Irina Podgorny

The Shaping of Latin American Museums of Natural History, 1850-1990

This essay reflects upon the milieu and the character of Brazilian and Argentinean natural history museums during the second half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the museums were influenced not only by European and North American museums but by each other. Museum directors in the two countries knew each other and interacted. Some of the relationships between these museums were friendly and cooperative, but because they were in young, emerging nations, they also became deeply involved in the invention of nationality in their respective countries and interacted as rivals and competitors. Even through rivalry, however, they contributed to each others development, as did rivalry among museums within each of the two countries. Later in the century they went well beyond the nationalist perspective, finding, through their research into paleontology and anthropology in their regions, a continental and uniquely South American scientific perspective, defined in reaction to North American and European views.

Fossil dealers, the practices of comparative anatomy and British diplomacy in Latin America, 1820-1840

This paper traces the trade routes of South American fossil mammal bones in the 1830s, thus elaborating both local and intercontinental networks that ascribed new meanings to objects with little intrinsic value. It analyses the role of British consuls, natural-history dealers, administrative instructions and naturalists, who took the bones from the garbage pits of ranches outside Buenos Aires and delivered them into the hands of anatomists. For several years, the European debates on the anatomy of Megatherium were shaped by the arrival in London of a small living mammal and the ideas and evidence received from Montevideo on the existence of huge fossil bony armours. These debates culminated late in 1838 in the creation of the extinct genus Glyptodon by Richard Owen as a result of the exchange of letters, objects and depictions, and a series of contingent events. Based on primary sources and South American scholarship, this paper aims to contribute to the current debates among historians of science about the mobility of knowledge, as well as presenting the condition that made Charles Darwins work possible.

Emma B. Documentos para servir al estudio de la estructura familiar de los coleccionistas de fósiles: el caso de Emma y Auguste Bravard

, con los reflejos de la vida de Paris en los rincones y las ciudades de campana. A la hora de narrar los derroteros del burgues medio, puesto a disputar un lugar en las ciencias buscando las puertas del saber, Flaubert elegiria a dos torpes senores: Bouvard y Pecouchet. Emma Bovary, en cambio, no demuestra interes alguno por la naturaleza: su camino a la muerte esta trazado por placeres mundanos, que solo la trascenderan en forma de deudas e hipotecas. Pero aunque Emma no padeciese de ninguna obsesion cientifica o filosofica, tampoco ignoraba el prestigio que la practica exitosa de la ciencia podia haber arrojado a su matrimonio. Los documentos que publicamos en el dossier quieren matizar la vida de Emma Bravard, otra senora de una ciudad de la provincia francesa, en este caso de Issoire, una pequena ciudad

The name is the message: eagle-stones and materia medica in South America

Abstract This chapter presents one case history – the transfer of the name and virtues of ‘eagle-stones’ to Andean minerals and terebratulid brachiopods such as Clarkeia antisiensis. Eagle-stones, an ancient remedy of Asian origin, were used in early modern Europe to prevent abortion and as a charm to assist obstetric delivery. In the eighteenth century eagle-stones were the subject of what G. Baronti (Tra bambini e acque sporche Immersioni nella collezione di amuleti di Giuseppe Bellucci, Morlacchi, Perugia, 2008) calls the process of folklorization of European learned medicine, becoming a ‘superstition’ and a popular remedy of medical lore. Based on secondary bibliography and documents from the Archivo de Indias in Seville, the paper discusses the uses of eagle-stones in Spain and Spanish America in connection to the texts published, written or translated in the Iberian Peninsula (lapidaries, early modern medical books). The last section proposes clues to analyse the expansion of the trade in eagle-stones to Spanish America, to finally survey the references to ‘eagle-stones’ in Latin American popular medicine of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eagle-stones are inscribed not only in the longue-durée but also in the intricate networks of commerce.

Travelling Museums and Itinerant Collections in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Abstract There is one genre of museums that remains little understood — travelling collections. These museums put on display natural history collections, anatomical specimens, and ethnographical models in wax. Maintained by itinerate charlatans and impresarios, their exhibits were displayed and interpreted in ever changing varieties. Travelling museums appealed to both the general public and the scientific community. As is evident from the reviews in newspapers and the catalogues that spread information about the specimens on display, travelling museums blurred the boundaries between science, commerce, and entertainment. Based on the analysis of sources dispersed across several repositories and archives in South America and Europe, and focusing on travelling museums that passed through Buenos Aires in the 1880s, this paper sheds new light on the manifold social and cultural practices involved in the circulation of knowledge.

