From Sexual Selection to Sex and the City: the Biogeographies of a Blue Bird-of-Paradise

This chapter takes as its starting point a preserved blue bird-of-paradise skin that became wildly famous after it perched atop the head of Carrie Bradshaw during Sex and the City: The Movie. I mobilize it in this article as a “telling example” of near-extinction. The blue bird-of-paradise is but one of the millions of Paradisaea that were hunted, traded, shipped and lusted after since their earliest forms of commodification. This article will chart its biogeographies: from New Guinea rainforests to New York streets. Here, instead tracing the blue bird-of-paradise’s individual commodity biography, it becomes an act of tracing and placing the bird-skin within the life and death worlds of human-animal relations that produced, mobilized and maintain(ed) it as a commodity. The chapter makes two important contributions to the field of social history. Firstly, by conceptually focusing on the relations that produce lives, things and worlds it challenges the certainty that anchors the narration of biographies to the singular and anthropocentric embodiment of “a life.” Secondly, mapping the biogeographies of a “lively” commodity, such as a preserved bird-of-paradise, offers the opportunity of highlighting the significant role so-called natural species and histories can play in shaping human histories.