El lunes 12 de diciembre de 9 a 14 horas se brindará el Seminario del proyecto RISE SciCoMove “Colecciones científicas en movimiento. Museos provinciales, archivos y practicas coleccionistas (1800–1950)” en el Auditorio Planta Baja de la Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo.
El proyecto SciCoMove se centra en el estudio de los intercambios científicos transatlánticos con el objetivo de compartir ideas acerca de cómo se construye el conocimiento sobre las colecciones de los museos. Este proyecto ofrece una visión más compleja de la historia de las colecciones paleontológicas, antropológicas, entomológicas y botánicas de los museos de Europa y América Latina. Está dirigido por las Dras. Nathalie Richard, Universidad Le Mans, e Irina Podgorny, CONICET – Museo de La Plata.
En este seminario los investigadores extranjeros invitados serán: Cristiana Oghina-Pavie, (Universidad de Angers, Grupo TEMOS-FRE CNRS, Francia), Franck Laurent (Universidad de Le Mans, Francia), Alma Hanning (Universidad de Bonn, Alemania) y Amandine Pequignot (Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de Paris, Francia).
El seminario es gratuito,sin inscripción y será en español e inglés. Está organizado por el Archivo Histórico del Museo de La Plata y el Proyecto Rise SciCoMove, financiado por la Unión Europea a través de su programa Horizonte 2020 para la investigación e innovación científica y el subsidio Marie Sklodowska-Curie.
¿Cómo llegan los objetos a los museos? ¿Qué viajes hicieron antes de ocupar un lugar en una vitrina o en un depósito? ¿En qué contexto fueron colectados? ¿Quién los adquiere, quién los cede, quién define cómo reunirlos, por qué se descartan? Algunas de esas preguntas llevaron a las historiadoras de la ciencia y de los museos Irina Podgorny y Nathalie Richard, investigadora del CONICET y de la Universidad de Le Mans respectivamente, a proponer un proyecto SciCoMove a la Unión Europea para estudiar estas cuestiones inherentes a la constitución de las colecciones de los museos de arqueología y de historia natural.
Foto: Adriana Miranda/ gentileza investigadora
A poco más de un año de su puesta en marcha en mayo de 2021, Podgorny señala: “A veces se piensa que un museo de provincia es algo local, de alcance limitado, nosotras destacamos que los museos, no importa dónde estén, funcionan en red con otros y con personas e instituciones que, a veces, trascienden las fronteras del país donde se encuentran. Los primeros resultados del proyecto lo confirman”.
Tal como indica la investigadora, el proyecto, a través del quehacer histórico, apunta a “dar vida a colecciones que quedaron olvidadas o que se descartaron porque perdieron la información asociada a ellos. Es decir, apuntamos a conectar las colecciones con los archivos y las bibliotecas ya que los objetos no hablan solos sino a través de la investigación. Nos interesa mostrar la relevancia de la historia para los profesionales que hoy hacen ciencia con las colecciones. Sobre todo a través de la documentación que rastrea su origen y muestra cómo llegaron, por qué se traspapelaron, quién los coleccionó, quién las hizo, cuándo y cómo. Se trata de proveer información que conecte esos objetos mudos con textos, personajes, ideas. Hay colecciones guardadas sin ningún archivo emparentado, o que han perdido hasta sus etiquetas: los historiadores podemos colaborar a reconstruir sus itinerarios tanto dentro como fuera del museo. Hay objetos que responden a los intereses de la ciencia del pasado y hoy, desechados de su uso, se desconoce para qué servían o cómo, por qué llegaron hasta allí. ¿Qué podemos hacer? Darles vida a través de la investigación histórica”.
Un componente central del proyecto son las misiones en el extranjero. “Gracias a ellas, este grupo interdisciplinario, con base en distintos países y con conocimientos diferentes, intercambia información sobre las piezas para que los museos y los investigadores puedan hacer algo con ello”.
