The Animal Body As Medium: Taxidermy And European Expansion, 1775–1865

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how the preserved animal body, with its roots in anatomy and the eighteenth-century culture of curiosity, came to evolve into a medium of European expansion by the mid-nineteenth century. It does so by concentrating on surviving specimens of preserved primates stemming from eighteenth and nineteenth-century collections which also produced documentation concerning the practices of their exhibition. Most historians now agree that the permeation of European society by the ideology of imperialism was crucial in ensuring the long-term success of expansion overseas at a time when questions of suffrage and representation were becoming increasingly volatile. Exhibitions and museums were of special importance in promoting the imperial agenda because of their appeal to broad sections of the illiterate and semi-literate public. Yet historians of empire have not dwelt on the fact that taxidermy objects were, in fact, European-made craft objects and as such reveal more about the time and place they were made in than about the animal’s country of origin. Taxidermy, unlike other media, not only told a certain narrative about other global regions, their wildlife and peoples. It also appeared to prove this narrative through the presence of the real animal body. As a result, the new medium was pivotal in reinforcing concepts of European superiority in the years between the establishment of the Raj in India and the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s.