In the case of Wallace's Malay collection, letters and specimens were either dispatched to London for delivery by the faster overland route (partly by camel via Suez and Alexandria to Malta) or went along the slower sea route around South Africa. 23 Upon arrival, specimens were presented to assemblies of scientists at the London Zoological Society and acquired by the British Museum and other international collectors. 24 Among these was Ferdinand Heine, a German sugar-beet baron with a passion for collecting unusual birds. The third instantiation of “Disappearing Legacies” in Halle included a selection of five bird skins on loan from the nearby Museum Heineanum in Halberstadt, where curators had just rediscovered nearly two hundred original “Wallace specimens” by analyzing the labels and sales records of Mr. Stevens. Throughout the exhibition cycle, these bird skins were the only original Wallace specimens we presented; they demonstrated the German collectors' keen interest in Wallace's journeys, which they followed closely from afar, as paying customers eager for new objects and knowledge.
The afternoon after our jungle birding experience, still reveling in what we had seen, we picked up Wallace's Malay Archipelago and reread a passage reflecting on his initial encounter with birds of paradise in the wild, and which includes some of his most melancholic deliberations. On the one hand, Wallace assesses the existence of birds of paradise as a unique outcome of long and complex lineages of life and interaction; on the other, he understands his own incursion into the territory as a foreshadowing of the birds' inevitable extermination:
I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course
—year by year being born. and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness: to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling or melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild, inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests. we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted
to appreciate and enjoy. 25
Remarkably, Wallace recognizes the cascading ecological effects of extinction events while admitting he is part of the cause. To be attentive to the “collective death” that characterizes these events, present-day environmental philosopher Thom van Dooren suggests thinking of species not as individualized “life forms" but as forms of life that are irreducible to mere population numbers and data. 26
It is both remarkable and depressing to recognize the extent to which debates and awareness regarding biodiversity loss have changed since we began the project in 2013. In fact, as we were writing this text, an article in the New Statesman suggested that we should no longer speak of “climate change” but “environmental breakdown,” while newspaper headlines about the disappearance of insects and birds appear almost daily 27 In Germany, large-scale agriculture and excessive use of pesticides have all but eradicated the habitat of once familiar insects, reducing their overall biomass by sixty percent since the early 1980s—the brief time span of our own lives. Against this background, we feel compelled to challenge dominant systems of productivity and accumulation while participating in movements for social and environmental justice.
Following the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos in The End of the Cognitive Empire, we believe such a shift entails recognizing the thinking-feeling, affecting body—human and nonhuman—as both
a sensor and agent of knowledge, politics, and community. Attuning ourselves to zebra finches, canaries, and birds of paradise helps to remind us of something elementary: in the words of de Sousa Santos, our bodies are an “ur-narracive,” “happenings,” and “embodied knowledge becomes alive in living bodies [...] they are the bodies that suffer with the defeats and rejoice with the victories.” 28 Within our current extinction crisis, when sixty percent of
all mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles are estimated to have been lost just since che 1970s, every little bird still alive today is also a kind of victory. 29
Still, the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the Semiopcera wallacii as “near threatened.” And, while local groups on Halmahera are monitoring and protesting the encroachment on the island's forests by national and international corporations, plantation industries have depleted the landscapes of larger islands, such as Borneo and Sumatra, to such an extent that they are now increasingly prospecting on the smaller islands in the East, as well as in West Papua and Papua New Guinea. 30
A Thousand Names of Empire
Bird-of-paradise is pure masculinity.
—Clarice Lispector, Aqua Viva 31
It is not only naturalists who are remembered in the nomenclature of biological species. Paying attention to the names on the labels of animal specimens in the drawers and cabinets of the collections in Hamburg, Berlin, and Halle led us to some crucial political insights about the will to scientific knowledge and class power in the heydays of natural history. For example, in the bird of paradise family, there is the Pteridophora alberti, or King-of-Saxony Bird-of-Paradise, endemic to the Bismarck Mountains in New Guinea. The adult male is characterized by two extremely long “brow-plumes,” which it
can erect from its head at will during its courtship dance. The animal—which the Kundagai Maring people of the area call balpan—received its scientific name in 1894 by Adolf Bernhard Meyer, a German ornithologist and anthropologist, and, from 1874
to 1906, director of the Royal Zoological Museum in Dresden, capital of Saxony. There is also the Paradisaea guilielmi, or Emperor-of-Germany Bird-of-Paradise, a larger bird with bushy yellow plumes that resembles Linneaus's P.apoda. A male type specimen of this New-Guinea species was sent to Berlin in early 1888 by German collector Carl Hunstein, and then named in honor of Wilhelm II, King of Prussia, who was crowned the last German Kaiser in the same year.
