Presentation short abstract

Collecting makes the distant material: From vipers to meteorites, this presentation explores how humans make nature and space tangible through collecting and how this forms moral economies that define ownership, legitimacy, and value, foreshadowing the future of ownership and trade in space.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation explores how humans materialise ideas of nature and space through acts of collecting, arranging, and contextualising objects. Drawing on ethnographic research, it traces how meteorites, acting as tangible links between Earth and the cosmos, circulate through collections that transform fragments of space into objects of value, possession, and imagination.

My earlier research on the Bitis viper trade between Africa and Europe examined how participants navigate legality, risk, and care within overlapping moral economies, understood here as the informal morals and attitudes held by trade participants that shape a trade’s norms and operations (Gregson & Crang, 2017). Building on this work, I extend my research on the materialisation and ownership of nature to the materialisation and ownership of space through the meteorite trade. Drawing on auction catalogues and object biographies of individual meteorites, I explore how actors negotiate authenticity, legality, and moral value when “space” itself becomes ownable.

In the Bitis trade, bio-active terrariums replicate fragments of tropical ecosystems, materialising biophilia, the human drive to connect with life. Similarly, the display and exchange of meteorites evoke astrophilia, a fascination that extends this impulse beyond Earth’s boundaries. This dynamic is also reflected in how wildlife and meteorites are occasionally framed in terms of cultural heritage – formally through regulation or informally through collecting practices – even though they are not human-made. Situating these practices within moral economies shaped by desire, my presentation considers how this foreshadows challenges with space industries as they expand into new forms of ownership and trade.