Publications by Adrian Van Allen
Deterritorializing the Future, Critical Climate Change. London: Open Humanities Press, 2020
Through crafting specimens and corresponding categories of life, natural history museums have bee... more Through crafting specimens and corresponding categories of life, natural history museums have been apparatuses for articulating knowledges, power, and natures into an ordered whole, practices that have extended through to contemporary natural history museums and their genetic collecting programs. In this paper I focus on the practices of “folding time” in specimen preparation practices of two museums—the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington D.C. and the Muséum National d’Historie Naturelle (MNHN) in Paris. Examining the ways that animal bodies are made and remade at these two sites I explore how they are configured into specific representations of types of time—as windows into ecological pasts, markers of deep evolutionary time, or as instruments for future biodiversity conservation policies. Within the context of these longer histories of specimen preparation, I argue that as birds are taken apart and reassembled in the museum they articulate different concepts of time with different pieces. Following scientists and their specimens into the workrooms, laboratories and biorepository of these museums, I learned to stuff bird skins, take tissue samples, extract DNA, and assemble genomic data. In examining two sets of materials and tools used by scientist to craft specimens and construct futures, I suggest different temporalities are “folded” into the daily practices of preserving specimens. Historic techniques are transformed with the integration of new technologies, and in doing so incorporate new perceptions of preservation, endangerment and care—all oriented towards charting the genomic biodiversity of life and preserving it for uncertain futures.
Valeurs et Matérialité: Approches Anthropologiques (Value and Materiality: Anthropological Approches), 2019
This project examines the shifting value of connected museum artifacts and specimens, linking pas... more This project examines the shifting value of connected museum artifacts and specimens, linking past and current uses to provide a model for future interdisciplinary collections research. Objects tell stories, through their creation, circulation, perceived value, and the connections they embody between people, places, materials, and interests. Amazonian featherwork objects tell a very specific narrative, as traced through their creation and display as exotic objects to sites of cultural heritage. Following a parallel line of inquiry, bird specimens were collected in the same region during the same period, transformed from exotic objects to scientific specimens, and are now being re-evaluated as sites for mining genetic data for biodiversity conservation. Connecting museum collections across disciplines—such as ethnographic featherwork and scientific bird specimens—highlights their location within larger networks of practice, exchange, and value. Tracing the material, semiotic, historical, and technological connections between a group of Amazonian featherwork objects (Museé du Quai Branly) and bird specimens (Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle), my research questions examine the shifting value of museum collections, focused on the material practices that create different kinds of value. Through studying how featherwork and bird specimens are made and remade as valuable objects through time—most recently as genetic samples and genomic data—I will focus on linking the historical, archival, and contemporary uses of the collections. In parallel, I will identify and engage subjects for ethnographic interviews at both museums. A close attention to the material practices of creating and conserving these objects, and the types of perceived value generated through these processes, form my methodological and theoretical framework. Collections are not simply accumulated objects, but instead can be seen as a continual reassemblage of the people who have made, use, and collect the objects, and the regimes of value they represent and reproduce. My research engages the construction of these assemblages, creating meaningful paths through and between collections, disciplines, and perspectives. Through examining featherwork and bird specimens as assemblages of materials and shifting values, in their historical and contemporary contexts, this project will produce a case study of these objects and provide an extensible model for interdisciplinary collections research.
Anthropology News, 2019
C ryopreservation provides the tools for crafting a new scientific ice age, in which the ability ... more C ryopreservation provides the tools for crafting a new scientific ice age, in which the ability to freeze and store biological materials is pivotal to assisted human reproduction, livestock breeding, and conservation biology.
New Genetics and Society , 2018
Museums have been apparatuses for articulating knowledges, power and natures into an ordered whol... more Museums have been apparatuses for articulating knowledges, power and natures into an ordered whole for centuries, practices that have extended through to contemporary museums and their genetic collecting programs. Examining how biotechnology is redefining concepts of “life itself,” I explore the museum as a site for thinking through how life is being archived and for what imagined futures. Focusing on negotiations at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History between 2014-2016, this article examines debates over whether a genetic sample could serve as a voucher specimen—a physical reference permanently preserved in a museum. Learning to pin beetles, take genetic samples and extract DNA I reconstruct the analytical chains that bind together a specimen, samples and data. I argue that the capacities and limitations of biomaterials are a vital part of understanding how cryo-collections are made to matter as ontological embodiments—through their negotiated use and continuing re-evaluation.
