Rethinking Evolution in the Museum: Envisioning African Origins

Rethinking Evolution in the Museum Rethinking Evolution in the Museum explores the ways diverse natural history museum audiences imagine their evolutionary heritage. In particular, the book considers how the meanings constructed by audiences of museum exhibitions are a product of dynamic interplay between museum iconography and powerful images museum visitors bring with them to the museum. In doing so, the book illustrates how the preconceived images held by museum audiences about anthropology, Africa, and the museum itself strongly impact the human origins exhibition experience. Although museological theory has come increasingly to recognize that museum audiences “make meaning” in exhibitions, or make their own complex interpretations of museum exhibitions, few scholars have explicitly asked how. Rethinking Evolution in the Museum, however, provides a rare window into visitor perceptions at four world-class museums – the Natural History Museum and Horniman Museum in London, the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Through rigorous and novel mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) covering nearly 500 museum visitors, this innovative study shows that audiences of human origins exhibitions interpret evolution exhibitions through a profoundly complex convergence of personal, political, intellectual, emotional, and cultural interpretive strategies. This book also reveals that natural history museum visitors often respond to museum exhibitions similarly because they use common cultural tools picked up from globalized popular media circulating outside of the museum. One tool of particular interest is the notion that human evolution has proceeded linearly from a bestial African prehistory to a civilized European present. Despite critical growths in anthropological science and museum displays, the outdated Victorian progress motif lingers persistently in popular media and the popular imagination. Rethinking Evolution in the Museum sheds light on our relationship with natural history museums and will be crucial to those people interested in understanding the connection between the visitor, the museum, and media culture outside of the museum context. Monique Scott works in anthropology education at the American Museum of Natural History. She received a doctorate in physical anthropology from Yale University in 2004.

Museum Meanings Series editors

Eilean Hooper-Greenhill and Flora Kaplan The museum has been constructed as a symbol of Western society since the Renaissance. This symbol is both complex and multilayered, acting as a sign for domination and liberation, learning and leisure. As sites for exposition, through their collections, displays, and buildings, museums mediate many of society’s basic values. But these mediations are subject to contestation, and the museum can also be seen as a site for cultural politics. In postcolonial societies, museums have changed radically, reinventing themselves under pressure from many forces, which include new roles and functions for museums, economic rationalism, and moves towards greater democratic access. Museum Meanings analyzes and explores the relationship between museums and their publics. “Museums” are understood, very broadly, to include art galleries, historic sites, and historic houses. “Relationships with publics” are also understood very broadly, including interactions with artifacts, exhibitions, and architecture, which may be analyzed from a range of theoretical perspectives. These include material-culture studies, mass- communication and media studies, learning theories, and cultural studies. The analysis of the relationship of the museum to its publics shifts the emphasis from the museum as text to studies grounded in the relationships of bodies and sites, identities and communities. Also in the series: Rethinking Evolution in the Museum Envisioning African Origins Monique Scott

Re-imagining the Museum Beyond the Mausoleum Andrea Witcomb

Recoding the Museum Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change Ross Parry

Museum, Media, Message Edited by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill

Museum Texts Communication Frameworks Louise Ravelli Reshaping Museum Space Architecture, Design, Exhibitions Edited by Suzanne MacLeod

Colonialism and the Object Empire, Material Culture and the Museum Edited by Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn Learning in the Museum George Hein

Museums, Society, Inequality Edited by Richard Sandell

Liberating Culture Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation and Heritage Preservation Christina F. Kreps

Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture Eilean Hooper-Greenhill

Pasts Beyond Memory Evolution, Museums, Colonialism Tony Bennett

Rethinking Evolution in the Museum Envisioning African Origins Monique Scott

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 Monique Scott All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Scott, Monique (Monique R.) Rethinking evolution in the museum : envisioning African origins / Monique Scott. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Human beings—Origin. 2. Human evolution—Africa. 3. Anthropological museums and collections—Social aspects. 4. Museum exhibits—Social aspects. 5. Racism in anthropology. 6. Race discrimination—History. I. Title. GN281.4.S383 2008 069'.5—dc22 2007020934 ISBN 0-203-93748-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–40539–4 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–40540–8 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–93748–1 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–40539–3 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–40540–9 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–93748–8 (ebk)

To my sister, Lisa

Ex Africa semper aliquid novi. Out of Africa, there is always something new. (Pliny the Elder)

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction

xi xiii 1

Making ancestral meaning 2 Excavating perceptions at four museums 4 Four museums in a larger representational universe 11 Methodology 11 Questionnaires and interviews 13 Questioning the quantitative 15 Synopsis 16 1 Up from Africa

20

A short history of a long evolutionary tale 20 Africans as mythical European forebears 21 Quantifying Africans as beasts in the Enlightenment 22 Darwinism and the nineteenth century 26 Exhibiting progress 27 The visual rhetoric of Darwinism 30 Between Boas and the bell curve: anthropology in the twentieth century 32 Evolution and twentieth-century pop culture 35 2 Evolving into the familiar

