Man and Animal at the Serengeti Research Institute: Management and Sciences of Sacralized Nature in the Second Half of the 20th Century

Funded by the SFB 1482 - Human Categorisation. The project understands comparative behavioural research as a central instance of dealing with the guiding difference between humans and animals in the 20th century. Using the example of the Serengeti Research Institute in Tanzania, East Africa, founded in 1965, it examines knowledge production, practice and politics of behavioural research on free-living large mammals. It examines the forms and media of objectification and anthropomorphisation of the animal as a research object, the transformation of formerly racialised categories of difference in the course of the postcolonial "Africanisation" of the institute, and the spatial differentiation and politics of order between humans and animals as a consequence of the institute's knowledge production.