Hospitality and Knowledge: Linnaeus's Hosts on His Laplandic Journey

Recent science studies emphasize that knowledge is generated through transit and encounters. If so, knowledge production depends on forms and dynamics of hosting and hospitality. We suggest hospitability is a crucial factor shaping intercultural knowledge creation and transfer. Using results from a research project on Carl Linnaeus's Laplandic Journey, we address the relationship between hospitability and knowledge construction. While in later reports Linnaeus created an image of Lapland, or Sápmi, as uninhabited and uncultivated, his journal documents encounters with state and church officials, reindeer herders, fishermen, settler farmers, and women with medicinal knowledge, many of them Sámi, on whose expertise and hospitality he depended.