John Locke described the mind as a cabinet; Robert Hooke called it a repository; Joseph Addison imagined a drawer of medals. Each of these philosophers was an avid collector and curator of books, ...coins, and cultural artifacts. It is therefore no coincidence that when they wrote about the mental work of reason and imagination, they modeled their powers of intellect in terms of collecting, cataloging, and classification.
The Mind Is a Collectionapproaches seventeenth- and eighteenth-century metaphors of the mind from a material point of view. Each of the book's six chapters is organized as a series of linked exhibits that speak to a single aspect of Enlightenment philosophies of mind. From his first chapter, on metaphor, to the last one, on dispossession, Sean Silver looks at ways that abstract theories referred to cognitive ecologies-systems crafted to enable certain kinds of thinking, such as libraries, workshops, notebooks, collections, and gardens. In doing so, he demonstrates the crossings-over of material into ideal, ideal into material, and the ways in which an idea might repeatedly turn up in an object, or a range of objects might repeatedly stand for an idea. A brief conclusion examines the afterlife of the metaphor of mind as collection, as it turns up in present-day cognitive studies. Modern cognitive theory has been applied to the microcomputer, and while the object is new, the habit is as old as the Enlightenment.
By examining lived environments and embodied habits from 1660 to 1800, Silver demonstrates that the philosophical dualism that separated mind from body and idea from thing was inextricably established through active engagement with crafted ecologies.
The essays in Private Libraries and their Documentation revolve around the users and contents of early modern private book collections, and around the sources used to document and study these ...collections. They take the reader from large-scale projects on historical book ownership to micro-level research conducted on individual libraries, and from analyses of specific types of primary sources to general typologies and overviews by period and by region. As a result of its comparative approach and active engagement with questions regarding the nature, selection and accessibility of sources, the volume serves as a guide to sources and resources in different regions as well as to state-of the-art methods and interpretational approaches.
Since the later stage of the Qing Dynasty, many imperial objects have been moved to Europe due to a series of Sino-European wars. Perceived as having less material value, Qing imperial books, ...manuscripts, and scrolls are studied less by contemporary scholars. The Yubi Zhiguolun (‘禦筆知過論’) is one example. The Qianlong Emperor wrote this introspective essay at the age of 71 (1781). Subsequently, it was reproduced as a scroll, carved in jade, presented in paper copies, and shared as a lacquered album. The lacquer album was originally stored in the Yuanmingyuan. It was brought to Europe after the Second Opium War. It is currently preserved in the British Library. To understand the Zhiguolun’s history, the author uses the concept of the ‘social life of things’. Travelling over time and space, its aesthetic value, social meaning, and emotional efficacy changed, corresponding to changes in its social relations. Here, the framework of the ‘social life of things’ will be mobilized to follow the Zhiguolun’s life trajectories over three phases: an indigenous life in the Qing context; the moment of rupture, as it departs from China; and its subsequent life in Europe.
Before American History juxtaposes Mexico City’s famous carved Sun Stone with the mounded earthworks found throughout the Midwestern states of the U.S. to examine the project of settler nationalism ...from the 1780s to the 1840s in two North American republics usually studied separately. As the U.S. and Mexico transformed from European colonies into independent nations—and before war scarred them both—antiquarians and historians compiled and interpreted archives meant to document America’s Indigenous pasts. These settler-colonial understandings of North America’s past deliberately misappropriated Indigenous histories and repurposed them and their material objects as "American antiquities," thereby writing Indigenous pasts out of U.S. and Mexican national histories and national lands and erasing and denigrating Native peoples living in both nascent republics.Christen Mucher creatively recovers the Sun Stone and mounded earthworks as archives of nationalist power and Indigenous dispossession as well as objects that are, at their material base, produced by Indigenous people but settler controlled and settler interpreted. Her approach renders visible the foundational methodologies, materials, and mythologies that created an American history out of and on top of Indigenous worlds and facilitated Native dispossession continent-wide. By writing Indigenous actors out of national histories, Mexican and U.S. elites also wrote them out of their lands, a legacy of erasure and removal that continues when we repeat these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century settler narratives and that reverberates in discussions of immigration, migration, and Nativism today.
