Paper short abstract:

This paper will focus on the attempts (18th and 19th centuries) of turning Angolan pemba clay and encaça bark into commodities, while stressing how scientific epistemology and the Enlightened study of laws contributed to this process by producing ignorance about their place in local orders of knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

As William Pietz made clear in his influential study of the "fetish", from the mercantile age onwards the creation of commodities depends on the stripping of objects from local orders of knowledge (or symbolic meaning systems), effectively promoting the ignorance about their cultural backgrounds in order to turn them into "standard" trade goods. Londa Schiebinger's "Plants and Empire" expands on this theme, by narrating an event which takes place simultaneously with this "commodification": the birth of "modern" scientific botany, based on "binomial nomenclature" and the forgetting of local epistemic contributions and social usages of plants. Finally, one can affirm that when African legal systems and cultures finally came under the scrutinizing gaze of western male scientists and scholars, it immediately became apparent to them that these social constructs needed to be "pruned" in order to be of any administrative use - Africans were deemed incapable of producing abstract concepts and (utopian) laws untainted by politics. Objects situated outside of culture; plant names that were purely arbitrary symbols; abstractions untainted by local idiosyncrasies: these were then the stuff of colonial (appropriation) dreams. Manufacturing them, nevertheless, proved to be a Sisyphus like toil, as old knowledge often uncannily resurfaced. This paper will focus on the history of two examples ("pemba" clay and the "encaça" bark), which provide a nexus between commodity creation, scientific epistemology, and abstract legal conceptualizing, while demonstrating how the production of ignorance (or "agnotology" following Londa's lead) about them was instrumental in fixating their value in a colonial context.