Universität Basel

Departement
Geschichte

The Project

As the consequences of the Anthropocene become one of the most pressing political issues of our time, humans are beginning to grapple with their destructive relationship to nonhuman life. What does it mean, for example, to kill animals in order to study them? A historical exploration of violent humanistic knowledge practices in the age of Empire.

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:

  • Birds in the tropical dry and moist forests of Northern South America
  • Fish and mollusks in the shallow and deep waters of the Southwestern Pacific
  • Large mammals in the mixed wood and grasslands of Southern Africa

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.

Subprojects

Illustration of an Hartebeest

Prof. Dr. Marie Muschalek

Hunting Mammal Specimens. Violent Practices of Knowing Nature in Southern Africa, 1790-1860

This subproject takes us into early to mid-nineteenth-century southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Botswana) and the burgeoning trade of specimens – the focus will be on mammals – for an ever more expanding market supplying private commerce as well as the numerous, rapidly growing natural history museums in Europe and North America. Transnationally operating entrepreneurial explorers, naturalist adventurers, colonial officials, as well as white settlers animated the hunt for the much-coveted large fauna. These men (and some women) relied heavily on southern African vernacular knowledge, and on the guidance of countless unnamed local experts and their knowhow in bushmeat hunting. Casting Africans, however, as cruel and inapt towards animals and nature, white naturalists were key players in creating early game reserves for their gentlemanly pleasure of safari hunting in the name of animal preservation. The context of collecting in this case study is thus that of settler colonialism, recurrent frontier conflicts over access to land and wildlife, and the beginnings of imperialist conservationism.

The approach of my subproject is microhistorical: it proposes to pay close attention to the daily deeds and experiences of all historical actors – local and intruder, human and nonhuman alike – involved in the enterprise of collecting mammal specimens. The goal is to understand how the practice of killing animals to keep and study them evolved in the terrain as an interspecies affair. The study scrutinizes different material technologies and bodily techniques, rooted in southern African and European traditions of hunting that informed practices of knowing and appropriating the natural world.

Drawings of animal bones

Marie-Charlotte Lamy

Perished but Preserved: Zoological Material of Extinction

This sub-project investigates extinct species, related to the geographical frameworks of the overall SNF project, as a way to explore historical and contemporary attitudes toward animal preservation. The focus will be on emblematic species such as the quagga, the thylacine, but also some mammals of South Africa and various birds and reptiles from the Pacific and South America. The study analyses both the historical causes of their extinction – primarily linked to colonial violence, native ecosystem disruption, scientific practices during the 19th century – and their contemporary symbolic and educational value – how these animals are testimonies to interspecies history and have become emblems of ecological awareness today.

Methodologically, the project integrates material culture studies with human-animal studies. It adopts a transregional approach to compare the preparation and preservation techniques of specimens held in different major natural history museums. In parallel, it engages with archival sources to highlight the motivations and mechanisms behind the large-scale killing. In doing so, the sub-project examines extinction as both a material and conceptual legacy of violence.

Painting of a fishmarket

Hanna Wüste

The Violence of Decay. The (after-)life of maritime fauna collected in the 19th century South Pacific

This dissertation project focusses on fish and mollusks from the Southwest Pacific that were located, captured and killed in the 19th century to be sent to museums in Europe during a time of intensive colonial extraction and accumulation. The maritime animals that can be found in European collections today are considered not only as natural history objects, but also as actors within colonial trade and scientific networks. Their particularly mobile behavior, their inevitable decay once they deceased and the threat of the Climate Crisis today make these animals especially elusive actors. How did decay and loss influence the practices of killing and preserving maritime animals and how does it affect practices today?

Although decay may be seen as an adversary to historical work, here it is the starting point to think about the obligations that arise from being part of a world interconnected in the past and the present. This project hopes to do so by creating a dialogue between collections and individual object histories, killing practices, archival as well as published sources and contemporary perspectives surrounding the contact between humans and marine animals over the wide area of the South Pacific, revealing overlooked connections and entanglements between scientific disciplines, natural history collections, and contemporary environmental challenges.

Illustration of a taxidermy manual

Yonatan Duran Maturana

Global Dimensions of Ornithology in Nineteenth-Century Northern South America: Knowledge Production, Imperial Networks, and Power

This subproject focuses on nineteenth-century northern South America, especially Colombia, and the flourishing practices of collecting, preserving, and circulating of bird specimens forto European institutions. It focuses specifically on the bird collection known as “Bogota skins” and what I term the “Bucaramanga skins”, using them as a lens to explore socio-political, scientific, and environmental relationships between Colombia and Europe. The case study posits that post-independence ornithology in Colombia operated within transnational, polycentric networks that integrated local knowledge and practices with European scientific traditions. These networks reinforced imperial hierarchies while relying on local expertise, resources, labor, producing a system of knowledge shaped by power asymmetries and mutual dependencies.

Methodologically, this subproject addresses three key lines of inquiry. First, it examines the roles of actors such as indigenous hunters, traders, and intermediaries in transforming Colombian avifauna into global natural object. Second, it analyzes the material practices of collection and transportation, focusing their adaptation to local environmental conditions and their role in shaping the representations of biodiversity. Third, it explores the commodification of avifauna as scientific artifacts, luxury commodities, and symbolic objects, highlighting the human and non-human forms of violence in these processes.

The Team

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