Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums
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Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums Overview
The natural history museum is a place where the line between "high" and "low" culture effectively vanishes--where our awe of nature, our taste for the bizarre, and our thirst for knowledge all blend happily together. But as Stephen Asma shows in Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, there is more going on in these great institutions than just smart fun.
Asma takes us on a wide-ranging tour of natural history museums in New York and Chicago, London and Paris, interviewing curators, scientists, and exhibit designers, and providing a wealth of fascinating observations. We learn how the first museums were little more than high-toned side shows, with such garish exhibits as the pickled head of Peter the Great's lover. In contrast, today's museums are hot-beds of serious science, funding major research in such fields as anthropology and archaeology.
"Rich in detail, lucid explanation, telling anecdotes, and fascinating characters.... Asma has rendered a fascinating and credible account of how natural history museums are conceived and presented. It's the kind of book that will not only engage a wide and diverse readership, but it should, best of all, send them flocking to see how we look at nature and ourselves in those fabulous legacies of the curiosity cabinet."--The Boston Herald.
Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums Specifications
Science museums can be illuminating, exciting, and disturbing--just like the collectors that make them possible. Scholar Stephen T. Asma turned his professional curiosity about preserving bodies into an engrossing, wide-ranging exploration of the nature of these places and their curators. Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums brings a refreshing vitality to a subject usually thought boring, if not morbid. Asma's writing ranges from expositive to chatty, and it occasionally feels like a travelogue or memoir, as he investigates the American Museum of Natural History, the Galerie d'anatomie comparée, and other collections in the U.S. and Europe. This informality keeps the reader engaged throughout. Referring to the process of skeletonizing specimens--while maintaining his hold on all but the most sensitive--he writes:
I stepped into the foulest, most pestiferous stench you can imagine.... Inside each tank were thousands of dermestid beetles, otherwise known as flesh-eating beetles, blissfully chewing the meaty chunks and strands off the bones. Each bug was no bigger than a watermelon seed, but en masse they could strip a skeleton clean in two short days.
To Asma's credit, the bulk of the text is less a gross-out fest than a consideration of the hard, sometimes obsessive work of the men and women behind the displays. He examines the role of museums and collectors in the great evolutionary debates of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the future of these institutions as they come more and more to depend on corporate largesse. Equally enlightening and entertaining, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads is a perfectly exhibited specimen. --Rob Lightner
