Collection Ecologies

November 14, 2024 (***RESCHEDULED***)
 
Dr Katherine Arnold, Lecturer in Environmental History at University of Liverpool (UK)
 
Title: The Will of Welwitsch: African Botanical Collections and Ownership in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract:
Along the Atlantic coast of Namibia and Angola lies the Namib desert. Reported to mean ‘vast place’ and ‘an area where there is nothing’ in Khoekhoegowab, it contains some of the world’s driest regions and has been considered the oldest desert in the world. Amongst the Namib’s characteristic sand dunes, Austrian collector Friedrich Welwitsch became the first European to formally describe what would become one of the most famous plants ‘discovered’ in the nineteenth century - the Welwitschia mirabilis (Tumboa, n’tumbo [Angolan]). Welwitsch was so overwhelmed at first sight of the plant that he ‘could do nothing but kneel down […] and gaze at it, half in fear lest a touch should prove it a figment of the imagination’. The ‘discovery’ of Welwitschia made Welwitsch an overnight celebrity; European and colonial gardens vied for information and specimens from his unique Angolan collections. When he died in 1872, his will – written only two days before his death – threw European botany into chaos.
This paper will discuss the legal battle which ensued as a result of Welwitsch’s will, demonstrating how far European botanists would go to safeguard their power over the production of knowledge about plants and colonial environments. Though the will stated that a full set of his collections be left to the British Museum (Natural History), the expedition had been formally sponsored by the Portuguese government to investigate their colony of Angola. The King of Portugal (upon realizing their scientific value) brought a lawsuit against the British Museum in the English High Court. This became tangled by further extraneous animosities between the British Museum and Kew Gardens, as Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker eventually represented the Portuguese government’s side of the battle against the British Museum. This raises questions about what it meant to ‘own’ a collection, contributing to present debates about ownership in museums. This paper thus offers fascinating insights into what it meant to ‘control’ knowledge and the different actors and institutions who had a stake in that power in the nineteenth century.

Jules Skotnes-Brown, postdoctoral research fellow, University of St Andrews
&
Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva, postdoctoral research fellow, University of St Andrews.
 
Title : "Zoonotic Collecting” in Southern Africa and South America"
 
Abtract : Collections have played an important role in scientific understandings of diseases and their control in past and present, from anatomical collections assembled to study the natural history and taxonomies of human diseases, to zoological collections of disease reservoirs, to collections of microorganisms for pandemic preparedness, to teaching collections for the education of doctors, veterinarians, and lay publics. Extracting specimens, taxidermizing these, creating models and displaying them have been particularly important to the medical sciences. Simultaneously, outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics have played a critical, if underappreciated, role in the history of collecting. Outbreaks of zoonotic diseases provided zoologists with unprecedented funding and resources to collect rodents, mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, and microorganisms. Finally, specimen collecting itself has, at times, provoked fears that the act of capturing and transporting specimens might result in outbreaks of zoonotic disease, sparking new biosecurity and biopolitical measures.
This session brings together two short papers on the history of “zoonotic collecting”. Jules Skotnes-Brown shows how a series of natural history collecting expeditions into Namibia for the British and Amathole Museums (1923-1929) served epidemiological and public health purposes through surveying potential reservoirs of plague in the region, and their ecological relations with humans. Matheus Duarte shows how studies on plague led by the Argentinian expert José Maria de la Barrera in several countries of South America in the 1950s constructed new ideas about plague ecology in the continent and contributed to the circulation of the local fauna of rodents and insects in and beyond South America.
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** A set of suggested readings can be found at the bottom of this announcement **
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Jules Skotnes-Brown is a historian of science, animals and the environment, and a postdoctoral research fellow at University of St Andrews. His book, Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910-1948 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) is a more-than-human history of pests, science, and segregation. He is currently working on a history of rats, plague, and economic infrastructure, 1890s-1950s.
Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of St Andrews in the United Kingdom. His research focuses on the global history of microbiology, tropical medicine, and disease ecology. He co-edited the books Rural Disease Knowledge and Beyond Science and Empire.

