Skin games. The incorporation of taxidermy know-how

The exploration of the process of incorporating a technique like taxidermy raises the question of the interaction of bodies, tools and materials in order to recreate the initial appearance of the animal as well as a certain illusion of life. My contribution starts from an observation of opacity when the apprentice, or the anthropologist, wishes to learn more about what constitutes the flesh of the practice being made. Faced with the finalized object, the artisan's journey remains in the shadow, hidden between the folds of the animal's skin. I have tried to show that transmission and learning do not play out only between the prescriptions of a manual, the instructions of an expert and the mental representations of the novice. Beyond the gesture guided by imitation, advice or supervision, I wanted to show what cannot be transmitted but which will be built, through personal experience, between shared lines. Learning, from this perspective, becomes an emerging, situated, non-linear process based on an ecology of attention and adjustment. And the apprentice becomes the one who acquires "a way of knowing more than a set of delimited and distinctly constituted knowledge" (Munz 2016: 227).