ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Entangled Organisms: Classificatory Challenges and Ecological Objects in Natural History Collections

• In Event: Collection Stories and Indo-Pacific worlds 1

English Abstract

Algae growing on a Surinamese sloth’s clipped fur, a liverwort found atop a lichen-encrusted scrap of bark from the Amazon, panic-driven webs spun by insects within endangered California pine needles, fungi collected alongside the dead animal bones that facilitated their growth: the files and folders of the herbarium present, despite their claims of perfectly catalogued botanical order, a world of multispecies entanglement pointing to the inherent complexity of nature. Following the entangled lives of plants, animals, fungi, and insects held at the New York Botanical Garden’s Steere Herbarium, this paper problematizes the flattened taxonomies of natural history collections, questioning the ongoing colonial drive to categorize specimens as individuals, often stored, labeled, and catalogued separately from one another, if at all. Thinking through nineteenth and twentieth century ideas of biological entanglement – symbiosis, mutualism, and even parasitism – while arguing against a colonial construction of individualism that has shaped the basic divisions infrastructures, and architecture of the natural history collection, I point to the tense politics of taxonomy and supposed fixity within the life sciences. As natural history institutions face a series of crises in 2025: widespread environmental catastrophe and species extinction, pushes towards ethical stewardship and “decolonization,” and crippling funding cuts, I trace ideas of interdependence based in often overlooked and ignored multispecies specimens (sometimes forming small collections themselves on a single page) as models for both exposing and rethinking the fixity of the colonial collection more broadly.

Author

• Elaine Ayers, Yale University