The practices of care: extinction and de-colonization in the natural history museum

Abstract

The practices of care of extinct animal specimens and other materials in natural history museums are many and varied. This article focuses upon two extinct animal examples from the Berlin Museum of Natural History (MfN), the quagga and the thylacine, to present critiques of historical care and argue for Indigenous led alternatives. These critiques and arguments are organized via the organizing headings of isolation, preservation and revolution. While the dark histories of museums as active purchasers and collectors of ancestral remains and creators of markets for scarce forms of life are sometimes acknowledged, it is not a history that has been critically connected to normative practices of ‘isolation’ and ‘preservation’. Indeed, such practices are often heedless of the ongoing demand to recognize Indigenous continuities and are unresponsive to calls for relations that figure the museum ‘materials’ as simultaneously understood as colonial/scientific events and entities that are lively and capable of producing diverse effects. Such understandings emerge from engagement with diverse critiques including those arising from Indigenous writings. One pathway to reimagine the museum and practice an aware care may be to consider the simultaneous times at play within such institutions and the decolonizing possibilities of organizing practices beyond a single linear time.

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