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Paper short abstract:

A popular way of thinking about natural history museums is as spaces that conserve and fix memories of the natural world. Here I argue that they do the opposite: the museum regularly destroys old memories to produce new ones. This is illustrated and problematised through select curatorial practises.

Paper long abstract:

A popular way of thinking about natural history museums is as spaces that conserve and fix memories of the natural world, material and immaterial. Closer inspection of museum practices however reveals that these museums also regularly do the opposite: old ways of ordering collections, names, species or knowledge are discarded for new ones.

Based on interviews with curators and ethnographic visits to the backstages of museums, I illustrate this process by looking at three curatorial practises: the spatial rearrangement of taxonomic groups, the digitisation of collections and the transfer of specimens from one type of container to another. While some elements of these memory objects are indeed conserved, a great amount of information and references are forever cut off, erased or forgotten, with no possibility to recover or rejoin them.

This aspect renders museums and their idea of natural history problematic: is natural history preserved and fixed, or rather reshuffled, reordered and reinvented? If the latter is the case, then what does and what should happen to the specimens and data that are discarded? Are there better and worse ways of grinding up memory?