Category Archives for Ethics

What is Taxidermy? An Intimate Relationship between Death and Maker.  

Written by Jazmine Miles Long, Taxidermist. https://www.jazminemileslong.com, Twitter: @TaxidermyLondon; Instagram: @Jazmine_miles_long

For taxidermy to exist an animal must have died. This brutal truth creates unease and leaves the viewer to ponder how the death occurred. And secondly how the death and the body is managed. A fluffy rabbit, cute and cuddly in life, suddenly becomes hideous and untouchable in death. Due to my profession, I am raising a child who has been exposed to dead animals and the concept of death his whole life. This has not made him desensitised to death, I’d say the opposite. He is deeply hurt by the death of any animal; he is a self-proclaimed vegetarian and last week at the age of 4 he asked me if his job when he grows up could be to stop people eating animals. He shouts at cars to slow down in case they hit anything and one of my favourite things he asks me when we meet new people is if they are a vegetarian or a carnivore eyeing them up suspiciously. Does a good understanding of death at a young age give a person greater empathy for animals and take us closer to not seeing them as ‘other’? 

When my son is asked what a taxidermist does, he says they look after animals when they die. I get at least one phone call a week from someone mourning their dead pet, I give advice on what to do next, ideas for memorials and how to store the body in the freezer while they decide what to do. I didn’t expect as a taxidermist to be a councillor, a listening ear, someone who is qualified to talk about death. 

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People and Plants Workshop Three: Sharing Knowledge in the Amazon

March 10th, 2023, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Written by Fiona Roberts (Collaborative ESRC PhD student, Cardiff University & Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales) and Violet Nicholls (Assistant Curator in Herbarium, Portsmouth Museums).

This post is dedicated to Dr Dagoberto Lima Azevedo (1979-2023), Tukano researcher, translator, scholar, author and a voice for the Indigenous peoples of the Rio Negro in the northwestern Amazon.

The third and final workshop of a one-year project ran in March 2023, at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The project, “People and Plants: reactivating ethnobotanical collections as material archives of indigenous ecological knowledge”, began in January 2022, and was supported by NatSCA (Natural Sciences Collections Association). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), it was led by National Museums Scotland, the Powell-Cotton Museum and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 

The workshop ran in partnership with Museu Goeldi, Brazil and the Department of Cultures and Languages, Birkbeck, University of London. It addressed the question, ‘how ethnobotanical collections in museums can best be used to support Indigenous communities?’. Dr Dagoberto Lima Azevedo, from the Federação das Organizações Indígenas do Rio Negro, and Claudia Leonor López Garcés (Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi) travelled from the Brazilian Amazon for the event. They met with fellow panellists Professor Mark Nesbitt (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew), Professor Luciana Martins (Birkbeck, University of London), Cinthya Lana (University of Gothenburg) and Dr William Milliken (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew).

Fig. 1. Some members of the panel at the workshop with, from left to right, Cynthia Sothers, Luciana Martins, Dagoberto Lima Azevedo, Cinthya Lana, Claudia Leonor López Garcés and Mark Nesbitt. Photo by Gayathri Anand.

The Richard Spruce collection (1849-1864) was used as a case study. Spruce collected plants and recorded their uses in South America, and is considered to be an early ethnographer, as he also recorded the traditions and customs of the different communities that he met on his travels.1 He collected over 14,000 herbarium specimens in the Andes and Amazon regions, and 350 items are in his ethnobotanical collections.2

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Unpacking the Unnatural History Museum (Season 1)

Written by Verity Burke, John Pollard Newman Fellow of Climate Change and the Arts, University College Dublin.

Blaschka Models. Image credit: courtesy of the National Museum of Ireland: Natural History.

We’re at a crucial historical moment, in which the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List has announced a catastrophic decline in global biodiversity, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported on the devastating trajectory of the climate crisis. Museums have an important role to play in communicating the value of nature. Yet nature is, necessarily, mediated in museums, through taxidermy dioramas and skeletal mounts; virtual tours and digital databases; image, text and film. While the natural world has always been mediated in the museum space, what does this mediation mean now for natural history museums and collections, and the natures they present?

These are some of the questions which drive my research into museum representations of the natural world, and was the inspiration behind putting together an event series called ‘The Unnatural History Museum: Mediating Nature in the Sixth Mass Extinction’ (part of the Irish Research Council-funded project ‘Still Lives: Organic and Digital Animals in the Natural History Museum’ at Trinity College Dublin). I was keen to make a space to have these conversations across disciplines and sectors (something which we get surprisingly few opportunities to do, despite often working on similar topics or issues), to allow us to share what we were doing and discuss why. This blog is a short overview of the topics that the first season of the Unnatural History Museum engaged with from September 2022 to April 2023, with some excitement about what arose in the first season, and in anticipation of continuing these conversations in a planned second season.

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Listening and learning: Reflections on the Second Workshop of the People and Plants Project

Written by Fiona Roberts. Collaborative ESRC PhD student, Cardiff University and Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales Decolonising biocultural curation of South Asian medicinal plants.

Monday 7th November, National Museums Collections Centre

In early November, a group of academics, researchers, curators, artists and knowledge holders gathered at Edinburgh’s National Museums Collections Centre. The second workshop of the year-long AHRC-funded ‘People and Plants’ project focused on ‘reactivating ethnobotanical collections as material archives of Indigenous ecological knowledge.’

During the object handling session (Photo by Dr Ali Clark, National Museums Scotland)

The People and Plants Project

Led by National Museums Scotland, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Powell-Cotton Museum, the project investigates current debates on decolonising museum practices, including the interplay between natural history and ethnography collections, creating a conversation about these among varied experts.

The project’s previous workshop, held at the Powell-Cotton Museum in March 2022, brought together Somali knowledge holders from UK diasporic communities and was run in partnership with the University of Kent’s School of Anthropology and Conservation and the NOMAD project, which engages Somali communities in heritage projects. To read more, see this previous blogpost, and view workshop talks on YouTube [People and Plants – YouTube].

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Behind The Heads: Natural History, Empire and The Abel Chapman Collection. Part 2.

Written by Dan Gordon, Keeper of Biology, The Great North Museum: Hancock.

Abel Chapman’s time in southern Africa was only the first of many visits to the continent. His next trip, in 1904, was to a very different place – British East Africa. This was a colonial protectorate roughly equivalent to today’s Republic of Kenya. It had grown out of land leased by the British East Africa Company but was now firmly under British imperial control.

The Uganda railway, a huge feat of engineering, had been completed just three years before Chapman’s visit. This now allowed trains to travel the 800km (500 miles) between Mombasa on the east coast and the African Great Lakes. The British now had the means to extend their influence right across East Africa, disrupting the slave routes and simultaneously opening up the land to the missionaries, settlers, tourists and game hunters that were now pouring in. It was in this rapidly changing environment that Chapman strove to find the longed for wilderness that had eluded him in Transvaal, and test his skills as a sportsman, before that land too vanished under the settler’s plough.

Figure 1. An undated photo of the Uganda Railway near Mombasa (http:/www.jaduland.de, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
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