What are the traces that an animal from the past carries within itself once it becomes part of an archival collection? In late-colonial Mexico, naturalists, collectors, and local workers gathered birds, mammals, insects, and other creatures from forests, wetlands, and mountains, then preserved, labelled, drew, catalogued, and shipped them across the world. This dissertation follows those animals on their journey from living landscapes into the archival collections, where they became archival animals: creatures that serve both as records of the past and as places where new knowledge was made.
By reading inventories, letters, illustrations, the physical traces of taxidermy and specimen preparation, alongside the symbolic significance of animals, the research uncovers what was gained and lost along the way. The seasonal rhythms, ritual meanings, and relationships between species that shaped an animal's life were often reduced to a classification label or a line in an inventory. To recover what these records leave out, the dissertation turns to Indigenous cosmologies present in the places from where these species where displaced, to show how animals were participants in the making of the world rather than objects to be described. Set alongside the scientific record, these stories counterbalance the biases of colonial natural history and reveal how much of an animal's world was left out of the archive.
Hidden within the sea of archival boxes, the archival animal never became a silent object. Its body and life history endure as an embodied record, bearing traces of the places and people from which it came. By placing the archival animal at the centre of the narrative, this dissertation examines collecting and archiving as practices that shape both environmental knowledge and relationships between humans, animals, and place. It offers a new way to understand whose worlds such practices preserve, obscure, or transform. Incorporated into a new archival ecology, these animals continue to carry the rhythms, knowledge, and relationships of the places they left behind.
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Trial lecture
Designated topic: Pick an animal (such as horse or pig) that was introduced by Europeans to the Americas. How were such animals incorporated in new habitats and Indigenous epistemologies? How do they trouble the stories told in the dissertation?
Time and place: Friday 16 October, 10:15 AM, Sophus Bugges hus, auditorium 2.
Evaluation committee
- Professor Dániel Margócsy, University of Cambridge (first opponent)
- Professor Lisa Voigt, Yale University (second opponent)
- Professor Brita Brenna, University of Oslo (committee administrator)
Chair of the defence
- Professor Einar Wigen, University of Oslo
Supervisors
- Professor John Ødemark, University of Oslo
- Associate Professor Mauro Caraccioli, Virginia Tech