Savage and civilized. Darwin, Fitz Roy and the Fuegians (2021)

What is Emerging, 2021

When Charles Darwin encountered indigenous peoples in South America during his round-the-world Voyage of the Beagle, he described them, variously, as "wild," "savage," "cannibals" and "idle"; also "retard[ed] in their civilization," thanks to their "perfect equality among individuals." In this essay I revisit Darwin's account of meeting indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego, many of whom were later exterminated in a genocide.

Critical Review, 40, 2000

A study of the chapter on Galapagos from the Beagle voyage, concentrating on Darwin's habits of investigation and his qualities of blindness and insight.

Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, 2018

The interests of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in natural history and evolution took them to remote parts of the globe on hazardous, multi-sensory journeys that were ultimately about collecting. This paper introduces a methodology for exploring these complex experiences in more detail, informed by historical geography, anthropology, textual analysis and the geo-humanities. It involves looking for evidence of the richly stimulating and often challenging sensory dynamics within which they collected and connected data, observations, images, specimens, memories and ideas. Darwin's exploits in Tierra del Fuego are examined as a case study, with a particular focus on the collection of ‘Fuegian’ body paints in 1833. This type of analysis provides a fresh insight into the multi-sensory entanglement of encounter with people and place involved in the collecting process. It helps us to understand better the experiences that shaped what was collected and brought back to Britain, ...

History and Anthropology, 1999

Kritikon Litterarum, 2018

2016

This paper focuses on the biography of the Portuguese naturalist Francisco de Arruda Furtado, born on São Miguel Island, in the Azorean archipelago, in 1854, who became part of an international network of naturalists. Despite his short life, he produced original research on malacology (the study of molluscs), and from his youth Furtado claimed to be a disciple of Darwin. Informed by recent literature reflecting on the resurgence of biography in the history of science, the narrative of Furtado’s life will take into consideration what it meant to be, and the implications of considering oneself, a disciple of Darwin in the nineteenth-century natural sciences. In the history of science, the concept of disciple has often been associated with research schools, but Darwin did not create one and never surrounded himself with young apprentices. In this paper we argue that in Furtado’s case, and in all probability in many others, in addition to being a scientific theory, evolution had the status of a doctrine. As such, Darwinian evolution had a strong ideological and political dimension. By propagating it among lay people it had the potential of changing attitudes individually and socially, while at the same time it provided the scientific foundations for social and political transformation. Consequently, in addition to scientific research based on Darwin’s theory, Furtado deeply engaged in proselytizing the natural sciences and Darwinian evolution, becoming representative of the importance of Darwin’s disciples in Furtado’s sense, in the reception and endorsement of evolution around the world, with repercussions beyond natural history.

Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Diane Losche, 65-99

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2022

Reading Darwin with a strong sense of déjà vu, French scholars often give him a long French intellectual genealogy. So the physical anthropologist Topinard averred in 1876 that 'transformism is of French origin … the honour is entirely due to M. Lamarck' and defined Darwinism as 'Natural selection through the struggle for existence, applied to Lamarck's transformism'. Using detailed exegesis, this article traces antecedents, intersections, rebuttals, appropriations, shifts, and mutual misunderstandings in late eighteenth-and nineteenth-century transmutationist thinking in France and Britain. With specific reference to unstable concepts of evolution and species, the article samples French and francophone reception and interpretation of Darwin's writings and his responses to critics or supporters. Relative to ideas of race or civilization, human unity or diversity, and the interplay of empirical or deductive logic, I compare Darwin's work with that of the French physical anthropologist Broca in debates on racial ranking, extinction, and the 'descent of man', particularly in Australia and Oceania more widely. I conclude that, notwithstanding Darwin's personal humanitarian values, his science of man made important contributions to the theoretical underpinnings of the science of race, or raciology, which had emerged and developed mainly in France in the half century after 1800.

2013

The Annual Review of Cultural Studies Vol. 2, 2014