Knowledge Organization, 2017
Examining the material practices of museum genomics, my ethnographic research focuses on the Glob... more Examining the material practices of museum genomics, my ethnographic research focuses on the Global Genome Initiative at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., a project that seeks to preserve vanishing biodiversity for an uncertain future by cryo-preserving half of the families of life in the next six years. Through stuffing a bird skin, taking genetic samples, and sub-sampling tissues for DNA extraction I examine a return to encyclopedic collecting with biotechnological tools, exploring how biotechnology is redefining and preserving “life itself” (Foucault 1970; Kowal and Radin 2015). This article examines one instance of how museum collections are made, standardized, and shared at the Smithsonian. Contrasting perspectives from ethnographic work in the Division of Birds and the Biorepository, I examine the friction and flow of biodiversity as specimens are transformed into data through material-semiotic practices. I analyze how these data and specimens then undergo multiple reclassifications as categories for new types of museum objects—such as genetic samples—are negotiated. Cryo-collections are “made to matter” (Barad 2003) as ontological embodiments through their preservation, multiple uses, and standardization across disciplines. Through attending to the (bio)materials themselves, I argue the practices currently structuring a shared ecological future become legible.
Book manuscript abstract (forthcoming), 2022
What ecological futures are currently being crafted in natural history museums?
How are they be... more What ecological futures are currently being crafted in natural history museums?
How are they being shaped by the cryopolitics (Radin and Kowal 2017) of putting "all life on ice" (Global Genome Inititaive, 2014)? Examining the material culture of museum genomics, my ethnographic research focuses on the Global Genome Initiative at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., a project that seeks to preserve vanishing biodiversity through for an uncertain future by sampling and cryo-preserving half of the families of life in the next six years. Examining how biotechnology is redefining and preserving “life itself” (Foucault 1966; Kowal and Radin 2015). I use craft as my method to gain a first-hand understanding of how “nature” is made and remade in the museum. Through stuffing bird skins, pinning beetles, pressing plants, taking tissue samples and sorting genomic data, I examine this return to encyclopedic collecting with biotechnological tools. Cryo-collections are made to matter (Barad 2003) as ontological embodiments—through their preservation, negotiated use and continuing re-evaluation. As specimens’ biologies are unbound (Helmreich 2009) into differently valued parts and pieces, spread across the spaces of the museum—from frozen tissue samples to a bird skins in cabinets to globally dispersed data—it is important to remember that specimens remain sites of contested classificatory meanings, objects of shifting value, and (dis)embodiments of hand-crafted “natural orders” (Daston 2004; Foucault 1966). Through exploring museum specimens in biographical terms, as mobile and transformative of a variety of relationships, I reiterate that there is multiplicity not only between but also within objects. Genomic collections currently being assembled in museums embody multiples kinds of significance, telling complex biographies of latent life (Radin 2013), and signaling different ways of being as living things are transformed into data through various material practices.
Museum Anthropology Review, 2014
Conference Presentations by Adrian Van Allen
Frozen Futures: Crafting Natural History in a Genomic Age
How Collections End: Objects, Meaning and Loss in Laboratories and Museums panel, Society for the Social Study of Science (4S), 2019
Folding Time: Practices of Heritage, Conservation and Temporality in Making Bird Specimens
Deterritorializing the Future symposium, University College London, 2018
From Bird Skin to Biorepository: Materials and Ontologies in Museum Collections
Relations hommes/animaux: questions contemporaines seminar, Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, 2018
Birds, Feathers, Specimens, Genomes: The Changing Value of Museum Collections in the Anthropocene
Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris, 2018
Marking Time in the Anthropocene: Taxidermy, Temporality and Practices of Care in the Museum
Relations hommes/animaux: questions contemporaines, Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris, 2018
The Value of Feathers: Amazonian Featherwork and Bird Specimens as Ecological and Cultural Heritage
Art and Anthropology panel, Royal Anthropological Institute conference, British Museum, 2018
Reassembling the Wild: Mining the Museum for an Authentic Bison Genome
Towards an Anthropology of Bioinformation panel, American Anthropological Association , 2019
Of Ferrets and Feral Biobanks: Craft, Care, and Salvaged Ecologies using Frozen Collections
Collections vivantes au prisme des sciences humaines et sociales, Muséum National d’Historie Naturelle, Paris, 2019
Flight Paths Through the Museum: The Circulation of Birds, Specimens and Genomes
Remaking Museums in the Anthropocene conference, Moesgaard Museum and the Aarhus University Center for Ecological Research. Aarhus, Denmark, December 6-7, 2017, 2017
From Stereograph Cards to Augmented Reality: Misaligned Bodies and Virtual Whales in the Museum
Panel: Embedding Value: Technological Practices in the Museum, co-organized with Hannah Turner, American Anthropological Association annual meeting. Washington DC, November 24-27, 2017.
