54RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINSart of Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson. It is in the context of their work that
anthropologist and animal studies scholar Garry Marvin proposes a
methodological approach designed to move beyond essentialist lines of
questioning.^50 In an essay titled “Perpetuating Polar Bears: The Cultural
Life of Dead Animals,” Marvin draws a parallel between the bodies of
leaders, heroes, artists, and those of taxidermy animals.^51 Marvin’s ap-
proach paves the way for rethinking animal life and death through a
taxidermy object. He proposes a subversion of the postcolonial con-
ception of taxidermy as pacified, subjugated animal representation and
recovers its agency, defining a model for the writing of a biography of
objects based on webs of interrelations between animals, humans, envi-
ronments, institutions, texts, discourses, and practices. To Marvin, the
live animal that preceded the taxidermy object clearly died; we find no
ambiguity there. However, and most importantly, the biological death of
the animal does not equate to the end of animal agency. Thus Marvin
speaks of the cultural afterlife of the mounted animal skin as a pointer in
networks of relationships between humans and animals and between
humans and animal-objects. Writing a cultural afterlife of a taxidermy
object thus entails the adoption of a biographical approach whereby a
taxidermy specimen is returned a kind of individuality through the
mapping of specific events that shaped its material existence. And note
that Marvin’s approach to the agency of taxidermy objects does not rely
on the aesthetic judgment of the quality of the animal skin or the realism
of the mount, but rests on the notion that something deeper and more
complex lies at the core of human/animal relations in which animals
have been made objects.
Geographer Merle Patchett has also focused on the idea of the cultural
afterlife of the mounted animal skins. Her work is informed by a 1986 col-
lection of essays edited by Arjun Appadurai that introduced the concept
of the social lives of things, in which the interaction between humans
and objects is conceived as a reciprocal, reflexive relationship.^52 From
this vantage point, it becomes possible to conceive of objects as having
ascribed value, rather than inherent value. But how is such value as-
cribed and through which relationships?^53 While Appadurai’s method
seems to have somewhat fallen out of fashion in academic discussion,
it is important to recognize that his edited collection was one of the first
serious attempts to consider objects beyond the classical limitation of the
metaphysics of presence upon which much post-Kantian philosophy