Marie-Christine Skuncke, Uppsala University

2008-2014

The project - 2009-2011 - was located at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, SCAS, Uppsala, where I was then a Long-term Fellow. I completed the work in 2012-2014 at the Department of Literature, Uppsala University. My collaborator, Dr Andreas Önnerfors, received support for a case study of German translations of Thunberg's travel account.

Purpose
The Swedish botanist and physician Carl Peter Thunberg (1743-1828), a pupil of Linnaeus, was the only European who visited and published his observations of Tokugawa Japan in the eighteenth century. On his way to and from Japan, Thunberg, travelling as a surgeon with the Dutch East India Company, visited territories in the Dutch colonial empire: the Cape Colony, Batavia (present-day Jakarta), and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Following his return to Uppsala, he published a ground-breaking work on Japanese plants, Flora Japonica (1784), and a travel account that was translated into several languages. In 1787, the Swedish king Gustav III, on Thunberg's initiative, founded a new Botanical Garden and a monumental building for natural history as a gift to the University of Uppsala - Linneanum, now the home of SCAS.
The initial purpose of the project, when I applied for funding in 2008, was twofold: a study of Thunberg's images of non-European cultures, mainly in his travel account, and a study of the spread and reception of these images through German, English and French translations. It turned out, however, that Thunberg's images of South Africa and Japan had been treated in a Swiss dissertation (Carl Jung 2002). At the same time, new research questions arose as I began to read Thunberg's manuscript correspondence. My attention turned from his images of non-European cultures in the late travel account to the actual meetings during his voyage with Asians, Africans and Europeans outside Europe, and to his scientific career.
The purpose of the project, consequently, was revised. My principal aim has been the writing of a monograph in which I reconstruct Thunberg's scientific career, by exploring exchanges within the networks which he built in Europe, the Dutch colonial empire, and Tokugawa Japan. Drawing on a wide range of sources, largely manuscript, the book is a study of social practices in natural history, in a global perspective.

Results
The monograph 'Carl Peter Thunberg, Botanist and Physician: Career-Building across the Oceans in the Eighteenth Century' (Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, 2014) explores how Thunberg, through exchanges with his patrons and colleagues, assembled huge collections, mainly in natural history, and used these collections as a basis for a spectacular career at the University of Uppsala. The following interrelated results are especially worth emphasizing:
1 The book is a contribution to the history of scientific and cultural relations between Japan and Europe at a time when there was a strong interest among Japanese intellectual elites in 'Dutch learning', that is, Western science (Rangaku). Detailed accounts are given of Thunberg's exchanges with interpreters on the island of Deshima off Nagasaki and with court physicians in Edo, present-day Tokyo. The Swede taught Western therapeutic methods in the field of materia medica and, in exchange, received services in botany and other areas. In my analyses, I have received invaluable help from specialists in Japan, Professor Matsuda Kiyoshi and Professor Wolfgang Michel.
2 More broadly, the monograph is a contribution to the study of knowledge transfer between continents in the late eighteenth century. Thunberg's voyage took place in a period of European expansion, with fierce competition between different chartered companies. The book studies his dealings with both Europeans and non-Europeans in the various 'contact zones' which he visited in Africa and Asia. Special emphasis is put on the role of non-European intermediaries, 'knowledge brokers' or 'knowledge go-betweens' (Kapil Raj), such as the interpreters in Deshima but also for instance physicians and merchants in Ceylon.
3 The monograph is also a contribution to ongoing research about Sweden's involvement, direct or indirect, in eighteenth-century European colonialism - cf. studies by Sverker Sörlin, Leos Müller, Göran Rydén, Kenneth Nyberg, Hanna Hodacs and Fredrik Thomasson. In the Dutch empire, Thunberg accepted and skilfully used the existing colonial structures. He was involved, too, in British attempts from Joseph Banks's circle to transfer breadfruit to West India as food for the slaves.
The European translations of Thunberg's travel account are discussed in a section of the monograph and in forthcoming articles by Andreas Önnerfors and myself, which demonstrate the swift diffusion of the texts across European book markets as well as the transformations of the Swedish original according to local contexts.

New research questions
The main research questions in the monograph, with the exception of the question of translations, were all generated in the course of the project by close readings of the source material in interaction with studies into current international and Swedish research in history of science. Questions about exchanges within networks and about 'knowledge brokers' are not new in themselves, but they are explored systematically in the monograph, and they appear fruitful for further research into eighteenth-century natural history.

