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secured, such studies cannot definitively reconstitute phenotypic expression
(Weiner, 2010: 46-52, 56-59, 207-212). More generally, despite recent phenom-
enological interest in the (human) body, relatively few interpretive archaeologists
have explored how their discipline could apprehend past biological characteristics
or processes (Whitehouse, 2011: 227).
Outhouses and ontology
The year 1870, therefore, represents a rupture in the ontology of both katipos and
redbacks. From that moment on, the encoding of these Latrodectus congeners
within the scientific literature, coupled with the capture of type specimens,
effectively ensured their objective existence as a species. I invoke here the process
of 'objectivity' as theorised by philosopher of science Lorraine Daston. Daston has
elaborated the operation of science as the conjunction of instruments and a
community of trained observers who - by their consensual acknowledgement of
what constitutes reliable data - permit the existence of entities, from cloud shapes
to pathogenic bacteria. Drawing upon the seminal work of fellow philosophers
Ludwik Fleck and Ian Hacking, Daston posits this process as historical ontology,
as a means by which entities can be conceived to exist within a historical milieu
(see Daston, 2000: 1-14; Daston and Galison, 2007: 1-53; Hacking, 2002: 1-26;
Latour, 2000: 247-269).
But scientists are not the only community privileged to determine what can or
cannot exist. Furthermore, their tools and techniques are not the only means by
which 'real' entities come into being. As Thomas Anderson Stuart, Dean of the
University of Sydney's Faculty of Medicine, observed in 1894: 'Records of cases
of [ Latrodectus ] bite in man are neither numerous nor complete in the medical
literature of Australasia, while the stories of the spiders are known to everyone'
(Stuart, 1894: 10). Although there must be points of concordance that 'realise' and
stabilise an entity within a historical moment, those points themselves can be
subjective, quotidian or ephemeral. Amid the intersections of Latrodectus spiders
with Indigenous and settler cultures, several such elements proved critical to the
ontology of these arachnids.
Three specific characteristics of these spiders ensured that they became visible
against a cultural background of general indifference to arthropods. Foremost was
the subjective experience of envenomation. In 1870, New Zealand ornithologist
Walter Buller observed of katipo bites that 'According to the natives, the common
symptoms are an aching pain in the part bitten, which soon becomes much swollen
and inflamed; then a copious sweat, and a feeling of intense languor and depression
of spirits' (Buller, 1870: 32). Other reported symptoms included fever, migratory
sweating and localised erection of body hairs. Nevertheless, both katipo and
redback bites were primarily characterised nociceptively - as the embodied
experience of pain. Until 1900, however, New Zealanders generally described this
pain as more excruciating than accounts arising in the Australian colonies.
Furthermore, while 15 per cent of katipo bites from 1844 to 1918 were reportedly
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