Historical records, e.g., herbarium vouchers, contain information about species distribution since the early days of the scientific exploration of floras until today. These data provide crucial ...evidence to map the biodiversity of the area of interest and most importantly enable the evaluation of the conservation effectiveness for a given group of organisms. This study aimed to explore the ferns and lycophytes’ diversity of Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture in tropical China with special emphasis on conservation efforts provided by the currently established protected areas (PAs). Instead of relying exclusively on current observation, the database was compiled from digitalized herbarium vouchers and publications being explored with special attention on the temporal and spatial dimensions of collecting efforts. Utilizing the indices including species richness, weighed endemism, corrected weighted endemism, and beta diversity, hotspots of ferns and lycophytes’ diversity were identified. In turn, the proportion of hotspots located outside PAs was estimated as a measure of conservation gaps in Xishuangbanna. Our results revealed a long collecting history of ferns and lycophytes in Xishuangbanna and this prefecture accumulated a considerable number of historical records covering 20.2 % of Chinese and 3.6% of global fern diversity. The accumulation of historical records showed strong parallelism to the historical events shaping modern China. The spatial distribution of ferns and lycophytes in Xishuangbanna was characterized by a concentration of species richness in southern valleys and endemism in western and northern mountains. In terms of conservation, existing PAs showed higher effectiveness in the protection of species richness, whereas lower effectiveness was observed in the protection of endemism and beta diversity. Our research provided a key reference for understanding the diversity and conservation of ferns and lycophytes in Xishuangbanna, as well as highlighting the locality for future collecting and conservation efforts.
Ivan Skušek Jr. (1877–1947), whose collection of Chinese and Japanese objects has been the subject of research and interest in recent years, can be considered the first collector of East Asian ...objects in the Slovene ethnic space to have built his collection systematically, examining and verifying the provenance, value, and significance of each item. His extensive collection can compare to Western European collections of East Asian objects while at the same time bearing a stamp of local uniqueness pertaining to the European periphery. Skušek’s legacy includes an important collection of Chinese money from all periods of Chinese history, which is introduced in this paper for the first time.
A crucial distinction between this and other collections of Chinese coins is that evidence exists that tells us how Skušek collected the coins, and reveals a lot about his sources and advisors. It has long been known that during his stay in Beijing Skušek befriended many influential and knowledgeable people, including a Franciscan missionary, Fr. Maurus Kluge, who assisted him in assembling his numismatic collection. The paper presents the cooperation between the two in the light of a recent find––the original list and summary appraisal of the most valuable part of Skušek’s numismatic collection and Kluge’s letters to Skušek.
All creatures Kohler, Robert E; Kohler, Robert E
2013., 2013, 2006, 2006-01-01
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We humans share Earth with 1.4 million known species and millions more species that are still unrecorded. Yet we know surprisingly little about the practical work that produced the vast inventory we ...have to date of our fellow creatures. How were these multitudinous creatures collected, recorded, and named? When, and by whom? Here a distinguished historian of science tells the story of the modern discovery of biodiversity. Robert Kohler argues that the work begun by Linnaeus culminated around 1900, when collecting and inventory were organized on a grand scale in natural history surveys. Supported by governments, museums, and universities, biologists launched hundreds of collecting expeditions to every corner of the world. Kohler conveys to readers the experience and feel of expeditionary travel: the customs and rhythms of collectors' daily work, and its special pleasures and pains. A novel twist in this story is that survey collecting was rooted not just in science but also in new customs of outdoor recreation, such as hiking, camping, and sport hunting. These popular pursuits engendered a wide scientific interest in animals and plants and inspired wealthy nature-goers to pay for expeditions. The modern discovery of biodiversity became a reality when scientists' desire to know intersected with the culture of outdoor vacationing. General readers as well as scholars will find this book fascinating.
Art Crossing Borders offers a thought-provoking analysis of the internationalisation of the art market during the long nineteenth century. Twelve experts, dealing with a wide variety of geographical, ...temporal, and commercial contexts, explore how the gradual integration of art markets structurally depended on the simultaneous rise of nationalist modes of thinking, in unexpected and ambiguous ways. By presenting a radically international research perspective Art Crossing Borders offers a crucial contribution to the field of art market studies.
Este trabajo quiere mostrar una faceta del papel desempeñado por el coleccionismo y las colecciones científicas en la formación de los naturalistas durante la Edad de Plata de la ciencia española. El ...objetivo es evidenciar que la Junta para Ampliación de Estudios, principal institución que impulsó ese proyecto, aspiraba a crear intelectuales con capacidad de participar en la gobernanza del país (una nueva cultura política). La JAE encarnó un proyecto científico racionalista que se oponía a las visiones más conservadoras, defensoras de una ciencia católica, en una lucha que no se restringía a la ciencia, sino que alcanzaba lo social, lo político y lo cultural. Para ello recurrimos a la biografía del botánico José Cuatrecasas partiendo del enfoque de una historia sociocultural de la ciencia y una historia de las ideas.
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