Taxidermy: lives and deaths of animal as object

As the anthropologist Jane Desmond points out, one of the ironic aspects of taxidermy is that this art requires the death of the animal to recreate something resembling the living (Desmond 2002 :160). In this paper, I would like to explore the question of the death of the object through the multiple lives of various stuffed animals encountered in ethnographic research conducted since 2014.

More specifically, I will try to show how the lives of these "remnant models" (Griesemer 1990) are negotiated and how it differs from the status of animal as an organic, animate, and mortal element. By becoming an object, transformed by the art of taxidermy, the animal's body also acquires the status of model: a model of its species in the case of specimens stored in natural history museums or a (more-than) representation of the beloved pet in the case of dead domestic animals. However, this type of model has a particular property: "Not only do these share properties with the things modelled, they are actually made from the individuals modelled" (Griesemer 1990). Neither really an animal anymore, nor really a simple object, neither alive, nor really dead, the stuffed animal will operate an ontological blurring that questions our points of reference. And does all this have anything to do with the fact that the French say "nature morte" where the English prefer "still life"?