ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Collecting the empire. Natural history collections as committed colonial practice

• In Event: Science and Empire in the Anthropocene: Towards an Environmental Shift 2 - Making Imperial Worlds

English Abstract

The history of African territorial borders is riddled with violence, injustice, and colonial power displays. This paper shows how the history of collecting zoological specimens from specific colonized African localities is embedded in that same context and how museums of natural history are institutions implicated in histories of racial prejudice, imperial control, and territorial appropriation. Museum collections represent classic examples of accumulation sites, with images of rooms filled with objects up to ceiling feeding our collective imagination. Bruno Latour used the example of the Paris natural history museum to describe museums as sites of calculation and centers of accumulation, where a specific paradigm of information management and knowledge production is made possible. However, this view of natural history museums as privileged places overemphasizes Western institutions’ claims to authority. Since the eighteenth century, museum naturalists actively instigated the procurement of more specimens, from more collecting localities, often expressing an enumerative mania based on the premises of compared anatomy. Today, public European zoological collections demonstrate geographical sampling biases that are a function of colonial pursuit. Analysing Cameroonian collections of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and Angolan collections of the Zoological Museum of Lisbon, I confront scientific and political uses of “collecting localities.”

Author

• Catarina Marques Madruga, Technische Universität Berlin