empires of nature

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ESSAYS

Empires of Nature

Jens Andermann

It must have been a strange, indeeduncanny, sight to any wanderer accidentally traveling through the area.

For there in the clearing, illuminated by the sparkling campfire against

the dark masses of the forest and the mountains of the coast fading in the

gloomy dusk, the bulk of a human torso bent over the flames where some

small game was roasting. But it would not have been so much the man,

whose almost certainly dark features now became visible as he looked upagain, observing the thicket, who would have made our accidental witness

freeze with fear. Much more terrifying, surrounding man and campfire

amid a strange array of boxes and bags, would have been the great number

of animals, of birds, foxes, and lizards, standing motionless, under a spell

that froze them in the midst of a leap, or spreading their wings, as if

bewitched in the very moment they were trying to escape from this fearful

siteas, almost certainly, our solitary wanderer would have done by now.

The dark magic worked on the animals of the coastal woods

one fine day in the year of 1820 was, of course, none other than the spell

of taxidermy. For it was then that the Museu Real (Royal Museum) of

Rio de Janeiro, founded some two years earlier, dispatched its warden,

porter, and preparator Joo de Deus e Mattos on a hunting excursion to

the surrounding coastal range in order to end the museums notorious

shortage of local animal and plant specimens. Joo de Deus, the presumably

black servant whose multiple skills had already been employed by (and, itmay be assumed, largely guaranteed the existence of) the Casa de Histria

Natural, more commonly known as the Casa dos Pssaros (House of

N e p a n t l a: V i e w s f r o m S o u t h 4.2

Copyright 2003 by Duke University Press

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birds), founded as early as in 1784, was to preserve and prepare his findings

on site, as the citys chronicler Manuel Moreira de Azevedo (1877, 223)

recalled: Joo de Deus immerged into the forest and began to hunt; and

the bird or animal falling dead was immediately prepared; whatever he

killed he preserved. Thus he depopulated the forests to enrich science,

and returned laden with different mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects,

precious remains of his mortiferous, yet useful and civilizing, expedition.

He depopulated the forests to enrich scienceto be susceptible to

representation, Moreira seems to suggest, nature had to be transformed

into an artifact; that is, it had to be mortified and embalmed: however,

in the process of the objects making, what it represented seemed to dis-appear irredeemably, and the exhibit became um despojo, a remainder or

trace of a presence perhaps forever lost. As Timothy Mitchell (1989, 222)

suggests, this is precisely the reality effect of nineteenth-century culture

in its attempt to conceive and grasp the world as though it were an ex-

hibition, that is, to bring reality into (linear) perspective as an external

world-object detached from the point of view of a monadic subject im-

plicitly coded as male and European. To be experienced as real, reality

first had to be made illusory, to prove capable of being simulated, whilenonetheless assuming that the distinction between the real and the sim-

ulacrum was just as clear-cut as the detachment of viewers from objects. It

is particularly telling, of course, that in our initial anecdote ablackservant

was dispatched inland to assemble and prepare the natural evidence in

the face of which the authoritativeand thus, implicitly, whitegaze of

science could be enacted: an eye that employs the service of a pair of arms to

seize and dissect a land-body and its contents. The Rio museum, then, can

be analyzed as an attempt to graspthat is, to simulateBrazilian real-

ity by bringing it into perspective from a viewpoint that, in many ways,

emulates and monumentalizes the gaze of the monarchical state itself, a

kind of symbolic enactment of the striation of tropical abundance by the

plantation economy that provided the socioeconomic fundaments of the

Brazilian Empire (Salles 1996, 71; Schwarcz 1998, 3542). However, I want

to argue, the fact that this was a state displaced to its own former periphery

considerably complicated the geographies of the gaze implicit in this per-formance. Because, to begin with, identity had to be located both in the

objectified, external reality of nature and in the gaze that brought it into

focus; at the same time, this double enunciation ensured the inscription

of the Brazilian Empire within civilization. In the same way as mod-

ern nation-states attempt to represent themselves as one, then, monarchical


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Andermann . Empires of Nature

Brazil as represented at the museum was both an object and a mode of dis-

play; both what was looked at and the gaze looking at it, while suggesting

that the two were really one and the same. In this critical tension, I will

argue, the indigenous people as human subjects of, or in, nature, came to be

one of the key concerns, as well as the critical point of, nineteenth-century

Brazils self-representation at the museum. I will, moreover, pay particular

attention to the museums role and its transformations during the last two

decades of the imperial, and the first decade of the republican state, a period

when, I want to suggest, the museum exemplifies an ultimately frustrated

symbolic attempt to reconcile the conflicting projects of nation, monarchy,

and modernity. As I will show, the institutions attempts after 1889 to adjustto the new regime remained torn between two contradictory desires: on the

one hand, to nationalize the apparatus of knowledge, to which, on the

other, the nation had to submit itself so as to select the components that

would qualify it for a destiny of progress. Once again, then, the problem

consisted in how to reconcile forms of representation imported from the

imperial centers and forged for the purpose of othering difference, with

the need to produce the material evidence of national identity.

Museums and exhibitions in Latin America have only recentlybegun to claim the attention of cultural critics as sites of the performance

of modernity, and as pedagogical iconographies of the nation-state prior to

the emergence of mass-produced forms of imagery (see, e.g., Andermann

1998, Fernndez Bravo 2000, Gonzlez Stephan 1995, Morales-Moreno

1994, or Tenorio-Trillo 1996). In Brazil, the pioneering research of Luiz de

Castro Faria (1949, 1993) has only been followed in recent years by more

extensive studies of historical and scientific museums (Abreu 1996; Souza

Lima 1989). Regarding the Museu Nacional in particular and its provincial

rivals, the important work of Myrian Santos (2001), Maria Margaret Lopes

(1996, 1998), and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (1993, 1998) has to be mentioned.

These authors, however, hardly discuss the museum display asperformance

of an image of the nation-state: while Santoss approach concentrates on

acertainly usefulBourdieuian sociology of museum audiences, Lopes

takes museums as richly documented case studies of a history of the natural

sciences in Brazil. Roughly following the diffusionist view first proposed byGeorge Basalla (1967) of a European science stretching out toward the pe-

ripheries, however, Lopes tends to reduce the peculiarities of its insertion in

Brazil to mere anachronisms that have since been progressively overcome.

Schwarcz, meanwhile, analyzes the part played by museums in the late

nineteenth centurys carnival of race, but she largely restricts her study to


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a comparison of the percentage of anthropological subject matter in muse-

ums journals, without taking into account that these were actually directed

at a rather different audience thanand thus did not necessarily reflect the

orders ofthe displays themselves. Moreover, her characterization of the

Museu Nacional and its provincial peers as ethnographic museums, when

most of their exhibition space and published research was, in fact, dedicated

to zoology, botany, and geology, misses the point that questions ofrace, for

the greater part of the century, were only implicitly dealt with and displayed

at these institutions.

This article, instead, focuses on the shifting balance between dis-

plays of nature and of man at the Museu Nacional, as a debate bymeans of material objects and images on the identity and project of the

Brazilian Empire.1 In this debate, however, the museum became only to a

very limited extent a space for the public and civic performance of images

of knowledge. Before entering into a detailed analysis of the moments of

this shift, I will try to locate the museum institution at the core of the exhi-

bitionary complex of nineteenth-century modernity, and thus of a partic-

ular production of subjectivities related to new, technologically enhanced,

organizations of the visual field. I will then sketch briefly the particular ar-ticulation of the museum institution with the Brazilian monarchical state

before turning, in the final two sections of this article, to the subsequent

attempts by the late empire and early republic to modify and reappropri-

ate an institution now perceived as anachronistic. The spectacle of visual

representations of imperial Brazil, after 1870, would be reinvented in the

panoramicorder of a natural history which, ironically, had by then already

been outdated in metropolitan museums by the new, Darwinian principles

of display. Well before the overthrow of the monarchy in 1889, however,

there would emerge another, panoptic strategy for visualizing the nation,

one that by the end of that decade had all but outrivaled the previous order

of visibility. While both attempts at visualizing two competing projects of

transition to modernity dialogue with contemporary European discourses

of science and the museum, I shall argue, they also bear witness to a chang-

ing political articulation, at a local level, between the museum and the state.

