Field Museum Final Project
Our final project is a trip to Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. We chose the Field Museum because museums of natural history are interestingly suspect as representations of science. Rather, they present interesting sciencefictions – representations that need to be analyzed for their political meaning.
My dream article would be one which would analyze various representations of evolution in natural history museusms across the United States. However, that doesn’t seem to exist. So I decided to identify a broader set of materials about the Field Museum more specifically.
Kadanoff, Leo P. “Sue’s Several Heads: The Evolution of the Natural History Museum”
This article, written in an accessible style, describes the experience of a scientist trying to understand how the natural history museum has come, in the 21st century, to present an uncertain mix of art, entertainment and science. More importantly, it represents very little up to date science. He offers a reading of the “Life Through Time Exhibit” that I would like students to see.
His article suggests that, by the 1900-1920s, the museum ceases to function “scientifically” and becomes a mode of entertainment. This is exactly the time of “science fiction” – literature about science, and what Marianne Sommer calls, “sciencefiction” – visual reconstructions of prehistory or natural history.
Marianne Sommer argues in this article that the president of the American Museum of Natural History is a “shaper of collective fantasies of human evolution”. Already, she argues that the museum is less about science, and rather, about creating fantasies that draw on both science and fiction. As we have been reading “science fiction” about evolution, the museum also occupies the space “between science and fiction” – so we can use the same tools to read it. Of course, what makes this so suspect, politically, is that museums “seem to be” about education in a way that literature does not – although we often expect the science of science fiction to work – and are annoyed when it does not.
The task for our students will be to read the representation of evolution in the Field Museum. There is one exhibit specifically about evolution, and a featured exhibit on mastadons and the ice age. What is the story it is telling? How good is the science, or, does it matter? How objective are museums when describing the origin of life on earth? We can use this project to refer back to the scene in Wells’ The Time Machine in which The Time Traveller runs through the museum looking for useful knowledge and finds none.
Dr. Wentzell, how does this sit with you as a project?
