Article ID: CBB509322382

Visible Labour? Productive Forces and Imaginaries of Participation in European Insect Studies, ca. 1680–1810 (2021)

unapi

The practice of early modern natural history depended on the collective collecting activities of a great variety of people. Among them, artisans played a major role in acquiring and distributing knowledge about the natural world and they contributed significantly to the scholarly labour in natural history. This distributed labour was both acknowledged by contemporaries as well as hidden from sight, reflecting the period′s dominant norms for class and gender. By combining an interpretation of the visual representation of labour in European insect studies with an examination of written sources about natural history practices from about 1680 to 1810, this article decodes the often-codified frontispieces and other more symbolic illustrations to offer new insights into the labour of natural history. Those who identified as scholars and artisans (or both) conceptualised their own intellectual and practical engagement with natural history within the semantic field of work. Some seemed to have even envisioned a new social role for academics as well as artisans. This article analyses the diversity of the “productive forces” in insect studies as they changed over time and it reconstructs what I will call the social imaginaries of participation.

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Authors & Contributors
Craig R. Macadam
Hugh B. Feeley
Janet R. Smith
Marples, Alice
Hung, Kuang-Chi
Wale, Matthew
Concepts
Natural history
Collectors and collecting
Entomology
Social class
Women in science
Science and gender
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century
17th century
21st century
16th century
Places
United States
Great Britain
Europe
Bath (England)
Sierra Leone
Romania
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