Contrary to contemporary developments in Europe and the United States,where the museum was made into a stage for civic self-improvement, ex-

posing the urban masses to impressive material evidence of evolutionary

progress in the image of which a bourgeois, progressive subject was to

fashion itself, here it was only the scope of the museum gaze itself that,

toward the turn of the century, was extended to large parts of thepopulation,


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assessing their racial credentials to eventually integrate thepublic. Rather

than invite the populace to model itself after the progressive object lesson

it would have received in contemporary European museums, then, in the

Brazilian case the public increasinglybecame the object of the lesson, and the

museum a symbolic site of enactment of the paradoxical democracy of

the old republic.

The Frame of Visibility

Museums are magical spaces: crossroads of desire and thrillsites of en-

counter and loss vis--vis the overwhelming, yet also constantly retreating,

presence of the object-worldand the scenes of an ambiguous dialectic ofstimulation and rejection of our own fetishistic investment in that world

with longing and awe (Clifford 1985). In his influential phenomenology of

collections, Krysztof Pomian (1990) has characterized the museum object

as one that has to be excised, that is, stripped of its functional or exchange

value; but, unlike the treasure, its new (and usually raised) value requires

public exposure rather than withdrawal from human eyes. Unlike the trea-

sure, too, the museum collections removal from economic circulation is

supposedly permanent: its objects have, as it were, moved into a differentrealm, cut off from the space of their beholder precisely because of their

perfect visibility. This art of the excerpt (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991,

388), moreover, likens the museum to previous cultural techniques of de-

and recontextualizing material objects, such as funerary and sacrificial of-

ferings, reliquaries, or gifts: all these, Pomian argues, just like museum

objects, have to pass from one space of visibility to another (which may, in

certain cases, be a space ofinvisibility, so as to expose the object to the eyes

of the dead). As secularized sacrifices, then, museum objectsstand infor

something that is absent: they constitute the visible link to that which cannot

be seen, but whose presence elsewhere is evidenced by the excised mate-

rial fragment before our eyes. Museums, in other words, aremetonymical

machinations at the same time asmetaphors of an apparatus of visualization

that attempts to elude the gaze.

This paradoxical, or even perverse, involvement of the museum in

the construction and destruction of material contexts has, in recent years,received much critical praise and condemnation: thus, in a groundbreak-

ing compilation of reflections by curators and cultural critics from the

early 1990s, we are confronted with laments over the museums monstrous

destruction of reference to anything that is not always already museum-

like, as collecting is likened to pillaging acts ofobjectifying an original


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context (an area of life) that is bound to lose its integrity in the act of

its re-presentation by one of its parts (Boon 1991, 256). Other contributors,

meanwhile, claim that it is only in museums that we can appropriately

appreciate the work of culture: When objects . . . are severed from their

ritual site, the invitation to look attentively remains and in certain cases can

even be enhanced (Alpers 1991, 27). In his brilliant study of museums and

memory in the bourgeois age, Didier Maleuvre (1999, 20) reminds us that

this debate has, in fact, been one of the fundamental controversies of moder-

nity ever since Quatremre de Quincys critique of the fine arts museum

in 1815: The idea that museums kill culture . . . forms a universal doxa of

modern philosophy. In truth, regretting authenticity seems almost synony-mous with esthetic modernity. Meanwhile, however, a strand of thought

beginning with Hegel holds that it is only thanks to the mediating work

of the museum that artifacts and artworks become accessible to reason: in

fact, it is only through the uprooting of false immediacy that the reasoning

spirit is liberated from the weight of custom. From this point of view, it is

not the museum but its critique in the name of culture as immediate that

isconservative, as it

reminds us museums were once called anticultural for prac-

ticing a systematic uprooting of culture. This accusation un-

derscores the revolutionary dimension of museums and their

invitation to rethink culture apart from the pathos of roots, be-

longing, and identity. . . . Museums are paradoxical: they shel-

ter restlessness but, in doing so, they build a home around

it. . . . The great paradox of museums is that they implement

cultures program of self-preservation by preserving the very

thing by which culture ungrounds itself, theartistic gesture. (38)

Maleuvre, as becomes plain in this quote, analyzes the cultural history of

the Western museum as part of the new techniques of the self emerging

after the French Revolution, which is why the Louvre, founded in 1793 and

exposing to the populace the spoils wrested from the aristocracy, becomes

the cornerstone of his narrative: the museum as a monument to revolution,one that endows with a public, egalitarian visibility what had once been

a private delectation for the ruling caste. As Tony Bennett (1995, 38) has

pointed out, the displacement of the king by the new figure of the citizen

as archactor and metanarrator of his (for it was a gendered narrative)

own development, added a performative dimension to museum-going,


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which can be conceived as paralleling and complementing the Foucauldian

logic of subject-production through repression. In addition to Foucaults

(1975, 34360) carceral archipelago, the institutions of what Bennett calls

the exhibitionary complex intervened in the formation of disciplinary

and power relations not through penalty and confinement but through

performative display. Along with exhibitions, fairs, zoological gardens,

and department stores, museums provided a set of cultural technologies

concerned to organize a voluntarily self-regulating citizenry (Bennett 1995,

64). Rather than only as a history of confinement, then, the nineteenth

century could also be read, from this point of view, as a period of the

opening up of objects to more public contexts of inspection and visibility,thanks to the invention of new instruments for the moral and cultural

regulation of the working classes (74).

It is important to remember, in this regard, that the kind of object

lesson which forms the core of Maleuvres argumentthe self-reification

of the present as the triumphant result of revolutionis proper only to

certain kinds of museums (it could be called the archtrope of history and

fine-arts displays). Another type of museum, however, which emerged, like

the history and the fine arts museums, out of the studioli and cabinets ofwonders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesthe museum ofnat-

uralhistorypresents us with quite a different narrative, one in which the

present is reified not as the outcome ofrevolution but as the culmination

of a gradual process ofevolution(even if, from a Darwinian point of view,

evolution is nothing but a continuous process of small revolutions). At least,

this is what the naturalistic cabinet would become after Charles Darwins

dramatic reconception of the horizontal order of Carolus Linnaeuss natu-

ral system ashistoricalanddynamic, and thus as both subject to continuous

change and devoid of any transcendental meaning. In fact, it is possible to

readThe Origin of Speciesas a treatise on how to visualize the new invisi-

ble of evolutionary time, that is, of selective reproduction: like the historical

museum, the Darwinian museum of nature becomes a backteller, tracing

the genealogical chain of being according to the evidence of discrete and

minor physiological details, rather than according to resemblance, which

had guided Linnaean classification (Darwin 1985 [1859], 397434). Thegaze of the naturalist, then, like that of the detective, the psychoanalyst, or

the artistic connoisseur, reconstructs an invisibleenchanementby submit-

ting the evidence to an indexical paradigm (Ginzburg 1990) informed by

focused suspicion.


