Collection Ecologies

 
"Cameroon in Berlin. A collaborative assessment of collections and archives from the mammal collections in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin"
with Paul Taku Bisong, MSc in Evolution, Ecology and Systematics from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, with a dissertation entitled "The Batanga Expedition in German 'Kamerun' (1887): The Role of the first 'Kolonialzoologe' Bernhard Weissenborn." He is the author of an assessment on the type material from "Kamerun" in the mammal collection of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.
and Catarina Madruga, postdoc researcher working on provenance research methods specific to colonial natural history collections; the connections between epistemologies of nature and the history of environment, empire, and zoological collections; and the political meanings of scientific localities in zoological catalogues and online repositories. 
Abstract: 
Cameroon in Berlin is a case study for the development of decolonial methods to assess information on natural history collections, their associated collection management systems, archival materials and library resources. Instead of looking at a particular animal genus or species, or of taking a biographical approach, we used the colonial political unit of German “Kamerun” as the entry point to assess the collections in the mammal department, I - Collections, and the historical archive, II - Archives, of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN).
Cameroon in Berlin I. Collections is the report by Paul Taku Bisong detailing the work of the assessment of the specimens in the mammal collections of the MfN that were tagged in the digital databank as both with having information under the category “type status” and with reference of geographical collecting location as “Kamerun.” The available databank information was checked and enhanced with use of the manuscript accession catalogue, remaining inscriptions and labels, and other available publications and historical documentation. The result is a list of 91 specimens, with enhanced metadata, of different 31 described mammal species.
The 12 valid and available type-specimens were published in open access, with a discussion of the relevance of this work: https://doi.org/10.3897/zse.99.110878.
Cameroon in Berlin II. Archives, lists the thus-far identified archival materials relating to the historical collections of the Zoological Museum of Berlin, with reference to manuscript catalogues and inventories, of type-localities and of suppliers involved in the shipment of specimens from the territories of German "Kamerun." To complement this, we added a list of identified suppliers and of the localities of shipments that were identified as including type-specimens. In order to be able to discuss real “access” to these documents, we describe and de-codify as much as possible of the underlying contexts of extraction, display, and management of zoological collections. We hope other researchers will find this provisional assessment of the materials useful, especially those interested in the dislocation of people and nature from the geographical collecting to this particular configuration of Cameroon in Berlin.