This paper examines the histories of augmented media in museums by locating the origins of augmen... more This paper examines the histories of augmented media in museums by locating the origins of augmented media at the turn of the 20th century with the use of stereoscopic image viewers for museum publics. This historic perspective is constrasted with ethnographic accounts of developing an augmented reality exhibit in a contemporary natural history museum, the California Academy of Sciences. Widely used media technologies at the time, stereoscopic images and viewers allowed for individuals to take home and experience the outside world – from the streets of Rome to the exhibits installed at the Chicago Field Museum. Contemporary scholarship in media studies and film studies has situated the stereoscope within the history of virtual or haptic visual environments; yet the use of stereoscopes to engage museum visitors is little understood. By looking at the history of the stereoscope and plotting the proliferation of museum objects on display in stereoscopic images from research completed in institutions such as the Pitt Rivers museum, The Chicago Field Museum, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, this paper both contextualizes the augmented museum – and the augmented museum specimen – in the long history of museum visualization and objectivity. It argues that particular epistemic loyalties and values were not only embedded into institutions by their displayed objects and dioramas, but also by the use of the stereoscope as an early augmented media technology for education and outreach.
Flight Paths through the Museum: The Circulation of Bird Specimens
Cargo: Birds as Material Culture symposium, co-organized by Adrian Van Allen and Joshua A. Bell, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC, July 6, 2015
Biodiversity Biobanking at the Smithsonian
LongNow Foundation Summit, San Francisco CA, Oct 4, 2016 [video]
Crafting Nature: Biodiversity Biobanking at the Smithsonian
Biobanques: Quelles reconfigurations pour le vivant? Approches interdisciplinaires et comparatives conference, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, May 12-12 2016
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Publications by Adrian Van Allen
How are they being shaped by the cryopolitics (Radin and Kowal 2017) of putting "all life on ice" (Global Genome Inititaive, 2014)? Examining the material culture of museum genomics, my ethnographic research focuses on the Global Genome Initiative at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., a project that seeks to preserve vanishing biodiversity through for an uncertain future by sampling and cryo-preserving half of the families of life in the next six years. Examining how biotechnology is redefining and preserving “life itself” (Foucault 1966; Kowal and Radin 2015). I use craft as my method to gain a first-hand understanding of how “nature” is made and remade in the museum. Through stuffing bird skins, pinning beetles, pressing plants, taking tissue samples and sorting genomic data, I examine this return to encyclopedic collecting with biotechnological tools. Cryo-collections are made to matter (Barad 2003) as ontological embodiments—through their preservation, negotiated use and continuing re-evaluation. As specimens’ biologies are unbound (Helmreich 2009) into differently valued parts and pieces, spread across the spaces of the museum—from frozen tissue samples to a bird skins in cabinets to globally dispersed data—it is important to remember that specimens remain sites of contested classificatory meanings, objects of shifting value, and (dis)embodiments of hand-crafted “natural orders” (Daston 2004; Foucault 1966). Through exploring museum specimens in biographical terms, as mobile and transformative of a variety of relationships, I reiterate that there is multiplicity not only between but also within objects. Genomic collections currently being assembled in museums embody multiples kinds of significance, telling complex biographies of latent life (Radin 2013), and signaling different ways of being as living things are transformed into data through various material practices.
Conference Presentations by Adrian Van Allen