JAKARTA: In November, people on social media rejoiced for a few weeks following the rediscovery of a rare species of the Rafflesia parasitic flower in West Sumatra. However, the rediscovery was met by renewed debate among researchers and public alike about academic colonialism.
The concerns hinged on whether the Rafflesia, which was named after a European colonial figure, should be renamed to better represent its South-East Asian origin and remove its colonial legacy.
Among the world’s largest flowers, the Rafflesia first entered Western scientific records in 1818 after it was spotted by a local guide working with British surgeon and naturalist Joseph Arnold in the then-British colony of Bencoolen, present-day Bengkulu.
The family of the flower was later named the Rafflesia, after the Bencoolen lieutenant-governor Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles. The species spotted by Arnold was later named Rafllesia arnoldii after the surgeon who died not long after finding the flower.
Meanwhile, the type recently discovered in West Sumatra is Rafflesia hasseltii, which was named after Dutch botanist Arend Ludolf van Hasselt.
As of today, the name Rafflesia is still used by the global scientific community to describe a genus that includes at least 42 species found in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.
But the Rafflesia never had just one name. Across Indonesia, it is commonly called the padma, pakma or ambai-ambai, depending on the region, language and species, said Joko Witono, botanist at the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) who studies monocots, including Rafflesia. He was part of the expedition team that found the hasseltii in West Sumatra, a flower commonly called cendawan muka rimau by Sumatran locals.
“Each place has its own name [for the Rafflesia],” Joko said. “It depends on the community.” Read also: Academic colonialism concerns haunt rare rafflesia sighting Environmental historian Luthfi Adam, who studies Dutch colonial-era science in the then-Dutch East Indies, said species’ scientific and vernacular names were usually based on the person who financed the expedition in which it was “discovered”.
“It may help identify the species more precisely,” Luthfi said. “But consequently, it will remove the local context and knowledge about the species.”
Among supporters of the Rafflesia renaming campaign is Lennard Gillman, ecology and biogeography professor at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. He said Raffles committed atrocities against local people in Indonesia and Singapore during the British colonial era in the region.
“Essentially, like the plant he's named on, he was a stinker,” Gillman said. “I don’t think that the scientific community should be honoring people like that with names on species at all.”
Gillman, who has been involved in species renaming debates since the early 2000s, said indigenous communities had already named plants and animals centuries before European scientists discovered them for themselves.
Replacing those names, Gillman added, may erase long-standing relationships between communities and their environments and may hurt future efforts to protect and conserve them.
But campaigns to change names of species have been met with resistance from various parties, including scientists who argue it would disrupt scientific databases.
“The argument is that it would destabilize the system,” Gillman said.
“But names change all the time. There’s already a lot of name changing in the system, and restoring some indigenous names would be minor by comparison.”
Species renaming occasionally happens, only after long and hard debate. In 2024, during the International Botanical Congress in Madrid, scientists voted to eliminate the names of more than 200 species of plants, fungi and algae that contain the word caffra, which originates in an insulting term for black people.
The word will be replaced by affra to denote their African origins.
The voting only took place after what was described as a “gruelling” six-day session in the congress attended by more than 100 researchers.
Gillman, however, acknowledged changing a genus name like Rafflesia would not be simple: “Finding a name that honors everyone would be difficult. But that doesn’t mean the conversation shouldn’t happen.”
The conversation for Rafflesia may have to wait for at least another couple of years. While acknowledging that scientific names can change when new evidence alters one species’ classification, BRIN’s Joko, who is one of the main Rafflesia researchers in Indonesia, said the scientific name mainly serves as a scientific tool to organize data.
“A name is just a name,” Joko said.
“What matters is accurate data. If there’s new taxonomic evidence, names can change. That’s how science works.” - The Jakarta Post/ANN