En el marco de esos viajes, Susana García, investigadora del CONICET en la Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata, integrante de este y otros proyectos dirigidos por Podgorny, tuvo la oportunidad de trabajar en los museos de Barcelona y de Le Mans sobre las colecciones de mulitas y peludos y los canastos que, a inicios del siglo pasado, se hacían con la coraza y la cola de estos animales como souvenir para los turistas. “Gracias a este proyecto, constaté que los ejemplares usados en algunos canastos no pertenecían a la especie comercializada desde Texas sino a una de la región pampeana. Por lo visto, en nuestro país alguien se aprovechó de esta moda para fabricar y comercializar el mismo objeto que se manufacturaba en la frontera mexicana”, señala García.
Hacia 2024, cuando el proyecto finalice, se realizará una exhibición digital de algunos objetos que incluyen piezas prehistóricas francesas y colecciones de insectos sudamericanos. Por otro lado, en 2022 se realizaron varios talleres y cursos sobre la historia de las colecciones de cráneos, las falsificaciones y las réplicas. Estos favorecen el intercambio entre los profesionales pero también apuntan a la formación de los doctorandos que forman parte de los equipos de trabajo.
During the Training Session in La Plata in July 2022, its participants took part in a poster competition. Divided into five groups and given exciting topics to explore, as well as some guidelines on what constitutes a visually appealing poster, they embarked on the journey of concise writing and visual communication.
The results were varied and reflected vividly the creativity and imagination of each group. The same stands true for the discussions that followed the presentations of the posters. Choosing the winner was not easy and the elaborations lasted for much longer than the planned one hour. It was so difficult that it led to the jury renouncing on the idea of selecting only one winner so each poster was celebrated for its qualities and each group received congratulations from the teaching staff.
In 1876 Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), a professor of Forensic Medicine and Public Hygiene at the University of Turin and widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern criminology, published the first edition of The Criminal Man, one of the most famous criminological treatises ever written. In his book, Lombroso claimed that criminals were a subspecies of the human race and that they exhibited distinct physical and mental features than law-abiding individuals, such as unusual shapes of the skull, the presence of tattoos and a lack of moral sense. According to Lombroso, criminal behavior was not the result of a free will, but of a biological predisposition. Criminals were basically “throwbacks” to an earlier stage of human evolution, modern primitive men unable to control their violent and immoral instincts. The theory of the “born criminal” travelled all over the world and had an enormous influence on nineteenth century European culture, even though it had no scientific basis. This does not mean, however, that Lombroso did not encounter resistance to his ideas.
This was particularly true in France, where Lombroso’s theories were rejected by the two leading representatives of the French School of criminology: Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), magistrate and director of the Justice Ministry’s statistical service in Paris, and Alexander Lacassagne (1843-1924), professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of Lyons. Unlike Lombroso, both scholars explained crime in sociological rather than biological terms. Tarde denied the existence of a “born criminal” marked by a cluster of physical anomalies and maintained that the similarities between offenders derived from their belonging to the same professional group. In Tarde’s view, criminality was a learned behavior that resulted primarily from the interaction with disadvantaged social environments rather than the product of a biological predisposition. Similarly, Lacassagne dismissed Lombroso’s atavistic explanation of crime and stressed the importance of poor living conditions in the etiology of crime. ‘The social milieu – he wrote – is the culture medium of crime; the microbe is the criminal, an element which only becomes active when it finds the medium to make it ferment’ (Lacassagne quoted from Renneville 2014).
