Towards decolonized terrariums? First conclusions from multi-site terrarium studies between Europe, Asia and Australia.

 
Invertebrates began to be imported from colonized and peripheral countries to the core during the period of the British Empire’s global dominance, especially in the Asian and African regions. Today, beetles from central Africa, spiders from India, butterflies from Indonesia, and hundreds of other types of tiny creatures from the Global South are being transported to Europe along the same routes. They are sent in parcels, packed in suitcases, carried on ships, and flown by plane. The full environmental and social consequences of this practice are impossible to estimate – uncontrolled harvesting, the transfer of invertebrates to new habitats, and the creation of species hybrids are just the tip of the iceberg. With seemingly endless invertebrate abundance and unmapping networks of relationships between them, all operations undertaken by individual terrarists, local governments, national governments, and international institutions are moving in the dark.
To understand the phenomenon of terrarium invertebrate breeding, one cannot limit oneself to examining practices in individual countries. First of all, one must look at the connections that created the necessary conditions for the emergence of contemporary global terrariums – from new media, through late capitalism, to the technology of the biological concept of species. What is the relationship between contemporary global terrariums and their colonial beginnings? Why are sculptures imitating Aztec, Inca or African structures so often placed in terrariums in Poland, but not in Australia? Can terrariums be local, or is it only a globalized practice? Who does an invertebrate that has never met a human belong to? During the seminar, I will present the preliminary results of multi-site field studies conducted in recent years in Poland, Australia, Thailand and Singapore. I will discuss the phenomenon of terrariums from a postcolonial perspective and analyze the ideological assumptions that underlie it.

Juliusz Galiński is a student of ethnology and cultural anthropology as well as Mongolian studies and Tibetology as part of his second-cycle studies at the MISH College of the University of Warsaw. He is currently working on a grant under the “Excellence Initiative – Research University” on a research internship at the Australian National University in Canberra. As part of the project, he is researching Australian terrariums, comparing them with Polish terrariums. He is primarily involved in the study of invertebrates and the relationships between them and people. In his earlier research, he looked at the relationships between people and bees, and the results of his work were published in “Etnografia Polska” (Galiński 2023). Juliusz is a member of Collegium Invisibile.