Interpreting nature: shifts in the presentation and display of taxidermy in contemporary museums in Northern England
Taxidermy is an organised craft which synthesises preserved animal skins with man-made materials to recreate a resemblance of living animals. As products of a cultural practice, displayed and interpreted in museums for the public, taxidermied animals are material manifestations of contingent value judgements. Despite the now widely held view in museum studies that the meanings of museum objects are constructed through their interpretation and reception, and therefore can have a multiplicity of meanings, many museums today continue to present and interpret taxidermied animals as objective species representatives. Although scientific themes continue to be privileged by many museums which maintain natural science as a discrete discipline, various social, ethical and political themes relating to the environment and to relationships between people have become more pronounced in recently redeveloped museums. Using Leeds City Museum, the Great North Museum: Hancock, and Museums Sheffield: Weston Park as case studies, this thesis investigates these changes to trace wider cultural shifts in politics, ethics, education and science. By analysing the frameworks within which museums and their staff operate, this investigation is concerned with the relationship between discourse and social practice in the form of museum exhibitions as a means of creating knowledge. It highlights how the public understanding of the natural world is more mutable than some of the enduring traditions of science may suggest, and how the discourses on science, and the objects through which they are articulated, are subject to cultural shifts which put their meanings in flux. 
This study is both part of, and a response to, an expanding field in museum studies and material culture studies which re-frames taxidermy objects as culturally contingent and therefore reflective of the subject positions of their makers, and the broader contexts of their making. In collating and investigating a diverse collection of archival material, this study recovers some of taxidermy’s histories, and contributes to the historical discourse on the display and interpretation of museum collections.
IMAGERY OF TAXIDERMY IN SCIENCE MUSEUMS: FROM SYSTEMATICS OF SPECIES TO SYSTEMATICITY OF VIOLENCE AND POSTHUMANIST NATURE
Статья посвящена изменениям образности таксидермических объектов в музеях естественной истории. На ряде случаев прослеживаются связи этих изменений с трансформациями сети разнородных элементов – научных теорий и парадигм, музея, национальной политики, моральных представлений. Таксидермический объект понимается как объект науки, обладающий собственной материальностью и историей, музей – как пространство репрезентации природы, научных категорий и морально- политических идей.
Таксидермия входит в музей естественной истории в XVIII веке ценой стирания своей художественности и искусственности в пользу объективной репрезентации «самой» природы. В контексте географических открытий и колониальных завоеваний чучела позволяли решить проблему удаленного во времени и пространстве наблюдения. Благодаря натурализации удается превратить чучело, теперь анонимное и стандартизированное, в воплощение таксона линнеевской систематики, неотделимой от соображений государственного управления ресурсами. Эта сцепка проявлялась в организации пространства экспозиции. В XIX веке с изменением принципа систематики, разработкой идеи организма в таксидермическую экспозицию через диорамы и биологические группы вводится измерение жизни. На конкретном примере демонстрируется использование таксидермических диорам в качестве инструмента морально-политической субъективации индивидов.
В середине XX века наступает упадок таксидермии. Актуальная наука меняется и уходит из музеев естественной истории, разрушается колониальная система, критически переосмысливается отношение к колониальному наследию и животным, развиваются кинотехника и телевидение. Чучела становятся нежеланными артефактами жестокой политики и эстетики прежней эпохи и в большей степени объектами критических исследований и истории науки, чем науки.
Музеи же, теряя финансирование и посетителей, оказываются в дважды противоречивом положении. Во-первых, между антиисторической натурализирующей научностью и историчностью денатурализованных экспонатов. Во-вторых, между неоднозначными эстетикой и историей таксидермии и изменившимся моральным порядком. Помимо других способов они пытаются разрешить эти противоречия путем переинтерпретации таксидермической экспозиции в рамках экологической повестки и при помощи точечных материально-дискурсивных вмешательств, превращающих чучела в аллегории вымирания и поврежденной природы. Этот ход позволяет удержаться в границах естественно-научного дискурса, одновременно обращаясь к моральному чувству посетителя. Однако при этом он воспроизводит мифологему «золотого века», основанную на противопоставлении природы и культуры, естественного и искусственного.
