RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINS59new preservation techniques, the specimens cataloged during the nine-
teenth century still survive, mostly in good shape, today. Their cultural
afterlives are exclusively linked to natural history discourses: they are
used by researchers to learn about evolution, extinction, and other ge-
netic data that can be gleaned from preserved biomatter.
In A History of Taxidermy: Art, Science and Bad Taste, Pat Morris has
tracked the oldest extant stuffed objects for the purpose of outlining the
ultimate, most up-to-date metanarrative account of the history of taxi-
dermy.^67 In Morris’s text, preserved animals are discussed as evidence
within the classical framework of connoisseurship; they are judged ac-
cording to their execution, realism, and conditions of preservation. The
resulting considerations are interesting but simultaneously limit what
these objects might tell us about human/animal relations. Considered
from archaeological and genealogically informed perspectives, these
specimens raise questions about the discursive features that led to the
stuffing and mounting of animal skins. Who was involved in such pro-
cesses and why? What power/knowledge relationship shaped the pre-
served animal body in the form we see today? At which point did the
animal become a commodity, and what discourses and practices made
that commodification possible? Which institutions commissioned col-
lection and preservation processes and to what end? Why were certain
animals chosen instead of others? But most importantly, these questions
enable the emergence of a variety of narrativizations in which the biogra-
phies and cultural afterlives of taxidermy mounts show that taxidermy
cannot be defined simply by a longing for immortality or by a desire to
subjugate nature.
An interesting case is provided by two opposed categories of animal-
objects identified by Morris as some of the oldest extant examples: the
stuffed hippopotamus skin at the Medici Museum in Florence that was
apparently destined to join the collection of early naturalist Ulisse Al-
drovandi (1522–1605) and a stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling of
the church of Nossa, Italy (1534). During the second half of the sixteenth
century, Aldrovandi’s museum (which opened in 1547 in Bologna) became
the model for the early institutionalization of natural history. The self-
appointed naturalist began to theorize a new science based on “observa-
tion, collection, description, careful reproduction, and ordered classifica-
tion of natural objects.”^68 His collection, which included more than