http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9908-7024
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ABSTRACT
This paper looks at an aspect of the ‘object habit’ by considering the motivations behind an ancient technical text, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. The text is an ‘encyclopaedia’ of knowledge covering a vast range of subjects and approaches by studying objects including things found in nature and worked by man. For Pliny, these phenomena shared enough to be considered together while presenting an inventory of the resources in the Roman world and thus controlled by the emperor Titus (AD 79–81), to whom the work is addressed. The collection of knowledge for Pliny is a political act. The Natural History’s collapse of distinctions between objects, animate or inanimate, worked by man or in a natural state, as well as its insistence on political motivations for collecting objects and knowledge, serve as starting place for considering the ‘object habit’ and the impact of politics on collecting. Two examples are discussed: a Benin ‘bronze’ at a Cambridge college, and three giraffes gifted to the superpowers of nineteenth-century Europe.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Emma Libonati is the Research Associate on the Artefacts of Excavation Project. She is interested in the material culture of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East, in particular stone sculpture and its manufacture, the dissemination of Egyptian religion throughout the Mediterranean, and the history of archaeology. Her doctorate is on the stone and large-scale bronze sculptures recovered from the underwater excavations in Aboukir Bay in Egypt. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and a research assistant at King's College London on the digital resource The Art of Making in Antiquity: Stoneworking in the Roman World.
ORCID
Emma Libonati http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9908-7024
Notes
1. My thanks to John Baines and Alice Stevenson and to the editors of Museum History Journal for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this paper.
2. Pliny, Natural History, 34.70. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. by Harris Rackham (London: William Heinemann, 1983–1995).
3. Pliny, Natural History, 7.35.
4. Pliny, Natural History, 10.118.
5. See R. Syme, ‘Pliny the Procurator,’ Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 73 (1969), 201–36.
6. M. Beagon, Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny the Elder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 130–1, points out that the overarching theme of Nature in the Natural History owes a debt to Aristotle.
7. R. French, Ancient Natural History: Histories of Nature (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 218–22.
8. Beagon, Roman Nature, pp. 18–22.
9. G. E. R. Lloyd, Science, Folklore and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 136.
10. S. Carey, Pliny's Catalogue of Culture: Art and Empire in the Natural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 34.
11. Carey, Pliny's Catalogue of Culture, pp. 32–40.
12. C. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind/[La pensée sauvage] (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966). M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970).
13. Pliny, Natural History, 34.14–15.
14. Pliny, Natural History, 36.102, considered the building to be one of the three most beautiful in Rome.
15. Pliny, Natural History, 12.94; 34.84; 35.102,109; 36.27, 58.
16. T. Murphy, Pliny The Elder's Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 197–201.
17. C. G. Nauert, Jr., ‘Humanists, Scientists, and Pliny: Changing Approaches to a Classical Author,’ American Historical Review, 84(1) (1979), 72–8.
18. E. Schulz, ‘Notes on the History of Collecting and of Museums: In the Light of Selected Literature of the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century,’ Journal of the History of Collections 2(2) (1990), 208. A. Doody, Pliny's Encyclopedia: The Reception of the Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
19. Schulz, ‘Notes on the History of Collecting and of Museums,’ pp. 205; 212.
20. Major collections like that of Ludovico Moscardo were divided into three broad groupings derived from the Natural History, keeping separate categories of antiquities; stones, minerals, and earth; and coral, shells, and animals. See: A. Shelton, ‘Cabinets of Transgression: Renaissance Collections and the Incorporation of the New World,’ in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. by J. Elsner and R. Cardinal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 182.
21. See: S. Moser, Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum (London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 12; and for general overview of early modern period collections in the West, pp. 11–32.
22. The errors of Pliny and his method were acknowledged early on, but that did not mean that the entire work was to be ignored. See A. Castiglioni, ‘The School of Ferrara and the Controversy on Pliny,’ in Science, Medicine, and History: Essays on the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice Written in Honour of Charles Singer, ed. by E. A. Underwood (London; New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), vol. 1, pp. 269–79.
