Assembling a Wider Expanse

As US botany expanded in the Philippines, botanists recognized the need to rely on Philippine-born field guides, translators, and laborers to fully assess the colony’s landscape. This reliance on native personnel, however, proved tenuous and, at times, dangerous. This chapter examines colonial botanists’ mortal fragility and homes in on the matter of superstition tied to forests and lands amongst native field labor. US personnel observed the frequency and diversity of superstition, a catch-all term which, the chapter suggests, had impeded proper excavating of Philippine domains. Complaints of superstition were not new to the US colonial period or to foreign observers alone. At the same time, critiques of it were seated within US colonial botanists’ own vulnerability prosecuting botanical work in places altogether new to them. Still, Philippine-born botany personnel had their own views on the difficulty of field labor that complicate botanists’ early appraisal of most laborers being “too superstitious.”