Two Birds of Paradise in North Holland, 1592: The Gift in the Exotic

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, the Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise: A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature, sixth edn. (London: Macmillan, 1877). Other illustrious biogeographers who specialized in birds of paradise include Ernst Mayr, David Attenborough and Jared Diamond. 2 Pamela Swadling, Plumes from Paradise: Trade Cycles in Outer Southeast Asia and their Impact on New Guinea and Nearby Islands Until 1920 (Coorparoo, Australia: Papua New Guinea National Museum and Robert Brown, 1996). 3 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (first edition, London: John Murray: 1871), chapters 13-16. ‘There is thus in any bionomic situation, in which sexual selection is capable of conferring a great reproductive advantage, the potentiality of a runaway process, which, however small the beginnings from which it arose, must, unless checked, produce great effects, and in the later stages with great rapidity’, Ronald Aylmer Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), p.137. See also Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London: Penguin, 1986), pp. 195-222. 4 Clifford B. Frith and Bruce M. Beehler, The Birds of Paradise: Paradisaeidae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p.5. 5 Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, ed. Stuart Kendall, trans. Michelle and Stuart Kendall (New York: Zone Books, 2005). For a similar Bataillian geography see Nigel Clark, ‘Aboriginal cosmopolitanism,’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32:3 (2008), pp.737-744. 6 Jan Huygen van Linschoten, The Voyage of John Huygen van Linschoten to the East Indies [1598] trans. William Philip (London: Hakluyt Society, 1885). 7 Jon Huygen van Linschoten, Voyage, vol. I, 118. On the Spice Islands see Charles Corn, The Scents of Eden: A History of the Spice Trade (New York: Kodansha, 1999). 8 Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998). 9 Cf. Luce Irigaray, To Be Two [1994], trans. Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito-Monoc (London: Athlone, 2000). 10 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [1969] (London: Tavistock, 1972). 11 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies [1923-24], trans. W.D. Halls (New York: Norton, 1990). 12 ‘Let us go to the limit: The truth of the gift (its being or its appearing such, its as such insofar as it guides the intentional signification or the meaning-to-say) suffices to annul the gift. The truth of the gift is equivalent to the non-gift or to the non-truth of the gift’. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p.27. 13 Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness [1997], trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002). 14 Jacques Derrida, Given Time, pp.30-31. 15 Stephen T. Asma writes of the ‘intoxication’ of taxonomy in Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), chapters 3 and 4. 16 Besides the birds of paradise from the Moluccas, Linschoten had also purchased for Paludanus little penis bells from Pegu (in present-day Burma); ancient inscribed palm leaves (olas); seeds of the night-flowering jasmine tree (Nyctanthes arbor-tristis); writing utensils and chop sticks from China; a comb made from turtle; and a dead armadillo. From his travels in the Arctiche brought a wooden Sami idol and what was probably a walrus skull. Roelof van Gelder, ‘Paradijsvogels in Enkhuizen. De relatie tussen Van Linschoten en Bernardus Paludanus,’ in Roelof van Gelder, Jan Parmentier and Vibeke Roeper, eds. Souffrir pour parvenir. De wereld van Jan Huygen van Linschoten (Haarlem: Arcadia, 1998), p.43. 17 E.g. Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Ken Arnold, Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (London: Zone Books, 1998), Stephen T. Asma, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 18 Martin Heidegger, What Is A Thing? Trans. W.B. Barton, Jr., and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967 [lecture of 1935-36]), p.1. 19 Martin Heidegger, What Is A Thing? p.6. 20 Martin Heidegger, What Is A Thing? p.7. 21 Martin Heidegger, What Is A Thing? p.244. 22 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996 [first edition 1927]), p.65. 23 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, pp.68-69. 24 ‘What is peculiar to what is initially at hand is that it withdraws, so to speak, in its character of handiness in order to be really handy’. Heidegger, Being and Time, p.65. 25 Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), p.46. 26 ‘The “logocentric” problem with deeply hidden essences was never that they were deep and hidden; the problem lay only in the assumption that they could somehow be delivered to us in person in order to serve as normative criteria’. Graham Harman, Tool-Being, p.173. 27 Graham Harman, Tool-Being, p.36. 28 Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: An Essay on the Aesthetics of Diversity, trans. Yaël Rachel Schlick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p.57. 29 Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, pp.18, 21. 30 Marcel Mauss, The Gift, pp.43 ff. ‘Everything holds together, everything is mixed up together. Things possess a personality, and the personalities are in some way the permanent things of the clan’, p.46. 31 Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of the Dutch Golden Age (New York: Vintage, 1987). 32 Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago, Open Court, 2005), pp.142ff.