ABSTRACT
Natural history museums are places where humans have arranged dead bodies in systems and categories. The Swedish Museum of Natural History, established in 1923, and the Gothenburg Museum of Natural History, established in 1916, both have roots in older collections and locations, and were both systematically arranged with rows of animals on shelves and in glass cases. Although museums can be understood as 'proper places' for animal bodies within the frames of Western science, they may be experienced as highly ambiguous and multilayered sites that encompass the relations of life and death, caring and killing, closeness and distance. Museums hide histories of movements and rearrangements of individual bodies and body parts and sometimes place 'colonial bodies' in the basement. Museum puts science and research information first, and collects materials for their scientific value. The zoo/mbie is a border creature who balances on the dualisms of nature/culture, life/death, science/art, craft/art, individual/type, ethical/unethical, in the sense of being morally ambiguous.
