Infesting and Preserving –Eenvironmental Histories of “Pests” in Natural History Collections
While exhibitions in natural history museums had started representing environments and displaying ecological interrelationships in dioramas and biological groups by the end of the nineteenth century at the latest, they often remained in a systematic order behind the scenes. However, they formed complex environments in themselves: both, technological environments that depended on urban infrastructure and human care and living habitats, inhabited and infested by many other life forms. These in turn became the focus of scientific study, making collections the objects of specific forms of preservation and prevention, namely pest control.
Drawing on historical examples at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, this paper explores the practices and politics of these collection environments. First, it investigates examples of how natural history collections became sites of infestation. Second, the paper traces some of the measures taken against such infestation as means to preserve “valuable” specimens, showing how animals labelled as “pests” in turn became objects of applied science. Third, the paper asks how these historical practices of preservation and pest control still affect us today, turning historical collections into contaminated sites with their own practices and politics of care. The paper aims to draw attention to the epistemic, social and environmental dimensions of this legacy, asking: How does contaminated material affect the practical work in and with historical collections? How does it shape the production of knowledge? And in what ways does it reshape social relations?
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