INTRODUCTION31bodied humans within a material world are, in new materialism, also in-
terlinked to a defining awareness of the interconnectedness of biospheres
and ecospheres, and the inherent fragility of the systems we co-constitute
and simultaneously share.
Many of the questions underpinning the concerns of new material-
ism are ontological in nature. The rethinking of anthropocentrism and
the consequent disavowing of our dominion over nature is reconfig-
ured through a reimagining of the fundamental structures of matter.^55
As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, authors of New Materialism: On-
tology, Agency, and Politics, argue, “The Cartesian-Newtonian under-
standing of matter yields a conceptual and practical domination of
nature as well as a specifically modern attitude or ethos of subjectivist
potency.”^56 Thus, new and vastly feminist materialist approaches re-
nounce determinism and attempt to describe active and generative
processes of materialization in which objects and humans are equally
engaged through an immanent vitality. These new ontologies thus aim
at identifying “materiality that materializes, evincing immanent modes
of self-transformation.”^57
Different aspects of object-oriented ontology and new materialism have
substantially influenced the writing of this book in the acknowledgment
that taxidermy objects constitute a particularly ontologically unstable
type of material presence characterized by pronounced specificities that
are in turn problematized by the exhibiting space. Most importantly, in
this book, taxidermy objects are contextualized as an interface, sensitive
substrates upon which human/animal relationships co-shape discourses,
practices, and, ultimately, ecosystems.
Chapter 1, “Reconfiguring Animal Skins: Fragmented Histories and
Manipulated Surfaces” reconsiders the traditional historiography of taxi-
dermy to recover the medium’s agency. This new trajectory moves away
from traditional object-based analysis to develop a conception of taxi-
dermy as a site in which discursive networks, practices, and power relations
can be mapped. The task begins with dismantling the metanarrative of
progress to recover essential statements, discourses, and practices of
which taxidermy is a sedimentation.^58 Shifting the focus from silent
historical beginnings, the emergence of the word taxidermie in 1803–
1804 is highlighted as a defining moment in the material history of the
medium.^59