Pinning beetles, biobanking futures: practices of archiving life in a time of extinction

Abstract

Museums have been apparatuses for articulating knowledges, power and natures into an ordered whole for centuries, practices that have extended through to contemporary museums and their genetic collecting programs. Focusing on negotiations at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History between 2014 and 2016 I examine the integration of biotechnology into museums, exploring how life is being “archived” and for what imagined futures. Engaging the practices of making and organizing genomic collections, I examine a specimen’s ontological instability as it is created and circulated. Learning to pin beetles, take genetic samples and extract DNA, I contrast these processes with a debate over whether a genetic sample could serve as a voucher specimen – a permanently preserved physical reference. I argue that the capacities and limitations of materials are a vital part of understanding how cryo-collections are enacted into being through different practices and are framed by an orienting ethic of preservation in biodiversity biobanking.

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