Our cross-disciplinary humanities research project Historicising Natures, Cultures and Laws in Etosha-Kunene proposes a multivocal and historical analysis that contributes new thinking on colonialism, indigeneity and ‘natural history’ in Namibia.

Etosha-Kunene Histories is funded by Germany's National Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft - DFG), the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), as one of 19 from more than 170 applications submitted in February 2019 to a new bilateral Humanities funding initiative of these research councils. It is built around international collaborations developed by the German Principal Investigator Ute Dieckmann at the University of Cologne, the UK Principal Investigator Sian Sullivan, Professor of Environment and Culture at Bath Spa University and Selma Lendelvo at the University of Namibia.

Our aim is to support laws and practice in biodiversity conservation to more fully recognise the diversity of pasts, cultures and natures constituting this internationally-valued region.

Our project runs from February 2020 - January 2023. It is built around three core research questions, a set of six objectives, and six intersecting work packages.

Research questions

• How can conservation of biodiversity-rich landscapes come to terms with the past [Vergangenheitsbewältigung], given historical contexts of extreme social exclusion and marginalisation?
   
• How can key biodiversity areas whose global value rests on ahistorical ideas of Nature resist an uncritical presentism, to be better understood as entangled with diverse human histories and values?
   
• How can conservation policy and practice recognise deep cultural and linguistic differences around ‘the nature of nature’?
   

Objectives
 

We seek to provide historical and ethnographic depth to questions of contemporary concern regarding global reductions of biological and cultural-linguistic diversities, for a set of contiguous territories that are themselves of global significance in terms of biocultural diversity. Our overlapping objectives are thus to:

• amplify understanding and recognition of the globally-significant conservation territories of ‘Etosha-Kunene’ as entangled with diverse human histories and values, involving cultural and linguistic differences around ‘the nature of nature’ in these territories;
   
• connect, compare and extend ethnographic research with varied indigenous groupings of people with regard to land, identity and natures-beyond-the-human in Etosha-Kunene;
   
• explore new methods and tools to represent, map, mediate and translate indigenous understandings and knowledges of the spaces and places comprising Etosha-Kunene, so as to support the recognition and representation of cultural diversity in conservation praxis;
   
• integrate people, places and histories into a dense “meshwork” for Etosha-Kunene conservation territories by compiling an environmental and cultural landscape history that attends to complexity through entwining and juxtaposing multiple data sources;
   
• contribute to a much-needed decolonisation of patriarchal-colonial thought regarding ‘the nature of nature’ through detailed analysis and deconstruction of how European colonial praxis objectified, collected and colonised both natures and cultures in Etosha-Kunene;
   
• support formal and institutional dimensions of environmental conservation policy and practice through creative compilation, publication and exchange of project analyses.

Researcher

Our research team of three women academics in Germany, the UK and Namibia has a combined 50+ years of ethnographic, archival, oral history and livelihoods enquiry in Etosha-Kunene. We are:

• Dr Ute Dieckmann
  Global South Study Centre, University of Cologne
   

• Professor Sian Sullivan
  Professor of Environment and Culture, Research Centre for Environmental Humanities, Bath Spa University
   

• Dr Selma Lendelvo
  Head of Life Sciences Division, Multi-disciplinary Research Centre, University of Namibia