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The pleasures of taxonomy : Casta paintings, classification and colonialism
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Earle, Rebecca (2016) The pleasures of taxonomy : Casta paintings, classification and colonialism. William & Mary Quarterly, 73 (3). pp. 427-466. doi:10.5309/willmaryquar.73.3.0427
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Official URL: http://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.73.3.0427
Abstract
‘The number of these natural productions is so great, their forms are so varied, the connections between them so loose and sometimes so difficult to perceive, that one is often uncertain how to determine the characteristics that constitute a Genus . . . and one is confronted by Species that do not fit into any established Genus, or that seem to belong to several at once.’ These were the challenges facing the Ecuadorean savant Pedro Franco Dávila as he sought to organize his vast collection of stones, minerals, fishes, plants and other natural objects into a coherent classification. Franco Dávila, born in Guayaquil in the early eighteenth century to wealthy parents, devoted much of his life to amassing a vast, and vastly admired, collection of natural objects, which later came to form the core of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid, of which Franco Dávila was the first director. In the 1760s he composed a three-volume catalogue of some of his collection; it was here that he offered his thoughts on the difficulty of reducing the diversity of the earth’s myriad productions to a single taxonomic system. A ‘simple, well ordered distribution’ of each species into its correct genus and each genus into its family illuminated the relationship between the different elements, but was no simple task.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History | ||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | William & Mary Quarterly | ||||||
| Publisher: | Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture | ||||||
| ISSN: | 0043-5597 | ||||||
| Official Date: | July 2016 | ||||||
| Dates: |
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| Date of first compliant deposit: | 26 January 2017 | ||||||
| Volume: | 73 | ||||||
| Number: | 3 | ||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 427-466 | ||||||
| DOI: | 10.5309/willmaryquar.73.3.0427 | ||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||
| Related URLs: |
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