involved in this process: he had helped establish national natural history museums in Costa Rica and Venezuela, and wrote or edited three national flora: the Primitiae Florae Costaricensis (1891-1901), the Ensayo sobre las plantas usuales de Costa Rica (1908), and the Manual de las plantas usuales de Venezuela (1926). National floras such as these were not simply ‘entertainment for intellectuals’ but also part of broader programs by Latin American governments to incorporate the natural world into the national political and economic order.