“The Materialist Relic: Nonhuman Bodies in Zoological Museums”

While the practice of collecting, displaying, and venerating the remains of the special dead is common across different cultural frameworks, the treatment of the bodies of endangered or extinct species as well as charismatic nonhuman-animal individuals in museum settings echoes the treatment of holy relics in the development of Christianity from the early Church up through the Middle Ages. Since the mid-19th century mechanistic revolution in biological research, the preserved and displayed remains of nonhumans have performed the role of a materialist relic, and this has only been augmented as scientists and the general public reckon with mass extinction, climate change, and dismantling the ontological positions underpinning environmental degradation.