Annelise Walker is a PhD candidate at the Penn State Department of History, co-advised by Martha Few and Christopher Heaney. Annelise received their BA in anthropology from the University of Rochester, and is now working on a dissertation entitled \u201cMineral Collecting and Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Alto Per\u00fa.” They currently serve as the graduate student representative on the History of Science Society forum for Science and Knowledge in Latin America and the Caribbean (SKLAC). We asked Annelise about their research for this spotlight interview.<\/p>\n
RECSLAC:<\/strong> What your dissertation is about?<\/p>\n Annelise Walker (AW):<\/strong> My dissertation reconstructs the networks Spain used to collect minerals from Alto Per\u00fa (Bolivia) for its first natural history museum, the Real Gabinete de Historia Natural (RGHN), founded 1752. The research question: Why did the RGHN transition from using the imperial bureaucracy to collect minerals by ordering local officials to gather specimens from mines from the 1750s to 1770s, to sponsoring a dedicated mineralogical expedition to Alto Per\u00fa led by German scientists in the 1790s? I argue that this change was motivated by both a) the museum directors\u2019 growing desire to control a collecting network in which local actors, especially Indigenous miners, exercised considerable agency; and b) the reality on the ground in Alto Per\u00fa, where bureaucrats failed to find specimens to ship because many mines were flooded, collapsed, or depleted, and their owners struggled to find laborers after centuries of the mit\u2019a\u00a0labor draft had shrunk Indigenous communities. However, my dissertation also shows that Indigenous miners remained central to the RGHN\u2019s work even when expedition science reached its peak.<\/p>\n RECSLAC:<\/strong> How did you become interested in the topic?<\/p>\n AW:<\/strong> I had always been interested in the history of natural history. When visiting the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Sevilla, Spain in 2024, I discovered a set of royal orders for subjects to collect natural curiosities for the RGHN and shipment catalogs that bureaucrats throughout Spanish America and the Philippines wrote to accompany the specimens they sent. I was especially interested in the relaciones\u00a0that bureaucrats and mine owners wrote about the mines that contributed metal ore to the museum, because they revealed a close link between mineral collecting and colonial mining, and all the violence that entailed\u2014the exploitation of Indigenous laborers, the degradation of the Andean environment.<\/p>\n RECSLAC:<\/strong> Is there a particular archival collection that has proven especially fruitful for your research? Tell us about it.<\/p>\n AW:<\/strong> Instead of an archival collection, I\u2019d love to talk about an object collection. Spain\u2019s National Museum of Natural Sciences (MNCN) holds what remains of the RGHN\u2019s mineral collections: specimens the German mineralogists Christian and Conrad Heuland collected during their expedition to Alto Per\u00fa and Chile (1795\u20131800). The museum has a few on display, but after connecting with the geology curator I was able to work with the hundreds of rocks kept in storage. One thing I\u2019ve learned from this research is that collectors\u2019 ability to label rocks depended on their geometry\u2014specifically, whether the specimen had a large enough flat surface to affix a paper label to. Collectors\u2019 ability to label rocks in turn impacts our ability to know these minerals\u2014to connect them to the expedition\u2019s catalog, to understand their histories\u2014today.<\/p>\n RECSLAC:<\/strong> Which text has most influenced your work, and why?<\/p>\n AW<\/strong>: I am indebted to so many great scholars and it pains me not to mention them all! But I think the most influential text has been Ricardo Roque\u2019s Headhunting and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870\u20131930. Roque has influenced my methodology in his demonstration that museum specimens and the texts that circulated alongside them must be studied together. He\u2019s also influenced my thinking about the RGHN: when we study \u201cthe colonial history of museum collections,\u201d he writes, we must be \u201csensitive to what is meant by \u2018colonial,\u2019\u201d because many of these collections were formed in networks that were \u201cindigenous as much as European\u201d (222\u201323). Thus, while my dissertation argues that colonial Spanish mineral collecting was a violent project that depended on unfree labor and environmental degradation, I never lose sight of the agency of Indigenous altoperuanos, who excavated, sorted, and circulated\u2014which is to say, collected\u2014the RGHN\u2019s specimens. I see the minerals that live in the MNCN in Madrid today as their legacy.<\/p>\n
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