The Platypus and the Mermaid: And Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination - Hardcover

Ritvo, Harriet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674673573 ISBN 13: 9780674673571

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1997

Synopsis

"Cats is 'dogs,' and rabbits is 'dogs,' and so's parrots; but this `ere 'tortis' is a insect," a porter explains to an astonished traveler in a nineteenth-century Punch cartoon. Railways were not the only British institution to schematize the world. This enormously entertaining book captures the fervor of the Victorian age for classifying and categorizing every new specimen, plant or animal, that British explorers and soldiers and sailors brought home. As she depicts a whole complex of competing groups deploying rival schemes and nomenclatures, Harriet Ritvo shows us a society drawing and redrawing its own boundaries and ultimately identifying itself.

The experts (whether calling themselves naturalists, zoologists, or comparative anatomists) agreed on their superior authority if nothing else, but the laymen had their say--and Ritvo shows us a world in which butchers and artists, farmers and showmen vied to impose order on the wild profusion of nature. Sometimes assumptions or preoccupations overlapped; sometimes open disagreement or hostility emerged, exposing fissures in the social fabric or contested cultural territory. Of the greatest interest were creatures that confounded or crossed established categories; in the discussions provoked by these mishaps, monstrosities, and hybrids we can see ideas about human society--about the sexual proclivities of women, for instance, or the imagined hierarchy of nations and races.

A thoroughly absorbing account of taxonomy--as zoological classification and as anthropological study--The Platypus and the Mermaid offers a new perspective on the constantly shifting, ever suggestive interactions of scientific lore, cultural ideas, and the popular imagination.

About this title

About the Author

Harriet Ritvo is Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Reviews

This wide-ranging study of the ``heroic age of scientific classification'' attempts--with only partial success--to place the taxonomic advances and prejudices of 18th- and 19th-century England in a broader cultural context. MIT historian Ritvo (The Animal Estate, 1987) first analyzes the politics and ``broader allegiances'' that clouded the objectivity of zoologists who embraced the gargantuan task of ordering the biological world, even as British imperialism was rapidly expanding their knowledge of that world. The author exhaustively details the unprofessional behavior scientists resorted to for personal gain (such as needlessly inventing new species and naming them after their employers). Then she expands her definition of taxonomy to include the informal classification of animals by amateur naturalists, groups with specialized relationships to animals (like farmers, breeders, hunters, and pet owners), and the general meat-eating public. Ritvo persuasively argues that ``each of the ways . . . people imagined, discussed, and treated animals inevitably implied some taxonomic structure.'' Her analysis of how British sportsmen classified wild animals as game or vermin points to a more fundamental and still prevalent assumption that nature exists solely for human entertainment. Similarly, her analysis of the conflicts between hunters, farmers, and pet owners over the proper role of wild animals describes a cultural battle yet raging. Too often, though, Ritvo shies away from social analysis with a sense of propriety rivaling that of her Victorian subjects. Her introduction notes that ``worries about the concupiscence of human females structured the theory and practice of animal breeding''; in the text these worries are mentioned only briefly, and Victorian attitudes about female sexuality are dodged entirely. This hit-and-miss social commentary, combined with a penchant for inflated academic language (allayed only slightly by period cartoons), sabotages Ritvo's goal of illuminating the cultural ramifications of Enlightenment zoology. (illustrations) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Most people can be divided into two groups: classifiers and nonclassifiers. Ritvo (history, MIT) brings order to the history of classifiers of the natural world. Looking primarily at 18th- and 19th-century Britain, she puts taxonomic, or classification, practices into their cultural context. Ritvo begins with a chapter on broad zoological classifications and their problems, followed by one on the history of zoological nomenclature?how and why we use the scientific names we use. The first two chapters are then placed in a wider context by chapters on hybrid animals, natural and unnatural monsters and abnormalities, and carnivorism. Ritvo's work is an insightful look at the development of English zoology and its strong ties to cultural context. As in her similar The Animal Estate (Harvard Univ., 1987), Ritvo rarely lapses into academic jargon. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries.?Eric D. Albright, Duke Medical Ctr. Lib., Durham, N.C.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674673573
• ISBN 13: 9780674673571
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 288