“OUR DINOSAUR”: NATURE AS A POLITICAL RESOURCE (GER)

Using the example of the dinosaur fossils that were extracted in Tanzania (then part of the colony of German East Africa) between 1909 and 1913 and transported to Berlin, our lecture aims to show how the practice of “collecting” involved different forms of violence and appropriation. Here, we will not only focus on eruptive and direct violence, but also on structural and subtle forms of violence and appropriation that are carried out and perpetuated by scientific and national institutions. The history of fossils thus reveals a history of political appropriation, in which nature is reformulated as heritage right up to the present day, thereby shaping colonial and national identities. It raises fundamental questions about the temporalities of extraction processes, as well as the political instrumentalization of nature.

Ina Heumann is a historian of science and, together with Tahani Nadim, heads the Centre for the Humanities of Nature at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. She has designed and acquired numerous third-party funded projects that deal with the political epistemology of natural history. Her research focuses on natural history and colonialism, collection economies and the genesis of natural history appropriation practices. She publishes internationally on topics such as “The Issue of Duplicates”, in: The British Journal for the History of Science, 55/3, 2022 (with A. MacKinney and R. Buschmann); “Promises of Mass Digitisation and the Colonial Realities of Natural History Collections”, in: The Journal of Natural Science Collections 11, 2023 (with K. Kaiser, T. Nadim et al.); “Deconstructing Dinosaurs: The History of the German Tendaguru Expedition and its Finds”, 1906-2022 (Brill, forthcoming, expanded and modified translation of the Kiswahili edition 2018), ed. with M. Vennen, H. Stoecker and “Animals as Objects”, https://animalsasobjects.org/de/, ed. with T. Nadim.

Tahani Nadim is Junior Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Institute for European Ethnology and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, where she heads the Centre for the Humanities of Nature together with Ina Heumann. Her research focuses on the socio-political contextualisation of natural history data production and its infrastructures as well as the politics of species and nature conservation. She is currently leading the research project “Museums and society: mapping the social” (2020-2024). Her recent publications include “Logistical natures”, Special Issue, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 54/2, 2024 (with M. Vennen, I. Heumann and F. Bertoni); “Seeds, German East Africa, 1892”, in The Planning Moment: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, 2024, Fordham University Press (eds. S. Blacker et al.); “Museums and Racism” (with R. Sarreiter), in Rassismusforschung, 2024, Nomos Verlag (eds. M. Bojadžijev et al.) and “Promises of Mass Digitisation and the Colonial Realities of Natural History Collection”, in: The Journal of Natural Science Collections 11, 2023 (with K. Kaiser, T. Nadim et al.).