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Designed to visualize the problematic point of encounter between

(primitive) man and nature, ethnographic and anthropological exhibi-

tions of the nineteenth century stand midway between the revolutionary

display of art and history and the evolutionary display of nature. It is also in

this interstitial space, which brings the citizen-beholder face to face with his

atavistic other, that the state-as-collector imposes itself most clearly as part

of the image. The taming, or mortification, of the primitive into a material

image that can be watched safely in the space of the museum, materializes

at the same time into a quasi-mythical image of state power. To partake in

this power (rather than to become exposed to its threatening gaze, as one

who has fallen back into the terrible atavism of savagery), we have to letourselves be coerced into the role of the spectator, to become worshippers

of the civic magic of representation. In other words, while looking at the

object we also find ourselves on display, exposed not only to the behavioral

control of other visitors gazes (encouraged, as Bennett has argued, by the

large and transparent glass-and-steel carcasses of modern museums), butto

the stare of the object itself. Nowhere more than in these inferiorizing dis-

plays of others, then, does the frame of the visibility granted by the museum

become more apparent: a frame which, as we enter it, exposes us to a gazewe mistake for our own.

From Cabinet to Museum, 18181870

Let us now turn to the particular insertion of the museum institution

in the context of monarchical Brazil. On 6 June 1818 Dom Jao VI, the

Portuguese monarch who had fled the Napoleonic armies in 1807, decreed

the creation of a Royal Museum at his court in Rio de Janeiro and to this

end ordered the purchase of a city mansion on Campo de Santana, which

its owner had offered to sell at a specially discounted price. The institution,

the decree pointed out, was to submit to the gaze of the natural sciences

the thousands of objects worthy of observation and study enclosed by the

abundant nature of this tropical kingdom, which had to be exploited for

the benefit of commerce, industry, and the arts (Azevedo 1877, 22021).

The museum, then, was to pursue a double task, one which, with only

slight variations, would occupy it for most of the century. On the one hand,the natural sciences were to survey and classify Brazils resources and thus

ensure efficient exploitation of the inland territories that King Joo, since his

very arrival, had been wresting from indigenous populations with a vigor

and violence unseen since the first days of colonization (Carneiro da Cunha

1998, 13334). On the other, the arts were supposed to refine natures


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primary resources in the opposite direction, that is, to convert them into not

so much material but spiritual value. Nature, then, was to be shown at

once as a repository of species and primary resources, a catalogue of objects

awaiting commodification, but also as a primordial and irreducible layer of

Brazilianness, as the very soil of nationality.

Scientific research and collecting in Brazil had already started in

colonial times, echoing the new emphasis on the exact and natural sciences

at Coimbra and Lisbon in late eighteenth century, encouraged by the Pom-

baline reforms.2 Colonial outposts for the storage and selection of species to

be sent to Portugal included, in addition to Rios Casa dos Pssaros, a botan-

ical garden at Belm created in 1796, or the Seminrio de Olinda, foundedin 1798, where the museums first director, Frei Jos da Costa Azevedo,

acted as a professor of philosophy (Lopes 1998, 37). Yet the removal of the

entire court to Rio de Janeiro, an unprecedented turn in colonial history, im-

plied a complete inversion of the geographies of knowledge on which these

institutions relied. In 1817 the Empress Leopoldina, a Habsburg princess,

arrived in Brazil with an entourage including several Austrian scientists,

among them the naturalists Karl Friedrich von Martius and Johann Bap-

tist von Spix. Martius and Spix, after participating in the foundation of abotanical garden annexed to the museum in 1819, embarked on a three-

year journey into the interior, published as Reise in Brasilien in Munich in

1827, that inaugurated a wide range of zoological, botanical, mineralog-

ical and ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, from which the museum was

largely to benefit (Martius and Spix 196667 [182331]).3 A first account

of the collections, published in 1830 (Lopes 1998, 51; Azevedo 1877, 239)

comprises not only birds, insects, agricultural machinery, minerals, medals,

and indigenous crafts, but also some specimens received from Macao, hunt-

ing tools from the Aleutian isles, and several Egyptian mummies, initially

destined for Buenos Aires Museo Pblico, but purchased en route by Dom

Pedro I from an Italian art dealer. The botanical collection, according to

a catalogue published in 1838, only comprised the relatively small num-

ber of sixteen hundred specimens; in the course of the century they would

increase to around thirty thousand (Lobo 1923, 40). The wide range of

materials, both vernacular and exotic, clearly emphasized the museumsimperialrather thannationalambition, which made it stand out from the

similar institutions founded, at roughly the same time, in the emerging

neighboring republics of former Spanish America:4 rather than symbol-

ically appropriating, in the name of a new national sovereign, the order

imposed on peripheral nature by the gaze and the collectionism of the


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foreign traveling naturalist, the Brazilian museum initially attempted to

relocate the site of this gaze to what had once been its object or horizon. In

other words, its initial challenge was directed not so much against a colonial

vision, in the name of enlightened, neoclassical tropes of self-government

and republicanism, but against imperial competitors in Europe.5

The task, in short, was to continue exhibiting not only anation but

anempirethat is, to position Brazil as a point of view not just onto itself

but onto the entire globe. Along with other courtly institutions imported

from Lisbon, such as the Supreme Tribunal of Justice, the Royal Treasury,

the Board of Censors, the Marine Guard Academy, the School of Surgery

and Medicine, or the Royal Printing Press, the museum was to demonstratethe survival of a stately body that in the doldrums of the Atlantic had lost

none of its capacity to manage and control a mass of archival knowledge

and thus impose its power on an immense portion of the globe.6 After

independence, this singular focus would shift only slightly toward a more

national concernor, rather, the new, national imagery would retain

many of its former imperial characteristics, as the museum remained, even

then, one of the stages to theatricalize the monarchys European ancestry

and the countrys imperial extension, as opposed to the scattered remainsof the former Spanish possessions, fractured, as they appeared to be, into

anarchic and barbarized republics.

During the reign of Pedro II (184089), who was more eager

than his father to fashion an image of himself as an enlightened patron

of the sciences, the institution would gradually be modified into a site of

production and assembly of local knowledge on Brazil. Under the direction

of Frei Custdio Alves Serro, a former professor of chemistry at the Escola

Militar, the Museu was restructured in 1842, following the example of the

British Museum: collections were divided into four sections headed by

subdirectorscomparative anatomy and zoology; botany, agriculture and

mechanical arts; mineralogy and geology; numismatics, arts, and customs

and traveling naturalists were employed to supply the institution with

specimens from the interior. However, when Louis Agassiz, the famed

Swiss zoologist, visited the museum in 1865, he would still sneeringly

dismiss it as une antiquaille, and complain that exhibits were in a stateof decay, poorly classified, and that the fish, except for some magnificent

specimens from the Amazon, [did] not give an idea of the variety one

finds in the waters of Brazil. You would form a better collection at the city

market in a single morning (Agassiz 1868; quoted in Lobo 1923, 20). The

museum, Agassiz suggests, suffered not only from poverty; it also lacked


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a system for representing the variety of Brazilian fauna and flora: like

other European visitors before him, he was made uncomfortable by not

being able to bring Brazil into perspective as a natural order properly

arranged before his eyes in a horizontal arrangement of families and classes

according to the Linnaean paradigm (as he could in a street market). Bad

press from prominent visitors, of course, was particularly problematic for

an institution that, during the first half-century of its existence, had made

a point of impressing visiting Europeans rather than a local publicfor

which it only opened its doors on Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. (Castro

Faria 1949, 34).7 Ferdinand Denis, a Romantic French traveler and the

author of Brazils first literary history, decried as exoticist the complaintsof his fellow journeymen about the lack of vernacular specimens at the

museum: A certain traveler has observed that at the Museu Nacional of

Rio de Janeiro a swan and a robin were being shown. The matter is very

simple, and the Brazilians would have a lot to talk about if they noticed all

the vulgar birds from their countryside that we conserve in our museums

(Denis 1826; cited in Lopes 1996, 71).

