78A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICONwell as metaphorically, immobilizing the object of knowledge, whether it
be animals or plants. This constant factor encompassed the emergence
of taxonomical arrangements typical of the classical age and the collect-
ing practices of the nineteenth century alike. The crystallization of form
enabled the visibility of beings whose normally elusive nature would re-
sist observation and classification.^11
The line that drew the animal body onto the page was essentially the
same line that wrote it into sentences. This epistemic contingency has
been well exemplified in Lévi-Strauss’s idea of the miniature as a site
underlined by power politics intrinsic to objectification. In The Savage
Mind, Lévi-Strauss stated that miniatures seem to have intrinsic aes-
thetic qualities derived from the dimensions of the objects in question.^12
Similarly to Foucault, Lévi-Strauss points to essential and inescapable
concepts of size and scale understood as part of reductionist operations,
whereby “the paintings of the Sistine Chapel are a small-scale model, in
spite of their imposing dimension, since the theme which they depict is
the End of Time.”^13 According to Lévi-Strauss, “even ‘natural size’ im-
plies a reduction of scale since graphic or plastic transposition [what
Foucault calls transcribing] always involves giving up certain dimen-
sions of the object: volume in painting, colour, smell, tactile impressions
in sculpture and the temporal dimension in both cases since the whole
work represented is apprehended at a single moment in time.”^14
Whereas Foucault attempted to configure the discursive and technical
intermingling that led to the prominence of scientific illustration as a tool
of natural history, Lévi-Strauss identified the virtue of reduction for the
purpose of positioning art “half-way between scientific knowledge and
mythical or magical thought.”^15 “To understand a real object in its total-
ity,” Lévi-Strauss argued, “we always tend to work from its parts. The re-
sistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it.”^16 The miniature, or the
natural-size replica, thus enables the exercise of “power over a homologue
of the thing, and by means of it, the latter can be grasped, addressed, and
apprehended at a glance.”^17 Metaphorically, the sealskin manipulated in
Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s the naming of things undergoes a process of
miniaturization through limiting and filtering.
As seen in the previous chapter, the practice of naming is an intrinsi-
cally humanist one—an affirmative act of dominance originally per-
formed by Adam through the naming of animals in the Garden of