Extinct as a result of overhunting and habitat loss, the great auk, or garefowl, leads a hidden taxidermied existence in museum storerooms, sheltered from potential further degradation. As an environmental icon, however, the bird inspires a lively political economy of re-creation. Engaging from an anthropological perspective with practices of collecting, representing, and re-creating the great auk, I combine testimonies from Cambridge ornithologist John Wolley’s mid-nineteenthcentury Garefowl Books with contemporary ethnography among taxidermists and model makers in Britain and Belgium to argue that remnants, re-creations, and reenactments of the extinct great auk offer a material substrate from which to grasp a human drive to achieve contiguity with a lost species. Re-creation as a form of attentive reanimation by dedicated experts takes shape both discursively and plastically, predicated on assumptions about natural appearance and behavior that may not reflect evidence from historical records. Animated by what I call techniques of contiguity, reconstructions play a persuasive role in expressing and shaping human perceptions and imaginings of past environmental disaster and future environmental opportunity. Contiguity is achieved, on one hand, through performances of bodily kinship between human practitioners and dead or extinct animals and, on the other, through plays on resonance with specific organic materials, including garefowl remnants in Victorian taxidermied auks and plumage from related seabirds used in contemporary auk reconstructions. The reanimated great auk lives to tell stories of ethographic entanglement and continues, through its presence in museum spaces, to provoke both thought and action in a time of unprecedented numbers of species extinctions. (Text from author’s abstract)

中文翻译：

---

将绝种的大树拼凑在一起

由于过度捕猎和栖息地的丧失而灭绝，大金雀（garefowl）或garefowl导致了博物馆储藏室中隐藏的动物标本剥制的存在，避免了潜在的进一步退化。但是，作为环保标志，这只鸟激发了重新创建生动活泼的政治经济。从人类学的角度出发，结合收集，表示和重新创建伟大的大公牛的做法，我结合了剑桥鸟类学家约翰·沃尔利（John Wolley）在19世纪中叶的加里弗劳尔（Garefowl）书籍的证词，以及英国和比利时的动物标本剥制者和模型制作者的现代人种志，认为，灭绝的大金枪鱼的再造和重演提供了一种物质底物，可以从该底物上把握人类的动力，以与丢失的物种保持连续。重新创建作为专职专家进行的专心复活的形式，无论是在语言上还是在塑形上都已形成，其前提是有关自然外观和行为的假设可能无法反映历史记录的证据。在我称之为连续性技术的启发下，重建在表达和塑造人类对过去环境灾难和未来环境机遇的看法和想象中发挥了说服力。一方面，通过从业人员与死去的动物或灭绝的动物之间的亲属关系表现出来，另一方面，通过与特定有机材料的共鸣来实现邻接，包括维多利亚时代的标本体中的百足鸟残留物以及来自用于动物的相关海鸟的羽毛当代的auk重建。复活的大白鼬生活讲述民族志纠缠的故事，并通过其在博物馆空间中的存在，在物种灭绝史无前例的时期继续激发思想和行动。（摘自作者摘要）