This article explores a long-standing discursive tradition within international nature conservation. In this tradition the argument is made that “primitive” people should be allowed to live in the areas the conservationists deem as “pristine” or “natural.” The article explores the (changing) relative importance of this tradition in the conservation discourse as a whole, and analyzes the shifting composition of its argumentative arsenal from the 1910s to the 1970s. Particular attention goes to the uneasy combination of two types of argument: one in which indigenous people are presented as part of nature, another in which their customary rights are stressed.
In the early twentieth century, ornithology underwent significant changes. So far, these changes, basically, have been studied by focussing on the elite of professional biologists working at universities or state museums. However, important developments also occurred in what Lynn Nyhart has called ''the civic realm'' of science -the sphere given form by private naturalist associations, nature writers, taxidermists and school teachers. This article studies the changing dynamics of civic ornithology, by looking at one particular case: the influential orinthological observatory in Rossitten, East-Prussia. This observatory, the first of its kind, was founded in 1901 and led, for the first three decades of its existence, by the minister Johannes Thienemann. This article analyses the ornithological practices Thienemann developed in Rossitten and the rhetoric he used to defend these practices. In both, so it is argued, one finds a mixture of the traditional, locally anchored naturalist approach with the new ideals of the ''modern'' and ''experimental'' university laboratories. The innovations which Thienemann introduced in this hybrid form of ornithology called for specific spatial strategies which made optimal use of the natural chatacteristics of his workplace and which mobilized a large civic network of geograhically scattered amateurs. At the same time, his work also altered the space he shared with the birds -materially, conceptually and culturally. Thus, this article maintains Thienemann's ornithology can only be understood by acknowledging its continuous interaction with the geographical and civic context in which it arose.
Historians dealing with evolutionary theory in the period between the death of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (in 1829) and the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (in 1859) have mainly focussed on evolutionist radicals who were, for the most part, working at the margins of mainstream science. This essay, however, wants to indicate that in the same time period, a more moderate (even conservative) transformism was developed in the well-respected centres of scientific debate. It does so by concentrating on the intellectual trajectory of the Belgian Jean-Baptiste d'Omalius d'Halloy, not only a geologist of European reputation but also a noted conservative and catholic aristocrat. On the basis of previously unused archival material, this essay researches how d'Omalius developed his evolutionist ideas, starting from the lessons he took with Lamarck in the beginning of the 19th century and ending with the last transformist publications he published as a 90-year-old in the 1870s. Furthermore, the essay analyses how d'Omalius adapted Lamarck's transformist ideas to his personal worldview and looks at the tactics he used to open a space for the evolution debate. In this way, it shows a largely unknown aspect of the transforming of transformism in mid-19th-century science.
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