Erasing the extinct: the hunt for Caribbean monk seals and museum collection practices

Abstract

The Caribbean monk seal (Monachus tropicalis), the only seal species native to Central America, was declared extinct in 2008, with the last confirmed sighting in 1952. This species historically had a broad range throughout the gulf of Mexico. This article discusses the history of Western science on the monk seal, from its first recorded sighting by a Western colonizer in 1492 to scientific collection in the 1800s and 1900s, as a history of the erasure of this species. Museum practices of collecting and displaying Caribbean monk seals have directly contributed to this erasure, and ways of writing a new history by giving the Caribbean monk seal the capacity to refuse erasure are suggested.

Curating time – Museum-things as counterclocks in a climate-challenged world

“…Particularly important in these environmentally challenged times are relationships forming beyond those conceptualized through anthropocentric lenses. As suggested by Fredengren and Karlsson (2019) museum things can then be analyzed as bundles of ecological relations (see also Alberti 2005 and Jørgensen 2022). For example, their production can have relations with extractive shadow places (see Plumwood 2008) , they may come about through the use and abuse of animals, and they may project out and bind their relations into several futures.…”

Hidden Stories of Extinction: Hawaiian ʻAhuʻula Feather Capes as Biocultural Artefacts

“…Even if the ʻahuʻula is made of different materials and no longer serves the same function in society, what is maintained is the knowledge of how to make it. In addition, Marzan asks whether we can be sure that something is indeed extinct, 'just because we cannot see it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist', 13 a question that Dolly Jørgensen has also raised in her investigation of how the 'presence of an absence' over time becomes the 'absence of presence' (Jørgensen 2017b). That the birds are no longer visible doesn't necessarily mean that they are extinct.…”

“…Extinction scholars have mainly looked at natural history collections as remnants of extinction, from the display of 'endlings' (Jørgensen 2017a) to analysis of natural galleries of extinction (Guasco 2021) to critical exhibitions of extinction inside natural history museums (O'Key 2020). But as O'Key (2020: 644) rightly points out, 'no matter how taxidermy specimens are reframed, they still stand as signs of anthropocentric mastery'.…”

“…Taxidermy is a particular western-oriented practice of preserving animal skins for science that developed in the sixteenth century. These specimens represent an often violent mastery over nature where humans intentionally killed animals to 'save' them from complete disappearance (Ashby and Machin 2021;Jørgensen 2021). Taxidermy has further been criticized for being 'crushed beneath the weight of its own metonymic function' (Bezan 2019: 214), as well as too narrowly focused on an individual animal that cannot represent an entire species' intergenerational disappearance (van Dooren 2014: 11-12).…”