37

The images that have come before us 37 Bringing evolution to the museum 40 Becoming familiar 45 The globalized evolutionary image 47 3 Revisiting Victorian progress

49

The march of progress 49 The “race” of progress 51

vii

Contents Exhibiting Victorian evolution 53 Victorian evolution at the Horniman Museum and American Museum of Natural History 56 The gift of the Horniman 70 The Victorian museum today 73 Romanticizing the Victorian 75 4 Envisioning our evolutionary beginnings

77

Acknowledging African origins 77 African ape-men as “ancestors” 78 Africa as the “Cradle of Mankind” 81 Color-coding 85 5 Envisioning our evolutionary destinies

91

“We are indeed all Africans under our skin”: The implications of an African Eve 91 Killer African apes vs. the sympathetic European Neanderthals 95 Rationalizing racial differences 98 Enduring Adam and Eve 99 The “Varieties of Mankind” 102 The Kenyan looking glass 105 Religion, the race alternative 109 Evolution and cultural heritage 111 6 The black counter-narrative

113

Visiting the museum black 115 Critiquing the museum 116 Pride in an African heritage 119 The Afrocentric counter-narrative 120 Kids reconceiving the cradle 122 United under one God 124 Shifting communities, knotty responses 125 7 “Out of Africa” in Kenya

129

The colonial heritage of a contemporary museum 129 Outsiders inside the museum 132 The “Leakey Museum” 133 Kamoya Kimeu and insider Kenyan paleontology 136 Picturing prehistory in the diorama 138 Evolution and religion in the museum 145 The Kenyan counter-narrative 145 Postscript: the big picture

viii

148

Contents Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Appendix 4 Notes References Index

Visitor data Sample questionnaires Quantifying African visions Visitors’ path from exhibit to interview

151 156 165 170 171 181 190

ix

Illustrations

i ii iii iv 1.1 1.2 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

The introductory diorama of “Our Place in Nature” at the Natural History Museum The exhibition of human evolution and human variation at the Horniman Museum The Prehistory Gallery at the National Museums of Kenya The introductory display of the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution Racialized ladder of progress from Nott and Gliddon (1861) An 1887 illustration for Henri du Cleuziou’s book, The Creation of Man and the First Ages of Humanity A classic representation of a “Neanderthal encampment” by Zdenek Burian A standard representation of the “march of progress” by H. T. Dignam A linear representation of primate skeletons found in Huxley’s 1864 book, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature The first diorama in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Biology and Evolution depicting A. afarensis in Africa The second diorama in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Biology and Evolution depicting Homo erectus in Africa The third diorama in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Biology and Evolution depicting Neanderthals in the Middle East. The fourth diorama in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Biology and Evolution depicting modern humans in the Ukraine The Horniman Museum’s natural history gallery in 2000 Map of early hominid sites in Africa Diagram representing hominid fossils through time Visitors who believe “African ‘ape-men’ are ancestors” and “Africa is the ‘cradle of mankind.’” A reconstruction of Homo erectus

5 7 8 9 23 32 38 50 51 60 61 62 63 72 78 79 80 87

xi

Illustrations 4.5 An illustration by Zdenek Burian for the cover of The Dawn of Man 5.1 Maps representing the “out-of-Africa” hypothesis and the multiregionalism hypothesis 5.2 Map representing the migration of Homo sapiens within and outside of Africa. 5.3 A “Cro-Magnon Hunter” by Zdenek Burian 5.4 The “Varieties of Mankind” display at the Horniman Museum 6.1 One young Horniman interviewee’s drawing of “Ape-Man” 7.1 Visitors outside the entrance to the National Museums of Kenya 7.2 The Homo erectus component of the National Museums of Kenya hominid diorama

