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On my campus, there is a zoological faculty, and its museum. This museum is filled with larvae in various stages of development, tadpoles and eggs, joining forces to enact different stages of a single life. Elsewhere, bees and ants pinned to hives stimulate the activities of collective life. A lobster is dismembered on a purple cushion to show its numerous components, and seven human fetuses float in jars, eyes variously opened or closed in eerie states of peace, calm, and disarray.
Among these pinned bees, beetles in bell-jars, tarantulas poised and preserved fish floating in pickling fluids, a variety of predators, prey, birds and mamiferous sea life are frozen in dramatic poses. From penguins to crows, sardines to a whale skeleton, passing by wolves and foxes and wildcats, there seems to not be a single creature spared from this display of once-was-life. The creatures, stolen from the clutches of fungi and decay, are frozen in time as efficiently as ancient stones. They will stand at the center of this essay.
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Whenever I see creatures closed away, I think of Sylvia Plath’s poem, Stillborn:
These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn’t for any lack of mother-love.O I cannot explain what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
They smile and smile and smile at me.
And still the lungs won’t fill and the heart won’t start
This poem holds my attention as a reflection on writing, and the trickiness of the act: giving life to that which is still, returning the breath to that which is disappearing, disappearing, gone. Writing is the difficult act of perpetuation, trying to enact the possibility of living and reliving what, once, was only a moment.
Anthropology and taxidermy are not dissimilar practices. Both bring fragments of the whole back into their workshop: a body cleaned, emptied, sterilised and reduced to its skin and bone, which will then, somehow, be rendered “alive” again. The result may be an incorrect imitation of the original, based on a lack of information or a lack of skill. It might be a ridiculous transformation of what the original was, such as pole-dancing taxidermy mice, weaved out of the fantasy and creative freedom of the anthropologist/taxidermist. Or it might simply be over-perfected: another neater and more “correct” version of the animal that was brought in by the hunter.
The anthropologist is a bit like the child hunting for seashells on the beach: what is most shiny, most striking, most interesting goes into the pail. The rest gets left behind. The desire for taxidermy comes from a desire to preserve treasures, to hold them tight and to maintain them. It takes the art of treasuring as its center, motivated as it is by this impulse to continue holding, at all cost, that which caught its eye, by which it is fascinated. And while the taxidermist finds themself with only skin and bones to work with, the academic anthropologist, similarly, has only skin and bones to work with once they return to their office and campus.
Taxidermy might try its best to comply to the original reality, or at least to a believable one, by attempting to weave a complete illusion and to make us forget that inside the skin are only a few bones (the ones which would be useful for the final form), and a shape of straw and wood shavings twined together into the desired shape. Even if the result may be an efficient enough illusion to make us forget that it only partially shows the real, both anthropology and taxidermy, in essence, remain a Frankenstein assemblage of components: the original pieces, the imagination of the creator, and whatever props, stuffings and pieces of wire will keep the whole together.
In Petra Kalshoven’s article, “Gestures of Taxidermy,” a practicing taxidermist describes taxidermy as being in the “zone of encounter between life and death.” The way that he describes it is this: “If you don’t die, you can’t live.” To maintain the treasures collected in nature—to treasure them—the taxidermist must be in possession of a deadened body, which they proceed to make alive once more… in their own manner. The ideals of preservation and immortality, so valued in the art of treasuring, are intimately linked to death. Something which—like a diamond or a stone, a necklace, a pressed flower, a beetle in a bell-jar—is cut off from the usual processes of life—its changes, its copulations, and its decompositions—cannot belong in the same sphere of life as the other objects. They are the ones which are treasure.
Something successfully written is also—at least temporarily—saved from the grasps of death: eternalized. “These poems do not live, it’s a sad diagnosis” is a sad recognition of failed writing: the act of writing perfected, yet not achieving its goal. The structure is there, and yet the aim, the rendering alive, is not achieved. But isn’t this a common theme?
In Hamlet, Gertrude likens words to breath, and then to life: “if words be made of breath, / And breath of life.” Words and life are interlinked. Without the breath, soul or life to carry them further—to heaven or into their own liveliness, detached from the speaker—then the words remain limited. “Words, words, words” and nothing else. Though the words may be “proper in shape and number and every part,” as Sylvia’s stillborns are, then they remain floating fetuses, a fox’s mouth caught in a snarl, yet never the wetness of a nose that “touches twig, leaf;” nor “an eye / a widening deepening greenness,” as is the “thought fox” in Ted Hughes’ poem. The eyes of a taxidermy creature are proper, and they are correct: the marble reflecting an almost-convincing-life. And yet.
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In a conversation on data privacy regarding our MA thesis topic, one of the students raises their hand to say that… it doesn’t matter to her if the topic is leaked or used. “It’s not,” she says, “like anyone is going to read our thesis.”
Writers and poets know how to wonder at the lifeness (as opposed to only the life-like-ness) of the words which they inscribe. Yet isn’t this questioning often forgotten by anthropologists? And isn’t it particularly necessary, when taking data and putting it back together again (like the king’s men re-assembling Humpty Dumpty), to continue obsessively wondering what makes the difference between a still life and a real life? What makes the difference between the taxidermy fox and the living fox? Between the real fox and the one which, in Ted Hughes’ poem, “The Thought Fox”, “with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox / it enters the dark hole of the head.” This might mean asking the difference between the fox which exists far away, and the fox which changes us.
