In the nineteenth century, conquering the world also meant exploring and mastering it scientifically. This project follows those men and women who travelled around the globe to collect animals in order to study them. The fact that “collecting” actually meant to capture and kill specimens by the hundreds and thousands, and that this violent work had to be organized and performed by somebody, is a part of modern scientific practice that has yet to be carefully scrutinized and historicized.
The project looks at three different collecting grounds:
The project's main attention is directed at everyday practices, at the manual skills and techniques of killing, eviscerating, and skinning animals-turned-specimen. But it also seeks to uncover the many different people, indigenous and intruders alike, involved in this practice, as well as to read carefully the traces of violence left on or in the objects themselves, i.e the animal specimens.
Our goal is to account for the complexities of human curiosity and the many different and culturally specific histories of violence against nonhuman and human life within the broader framework of colonial subjugation and its politics of difference - in order to write the history of Humanism as a posthumanist history of imperialism.
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