“Permanence and Transience: New Zealand Natural Objects in Translation”

Sally Kohlstedt (University of Minnesota)

Explorers inevitably gathered evidence of their travels, including both natural specimens and human artifacts, most often crafted from natural materials. Some such objects eventually became familiar and even symbolic as they moved from place to place and were interpreted by various audiences. Certain New Zealand items, particularly the beautiful Pounamu (greenstone) hei-tiki, became prized by visitors from the time of Captain Cook and among seafaring merchants and captains. They subsequently became part of the collections that would eventually be opened for public exhibition. In many ways, the greenstone itself remains remarkably unchanged, volcanically-produced, fine-grained nephrite so strong that it was also used for weapons. Physically shaped by expert Maori, the carvings in this stone have meant quite different things to other observers over time and in particular locations, sometimes explicitly stated but in other instances given meaning by their location in collections and in exhibition. The hei-tiki, in particular, seemed a heathen god to some who observed it in the late eighteenth century, was viewed as representative of a stone-age people by early anthropological commentators, and quite recently has taken on new significance as craft when placed in art exhibits. Such objects, important in the gift culture of the Maori before Euro-American encounters, maintain the resilience of their origin even as they enable multiple meanings to inquisitive observers.

“The Posthumous Lives of the Giant Sloth: The Megatherium’s Path from Artifact to Idea”

Anna Toledano (Stanford University)

In 1787, on the banks of the Luján River somewhere in modern-day Argentina, a Dominican friar happened upon a fossil. The bones belonged to an animal unlike any creature he had ever seen. He sent them to Madrid, the seat of the Spanish Empire, where this beast—a giant sloth, soon to be of the genus Megatherium—was the first fossil skeleton to be put together and mounted in a museum. Juan Bautista Bru, the artist who assembled it, drew a paper-based representation of his work that traveled across the European continent. These revolutionary illustrations sparked international interest in the Spanish Megatherium and further encouraged its afterlife. The specimen generated studies not only in Spain but also in France, the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual figures including Georges Cuvier, Charles Darwin, Richard Owen, and Thomas Jefferson took interest in this strange object of natural history. These naturalists reinvented the habits of the giant sloth, further disembodying the Spanish Megatherium to represent its species as a whole. Finally, the interaction between science and religion in Victorian England removed what physicality the giant sloth had left. Victorians reimagined the prehistoric animal as characterizing the Christian sin of slothfulness even more than its modern, tree-bound counterpart. This paper will chart these afterlives of the giant sloth—as a physical object in a museum, as an evolved and extinct species, and as an intangible literary trope—to demonstrate how in death a natural thing can grow into something much larger than it was in life.

“’Living Fossils’: Pelvic Bones and Fertile Wombs as Objects of Natural History in Semi-Colonial Egypt”

Taylor Moore (Rutgers University)

In 1935, Egyptian gynecologist Naguib Mahfouz dissected the vagina of an Egyptian woman named Henhenit. The urinary fistula lodged between her genital apparatus and urinary tract, he believed, served as evidence that gynecological diseases had plagued women from “time immemorial.” Henhenit’s pelvic region, while well preserved, was over two thousand years old. Despite its age, her womb and the bones encasing it were the keys to a fertile reproductive future for the newly independent nation. Yet, Henhenit’s womb was not the only female Egyptian body under scientific scrutiny.

As medical students examined skeletal remains, anthropologists conducted anthropometric surveys on the bodies of living women in Upper Egypt. La femme pharonique, as she was dubbed, was the perfect specimen for early twentieth century scientists--a ‘living fossil.’ Her skeletal structure, particularly the size and shape of her pelvic bone, was said to be an atavistic trait characteristic of ancient Egyptian women. Unlike Henhenit, these women could be observed in the flesh as part of their ‘natural environment,' a region deemed immune to the passing of time.

This paper examines how the pelvic bones and wombs of Upper Egyptian women took on new scientific and cultural meanings in the first half of the twentieth century as scientists and social reformers ‘returned to the womb’ to answer questions of Egyptian natural history, social Darwinian theories of race, and neo-Malthusian hopes to decrease the country’s infant mortality rate. It explores how the bodies of Upper Egyptian women, both living and deceased, became specimen of scientific inquiry in museums, dissection halls, and in the field.

“When Coral was British: Tracing Victorian Ownership through International Exhibition Narratives, 1851-1862”

Anne Ricculli (Drew University)

Abstract coming.