Larissa Schulte Nordholt: ‘In colonial territories, local and European agricultural knowledge intermingled’
Veni grant image: Nehir Aksel
Plantation owners in the former Dutch colonies who wanted to eliminate pests turned to local techniques. Later, they often combined the knowledge they acquired in this way with European science. Researcher Larissa Schulte Nordholt has been awarded a Veni grant to map out this interplay.
One of the first items on Schulte Nordholt’s to-do list is to come up with a different term for ‘vermin’. ‘That term is entirely human-centric,’ she says. ‘If we find an animal a nuisance, it suddenly becomes a pest. Did Singapore have tigers in the city? Pests. A few centuries later, the problem has gone and the tigers are suddenly no longer pests, even though the animal has remained the same.’
Open buffet
Bad term or not, ‘pests’ provide an interesting case study into the knowledge acquisition of colonial scientists. By planting plantations with a single crop, colonial farmers introduced monoculture to Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. Schulte Nordholt: ‘In doing so, they created an open buffet for all manner of creatures.’
Those mice, rats and insects then had to be kept as far away as possible from their freshly planted snacks. To resolve the problem, plantation owners looked, among other things, to the local population. ‘They often already had ways of controlling those animals, which they had in turn sometimes adopted from other population groups,’ explains Schulte Nordholt.
Creolised knowledge
These techniques also caught the attention of colonial scientists, who often focused on agriculture. ‘I was researching the colonial history of Wageningen University at the time,’ says Schulte Nordholt. ‘There, it struck me how dependent scientists were on the labour and knowledge already present in the colonies. One of them, for example, wrote home about how Javanese workers very skillfully stacked, organised and distributed the tobacco. That knowledge has subsequently become interwoven in all sorts of ways with what we now call Wageningen knowledge or European science.’
Schulte Nordholt would like to map out that interwovenness more precisely. ‘In the history of science, there is an increasing focus on local knowledge,’ she says. ‘However, that term presupposes a contrast between Western and non-Western knowledge. I therefore prefer to talk about creolised agricultural knowledge, because it is a hybrid of local knowledge with external influences. Moreover, other animals are often used to control pests. Jack Russells, for example, are very good at catching mice and rats. Because animals also possess their own intelligence, this influences the way people treat them and, in turn, that creolisation. I’d also like to explore that.’
Long-term perspectives
Schulte Nordholt focuses on long-term perspectives. She aims to examine the period from 1870 to the present day, covering both the Dutch East Indies and Suriname. ‘Following the independence of the Dutch East Indies, Javanese labourers and colonial scientists moved to Suriname. The latter, in particular, are an underestimated group. I have already found dozens of names of people who made the crossing. I am very curious about their mutual exchange.’
This will certainly relate to the interaction between biological and artificial pest control. Whilst the Green Revolution emerged in the 1940s, encouraging the use of artificial methods to combat global food insecurity, the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of Integrated Pest Management, which criticised this chemical approach to agriculture. Schulte Nordholt: ‘They are actually returning to earlier biological methods, often with local roots. I am very curious to see what that trajectory looks like when you zoom in on it.’