Deniss account is particularly interesting in that it attempts to

take a Brazilian point of view, which makes him one of the few Europeanvisitors, if not the only one, to have noticed, in the order of display prevalent

during the first half-century of the museums existence, the purposeful

dislocation of the imperial gaze. Surprisingly, though, we find a very similar

impression, some fifty years later, in an account by the urban chronicler

Moreira de Azevedo, who included a description of the museum in his

1877 guide to Rio de Janeiro. Here we discover not only a series of objects

that Agassiz, in his exclusive focus on natural history, had deliberately

overlooked on his visit in 1865; we also recognize an underlying principle

of order that was not panoramic like the naturalists Linnaean grid, but

spectacular:

This museum contains many curious objects, among which

we can mention the following: an orangutan, a collection of

Brazilian macaws, composed of fifty individuals . . . two alli-

gators, one of four and one of eight feet in diameter, killed,in January 1831, in a swamp near Boa Vista Palace by Pedro I,

who came to the museum and ordered that they be suitably pre-

served and mounted. . . . In the Pompeian room, two hundred

and seventy artifacts donated by D. Pedro II can be observed;


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in the Brazilian archaeology room, one sees a scepter made

of compact slate, one meter and seven centimeters in length,

and other curious Indian objects. In the archaeological salon:

an idol, offered to the museum in 1843; two embalmed heads

of chiefs from New Zealand, brought here by Jacques Arang

and sent to the museum by the minister Villa Nova Portugal;

a cape of red and yellow feathers from the habit of Mama-

hamal, king of the Sandwich Islands, who gave it to D. Pedro

I when visiting Rio de Janeiro . . . ; a statue of Charity donated

in 1845 by its creator Fernando Petrich; the skull of an Asian

elephant, offered by D. Pedro I; a narwhals tooth of fourteenpalms length; a great piece of a swordfishs spur, found drilled

one palm and six fingers deep into the flank of the war brig

Constanciaand donated to the museum on 29 March 1830; an

indigenous canoe made of a single piece of jutahy bark, and

many other indigenous objects. (Azevedo 1877, 23639)

In the same way as his sentences race across the page, Moreiras gaze

runs from one curiosity to the next, evoking an aristocratic cabinet ofwondersor rather its Romantic imageinstead of a modern museum.8

Indigenous objects are only singled out where they appearin the same

way as the elephants skull or the South Sea kings feather capestrange

and extraordinary: indeed, it is their singularity rather than their repre-

sentativitythat attracts the chroniclers eye. Rather than seeking to classify

the objects, to assign them their place in the Linnaean natural system or

Darwins great chain of being, this visitors gaze attempts a kind of ma-

terial philology binding them back to their donors, foremost among whom

figures the emperor himself. Indeed, if the political project of the Brazilian

Empire had been, until approximately the late 1860s, not nation-formation

but the conservation of territorial unity linked to a narrative of dynastic

continuity, both allegorically synthesized in a monarchical body adorned

with the heraldic signs of a medieval past and of virginal, abundant nature

(Magnoli 1997, 87116; Murilo de Carvalho 1999, 23368), then the mu-

seum, in its unique juxtaposition of naturalistic and historical imagery, canbe read as an extensive exercise in glossing this signifying body through the

display of material objects. This constellation of mutual allegorization also

worked the other way round: thus, in 1823, Emperor Pedro I requested

some of the stuffed toucans from Joo de Deuss collection in order to have


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their feathers woven into his ceremonial cape, a royal insignia that was to

become one of the most powerful symbols of Brazils tropical monarchy

(Azevedo 1877, 224; Schwarcz 1998, 7581).

Perhaps the deliberate anachronism of these spectacular images

of empire should be read, not as dmodas Claude Lvi-Strauss was to

depict Rio on his visit in the 1930sbut as a means of imposing order

on a reality that was experienced, or construed, as too diverse to fit

entirely into the coordinates of the European world-as-exhibition pattern.

However, after the Paraguayan war (186570) had exposed the limitations

of a slave economy in the face of external contenders (Salles 1996, 7274),

the Brazilian Empire increasingly found itself forced to reaccommodate aniconography based chiefly on the myths of literary and artistic Indianism,

centered around the theme of Indian warriors heroic self-sacrifice, as the

founding epic of an autochthonous, chivalric tradition (Bosi 1994, 91160;

Treece 1986, 2000). In order to mobilize patriotic sentiment, the people

had to be reenvisaged as a nation-in-armsallegorized, ironically enough,

once again in the body of Dom Pedro II, who was now portrayed sporting

the simple uniform of the nations first soldier rather than his former

medieval garments, inspecting troops or visiting field hospitals. Parallelto a reappraisal of the black populations contribution to this new notion

of nationality (as freed slaves comprised the larger part of the Brazilian

battalions dispatched to Paraguay), scientific discourse played a key role

in reassessing the iconography of Romantic Indianism. Not only would

the heroic Tup warrior of Romantic literature now be exchanged for the

savage Botocudo nomad of science but, moreover, in the museum the latter

would be placed into an exhibitionary order that would shift, first, from the

spectacularto thepanoramicand finally from thepanoramicto thepanoptic,

in a series of symbolic relocations that underscored one of the key functions

of museums in a premassified (in other words, prehegemonic) Brazilian

society: to map the image of the state onto the image of nature. In the two

sections that follow I will discuss, first, the modification of the spectacular

museum-cabinet of early empire into the naturalistic panorama that,

during the last two decades of the monarchical order, attempted to reconcile

the imperial project with the necessities and pressures of the modernizingprocess, and then move on to analyze the articulations of a new, panoptic

scientific gaze with the republican order it both announces and sanctions

before and after 1889.


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Modernizing Empire, 18701889

Following the appointment of Ladislau Netto, a botanist trained in France,

first as interim (1870) and then as full director (1876), a new set of rules was

issued in order to reorganize the museum as a center of research, teaching,

and display of the natural and exact sciences. In addition to the publica-

tion, from 1876, of the journalArchivos do Museu Nacional, a physiological

laboratory directed by the French anatomist Louis Couty was set up, and a

series of evening lectures on zoological, botanical, geological, agricultural,

or anthropological subjects was organizedsome of them given by invited

scientists from abroad, and often in the presence of the emperor himself

with summaries published in the local press. Visiting hours were extendedto three days a week, attracting, if we are to believe Nettos successor Joo

Baptista de Lacerda (1906, 45), thousands of people avid to see the objects

on display. Thus the Museum was in constant contact with all social classes

of the country, from the national sovereign to the most modest proletarian.

It would be interesting to find out whether members of the labor-

ing classes, perhaps involved with early unionism or anarcho-syndicalism,

did indeed make their own use of the institution. One thing is certain: the

reforms of 1876 attempted to address (and create) a new public of urbanmiddle-class and military professionals and inclined toward the medical,

technical, and exact sciences rather than the literary and juridical knowl-

edge of the courts scribes, or bacharis (Sevcenko 1983, 7882). The new

division was entirely composed of hard sciences, section 1 now compris-

ing anthropology, general and applied zoology, comparative anatomy, and

animal paleontology, section 2 general and applied botany and vegetal

paleontology, and section 3 physical sciences, mineralogy, geology, and

general paleontology (Netto 1876, 1877). The archaeological, numismatic,

and ethnographic collections held in the fourth section, the new museum

rules proposed, would be located in a different institution; meanwhile,

they would be kept in an annex to the exhibition. On taking office in 1870,

Netto had already referred to the anthropological and ethnographic col-

lections as the most important of all the sections; for it was only here that

the Brazilian museum could outrival its European peers.9 The foundation

of a specialized institution, to which the government, as Netto claims in1885, had already committed itself, would further advance the excellence of

Brazilian anthropology, as well as reconfigure romanticized images of the

Indian in the light of science. However, as the project was delayed again and

again, Netto changed plans and the ethnographic collections soon became


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a central concern of the museum. Nettos interest in indigenous archaeology

rather than in physical anthropology, which would become one of the mu-

seums chief concerns under the new republican order imposed in 1889,

could be interpreted as a compromise formation characteristic of a moment

of transition, an attempt to conciliate the arcadian images of nature and

the virtuous allegorical Indians of an earlier, literary and artistic, represen-

tation of the empire with the late nineteenth-century scientific racism that

was quickly making inroads into the local scientific and literary community.

