ANTHROPOCENE FRONTIERS
THE CLIMATE OF CONFLICT IN SIBERIA AND CENTRAL ASIA
This project seeks to understand how settler colonial violence in the marches of the Russian Empire generated knowledge about climate and the human capacity to change it. Scholars have recently shown how climate science developed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on the scale of Europe’s overseas and land empires. Vast imperial geographies enabled the comparison of disparate phenomena across local, regional, and even planetary scales. Less is known about the knowledge produced by processes of settler colonialism and the expropriation of Indigenous land. These same processes intensified forms of environmental exploitation that characterize the “Anthropocene,” a geologic age in which human beings act as a planetary force. This project therefore centers on a specially trained, transdisciplinary corps of nine Baltic-German scientists dispatched by imperial patrons to Russian frontiers at a decisive moment in the empire’s expansion across the northern Kazakh steppe.
NATURE’S KEEPERS
WORKING FAMILIES AND VILLAGE LIFE IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES
This project explores a system of knowledge production generated by upland village communities, from the Bernese Oberland to the Julian Alps, the Harz to Tyrol. Animated by global studies of knowledge circulation, “small-space” anthropologies, and working-class history, this book centers on an artisan family in the Franconian Alps (of southern Germany) whose mountain-guiding and naturalia-collecting business spanned three generations. Wainwrights and tanners by trade, the family Wunder also belongs to another unrecognized social group: the hunters, shepherds, tavern owners and other rural actors who built and sustained the spatial infrastructures that underpinned modern natural sciences. By placing village life in the history of science, Nature’s Keepers traces a robust, if highly unequal, exchange in scientific goods and services, which quietly shaped the material culture and theoretical content of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural sciences. The project draws on parish records alongside travelers’ journals, making use of artisanal tools and domestic artefacts as well as extant museum collections.
Image sources
Nikolai Nikolaevich Karazin, 1891. Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2018693677/. / Staatsarchiv Bamberg A 240 Nr. R 0525.