Trayectorias y desafíos de la historiografía de los museos de historia natural en América Del Sur

En el siglo XIX los museos de historia natural de America del Sur se constituyeron en instrumentos clave para el intercambio y la circulacion de datos y especimenes y, en ese sentido, en loci privilegiados de la infraestructura de las ciencias y del saber. Almacenaron tal cantidad de objetos y colecciones que los organizadores de estas instituciones se enfrentaron al problema de como guardarlos y exhibirlos dandoles un orden que pudiera entenderse. Por eso, los museos no pueden separarse de la historia del papel, del archivo y de los catalogos. Este articulo repasa algunas cuestiones de la historiografia producida en las ultimas decadas, discutiendo, entre otras cosas, la identificacion acritica entre museos, memoria y representacion de la nacion. A su vez, propone el desafio de como escribir la historia de los museos incorporando los agentes humanos y no humanos y el conjunto de circunstancias que sustentan sus exitos y fracasos.

A horse-cloth for Uganda, or how an account by a transhumant veterinary connects histories, animal diseases and continents

ABSTRACT The picture of a ‘pony in pajamas’ is used to construct the backstory of a deadly animal disease in three parts. First, by focusing on the figure of the ‘author’ of the cloth depicted in the picture, Scottish veterinarian Robert John Stordy, one can examine the repercussions of transhumant biographical itineraries. Second, a focus on regional epizootics helps alter scales defining the local versus the global. Third, the global circulation of mules and the medicines used to cure them illustrate displacement of objects and knowledge that shaped the understanding of sickness and its remedies. Thus, the remedies and horse-clothes used in Uganda not only speak of things and beings that linked distant geographies and contexts, they also mark the multiple hubs where these connections did occur, propelled in part by commercial interests, biographical itineraries and, of course, randomness.

Filling in the Picture: Nineteenth-Century Museums in Spanish and Portuguese America

This special issue comprising articles on Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico is devoted to museums established over the long nineteenth century in Spanish and Portuguese America. It features a variety of museums: from national to provincial, from monumental to one-room shows, from general to those devoted to a single subject, from lost to still existing. Awide variety of institutions in North, Central, and South America are examined in a century that witnessed the last reforms of the Iberian empires, the impact of Napoleonic politics on the Atlantic world, the long processes inaugurated by the wars of Revolution and Independence, the establishment of the Brazilian empire, and the convoluted configuration of the new Latin American Republics. The contributions cover a period that begins with the establishment of new general museums in Mexico (1825) and Bogota (1823). Miruna Achim, in her article, calls this moment ‘the trial years’. A complete continental survey would also have included studies of museums founded in Rio de Janeiro (1818), Buenos Aires (1823), Santiago de Chile (1823), Lima (1826), and Charleston (in South Carolina), all of which faced the same difficulties. A number of the following articles remark, in fact, on the ephemeral character of those creations. Institutional accounts and current historiography have tended to make a connection with later, surviving establishments. From a historiographical point of view, however, one may ask whether it is legitimate to insist on these connections, which tend to canonize a notion of permanence attaching to present-day museums. The period covered in this volume finishes with the establishment late in the nineteenth century of museums devoted to art, history, or natural history in Sao Paulo, Salvador in Bahia, Amazonas, La Plata, and Buenos Aires. By discussing all these institutions in one place, we want to address historiographical problems that museum history journal, Vol. 9 No. 1, January, 2016, 3–12

The Daily Press Fashions a Heroic Intellectual: The Making of Florentino Ameghino in Late Nineteenth-Century Argentina

This article considers the emerging career of school preceptor Florentino Ameghino (1854?–1911), a fossil collector from the Argentine countryside who became an international authority in the 1880s and 1890s in the field of prehistory and the paleontology of vertebrates. Reflecting on investigations in the 1870s about the antiquity of humanity in the Argentine Pampas, Ameghinos story allows us to examine how the press circulated news in a context where political and intellectual matters were closely interconnected. This work is based on a collection of newspaper clippings gathered by Ameghino between 1874 and 1897 and found in the Jorge Furt Library, a private collection of books located near Lujan, the city where it is said that Ameghino was born.

Buenos Aires, 1884: de cómo la fragilidad de unos esqueletos derrumbaron el proyecto de un Gran Museo Nacional

Buenos Aires, 1884. How the fragility of a few skeletons triumphed over the project for a Grand National Museum. The museums of our continent are a result from a combination of factors, such as cultural trends, rivalry between cities, countries, and research teams, and the affinities or exchanges with metropolitan centers. Alliances and scientific wars determined the course of these institutions. As we show in this paper, in the 1880s and 1890s, competition between individuals, the Museo General de La Plata of the Province of Buenos Aires and the Museo Nacional of Buenos Aires would define the paths they would follow and a race for the possession of a large fossiliferous collection.