Panels

The Natural Lives of Cultural Things: Collecting Materials, Environments and Categories

Expert: James Delbourgo, Rutgers University

What is the relationship between what we think of as cultural objects and the natural environments from which they come? Histories of collecting, like modern museums, are usually organized by disciplinary categories such as science, natural history, anthropology, archaeology and art. But how can attention to the natural environments from which objects come shed new light on the processes by which they get valued and categorized? If historians of science have sought to restore the cultural context within which natural knowledge is made, how might we restore the natural context in which cultural knowledge is made? The rise of industrialization and imperialism between 1700 and 1900 produced unprecedented global mobility and contacts between different peoples, while fostering specializations of knowledge into new disciplines and institutions, notably including museum collections. By what practices were objects valued, represented (verbally and visually) and collected both through dealings with local populations and negotiating natural environments? What role did forms of materials science - whether vernacular or more formal judgments of specific materials' value - play for the formation of a basis for collecting what later came to be seen as primarily cultural artefacts? How, in other words, might we melt down conventional disciplinary divisions to reframe the history of collecting and see how acts of collection were interventions in natural environments that, in turn, produced judgments about natural materials, as well as cultural forms? Finally, how did the meanings of specific materials shift through relocation from collection sites to museums, and to what extent did such movement erase, preserve or invent associations between exotic materials, lands and peoples in the minds of metropolitan publics?

Scientific travels and the spaces and people in-between

Expert: Vanessa Smith, University of Sydney

There is now a long history of work on the implication of scientific voyaging in the establishment of European global Empire; however more recent scholarship, building on the insights of Kapil Raj in Relocating Modern Science, has shifted the focus to the intercultural constitution of scientific knowledge. Rather than a Latourian vision of European science emanating from "centres of calculation" in which Indigenous specimens were amassed and classified and local knowledges appropriated, Raj and others have set out "an alternative vision of the construction and spread of scientific knowledge through reciprocal, albeit asymmetric, processes of circulation and negotiation". This panel will focus on the transnational travel, networks and exchanges that produced scientific knowledge: that is, knowledge that would not have come into existence without documented intercultural encounter. We are interested both in work that engages with new archival materials or case-studies, and work that revisits existing accounts of European scientific discovery and assesses them in the light of these considerations. We envisage that both accounts of travel from Europe to outer Empire, and travels by colonial subjects to metropolitan centres will be of relevance to the discussion.

Imperial infrastructures and scientific travel as a collaborative endeavour

Expert: Bernhard C. Schär, ETH Zürich

Scientific expeditions into "unknown territories" developed simultaneously with imperial aspirations of European colonial powers from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards. On the one hand, they benefited from colonial infrastructure, such as trade fleets, support from colonial armies, plantation owners, and colonial administrators, who provided forced laborers, translators, local guides, and indigenous collectors. On the other hand, they provided cartographic, geographic, ethnographic, but also botanical or zoological knowledge, which was useful for economic exploitation and European rule in the colonies. Such entanglements between colonial infrastructures, colonial trade relations and exploration voyages enabled a rapid expansion in the presence of "scientific objects" in Europe, as well as the establishment of an appropriate infrastructure for the exploration of these objects: academies, museums, botanical gardens and universities. In recent studies on global history, the sciences are therefore seen both as a supporting pillar and as a product of colonialism.
In the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the practice and the organization of expeditions and exploration changed of course: from the journey of an encyclopaedic scholar, still embodied most recognizable by Alexander von Humboldt, they increasingly mutated into well-organized and firmly-lead expeditions of multi-disciplinary research teams - typically consisting of specialists in botany, geology, zoology and ethnography. However, specialization was not only visible and important for the European scientists but increasingly produced a large number of indigenous specialists from the colonized population who often remain anonymous. Researchers were also always involved in transnational communication networks in Europe and the colonies.
The studies envisioned for this panel could address the following questions: How did the relationship between expeditions and colonial infrastructure in play out in the different European empires?

Drawing and inscription as practices of mobilisation and insight

Expert: Joachim Rees, Freie Universität Berlin

Drawing and sketching took prominent positions among the practices which transcended the seen and the observed into flat and mobile units. The laborious and meticulous efforts to create, print and distribute images, as well as the passionate arguments among European scholars about quality, adequacy and usefulness of images, clearly show the enormous importance of drawings in the exploration of foreign environments. At the same time, the visual mobilization of both natural and social phenomena transferred the hitherto strange environment not only into an object of scientific knowledge, but also into an object of imperial and colonial governmentality and administration. After all, drawing was itself a form of knowledge production, as well as a key technique of the appropriation of the natural world. Thinking with the sketching hand was an important form of approaching objects and phenomena not only in the European studios, but also in the field. In addition to the practical conditions of drawing in the field, contributions to the collaboration between scholars and draughtsmen and -women, the professional self-understanding of draughtsmen and -women are very welcome. Furthermore, the epistemic significance of drawings, the media competition between preparation and drawing, as well as the different graphic representations and formats of drawings may also be addressed.