Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez. Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press, 2025.

Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez’s Unmaking Botany offers a compelling and interdisciplinary rethinking of the history of science in the Philippines. Rather than treating botany as a one-way imposition of imperial knowledge, the book foregrounds the coproduction and friction between colonial science and local epistemologies. In standard botanical usage, the “vernacular” refers to local plant names (as opposed to Latin scientific nomenclature). Gutierrez redefines and broadens this notion of the vernacular, encompassing embodied, cosmological, artistic, and varied taxonomic practices—from the culinary (rice flavors) to the artistic (folk songs for flowers) and the material (weaving skirts from abacá fiber). By illuminating these lived ways of knowing plants, she exposes the philosophical and practical limits of Western botany when confronted with tropical biodiversity and local classification systems.

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