While the reception of Lombroso’s theories in France has been the subject of numerous studies in recent years, the way in which they were received by less known actors and in more peripheral contexts is still worth investigation. One interesting case study in this regard is represented by the learned society of Le Mans. Founded in 1761 by a royal decree of Louis XV, the Society of Agriculture, Sciences, and Arts of Sarthe is the oldest learned society in the Sarthe region. In 1840 it launched its own journal, which continues to be published to the present day. An analysis of all the volumes of the Bulletin published from 1840 to 1927 seems to reveal that Lombroso’s ideas did not spark much debate in the local scientific community. In fact, only one article refers to the controversial theories of the Italian scientist. The text was published in 1890 by Paul Hervé, a physician at the local hospital and a member of the Sarthe’s learned society, and reported the content of a communication he had presented a few months earlier to the Medical society of Le Mans. The article, which was entitled Essai sur la suggestion mentale (Essay on Thought Transmission), quoted the testimonies of several men of science of unquestionable credibility who had witnessed firsthand apparently inexplicable phenomena of thought transmission, mental telepathy and hypnosis, and concluded that the latter should be made the subject of serious scientific investigations. In the final bibliography, Hervé included two works written by Lombroso: the 1889 French translation of L’Homme de génie (The Man of Genius) and the 1886 second Italian edition of Studi sull’ipnotismo (Studies on Hypnotism). In addition to studying crime and criminals, Lombroso became in fact very interested in spiritualism, mediumship and hypnosis, publishing several works on the topic and even attending séances presided over by the world-famous medium Eusepia Palladino, an experience that produced a strong impression on him. After outlining the main theories that had been formulated hitherto to explain thought transmission, Hevré went on to discuss whether this phenomenon could be considered the product of a pathological condition. After all, he noted, most of the subjects involved in these experiments suffered from nervous disorders, hysteria in particular. Although he discarded this hypothesis, Hevré quoted in a footnote a passage from Lombroso’s L’Anthropologie criminelle et ses récents progrès (Criminal anthropology and its recent progress), in which the Italian criminal anthropologist had claimed that genius was often associated with pathology, especially with epilepsy and degeneration:
The fact that genius is frequently derived from parents either addicted to drink, of advanced age, or insane, certainly points to this conclusion, as also does the appearance of genius subsequently to lesions of the head. It is also indicated by frequent anomalies, especially of cranial asymmetry; the capacity of the skull being sometimes excessive, sometimes abnormally small; by the frequency of moral insanity, and of hallucinations; by sexual and intellectual precocity, and not rarely by somnambulism. To these we may add the prevalence of suicide, which is, on the other hand, very common among epileptic patients
(Lombroso 1890, pp. 110-111)
Cesare Lombroso attending a séance in Milan in 1908. Salt print photo. Credits: Cesare Lombroso Museum of Criminal Anthropology
In conclusion, an analysis of the Bulletin de la Société d’ agriculture, sciences et arts de la Sarthe seems to confirm that French scientists and physicians adopted a rather hostile attitude towards Lombroso’s theories. However, the article by Paul Harvé shows that Lombroso’s publication were read and discussed not only in intellectually thriving cities like Paris and Lyons, but also in more peripheral locations like Le Mans.
Selected bibliography
Paul Hevré, “Essai sur la suggestion mentale”, Bulletin de la Société d’ agriculture, sciences et arts de la Sarthe, 24 (1889), pp. 357-424.
Cesare Lombroso, L’anthropologie criminelle et ses récent progrès, Paris, Felix Alcan, 1890.
Marc Renneville, “Exploring the History of French Criminology (1885-1939): the Case of the Archives de l’Anthropologie Criminelle”, Criminocorpus, 2014, http://journals.openedition.org/criminocorpus/2753
Francesco Paolo de Ceglia, Lorenzo Leporiere, “Becoming Eusapia: The Rise of the ‘Diva of Scientists’” Science in Context 33, 4 (2020), pp. 441–71. doi:10.1017/S026988972100020X.
Carlos S. Alvarado, Massimo Biondi, “Cesare Lombroso on Mediumship and Pathology”, History of Psychiatry 28, 2 (2017), pp. 225–241. doi:10.1177/0957154X16686904.
By Silvano Montaldo, Cesare Lombroso Museum of Criminal Anthropology, University of Turin
The circulation of the technical knowledge of the scientific police is an example of the technological transfer between the two sides of the Atlantic, and of the existing tensions in the field of positivist criminology. The important body of letters received by Juan Vucetich (La Plata, Museo Policial) from European correspondents is an eloquent demonstration of this. His personal identification system, which replaced Bertillon’s anthropometric measurements with the collection of fingerprints, was adopted by the Italian forensic police after it spread to Latin America. In this process, what was weakened was the anthropological perspective of Lombrosian criminology, with its baggage of signs of degeneration and atavism, while a new perspective of institutionalization of scientific knowledge by the state was opening up.
