On September 19, 2025, Professor Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez gave the first guest lecture of the University of Michigan Center for Southeast Asian Studies Friday Lecture Series entitled “Botany's (Un)making: Vernaculars of Plant Knowing in the Early 20th-Century Davao Gulf.” Cruz, an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz based the lecture on her recent monograph, Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines.
U-M Asian Languages and Cultures Chair, Professor Deirdre de la Cruz, introduced Gutierrez’s work as “a deeply researched and really beautifully written history of botany in the Philippines in the decades, spanning the late Spanish and early American colonial periods, [Unmaking Botany] is a book that really redefines and, expands our very concept of the vernacular to include embodied practices, artistic work, cosmological worldviews.and other practices, and I think of this book as a real exemplar for how to read lingeringly along and against the colonial, archival brain.”
Gutierrez’s lecture was based on the fourth chapter of her book, “Woven Transformations," which focuses on textile production, weaving implements, and locally printed serials that
discusses topics such as environmentally oriented superstitions. She discussed the lives of field laborers, weavers, and tradespeople from the southern Philippines and how “their fluency with plant life exhibited vast knowledges that predated, existed beside, and transformed with the colonial encounter.” She notes how Bagobo cultural, weaving, and agricultural practices changed in the face of changing economic structures installed by the new American colonial government and interest in Philippine textiles after the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.
More importantly she shared with the U-M Community her insights on her intervening concept of sovereign vernaculars, or “insight into plant life, again, conveyed linguistically and otherwise, that both made and unmade the science.”
Gutierrez emphasized, “In the history of Anglo-European botany, it's been customary to think of the vernacular as simply that which is not Latin. I instead reconceptualized the vernacular as more than just the non-Latin, and to expand it to include embodied cosmological, artistic, and other taxonomic practices through which historical actors came to know plants. The word vernacular and its very study imply uneven relation, coming from the Latin Verna, or a, ‘enslaved person born in the hall of a master.’ On the one hand, the term sovereign implies enforcement of authority in European styles of governance, and on the other hand, the term invokes a declaration of power against prevailing hegemonic claims. So in my usage, sovereign takes a doubled meaning, the sovereign of imperial botany, fed by the vernacular, and the sovereign of the vernacular, or the manifold ways of knowing plants, which historical actors held that could skirt botanists' attention, be cast to marginalia, or simply remain unrecorded in their books.”
Kathleen "Kat" Cruz Gutierrez (Ph.D. Southeast Asian Studies, Berkeley) is assistant professor of Southeast Asian history and the history of science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She writes on the history of botany, botanical taxonomies, and the recent scholarly "plant turn."
Her research has been generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her previous affiliations include De La Salle University, Manila, the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden, and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation.
She presently serves as co-principal investigator for a community-engaged research initiative on Filipino agrarian labor and migration titled "Watsonville is in the Heart." For her work, she was awarded in 2024 the Richard E. Cone Award for Emerging Leaders in Community Engagement by LEAD California, an honor that recognizes individuals in higher education evidencing steadfast commitment to community engagement in their early careers.
You can find more information about Unmaking Botany Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines at Duke University Press here.
For information on upcoming CSEAS lectures and events at the University of Michigan, click here.