In hisInvestigaes histricas e scientficas sobre o Museu Imperial e

Nacional(1870), Netto elaborates further on the museum he had in mind.10

His pace is not Moreiras excited ramble from one spectacular object to an-other but a methodical description of showcase after showcase, an extended

label. The museum guide, then, must not be read as a mere transcription

of a spatial arrangement but as one that inscribes into this arrangement a

perspective, a way of seeing, and thus as an attempt to control the perfor-

mative dimension of museum space as a crossroads of the production and

reception of knowledge. As Mieke Bal (1992, 561) writes, the space of

the museum presupposes a walking tour, an order in which the exhibits

and panels are to be viewed and read. Thus it addresses an implied focal-izer, whose tour is the story of the production of the knowledge taken in

and taken home. As such, Nettos guide can be read as a peculiar kind of

travel literature, a synthetic and instructive journey through Brazil that vi-

sualizes the metonymic depths hidden in the objects: it is meant to convert

the museum visit into the miniature of an initiatory journey through space

and time, the voyage of the archaeologist who discovers the deep and

original Brazil.

Where, in room 6 of the museum building on Campo de Santana,

Moreira de Azevedos philological gaze would be attracted by the Pompeian

antiquities, Nettos interest lies entirely with the indigenous exhibits shown

opposite, as if suggesting a dual line of descent. Having mentioned the

Pompeian collection in one half-sentence, he pauses to describe in detail

the contents of showcase 6, dedicated to autochthonous ethnography, then

zooms in and singles out a painted adornment, a tiny piece nevertheless

laden with significance:

This curious antiquity, which was found in a receptacle near

Lake Arary on Maraj Island, is made of very fine clay, par-

ticularly suitable for the delicate paint embellishing it, which


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consists of straight, broken, parallel, or crossed black lines on

a white background. None of the tribes known in Brazil over

the last three centuries would have been capable of producing

objects, or instruments of prayer or superstition, as perfect as

this curious adornment. The individual who made it was more

than an intelligent son of our forestshe was almost an artist of

modern civilization; a spirit holding quite developed ideas and

perhaps a considerable feeling for Asian art. (Netto 1870,252)

As contemporary indigenous populations are cut off here from any kind of

genealogical succession with these precocious and cosmopolitan Braziliansof old, the modern citizen can, thanks precisely to this previous decontex-

tualization, enter into an empathicEinfhlungwith those he now claims as

hisspiritual forebears. What is important here, moreover, is to observe how

Nettos archaeological hermeneutics of the indigenous object visualizes the

invisible, taking us on a speculative journey into the forest and into remote

pasts, an aesthetic experience we can share thanks to the label rather than

the object.

Before escorting us out of the exhibition, however, Nettos guidedraws our attention to a large drawer placed in the middle of room 6,

surrounded by the seventeen showcases displaying indigenous life. For

here, as if to cleanse our eyes and minds of the impressions of savage

fetishism, we are finally made to admire the fetish of capital:

Between this last showcase and that of the Bolivian antiqui-

ties, placed next to it, there is a big, glass-framed drawer con-

taining a large number of ancient and modern coins, made

of gold, silver, copper, and nickel, from colonial as well as

modern Brazil, from Portugal, from Spain, from France, from

England, from Holland, from Belgium, from Prussia, from

Sweden, from Denmark, from Austria, from Hungary, from

the German Empire, from Hamburg, Hanover, Brandenburg,

Frankfurt, Bavaria, Wrttemberg, Baden, Saxony, from Rus-

sia, Poland, Turkey, Tunisia, Ceylon, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco,China, from Switzerland, Italy, Sardinia, Tuscany, Lucca,

Venetia, Milan, the Vatican, the Italian Revolution, the two

Sicilies, from the United States, from Mexico, Chile, Bolivia,

Peru, New Granada, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, etc. (Netto

1870, 283)


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Numismatica, thencoins secured from the circuit of trade and thus con-

vertible into singular, auratic museum objectsprovide the necessary bal-

ance here, so as to place modern Brazil once again at the crossroads of

two lineages: one chain of antiquities cut off from (and thus linked to)

the visitors present by three centuries or more of indigenous populations

unrelated to this Golden Age of a lost high culture of the Amazon, the

opposite chain uninterrupted and ongoing, a continuous and metonymic

cash flow that testifies to the empires place among the civilized, that is,

among thetrading nations. Just as nature, in the other sections of the mu-

seum, was displayed as a resource of both material and spiritual wealth (or

biodiversity, to use a more up-to-date expression), the treasures assem-bled in the fourth section suggested an idea ofheritagerelated to notions of

both identity and accumulation. The state, as a collector of cultural value

and as the distributor and arbiter of currency and warrant of trade relations,

would thus be located at the crossroads of two axes that form the image of

anational economy.

A similar constellation of the material and the spiritual in the

imagery of the late imperial state can be observed in a series of public ex-

hibitions, of which the Exposio Antropolgica of 1882, organized by themuseum and on its premises, was the paramount event. It was understood

as a necessary complement to theExposio de Histria do Brasil,heldin1881

in the National Library, and the firstExposio da Indstria Nacional, cele-

brated in early 1882. While these two events proposed new representations

of Brazils past and future (or tradition and progress), the anthropo-

logical exhibition attempted to reassess and publicly submit to the gaze of

science what had been imperial iconographys principal allegory of locality.

The exhibition, fragments of which Netto was to expose again seven years

later as part of Louis Garniers Exposition de lHabitation Humaine at the

Paris Worlds Fair,11 thus paved the way from a primarily archaeological

concern with the origins of Brazilian man toward a physiological interest

in the different degrees of savagery, in line with what would soon become

the museums new role in assessing the racial qualities of the population

(Schwarcz 1993, 7175).

In 1881, Netto had undertaken an expedition to the coast of Par,from which he returned laden with a large collection of ancient pottery

and ritual objects as well as skeletons and skulls sacked from Amanaj

tombs on the upper Rio Capim (Netto 1889, 5589). The exhibition, which

filled seven showrooms, each baptized for the occasion with the name of a

famous Brazilian traveler or scientist, also featured three Cherente Indians


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and a family of Botocudos brought from Goiaz and Esprito Santo, who

were put on show in a simulated everyday-life environment. In addition

to their living bodies, plaster casts were used as life groups in other ar-

eas of the exhibition; and portraits painted by Dcio Villares and Aurlio

de Figueiredo, two artists soon to become the foremost exponents of the

positivist and historicist school, depicted them as representative of their re-

spective physiological types (Barbosa Rodrigues 1882). Lacerda (1906, 58),

the museums leading physiologist and future director, in charge of taking

anthropometric measurements of the exhibited Indians, later recalled the

event as a popular feast of science:

In the showrooms, huts containing the nets and domestic tools

of the Indian were constructed, arranged together with canoes

and ubs, or fish traps, and figures of Indian hunters, all imitated

from nature. The beautiful collections of habits and feather

garments that the museum already owned were brought into a

more artistic order; arms, arrows,maracs, trumpets, blowpipes,

and bows occupied a large extension of the room; the stone axes,

grinders, tamping tools,tembets, and so forth, in their regular

distribution formed tables inviting comparison. . . . Exhibits of

carbon paintings, of remains of birds and fish gathered from the

sambaquigravesites, as well as a topographical sketch of these

exquisite formations of caves, and human skulls and skele-

tons, stone tools, and arrowheads found in them, composed an-

other group that attracted visitors attention. . . . Each exhibit

belonged to a particular tribe, thus facilitating comparison be-

tween artifacts of one and the same kind, but from different

tribes.

