Los Pichiciegos: Scraps of Information and the Affinities of Mammals in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Pichiciegos had emerged as a scientific object in the networks of trade and diplomacy established in South America by England and the United States early in the nineteenth century. In fact, in postcolonial times these animals partly became goods to circulate among people who, wishing to survive wars and disarray, generated objects of inquiry of a controversial nature. In this chapter I propose following as zoologists did in the past the itineraries of specimens of pichiciegos amassed in collections over the first half of the nineteenth century. By following specimens, one crosses not only the Atlantic but also the institutional and linguistic borders within Europe. And those specimens confront us with the intrinsic disorder that characterized the accumulation of facts and artefacts in the most robust institutions of nineteenth-century natural history. By listing the specimens of pichiciego available in the collections of North America and Europe between 1825 and 1850, I will present the agents involved in their transmission, namely, the brokers or go-betweens, as Schaffer, Delbourgo, and Raj called those agents who articulated relationships between disparate worlds or cultures by being able to translate between them 5 Brokers mediated not only between Western and Non-Western cultures: our pichiciegos show the myriad of transactions and translations existing within European natural history. Finally, I will analyze the unstable character of classificatory systems as well as of the affinities among animals postulated by those systems. In this chapter, in which I aim to contribute to the current debates about the mobility of knowledge, I recall, first, the transnational character of these undertakings, defined by multiple transactions occurring, as it has been argued, in multiple points of interactions all along the network.