Museums Making Meaning: What Can Specimen Preparation Tell Us About the Values of Natural History Museums?

When we visit natural history museums, we approach these institutions as authorities teaching us objective facts about life throughout our planet’s history. But do we ever question whether we are being presented with the whole picture? What happens behind-the-scenes in museums, before specimens are put on display? And how does this affect what museums teach us? Specimen preparation is the process through which museum staff transform organisms collected from the field into preserved specimens. Fundamentally, specimen preparation de-contextualizes organisms from their environments of origin and re-contextualizes them within the space and values of the museum. Grounding my research in the Yale Peabody Museum’s Ornithology and Botany Collections, I investigate how specimen preparation influences the tangible and intangible contexts (attached/associated attributes) that specimens carry with them from their environments of origin. Tangible contexts encompass living and nonliving things (such as parasites and microplastics) that organisms interact with physically. Intangible contexts describe the stories, values, and meanings that people attach to the nonhuman beings in their local environments. I conducted my mixed-methods research—consisting of specimen observations, participant observation of specimen preparation, and staff interviews—for eleven weeks in the summer of 2023. Two major findings of my research are that specimen preparation overwhelmingly preserves specimens’ original tangible contexts and adds museum-made contexts to specimens. Crucially, I also found that while specimen preparation actively adds new intangible contexts to specimens, it does not preserve any intangible contexts from specimens’ environments of origin. This outcome helped me address the following sub question of my research: “How might the contextual changes resulting from specimen preparation indicate what facets of its specimens the museum values and devalues?” The fact that no original intangible contexts of the specimens I studied were preserved suggests that the Museum does not value these contexts. On the other hand, the many preserved tangible and museum-made contexts indicate that the Peabody attaches importance to the physical contexts that specimens carry with them from their ecosystems and the historical and narrative additions that museum staff make to specimens. I believe these findings have the potential to inform how we engage with the narratives natural history museums present to us. Do they burnish certain qualities of their specimens, while obscuring others? What stories are being told, and whose are being left out? Understanding the effects of behind-the-scenes processes like specimen preparation can equip us with the knowledge to think critically about these questions, and potentially even compose new, more authentic narratives about the specimens we see on display.