RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINS55relied. And most importantly, Appadurai’s Foucault-informed cultural
life of things is responsible for shifting the focus of inquiry from the es-
sence of things to their function. Subject/object relationships appeared to
be investigated in a defined and limited context, a spatiotemporal milieu
enabling the surpassing of inherent transcendentalism. At the dawn of
the new millennium, Appadurai’s methodological fetishism was further
problematized by Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory” (2001), in which Heidegger’s
phenomenological distinction between object and thing began to play a
defining role in the formation of new conceptions of material complica-
tions. According to Heidegger, an object is an object when it fits a precoded
relation between function and purpose in the subject/object relationship.
An object such as a fork or a blender that functions according to the cul-
tural and personal expectations of the subject can be understood as such.
However, once the object ceases to function, or when it malfunctions, it
challenges our expectations, commanding a heightened register of atten-
tion: it becomes a thing.^54
A thing is that which is not yet fully or even partially codified in rep-
resentation, and as such, it challenges the subject through a series of non-
affirmative experiences of the world. Should one really wish to insist on
the essentialist questioning line, the appropriate question in relation to
taxidermy objects may therefore not be “animal or object?” but “animal
or thing?” As art critic Leo Stein claimed, “things are what we encoun-
ter,”^55 while objects vanish to consciousness, absorbed by anthropocen-
tric functionalities. In opposition, things hold within them an “audacious
ambiguity”^56 that objects lack. They are distinguished from functional
objects by a sensuous presence that exceeds the limitations of purpose
and function.
I have previously stated that taxidermy mounts are essentially com-
modities and that, as such, they have an ascribed commodity value
(monetary and symbolic) that is of essential importance to the under-
standing of the human/animal relationships inscribed in it. In Marx’s
conception, a commodity is an object external to ourselves that “satisfies
human wants of some sort or another” and that is essentially defined by
its use value, intrinsic to its effective usefulness, and its exchange value,
the common factor in the exchange relation between commodities.^57 In
the first half of the first volume of Capital, Marx unveils the complex re-
lation between commodities and labor time in order to reveal the dynam-
ics involved in the exploitation of the proletariat by the wealthier social