A workshop on Mounted Zoological Specimens
Research projects pertaining to „sensitive objects” – that is, to objects stolen or taken from their place of origin in the name of scholarship in the era of high imperialism – abound. Notably their provenance is being increasingly (though hesitantly) examined since non-western communities (whether they are whole nation-states or smaller organizations) have been persistent, and are becoming increasingly vocal, that these valuable artifacts need to be returned. Increasingly, projects have come to realize that many natural history collections were amassed in the same era of imperial expansion – sometimes during the very same expeditions – as the currently disputed ethnographic material, i.e. cultural objects, art, and human remains. By focusing on animals and the complex sensitivities of nature collecting in high imperialism, this workshop would like to contribute to current historical research that seeks to counter the idea of the natural sciences as universal, spaceless, and transhistorical.
Our workshop addresses a series of questions pertaining to practices of gathering and preserving zoological specimen. It takes a collection of mounted zoological specimen at the University of Constance and collections at the Zoological Museum in Strasbourg as starting points for a broader conversation along three axes of reflection: While collecting and interpreting nature was a powerful exercise of scientific knowledge production and colonial domestication, there are more complex relationships hidden in these mounted animals pertaining to boundary work between humans and animals. A first endeavor is thus to explore current (post-humanist) discussions relating to the human—non-human animal divide and to make those bear on our objects of study. Second, our workshop wants to discuss these practices between humans and other animals as an activity which connected science with art, material techniques and craftsmanship with intellectual thought processes and knowledge production. Mounted specimen were created often with an aspiration to both make something beautiful and create something scientifically useful. Such inquiries compel us to go beyond the confines of the field of history of science, and to interdisciplinarily include questions from fields like art history, media studies, conservation and restauration studies, or anthropology, for instance. Third, and closely related to the conversations led by scholars and thinkers interested in human—animal relations, we wish to address the issue of violence, that is, the act of killing that was involved in the researchers’ encounters with animals in order to keep them, and to embed that violent relationship within the broader context of asymmetrical power structures that characterized the imperialist situation.
The Workshop
Our workshop takes place online, on two separate half-days. Contributions will be commented on by expert discussants, followed by seminar-style discussions. We chose this format to encourage intellectual exchange of work-in-progress projects.