xii

88 92 93 97 103 123 130 139

Acknowledgments

A project like this is indebted to countless people. Enormous gratitude must fi rst go to the four museums that indulged my interests. The people I worked with at the National Museums of Kenya, the American Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum and the Horniman Museum were stimulating and encouraging. I am also thankful to the various funding bodies that supported my research and travels – the National Science Foundation, which supported me as graduate student and postdoctoral fellow, as well as Yale University and the Ford Foundation. As the fi rst stop in my museum tour, the British museums provided an important place for me to develop my research protocol as well as cultivate my love for splendid, historic old museums. At the Natural History Museum I owe particular thanks to Robert Bloomfield, Katie Edwards, and Chris Stringer. At the Horniman Museum I owe particular thanks to James Brock, Anthony Shelton, Nicky Levell, and the retired Leaford Patrick. At both museums I am also grateful for the help of the education department, security guards, tour guides, and librarians. As my fi rst museum love, I owe the American Museum of Natural History more than ten years of thanks. For support during my dissertation work, I am particularly indebted to curator Ian Tattersall of the anthropology department, as well as Enid Schildkrout for her useful comments. I am also very much indebted to my undergraduate museum mentors, Rob Desalle and Melanie Stiassny, for providing the internship experiences that redirected the whole course of my professional life. Ellen Giusti, now retired visitor evaluator at the museum, provided me years of invaluable mentorship. She taught me not only how to evaluate visitors but how to care about them as well. For providing recent mentorship I am also appreciative of the fantastic Maritza Macdonald. At the National Museums of Kenya many people provided valuable insight and friendship. I am thankful to then director, George Abungu, and curator, James Maikweki, for their support. I would also like to thank current director Idle Omar Farah, and head of sites and monuments Mzalendo Kibunjia, for their feedback. I am also thankful for the attention of Frederic Karanja, Mary Muungu, Alfreda Ibui, and Christopher Kiarie, as well as others in the education and paleontology departments that provided generous support. I would also like to thank Lorna Abungu, and other members of Africom, for the useful information they shared. I

xiii

Acknowledgments am also indebted to Richard and Meave Leakey, who were kind enough to sit with me and share their valued recollections. Most importantly, I owe many thanks to the tour guides and museum staff who contributed enormously to the quality of my research at the museum. I would especially like to thank Alex Oloo, Ahmed Abubaka, and Boniface Kimeu, for their rich stories and companionship. I also owe thanks to a few museums that were not included in the fi nal study but helped shape me as a scholar and museum-lover nonetheless. As my home museum during graduate school, I am thankful to the beloved Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, in particular to the team of people I worked with on “Fossil Fragments: The Riddle of Human Origins,” including designer Willard Whitson. I also owe enormous gratitude to the South African Museum and Transvaal Museum in South Africa, both of which graciously hosted me during the earliest phase of my research, but have unfortunately fallen out of the final project. I have been fortunate to study under Andrew Hill, my incomparable doctoral adviser. Over the years he has provided relentless support, spanning many continents and even more lunchtime martinis. I am also grateful for the training I endured as his curatorial assistant for “Fossil Fragments,” an experience that opened my eyes to the real rewards, and even more real challenges, of putting together one of these human evolution displays. I also owe enormous thanks to my other dissertation advisers, Eric Worby and Stephanie Moser – Eric for showing me the transformative possibilities of teaching; Stephanie for inspiring me from the very first page of Ancestral Images. Since then, she has become an extraordinary role model, mentor, and friend. I also thank Diane Gifford- Gonzalez and Melanie Wiber for their advice on early phases of the project; and for the feedback that helped me develop my later thinking on the book, I am grateful to Eilean Hooper-Greenhill and Flora Kaplan. I would also like to thank all of the diligent and thoughtful editors at Routledge. What would I have done without the enduring support of my longtime colleague, friend and husband, Anthony? I am forever grateful to him for his big brain, patience, and nearly tireless readings of this book. With his seemingly boundless well of support, he has helped me nurture this project from nearly its conception. I am also adoring and appreciative of my lovely friends for their continual wit, charm, and ever-stimulating conversation. While struggling along financially through graduate school, they kept me rich in cocktails and hugs. Finally, this book is a tribute to my family, those that have come before me and those that will continue on after me. This book is dedicated to my beautiful sister, Lisa, who passed away while I was preparing the manuscript, but continues to provide an important source of inspiration and strength. I am endlessly indebted to my mother, for bringing beauty and backbone to the family, and my father, my fi rst model of an over-committed professor. I am also thankful for the support of my sister Kim and beautiful nieces, Ansley and Mikayla, and my brilliant nephew Jansen, who certainly carries his mother’s light. Without a doubt, all of my family members are the stars of this ancestral story. Monique Renee Scott September 2007

xiv

Introduction

What does it mean to have evolved out of Africa? The question, which is the motivation for this book, actually came to me by eavesdropping in museums. While studying as a geneticist in the American Museum of Natural History in 1996, I spent many lunch breaks with the stunning dioramas of the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution. On one occasion, I overheard a provocative conversation between a mother and her young child. Standing in front of a diorama of Homo erectus in Africa, a diorama depicting a couple carving raw meat and warding off imposing scavengers on the East African savanna, the child asked, “Mom, why don’t we look like that anymore?” His mother paused momentarily then rather confidently responded, “Because we left Africa.” This unexpected rationale took hold of me and inspired a whole chain of insistent questions: What exactly happens when museum visitors encounter such provocative representations of human origins in museums? How do they make sense of these representations and integrate them into their identities? What set of tools – whether cultural, intellectual, religious, racial, or political – do visitors bring with them to exhibitions, and how do these tools interact with what is being given to them? And more specifically, how did the trope of “leaving Africa” come to represent a condition or catalyst for evolutionary progress? Looking into that place where science and culture meet, Rethinking Evolution in the Museum is ultimately about the ways culturally diverse visitors to the natural history museum imagine their African evolutionary heritage. The work opens a small window onto visitor perceptions at four world-class museums – the Natural History Museum and Horniman Museum in London, the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Through mixed quantitative and qualitative methods uncovering the perceptions of nearly 500 museum visitors, I found that many museum visitors interpret human evolution exhibitions as linear, teleological narratives of progress from bestial African prehistory to a civilized, European present. I also found that the sources of these teleological assumptions are complicated and dynamic, a product of culturally encoded exhibition media and the cultural preconceptions that museum visitors bring with them to exhibitions, including those derived from the pervasive racial and ethnographic folklore circulating outside the museum that continues to stigmatize African people as evolutionary relics. Museums, their visitors, and the greater cultural matrix in which both 1

