Beringia: Material Evidence, Praxis and the Shape of Science

How do everyday things become scientific specimens? And how does the perception and use of specimens as data impact how science develops in, and in conversation between, different disciplines? These were the preliminary questions I set out to answer with the "Beringia" project. Once these questions were answered, the next step was to investigate After establishing the answers to these questions, the aim was to investigate a far more pernicious phenomenon: Why have some organisms - humans and other-than-humans alike - historically been accorded more value or a higher level of development (in terms of form, intelligence, etcetera) than others? And what is the longer-term legacy of these hierarchies? For decades now, anthropologists and historians alike have traced the roots of the so-called "scientification" of discrimination - or how the hierarchical treatment of different groups of humans came to be scientifically justified - to the mid-nineteenth-century, when scholars across Europe and the Americas developed a "natural science of human culture." Far less clear, however, is why and how such a large and ideologically diverse assortment practitioners chose to do this around roughly the same time, and why this determination is now considered so problematic, particularly in light of contemporary calls to reexamine the nature/culture dichotomy. With regard to the general public, my three most significant findings are: 1) Anthropologists adopted concepts and methods from the natural sciences in an effort to establish an empirical basis for their investigations. They believed an empirical foundation would persuade colleagues in the natural sciences to recognize the legitimacy of their research, and afford them an intellectual and methodological framework within which to bring their investigations into the development of human culture into conversation with work on the development of plants and animals more generally. 2) I have reconstructed the administrative and epistemic processes practitioners developed to transform ethnographic objects into scientific data, and then leverage that data as empirical evidence of cultural development in many of the most influential natural history and ethnographic museums in Europe and North America. 3) I have established how nineteenth-century hierarchies of difference that were embedded in natural science methods and analytical frameworks coalesced with fin de siècle anxieties about human fitness and degeneration, resulting in the now infamous biologically-based notions of racial difference that took root in the 1910s and continue to linger to this day. The results of this research have been and are in the process of being disseminated in 1 chapter in a text-book style academic volume, two international workshops, over 10 lectures, 1 article in a special issue journal, one special issue journal, and a book manuscript which will be finished in the months directly following the conclusion of the fellowship.