Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies

3. The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science in the Spanish and American Philippines

78 3 The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science in the Spanish and American Philippines Greg Bankoff When Americans occupied the Philippines in 1898, they began the persistent propagation of a second leyenda negra about their colonial predecessors. Rather than depicting the conquest of the New World in lurid and exaggerated details that stressed Spanish brutality as sixteenth-century French and English authors had, this second black legend was a more measured, scientifically couched denunciation that dwelt on the decadence, backwardness, and irrational nature of Iberian culture.1 The proponents of this new missionary colonialism were quick to point to the unsanitary living conditions, the general lack of educational facilities, the absence of scientific inquiry , the superstitious nature of Hispanic culture, the inability to exploit natural resources, and the continuation of archaic forms of social relations such as slavery that were the end products of more than three hundred years of Spanish rule.2 This view was nothing new to the American historiography of Spain and its empire. William Hickling Prescott had said as much in his path-breaking History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic in 1837, contrasting the virile new American Republic to the moral decay of Spain. The initiative and energy that had earned the latter its empire in the sixteenth century, he argued, had already sunk into the torpor of The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science |  economic backwardness, intellectual stagnation, and political weakness by 1600. This trope became so marked in subsequent American historiography that it soon was known as “Prescott’s paradigm”: an understanding that Spain was everything the United States was not.3 Its tone and tenor were readily adopted and echoed by many Filipino nationalist writers who condemned the Spanish Philippines as an oppressive frailocracy or a society ruled by religious orders mired in bigotry, corruption, and superstition (Reyes y Florentino 1887; Del Pilar 1889). Actually, Spanish science in the Philippines was not nearly as rudimentary as it is frequently made out to be and was partly based on different schools of thought. Darwinian concepts have so dominated twentieth-century natural science that those who held alternative notions have been deemed unutterably backward (Endersby 2003). This northern European monopoly on perceptions of nature has come to constitute modern scientific thought and has shown only disdain for anything that does not share its cultural affinity. Only now are alternative notions based more on ecological concepts that stress commensality rather than species competition regaining some scientific respectability. Such alternative ideas, however, were very much current in the intellectual tradition of the nineteenth century, especially in Southern Europe, and traced their origins back to late eighteenth and early nineteenth transformist ideas on acclimatization and the inheritance of acquired characteristics found in the writings of Georges Buffon, Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and the latter’s son, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. The late nineteenth-century Philippines pose an interesting case where different notions about the environment vied for state and public acceptance. This chapter examines ideas about the science of nature and the nature of science in relation to forestry, botany, meteorology, and animal breeding. Far from demonstrating an unsophisticated dialogue about the environment, the evidence shows a surprisingly rich fusion of European debates and discourses. The Spanish colonial official, the foreign naturalist, and the missionary father were as well versed in the science of their day as geographical location and international communications permitted. Only in the eyes of the self-  | Greg Bankoff assured and self-righteous proponents of the new American imperium was all darkness and ignorance. Science of Nature After the discovery in 1952 that DNA provides the genetic information for cell replication, explanations of evolution that stressed the hereditary nature of acquired characteristics lost their scientific validity. Prior to this scientific breakthrough, however, the prevalent views for most of the nineteenth century favored the notion of acclimatization, the idea that an organism adjusted to climate and physical environment. The French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck even speculated on the extent to which such acquired characteristics could be inherited by progeny (Mayr 1972, 55). The fate of organisms was of particular concern to the imperial mission in an age of high colonialism that sought the transfer of plants, animals , and humans from their ancestral environments in more temperate climes and their successful introduction into tropical zones. The earliest European accounts describe equatorial regions in...