Anders Burman’s article “Are Anthropologists Monsters?” questions the current structures in the production of academic knowledge, in which “extraction and distance” are practices more rewarded than practices of giving back and critically engaging with interlocutors as thinking agents. “People who are subjected to anthropological scrutiny,” Burman writes, “wonder, and justifiably so, what the anthropologists do with the extracted knowledge.” In the words of an Aymara woman: “‘What do they do, huh, with everything we tell them? And all the photos?'”
It does seem to me that, in academic anthropology especially, we tend to forget to do anything with the bodies collected. What is worse than a taxidermic non-human animal stuffed and snarling on the mantelpiece? A taxidermic non-human animal stuffed and snarling in the attic. Collecting dust, unseen, unnoticed. Another file which was just a stamp in the anthropologist’s career path: a tick in our advancement towards a PhD, a postdoc or a tenured position. A to-do completed, a toast at a graduation party.
These are examples of data extracted but not treasured. The beginning of the treasuring process is achieved—the taking and the transforming into words words words—but the second layer of the process is missed. The body is killed but not revived, the encounter encountered, and then severed. We are left with only an object, a stack of papers, lying limp in your hands. These poems do not live, it’s a sad diagnosis. The bell jars of the university are filled, yet all the eyes which stare back are glassy, unfocussed. And while one of our professors spends half an hour speaking about structure, formatting and referencing, the most important element is missed: that of life.
Anthropological writing does not have to imply immobility and lifelessness. Via true treasuring, it might imply exactly the opposite. Something which we choose to treasure might be the very thing which we let in, which we allow to transform and change us. As opposed to how we have practiced treasuring so far: that which we separate from ourselves with marble eyes and a pane of glass. Perhaps the element of lifelikeness is omitted from anthropology because it’s terrifying. Because it demands, nags and snags. It does not let you be, simply, an objective observer.
Of course, I can understand it, this tendency to isolate and deaden. Life is scary, frightening and unpredictable. It meets you in the middle of the tundra and, in a moment of shock, changes you forever. In the words of Nastassya Martin, in In the Eye of the Wild, the anthropologist physically disfigured by her encounter with a bear in the mountains of Kamchatka:
“There exists an implicit, silent law. A law unique to the predators which search and avoid each other in the depths of forests or the spines of the earth. The law is the following: when they meet, if they meet, their territories implode, their worlds are reversed, their usual paths transform and their connections become indefectible.”
However, like the “Thought Fox” in Ted Hughes’ poem, a moment of encounter can also be an internal one. The fox changes you from a visit in the night. We can further imagine the kind of treasuring described by another fox, the one in Le Petit Prince: l’apprivoisement. Taming. However, the fox does not use this word in the patriarchal, colonialist and human-centered way it can often be used. He describes ‘taming’ as ‘establishing ties’. He explains:
“To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”
This description is not dissimilar to the way in which Daria, the Evenes woman in Nastassya Martin’s ethnography, A l’Est des Rêves, describes the hearth fire:
“This small fire, Oulekit, is linked to all of these other fires (lava fires, the sun…) but he must not wish to do the same as them. He must be comfortable where he is. Because we need him. Do you understand now? You ask if I speak to him? Of course I speak to him!”
While there are certain elements of possessiveness in these two descriptions, I believe that they also, importantly, speak about what treasuring is. The choice of one element, or one part of an element above all others. But there is also, in that choice, an encounter, and within that encounter there is a uniqueness that emerges, and a transformation of both parties. Treasuring is not an immobile act. It is not a filing cabinet or a formulaic organization of butterfly bodies. It is a living connection, a moment of meaning created between bodies.
What I mean to say with all of this is that treasuring is a matter of maintaining, of holding a relationship. Of connecting, mutually and across the elements. For an anthropology to be simply reduced to raw data, pieced back together in formulaic Frankenstein collages is not enough. There is still needed the element of life. An element which, I believe, can be found in the act of creative writing. Practicing writing, thinking about writing and playing with writing.
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The shelves come alive. The birds begin rushing through the bars, the tadpoles squirm away from their neat positioning in the queue from smallest to biggest. The fetuses open their eyes wide and look straight back at you with accusatory eyes, and the water voles begin to scratch on the glass. Over our head, the whale’s skeleton, which had been still for so long, sways. This may sound like a ridiculous scenario. Night at the Museum with only taxidermic objects, Ben Stiller running with wide eyes and torch through the zoological institute of this Belgian university. Yet as ridiculous as the metaphor might seem, I think that there is something to be said for, in every act of writing, looking for the most direct expression of life and settling for nothing less.
I aspire to a form of writing which is neither a taxidermied body stuffed on a mantelpiece, nor one forgotten in the attic. I aspire to a form of writing which is incapable of sitting still on a shelf. I aspire to a form of anthropological writing which speaks, and in which forms speak, interact, and connect as fully as it is possible. I hope
You tell me. Is this possible?