Paraobjects: Writing History through the Margins of Natural History Heritage

International audience ; Historians of science have perhaps never paid as much attention to objects and to the materiality of knowledge as they do nowadays. And yet artefacts often still remain elusive historical sources. This is particularly true for natural historical heritage. What can we do, as historians, with a stuffed chimpanzee, a dried fern, a pickled fish, or a fossil bone? What can we do with century-old specimens when they are preserved for their value to today’s natural sciences at the expense of their historicity? How can historians even find their way in the institutions that care for natural historical heritage in cases in which these are not designed primarily to be historical repositories? One way to address these questions is through “paraobjects”. With this neologism, we designate what surrounds museum artefacts: boxes and flasks, labels and wrapping material, display cabinets and bases. Like paratexts to texts, paraobjects also shape the ways we use, preserve, and understand specimens—just as they did in the past. They offer, in other words, a key point of entry for historians to interrogate the social, cultural, economic, and political lives of specimens.This panel is the third public installment of the project “Paraobjects: Natural Historical Heritage through the Margins,” launched in the framework of the MSCA project SCRIBSCIE (“Scribal Science: Naturalists’ Paper Empire in France, ca. 1660-1770,” 2019–2022). In collaboration with the RISE project SciCoMove (“Scientific Collections on the Move: Provincial Museums, Archives, and Collecting Practices (1850–1950),” 2021–2025), it brings together historians who deal with paraobjects as historical sources and reflect on the possibilities and the challenges that natural historical heritage presents to the writing of history.