PAN - Perspektiven auf Natur

Colonial sources should be taken with a pinch of salt; in the best cases, they are read against the grain – these recommendations are often given to students of the history of Africa. The value of colonial sources, it is argued, is limited, as these documents usually speak from the point of view of the colonisers. They conceal the perspective and actions
of the colonised and provide ideologically biased descriptions. However, what does this exactly mean? When, specifically, should we take colonial sources with a pinch of salt, and how exactly do we read them against the grain? Furthermore, what do we gain from working with biased sources? These are the questions that I will address in this paper.
I deal with a rather dull but important body of sources: the Medizinal-Berichte über die deutschen Schutzgebiete, or the ‘Medical Reports on the German Colonies’ (henceforth Medizinalberichte or Medical Reports). For studies on the history of health and medicine in the German colonies2 the Medizinalberichte provide an important point of
departure, as they promise a systematic survey of the main challenges and projects in colonial health policy. In the following paper I will show why the Medizinalberichte do not easily deliver on this promise. Highlighting some basic assumptions of the reports, I argue that these must be read critically and I demonstrate how this is possible.

The concept of association is centre stage in ecological studies on coral reefs. It describes the specific composition of diverse coral species in a given reef section that depends, among other factors, on the type of surf and the form of the seabed. ‘Association’ is also an important concept in Bruno Latour's plea for transcending the division between humans and objects in sociological analysis. Drawing on the idea of association, the article explores the history of the corals that were moved from the northern Cuban coast to East-Berlin in the late 1960s and worked into a coral reef diorama exhibited in East Berlin's Natural History Museum in 1974. By focusing on the mobilisation of the corals between Cuba and the GDR as well as within the museum, I will show that far from being sharply defined objects of nature, the corals collected in Cuba and displayed in East-Berlin must be understood as parts of constantly changing heterogeneous associations of organisms, non-organic material, national politics, postcolonial economies and institutional politics.

Der Aufsatz untersucht, auf welche Weise Ärzte im kolonalen Kontext den "Europäer" dachten. Er nimmt dafür zeitgenössische Debatten über die Dispotion bestimmter "Bevölkerungsgruppen" für Krankheiten wie Malaria und Schlafkrankheit in den Blick sowie die Praxis der Malariabekämpfung in der Kolonie Deutsche-Ostafrika zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, in der "Europäer" und "Farbige" unterschiedlich behandelt wurden. Es wird gezeigt, wie "Europäer" und "Farbige" als Phänomene konstruiert wurden und immer wieder argumentativ und praktisch voneinander abgegrenzt werden mussten. Am Beispiel der dabei produzierten "Grenzfälle" der "Goanesen" und "Buren" arbeite ich heraus, dass in der Idee des "Europäers" das Konzept biologisch definierbarer "Rassen" auch für Ärzte untrennbar mit Vorstellungen von "Kultur" sowie mit Klasse verknüpft war.

Malaria fand um 1900 eine enorme Beachtung durch europäische Kolonialmächte und Mediziner, galt sie doch als Bedrohung für den "weißen Mann" und sein koloniales Projekt. Malaria kam damals aber auch in Teilen Deutschlands vor. Manuela Bauche zeichnet nach, wie die Behörden in drei Gebieten des Deutschen Kaiserreichs - in Kamerun, Deutsch-Ostafrika und Ostfriesland - versuchten, gegen lokalen Widerstand Maßnahmen zur Malariabekämpfung durchzusetzen. Sie kann dabei zeigen, dass das medizinische Vorgehen sowohl in den Kolonien als auch in Deutschland mit dem Ausbau staatlicher Herrschaft, mit Rassismus und Trennung entlang von Klasse verbunden war.

This essay reconstructs the history of a coral-reef diorama, the outcome of a German Democratic Republic expedition to Cuba, that was displayed in East Berlin’s Natural History Museum in 1967 on the occasion of the GDR’s twenty-fifth anniversary. The paper investigates how the practice of socialist internationalism influenced the diorama’s coming into being, arguing that while official diplomatic relations between Cuba and the GDR were a prerequisite for the expedition, nongovernmental contacts were central to both the initiation and execution of the project. It also demonstrates how the diorama’s display was informed more by national and institutional concerns than by the rhetoric and policies of internationalism.

Der Aufsatz untersucht, auf welche Weise Ärzte im kolonialen Kontext den "Europäer" dachten. Er nimmt dafür zeitgenössische Debatten über die Disposition bestimmter "Bevölkerungsgruppen" für Krankheiten wie Malaria und Schlafkrankheit in den Blick sowie die Praxis der Malariabekämpfung in der Kolonie Deutsch-Ostafrika zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, in der "Europäer" und "Farbige" unterschiedlich behandelt wurden. Es wird gezeigt, wie "Europäer" und "Farbige" als Phänomene konstruiert wurden und immer wieder argumentativ und praktisch voneinander abgegrenzt werden mussten. Am Beispiel der dabei produzierten "Grenzfälle" der "Goanesen" und "Buren" arbeite ich heraus, dass in der Idee des "Europäers" das Konzept biologisch definierbarer "Rassen" auch für Ärzte untrennbar mit Vorstellungen von "Kultur" sowie mit Klasse verknüpft war.

In social sciences, approaches to hard sciences tend to present these as naturalist, i.e. anchored to the belief in a coherent and closed universe in which natural laws operate. This idea of an objectivist science has been the dialogical opposite pole of social sciences, particularly the qualitative ones. Considering naturalist science ethnographically, asks the question whether this idea is grounded in the actual practices of scientists or not and what alternative ways of engaging with science emerge from them. To do this, I will try to understand what the relation between worms and their environment is.