Typological display principles for tools, crafts, and other artifacts,

so as to facilitate comparison between more and less advanced popula-

tions in a linear evolutionary narrative of human development (echoing,

as well as providing the natural ground for, the bourgeois pedagogics

of self-fashioning for which the museum provided a stage), were beingtheorized at this time by Augustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers at Londons Beth-

nal Green Museum. Pitt-Riverss explicit aim was to convince a working-

class audience all too easily seduced by revolutionary agitation that, in his

own famous phrase, nature makes no jump (Bennett 1995, 198200;

Stocking 1985, 8). Extinction, on the other hand, was shown to be the


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irrevocable fate of the least advanced peoples, who had failed to adapt

themselves. In a similar object lesson, the Exposio Antropolgica, with

its peculiar combination of simulated life environments and their scientific

dissection in the abstract grid of the typological table, celebrated indige-

nous life in the aesthetic of the ruin: the public display of indigenous

families, surrounded by their tools and artisanry, the remains of their

dead and the plaster replicas of their own bodies, actually resemble an au-

topsy performed in an anatomical theater. At the same time, this refocusing

of the museological gaze from archaeological remains onto the surface of

the body already anticipated the shift from the panoramic to thepanoptic

(which I will discuss shortly): the very way in which visitors of theExposioAntropolgicawere enabled to (or at least made to believe that they could)

catch a glimpse of the back region of indigenous village life would soon

become the gaze of physiology assessing the entire populations genetic

qualities and their subsequent ability to integrate the nation.12

Inverted Gazes

In the aftermath of the military coup of 15 November 1889, the physiologist

Joo Baptista de Lacerda, as acting director of the museum (Netto beingaway representing the empire at the Paris Worlds Fair and the Congress

of Americanists in Berlin), paid a visit to the new minister of foreign

affairs, the Republican leader Quintino Bocaiuva. Politician and scientist

seem to have gotten along well, and eventually, Lacerda was to recall a few

years later, Bocaiuva suggested the removal of the museum to the vacated

imperial palace at Quinta de Boa Vista (Lacerda 1906, 64). The transfer

of the collections was only completed in 1892, due to the occupation of

the central patio by the Congresso Constituinte, which was to deliberate

over a new constitution. In a strange overlap of architectural, scientific, and

juridical fictions of the state, the attempts to redesign Brazils legal base and

its scientific image coexisted for two years within the walls of a baroque

fantasy of tropical monarchy.

Crisis, however, was looming over the museum just as much as

over the new republican state, whose legal shape was being debated amid

mounted skeletons and stuffed animals from the tropical forest. Netto hadhardly returned to Rio when the latent struggles between the museum and

its foreign correspondents, scientific seekers who had chosen Brazil as

their platform to gain an international reputation (Pyenson and Sheets-

Pyenson 1999, 36366), burst into open conflict, one that would eventually

call into question the very model of the metropolitan, encyclopedic museum


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that for decades had made the Rio institution the scientific embodiment of

the empire. The escalation of Nettos disagreements with the museums res-

ident foreigners simultaneously indicates the degree to which the Museu

Nacional was immersed in attempts to redefine nationalist discourse in the

immediate aftermath of Deodoro da Fonsecas coup, raising the stakes in

claiming the Brazilianness of scientific work and not only of its object.

Local expertise in collecting and classifying specimens from the interior

of Brazil had been scarce throughout the century, and the museum was

relying heavily on foreign travelers and naturalists who had taken up res-

idence in Brazil, commissioning them to collect zoological, botanical, and

ethnographic material. Already in 1829, the Italian Ricardo Zani had beencontracted to explore Par and the Amazon; but not until the 1850s did the

museum have the means to employ foreign specialists on a permanent basis.

The first generation of these, usually French scientific adventurers, would

spend a few years in Brazil before returning to their home country.13 After

Nettos appointment as director in 1876, a second generation of naturalists,

mostly from Anglo-Saxon and Germanic countries, was contracted, many

of them holding posts not only as traveling collectors and taxidermists but

also as sectional directors or subdirectors, even though most lived in theimmigrant states of the South and only occasionally visited the museum.14

At the root of the polemic between these foreignfonctionnaires and

Ladislau Netto was the new, considerably more nationalistic set of rules

for museum staff issued in 1889. While maintaining the encyclopedic and

imperial scope of the institution, these regulations sought to recentralize

under the directors authority the competences and budgets of formerly au-

tonomous units, such as the physiological laboratory, and restrict eligibility

for future posts to Brazilian citizens; at the same time, they demanded

continuous presence at the institution by all members of staff. In response

to Nettos autocratic measures, Mller, Ihering, Derby, Schwacke, and

Goeldi, as well as Lacerda, resigned in protest. Even though Netto, who

suffered a stroke in 1891, stepped down from his directorship the following

year, most foreign scientists had by then followed the lead of Ihering and

Goeldi, who set up new institutions at Belm and So Paulo (the Museu

Paraense [Museum of Par State] would be directed by Goeldi from 1894to 1907, the Museu Paulista [Museum of So Paulo] by Ihering between

1895 and 1915).

The conflicts involving Netto and the foreign naturalists in

the years of transformation from empire to republic reflect, albeit in a

sometimes contradictory way, some of the tensions between, on the one


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hand, a capital-based, bureaucratic project of a lettered modernity relying

on a powerful state apparatus and embodied by the courtly elite ofbacharis,

and, on the other, the various dissenting projects brought forth by the rul-

ing sectors of provinces such as Par, So Paulo, or Paran. The claim of

the latter, who sought to challenge Rios hegemonic position, would be

founded, precisely, on new, state-of-the-art institutions of display and re-

search, concerned not so much with the representation of the nation as

with attesting the provinces achievements in modernity and progress. As

Goeldi (1894) formulated it, on taking charge of the new provincial institu-

tions the foreign naturalists were also seeking to establish a kind of barrier

separating the past and the future of museums, and thus also to draw aline between the archaic former imperial capital and the northern and

southern pioneer states, flourishing at the height of the rubber and coffee

booms.

Both Goeldi and Ihering would use their positions to design highly

specialized institutions focusing on local zoology, botany, and anthropol-

ogy, in a symbolic contest with the Museu Nacional over the richness and

exclusivity of the natural resources they explored and exposed, as well as

over the most advanced scientific method, thus echoing interprovincialcompetition for foreign investment and immigration. The dispute with the

Museu Paulista is of particular interest here, for Iherings idea of creating

a museum specializing in certain questions of zoology (such as mollusks,

his own field), rather than providing a totalizing view of local, or national,

nature, called into question the representational link between science,

space, and the state that had sustained all previous museum projects in

Brazil. From this new point of view, which was not accidentally located in

So Paulo, the most technically advanced and immigrant-populated city in

the country, not only Brazils romantic iconographies but the nation itself

had become an obstacle to the development of a pure and self-sufficient

science. In his inaugural speech, Ihering polemically claimed his museum

and Goeldis to be the only scientific institutions of importance in Brazil

(Ihering 1895, 1924), provoking an immediate response from Lacerda

(who had assumed the directorship of the Museu Nacional that same year)

that, once again, raised the question of representing the nation:

I would, however, like the honorable director of the Museu

Paulista to tell me what he means by a museum organized on

scientific grounds, which he claims his own museum is; and

which he pretends the museum of Rio de Janeiro is not. . . .