On 10 December 2021, the three researchers went to present SciCoMove at the Historical Museum and the Ameghino House in Luján.
The Complejo Museográfico Provincial Enrique Udaondo incorporates the Museo Colonial e Histórico, which has a very interesting history. Founded by Enrique Udaondo (1880–1962) in 1918, this museum grew out of the transformation of its founder’s private collection into a public one; later its collections have been expanded through numerous donations and purchases of other private collections gathered by national history amateurs. Udaondo himself is quite a representative of amateur scholars, who collected the past often in a troubled political context and with partisan intentions. Belonging to the conservative circles, he collected traces of Argentina’s “colonial” past and did not radically oppose this past to the history of Argentina after its independence (María Elida Blasco, Un museo para la colonia. El Museo Histórico y Colonial de Luján, Rosario, Prohistoria ediciones, 2011). This scholar can be compared to his French counterparts who collected traces of France’s pre-revolutionary past after 1789 and whose private collections often enriched national or local public museums, such as the Musée Carnavalet in Paris (see Tom Stammers, The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris c.1790–1890, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020). Exchanges with the museum’s management team were very productive and allowed to widen the reach of the SciCoMove project. The Historical Museum might be interested in the virtual exhibition prototype that will be produced at the end of the project, as well as in the MOOC for its staff.
From left to right: Mauricio Cano, Viviana Melloni de Mallol, Irina Podgorny, Nathalie Richard and Silvano Montaldo
Luján is also the city where the family of the naturalist Florentino Ameghino (1853–1911), coming from Italy, settled when he was still an infant. This paleontologist, author of a theory that made Argentina the cradle of the human species, was transformed into an Argentine national hero (Irina Podgorny, “Florentino Ameghino entre Luján et Moscou (1911–1954)”, Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, 36/2020, 79-102, https://doi.org/10.4000/rhsh.4654; Irina Podgorny, Florentino Ameghino y Hermanos, Buenos Aires, Edhasa, 2021). His family home has become a small museum. The SciCoMove researchers met the museum team, and Irina Podgorny and Nathalie Richard were interviewed for a video dedicated to Ameghino on the city’s website. This visit was an opportunity to present the SciCoMove project and the local press reported on it.
Le 10 décembre, les trois chercheurs sont allés présenter SciCoMove au Musée historique et à la Maison Ameghino de Luján.
De gauche à droite : Mauricio Cano, Viviana Melloni de Mallol, Irina Podgorny, Nathalie Richard et Silvano Montaldo
Le Complejo Museográfico Provincial Enrique Udaondo intègre un Museo Colonial e Histórico dont l’histoire est très intéressante. Fondé par Enrique Udaondo (1880-1962) en 1918, ce musée historique est issu de la transformation de la collection privée de son fondateur en collection publique et ses collections se sont accrues grâce à de nombreux dons ou achats de collections privées rassemblées par des amateurs d’histoire nationale. Udaondo lui-même est tout à fait représentation des érudits amateurs, qui collectionnent le passé, souvent dans un contexte politique troublé et avec des intentions partisanes. Appartenant aux milieux conservateurs, il collectionne les traces du passé « colonial » de l’Argentine et n’oppose pas radicalement ce passé à l’histoire de l’Argentine après son indépendance (María Elida Blasco, Un museo para la colonia.El MuseoHistórico y Colonial de Luján, Rosario, Prohistoria ediciones, 2011). Cet érudit conservateur peut être comparés à ceux qui, en France, ont collecté les traces du passé prérévolutionnaire après 1789 et dont les collections privées sont venues enrichir souvent les musées publics nationaux ou locaux, tel le Musée Carnavalet à Paris (voir Tom Stammers, The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris c. 1790–1890, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020). Les échanges avec l’équipe de direction du Musée ont été très enrichissant et ont permis de faire connaître SciCoMove à ce musée qui pourrait être intéressé par le prototype d’exposition virtuelle qui sera produit en fin de projet, et par le Mooc pour son personnel.
