This paper explores a collection of chicken feathers currently located in the papers of Hubert Dana Goodale, a mixed-media archive housed at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. An influential early twentieth-century livestock geneticist, Goodale and his collection of feathers have been largely peripheral to the history of science, although both have been important to the history of animal agriculture. The feathers could, in fact, be characterized as archival waste: they are the devalued and disordered material remnants of the birds who were the very substance of Goodale’s studies—a by-product of his scientific inquiries that has unintentionally been preserved within his archive among the various texts that explicate their meaning and significance. This contribution turns focus to the wasted feathers rather than their explicating texts, as a remnant substance that both encodes and decodes the complex science and economy of feather keratin as it has gone from a waste by-product of poultry agriculture to a valued additive substance for cosmetics and animal feed. The project asks what these feathery remains tell us about the interlocking history of feathers, keratin, material science, and chicken agriculture, as well as how such historical objects can illuminate the molecular politics of waste in and beyond Goodale’s archive.
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