Presenting “Disappearing Legacies” in Germany made these avian designations narratively pertinent. While the thirty-year period of German colonialism may appear as a brief lapse when compared to the colonial eras of the Netherlands, France, or England, it is impossible to understand German history and identity without accounting for the influence of colonialism and imperialism. 32 In the context of the exhibition, we calibrated our curatorial assemblages on Wallace and the birds of paradise to address the era of German colonization in the Pacific. In a more general sense, the stories that emerged are exemplary for the complicity between imperialist politics, economic interests, and the natural sciences.
Importantly, the imperial names of the specimens are also mirrored on the map itself. The majority of bird of paradise species are endemic to New Guinea; looking at a contemporary map of the island, “Finschhafen” stands out among the other place names in Morobe province on the northeast coast. Both “New Guinea” and “Finschhafen” indicate the nearly five hundred years of colonization on the island. 33 While the Spanish claimed "Nuevo Guinea" in 1545, Finschhafen was founded in 1884, the same year the flag of the German Empire was raised on several other Pacific islands after annexing the land. It was named after Otto Finsch (1839-1917), an ornithologist who in 1884-85 participated in a German colonial mission that occurred under the false pretense of a natural science expedition. 34 While German traders had already established export relations and large-scale plantations on other islands, it was not until Bismarck officially endorsed colonial annexations that overseas expansion became a true state affair. Until the end of World War I, the “German Empire” held as its possessions colomes in Melanesia and Micronesia: the so-called “Kaiser-Wilhelmsland” on the northeast coast of today's Papua New Guinea, several larger islands in the “Bismarck Archipelago,” the Solomon and the Marshall Islands, as well as the islands of Samoa, Manus, and Nauru.
During his time in the Pacific, Finsch was an agent of the Neuguinea-Kompagnie, a powerful German trading syndicate attempting to colonize new territories in a region already dominated by the other European powers and the United States
(Hawaii). The Kompagnie was founded in the early 1880s by influential German bankers and trading companies, including Hamburg-based firms such as the Deutsche Handels-und Plantagen-Gesellschaft (DHPG), the Sudsee-Aktiengesellschaft, as well
as Adolph Woermann, then the largest private ship owner in the world. Authorized by King Wilhelm II (1859-1941), the company had the power to directly administer the “Protectorare” with the unambiguous goal of exploiting natural resources in the region for the benefit of the German Empire. 35 The most valuable materials to be extracted from the islands in the Pacific were phosphates and tropical woods, but the development of plantations also allowed for the intensive cultivation of copra, cocoa, coffee, rubber, sisal, and tobacco.
Back in Germany, Finsch frequently collaborated with Adolf Bernhard Meyer, a naturalist based in Dresden. In late 1885, they copublished descriptions of a number of hitherto unknown bird species, including the Paradisaea rudolphi, named as such in honor of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary, a passionate bird enthusiast himself. 36 In our research for the exhibition cycle, Meyer had already come up in a slightly different context than the colonial legacies inscribed in the scientific nomenclature of the birds of paradise. A fluent English speaker, he was also Wallace's German translator and thus had been instrumental to the dissemination of evolution in the German-speaking world. In
1869, he published the German translation of The Malay Archipelago almost in parallel with the original English edition; in 1870, his translation of the Darwin-Wallace texts on the origin of species and evolution from 1858 followed, including his own commentary on the matter; and, in 1875, he successfully solicited to translate also Wallace's then still forthcoming book On the Biogeographical Distribution of Animals. 37
For “Disappearing Legacies,” episodes of Meyer's biography became important connecting threads for understanding Wallace's legacies in German natural history institutions. Indeed, Meyer's views and field research destinations seem significantly influenced by his familiarity with Wallace's ideas. Alongside Otto Finsch, he was among the very first Germans to visit New Guinea and they are both listed in Wallace's tench edition of The Malay Archipelago (1890) as belongmg to the “most important natural history travellers” following in his wake. 38 Lesser known is the fact that, during his career as museum director, Meyer was also eager to improve the conditions of his bird collection with the result of developing one of the iconic features of natural history museums. Together with the metal fabricator August Kühnscherf & Söhne, he designed a steel-and-glass museum case that made its tropical contents virtually inaccessible to European pests. The so-called Dresden Case became a best seller. 39
The Interpretation of Imperial Dreams
Man, in his orderly isolation, hardly knows how to react. This is not the doing of Man, He says. But then, what is it, and who will stay alive?
—Anna Tsing, “Earth Stalked by Man” 40
As the Dresden Case enabled the hermetic display of natural history collections for the public and quickly became an iconic technology for viewing the necroaesthetic presentation of tropical taxidermy displays and dioramas, the significance of museum collections for the production of scientific knowledge in Europe was also being further elaborated.