Rethinking evolution in the museum are situated all work to co-produce anthropological knowledge; all work to answer the question of what it means to have evolved out of Africa. Public perceptions of African origins have long been saturated by fantastic notions of exotic and bestial African people, the troublesome manifestations of Victorian social-evolutionist lore. Through the evolution-inspired images circulating in early twentieth-century museums and world’s fairs, Euroamericans were challenged to confront their darkest origins and ancestors; today, as natural history museums worldwide address increasingly diverse audiences, the challenge becomes one of incorporating a multitude of shifting identities into the conventional evolutionary story. In considering how Kenyan, British, and American museum visitors negotiate human evolution exhibitions, I hope to offer insight into the common interpretive frameworks that structure how museum audiences, with varied intersecting identities including race, nationality, age, gender, and education, understand human evolution exhibits and imagine ancestral Africa. As an ardent lover of museums myself, I hope with this book to bridge the interpretive gap between those that produce anthropological knowledge in museums and those whose perceptions that anthropological knowledge shapes.

Making ancestral meaning In arguing that museum visitors commonly read progress narratives into evolution exhibitions, I rely upon the premise that while museum visitors are “active ideological agents” projecting their own complex meanings onto exhibitions, there are patterns and limitations to the universe of meanings they make. Because museum visitors are situated within culture (as are museum exhibits and museum anthropologists such as myself), the meanings museum audiences make are socially constructed and profoundly shaped by visitors’ previous insights and experiences. Certain narratives or tropes that predominate in wider culture, then, predominate in museum visitors’ perception.1 Progress narratives persist as an interpretive strategy because they still function as a conceptual crutch. They are nearly ubiquitous in popular culture (can you imagine human evolution without imagining the cartoonish images of humans evolving single-file toward their destiny?) and they stand largely unchallenged in museum exhibitions which conventionally move case-by-linear-case from Africa to Europe. Many museum visitors, particularly Western museum visitors, rely upon cultural progress narratives – particularly the Victorian anthropological notion that human evolution has proceeded linearly from a primitive African prehistory to a civilized Europe – to facilitate their own comprehension and acceptance of African origins. Overwhelmingly, museum visitors relate to origins stories intimately, and in ways that satisfy or redeem the images they already have of themselves. Historically, evolutionary exhibitions served primarily to reassure white Western audiences of their own cultural identity, and I found they serve a similar function for audiences today. 2

Introduction Built on a long history of stereotypical images of a static, primitive Africa, these narratives of progress represent a “dominant reading,” to use the language of Stuart Hall (1973), meaning it is consistent with a dominant ethos. But this study is not only about dominant readings made by the majority of museum visitors. Because museum visitors reinterpret origin stories from their own social positions, sometimes museum visitors make “negotiated” and “oppositional” readings in addition to the ones consistent with the dominant culture (again, as formulated by Stuart Hall, 1973). For me, I found alternative readings of these sorts again and again among the black visitors, particularly Kenyan visitors, I targeted (as one of many groups marginalized in the museum). These visitors were more likely to acknowledge the politics of race and nation infusing evolutionary narratives and to complicate the conventional “up-from-Africa” evolutionary story. I did indeed find that visitors of African descent (such as myself) represent a unique “interpretive community,” sometimes seeing both the science of human evolution and the museum itself through unique lenses (see Fish, 1980; Perin, 1992). As illustrated by several important critiques of the relationship between museums and their visitors – such as Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (1992), edited by Karp, Kreamer, and Lavine – diverse individuals bring unique understandings to museum exhibitions. These understandings are an amalgamation of varied cultural histories, educational experiences, and class-inflected insights. As Karp writes, “When people enter museums they do not leave their cultures and identities in the coatroom.” Nor do they respond passively to museum displays. They interpret museum exhibitions through their prior experiences and through the culturally learned beliefs, values, and perceptual skills that they gain through member comment encapsulates exactly what this book aims to get at – the varied interpretive strategies communities use to understand human evolution exhibitions. When visitors imagine their African origins, they do so with varied cultural, national, gendered, and socio-economic identities in tow. Furthermore, these identifications and interpretive strategies are anything but fixed or stable. Museums generate an atmosphere where networks of cultural values, interests, and beliefs struggle against each other and are renegotiated, refashioned, or simply confirmed. In this book, I illustrate that museum audiences actively derive meanings both as individuals and through shifting community politics. Here, museum audiences are revealed to make meaning as members of at least two distinct interpretive communities. To borrow Hall’s language, visitors derive or make meaning (1) as a cosmopolitan globalized group influenced by Western culture producing dominant readings based largely on ideology picked up outside the museum, and are reinforced in the museum space; and (2) as marginalized cultural communities producing negotiated or resistant readings based largely on a politicization or sense of alienation acquired from the politics of oppression that exist outside the museum (historically and in the present day) and reinforced in the museum (historically and in the present day). In both instances, the image that the natural history museum has accumulated over time, across real space (continents) and imagined spaces (through varied media), is critical to the museum experience. The two interpretive strategies – the dominant class readings and the oppositional 3

