The World as We Know It. Sclater’s Six-Region Model and the Life Sciences, 1858 to Today
Most research in biogeography today is based on a 146-year-old model that divides the world into six regions. These so-called Sclaterian regions were originally proposed by lawyer and zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater on the basis of the global distribution of birds, and subsequently adopted across the life sciences. They became the foundation for research into the geographic distribution of living organisms, which in turn, became a component of one of the nineteenth century’s most contested scientific phenomena: Evolution. Today most biologists take the existence of the Sclaterian regions for granted, yet they are the product of centuries of classificatory work on living organisms, experimental research into the environment’s influence on their behavior and physical appearance, and negotiations of the epistemic borders of scientific disciplines. The Sclaterian regions are, in short, a powerful yet little-researched scientific tool of extraordinary endurance. Brooke Penaloza-Patzak researches how and why the Sclaterian regions came to entwine different fields of inquiry and animate hierarchical notions about the origins and development of humans and other animals.
Associate Researcher at ifk
Brooke Penaloza-Patzak is a historian interested in the social, material, economic, and environmental aspects of scientific practice and knowledge production and is currently completing her first book, entitled With Objects at Hand. The Rise and Fall of the Natural Science of Human Culture, 1860–1930. From 2022–23 she was a visiting researcher at the University of Vienna Institute for Economic and Social History, and at the Department for the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania from 2020–2022. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from, among others, the American Museum of Natural History, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austrian Science Fund, Max Plank Institute for the History of Science, and Smithsonian Institution. She received her PhD from the University of Vienna, Department of History, MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture from Bard Graduate Center in New York City, and BFA with a concentration in Byzantine-style panel painting from the New York State College of Ceramics.
mit Claudia Wedepohl, »Franz Boas and Aby Warburg: The Complete Correspondence, 1895 to 1928«, in: West 86th. A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 30 (1) (2023): 70–90.
»Scientists and Specimens: Early Anthropology Networks in and between Nations and the Natural and Human Sciences«, in: David McCallum (Hg.), The Palgrave Handbook on the History of the Human Sciences, Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan 2022, 1651–1678, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7255-2_104.
»Friends in Deed: Allied in the Interwar Struggle for ‘German’ Science and Art«, in: Academies and World War I: The Aftermath, special issue of Acta Historical Leopoldina 78 (2021): 139–160.
»Capital Collections, Complex Systems: Vienna, Berlin, and Ethnographic Specimen Exchange in Trans-National fin de siècle Scientific Networks«, in: Mitchell Ash (Hg.), Science in the Metropolis,. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge 2020, 152–171, https://doi-org.uaccess.univie.ac.at/10.4324/9781003104865.
»An Emissary from Berlin: Franz Boas and the Smithsonian Institution, 1887«, in: Museum Anthropology 41 (1) (2018): 30–45, https://doi.org/10.1111/muan.12167.
Most research in biogeography today is based on a 146-year-old model that divides the world into six regions. These so-called Sclaterian regions were originally proposed by lawyer and zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater on the basis of the global distribution of birds, and subsequently adopted by researchers across the life sciences.