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Linnaeus’ study of Swedish swidden cultivation: Pioneering ethnographic work on the ‘economy of nature’

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Abstract

Carl Linnaeus’ work on the ‘economy of nature’ was a major early development in what became the modern field of ecology. This analysis suggests that a key subject of this work that has been ignored or misunderstood for 250 years is the rural livelihoods, especially swidden (or slash-and-burn) agriculture, which Linnaeus studied during his expeditions through rural Sweden. Rereading his reports in the light of modern work on swiddens, political ecology, and the history of science affords a new appreciation of Linnaeus’ insights into traditional systems of resource exploitation. The logic of nutrient cycling in swidden agriculture and its utilization of natural dynamics to serve human ends exemplify the principles of the ‘economy of nature’, and gave Linnaeus a philosophical basis for understanding and defending this system of agriculture as well as other rural resource use systems in Sweden. This analysis sheds new light on Linnaeus’ ethnographic work, his view of folk environmental knowledge, and his often derided identification with Sweden’s ethnic peoples.

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Notes

  1. Worster (1977, p. 33) cites Linnaeus’ work as one of the two most important eighteenth century contributions—the other being Gilbert White’s studies in Selborne, England—to the initial development of ecological thinking.

  2. The term ‘swidden’, used here in preference to the more misleading terms ‘shifting cultivation’ and ‘slash-and-burn agriculture’, is derived from the old English ‘swithen’, meaning to be singed (Oxford English Dictionary 1999).

  3. The passages by Linnaeus cited in Weimarck (1968) were all translated from the original Swedish by Weimarck.

  4. This is typical of swidden systems worldwide, which Scott (1998) has called “fugitive agriculture.”

  5. A small number of copies of “Scanian Travels” with the unexpurgated original text survived (Blunt 2001, pp. 213–214), and the complete edition of the Scanian Travels was not altered. The 1884 edition by Martin Weibull (Lund: Gleerup) and the 1940 facsimile edition (Malmo: John Kroon) contain both the original and amended texts.

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Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the participants in his Spring 2013 seminar at Yale, “Disaster, Degradation, Dystopia: Social Science Approaches to Environmental Perturbation and Change,” for an insightful discussion of Linnaeus’s work, to his research assistants Julia Fogerite and Sarah Casson for assistance with library research and manuscript preparation, and to four anonymous reviewers for Ambio for their insightful comments.

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  1. School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, 134-136 Kroon Hall, 195 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT, 06511-2189, USA

    Michael R. Dove

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Correspondence to Michael R. Dove.

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Dove, M.R. Linnaeus’ study of Swedish swidden cultivation: Pioneering ethnographic work on the ‘economy of nature’. AMBIO 44, 239–248 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-014-0543-6

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