Luján est aussi la ville où la famille du naturaliste Florentino Ameghino (1853-1911), venue d’Italie, s’est établie alors qu’il était encore un nourrisson. Ce paléontologue, auteur d’une théorie qui fait de l’Argentine le berceau de l’espèce humaine, a été érigé en héros national argentin (Irina Podgorny, « Florentino Ameghino entre Luján et Moscou (1911-1954) », Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines [En ligne], 36 | 2020, 79-102, https://doi.org/10.4000/rhsh.4654 ; Florentino Ameghino y Hermanos, Buenos Aires, Edhasa, 2021). Sa maison famille a été transformée en petit musée. Les chercheurs du projet ont été reçu par l’équipe en charge de cette structure, et Irina Podgorny et Nathalie Richard ont été interviewées afin d’intégrer leurs propos dans une vidéo consacrée à Ameghino qui sera valorisée sur le site de la ville. Cette visite a été l’occasion de présenter le projet SciCoMove et la presse locale en a rendu compte.
Nathalie Richard (Le Mans University), and Silvano Montaldo (Lombroso Museum, University of Turin) are now in La Plata.
Cast Skeleton of Diplodocus Carnegii, Museo De La Plata, Argentina (photograph by S. Montaldo).
Silvano Montaldo is working, with the help of the anthropology and Museum Archive teams at La Plata, on the circulation of Cesare Lombroso’s ideas on physical anthropology and criminology in Argentina (case study). He discovered some interesting archives in the La Plata Police Museum. This museum keeps the archives of Juan Vucetich, who devised a system of fingerprint identification in the 1890’s, and was in contact with Lombroso.
Nathalie Richard is working with the La Plata Museum team and the team at the Museum Archive, on communication and dissemination. She helps planning the training session on “archives and collections”, designed for PhD students (July 4-8 2022). Together with the La Plata teams, she is selecting interesting specimens and archive files, attesting to the circulation of collections between Europe and Argentina, which could be included in the mooc and the digital exhibition.
James Lloyd was an amateur botanist author of local floras in western France. He gathered an important herbarium from 1838 to 1895 and was in correspondence with several important botanists of this period, such as François Crépin (1830–1903).
James Lloyd, 1865. Gadeceau, “Notice sur les travaux et la vie de James Lloyd » in Annales de la Société académique de Nantes et du département de la Loire-Inférieure, vol. 7 sér.7, Nantes, Mellinet, 1896, p. 205.
James Lloyd was born in England in 1811. When he was six years old, he left England to live in France, in Thouaré near Nantes,where James’s mother, Elisa Lake, married M. Ranson. Very interested in music and horticulture, he begun to study botany on his own in Nantes in 1835, using De Candolle’s flora.
In 1844, on the basis of his herbaria and the plants sent by many amateurs of botany, he published a local flora (Flore de la Loire-Inférieure). In 1854, this flora was extended to western France with the Flore de l’Ouest de la France.
James Lloyd was very interested in algae. His library contained several books on algae, published by European specialists between 1818 and 1850. He probably collected his first algae with his stepfather, M. Ranson. He collected algae for exsiccatae.
Exsiccatae were part of the process of the commodification of sciences. They enabled botanists to gather plants from all over the world without travelling and to access types confirmed by specialists without going to national museums. Exsiccatae were a specific type of collection created at the end of the 18th century to increase the circulation of types of botanical specimens.
The exsiccata is a specific genre of scientific output between the herbaria and the book. It would be edited by a botanist who produced several identical herbaria, containing the same set of species. They were considered scientific references because plants’ names were confirmed by well-known botanists or because they contained descriptions and types of new species. Unlike books or scientific illustrations, exsiccatae contained real plants, presenting both the characteristics of the species and the idiosyncratic particularities of the specimen. They enabled more precise observations and comparisons. Below each plant, a printed label indicated the title of the collection and its author’s name, the name of the species, it’s author, and sometimes the place and date of collecting.
