Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Forschungsprojekte

 

Aktuelles Forschungsprojekt

 

Commodifying Cattle. Transforming Livestock Economies and Knowledge Regimes in the French Colonial Empire, 1890-1960
(vorher finanziert von der Leibniz-Forschungsgruppe zur Geschichte und Theorie des Globalen Kapitalismus an der Universität Gießen, und, ab 2019 von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft im Rahmen einer ‚Eigenen Stelle‘)

 

This project explores the policies towards cattle and cattle pastoralists in the French colonial Empire in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The project examines how in various French colonies, most notably in French West Africa, Madagascar and Indochina, administrators, veterinary doctors and other experts came to see cattle as a key economic resource that needed to be harnessed through a series of interventions aimed at promoting commodification, raising productivity and ultimately transforming the pre-existing cattle economies. By analysing these interventions, which ranged from the improvement of local breeds and new methods of cattle disease management to the taxation of cattle, the sedentarization of cattle pastoralists and the establishment of new cattle trading networks and meat factories, this project contributes to various fields of research, most notably colonial history, the history of science and knowledge, economic history and environmental history. While it will shed new light on the multiple tensions, conflicts as well as transformative effects which the imposition of colonial and capitalist logics on rural, especially pastoralist, societies and their environments entailed, it will also enhance our understanding of the role of science and knowledge in French colonial projects of agrarian reform and socio-economic modernization. Through its geographical focus on French West Africa, Madagascar and Indochina, it connects regions that are rarely studied together and that, along with the analysis of their transnational connections, promise to provide a more global view on French colonialism.

 

 

Vorherige Forschungsprojekte

 

Medical Demography in Colonial Central Africa. Measuring and Negotiating Health, Reproduction and Difference, 1918-1945
(Postdoc-Projekt am MPI für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, 2014-15)
https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/projects/NWGLipphardt_SCoghe_Medical-Demography

 

Population Politics in the Tropics. Demography, Health and Colonial Rule in Portuguese Angola, 1890s-1940s
(PhD-Projekt am European University Institute, Florenz, 2008-2014, eingereicht und verteidigt im Jahr 2014)
 

Sklavenemanzipation in Angola im 19. Jahrhundert. Die Libertos der angloportugiesischen Mixed Commission in Luanda (1842-1871)
(M.A.-Projekt an der Freien Universität Berlin, 2007-2008)

 

 

Mitgliedschaft in gemeinschaftlichen Forschungsprojekten

 

2015-: Mitglied (und Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) in der DFG-geförderten Leibniz-Forschungsgruppe zur Geschichte und Theorie des globalen Kapitalismus, Prof. Friedrich Lenger, Justus Liebig University Gießen.

 

2015-: Associate Fellow im Forschungsprojekt The International History of Rural Development since 1950, finanziert von der Volkswagen-Stiftung.

 

2011, 2013-2015: Mitglied in der Forschungsgruppe Twentieth Century Histories of Knowledge About Human Variation, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin.

 

2011-2014: Mitglied im Forschungsnetzwerk Population, Knowledge, Order, Transformation: Demography and Politics in the Twentieth Century in Global Perspective, gefördert von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft.