LITMIR.BIZ

      Figure 2.1 Benjamin Ives Gilman’s “phonographic transcription” of Hopi song. Gilman, Hopi Songs, 100.

      The backdrop for this discourse was an unstable history of biological classification marked by the transition from metaphorical typology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the twentieth-century type specimen. Specimen collections trace their origins to the age of seventeenth-century explorers and their ships’ holds of exotica, when expeditions were motivated largely by the promise of selling valuable rarities. As the following century delineated the limits of the world, private and princely collectors built taxonomies of exotic objects in curio cabinets filled with large collections of preserved plants, animals, and insects. During the rise of the great colonial powers in the 1800s, these collections came to represent a country’s imperial reach (sometimes in obvious ways: many nineteenth-century catalogues of Indian ornithological collections represent birds hunted by the British officers who authored the catalogue, but feature illustrations made by local Indian artists hired to do the time-consuming work of painting the figures).⁴² Such collections offered research material for the growing interest in natural taxonomy that took definite shape during the late 1800s in an attempt to trace evolutionary relationships between species. By the early twentieth century, museums and individuals routinely arranged, displayed, and stored specimens in evolutionary ranks of species and subspecies, in drawers and “living” dioramas. By arranging species in order of relatedness, their viewers had immediate access to a visual taxonomy that educated and offered a highly organized frame for morphological research (study based on visual characteristics), making possible the comparison of large numbers of species.⁴³ For many twentieth-century biologists, the primary tool for scientific classification was the visual comparison and subsequent grouping and naming of different specimens.⁴⁴ The cornerstone of this project was, of course, the type specimen.

      Like the textual descriptions that were superseded by type specimens, types also came from a literary tradition. Typology originated in biblical exegesis of the early 1600s, when theologians imagined patriarchs like Adam as “types” whose presence in the Old Testament prefigured the identity of Christ.⁴⁵ While explorers sailed to the world’s far reaches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries collecting exotic curiosities, biblical typology was adapted to secular applications, and developed a broad reach in fields as far-ranging as biology, ethnography, music, and literary studies.⁴⁶ In the field of printing, the prophetic types of Moses and Ezekiel gave way to a different fixed form, the wood and metal block that held the form of a letter.

      Typology entered natural history in the 1830s, when the famous naturalist Georges Cuvier adopted the notion of the type from the printing press to describe his new classification system, which would later be used as an adaptation of the Linnaean system.⁴⁷ Cuvier’s types, unlike printers’ blocks, were meant to arrange nature in a definite hierarchy in which lesser animals were represented by species that served as examplars (or types) of their particular genre. This was a typology of synecdoche, in which a strategically chosen part had the power to represent the greater whole. The many varieties of oblong fish who had hard scales, spiny gills, and toothy jaws were best represented by the perch, their type; while the leaf-cutter ant Formica cephalotes of South America, famous for its large colonies and social behavior, proudly stood as the type for the entire ant genus.⁴⁸ Historian Edward Eigen suggests that it was with rather coy self-awareness that Cuvier used different print types to show conceptual types, deploying various typefaces in Le Règne Animal to rank the categories in his prose from more to less general ideas.⁴⁹

      Over half a century later, when Cuvier’s types gave way to type specimens, naturalists retained their mania for connecting words, bodies, and categories by synecdoche. They made up new words, like paratype, prototype, and holotype, for different kinds of specimens. One of the first articles in The Auk, the organ of the American Ornithologists’ Union, suggested a long list of new words to be used in species nomenclature that included neologisms like “chironym” (for species names that had not yet been published) and “onymizer” (the person who successfully finds and names a species).⁵⁰ Several years later, paleontologist Charles Schuchert even suggested that biologists adopt words like “protolog” for the first written description of a specimen and “protograph” for the first known picture of a specimen.⁵¹

      The bodies that these words represented reflected the tension between ideals and reality that was embedded in the notion of the type. Like Cuvier’s types, specimens were supposed to represent an entire category of bodies. It was a heavy burden to place on the preserved remains of plants and animals, and naturalists carefully culled through their options to cultivate specimens that, they felt, met the ideal of a species. The modern museum preparator was expected to be a naturalist, sculptor, and artist, crafting what biology editor Frank Thone rhapsodically called “the exact form of the animal’s lithe grace, its smooth waves of muscle, every vibrant detail that existed under its skin while it was still breathing and moving.”⁵² The story of the process through which such specimens were selected for display in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of African Mammals, as told by Donna Haraway, shows just how important this interplay was between taxonomic practice and idealizations of the body.⁵³ Haraway’s story demonstrates that the type specimen of a species was almost always male, and that display specimens were carefully curated to represent idealized postures and attributes ascribed to a given species.

      This process of preparing and ordering specimens was just as important for those who collected and curated sonic bodies in the early twentieth century. But what was a musical “type”? Unlike an animal body, a song changed every time it was sung, and the recordings and transcriptions that served as sonic specimens were records of transient, singular experiences that had fundamental differences from the biological type specimen. A musical type was revealed by a whole collection of specimen melodies, not a single example—there was rarely a musical “type specimen.” Instead, the cowboy “type” was found in the melodic pattern of American ballads for one scholar, while the English “type” was discovered by another in simple uses of church modes.⁵⁴ Naturalists, not to be outdone, compared hundreds of birdsongs to determine species types in the first half

Скачать книгу