<i>La febbre dei fossili</i>. Pedro de Angelis y el carácter transaccional de la ciencia

Abstract

This paper reconstructs the circuits in which data, information, and bones were exchanged as objects of transactions that linked the European and South American worlds, demonstrating how the scientific endeavors cannot be separated from the commerce of local products. It looks at the agents and the dynamics of the mobilization of these objects. After the dissolution of the Spanish colonial bureaucracy and in the absence of a new State, these things became goods of trade to circulate among antiquaries and dealers in natural history, generating new objects of inquiry of controversial existence. Second, it reflects on the intellectual practices linked to the trade and circulation of bones, especially what I call the “transactional character” of the scientific enterprise. Transactions included the selling of intellectual authorship of the discovery of the bones, their arrangement into complete skeletons, and their classification. Finally, it argues that the protocols for observing and recording employed by different bureaucratic departments of state administration contributed to create a matrix that would be fortuitously incorporated into the practices of the new discipline of paleontology.