Making Our Beasts Paleontology in the United States

About this book

Making Our Beasts is an ethnography of science-in-action that uses a familiar topic – dinosaurs – to lead readers to understand science and its objects in new ways. Through fieldwork and interviews conducted at laboratories, dig sites, museums, and entertainment sites, Elana Shever explores vertebrate palaeontology in the United States, showing how the practices of scientists and the materiality of fossils together shape the social world and also are shaped by it. The book foregrounds elements of scientific inquiry that have been sidelined: affect, touch, material agency, and the labour of volunteers, technicians, and other nonscientists. It also reveals how palaeontology continues to be structured by race, gender, and colonialism.

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Biography

Elana Shever is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colgate University and author of Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina.