Victoria Dickenson and Anna Winterbottom (McGill), "Hidden hands in colonial natural histories: lessons from four case studies at McGill"
In this opening session, we will reflect on the concept of “hidden hands” and why we believe it is useful to describe people who were important to making natural history collections, but whose knowledge and skills have rarely been discussed. These include women, servants, and enslaved people as well as local and Indigenous experts and “go-betweens”. We will introduce our four case studies, which focus on Canada, Haiti, India, and Sri Lanka, and include herbarium specimens, natural historical drawings, palm-leaf manuscripts, and material belongings. Some of the practical approaches to these materials that we will discuss include, cataloguing, digitisation, and the identification of species. The theoretical approaches that we bring to the materials range from communal biographies to animal histories to a focus on material culture and the material aspects of artwork and manuscripts. We will also talk about some of the partnerships we have made during our study, including working with visual artists, inviting experts for study visits, and hosting study days within museum collections. At the end of the session, we would like to invite group members to introduce themselves and their interests and approaches to hidden hands and hidden histories of natural history.
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