Rethinking evolution in the museum cultural readings – are not mutually exclusive. They represent the fundamentally dialectical or dialogical nature of the museum-visiting experience itself. This book also fundamentally holds that to understand what goes on in the museum, we have to understand what goes on outside of it. When museum visitors bring progress narratives to the museum, they are bringing the globalized popular images of Africa or anthropology circulating outside the museum – in fi lms, in magazines, in classrooms, and even from other museums. In this hyperkinetic world of modern information, the anthropological soundbites produced in television programming, newspapers, and the Internet, through Walt Disney, the Discovery channel, and Hollywood, are always rubbing up against one another. Museum visitors attempting to make sense of evolutionary discourses, then, do so through a dizzying kaleidoscope of signification. Furthermore, despite critical growth in anthropological science, outdated Victorian progress motifs often linger in popular media. This is largely due to the lag time between changes that happen in evolutionary science and the changes that happen in popular representation. This book is also about the legacy of the natural history museum itself. In ways, while museum visitors bring outside anthropological images to the museum, they also bring the idea of the museum itself to the museum – vague notions of this institution’s grand or intimidating history and specific recollections of its past politics and exhibitions. The natural history museum is an institution whose public image is intricately bound to politics of race, class, culture, and history – a political matrix that affects the museum-visiting experience, engaging some while marginalizing others. To be sure, the museum’s past casts powerful shadows over its exhibitions today. Altogether, the making of ancestral meaning in museums is complex and dynamic, impacted by a dizzying array of institutional, historical, cultural, popular, religious, political, and personal dimensions.

Excavating perceptions at four museums Each of the four museums considered in this work – the Natural History Museum (London), the Horniman Museum (London), the National Museums of Kenya (Nairobi) and the American Museum of Natural History (New York City) – are rather traditional institutions of some historical significance yet represent the inherent complexities and contradictions of the modern-day natural history museum.2 In addition to being personal favorites, as case studies they are useful in offering some insight into the relationship between the prototypical Victorian natural history museums and their overseas extensions, given the colonial and postcolonial legacy of British anthropology in Kenya. But the four museums are not considered here as essentialized museum archetypes, nor are they considered representative of museum visitors or nations as a whole; they merely offer some insight into certain museum moments, discrete in place and time. And while they share a common universe of anthropological ideas, they differ 4

Introduction

Figure i The introductory diorama of “Our Place in Nature” at the Natural History Museum. Author’s photograph; courtesy of the Natural History Museum.

from one another significantly in their approaches to exhibiting human evolution (contrasts that highlight the differences between what museums put on display and how visitors read them). The Natural History Museum’s take on human evolution, “Our Place in Nature” (which opened in 1980 as “Man’s Place in Nature”), is perhaps most distinguished by its emphasis on phylogenetic reconstruction, or cladistics, as a novel didactic device. (Cladistics is a method of allocating organisms into taxonomies based on shared derived and shared ancestral traits.) The museum divorces itself from conventional representations by having visitors weigh species-specific character traits at each new exhibition juncture. For example, the exhibition delineates the cladistic characters for modern humanity by the use of such markers as art, symbol, farming, and ceremony. This strategy offers museum visitors unique insight into scientific method and theory, an important critical tool to impart to visitors. However, the cost of presenting cladistics alone is that it distinguishes the method as the only valid scientific approach, to the exclusion of other methods. The strategy also, I fi nd, subverts the linearity of the evolutionary course, and presents a course that is decidedly less defi nitive. Given the exhibition’s resistance to the certainty attributed more conventional modes of representation, this approach also tends to beget confusion and uncertainty at moments for museum visitors; it is also more amenable to creationist deconstruction, as I learned in my visitor studies. 5

