Skip to main content

Abstract: Animals for education. Taxidermy display in school cabinets in Chile (twentieth century)

Dra. Carolina Valenzuela Matus, PhD Universidad Autónoma de Chile 

carolina.valenzuela01@uautonoma.cl 

 Animals for education. Taxidermy display in school cabinets in Chile (twentieth century) 

The school cabinets of Natural History were considered key to teaching Natural Sciences according to diverse educative proposal implemented during the 19th and 20th centuries in Latin America. These ideas had a great impact in educational programs in Chile. In this context, the State and the private invested a great amount of money to acquire taxidermy collections for those school cabinets, among other collections such as minerals and plants. In this paradigm, taxidermy display was essential to connects the young students with a particular vision of a subdued nature and it was a means to know an exotic natural world to which few had access, so polar bear, alligators, gorillas and lions were some of the pieces frequently bought to show this diversity. Nowadays, the ancient school cabinets of Natural History have been transformed in historical-patrimonial spaces that allow us to inquire on the relation between science and education and the approaches to a reinterpreted Nature from a scientific-pedagogic perspective. In this 20-minute paper, we emphasize the collections of taxidermy existing in those school cabinets and the evolution of its significance. At the same time, we identify what have been the preservation efforts done, reflecting on its projections as an important heritage. 

Keywords: school cabinets, pedagogy, natural histories, taxidermy, Chile.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Abstract: [Dis]Playing Changing Bodies: Metamorphic Greco-Roman Myths as ‘Display’ of Form

  [Dis]Playing Changing Bodies: Metamorphic Greco-Roman Myths as ‘Display’ of Form Dr Tanika Koosmen University of Newcastle, Australia. tanika.koosmen@newcastle.edu.au The historical narrative of displayed bodies in a variety of contexts – freak shows, museum display of human remains, even as far as drag shows – finds its philosophical origins in the traditions of Greco-Roman mythological metamorphosis. To display a body is to be aware of its physicality, its metaphorical makeup, and its human/nonhuman subjectivity. In the Greek and Latin myths of transformation, exemplified by 1 st century CE Latin poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses , the display of the human and nonhuman form pre-empts the approach validated in later display traditions. When displaying a body that traverses the line between human and nonhuman, object and subject, these categorical violations must be considered: display of the metamorphosised form in literature is the early origins of these discussions, such as the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Call for Papers

An increasing amount of attention has been paid to impairment and disability in classical antiquity in recent years. However, one aspect of the subject that has not received significant attention, despite recent developments in the study of ancient paradoxography (e.g., Kazantzidis 2019; Geus 2018) and ancient collections, collectors, and collecting (e.g., Carpino et al. 2018; Higbie 2017; Thompson 2016; Gahtan and Pegazzano 2015; Rutledge 2012), is the public display of impaired and disabled people. The same applies to extraordinary (in all senses of the word) bodies. Whether those bodies were human, animal, or cryptid, when scholars have acknowledged this phenomenon, the focus has been placed squarely on those individuals responsible for the displaying. For example, the imperial biographer Suetonius uses this as an indicator of virtue or vice in his subjects: Augustus is a good emperor for avoiding bodily display while Tiberius and Domitian are bad emperors for indulging in the pr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Abstract: “The sort of man you all see me to be”: Visible Disability and Citizenship in Classical Athens

Jasmine Sahu-Hough  PhD candidate, Yale University   “The sort of man you all see me to be”: Visible Disability and Citizenship in Classical Athens   The dokimasia held annually to assess the eligibility of Athenian citizens for the so-called ‘disability pension’ would seem, in many ways, to be a classic example of the public display of disabled bodies. In requiring the recipients of the pension to submit to examination, the ancient Athenian democracy appears to prefigure modern states, which often subject those claiming disability benefits to intrusive surveillance – a process which, as Nancy Hirschmann and Beth Linker (2014) have argued, demotes disabled citizens to the status of “dependents”. Matthew Dillion (2017), however, has demonstrated that the dokimasia was simply a standard feature of democratic fiscal oversight; not only the pension beneficiaries (the adunatoi), but ...
Post a Comment
Read more