Article ID: CBB786517117

Alfred Wallace’s Baby Orangutan: Game, Pet, Specimen (2020)

unapi

Alfred Russell Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago, published in 1869, is a classic text in natural history and the theory of evolution. Amidst heroic hunting narratives and picturesque descriptions of local fauna and flora, stands out a curious episode in which Wallace describes adopting a baby orangutan, whose mother he had killed. Wallace, a British naturalist and collector, cultivated an affectionate relationship with the orphaned orangutan, often referring to her as his “baby.” This paper examines how the orangutan was transformed from being a moving target for museum display, to a beloved companion but also a scientific specimen. In this process, Wallace redesigned his colonial bungalow to a space that combined domestic settings with engineered nature-like environments, a familiar construction in later primate research. I use Wallace’s adoption episode to discuss how affect and care were interwoven into the exploitative relations of British naturalists and physiologists and the animals they studied. The account of Wallace’s idiosyncratic relationship with the orangutan is augmented with additional documentation of the close relationships of scientists with research animals, staged as familial kinship. The emergence of the “laboratory pet” demonstrates how the production of knowledge, the sharing of households, and human-animal emotional ties were interwoven in early biomedical research.

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Authors & Contributors
Matthew Fishburn
Mustafa Haikal
Oxford University Museum of Natural History
Robert Rutkowski
Dominika Mierzwa-Szymkowiak
Martin Rickard
Concepts
Natural history
Biological specimens
Collectors and collecting
Naturalists
Zoology
Human-animal relationships
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century
21st century
20th century, early
17th century
Places
Great Britain
Australia
Bath (England)
Antarctica
England
Amazon River Region (South America)
Institutions
Oxford University Museum of Natural History
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