RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINS57quire commodity status at the moment of their birth. This is especially
true of animals bred and raised by farmers or landowners. Alternatively,
wild animals can acquire commodity status upon capture. Transporta-
tion from one country to another may affect their commodity status more
or less favorably—think of the notions of the rare and the exotic, for in-
stance. However, killing an animal doesn’t automatically equate to the
acquisition of commodity status. Live animals destined to become pets
have commodity value, as do animals that traveled from the tropics as
prepared skins. Identifying the moment in which the animal acquired
commodity value can aid in the recovery of the cultural systems of belief
that turned the animal into an object, positioning it within a specific dis-
cursive formation or at the intersection of multiple ones.
THE SECULAR AND THE SACREDAcknowledging the commodified status of taxidermy enables a con-
ception of this class of objects as a material interface inscribing human/
animal relationships shaped by power/knowledge relationships, practices,
and discourses. Here, too, Foucault’s approach to the analysis of relations
between institutions, subjects, and objects, his genealogical method, can
prove productive. Conceived as an extension of the discursive retrieval
operated by archaeological analysis, genealogy mainly distinguishes itself
from archaeology through a heightened analytical focus on the proces-
sual aspects of the interlinking and overlapping of discourses as actively
shaped by invisible and pervasive relationships of power.^61 Foucault saw
archaeology and genealogy as complementary. However, genealogy goes
further into defining the tactics by which discursivities are implicitly
shaped by power relations.^62
In Foucault’s conception, power is constituted through accepted forms
of knowledge; it is an all-forming entity capable of producing objects and
subjects in discourses and practices. It is not centralized and operated by
one individual, but is instead diffused, and most importantly, it links dis-
courses to the materiality of bodies as political sites in which institution-
alized knowledge influences local practices. The human body, the animal
body, or the bodies of animals-made-things, are all subjected, in different
but interlinked ways, to the forming agency of power. Thus configured,