Broken Taxonomies

This post is part of a series that reviews decolonialism in libraries, archives and other similar spaces, from the perspective of the Global South and the margins, and how colonialism affects collections, staffing, services, activities, policies, and results. Check all the posts in this section's index.

When Knowledge Is Pressed Flat

To catalog is to frame. To label is to delimit. And to systematize is often —too often— to extract.

Herbaria are not so different from libraries. Both are memory institutions. Both preserve traces of worlds. And both operate under the guise of neutrality while enacting systems of deep epistemic control. A pressed plant is not unlike a bound book: removed from its native soil, dried, contained, classified, and stored for consultation — often by those far removed from the contexts that gave it meaning.

In librarianship, we are trained to trust classification. To believe in metadata. To structure. To order. But what if the very act of ordering is part of the violence?

Metadata as Mistranslation

In the taxonomic traditions inherited from European natural history, naming is an exercise in domination. Linnaean binomials are touted as universal — yet they silence thousands of local ontologies, each with their own systems of classification, use, and significance. When a plant known through ritual, cosmology, and relational knowledge becomes merely Nicotiana tabacum, we have not translated. We have amputated.

The same happens in libraries. Controlled vocabularies erase multiplicity. Subject headings reduce living knowledge to bureaucratic descriptors. A cosmology becomes "Mythology — Indigenous." A healing chant becomes "Medicine, Traditional." A territory becomes "Developing regions." What is framed as organization is often misrepresentation. What is called legibility is frequently erasure.

Metadata —like taxonomy— is never neutral. It is always authored. And in both herbaria and libraries, that authorship has historically served colonial, extractive, and universalist agendas.

Annotations That Never Made It

In the margins of scientific field notes —and in the catalog cards and MARC fields of libraries— there are absences. Ghosts of voices that were never allowed full entry. Indigenous informants appear unnamed. Ritual knowledge appears as "superstition" or disappears entirely. Multisensory, oral, and embodied epistemologies are translated into flat prose or omitted altogether.

Library science has mirrored this flattening. We privilege the written over the spoken. The codified over the performed. The fixed over the fluid. As a result, libraries —like herbaria— become archives of partial memory. What is preserved is what fits. The rest is either footnoted or forgotten.

The Epistemic Press

A herbarium sheet is an infrastructure. So is a library catalog. Both shape what counts as knowledge. Both determine who gets to speak — and who is cited, indexed, retrieved, remembered.

But what if we took seriously the call to unpress these sheets? To rehydrate the stories? To rebuild taxonomies not around universality, but around relationality?

What would it mean to build library systems where a plant could be indexed not just by genus and species, but by taste, by season, by ceremony, by name-in-song? Where catalog entries could hold chants, where metadata fields could accommodate multiple cosmologies — not as add-ons, but as central structuring logics?

Decolonizing the Herbarium... and the Library

Several radical projects —community archives, Indigenous cataloging initiatives, epistemic justice frameworks— are already pointing the way. But the real shift will not come from including more terms or "diversifying" authority records. It will come from dismantling the structures that require flattening in the first place.

Libraries, like scientific archives, must move from storage to stewardship. From extraction to reciprocity. From classification to relation.

That shift requires a different kind of librarian: one who listens to absences, who questions the label, who reads between the lines of what the catalog doesn't say.

The Language Was Never Lost

The leaves still speak. The herbarium still remembers. And so does the library — if we are willing to unlearn how we were taught to listen.

To build a librarianship worthy of the knowledge it claims to preserve, we must first admit how much it has erased. And then, with care and courage, begin the slow, necessary work of re-annotation.

Not to "recover" the past — but to allow the future to grow in richer soil.

  This entry mirrors the chronicle "The Language of Leaves," a narrative reflection on the same theme.