Hunting and Masculine Knowledge: A Swiss Naturalist in South America and the Coloniality of Nineteenth-Century Science

During the mid-nineteenth century, the shifting boundaries of natural history and hunting practices were at the core of debates about general and practical knowledge, science and leisure, hunters and poachers. Focusing on the Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob von Tschudi and his travels to South America, this article reexamines the relationships of natural history and hunting skills in forging a kind of scientific “hegemonic” masculinity. For this purpose, it reconstructs Tschudi’s social formation in bourgeois circles during the institutionalization of natural history in Switzerland. More than his natural history knowledge, Tschudi’s hunting skills were crucial for the success of his Peruvian expedition (1838–1842), and thus his zoological treatise Fauna peruana could be considered a manual for hunting in the Amazonian rainforest and the Andes. Finally, this article analyzes the class and race intersections of Tschudi’s scientific discourse about poachers in the German states and in the Brazilian empire. The study of Tschudi’s biography, especially his roles as a global naturalist and a “true hunter,” sheds light on natural history as a space for constructing class, gender, and race hierarchies during the mid-nineteenth century, in both South American and German-speaking contexts.