Groups audience:
Dear members of the Collection Ecologies working group,
Please be reminded on our next meeting which is held later today May 9, 2024 at 12:00pm EDT / 6pm CEST!
--
This time will welcome Brooke Penaloza-Patzak (University of Vienna) & Tamara Fernando (Stony Brook University) who will present their new paper on :
"Archiving Mollusks, Articulating Difference: Mollusks as Scientific Objects in Studies of Human Difference".
The presenters have kindly accepted to share their unpublished paper which is now available from the working group's main page. Please be sure not to circulate it as it is work-in-progress.
Abstract : Mollusks and their traces—fossil, food, refuse, commodity or bijouterie—are found from the heights of Prebético to the depths of the Gulf of Mannar, from the rivers of Unalaska to Hispaniola’s Bloodwood branches and nearly everywhere in between. The history of mollusk-based research intertwines environmental spaces, geologic eras, forms of knowledge, and ways of knowing. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, this strand of research also became deeply imbricated in studies of human development. This paper looks at how William Healey Dall (1845-1927) and James Hornell (1865-1949), naturalists from two consecutive generations working for unrelated extractive colonial ventures in dramatically different environs, brought natural history practices and frameworks used to study mollusk anatomy, distribution, classification, and development to bear on questions of human origin and cultural development. In both cases, colonial projects awakened by commercial and political interest in specific environs produced opportune circumstances for scientists enlisted to survey and monitor natural resources to turn their attention to human culture and development. Interweaving methods and considerations from the history of science, environmental studies, and museum anthropology, we take Dall’s Strait-based research and Hornell’s undertaken in the Gulf of Mannar as points of entry to discuss how and why specimen-based research facilitated the transfer of theories and practices between what we now consider the natural and human sciences, ethnology in particular, and how these and others projects like them endeavored to legitimize “expert” as opposed to indigenous knowledge about indigenous life and the material matter of the sea.
The following meeting will be held on June 13. We will receive Katherine Arnold (RCC, LMU München) who will present "The Will of the Welwitsch: Collections as the Object of a Transnational Legal Battle".
Looking forward to meeting you again soon!
Catarina, Déborah and Nuala