Katherine Arnold, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU München 

Title: The Will of Welwitsch: Collections as the Object of a Transnational Legal Battle
Abstract:
Along the Atlantic coast of Namibia and Angola lies the Namib desert. Reported to mean ‘vast place’ and ‘an area where there is nothing’ in Khoekhoegowab, it contains some of the world’s driest regions and has been considered the oldest desert in the world. Amongst the Namib’s characteristic sand dunes, Austrian collector Friedrich Welwitsch became the first European to formally describe what would become one of the most famous plants ‘discovered’ in the nineteenth century - the Welwitschia mirabilis (Tumboa, n’tumbo [Angolan]). Welwitsch was so overwhelmed at first sight of the plant that he ‘could do nothing but kneel down […] and gaze at it, half in fear lest a touch should prove it a figment of the imagination’.[1] The ‘discovery’ of Welwitschia made Welwitsch an overnight celebrity; European and colonial gardens vied for information and specimens from his unique Angolan collections. When he died in 1872, his will – written only two days before his death – threw European botany into chaos.
This paper will discuss the legal battle which ensued as a result of Welwitsch’s will, demonstrating how far European botanists would go to safeguard their power over the production of knowledge about plants and colonial environments. Though the will stated that a full set of his collections be left to the British Museum (Natural History), the expedition had been formally sponsored by the Portuguese government to investigate their colony of Angola. The King of Portugal (upon realizing their scientific value) brought a lawsuit against the British Museum in the English High Court. This became tangled by further extraneous animosities between the British Museum and Kew Gardens, as Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker eventually represented the Portuguese government’s side of the battle against the British Museum. This raises questions about what it meant to ‘own’ a collection, contributing to present debates about ownership in museums. This paper thus offers fascinating insights into what it meant to ‘control’ knowledge and the different actors and institutions who had a stake in that power in the nineteenth century.
 

 
Archiving Mollusks, Articulating Difference: Mollusks as Scientific Objects in Studies of Human Difference

Brooke Penaloza-Patzak, Marie Jahoda Fellow, Inst. for Economic & Social History, University of Vienna
&
Tamara Fernando, Assistant Professor, Stony Brook University

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.

Please note the time change for this session!
 
Reevaluating Insects as Archives – Collection Ecologies as Multidisciplinary and Multipractice Conversation
Dominik Huenniger, German Port Museum, Hamburg
Karina Lucas Silva-Brandão, Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change
Christian Reiß, Regensburg University
Xiaoya Zhan, Nanyang Technological University

Abstract: 
Historically marginalized beings gain significance when networks of relations are redrawn through ecological sciences. These sciences are typically seen as working in or on “the field,” but natural history collections are used increasingly by scholars to readdress ecological questions. Natural history collections, understood as environments themselves, foreground both the materiality of specimens and the knowledges extracted from them in an ongoing discourse about the norms of scientific practices. Insects reevaluated as archives foreground possible sites of multidisciplinary research, with multifaceted potential for the history of science. With different disciplinary approaches to the study of small animals and the production of collections, history of science, archaeology, environmental history, and natural history are brought into conversation a forum on “Collection Ecologies” published in a Focus Section of Isis -  A Journal of the History of Science Society in March 2024. The participants of this exchange about collections as a web of relationships entailing regimes of value, epistemes of logistics, and bureaucratic and scientific practices explore how multidisciplinary knowledge of “natural” bodies can be formed around insect collections.  For the Collecion Ecologies CHSTM Working Group meeting they share their experience in collaborating on this forum.

 
"Captivity's Collections: Science, Natural History, and the British Transatlantic Slave Trade." 
 
Kathleen S. Murphy, Professor of History and Associate Dean for Student Success, California Polytechnic State University.
 
Abstract: 
Cashews from Africa's Gold Coast, butterflies from Sierra Leone, jalap root from Veracruz, shells from Jamaica—in the eighteenth century, these specimens from faraway corners of the Atlantic were tucked away onboard inhumane British slaving vessels. Kathleen S. Murphy argues that the era's explosion of new natural knowledge was deeply connected to the circulation of individuals, objects, and ideas through the networks of the British transatlantic slave trade. Plants, seeds, preserved animals and insects, and other specimens were gathered by British slave ship surgeons, mariners, and traders at slaving factories in West Africa, in ports where captive Africans disembarked, and near the British South Sea Company's trading factories in Spanish America. The specimens were displayed in British museums and herbaria, depicted in published natural histories, and discussed in the halls of scientific societies. Grounded in extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, Captivity's Collections mines scientific treatises, slaving companies' records, naturalists' correspondence, and museum catalogs to recover in rich detail the scope of the slave trade's collecting operations. The book reveals the scientific and natural historical profit derived from these activities and the crucial role of specimens gathered along the routes of the slave trade on emerging ideas in natural history.

Building an Inclusive Botany: The “Radicle” Dream
Makenzie E. Mabry, Nuala Caomhanach,  R. Shawn Abrahams, Michelle L. Gaynor, Kasey Khanh Pham, Tanisha M. Williams, Kathleen S. Murphy, Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Douglas E. Soltis, and Pamela S. Soltis
 
During the session the authors of the paper will discuss how this collaboration emerged, the goals for the paper, and share their experiences working across disciplinary fields as botanists and historians of botany. 
 
