RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINS49every event, it is unique, yet subject to repetition, transformation, and
reactivation;... it is linked not only to the situations that provoke it, and
to the consequences that it gives rise to, but at the same time, and in ac-
cordance with a quite different modality, to the statements that precede
and follow it.^28The statement constitutes the smallest element of a discursive formation,
yet it is something that can affect the material world.^29 Statements are
charged with agency. They open up possibilities for new disciplines to
arise or cause ruptures in established institutional discourses. They have
different magnitudes and can cause deliberate change or trigger minor
societal or epistemic shifts. Most often, however, they constitute interrup-
tions of some kind—they are points at which epistemic trajectories can
be diverted.
The French naturalist Louis Dufresne was the first to use the term taxi-
dermie, in the scientific reference work Nouveau Dictionnaire d’Histoire
Naturelle (1803–1804).^30 He was a curator at the Muséum National
d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris in 1793 and undertook voyages of discovery
to South America, Alaska, and China on board the ship Astrolabe.^31 From
the start, the term appeared as an elusive and unspecific compound of the
Greek words taxis (to arrange) and derma (sk i n).^32 Prior to the emergence
of taxidermie, the term empailler was most commonly used. A text from
1811 by J. P. Mouton-Fontenille, titled Traité Élémentaire d’Ornithologie,
Suivi de l’Art d’Empailler les Oiseaux (Elementary Treatise of Ornithol-
ogy on the Art of Stuffing Birds), suggests that the first books entirely
dedicated to the subject (preceding Dufresne’s own treatises) were pub-
lished in France toward the end of the eighteenth century. In these early
accounts, the verb empailler is used to capture the essence of the proce-
dure involved in the preservation of bird skins.^33 The verb empailler also
featured prominently in the title of a popular treatise by a French monk,
Monsieur l’Abbé Manesse, published in 1787: Traité sur la Manière
d’Empailler et de Conserver les Animaux, les Pelleteries et les Laines (Trea-
tise on the Manner of Stuffing and Preserving Animal Skins and Hides).^34
Empailler essentially means “to stuff with straw.” It was widely used in
early publications because of its versatile linguistic root: in French, it si-
multaneously came to designate the practice of upholstery of chairs and
divans and the practice of preserving animal skins in a three-dimensional