ABSTRACT
Museum genomics is merely the most recent iteration of viewing the natural world as a data set to be collected and analyzed. Framing natural science collections as databanks reconfigures the collections as valuable to expanded audiences, transforming them into resources—and potential solutions—for contemporary crises both social and biological. This chapter examines the negotiation and creation for a data standard for “genome-quality” frozen tissue collections at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. – a practice the museum scientists termed “capturing genomes.” My ethnographic study of biodiversity biobanking in the museum focus on the material practices of making and remaking life in an era of increasing biotechnical capacity as well as increasing biodiversity loss. Standards make data accessible, but they also draw invisible lines between what is kept and what is discarded, naturalizing the remaining data, practices, specimens, and interests and obscuring the labor required to make and maintain them. That is, biobanking practices orient museum sociologies, biologies and ecologies—engaging them in ongoing processes of re-inscribing and removing the boundaries of nature and culture. In turn, these nature-culture assemblages have the potential to expand the multiple possibilities for thinking about interspecies relationships as we move into uncertain futures.
