At the turn of the 21st century, repositories of natural history specimens reestablished the significance of their collections by designating them the new role of saving biodiversity in a decaying world. Ironically, the collections of these research centers have been intricately tied to histories of violence and ecological destruction. Developing imperial histories of natural history collections further, this twofold session brings together stories of extraction, preservation, and (scientific) knowledge production that attend to practices of killing, hunting, displacement, experimentation, looting, confinement, and care. The papers focus on different locations and species to analyze both the creation of knowledge in natural history and the preservation of animal specimens through the lens of violence. What can we learn about the multiple forms of violence through natural history specimens?
Part I: Taking focuses on the reconstruction of the political and logistical conditions that made the ‘taking’ of animal objects possible and which in turn were shaped by natural history practices. To what extent these histories of death and losses change our view of collections and museums? Starting with a microhistory of practices of killing animals in early 19th century South-Africa, Marie Muschalek analyses interspecies-relations in a context of colonial violence against humans and nature. Tamar Novick focuses on the story of two ostriches, captured and used to define the “Syrian ostrich” as a subspecies in 1919. She outlines a history of scientific research deeply entangled in European military interventions in the Middle East. The question of how natural history exploited war sites in the First and Second World War is at the center of Ina Heumann ‘s paper. Shira Shmuely examines the history of an orangutan dynasty to highlight the consequences of wildlife extraction and the loss of cultural knowledge among animals.