Interview with Sarah Pickman (in 2021) for the website Order of Multitudes (unabridged version)
 

Can you tell us a bit about your academic and professional background? How did you first become interested in working in, and researching, museums?

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I actually started out in the Fine Arts Faculty in Lisbon graduating in Design, at the time and still today, the only place in Portugal you could take courses resembling a Material Culture Studies program, which was what I was interested in. I was very fortunate for I had a talented generation of Portuguese designers as colleagues and professors, while I also had the pleasure of taking courses on Anthropology – Material Culture, Sociology of Art, and Aesthetics which fascinated me and helped shape my reading references and my interests. Some years in, I had the opportunity to work in a contemporary art exhibition centre as a guide of the education office, where I prepared tours for different audiences and for different art fields. That was an amazing time, and I knew that I wanted to work with museums, the theory and the practice of these institutions attracted my full attention. Shortly after, I started working as a guide at the Lisbon zoological museum, and I knew I wanted to focus on natural history museums. This is the place where the very abstract concept of nature is translated into physical, individual, specimens, and that is still appealing to me today. When I realised the zoological museum had a rich and underexplored historical archive I knew I needed more analytical tools in order to study it, and so I enrolled in the master course in history and philosophy of science.

 

In your dissertation, you examined the late nineteenth century activities of the Zoological Museum in Lisbon, with a focus on a figure named José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage. Who was Bocage, and how did he go about building the collections of the museum?

 

A peculiarity about José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage (1823-1907) recognisable to most Portuguese is that he shares his family name with a late eighteenth-century talented poet, most renown in popular culture for his colourful bohemian anecdotes and improvised verses. In stark contrast, the naturalist Bocage could not be more boring and conservative in his lifestyle. I am still convinced however, from reading some of the family’s personal correspondence, that nineteenth-century Bocage was, at heart, just as satirical and poignant as his second cousin.

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On my Master dissertation I focused on how Bocage built his scientific persona around the idea of self-effacement and “disinterested interest”, which falls back into this idea of him having a monotonous daily life. He was often sick, and regularly took spa breaks, and he disliked the opera and the theatre. Although his wife was a gifted painter and musically inclined, he refused all such occupations, the same that the Lisbon liberal bourgeoisie (his social group) was so invested in. Despite all that, between 1883 and 1886, and in 1890, Bocage had a second career as a politician, occupying the ministerial chairs of the Navy and Overseas, and the Foreign Affairs. He was considered to bring a modest and temperate influence onto such hot topics as the partition of European power in the African continent (as the Portuguese minister for Foreign Affairs, he was the original proponent of an international meeting on the river Congo, which then famously Bismarck convened, and which we know as the Berlin Conference). I tried to show Bocage’s efforts to maintain an “objective” and therefore “disinterested” demeanour both as a private individual, a scientist, and a politician.

On my PhD I focused specifically on Bocage’s scientific work on African vertebrates as part of his study of the “Portuguese fauna.” I identified the strong bias that the Lisbon collections and research agenda had towards Angolan vertebrates. I based my work on both published materials and unpublished manuscripts of his scientific correspondence network. I aimed to map the entanglements between nineteenth-century scientific practices and the renewed ideas about the Portuguese empire in Africa. By amassing a large Angolan collection, with many type-specimens, Bocage led the growth of the Lisbon museum as a reference within the network of other European museums with similar African interests. The publication of expert knowledge in periodicals and in illustrated books was part and parcel of the idea of an European “civilizing mission,” and was not separated from political and cultural gains. Specifically, I looked into the publication of collecting, preparing and shipping instructions which were distributed to the various colonial settlements, the resulting engagement of colonial officers as collectors and correspondents for the Lisbon museum, and how the knowledge thus gathered was transformed into scientific publications. I looked into nomenclatural practices and ambiguities, the museum organization through specialization of assistant-naturalists, and into practices of writing up catalogues, and publishing scientific works in French, so as to get the largest readership possible.

 

You argue that the activities of Bocage and his network (inside and outside of the museum) weren't just about making scientific knowledge, but about legitimating Portuguese colonialism, especially in Africa. Can you discuss how animal specimens in a museum worked to reinforce this colonial control - and to obscure the presence of colonized peoples?

 

Animal specimens in a museum are very specific types of artefacts. They represent and, at the same time, are evidences of the natural world. For example, in the end of nineteenth-century, in the middle of the city of Lisbon, a person could (on Thursday afternoons), visit a room full to the brim with dried snakes, alcohol flasks with reptiles, and naturalised apes, antelopes and giraffes. That was called the Angola Room, and it was inside a huge neoclassical building with a magnificent façade. As much as the zoological museum never really received all that many visitors, this room’s very existence was connected with all other colonial collections in Lisbon, from the colonial museum in the Navy arsenal, to the Geographical Society ethnographical collections. Attached to each of these specimens of exotic looking animals were labels, inscriptions that provide with a different type of territorial appropriation. The labels hold the scientific nomenclature of these animals, the locations where they were hunted or bought, and sometimes also the collectors associated with their shipment to the museum. The animals were dislocated, but the labels provide a sort of new scientific root, a legitimation for them to be there, because only there, outside of their natural environment can they make sense as scientific fact. In order to get to Lisbon, these animals had to be procured, purchased, exchanged, fished, plucked, collated by trusted sources who can keep the chain of custodial evidence clean. Some of the collectors have known names, or were even heroes of some African campaign, and the resonation with the claims of the imperial agenda were in fact, hidden in plain sight, as they are still today in most natural history museums. But, as you rightly say, these labels also hide and obscure the unequal underlying conditions in which many workers, in the distant hinterland, actually hunted the animals, prepared and carried them, and who possibly depended on that trade to survive through harsh and often violent situations. The sheer scale of objects that exist in European museums and were displaced from places like Angola is enough to raise concern about the role of those institutions in the upkeeping of imperialistic systemic frameworks.