International dimensions of the project
The subject for the project, C. P. Thunberg and his career, is international in its very essence: it touches on the Dutch Republic, France, Great Britain, the Germanies and Russia as well as South Africa, Indonesia and Japan. The project's location at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, with its tradition of research on encounters between civilizations and dialogue between disciplines, provided a stimulating international milieu for my work. In 2011, SCAS hosted a symposium funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, 'Carl Peter Thunberg's Voyage and Scientific Encounters between Europe and Asia, c. 1770-1830', with speakers from Japan, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Germany besides Sweden.
In order to write my monograph, I had to turn for help to specialists in a number of countries, especially (as mentioned above) Professors Matsuda Kiyoshi and Wolfgang Michel in Japan.
I have presented my research on Thunberg at various international events: a lecture at the Kyoto Botanical Garden in 2010; a paper at a conference on eighteenth-century scientific translations in Paris in 2012; the introductory keynote lecture at the Nordic Conference for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Oslo (Lysebu) in 2013.

Presentations of the project outside academia
I have presented my project in a number of talks and lectures directed at different Swedish audiences outside the academic world, for example a lecture at the Uppsala Municipal Library and a presentation at a Swedish-Japanese evening organized jointly at Linneanum by Uppsala University and its sponsors (both 2014).

Publications and publishing strategy
The main publication of the project is my monograph from 2014, published by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. The work, written in English in order to reach international academic audiences, is the Collegium's first book publication. One ambition besides the work's scholarly aims was to create a richly illustrated and beautifully designed volume. The work was entrusted to the experienced graphic designer Lars Paulsrud.
The articles in the list of publications present aspects of the project to various audiences. The 2010 article, in Japanese translation, is a result of my lecture in Kyoto that year. The 2012 article on Thunberg and Sparrman (both of them travelling students of Linnaeus), resulted from a symposium about Sparrman organized by the Swedish Linnaeus Society. The two forthcoming articles about translations of Thunberg's travel account, by Andreas Önnerfors and myself, will appear in French anthologies devoted to eighteenth-century translations.


Web links: http://www.littvet.uu.se/forskning/profilomraden/1700-tal/avslutade_projekt/ ; http://www.littvet.uu.se/om_oss/personal/hemsidor_s-o/marie-christine_skuncke/

Publications

Monograph:

Carl Peter Thunberg, Botanist and Physician: Career-Building across the Oceans in the Eighteenth Century. Uppsala: Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, 2014. 376 pages. ISBN: 978-91-981948-0-7. 
 
Articles:
 
”Carl Peter Thunbergs japanska resa i 1770- och 1780-talens medier”, Sjuttonhundratal [Journal of the Swedish Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies] 2008, pp. 44–62.
 
‘Carl Peter Thunberg: From Amsterdam and Deshima to Linneanum in Uppsala’. Japanese translation by Kiyoshi Matsuda, in: Shūhō: Report of Ono Ranzan Bicentennial Commemoration Activities 2010. Tokyo: University of Tokyo, 2010, pp. 14-27.
 
”Carl Peter Thunberg och Anders Sparrman”, in the anthology: Anders Sparrman. Linnean, världsresenär, fattigläkare, red. Gunnar Broberg, David Dunér & Roland Moberg. Uppsala: Svenska Linnésällskapet, 2012, pp. 81–96.
 
Forthcoming: « Suède, Europe, Japon. Le botaniste Carl Peter Thunberg sur le marché international », in Bret, Patrice & Chappey, Jean-Luc (eds.), Traduire entre savoirs et pouvoirs. Pratiques et enjeux scientifiques, intellectuels et politiques de la traduction, 1660–1840.

Andreas Önnerfors

Article: ‘Thunberg’s Travels in German: The Protracted Birth of a Translation’, in Patrice Bret & Jeanne Peiffer (eds.), La traduction comme dispositif de communication, Paris: Editions Hermann, forthcoming.

See also by Andreas Önnerfors: "Translating Discourses of Enlightenment - Trans-Cultural Language Skills and Cross-references between Swedish and German Educated Journals in the 18th century", in Cultural transfer through translation: the circulation of Enlightened thought in Europe by means of translations, ed. Stepahnie Stockhorst, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2010, pp. 209-229.