Materialities and transnational scientific culture of objects: the 12th International Congress of Zoology, Lisbon, 1935

Abstract

The material memory of the 12th International Congress of Zoology, held in Lisbon in 1935 includes insignias – the starfish – and caricatures of zoologists. Through an investigation of the archives at the University of Lisbon’s National Museum of Natural History and Science, we intend to investigate the material landscape as conceived by the zoologist Artur Ricardo Jorge by drawing epistemologically on the potentialities of the biography of scientific objects. This research note reveals a scientific discourse translated into materialities circulated in public spaces in the globalized Europe of the 1930s, with references from scientific power, in the context of Portugal’s Estado Novo regime, enshrined in its 1933 constitution.

history; history of science; material culture of science; International Congress of Zoology