Empires of Nature

It must have been a strange, indeed uncanny, 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 up again, 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 site—as, 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 João de Deus e Mattos on a hunting excursion to the surrounding coastal range in order to end the museum's notorious shortage of local animal and plant specimens. João de Deus, the presumably black servant whose multiple skills had already been employed by (and, it may be assumed, largely guaranteed the existence of) the Casa de História Natural, more commonly known as the “Casa dos Pássaros” (House of birds), founded as early as in 1784, was to preserve and prepare his findings on site, as the city's chronicler Manuel Moreira de Azevedo (1877, 223) recalled: “João 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 science—to 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 object's making, what it represented seemed to disappear 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 exhibition,” that is, to bring “reality” into (linear) perspective as an external world-object detached from the point of view of a monadic subject implicitly coded as male and European. To be experienced as “real,” reality first had to be made illusory, to prove capable of being simulated, while nonetheless assuming that the distinction between “the real” and the simulacrum was just as clear-cut as the detachment of viewers from objects. It is particularly telling, of course, that in our initial anecdote a black servant was dispatched inland to assemble and prepare the “natural evidence” in the face of which the authoritative—and thus, implicitly, white—gaze 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 grasp—that is, to simulate—Brazilian “reality” 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...