ON THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE MUSEUMS: WHAT DO EXHIBITS VISUALIZE? (A CASE OF THE HALL OF AFRICAN PEOPLES IN THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY)
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2018-4-202-221
The paper is devoted to the visuality of exhibits in science museums. The author begins by briefly outlining the specificity of science museums as places of epistemological accumulation and collective empiricism, and a range of problems associated with the museum representation of working objects of science. Problems are divided into two blocks. A case study of the exposition of the Hall of African Peoples of the American Museum of Natural History shows the multidimensionality of the content that could be broadcast by the exhibits. Firstly, it is shown that the scientific accuracy in the reproduction of nature was the key principle in the creation of the dioramas in the Hall. However, this principle was interpreted by the key participants of the production in different ways. There were two incompatible interpretations. According to one, belonging to the founder of the Hall, taxidermist C.E. Akeley, following nature meant recreating its harmony and perfection. This meant that not specific individuals were represented, but a perfect archetype, under which the animals that best met criteria of perfection were carefully selected. This epistemic orientation is close to what L. Daston and P. Galison called truth-to-nature. The oother interpretation belongs to James Perry Wilson, the leading artist of the exposition at a late stage of its production. He strictly followed the materials accumulated during the African expeditions, meticulously reproducing each landscape. This required the suppression of subjective interpretation in order to give the word to nature itself. Such an orientation is closer to mechanical objectivity. The contradiction between these interpretations, however, was rather virtual since they direct different elements of the dioramas. Moreover, the entire exhibition as a whole implements Akeley’s idea. D. Haraway discovers the dual nature of his idea. Analyzing the entrance group of the museum, the design of the exposition of the Hall of African Peoples, as well as the peculiarities of the dioramas and their creation, she shows that although Akeley sought to reveal the virgin world of Africa, he turned the exposition into a screen for his own moral and political notions. The central motive of these ideas is the resistance to the decline of nature by way of its conservation in the Hall and the resistance to the decadence and the disintegration of social ties in a modern industrial city. At the same time, the selection of animals for dioramas and their representation beyond any scientific neutrality expressed patriarchal and organicist ideas about the structure of the social world. The analysis shows that the expositions and exhibits of science museums require a comprehensive analysis that takes into account not only the representation of scientific content, but also a broader context, including ideas about the role and place of science and scientific knowledge and the moral and political conditions of production and functioning of exhibits.
Keywords: science museum, exhibit, visuality, representation, nature, moral, organicism, epistemic virtue, social philosophy
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Issue: 4, 2018
Series of issue: Issue 4
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 202 — 221
Downloads: 1190