All Creatures:
Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity,
1850-1950
by Robert E. Kohler
Princeton University Press, Princeton,
NJ, 2006
380 pp. illus. 56 b/w, including maps
and tables. Trade, $35.00
ISBN: 0-691-12539-8.
Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg
jonathanzilberg@gmail.com
All Creatures tells the tale of
the legacy of the Victorian Linnaean quest
for the encyclopedic documentation of
nature. It focuses on the history of North
American natural history museums and provides
a fascinating and highly readable account
of how and why scientific collections
were built up through surveys that reached
their zenith in the late 19th
and early 20th Century. It
is particularly interesting in that it
reveals how taxonomic studies were bolstered
not only by the desire for partaking in
adventurous expeditions but because of
emerging popular outdoor pursuits associated
with the rise of the middle class and
the democratization of leisure as morally
sanctioned recreation.
One of the most interesting aspects of
the book is the revelation that the full
flowering of the 20th Century
study of biodiversity is due not only
to the changing practices of collecting
but due to the unanticipated productive
intersection of vacation culture and science.
It is in part, the fascinating story of
how the scientific art form of the diorama
created such an enduring public interest
that it forced curators to not only build
new collections but to conduct field research
and gather the contextual documentation
needed to produce scientifically useful
collections to better serve the public,
the patrons and the state. In all this,
it is interesting to keep in mind that
though the great surveys are largely a
thing of the past - with the ranks of
taxonomists thinning and aging, and collecting
having become a thoroughly evil thing
to do in the naïve popular imagination,
natural history surveys remain important
parts of the conservation movement. This
is especially the case in the developing
world where biodiversity is far less well
documented and where extinction rates
are highest.
Perhaps the most well known case in the
mass media today is the project in West
Papua by Conservation International. The
discovery of so many new species on last
year’s two week visit to the Foja
mountains reveals how little we still
know about some of the most threatened
parts of our endangered planet. To visit
such rare places is in a sense to return
to the Garden of Eden for the birds are
yet fearless and perform their astounding
mating displays unconcerned, the ultimate
reward for latter day adventurers and
scientists reveling in Darwinian wonder
and delight. To all those mesmerized by
these new photographs and film footage,
particularly of the bower birds and birds
of paradise, All Creatures will
be a fascinating and compelling book for
it provides a historical perspective on
how natural history collections are built
and why they are so important. In short,
for the ever growing community of people
around the world who are emotionally and
intellectually charmed by nature and the
increasingly urgent quest to actively
become friends rather than enemies of
the earth, this book will become a prized
and well examined specimen in their book
cases.
Interestingly enough, Kohler concludes
that new forms of cultural consumption
and popular concern for the environment
will inform future survey practices in
terms of how they combine expeditionary
and project work. Ideally, in the Papuan
case and in other developments in Indonesia
and elsewhere, the continuing imperative
for collection and survey provides an
excellent context for charting a course
for empowering local communities to claim
and protect their natural heritage. One
can only hope that this will encourage
local communities and local and national
governments to conserve rather than destroy
their natural resources - which in most
tropical cases have never been surveyed
extensively never mind selectively. Indeed,
as All Creatures details, surveys
require a functioning civil society and
a popular imagination that is actively
and creatively engaged with nature. While
this conjunction of interests has been
well established in the developed world
since the late 1800’s, the task is
just beginning in the developing world
where "native" knowledge has
been traditionally discounted by the modern
state and indigenous rights ignored for
the development of extractive economies.
As taxonomists and ecologists begin to
penetrate these last undocumented natural
domains, the Linnaean concept of the species
and subsequently the layman’s understanding
of debates over sub-species will find
themselves in dire need of a book like
this. Herein All Creatures deftly
relates how these categories themselves
change with time. It aptly demonstrates
how collecting practices shape taxonomic
categorizations that are in turn shaped
by changing collecting practices themselves.
Doing so, Kohler reveals how classification
practices have changed over the last two
hundred years of collection, that is,
during the three ages of exploration and
empire, then survey and lastly, ecology.
As he relates, the process began serendipitously,
then, became increasingly extensive and
intensive culminating in the highly localized
ecologically contextualized studies that
have characterized the field since the
1940’s and 1950’s.
In the process, evolutionary biologists
have come to understand the species not
as fixed categories, but as a constantly
changing and highly variable population,
that is, no longer through focusing attention
on discrete specimens. This critical theoretical
shift came about due to the extensive
geographic collections assembled during
the age of survey and it had important
theoretical consequences. For example,
in delving into the historical debates
over sub-species as incipient species,
Kohler shows how it was only through deep
and comprehensive survey collecting that
scientist were able to adequately investigate
sub-species variation. Thus we learn how
collectors focus on entire ranges and
especially on critical boundaries in order
to be able to discern the gaps or discontinuities
that exist between species.
Accordingly, this book constitutes a culturally
informed historical view of knowledge
production, specifically concerning biodiversity.
It is doubly important today because of
the twin ecological and intellectual crisis
that we face. Kohler’s work is fundamentally
important here in that its intellectual
fecundity reveals why post-modernist anthropological
knowledge about identity and knowledge
as unstable and emergent is essential
to understanding the historical evolution
of scientific knowledge. This is all in
very sharp contrast to the incomprehension
amongst mainstream biological anthropologists
as to the importance of post-structuralist
cultural anthropology to the study of
biology. As such this book makes a vital
contribution to the popular understanding
of how knowledge emerges, how it is constructed
and how it changes, why, and much more.
Kohler’s great contribution in all
this is that his study reveals how identity,
popular culture and science can inform
each other in completely unanticipated
ways.