From ecotoxicologists studying the effect of toxic compounds on the soil, to curators taking care of specimens in museum collections, to ecologists teaching amateurs how to recognize different species, a number of scientists are everyday working with earthworms. In these scientific contexts, which animate Western naturalist science, what a worm is and how it relates with its environment come into being in many complicated ways. As we will follow these practices, what 'naturalist science' is will multiply and emerge oftentimes as incoherent. Still, some of the practices of scientists also take care of holding together these incoherences. From these multiple naturalisms, their gaps, and the work put into holding them together, a different way to engage with science takes shape, one that is not (overly) critical, but attempts to 'take science seriously'.

In biology, race is not an official taxonomic unit; in fact, the lowest rank in taxonomy is that of species. Yet, notwithstanding its widespread use, also the notion of species is a very problematic one. The problem of how to define and use this notion dates back to Darwin’s times and is still not resolved. Following this issue in contemporary debates between biology and philosophy of science, this talk takes a stroll through research practices to shed light on what came to be called “the problem of species”. A number of different cases will show how species do not refer to one single entity, but multiple divergent practices. By considering the ways in which scientists deal with the category of species, I argue, more alternatives emerge to tinker with the ir/relevance of race.

Earthworms and soil combine in an ecotoxicological experiment in the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. To determine the effects of a toxic compound produced by genetically modified broccoli, ecotoxicologists use the earthworm in a standardized test to understand the conditions of the soil. In the experiment a variety of elements are brought together and associated in a stable network, but the worm and the soil do not only associate; rather, the worm emerges entangled in different kinds of relations with the soil, both as bioindicator and as bioturbator. Eating provides a good tool to analyze these relations: keeping close to the tangible materialities of the lab practices, eating highlights the complex, asymmetrical relationality of worm and soil. This pushes the understanding of association that circulates in social theory, bringing back its original critical stance towards given notions of liberal, autonomous agents with renewed empirical strength. Thus eating not only frames worms that emerge from the practices of ecotoxicologists as bioindicators and as bioturbators, but it also offers a different language for what has been called the ‘politics of nature’, or how to bring nature into politics without accepting it as a given. In responding to the question on how to live with our planet, eating reminds us that we would do well to start from practices instead of agency in framing our ‘politics of nature’.

The ethnographic effort of grasping the multiplicity of nature even where mononaturalism should be produced has already pointed out how we cannot think about nature as unitary when we consider the practices that enact it. Using fieldwork with earthworm scientists and ethnographic experiments with vermicomposting, I will offer a specific set of such multiplicity. Considering the earthworms and the togetherness that practices can afford us (worms and humans, and all sort of others), I will then try to offer a tentative answer (and, yet again, a number of new questions) to the question often voiced by those who are faced with such multiplicity: so what?

Emerging from the question of how to live together with our planet, more-than-human approaches to interspecies relations have often presented ‘cozy’ versions of conviviality (Whatmore 2002; Haraway 2008; Hinchliffe 2010). This was usually set against a (supposedly) exclusionary politics of nature, in a move that betrayed a still largely humanist ethics. From the focus on friendly companions, to the attention to practices of care or living-together, the notion of companion species and their entanglements with humans has been polarized towards a pleasant and ‘nice’ version of coexistence. But, dealing with composting, it becomes clear that relations with the environment are never so neat and clean. What are, then, the modes of being together with the ‘dirty’ side of the ‘green’? What practices emerge at the mundane interstices of the ‘big picture’ of a functional ecology? Wasting, eating, rotting, consuming, transforming and becoming-with are brought together in a variety of ways in practices of composting-with earthworms. Reporting on our own and others’ attempts to ‘live-together’ with earthworms, this paper tracks the non-relations and asymmetries of the transformations of more-than-human materialities inside (and outside) domestic composting bins. We argue that the example of living-together with dung earthworms sheds light on the interplays between attachment and detachment (Candea 2010), shifting the notion of conviviality from a green and comfortable ‘democratic collective’ (Latour 2004) to a messy, yet constantly productive and on-going coexistence

Global warming has been shown to strongly influence inland water systems, producing noticeable increases in water temperatures. Rising temperatures, especially when combined with widespread nutrient pollution, directly favour the growth of toxic cyanobacteria. Climate changes have also altered natural water level fluctuations increasing the probability of extreme events as dry periods followed by heavy rains. The massive appearance of Dolichospermum lemmermannii ( = planktonic Anabaena), a toxic species absent from the pelagic zone of the subalpine oligotrophic Lake Maggiore before 2005, could be a consequence of the unusual fluctuations of lake level in recent years. We hypothesized that these fluctuations may favour the cyanobacterium as result of nutrient pulses from the biofilms formed in the littoral zone when the lake level is high. To help verify this, we exposed artificial substrates in the lake, and evaluated their nutrient enrichment and release after desiccation, together with measurements of fluctuations in lake level, precipitation and D.lemmermannii population. The highest percentage of P release and the lowest C:P molar ratio of released nutrients coincided with the summer appearance of the D.lemmermannii bloom. The P pulse indicates that fluctuations in level counteract nutrient limitation in this lake and it is suggested that this may apply more widely to other oligotrophic lakes. In view of the predicted increase in water level fluctuations due to climate change, it is important to try to minimize such fluctuations in order to mitigate the occurrence of cyanobacterial blooms.