The Uses of Butterflies

Abstract

In this article, I examine the life and career of Henry Walter Bates, both for its intrinsic interest and in an effort to understand some of the scale-making activities through which Amazonia became a region. Bates, a distinguished entomologist who spent the years 1848-59 in the Amazon basin, returned to Britain to write the most famous of the 19th-century accounts of regional life. Examining Bates's intellectual and philosophical formations, his fieldwork experience in the context of a turbulent Amazonian politics, and his relationships with metropolitan and colonial natural scientific institutions, I offer a thick history of practice as a strategy for analyzing the complex productivities of Victorian traveling science. [Amazonia, collecting, colonialism, fieldwork, natural science, region, space] History begins at ground level, with footsteps.- Michel de Certeau (1985:129) American Ethnologist 28M):51 3-548.

Knowing Insects: Hosts, Vectors and Companions of Science

“…Many early entomologists began their career as travel explorers, who during their journeys built up collections and thus launched their naturalist careers (e.g. Raffles, 2001;Clark, 2009). Today, amateur entomologists and their expertise are being actively sought out through public engagement initiatives of natural history museums.…”

Fact and fetish in creolization studies: Herskovits and the problem of induction, or, Guinea Coast, 1593

“…And both, I suggest, inaugurate the problem of creolization as a social fact and an analytical enterprise.14 As Peter Pels points out, the seventeenth century was book-ended by two travelers' accounts of the West African fetish, the first by Pieter de Marees written in 1602 and the second by Willem Bosman, written in 1702 and much more widely read (Pels 1998:102;see also Pietz 1987:39 andPietz 1988). It was also, as Pels remarks, the "heyday of the curiosity cabinet and the object displayed in it, the so-called 'curiosity' or 'rarity,"' an object of singular importance in the history of Western conventions of objectivity, empiricism and induction (Pels 1998:102-3; see also Daston 1988Daston , 1994Raffles 2001).…”

Producing affect: Transnational volunteerism in a Malaysian orangutan rehabilitation center

“…In this article, I approach two recent turns taken up in cultural anthropology: the animal and the affective. Building on earlier anthropological work that explains how animals are used to mediate social relations, the recent “animal turn” in anthropology points to the ways humanity is constituted through multispecies encounters (Anderson 2004; Evans‐Pritchard 1969; Franklin 2007; Ingold 1980; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Kohn 2007; Raffles 2001; Wolch and Emel 1998). In cultural studies, the “affective turn” of the last decade has found inspiration in recent readings of 17th‐century philosopher Baruch Spinoza and 20th‐century developmental psychology (Clough 2008; Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Hardt 1999, 2007; Hardt and Negri 2004; Massumi 2002; Probyn 2004; Sedgwick and Frank 2003; Stewart 2007).…”