AMATEUR NATURALIST AND “PROFESSIONAL” ORIENTALIST. PAULINUS A S. BARTHOLOMAEO IN KERALA AND ROME (18TH-19TH C.)喀拉拉和羅馬的業餘博物學家及“專業”東學家 Paulinus a S. Bartholomaeo (18 至19 世紀)
This article examines the figure of Paulinus a S. Bartholomaeo, a missionary and naturalist observer active between Kerala and Rome in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, interrogating the boundaries between "amateurism" and professionalization in the field of knowledge of the Asian world. The...
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| Published in: | Review of Culture |
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| Format: | Articles |
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Instituto Cultural de Macau
October 2006
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| Online Access: | https://www.icm.gov.mo/rc/viewer/pdfViewerParts/40020/3738 |
| Summary: | This article examines the figure of Paulinus a S. Bartholomaeo, a missionary and naturalist observer active between Kerala and Rome in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, interrogating the boundaries between "amateurism" and professionalization in the field of knowledge of the Asian world. The author argues that Paulinus embodies a process of transition in which empirical competencies and collecting practices—typical of traveler-experts—come to be legitimized, contested, and reconfigured by emerging academic criteria, particularly within the Roman circuit.
Methodologically, the text mobilizes historical analysis and hermeneutics of writings and documentary practices attributed to the author, situating them within Catholic networks and European dispositifs for classifying the natural world. The reading articulates the epistemological problem of "understanding and reporting" with the material problem of "possessing, appropriating, and dominating" nature and populations, showing how collecting curiosity and descriptive routines are transformed into language and authority of a more "scientific" kind.
It concludes that the difference between "amateur naturalist" and "professional orientalist" cannot be reduced to a fixed hierarchy of knowledge, but rather results from institutional negotiations and regimes of validation, in which local observational work is reconverted into global credentials. |
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| ISSN: | 1682-1106 |