23. M. Beagon, ‘The Curious Eye of the Elder Pliny,’ in Pliny the Elder: Themes and Contexts, ed. by R. K. Gibson and R. Morello (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 86–8, gives an example of a public disavowal of Pliny by a man with a taste for curiosities.
24. V. C. Gardner Coates, K. Lapatin, J. L. Seydl, The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), pp. 126–7: Jacob More, 1780. Mount Vesuvius in Eruption (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland NG 290).
25. Pliny the Younger, Letters 6.16.37. Pliny the Elder did try to rescue people by ordering ships when he realized the extent of the disaster.
26. Pliny, Natural History, 8.27.
27. For actor–network theory or object-oriented ontology, see B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); G. Harman, Tool-being: Heidegger and the Metaphyics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002).
28. Critical to this is the work of W. Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. by H. Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 190: ‘experience of the aura thus rests on the transposition of a response common to human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man … To perceive the aura of an object means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.’
29. R. MacMullen, ‘The Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire,’ American Journal of Philology 103(3) (1982), 233–46; J. Ma, Statues and Cities: Honorific Portraits and Civic Identity in the Hellenistic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 9–10.
30. G. Harman, Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2007), pp. 129–31.
31. There is no need for a human Dasein to give meaning to the object for Heidegger. Benjamin needs a collector to bring the historical object to the collector's time and place.
32. For habitus see especially P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
33. P. Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital,’ in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Capital, ed. by J. G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 241–58.
34. Ben Building: Mussolini, Monuments and Modernism, BBC 4 documentary, writer J. Meades, 2016.
35. See A. Stevenson, J. Baines, E. Libonati this volume for further discussion. For object-biographies see: C. Gosden and Y. Marshall, ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects,’ World Archaeology, 31(2) (1999), 169–78; I. Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,’ in The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. by A. Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 64–91; K. Hill, ed., Museums and Biographies: Stories, Objects, Identities (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012).
36. W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999), N.10a,3; p.475; N7,7; p. 470.
37. K. Ezra, Royal Art of Benin: The Perls Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), p. 129.
38. Ezra, Royal Art of Benin, pp. 85–6.
39. Ezra, Royal Art of Benin, p. 16.
40. A. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 9–11.
41. Coombes, Reinventing Africa, pp. 11–22.
42. Coombes, Reinventing Africa, pp. 23–6.
43. K. W. Gunsch, ‘Art and/or Ethnographica: The Reception of Benin Works from 1897–1935,’ African Arts, 46(4) (2013), 26–7. The bronzes were bought by the Ethnographic Museum because German Fine Art Museums were restricted financially and by a collection policy that did not recognise bronze objects as art.
44. Gunsch, ‘Art and/or Ethnographica,’ 26.
45. Gunsch, ‘Art and/or Ethnographica,’ 27.
46. Gunsch, ‘Art and/or Ethnographica,’ 28–30.
47. C. Freeman, ‘Cambridge under Pressure to Return Looted Benin Bronze Cockerel – But Won't Return it in Case it Gets Stolen Again,’ The Telegraph, 8 October 2016. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/08/cambridge-under-pressure-to-return-looted-benin-bronze/> (accessed 16 January 2017).
48. T. Jenkins, ‘Bloody Truth about the “Colonialist” Cockerel Cambridge Students Want Sent Back to Africa: It's Made from Melted-Down Money Africans Earned by Selling Slaves,’ Daily Mail, 10 March 2016, <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3485000/Bloody-truth-colonialist-cockerel-Cambridge-students-want-sent-Africa-s-melted-money-AFRICANS-earned-selling-slaves.html#ixzz4Uof5YhAW> (accessed 4 January 2017). J. Jones, ‘The Cambridge Cockerel is no Cecil Rhodes Statue – It Should Be Treated as a Masterpiece’, The Guardian, 22 February 2016, <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/feb/22/cambridge-cockerel-jesus-college-cecil-rhodes-nigeria> (accessed 16 January 2017).
