Premium
The Uses of Butterflies
Author(s) -
Raffles Hugh
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.2001.28.3.513
Subject(s) - bates , amazon rainforest , context (archaeology) , metropolitan area , colonialism , politics , amazon basin , space (punctuation) , sociology , geography , history , social science , ecology , archaeology , law , political science , philosophy , engineering , linguistics , biology , aerospace engineering
In this article, I examine the life and career of Henry Walter Bates, both for its intrinsic interest and in an effort to understand some of the scale‐making activities through which Amazonia became a region. Bates, a distinguished entomologist who spent the years 1848–59 in the Amazon basin, returned to Britain to write the most famous of the 19th‐century accounts of regional life. Examining Bates's intellectual and philosophical formations, his fieldwork experience in the context of a turbulent Amazonian politics, and his relationships with metropolitan and colonial natural scientific institutions, I offer a thick history of practice as a strategy for analyzing the complex productivities of Victorian traveling science. [Amazonia, collecting, colonialism, fieldwork, natural science, region, space]