You Ain’t Nothin But a ___: Modelling, Manufacturing, Standardising, and Enacting Elvis Presley in Regional NSW

• In Event: If a Body Meet a Body: Making People in Daily Practice

Abstract

The August Krogh principle – often cited as the basis for model organism selection and use - states that for any question raised within the biological sciences, there is some single organism best suited to its answering. Once identified and manufactured, such organisms move between physical locations, between disciplines, and between individuals, assisting in the establishment of infrastructures, communication systems, and material exchange. But how are such organisms first identified, how are they constructed, how are they standardised, and how are they then used to position some bodies against or amongst others?

In this paper, I will describe how the town of Parkes, NSW, Australia, has standardised the body of Elvis Presley in order to achieve many of the same aims as model organisms within biological lab spaces. Comparing ethnographic notes from Parkes against this larger notion of the model organism, I will ask how the body of Presley is constructed and standardised in order to move between locations, communicate between state organisations, and between Parkes individuals. Bringing together notions of boundary objects (Star and Greisemer), standardised packages (Fujimura), ethnographies of knowing subjects (Mialet), and my own field notes, I aim to present an instance in which classically STS studies of laboratories are able to move far outside of formal scientific settings, considering not only how we might see the social practices of community building and communication in the scientific but also the scientific practices of organism manufacture and standardisation in the social.

Author

• Sahar Tavakoli, Cornell University STS