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Allow me, then, to ask him this: A museum in which nu-

merous collections are distributed in sections, according to the

rules adopted by science, where there are methodically classified

specimens, workshops of taxidermy and assembly, a botanical

garden, and a rich herbarium like no other in Brazil; which has

a library containing rarities as well as the most recent publica-

tions from all the branches of the natural sciences, which has

laboratories well-equipped with the most modern devices and

instrumentsis this a museum organized on scientific grounds,

or not? (Lacerda 1896; quoted in Souza Lima 1989, 31)

A modern museum, as Lacerda and Ihering agree, is a site of not

only display but also experimentation. The political implications of this

pure and disinterested experimental science were, however, immediately

linked to ongoing discussions on race and the nation concerned with the

construction and argumentative foundation of new forms of property and

labor relations, and of coercion of the urban and rural workforce follow-

ing the abolition of slavery in 1888. In a controversial article published

in the state of So Paulos official presentation at the Louisiana PurchaseExhibition of 1905, Ihering recommended the extermination of the Cain-

gang Indians of thepaulistahinterland as a means to accelerate industrial

progress and inland colonization. Lacerda, meanwhile, was also the chief

ideologue ofbranqueamento, and, as official Brazilian delegate to the first

International Conference on Race in Geneva in 1911, expressed the view

that within a century Brazil would have achieved the complete whiten-

ing of its population (Schwarcz 1993, 11). A new, militant physiologi-

cal emphasis, then, now turned the museum gaze outward to transform

the people into the object of a new museology, one which instead of

arranging groups and species in the horizontal and normative order of

the Linnaean panorama sought to predict (and establish the laws guid-

ing) its possible alterationsdegenerations, abnormities, mutationsand

to assess the usefulness of populations and their miscegenations, thus

submitting communal and individual bodies to a new form of biopolitics.

This new,panopticconcern turned the museum from a site of storage andexhibition of natural phenomena into one of planning future modifications

of an imperfect nature, as Lacerda argues in his own museum guide,Fastos

do Museu Nacional(1906, 72): We must understand that nowadays the mu-

seums mission is not limited, as it used to be, to that of a simple depository


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of interesting objects exposed to the gaze of the public, which often does not

even know how to make the most of them. Its field of action is much vaster,

because it includes today the investigable part of science, the experimental

research as well as the systematizing, coordination, and classification of

natural species and collections.

Lacerdas guide is, in fact, a striking example of that inversion of

the museum effect so masterfully plotted by Jorge Luis Borges in Tln,

Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1990, 43143), in which the encyclopedic form folds

back onto its own contents and destroys them. For, whereas Nettos guide

lays out before our eyes the panoramic distribution of showcases, every

now and then zooming in to highlight individual objects and delve into themetonymic chains of meaning attached to them, Lacerda a priori unfolds a

millenary narrative of natural and human migrations and miscegenations,

which he then forces onto individual objects that nonetheless remain unre-

lated among themselves, their only link being the oneto Lacerdas narrative,

from which they jump out at us, while the museum fades into a blurry, un-

defined, yet all-embracing background space. It is the triumph of label over

object, as if echoing the famous phrase coined in 1891 by George Brown

Goode (quoted in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991, 395), head of the Smithso-nian Institution: An efficient educational museum may be described as

a collection of instructive labels, each illustrated by a well-selected speci-

men. This same inversion causes Lacerdas guided tour, eventually, to turn

from a description of the Museu Nacional into a description of the nation,

as reality and its representation become undistinguishable:

Civilization is entering thesertesof Brazil: in less than a cen-

tury the indigenous tribes will have disappeared, and it will

be difficult to find in their descendants a trace of the primitive

race. Cross-breeding between Indian and white is rare among

us compared to that of white and black. We can easily under-

stand that this is how it must be, because these two races lived in

intimate and continuous contact with one another in the popu-

lated centers; whereas the indigenous tribes remained far from

the civilized areas occupied by the white race. As a worker, theIndian is unquestionably inferior to the black; he is more agile

than the latter but his physical resistance and muscular strength

are sensibly less. We have measured with a dynamometer the

muscular strength of adult individuals belonging to the Boror,


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Botocudo, and Cherente tribes, and the instrument showed a

force below that observed in white and black individuals. (Lac-

erda 1906, 100101)

According to Lacerda, anatomical inferiority, rather than expulsion from

communal lands, systematic torture, famine, and disease, the collateral ef-

fects of peripheral capitalism at the height of the Amazonian rubber boom

(Taussig 1987, 3135), accounted for the decimation, unusually vast even by

Brazilian standards, of the indigenous population since the proclamation of

the republic. Once again, the museum had managed to transform history

into nature: but then, nature had now ceased to be an empire, a harmoniousand stable order, and had turned into the Darwinian republic of predators

and capitals.

Notes

1. As I hope will become clear, I employ the notion of empire in a strictly his-

toriographical sense: as Ricardo Salles (1996) has argued, with regard to

Brazilian history between 1822 and 1889, the concept should be read with

Habsburgian Austria or tsarist Russia in mind, rather than French and British

imperialism. Empire, then, stands here in the first place for what is per-

ceived as a successful alternative to the former Spanish American posses-

sions, one that assumes and preserves the colonial legacy based on a cul-

tural and ideological valorization of territorial extension and abundance,

and on a politics of transaction of competing elite factions through the

arbitrating powers of the monarch (theorized in 1855 by the conservative

politician Jos da Rocha). In terms of the display of material culture, as

we shall see, this particular imperial state remained prone, well into the

second half of the nineteenth century, to an exhibitionary aesthetic associ-

ated with the aristocratic cabinet of marvels rather than with the encyclo-

pedic museum of high imperialism: in Stephen Greenblatts (1991) terms,

we could argue that it was meant to evoke the sublime object of won-

der rather than generate the systematic and disciplined understanding of

resonance.2. On the emergence and circulation of enlightened tropes and institutions in eighteenth-

century Portugal and their resonance in Brazil, see Cruz Ferreira 1999 and

Neves 1999.

3. A Bavarian naturalist and botanist best known for his epoch-making work on Brazil-

ian flora, Martius (17941868) not only published widely on palm trees and


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potatoes, but also on indigenous languages, literature, and the history of

Brazilian nation formation. In 1867, once again in collaboration with Spix,

he publishedBeitrge zur Ethnographie und Sprachenkunde Amerikas, zumal

Brasiliens[Contributions to the ethnography and linguistics of America, es-

pecially Brazil], one of whose central concerns was the origin of Ameri-

can mana widespread and influential debate in nineteenth-century ethno-

graphic and archaeological writing. In a secular version of earlier disputes

about the humanity or animality of Indians, nineteenth-century scientists

discussed whether the Indians backwardness was a result of their prim-

itivity (that is, of their belonging to an earlier stage of nature, still close to

Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Golden Age), or if they had not rather degener-ated from a former cultural bloom into a state of secondary primitivism,

as a group of German idealist philosophers, known as the Freiburg circle,

maintained (Azevedo 1994, 41819). Martius supported the latter position,

suggesting that, savagized rather than savages, the Brazilian Indians rep-

resented thedisjecta membraof extinct indigenous empires. When the Insti-

tuto Histrico e Geogrfico Brasileiro, an elite society of learned gentlemen

chaired by the emperor himself, proposed an essay contest in 1844 on the

topic of How to write the history of Brazil, it was Martius who, a year later,

submitted the winning text, one of the first attempts to theorizemestiagem

as a catalyst of Brazilian national history, the specificity of which lies in the

fusion of three races: The winning project, writes Lilia Moritz Schwarcz

(1993, 112), proposed a formula, a way of understanding Brazil. The idea

was to correlate the countrys development with the specific striving toward

perfection of the three races that composed it.

4. Contemporary institutions in neighboring countries were usually set up for the pur-

pose of collecting and classifying the totality of national fauna and flora, as

a means of endowing emergent territorial units with an enduring, natural-

ized image of cohesion. Among the most important examples are the Museo

Nacional in Santiago de Chile, founded in 1822, and the Museo Pblico de

Buenos Aires, founded in 1823. Even though the actual inauguration of both

institutions took place a few years after that of the Brazilian museum, first

attempts had already been made at the beginning of the independence move-

ments (foundational decrees being issued in Argentina as early as in 1812,and in Chile in 1813). On the Museo Nacional see Schell 2001; on the Museo

Pblico see Andermann 2002, part of the virtual exhibition Relics and Selves:

National Iconographies in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile (18801890) of the

Iberoamerican Museum of Visual Culture.


