title: At home in the postcolony: Ecology, empire and domesticity at the Lamto field station, Ivory Coast.
abstract: This article is a history of the field station Lamto, in Ivory Coast, which was created by French ecologists in 1962, after independence. It retraces the origins, the logics and the contradictions of an extraordinarily ambitious scientific project, which aimed at the systematic, holistic, quantitative and multi-disciplinary description of a unit of African nature - the savannah ecosystem. It explores how knowledge-making was articulated with work hierarchies and postcolonial politics, lifestyles, values and affects. It reconstitutes the political ecology of a research station in ecology, following in its residences, laboratories and open-air experiments the co-production of domesticity, nature, science and (post-)colonial situations.
authors.affiliation: Département Histoire et Philosophie des Sciences, SPHERE UMR 7219, Université Paris Diderot and Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Guillaume
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Lachenal
keywords: Africa; ecology; field station; postcolonial