“The Materialist Relic: Nonhuman Bodies in Zoological Museums”

If you wander into the Great Mammal Hall at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), you’ll find yourself greeted by rows of taxidermied faces staring out from polished cases, limbs posed to mimic life; above you, float the skeletons of whales caught mid-migration on a ghostly parade. Each animal has a little white identification card, but you’ll notice that some have a bright red box along the top of their card with white lettering labeling a threatened or extinct status for the individual’s species; this could be the only glimpse you ever get of them. With white walls, warm lighting, pristine glass, and well-tended wood floors, the Hall resists both gloominess and gaudiness. This collection is, by no means, the most grandiose or dramatic presentation of specimens; compared to other mammal mausoleums, the Hall is a rather tame example of such a display. And yet, there is a kind of familiar eeriness to the space – in the seeming timelessness of the bodies, suspended from the usual decay; in the reflective eyes of creatures who no longer walk the earth, but whose materiality is tangible and present; in the identification cards like little immaculate gravestones providing only the most basic story, but enough for the engaged mind to conjure a world. Moving amongst the cases, one can feel the quiet of reverence of the visitors juxtaposing the energy of a shared intrusive thought – glass aside, what if I just reached out and touched the giraffe? Will this be the time the lioness comes alive? What if this is all I ever see of the beauty of a bison?  

Here, the nonhuman body becomes holy – the potential for a miracle, a site for the clash of cultures and social classes, a talisman for ideological identification, a reflection of the animal self. While the practice of collecting, displaying, and venerating the remains of the special dead is common across different cultural frameworks, the treatment of the bodies of endangered or extinct species as well as charismatic nonhuman-animal individuals in museum settings echoes the treatment of holy relics in the development of Christianity from the early Church up through the Middle Ages. Since the mid-19th century mechanistic revolution in biological research, the preserved and displayed remains of nonhumans have performed the role of a materialist relic, and this has only been augmented as scientists and the general public reckon with mass extinction, climate change, and dismantling the ontological positions underpinning environmental degradation. Touching on Katherine Verdery’s analysis of the sociopolitical roles of dead bodies, I argue that this practice has a social history – an understood semiotics that recreates worlds of meaning by reshaping time, space, and kinship ties. This entanglement forces a consideration of the sacred and the role of ritual beyond the modern proclivity to ontologically separate the religious and the secular. Therefore, exhibition taxidermy manifests a new kind of miracle, weaving together the past and present through its own special powers of embodiment and re-animation. 

I argue there are two wonders attributed to materialist nonhuman relics.  First, there is the miracle of affect, the experience of an intersection with a being simultaneously close and distant, both physically and genetically. Here, the mind becomes alive – we not only imagine ourselves with these wild creatures, but we imagine ourselves as these wild creatures. Like a believer brought closer to God through the imitation of the saints or one who is transformed by the transference properties of a relic, the museum visitor becomes part of a continuum of relatives while gazing into the face of the Other. The second miracle is the preservation of the holotype. Through DNA sampling, we have the opportunity to collect a creature’s basic genetic essence, even if their physical existence has been eradicated, and so, believe that we can change the course of the sixth extinction. This is an obsession with death comparable to the fixation on martyrdom in the early Church, because, as our world might end as we know it, science tells us that we must sacrifice certain bodies in order to eventually right the wrongs of human behavior. It constitutes a wild hope – hope that one’s feeling of disconnection from nonhuman ways of living might be healed, hope that our planet might be healed. 

Finally, I argue that these cultural death practices – whether that is a case containing an extinct nonhuman body or the undecayed arm of Mary Magdalene –  transition into the realm of morbidity when the chance at a miracle is no longer present, when there isn’t a sense of the continuum, but instead, simply a leftover celebrating a meaningless sacrifice. If a gallery tour was effective in its unspoken aim, the visitors leave the zoological museum experiencing a conservation conversion, awash with a new sense of awe at numinous relationality, the glory of shared genetics, and a sense of responsibility to our aching planet, carrying the transference properties of our moment of engagement with presence out into the world.