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5. It is interesting to note, however, that in its initial years the museum, due to the

lack of vernacular expertise, principally operated as a mediator between the

imperial state and foreign expeditioners, for whom it helped to secure offi-

cial protection in exchange for a modest share of the specimens the parties

brought back from their travels. In spite of its imperial aspirations, the mu-

seum was thus forced to negotiate constantly with naturalists from the very

countries whose scientific hegemony it was seeking to challenge: in order to

acquire complete classified collections, it had little choice but to buy them

from foreign specialists, as in the case of the Werner collection of minerals,

purchased from the German geologist Gottfried Pabst von Ohain in 1818 for

twelve thousand reis. Only after the declaration of independence in 1822 andthe appointment as minister to the court of Jos Bonifcio de Andrade e Silva,

an illuminated reformer and a trained mineralogist, did the local authorities

seem to take a firmer stand on the museums claim to items harvested by

visiting naturalists (Lopes 1996).

6. On the concept of empire as an archival fiction, see Richards 1993.

7. Illustrious visitors to the institution included, for instance, Hyacinthe de Bougainville,

son of the great navigator, who arrived at Guanabara Bay in 1825 in command

of the frigate Le Thtis and the corvetteLEspranceon his way around the

globe. His memories of a visit to the museum conclude: As it is set up,

or rather as it was then, this museum is highly recommended for viewing,

and the way the mineralogical sectionthe only one that was finished

has been organized, clearly demonstrates that it is not due to the lack of

taste or want of instruction that a kind of disorder reigns among the other

pieces. This one is splendidly rich in precious stones, and every sample has

been classified and numbered in a way that makes it impossible to mistake

its nature (Bougainville 1837, 612). Aubert du Petit-Thouars (1840, 62), a

French botanist whovisited the museuma dozen years after Bougainville, was

less generous in his account: The Museum, situated on the most beautiful

square in Rio de Janeiro, is remarkable only for the order and cleanliness to

be found there; it is rich in ornithology and mineralogy, but still poor in all

other fields; it is little visited and does not seem to be to Rio de Janeiro more

than a scarcely useful object of luxury.

8. Early modern wonder cabinets were, of course, very different from the image of pic-turesquely decaying mumble-jumble that romanticism fashioned of them.

Modeled principally on PlinysHistoria naturalis, wonder cabinets aimed to

reconstruct in miniature the cosmic order inherent in the scattered fragments

of the material world, so that this orders recovered image would mirror the

imposition and reproduction of worldly order by the aristocratic sovereign


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who owned the collection, and whose image featured centrally in it, mostly at

the cross-point of the axis of natural and manufactured objects, in portraits of

his ancestors and other famous collectors, and in other works of art represent-

ing mans embellishment of natures forms. See, for example, Eva Schulzs

(1994) discussion of early modern museological tracts and Oliver Impey and

Arthur MacGregors (1985) study of wonder cabinets of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries.

9. This is the museums most important showroom. I say the most important because,

to the vast and rich mineralogical cabinet (showroom no. 5), of which we

have already given a rough sketch, we might oppose equal if not better ones

in the European museums, whereas this showroom holds the most completeethnographic collection of our numerous indigenous tribes ever to have been

displayed (Netto 1870, 266).

10. It is necessary here to stress the fact that Nettos museum guide is previous to

Moreira de Azevedos: rather than as reflecting a modernized order of display

already in place, it should be read as the outline of such an order, one that, as

Moreiras text seems to suggest, had still not been translated into the actual

space of the exhibition seven years later. But then, Moreiras account need not

necessarily be an objective depiction either: whereas Nettos guide points to

the future (of science and of the empire), Moreiras clearly points toward the

past. There is, I would like to suggest, a point in this disagreement between

visitor and curator about the performative dimension of museums, one that

Michael Baxandall (1991) has attempted to formulate as a multiple interaction

between the producers, museumizers, and visiting observers of objects,

whose sometimes conflicting attitudes intersect in the space separating object

from label.

11. TheExposition Rtrospective de lHabitation Humaine, organized by Louis Garnier,

the eclecticist architect of the Opra de la Bastille (an exact copy of which

was to be erected in Rio de Janeiros city center), featured an impressive range

of monumental buildings erected along the Seine, divided into three princi-

pal groups: the prehistorical period, the historical period, and isolated

civilizations. As a subgroup of the latter, the indigenous populations of

America were represented by three model homes, one ofpeaux rougesof the

North American prairies, as well as an Aztec and an Incaic building, whichGarnier had reconstructed following archaeological treatises and museum

catalogues. Within the Maison Inca Netto showed a number of objects of

Amazonian Indians, especially Botocudos and Jvaros, in what he called a

museu retrospectivo: cups, urns, clubs, axes, spears, ritual objects, a shrunk

human head, and several of Villaress and Figueiredos oil paintings commis-

sioned by the museum in 1882. See Barbuy 1996, 22829.


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12. Living people exposed at nineteenth-century museums and fairs were either made

to stage recreations of cultural performances or the drama of everyday life

itself. As objects of exhibition, these performances of authenticity were posited

in an apparently hermetic illusionary space fenced off from the visitors point

of view, thus creating the illusion of everyday life (of an imaginarily entire

back region of other peoples intimacy) glimpsed at without the other being

able to return this gaze: the museographic framelike the panopticon

relies on the noninvertibility of the gaze, and this is what mortifies the other,

rather than his or her installation in a showcase. See Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

1991, 40513.

13. Jean Thodore Descourtilz, an ornithologist, collected samples in Esprito Santofrom July 1854 until his death in February 1855; Alfred Sohier de Gand,

a naturalist and merchant of botanical and zoological specimens, was sent

to the provinces of Par and Amazonas in 1855; Louis Jacques Brunet, a

Frenchman living in Pernambuco, was contracted to collect in the Amazon

region between 1860 and 1861; and Jules Audemars de Brassus held the posi-

tion of traveling naturalist from 1863. Another compatriot, Arsne Onessim

Baraquin, was granted, in exchange for sending samples of his collections

from Par and Amazonas, the title of honorary naturalist. See Lobo 1923 and

Lopes 1996.

14. The first foreigner to assume a permanent position was Lutz Riedel, a German

botanist who participated in the Russian exhibition to Matto Grosso com-

manded by the baron Langsdorff in 182628. In 1842, when the museum was

divided into separate sections, Riedel was appointed as director of the botan-

ical section, a post he was to hold until his death in 1861, to be succeeded by

Netto. Theodor Peckolt, a German, was the first head of the chemical labo-

ratory; Charles Frederick Hartt, a U. S. geologist and paleontologist who had

been a disciple of Agassiz at Harvard and a professor at Cambridge, directed

the geological section in 1876 and 1877, to be succeeded by his compatriot

Orville Adalbert Derby. Wilhelm Schwacke, Fritz Mller, and Hermann

von Ihering, German zoologists living in Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do

Sul (who, like Derby, would eventually move to the Museu Paulista after

resigning from their posts in the capital), held titles as traveling naturalists,

and their Swiss colleague Emil August Goeldi, who was later to assumethe direction of Belms Museu Paraense, was subdirector of the zoological

section from 1885 to 1890. Among these, Mller demands attention for his

Fr Darwin(1864), a complex discussion of the law of ontogenesis, dedicated

to his friend and correspondent Charles Darwin, that is considered the first


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major theoretical scientific work published in Brazil. The book relied on

experimental research Mller had carried out in the frontier areas of Santa

Catarina.

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