Philipp Schorch & Nicholas Thomas

Beyond the nature/culture divide

Given the dramatic impact of human action on the environment, evidenced in climate change and biodiversity loss, it has been widely recognised that humanity needs to reimagine its environmental relations. Yet, the deeply entrenched separation of concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ in Western thought and museums forms a major impediment. Western institutions and legal frameworks define and govern sites of ‘natural’ and/or ‘cultural’ significance; meanwhile, museums promote ‘cultural’ and/or ‘natural’ heritage. Reflecting recent and ongoing efforts to deconstruct the ‘nature/culture’ divide, and to creatively reimagine museum collections as archives of environmental knowledge, this project considers how the museums of the future might lead the way in reimagining and reconceptualising human-environment relations.

Advocating a cross-disciplinary approach across anthropology, the arts and natural history, the researchers explore three pressing questions:
1) As knowledge-generating institutions, how were museums historically implicated in the conceptual and actual segregation of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ knowledge, and to what extent does this continue to be the case?
2) How can we access materialised human-environment relations conserved in material things, such as Indigenous ‘artefacts’ and ‘specimens’, and generate novel insights across different systems of being and knowing, such as Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies?
3) In what ways can innovative forms of scholarly engagement, curatorship and experimental exhibitions reactivate historical collections as creative technologies, and so promote the re-imagination of human-environmental relations on a larger scale?

This project is facilitated by the Cambridge LMU Strategic Partnership and funded by the Bavarian State Government.

Subprojects

• The ethno-botanical intertwining of the Amazonian collections of Spix and Martius (Gabriele Herzog-Schröder)
• Thinking through wood: Māori artefacts in the Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich (Hilke Thode-Arora)
• Museum futures (preceding project)