Page 66 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

50 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

provides a veneer for assertions of white male superiority and the argument that
miscegenation produced degeneracy (Brechin 1996). Haraway argues that Ake-
ley’s African Hall, with its emphasis on the perfect male specimen and con-
ventional family groupings, encodes a masculinist and colonial view of the
world, and uses nature as justification for eugenicist notions of the survival of
the fittest. She shows how the dioramas express the anxieties and worldview
of the men who ‘largely authored’ the museum (Haraway 1989: 41, 54–8).
Another view, from Tony Bennett (1995), would be that such anxieties trans-
late not directly into the content of displays but into the increasing involvement
of museums in the techniques of liberal government. This is not to suggest that
men such as Osborn and Grant were politically liberal, but that they were part
of a larger project which saw the museum as a means to enable people to
regulate their own behaviour and exercise restraint. As Bennett acknowledges,
this does not mean that the museum actually worked in this way, but that such
ideas shaped its formation (1995: 11). The museum was thought to have a moral
effect, counteracting ‘the influence of the saloon and of the racetrack’ (Boas
cited in Griffiths 2002: 5). This notion, originating in Britain, was the basis of
the ‘modern Museum idea’ propounded by George Brown Goode in 1895
(Bennett 1995: 20). In the natural history museum this idea combines with
earlier views that studying nature in the field was morally beneficial. Nature
itself was seen as playing a role in the control of the working classes, as Osborn
wrote: ‘Nature teaches law and order and respect for property. If these people
cannot go to the country, then the Museum must bring nature to the city’
(Osborn cited in Brechin 1996). However, for Osborn and others at the turn of
the century AMNH, the lessons of nature and the civilizing effect of the
museum were produced through acts of consumption, rather than (as earlier)
through the active involvement of working-class people in the practice of nat-
ural history. The dioramas directed visitors toward a particular understanding
of nature whilst, at the same time, positioning them as consumers. For the men
who ran the museum, the dioramas offered to transform the museum visitor.
But they were not simply the expression of certain social interests and anxieties;
rather they spoke to existing popular tastes and beliefs. This was because they
took shape out of well-established artistic traditions and much-used popular
display techniques.
As with the Romantic and panoramic styles in painting, the dioramas invest
nature with an apparently religious significance. Haraway perceptively high-
lights their quasi-religious character, describing the Akeley African Hall as both
a ‘cathedral’ and a depiction of a lost garden of Eden, with each diorama
appearing as an ‘epiphany’ or a ‘revelation’ (Haraway 1989: 29, 38). She links
this religious quality with the white supremacist beliefs held by the trustees and
hunter–naturalists. But the dioramas also reaffirmed a Romantic, theological