Muséum de sciences naturelles d’Angers. Fonds James Lloyd – Algues de l’Ouest de la France, n°209 – Gloiosiphonia capillaris Glam
James Lloyd contributed to the exsiccata Algues marines du Finistère edited in 1852 by two brothers, Pierre-Louis (1798–1871) and Hippolyte-Marie (1802–1871) Crouan, pharmacists from Brest. This exsiccata was published in 50 exemplars and contained 404 species of algae. Some of its content was collected by James Lloyd, who was at the same time making his own exsiccata, Algues de l’Ouest de la France, began in 1847.
This collection was composed of twenty-four volumes of herbaria and made on subscription: buyers had to pay before receiving it, partly to finance James Lloyd travels to gather algae. He collected 83 percent of the specimens published in this collection. Fourteen collectors took part in the project. Some of them were specialists of algae, such as Gustave Thuret and Edouard Bornet; others were amateurs or Lloyd’s friends.
Specimens were carefully collected: they had to be similar, collected at the same phase of development (flowers, fruits, etc.), with visible organs. To make the various exemplars of the exsiccatae, collectors had to pick up many specimens of the same species (sometimes 50, sometimes several hundreds). This was a problem for rare species: some of them were collected in different places in order to get enough specimens without damaging or threatening the presence of the species in the localities. It was the case for the Nytophyllim punctatum var. ocellatum collected in Belle-Ile and le Croisic, even if the number of specimens from le Croisic were finally sufficient.
This exsiccata was published in few exemplars, from 1847 to 1894. Some of them were bought by local amateurs (Bourgault-Ducoudray, Mme Mosneron du Pin, etc.); others were acquired by well-known botanists, such as Gustave Thuret. One teacher of botany at the University of Uppsala, Johan Erhard Areschoug (1811–1887), asked James Lloyd to send him an exemplar of the exsiccata, but no exemplar is conserved in Uppsala now. Nowadays, some of them are conserved at Harvard, Oxford, Paris, Autun, Nancy, and Montpellier. Those collections increased the circulation of specimens collected by amateurs.
Bibliography
DAYRAT B., Les botanistes et la flore de France, trois siècles de découvertes, Paris, Publications scientifiques du Muséum, 2003, pp. 407–416.
DIXON P.S., “Notes on important algal herbaria”, British Phycological Bulletin, 3(2), 1967, pp. 213–218.
LAMY D., « Le savoir botanique par les herbiers », Colloque « Voyages en botanique », 16 et 17 juin 2005, Besançon, en ligne sur www.livre-franchecomte.org, pp. 1–13.
LAMY D., « Les herbiers de plantes cryptogames : méthodes, emplois, perspectives » in PIERREL R. et J.-P. REDURON (ed), Les herbiers : un outil d’avenir. Tradition et modernité, Actes du colloque de Lyon, 20–22 novembre 2002, Villers-lès-Nancy, 2004, pp. 30–39.
ROUILLARD T., BAZAN S., et COUEFFE L., « L’exsiccata des Algues de l’Ouest de la France du botaniste nantais James Lloyd », Bulletin de la Société d’éetudes scientifiques de l’Anjou, 2019, pp. 153–181.
STAFLEU F. A. and R. S. COWAN, 1976-1988 Taxonomic literature: A selective guide to botanical publications and collections with dates, commentaries and types, vol. III Lh-O, Utrecht, Bohn, Scheltema & Holkema, 1981, pp. 127–128.
STAFLEU F. A. and R. S. COWAN, 1976-1988 Taxonomic literature: A selective guide to botanical publications and collections with dates, commentaries and types, vol. I A-G, Utrecht, Bohn, Scheltema & Holkema,1976, pp. 569–570.
Our project participates in the Le Mans edition of the 2021 European Researchers’ Night. It is a Europe-wide public event, which displays the diversity of science and its impact on citizens’ daily lives in fun, inspiring ways.
The event will take place on Friday 24 September 2021 at the Place des Quinconces from 18:00 to 23:00.
The European Researchers’ Night aims to:
bring research and researchers closer to the public
promote excellent research projects across Europe and beyond
increase the interest of young people in science and research careers
showcase the impact of researchers’ work on people’s daily lives
Nathalie Richard will present the project via an interactive game that will make you travel around the world to discover the hidden treasures of natural history museums and collections.
Come to learn about what we do and share our passion for research!