Activating the Archive: African environmental histories and knowledges materialised in museum collections

在肯尼亚和尼日利亚等国，英国殖民统治对其控制的景观和社区的影响，对人们对自然景观的构成以及人们如何与环境互动和管理环境的看法产生了深远的影响。由于排斥和种族主义的遗留问题阻碍了让不同社区参与环境科学和环境正义议程的努力，这些殖民遗产给当代改善包容性以解决环境问题的努力带来了进一步的挑战。皮特河博物馆（PRM）的人类学收藏，包括殖民科学家收集的各种生物材料、物品、照片和手稿，创造了与这些景观的环境历史有关的丰富档案，重要的是关于土著知识体系的档案，其中许多在殖民过程中丢失了。利用这些档案，该项目旨在探索殖民科学观点与生态知识的不同价值体系之间的联系，这些价值体系导致了这些排他性环境历史的遗产。该项目将解决三个主要问题：1。环境历史是如何通过博物馆收藏的殖民官员和科学家收集的物品和照片具体化的？从不同的文化角度来看，景观和自然资源的价值是如何不同的？殖民政府的行动如何影响创造这些环境历史的生态知识和土地利用？来自非洲的藏品有什么可持续性解决方案来应对当前的环境挑战？关于更美好的未来，被遗忘的过去教会了我们什么？为了解决这些问题，该项目将举办一系列研讨会，汇集来自不同学科和文化背景的贡献者，与来自肯尼亚和尼日利亚的资料进行互动。我们的项目汇集了人类学、考古学和环境科学方面的学者，以及自由记者、艺术家、非政府组织和博物馆馆长。通过使用PRM开发的数字方法进行对象处理会议，研讨会的贡献者将能够“现场”参与已经放在一起的博物馆藏品，评估主题并确定有助于回答所提出的研究问题的关键联系。然后，这些将被发展成产出，如展览、公众参与活动、策展藏品的跨学科数据库和框架，以提高英国跨学科和文化对环境科学的参与和认识。

The impact of British colonial rule on the landscapes and communities they controlled in countries such as Kenya and Nigeria have had far reaching effects on people's perceptions of what constitutes natural landscapes and how people interact with and manage their environments. These colonial legacies have raised further challenges in contemporary attempts to improve inclusion in addressing environmental issues due to the legacies of exclusion and racism that have hampered efforts to engage diverse communities in environmental sciences and in environmental justice agendas. Anthropological collections such as those in the Pitt Rivers Museums (PRM), containing a wide range of biological materials, objects, photographs and manuscripts collected by colonial scientists, have created a wealth of archives relating to the environmental histories of these landscapes, and importantly about indigenous knowledge systems, many which have been lost through the process of colonisation. Utilising these archives, the project aims to explore the link between colonial science perspectives and the different value systems placed on ecological knowledge that resulted in these legacies of exclusionary environmental histories. The project will address three main questions:1. How is environmental history materialised through objects and photographs collected by colonial officers and scientists held in museum collections?2. How are landscapes and natural resources valued differently from diverse cultural perspectives and how did actions of colonial governments affect ecological knowledge and land use which create these environmental histories?3. What sustainability solutions do the collections from Africa hold to respond to current environmental challenges? What does the forgotten past teach us about a better future? To address these questions the project will use a series of workshops to bring together a group of contributors across different disciplines and cultural backgrounds to interact with collections of materials from Kenya and Nigeria. Our project brings together academics in anthropology, archaeology, and environmental science alongside freelance journalists, artists, NGOs and museum curators. Through the use of digital methods developed at the PRM for conducting object handling sessions, the contributors at the workshop will be able to engage 'live' with the museum collections that have been put together and evaluate the themes and identify key connections that help answer the research questions posed. These will then be developed into outputs such as exhibitions, public engagement activities, interdisciplinary databases of the curated collections and frameworks for improving engagement in, and perceptions of, environment sciences across disciplines and cultures in the UK.