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Making Our Beasts

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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Making Our Beasts is an ethno...
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  • 09 December 2025
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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

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 paleontology 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. Foregrounding elements of scientific inquiry that have been sidelined—including affect, touch, material agency, and the labor of volunteers, technicians, and other nonscientists—Shever reveals how paleontology continues to be structured by race, gender, and colonialism.
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Price: $34.95
Pages: 270
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Series: Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics
Publication Date: 09 December 2025
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520416727
Format: Paperback
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Elana Shever is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colgate University and author of Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina.
Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Meeting Prehistory Halfway
1. Becoming Stone
2. Making Charismatic Violence
3. Forging Connection Across Millions of Years
4. Paleontology, Colonialism, and Edutainment
5. The Paleontological Real
Conclusion: Re-Making Our Beasts

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index