На этом фоне выделяются другие траектории чучел в музее. Во-первых, художественные интервенции на территории музея, обращающиеся к таксидермии и шире архиву естественной истории. В таких случаях музей делегирует художникам право критической рефлексии по поводу научной идеологии и власти. Приводится ряд примеров таких интервенций. Во-вторых, таксидермические коллекции новых типов, изначально создаваемые не как плод объективирующего и систематизирующего подхода науки, а как проявление систематичности насилия и новой природы, безразличной к упомянутым выше оппозициям. Такая таксидермия может стать инструментом осмысления новой природы в эпоху, столь неудачно названную антропоценом, и рабочим объектом постгуманистической образности.
 The article is devoted to the transformations of the imagery of taxidermic objects in natural history museums. By examining several cases these transformations are linked to changes in a network of heterogeneous contexts - scientific theories and paradigms, the role of the museum, national politics, and public morals. While discussing the topic a taxidermic object is understood as an object of science with its own materiality and history and science museum is considered as a space for the representation of nature, scientific categories, and moral and political ideas, and as an instrument of collective empiricism.
The history of taxidermy in a museum is the history of erasing its artistry and artificiality in favor of an objective representation of nature “itself". This naturalization makes it possible to turn the stuffed animal, now anonymous and standardized, into a taxon of Linnaean taxonomy, inseparable from considerations of public resource management. The consequences of such entry into the museum for the visual nature of taxidermy are written out. Next, we consider the change in taxonomy in the XIX century and the introduction of the idea of life in taxidermic exposition through dioramas and biological groups. A concrete example demonstrates the use of taxidermic dioramas as a tool for moral and political transformation of individuals through the aura-like experience of nature.
In the middle of the XX century, the decline of taxidermy begins. Due to the withdrawal of up-to-date science from natural history museums, changes in politics, collective imagination, and the ethics of dealing with colonial heritage and nature, museums are losing funding and visitors and are gradually shifting to the periphery of culture. It is shown that they find themselves in a twice contradictory position between their own anti-historical and naturalizing scientific nature and the historicity of denaturalized exhibits, between the ambiguous aesthetics, history of taxidermy and the changed moral order. 
Museums tried to resolve these contradictions and return to the current culture by including in the communication about the environmental agenda and the environmental reinterpretation of taxidermy exposition with the help of occasional material and discursive interventions that turn stuffed animals into allegories of extinction. This move allows them to stay within the boundaries of the natural science discourse of preservation species diversity, while simultaneously appealing to the moral sense of the visitor and influencing the collective sensibility. At the same time, it reproduces the mythologem of the "golden age", based on the opposition between nature and culture, natural and artificial. Thus, these contradictions are not completely resolved.
The first possible way further are artistic interventions on the territory of the museum, in which the Museum delegates to artists the right of critical reflection on scientific ideology and power. A number of examples of such interventions are provided and analyzed. The second way are new taxidermy collections, initially created not as a result of the objectifying approach of science, but as a manifestation of systematic violence and a new nature, indifferent to the above-mentioned oppositions. Such taxidermy can become a tool for understanding the new nature in an era so aptly called the anthropocene, and a working object of posthumanistic imagery.
Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought
Abstract Animism is often described as the imputation of life to inert objects. Such imputation is more typical of people in western societies who dream of finding life on other planets than of indigenous peoples to whom the label of animism has classically been applied. These peoples are united not in their beliefs but in a way of being that is alive and open to a world in continuous birth. In this animic ontology, beings do not propel themselves across a ready-made world but rather issue forth through a world-in-formation, along the lines of their relationships. To its inhabitants this weather-world, embracing both sky and earth, is a source of astonishment but not surprise. Re-animating the ‘western’ tradition of thought means recovering the sense of astonishment banished from official science.