| Summary: | The second voyage of the HMS Beagle (1831-1836) offers an illuminating case study for contextualising the British Empire’s efforts to secure access and sanction control over natural and cultural resources located in distant regions of the globe. Attempts to obtain this power took the form of extractive collecting, activities which allowed colonial administrators and scientists to dictate ownership over the existence and mortality of nature. In this article, I explore the concept of extraction as an enduring set of actions and processes by which biocultural collections were assembled and transported from the Global South to repositories in the European metropole. Broadly defined, biocultural collections may be ‘ethnobiological specimens, artefacts and documents – plant, animal and cultural – that represent dynamic relationships among peoples, biota, and environments’. Examples from the Beagle expedition include fossils, botanical specimens, surveying maps, artistic portraits, field journals, weapons, animal skins, geological samples, etc. Preserved in the collections of museums and archives, these artefacts reveal a Western positionality, a ‘biopolitics’ of extraction, which is built upon a situated, partial knowledge that portrays the extractive collecting of life as scientific objectivity. Consequently, the violent history of the possession of natural worlds and the loss experienced by the living communities of the Americas and Pacific remains obscured.
Via an examination of a positionality based upon a biopolitics of extractive collecting, I shall discuss the means and methods employed to accumulate and justify the extensive removal of biocultural resources under empire. Beginning with a brief overview of Michel Foucault’s philosophy of ‘biopower,’ I outline how colonial extraction, manifested in the various forms used to collect and export biocultural artefacts, may correspond with Foucault’s interpretations of power and knowledge. Next, I draw upon a particularly impactful example, a bolas stone acquired by Charles Darwin during the Beagle voyage, to consider how fieldwork merged anthropology and natural science to theorise natural and cultural landscapes together. Finally, I shall consider the possibility that a form of ‘salvage ecology’ emerged alongside nineteenth-century salvage anthropology to rationalise, via extinction narratives, colonialist extractive policies. Displayed as neutral scientific objects, natural history collections evince a paradoxical ‘living death,’ the continuation of a legacy of power over life; yet they also await the meaning to be found in surrendering these remnants of imperial control.
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