What we want to stress here is that all collections – whether they are ethnographic or natural, artistic or cultural – are comprised of things that have been collected. By being rendered collectable, each specimen or artefact has been produced as an object indexing a scientific will to knowledge. This will to knowledge is epistemological as much as it is institutional: it is a form of normalised violence that must be accounted for within the contemporary practice that seeks to both decolonise and ecologise the museum – two moves that we consider as entirely necessary.¹ In these fantastic inheritances called natural history collections, is it possible to denaturalise the act of “collecting” to renegotiate the co-production of knowledge – past, present, and future? In order to enable this to occur, it is necessary first to decipher the contemporary necroaesthetic strategies, which perpetuate the naturalised fiction of specimen collections.

In the Oxford Natural History Museum, we recently encountered an elegantly stuffed deer placed near the entrance of the main exhibition hall. A sign beside this formidable specimen invited visitors to pet the fur of this now inanimate object. Many viewers seemed indeed to have great fun doing this. “Exhibition was a practice to produce permanence, to arrest decay”, writes Donna Haraway in her essay on museum taxidermy (1989, p. 55). Focusing on the late nineteenth-century genesis of the American Museum of Natural History, Haraway unpacks how the naturalisation of certain civil hierarchies (i.e. human exceptionalism and patriarchy) underlies the presentation of organic hierarchies constructed by means of inanimate taxidermy. “The animal is frozen in a moment of supreme life, and man is transfixed. No merely living organism could accomplish this act. [...] This is a spiritual vision made possible only by their death and literal re-presentation. Only then could the essence of life be present. Only then could the hygiene of nature cure the sick vision of civilized man. Taxidermy fulfills the fatal desire to represent, to be whole; it is a politics of reproduction” (Haraway 1989, p. 30). To this day, natural history dioramas tend to compose three-dimensional tableaus of wild nature, while anthropogenic visions of urbanisation, deforestation, mining, extinction, or pollution remain an absolute exception. So what could possibly be the point of an invitation to tenderly caress a stuffed deer – a specimen so dead that it is not even indifferent to our touch – other than to naturalise the obvious, disturbing sense of death signalled by the eerie stillness of these once live creatures? While standing in a hall filled with dead creatures made to look animate or frozen in space-time, an invitation to pet the collection surely encourages visitors to suspend disbelief, in favour of the wish-image that this collection is somehow, against all empirical evidence, natural.