The Things of Civilization, the Matters of Empire: Representing Jemmy Button

This paper reflects upon the many representations of Jemmy Button, a Fuegian native who was abducted to England and returned to Tierra del Fuego in the first half of the 19th century. Travel and science writers like Robert Fitzroy, Charles Darwin, W. Parker Snow, and social Darwinist writers such as Max Nordau reflected upon Jemmy Button's life and fate – and their accounts reveal a deep, if changing, fascination with the material aspects of the civilizatory project. Jemmy Button's story was told in many variations and with glaringly different conclusions, but it tends to be told as a story replete with objects, objectification, and with the fantasies that objects inspire. Focusing on the material aspects of the story, I mean to cast light on a larger logic of materialism which framed the development of Darwin's theory of evolution and civilization, and its social Darwinist offsprings.