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SUMMARY:Ethnographic collecting and the despotism of Joseph Banks - Daniel
  Simpson (Royal Holloway\, University of London)
DTSTART:20161128T130000Z
DTEND:20161128T140000Z
UID:TALK67019@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Edwin Rose
DESCRIPTION:While Joseph Banks is generally thought to have been an effect
 ive scientific patron\, things were not always so. In 1784\, several disaf
 fected members of the Royal Society printed a remarkably angry pamphlet wh
 ich accused Banks\, their president\, of numerous acts of 'despotic' behav
 iour quite unwarranted in a man who\, in their opinion\, possessed only 'p
 uny pretensions' to his position. While Banks might make 'a very good Cler
 k'\, they offered\, 'the man who is to fill the place of President\, shoul
 d be something more'.\n\nIn this talk\, I explore such thinking on Banks' 
 very particular brand of scientific patronage in terms of its impact upon 
 the development of a subject which he did not much like. Although an avid 
 collector of artificial curiosities on board the first expedition of Capta
 in Cook\, there is little evidence that Banks encouraged the subsequent de
 velopment of object collecting as a subset of natural history\, or as a me
 ans of colonial knowledge\; in fact\, he seems to have done much to frustr
 ate the all-embracing mode of natural historical enquiry in which such stu
 dy found legitimacy. By focusing in particular upon Banks' relationship an
 d correspondence with colonial officials and scientific elites in late eig
 hteenth-century Australia (the continent\, perhaps\, in which he was most 
 invested)\, I argue that the nascent ethnographic studies favoured by impe
 rial administrators as well as amateur explorers were gradually undermined
  by the enduring appeal of collecting according to the Banksian hierarchy.
  Our understanding of early Aboriginal Australia\, I conclude\, has never 
 quite recovered.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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