Abstract
As in other countries in Central and Western Europe, the return of wolves to Switzerland since the mid-1990s has generated intense debates and has taken place in various fields in which material and immaterial entities come together in new multispecies networks. This paper focuses on one of those fields: wolf taxidermy. Based on interviews and fieldwork in taxidermy workshops and Swiss nature museums, the main question here is whether there are moments of wolfish agency in this unquestionably human-dominated process of taxidermy. A praxeological, performative and relational understanding of agency is laid out to explore this question. The selective and restricted agentic capacities wolves perform – mostly as a sort of offstage agents absent from the workshop itself – within the sociomaterial networks of wolf taxidermy is captured with the term interference.
Highlights
As in other countries in Central and Western Europe, the return of wolves to Switzerland since the mid-1990s has generated intense debates and has taken place in various fields in which material and immaterial entities come together in new multispecies networks
Thereby, not mistakenly to be taken as intentions, the animals enter into a sort of dialogue with humans’ taxidermy work and start performing agency in wolf taxidermy networks that may have an influence on prepared specimens in a highly material way: on the creation itself of specimens, on the material dimensions and exact poses of the mounts, on their staging, and on concrete steps in the taxidermy procedure, such as the cutting of the skin, the draping of hair or the forming of the mould
This animal agency in wolf taxidermy is tied, to a large degree, to the tense social context that the wolves’ return opens up and in which the wolf taxidermy I examined takes place. This means that the wolfish agency in taxidermy that I observed cannot be transferred one-to-one to other animals causing less furore
Summary
As in other countries in Central and Western Europe, the return of wolves to Switzerland since the mid-1990s has generated intense debates and has taken place in various fields in which material and immaterial entities come together in new multispecies networks. As I have showed, when following a praxeological conception of agency in sociomaterial networks, the returning wolves take part in launching such a wolf taxidermy process by their recent presence in Switzerland.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call