Rethinking evolution in the museum Other than the emphasis on phylogenetic reconstruction, the exhibition is fairly classic in layout, progressing directionally from apes and Africa in the beginning to culture and Europe in the conclusion. In order to represent tidily the leap from past to present, the introductory diorama offers (perhaps self- consciously) a stark juxtaposition between an ape standing next to an idealized, Davidesque bust of a white man (as seen in figure i.). Reinforcing this, “Modern Humans” are represented by a conventional European cave-man illustration: a shaggy-haired man holding a spear standing beside a crouching woman. 3 The exhibition also uses a variety of artistic reconstructions and life-size models, including an unconventional life-sized model of a dark-skinned Neanderthal female that complicates many visitors’ expectations of white-skinned Neanderthals. At the time of my research in 2000, “Our Place in Nature” did not expand significantly on the origins of modern humans or on human diversity but has since added a module dealing with this topic. It is worth noting that the opening of “Man’s Place in Nature” was attended by a flurry of well-publicized debate over the exhibition’s incorporation of cladistics. Unique to the history-of-origins display, the protest was not overtly religious, philosophical, cultural, or aesthetic; it was about a seemingly esoteric set of scientific information. But cladistics was then a newfangled method of resolving evolutionary relationships, and vocal anti-cladist Beverly Halstead protested the manner in which it structured the exhibition.4 On the part of the Natural History Museum, most of the attacks were dealt with by the then director of exhibitions, Roger Miles, and “Our Place in Nature” consultant Theya Molleson. Despite the scientific sophistication of the protest, there are ways in which the contestation of evolutionary knowledge and evolutionary display is vaguely familiar. On some level, the protest involved contestation over the domain and definition of the natural history museum (and its resident anthropology), contestation between conservative and progressive approaches to the display of natural history, and ultimately evolution’s role in defining for us who are and are not our ancestors.5 In contrast to the Natural History Museum, the human evolution exhibition at the Horniman Museum is rather small and inconspicuous, and is consistent with the classic Victorian style that characterizes the rest of the natural history gallery. The exhibition covers in a very simple, prosaic fashion the procession in hominid forms from australopithecines to modern humans, as understood in the 1980s when the exhibition was curated.6 The exhibition pays little attention to hominid behavior and scientific methodology, and it lacks any artistic reconstructions. The exhibition ends with a “Varieties of Mankind” panel, which divides humans into four discrete regional categories: Indo-Europe, Northeast Asia and the Americas, Africa, and Australia. This outdated archetypal view of human races rests heavily on multiregionalist notions, which caused consternation in more than one of the Horniman’s regular black visitors. Overall, compared to the wide range of media and didactic strategies employed by the Natural History Museum, the Horniman Museum exhibit is rather flat and simplified, and this contrast became apparent in the range of what visitors mentioned learning from the two exhibitions. 6

Introduction

Figure ii The exhibition of human evolution and human variation at the Horniman Museum (left wall). Author’s photograph; courtesy of the Horniman Museum.

The Horniman Museum’s permanent cultural exhibition, “African Worlds,” was also of great peripheral interest to my study of the museum. The exhibition includes dynamic, lively exhibits of a tremendous variety of African cultures including the voices and interpretations of diverse African peoples, past and present. With its opening quote from Ali Mazrui – “You are not a country, Africa. You are a concept . . . you are a glimpse of the infi nite” – and its progressive representation of African cultures, “African Worlds” is a unique ethnographic exhibition of Africa. Because this cultural exhibition complicates African cultures with its display techniques and counter-representations, it provides a unique opportunity to consider how it might influence visitors’ responses to the narrative undergirding the Horniman Museum’s more conventional Victorian displays. Far from the swanky South Kensington neighborhood which is home to the Natural History Museum, the Horniman Museum also made an important contribution to this study because the museum has a really diverse visiting constituency. Situated in a largely black and Asian region of southeast London, the Horniman Museum attracts a relatively high percentage of black visitors (15 percent) and Asian visitors (11 percent). (The breakdown of demographic variables is similar to information collected by the Horniman Museum’s marketing department in 1999.) The Horniman attracts almost all local regulars, a real feat for a natural history museum, and despite its tremendous scale and history, 7

Rethinking evolution in the museum

Figure iii The Prehistory Gallery at the National Museums of Kenya. Author’s photograph; courtesy of the National Museums of Kenya.