The afternoon after our jungle birding experience, still reveling in what we had seen, we picked up Wallace's Malay Archipelago and reread a passage reflecting on his initial encounter with birds of paradise in the wild, and which includes some of his most melancholic deliberations. On the one hand, Wallace assesses the existence of birds of paradise as a unique outcome of long and complex lineages of life and interaction; on the other, he understands his own incursion into the territory as a foreshadowing of the birds' inevitable extermination:
I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course —year by year being born. and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness: to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling or melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild, inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests. we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and
Remarkably, Wallace recognizes the cascading ecological effects of extinction events while admitting he is part of the cause. To be attentive to the “collective death” that characterizes these events, present-day environmental philosopher Thom van Dooren suggests thinking of species not as individualized “life forms" but as forms of life that are irreducible to mere population numbers and
Following the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos in The End of the Cognitive Empire, we believe such a shift entails recognizing the thinking-feeling, affecting body—human and nonhuman—as both a sensor and agent of knowledge, politics, and community. Attuning ourselves to zebra finches, canaries, and birds of paradise helps to remind us of something elementary: in the words of de Sousa Santos, our bodies are an “ur-narracive,” “happenings,” and “embodied knowledge becomes alive in living bodies [...] they are the bodies that suffer with the defeats and rejoice with the
Still, the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the Semiopcera wallacii as “near threatened.” And, while local groups on Halmahera are monitoring and protesting the encroachment on the island's forests by national and international corporations, plantation industries have depleted the landscapes of larger islands, such as Borneo and Sumatra, to such an extent that they are now increasingly prospecting on the smaller islands in the East, as well as in West Papua and Papua New
A Thousand Names of Empire
Bird-of-paradise is pure masculinity.
—Clarice Lispector,
It is not only naturalists who are remembered in the nomenclature of biological species. Paying attention to the names on the labels of animal specimens in the drawers and cabinets of the collections in Hamburg, Berlin, and Halle led us to some crucial political insights about the will to scientific knowledge and class power in the heydays of natural history. For example, in the bird of paradise family, there is the Pteridophora alberti, or King-of-Saxony Bird-of-Paradise, endemic to the Bismarck Mountains in New Guinea. The adult male is characterized by two extremely long “brow-plumes,” which it can erect from its head at will during its courtship dance. The animal—which the Kundagai Maring people of the area call balpan—received its scientific name in 1894 by Adolf Bernhard Meyer, a German ornithologist and anthropologist, and, from 1874 to 1906, director of the Royal Zoological Museum in Dresden, capital of Saxony. There is also the Paradisaea guilielmi, or Emperor-of-Germany Bird-of-Paradise, a larger bird with bushy yellow plumes that resembles Linneaus's P.apoda. A male type specimen of this New-Guinea species was sent to Berlin in early 1888 by German collector Carl Hunstein, and then named in honor of Wilhelm II, King of Prussia, who was crowned the last German Kaiser in the same year.
Presenting “Disappearing Legacies” in Germany made these avian designations narratively pertinent. While the thirty-year period of German colonialism may appear as a brief lapse when compared to the colonial eras of the Netherlands, France, or England, it is impossible to understand German history and identity without accounting for the influence of colonialism and
Importantly, the imperial names of the specimens are also mirrored on the map itself. The majority of bird of paradise species are endemic to New Guinea; looking at a contemporary map of the island, “Finschhafen” stands out among the other place names in Morobe province on the northeast coast. Both “New Guinea” and “Finschhafen” indicate the nearly five hundred years of colonization on the
During his time in the Pacific, Finsch was an agent of the Neuguinea-Kompagnie, a powerful German trading syndicate attempting to colonize new territories in a region already dominated by the other European powers and the United States (Hawaii). The Kompagnie was founded in the early 1880s by influential German bankers and trading companies, including Hamburg-based firms such as the Deutsche Handels-und Plantagen-Gesellschaft (DHPG), the Sudsee-Aktiengesellschaft, as well as Adolph Woermann, then the largest private ship owner in the world. Authorized by King Wilhelm II (1859-1941), the company had the power to directly administer the “Protectorare” with the unambiguous goal of exploiting natural resources in the region for the benefit of the German
Back in Germany, Finsch frequently collaborated with Adolf Bernhard Meyer, a naturalist based in Dresden. In late 1885, they copublished descriptions of a number of hitherto unknown bird species, including the Paradisaea rudolphi, named as such in honor of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary, a passionate bird enthusiast
For “Disappearing Legacies,” episodes of Meyer's biography became important connecting threads for understanding Wallace's legacies in German natural history institutions. Indeed, Meyer's views and field research destinations seem significantly influenced by his familiarity with Wallace's ideas. Alongside Otto Finsch, he was among the very first Germans to visit New Guinea and they are both listed in Wallace's tench edition of The Malay Archipelago (1890) as belongmg to the “most important natural history travellers” following in his
The Interpretation of Imperial Dreams
Man, in his orderly isolation, hardly knows how to react. This is not the doing of Man, He says. But then, what is it, and who will stay alive?
—Anna Tsing, “Earth Stalked by
As the Dresden Case enabled the hermetic display of natural history collections for the public and quickly became an iconic technology for viewing the necroaesthetic presentation of tropical taxidermy displays and dioramas, the significance of museum collections for the production of scientific knowledge in Europe was also being further elaborated.