Frozen Futures: Crafting Natural History in a Genomic Age

• In Event: How Collections End: Objects, Meaning and Loss in Laboratories and Museums - I

Abstract

As biotechnology reshapes museum practices, vanishing biodiversity is being preserved for uncertain ecological futures in a variety of ways, each with a distinct shape and scale of time guiding its making. This ethnography focuses on the Global Genome Initiative at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., a project that seeks to cryo-preserve half of the taxonomic families of life in the next six years. Grounded in a feminist STS perspective of how materials are made to matter (Barad 2003) I examine how museum cryo-collections are crafted as ontological embodiments (Mol 2003) and forms of "latent life" (Radin 2013; Radin and Kowal 2017) as they are made and used. Through stuffing bird skins, pinning beetles, pressing plants, taking tissue samples and assembling genomic data I explore how these disembodied living things are transformed into embodiments of different types of time—through their preservation, negotiated use and continuing re-evaluation as specimens are made, evaluated and consumed. As specimens’ biologies are unbound (Helmreich 2009) into differently valued parts and pieces, spread across the spaces of the museum—from frozen tissue samples to a bird skins in cabinets to globally dispersed data—these distributed specimens remain sites of contested classificatory meanings, objects of shifting value, and disembodiments of hand-crafted “natural orders” (Foucault 1966; Haraway 1989). Through exploring museum specimens as mobile and transformative of a variety of scales of time, I argue there is multiplicity not only between but also within objects as they negotiate reconstructed pasts and imagined futures.

Author

• Adrian Van Allen, UC Berkeley / Smithsonian NMNH