it remains a free neighborhood museum. As many Horniman employees noted to me, the museum is not a place for the typical museum-goer and attracts a “broader sweep of South London.” Much of the National Museums of Kenya’s current Prehistory Gallery was curated by Meave Leakey and Eustace Gitonga in the 1970s. It is an exhibition of comprehensive size and scope, and one that has been steadily updating over the last thirty or so years, although it bears some evidence of its datedness (compared to the new exhibitions of the Natural History Museum or American Museum of Natural History, for example). It ranges from a cave art display to relatively detailed representations of paleontological methodology, fossil beds, and fossil fauna. The exhibition also features casts of many hominid fossils, including a life-sized cast of the Kenyan “Turkana Boy” and a popular hominid diorama (illustrated by Gitonga). Across from the formal Prehistory Gallery is a lively, colorful exhibition of the Kenyan Koobi Fora fossil region. The display is novel in incorporating the history of the Koobi Fora expedition, and a map of the fauna and the people of the Lake Turkana area, as well as a colorful wall illustration. The Prehistory Gallery has evolved rather steadily from the original incarnation Louis and Mary Leakey developed in the 1950s – the Hall of Man.7 It included an exhibition of “man and his culture,” “Prehistoric man,” and the life-size reproduction of Tanzanian cave art, the Cheke Rock Shelter. Mary 8

Introduction Figure iv The introductory display of the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Photo Library.

Leakey’s 1953 Rock Art Gallery was actually the fi rst display to develop into the Prehistory Gallery, which opened to the public in 1954 (see Mary Leakey’s African Vanishing Art, 1983). The Rock Art Gallery still introduces museum visitors to the Prehistory Gallery today, and is a welcome intervention in the more common European cave art displays that typify early modern human culture in most museums.8 Generally, the human evolution exhibitions at the National Museums of Kenya have followed the history of the Leakey expeditions in Kenya, certainly a draw for many of the museum’s visitors (who often regard the museum as “the Leakey Museum”). The American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Biology and Evolution offered museum visitors a dramatic new expression of human origins when it opened in 1993. Curated by Ian Tattersall and designed by Willard Whitson, the hall was clearly a product of tremendous scholarly and creative 9

Rethinking evolution in the museum investment.9 It was a large and comprehensive exhibition of human biology in the fi rst section and of human evolution in the second. The scope of the two halls was wide – ranging from descriptions of human cellular biology and muscular–skeletal anatomy in the biology section and displays of the many fossil casts and species in the succeeding hall. The exhibition, with AMNH’s two million visitors a year, was arguably one of the most persuasive exhibitions of human evolution in the country. (Although this exhibition closed in 2005, a new exhibition of human evolution opened in February 2007, curated by Ian Tattersall and Rob Desalle.) The Hall of Human Biology and Evolution was broken into seven successive sections: “Earliest Human Relatives,” “Toward Modern Humans,” “Earliest Architecture,” “The Origin of Modern Humans,” “Human Creativity,” “Ice Age Art,” and “The First Modern Humans.” Tattersall presented the defining essence of humanity as artistic creativity, and the concluding section of the exhibition featured European Paleolithic art. The “Ice Age Art” text, hinting at the origins of art both within and outside of Europe, reads: In this gallery, we look at the art that emerged over 30 ka with the appearance of modern humans in Europe. This regional art is the best-documented example of innovations that were undoubtedly taking place through the Old World at the same time, though evidence elsewhere is relatively sparse at present. Despite the exhibition’s text, the exhibition was narrated most by its four penetrating dioramas which take visitors through four successive steps of human evolution – from an Australopithecus afarensis couple at an exploding volcano diorama, to a Homo erectus couple on the African savanna, to a Neanderthal family unit, and finally to representatives of ourselves, an Ice Age family unit in the Ukraine. The museum intended the dioramic reconstructions as a colorful introduction into the more rigorous and scientific aspects of human evolution, but the dioramas’ dramatic force was unrivaled by the media accompanying it (something confirmed by both my visitor study and the museum’s own). For example, the relatively unadorned modern human origins alcove attracted only the most educationally earnest visitors. The alcove was diorama-free, and primarily decorated by landscape shots. The section, however, significantly contrasted the progress narratives encoded in the dioramas. The display provided evidence for modern human origins in sub-Saharan Africa, and it shared archaeological and paleontological evidence for modern humans in eastern Asia and Australia, the Americas, the Mediterranean basin, and Europe. For example, at sub-Saharan Africa, the exhibition label read, “the earliest fossils that hint at the emergence of modern humans come from Africa, south of the Sahara,” displaying six African casts as evidence. Conversely, at the European display, the exhibition claimed, “despite all the fossils of the last Ice Age, there is little evidence of the transition towards modern humans in Europe.” This is an important supplement to what visitors receive from the Africa-to-Europe progress narrative conveyed in the dioramas, but it usually escaped visitors’ attention. 10

