Multispecies Interferences

Taxidermy and the Return of Wolves Taxidermy and the Return of Wolves

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3060931
AutoresElisa Frank
Ano2020
Volume49
Fascículo2
Data de publicação2020-03-27
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEthnologia Europaea (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0425-4597 • E-ISSN: 1604-3030
EditoraBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.16995/ee.1434
OpenAlexW2972694537
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas25

As in other countries in Central and Western Europe, the return of wolves to Switzerland since the mid-1990s has generated intense debates and has taken place in various fields in which material and immaterial entities come together in new multispecies networks. This paper focuses on one of those fields: wolf taxidermy. Based on interviews and fieldwork in taxidermy workshops and Swiss nature museums, the main question here is whether there are moments of wolfish agency in this unquestionably human-dominated process of taxidermy. A praxeological, performative and relational understanding of agency is laid out to explore this question. The selective and restricted agentic capacities wolves perform – mostly as a sort of offstage agents absent from the workshop itself – within the sociomaterial networks of wolf taxidermy is captured with the term interference

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Art history · Ethnology · Performative utterance · Performativity · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Gender Studies