ERC Inaugural Lecture "Foraging, Colonialism and More-than-Human Agency in Central Africa"

In FORAGENCY, we aim to research lived experiences of colonialism and capitalism at the crossroads of microhistory and more-than-human approaches. On the one hand, we study how Central Africans could manage to counter, alleviate or minimize their encroachment by outside forces through practices such as hunting, fishing and foraging. On the other, we regard these activities as complex ecological entanglements, entailing manifold relationships between humans and non-humans. We aim to study the act of colonizing in the field, to understand what ‘colonizing’ effectively meant when unfurled in specific biotopes such as rainforests, the shores of a great lake, or a pool on a mighty river. We believe that by researching the ecological dimensions of colonial endeavors, we will be able to shed light on how given environments, resources and (non)-human populations collectively shaped the violent historical dynamic of imperialism and could put dents into the colonizers’ longing for hegemony.

Lecture by Benoît Henriet (P.I. FORAGENCY), Thijs Costers and Etienne Gontard (PhD candidates FORAGENCY)