Returning to Marina Warner, or the Taxidermist and the Taxonomist

If you're engaged in taxonomy development work, you've probably been asked, at least once, "What's taxonomy got to do with stuffing dead animals?"  Some folks are irritated by this, but I think it's a great question.  Marina Warner provides some thing of an answer in PHANTASMAGORIA: SPIRIT VISIONS, METAPHORS, AND MEDIA IN THE 21st CENTURY (Oxford, 2006).

When I read P... a few years back, part I, "Wax," chapter 2, "Anatomies and Heroes: Madame Tussauds" really struck home with its tracing of waxworking as an entertainment from the forensic waxworking practiced in Italian medical schools in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Elaborate forensic waxworks were models of the human anatomy used to teach medical students.  Such waxworks didn't horrify like the tales of cadavers provided to Dr. Knox by Burke and Hare, but they did point to the post French Revolution career of Madame Tussaud who took the art of the forensic waxworkers in to popular culture along with a wink and a nod to the resurrectionists of medical schools through her ever popular "Chamber of Horrors," a must for all subsequent and competing waxwork exhibitions.

Forensic waxworks functioning as models attempted to display characteristics of the human body, ideal forms of what "the body" looked like,  complete with cross-sections showing internal wax organs, wax disease, wax anomalies, and whatever else medical students needed to "know" without having to rout around in corpses.  Warner then touches on a cousin of wax working, taxidermy, and the practice of preserving corpses for similar study and, sometimes, popular exhibition.  The sexual organs of the celebrated Hottentot Venus wound up as one of these (controversial) exhibits.  The "Spectacular Bodies" museum exhibits of just a few years ago carry on the tradition; though, thinking of exsanguinated and freeze-dried human bodies as examples of taxidermy probably didn't cross the minds of too many moms and pops, kids in tow for "educational purposes," with stuffed dears' heads and marlins hanging in the family den.  Or maybe it did cross their minds.

But what does preserving once living entities mean beyond providing focus and shudders at carnival exhibitions and interior decoration and conversation pieces for some homes?  Going back to the forensic waxworks, it's the knowledge model functionality of the waxwork that's key.  Knowledge, thesis/antithesis/synthesis, comparison and contrasting one thing to another, to a model or control, to draw conclusions or know something about the subject at hand, was the goal.  Compare a blue-black leg to the ivory leg of the wax model, or compare the mottled, decaying pancreas of a recently dead man to the wax pancreas standard, and perhaps arrive at the notion that the blue-black leg or the mottled pancreas caused death.

A knowledge model is exactly what a taxonomy is but conveyed in words, codes, and associative relationships setting a standard for a knowledge domain rather than as a wax representation providing an ideal for another.  A taxonomy implies that some output of knowledge, say, a document set, will be compared to it in order to know which documents of the set meet its standard and which do not, which belong and which might need to be measured against another taxonomy.  For die-hards, the Z39.19-2005 standard covering the creation of monolingual controlled vocabularies contains information on how to validate vocabularies and taxonomies, which is sort of comparing and contrasting the standard in development to another standard, all of which makes the process of developing knowledge models a bit like playing the game variant, "Which Came First? The Chicken or the Structure Containing the Chicken?"  Beware of taking it too far!  Even forensic wax workers had to know when to stop, which probably accounts, in great part, for considering their surviving representations as art objects today.

I don't necessarily recommend to everyone decorating the den by hanging a taxonomy over the fireplace;  but, compared to a desiccated marlin, I'll take a mounted taxonomy any day.