49. Coombes, Reinventing Africa, p. 223.
50. It is clear that taxidermied animals were not as prestigious as live ones, although bones and hides were displayed in temple complexes throughout Greece, if one is to believe Pausanias. See A. Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 260–81.
51. The Aztecs also used animals in gift-exchange. See historical overview: R. J. Hoage, A. Roskell and J. Mansour, ‘Menageries and Zoos to 1900,’ in New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by R. J. Hoage and W. Deiss (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 8–18.
52. The giraffe as tribute item remains consistent from the Punt reliefs in the Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri in Egypt to the black obelisk of Shalmaneser III from Nimrud in Iraq. After Nubia was defeated by the Caliphate in AD 652, it had to pay an annual tribute that included a giraffe. When the Mamluks annexed Sudan to Egypt in AD 1275, the Nubians were required to send annual tribute of animals including giraffes, panthers, and elephants. See B. Laufer, The Giraffe in History and Art (Chicago: Field Museum, 1928), p. 35.
53. A. Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East: c.3000–330 B.C. (London: Routledge, 1995), vol. 1, p. 361.
54. See Laufer, The Giraffe in History and Art, pp. 15–25 for the prevalence of the giraffe in Egyptian art.
55. There are rich debates among anthropologists questioning the division between ‘gift’ and a ‘commodity’. See: M. Mauss, The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. by W. D. Halls (London: Cohen & West, 1954); A. Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); A. B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: the Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley; Oxford: University of California Press, 1992); D. Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); M. Douglas, ‘The Genuine Article,’ in The Socialness of Things: Essays on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects, ed. by S. H. Riggins (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), p. 16: ‘But the distinction between gift and commodity comes under the same umbrella. The direction to which this distinction leads us is not to different kinds of objects, but to different kinds of relations between persons.’
56. 200F–201C, trans. by E. E. Rice, The Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 17–9. Some animals may not have been sourced specially for the procession since there is a suggestion of a royal menagerie. Rice, pp. 86–7.
57. See T. R. Trautmann, Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
58. Pliny, Natural History, 8.27.
59. C. Grigson, Menagerie: The History of Exotic Animals in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 1, notes various gifts from monarchs received by Henry III during his reign in the thirteenth century.
60. Laufer, The Giraffe in History and Art, p. 66.
61. W. Blunt, The Ark in the Park: The Zoo in the Nineteenth Century (London: Book Club Associates, 1976), p. 73.
62. S. Wilson, ‘The Emperor's Giraffe,’ Natural History (December 1992), 22–5.
63. M. Belozerskaya, The Medici Giraffe and Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power (New York: Little, Brown, 2006), pp. 87–129.
64. Weiner 1992 (see n. 55) argued that exchange/giving should be related to politics and the production of political hierarchies.
65. M. Allin, Zarafa: A Giraffe's True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris (New York: Delta, 1999), pp. 175–7. In France that year's winter flu was known as ‘Giraffe flu’, while the expression ‘peigner la girafe’ (‘combing the giraffe’) alludes to doing something lazily because the crowds attended the giraffe's grooming.
66. C. Grigson, Menagerie: The History of Exotic Animals in England, 1100–1837 (Oxford: Oxford University, 2016), p. 231.
67. Grigson, Menagerie, p. 238.
68. Allin, Zarafa, pp. 144–59.
69. H. J. Sharkey, ‘La Belle Africaine: The Sudanese Giraffe Who Went to France,’ Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des études Africaines, 49(1) (2015), 46.
70. Allin, Zarafa, p. 181.
71. Quoted in Blunt (p. 79), Balzac writing in La Silhouette, 17 Juin 1830: ‘la girafe n’est plus visitée que par le provincial arriéré, la bonne d’enfant désœuvrée et le jean-jean simple et naïf.’
72. Allin, Zarafa, p. 195; Sharkey, ‘La Belle Africaine,’ pp. 5–6; pp. 23–4; Grigson, Menagerie, pp. 238–9; Blunt, The Ark in the Park, p. 76.