A Langur from Sumatra: Digital Futures, Material Presents and Colonial Pasts

Researchers interested in the colonial provenance of European natural history collections find themselves currently in an ambiguous position. On one hand, there is a fast-growing amount of digital services that provide them with statistics, names and lists of objects that have been accumulated in former colonial areas and are now stored in natural history museums in the Global North. On the other hand, these digital collection services fail to provide researchers with archival information on historical collection contexts, local names and meanings of animals and plants, and the labour, knowledges, colonial infrastructure and (epistemic) violence that were necessary to move tens of millions of natural objects across the globe. By zooming in on the digital representation of a black-crested Sumatran langur collected on the island of Sumatra (Indonesia) in the 1830s, this short paper reflects on the impact of these data absences on the further development of large-scale data infrastructures in the field. Inspired by earlier problematization of the digital turn in collection-based biodiversity sciences, this paper argues for the more sustained use of archival evidence so as to rethink what it means to infrastructure 'biodiversity heritage' collections in a digital age.