Spring 2025 Colloquium - Whitney Robles
Title: The Anonymous Animal: Naming and Knowing in the Anthropocene
Abstract: Scientific nomenclature has a rich historiography. But what about the history of not naming species? Using the Comte de Buffon’s eighteenth-century description of an “anonymous animal” as a jumping-off point, this talk narrates the history of leaving species unnamed, considering the relationship between naming animals and killing them to generate so-called type specimens. I argue that type specimens, although a genuine innovation in the nineteenth century, did not solve the muddy underlying ontological problems tied to naming. As a result, the anonymous animal never disappeared. I draw throughlines between present-day systematics and earlier eras of natural history, with a particular focus on the work of nineteenth-century marine zoologist John Vaughan Thompson. Current debates over specimens and naming show a reprise of the Buffonian struggle to distill ever-shifting species into discrete categories and labels.