KATEGORIALE SAMLINGER: Eller hvordan man fik indført en vis orden i universet i det 18. århundredes

Resumé

Following the zoologists of eighteenthcentury

Britain from the field to the study

this article investigates how animals

were categorised in the grand taxonomic

systems of the day. The article analyses the

epistemological, social and cosmological

underpinnings of this particular kind of

classificatory collections, showing both how

the notions of specimens, species, genera,

orders and classes of the taxonomic systems

as well as the methods of categorisation

were culturally framed, and how the categorisation

of animals entailed a categorisation of

humans well. The article hence deals with the

categorial collections of eighteenth-century

zoology from the vantage points of both a

history of science and an anthropology of the

“totemic” perspective.