No. 116/2024
Colonialism was all-embracing and it was violent. It re-organised the world, led to the circulation of knowledge as well as to war, displacement, slavery, oppression and exploitation. The colonial era made deep inroads into identities – and has a huge impact to this day, not least on science and research. Text NORA LESSING M any academic di scipl ines only actually developed and established themselves at the height of colonialism in the 19th century,” says Ulrike Lindner, historian and expert on imperial and colonial history. Colonial history, the history of knowledge and the history of science, she maintains, are now inextricably interwoven. Geography, for example, with its measuring projects and cartography was the basis of later military campaigns. Biology benefitted from the study of plants and animals that were collected in the colonies. And disciplines like ethnology and anthropology would never have come about in the first place if it were not for colonialism. On their expeditions to the colonies, European adventurers, traders and scientists collected countless items and brought them back to Europe – from rock samples to cultural artefacts, from everyday objects through to human beings who were exhibited in human zoos in Europe. Quite often, the aim of these collections and research was to underpin the supposed superiority of western societies. “Ethnology, for instance, collected objects on the assumption that other cultures were inferior,” explains Ulrike Lindner who conducted research at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom in 2005 supported by a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship. “And many anthropologists wanted to use skull measurements to prove that people in non-European societies were more primitive and less intelligent than Europeans. At the time, this was hailed as science. In today’s understanding, it’s racism.” Eurocentric assumptions – often, but not always of a racial nature – not only shaped European discoverers’ passion for collecting; they also found their way into travelogues, biographies and history books where a certain type of narrative dominated: “How exploration of the world was presented was often shaped by the topos of the European or American man driving research, development and progress as a whole,” explains Moritz von Brescius, historian and expert on European overseas journeys of discovery at the University of Bern who is currently working at Harvard. “The image of these great European discoverers heading expeditions against hostile nature and allegedly hostile natives in order to carry the flame of the Enlightenment into unknown parts of the world does not correspond to the truth.” INDISPENSABLE KNOWLEDGE Von Brescius has conducted particularly intensive research on the expeditions of the Schlagintweit brothers from Munich who set off for India and Central Asia in the mid- 19th century, supported by Alexander von Humboldt. “Sometimes they had more than 50, or even 100, people accompanying them: local porters, guides, translators, cooks, hunters. They all had indispensable knowledge about things like mountain passes, springs › Photo: Maureen Vollmer 13 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 116/2024
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