Representing Human-Specimen Relationality in Scrapbooks

Abstract

Scrapbooks have long been associated with the construction of identity and knowledge systems through the appropriation and recontextualization of externally-sourced material. Sometimes these materials are conventional, like poached newsprint, stationery, and pages from cannibalized books. This project consults materials less typically associated with bookwork: natural specimens. Using posthumanist theoretical frameworks such as Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and Jane Bennett’s vital materialism, this project analyzes the work of three amateur naturalists—Laura Hecox, Edwin Lewis, and Nels Bruseth—whose scrapbook-making practices were bound to lifelong self-directed intellectual pursuits within the natural sciences. Through introducing scientific specimens into preexisting social frameworks, arranging prints and texts to construct narratives about human and nonhuman labor, and utilizing data in ways that draw out relationships between seemingly disconnected events, their bookwork embodies the many ways in which humans and specimens engage in dialogues with one another. The treatments of specimens within the scrapbook-making process discussed here encourage a greater attunement to the agency and influences of the nonhuman world.