Curating an empire : creating and destroying archives of nature in Spain and Spanish America, 1781-1821
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The Enlightenment was an age of institution building. Throughout the 1700s, natural history museums fed by imperial spoils emerged in European capitals. In the case of the Spanish Empire, more studies focus on such institutions in Madrid than those across the Atlantic. Ample textual evidence confirms the creation of two public natural history institutions in Spanish America—one in Mexico City in 1790 and another in Guatemala City in 1797—although the locations of the objects once within them are unknown. I argue that scholars have written about these colonial museums less than about contemporary European museums due to a dearth of extant material specimens from their collections. Throughout my research in Spain, Mexico, and Guatemala, I not only visited traditional textual archives, but also embedded myself within museum collections to study objects. In Spain, I encountered many specimens from the eighteenth century, but I found no such remnants in the Americas. Colonial violence led to the disappearance of objects in the Americas, while they survived on the Iberian Peninsula. On the surface, these findings appear to justify paternalistic rejections of repatriation. Yet, even without their physical collections, the historical impact of long-gone American institutions remains accessible. My dissertation tells the stories of multiple "lost" American collections—natural history museums, botanical gardens, and the spoils of nature collected on expeditions—thus breaking the historian's fixation on objects and "reading" for silences in the modern material archive. I use this decolonial approach to contextualize these American practices and institutions alongside their Spanish analogues.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Toledano, Anna |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Findlen, Paula |
| Thesis advisor | Findlen, Paula |
| Thesis advisor | Bleichmar, Daniela, 1973- |
| Thesis advisor | Riskin, Jessica |
| Thesis advisor | Schiebinger, Londa L |
| Degree committee member | Bleichmar, Daniela, 1973- |
| Degree committee member | Riskin, Jessica |
| Degree committee member | Schiebinger, Londa L |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Anna Miriam Toledano. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/xd155bv3264 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Anna Miriam Toledano
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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