Abstract
It is important to recognize how our current understanding of plants has been shaped by diverse cultural contexts, as this underscores the importance of valuing and incorporating contributions from all knowledge systems in scientific pursuits. This approach emphasizes the ongoing bias, including within scientific practices, and the necessity of discussing problematic histories within spaces of learning. It is crucial to acknowledge and address biases, even within scientific endeavors. Doing so fosters a more inclusive and equitable scientific community. This article, while not comprehensive, serves as a starting point for conversation and an introduction to current work on these topics. In response to a global dialog about systemic racism, ongoing inequalities, appeals to decolonize science, and the many recent calls for diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion, we draw on the narratives of plants to revisit the history of botany. Our goal is to uncover how exclusionary practices have functioned in the past and persist today. We also explore the numerous opportunities and challenges that arise in the era of information as we strive to establish a more inclusive field of botany. This approach recognizes and honors the contributions of historically marginalized groups, such as Black and Indigenous communities. We hope that this article can serve as a catalyst for raising awareness, fostering contemplation, and driving action toward a more equitable and just scientific community.
 

 
"Cameroon in Berlin. A collaborative assessment of collections and archives from the mammal collections in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin"
with Paul Taku Bisong, MSc in Evolution, Ecology and Systematics from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, with a dissertation entitled "The Batanga Expedition in German 'Kamerun' (1887): The Role of the first 'Kolonialzoologe' Bernhard Weissenborn." He is the author of an assessment on the type material from "Kamerun" in the mammal collection of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.
and Catarina Madruga, postdoc researcher working on provenance research methods specific to colonial natural history collections; the connections between epistemologies of nature and the history of environment, empire, and zoological collections; and the political meanings of scientific localities in zoological catalogues and online repositories. 
Abstract: 
Cameroon in Berlin is a case study for the development of decolonial methods to assess information on natural history collections, their associated collection management systems, archival materials and library resources. Instead of looking at a particular animal genus or species, or of taking a biographical approach, we used the colonial political unit of German “Kamerun” as the entry point to assess the collections in the mammal department, I - Collections, and the historical archive, II - Archives, of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN).
Cameroon in Berlin I. Collections is the report by Paul Taku Bisong detailing the work of the assessment of the specimens in the mammal collections of the MfN that were tagged in the digital databank as both with having information under the category “type status” and with reference of geographical collecting location as “Kamerun.” The available databank information was checked and enhanced with use of the manuscript accession catalogue, remaining inscriptions and labels, and other available publications and historical documentation. The result is a list of 91 specimens, with enhanced metadata, of different 31 described mammal species.
The 12 valid and available type-specimens were published in open access, with a discussion of the relevance of this work: https://doi.org/10.3897/zse.99.110878.
Cameroon in Berlin II. Archives, lists the thus-far identified archival materials relating to the historical collections of the Zoological Museum of Berlin, with reference to manuscript catalogues and inventories, of type-localities and of suppliers involved in the shipment of specimens from the territories of German "Kamerun." To complement this, we added a list of identified suppliers and of the localities of shipments that were identified as including type-specimens. In order to be able to discuss real “access” to these documents, we describe and de-codify as much as possible of the underlying contexts of extraction, display, and management of zoological collections. We hope other researchers will find this provisional assessment of the materials useful, especially those interested in the dislocation of people and nature from the geographical collecting to this particular configuration of Cameroon in Berlin.

 
“Field/Work in the Archive: Herbaria as Sites of Cultural Exchange”
with Martha Fleming
Museologist, historian of science and of collections, Associate Professor, Natural History Museum of Denmark
 
Abstract: Martha Fleming will discuss the aims, research methods, and preliminary findings of the project of the same title for which she is the Principal Investigator.  Field/Work investigates the global cultural historical value of elements of the dried plant collection of 'Herbarium C' -- the Danish national herbarium held at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.  Significant elements of the collection are colonial in nature, and the project thus aims to conjoin history of science, history of collections, collections-based research, and global and colonial histories.
Bio: Martha Fleming is a museologist, an historian of collections, and an historian of science with a particular focus on natural historical and correlative scientific collections and archives. Her current research investigates the creation and management of natural history collections as significant forms of knowledge producing practices embedded in globalised colonial contexts.  Fleming was instrumental in the creation of the Centre for Arts and Humanities Research at London’s Natural History Museum (2009-2011), a research centre that has since been held up as a model internationally for the productive integration of the methods and rigour of humanities and social science disciplines into life science research contexts.
 

 
Conveners’ introduction : “Introducing the Collection Ecologies Working Group”
with Catarina Madruga
Historian of zoological collections Centre for Humanities of Nature, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
Nuala  P. Caomhanach
Historian of  science, evolutionary biologist and doctoral candidate, New York University & American Museum of Natural History
Déborah Dubald
Historian of science and health, lecturer at the University of Strasbourg
Dominik Hünniger
Historian of museums, natural history and the environment, curator for innovation research, German Port Museum Hamburg

Abstract: This session will introduce the aims and methods of the Collection Ecologies collective so far. Following a brief presentation by Dominik Hünniger, founder of the collective, any member of the working group will be invited to present an image, an object or a collection and how it resonates with the “Collection Ecologies”.
Note : please bring an object, image or a collection for a 2 minute presentation!