 

You also discuss how, because of a fire in the original museum building in 1978 that destroyed original specimens, you had to reconstruct the museum's nineteenth-century activities in part from a huge quantity of paper materials. What kind of paper archive did Bocage and his network leave behind, and how did paper materials like museum catalogues help reinforce the colonial dimensions of the museum's collecting and organization practices?

 

The accidental fire of 1978 was a huge fatality. Although the fire brigade was able to protect the Chemical Laboratory in the same building, the zoology museum and practically all of its 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century collections were gone in a matter of hours. Fortunately, most of the historical archive survived. The zoology museum’s archive had been set up some years before and included notes and illustrations from the eighteenth-century explorations of Brazil.

 

Probably around the 1940s, Bocage’s nephew, Carlos Roma Machado de Faria e Maia, bequeathed to the Zoology Museum some folders and boxes with his uncle’s scientific correspondence and papers. These papers, together with other materials such as manuscript catalogues, were my main source materials. In Bocage’s correspondence, for example, we find his relationships with many European naturalists, side by side with the correspondence with the collectors (many in the colonies) who actively contributed to the expansion of the Lisbon collections.

 

Taking both manuscripts and printed materials I tried to reconstruct a possible image of the museum that there once was. There are also some photographs of the museum rooms in the nineteenth century, but I was mostly driven by the sources into matters such as the building of a correspondence network, the negotiation of nomenclature priority, and the publication of catalogues and lists as strategic steps in the affirmation of the peripheral Lisbon museum within the European web of museums.

In one particular chapter, for example, I explored how bookkeeping practices reveal the practical challenges of scale and scope in a zoological museum, and how the same specimens could be organised in different types of lists, depending on the type of knowledge you want to extract from the list itself. Cataloguing, in this sense, was not just inventorying in one single document, but rather a set of unique and provisional ways to organise data into meaning clusters. A catalogue of the birds of the museum can be the result of the enunciation of the physical holdings of a specific collection, while a book on the mammals of Angola will need to include (ideally) all references to all mammal species known to be geographically distributed in Angola. One list refers to physical specimens, the other to known and accepted species, even if you do not hold specimen examples for all of them. In order to publish books on the vertebrate fauna of Angola, which Bocage did in 1881 (Ornithologie d’Angola) and in 1895 (Herpetologie d’Angola et Congo), the Lisbon museum needed to become a centre of accumulation of Angolan specimens. The fact that taxonomical zoology is a collection-based science puts an enormous value on procuring, managing, and describing specimens. And the progressive construction of Portuguese Africa in the late nineteenth century provided with a most favourable background for that expert knowledge to be developed. The collections do not exist anymore, but the knowledge that was once extracted from them resides still in the pages of the many articles and books published by the Museum naturalists.

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In addition to studying the history of natural history museums, you've worked extensively in museums yourself, as a curator, educator, and guide. How do you think this practical experience has informed your thinking on historical museum practices, or how has your historical research informed your work as a museum professional?

 

When I has a museum guide, I had first-hand contact with how people felt about contemporary art, and I was privileged to be able to explore with the public the fascination as well as the exasperation a work of art has the power to stir. When I worked at the design museum, for example, a single object could prompt a debate on the history of twentieth-century political social and cultural events. This multidimensional characteristic, this stickiness if you will, that museum objects can have is fundamentally interesting to me. As a curator, the job is also to study, identify and tease out all of these layered attributes and “use” them in order to create larger narratives in exhibits or books, constellations of meaning that also exist outside of the objects themselves.

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When I started working at the natural history museum of Lisbon, as a guide, I worked mainly with pre-schoolers whose main two questions were: are these animals dead? (and who killed them?), and: are they real? And these two seemingly naïve issues of how and where this thing come from, how it was “made” as well as the contemplations about the hybrid essence of these specimens as part animal, part artefact, are still part of what I do today in my historical research work. Most museum work is about communication and I feel lucky to have been in various positions of the workforce, because I think it is helpful to consider all aspects of museum work especially given the precariat conditions of most cultural agents. I would also like to reinforce the idea of the collaboration between the work in collections, with the crucial work done in libraries and archives, within the same museum or across institutions. Having been an outside researcher working on the history of scientific institutions has often made me wish that the relevant role of usually understaffed and underfunded archives and libraries in museums, for example, received more attention.

 

You recently started a position as a researcher on the project "Colonial Provenances of Nature" at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. Can you briefly describe what this project aims to do? What are you most looking forward to working on as part of this project?

 

I am indeed very excited about this project, not the least because I get to work with a brilliant team of people, but also because the Berlin museum has been at the forefront of the discussion of how to deal with the cultural, political, and colonial aspects of natural history collections. With this project we aim to write the biography of the museum’s mammal collections through provenance research, while at the same time as we are working on how to improve practices of inventory and open access policies, and how to establish active and sustainable collaborations with “interest communities” outside the academic sphere.

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The fact that the project is funded by the German Centre for Lost Art (Deutsche Zentrum für Kulturgutverluste) puts the accent on a more process-oriented methodology, and one of our main challenges is to reflect upon new ways of working within the museum, as well as outside the walls of the museum, in order to create long lasting routines that can draw attention to the nexus between collecting natural history specimens and the backdrop infrastructure of the colonial agenda. There is a specific challenge to the inclusion of natural historical collections within the scope of current decolonisation discussions which are usually focused around sensitive ethnographical and religious objects or human remains. I look forward to this project’s contribution to the dialogue with different communities outside of academia, and to helping build new standards of practice in colonial provenance studies.​