Paper short abstract:

Natural history is an old-fashioned genre characterized by variously conceived attempts at mixing human and non-human histories. This paper connects recent trends in environmental humanities that stress the importance of natural history with its long history and underlines its political potential.

Paper long abstract:

Natural history is an old-fashioned genre that carries with it both a dark colonial past and variously conceived attempts at mixing human and non-human histories. Recent anthropological and environmental humanities studies on the empirical features of the Anthropocene have insisted on the importance of “natural history” conceived as an “art of observation” that bypasses rigid boundaries between “nature” and “culture”, and between human and non-human pasts. In this paper I try to connect these recent trends (especially focusing on the work of Anna L. Tsing) with the history of natural history, a very old scientific and literary genre that – blooming in the early modern period but beginning with Pliny the Elder and continuing through 19th century ethnology, biology, and history – very often blurred such boundaries. I will try to describe a revival of natural history within a conception that emphasizes this side of the history of natural history and rejects its colonial side, in order to describe the political potential of such a tradition.