Introduction

Four museums in a larger representational universe All of the four museums considered in this book are representatives of the beauties, challenges, and paradoxes of the modern natural history museum.10 For many of the museum visitors I spoke with each represents a natural history museum in the most traditional sense, yet all achieve something unique relative to the greater representational field. As shown, the four museums considered here both conform to traditional modes of evolutionary representation and make significant revisions to them. For example, the Natural History Museum complicates conventional origins narratives with its use of cladistics to subvert the linear, teleological narrative. The Horniman Museum achieves this in the ways its progressive “African Worlds” exhibition potentially works to subvert traditional representations of African culture as primitive and prehistoric. The American Museum of Natural History is exemplary in providing the most modern and thorough human evolution exhibition of those considered, and for its state-of-the-art origins dioramas. The National Museums of Kenya is unique on many fronts. Most importantly, it makes a useful intervention in origins displays by working to engage local Kenyans, and Kenyan culture and history, in evolutionary representations and programming. Despite these individualized articulations, as I will illustrate throughout this book, a significant number of museum visitors across the four museums responded to human evolution exhibitions similarly. One would expect that because of the unique identities of each museum, the perspectives of museum visitors would vary according to museum. However, as I will discuss in chapters to come, many museum visitors across the British and American museums commonly use a teleological ladder of progress from Africa to Europe to facilitate understanding of African origins. The misconception of an evolutionarily inferior Africa, amplified by the feedback loop between museums and their visitors, strongly suggests that historical forms of racism have not disappeared into history. Natural history museums have long communicated African origins stories through a universal visual lexicon. By continuing to use certain representational strategies – linearity of the evolutionary course, racial typology and racial hierarchies, the juxtaposition between black prehistory and white modernity – today’s natural history museums often do not remove themselves far enough from outdated anthropological dogma. Although science has taken great strides in the last century, these advances become weighed down by the vestiges of Victorian anthropology still lingering in museums and popular culture.

Methodology My work adheres to new critical museum theory emphasizing the importance of social memory and experience in the development of audience perceptions, as well as the importance of using mixed and novel approaches for unraveling those perceptions. While the study uses broad quantitative questionnaires to 11

Rethinking evolution in the museum arrive at general patterns in visitor response, more attention is given to the smaller sample of in-depth interview responses. Close readings of interviews are conducted, from readings that highlight cultural or class-inflected interpretations to those that highlight the idiosyncratic. The synthesis of quantitative data and qualitative analysis is thought to deepen the overall analysis, and offer contrast and perspective (see Silverman, 1995). The paradox, however, is that the very reasoning that supports doing visitor studies makes them very hard to perform: museum visitor perceptions are knotty, and the interpretive strategies museum visitors use are fluid and unpredictable. Furthermore, not only are the ways visitors construct perceptions exceedingly complex, but so are the ways they communicate their perceptions. This was something that surprised and overwhelmed me in the course of my research. I learned that the research space was anything but sterile and consistent (despite my efforts), and an array of influences affected visitors as they responded to my questions – from the order of exhibitions they had seen that day, to the cultural activities they had participated in the previous weekend, to their comfort in the research environment (whether at a table or a bench, whether inside or outside of the museum), to their perceptions of me, as the black American female anthropologist with whom they were interacting (see Appendix 4). I found that museum visitor perceptions overwhelmingly defy quantification and reduction. Without a doubt, my most revealing insights into visitor perceptions came from qualitative research, primarily from the in-depth interviews but also from open-ended questionnaire questions. The qualitative research powerfully exposed the complexities of individual perceptions without artificially forcing order on those human emotions, sentiments, and perceptions that defy simplistic categorization. Museum visitors could not simply rate on a scale of 1 to 10 their comfort at having evolved out of Africa (which incidentally was not a question I used), and although such measures do have value in studies of certain types, this study aimed to get at perceptions at a different, less tidy level. For example, two phenomena stood out for me as particularly provocative – the performative nuances of visitors’ self-presentation and those rare moments of visitor self-revelation. First, the many interviews I conducted allowed me to see how museum visitors navigate challenging and sensitive questions through a complex of uncomfortable pauses, posturing, excitement, uncertainty, laughter, self-deprecation, self-defense, revisions, lack of eye contact, testimonials, and confessions. Confronted with challenging origins-oriented topics such as the nature of humanity, racial origins, and racial differences, religion and spirituality, interviewees’ performance anxiety became an unexpected yet most important aspect of the research environment. Second, human origins discussions often urge interviewees to confront their own ideological dilemmas and internal contradictions. Such revelatory moments occurred most often when visitors found unexpected incongruities between their religious beliefs and evolutionary beliefs, or between either origins belief system and their perceptions of race. This is illustrated poignantly, for example, by the ways in which black interviewees often found themselves arriving at profound ideo12

Introduction logical dilemmas when reconciling racial folklores, religious convictions, and the museum’s intellectual conventions – for example during questioning about the origins of races, when visitors resisted certain notions intellectually (such as environmentally derived racial essences) while clinging to certain religious folklores (such as a white Adam and Eve) and racial beliefs (such as a noble African motherland) emotionally or intuitively. Such tangled layers of visitor perception are exceedingly meaningful and bear witness to the complex ways visitors actually construct perceptions of anthropology in museums. The goal of this research is not to provide a blueprint of audience perceptions for explicit prescriptive purposes. Rather, the goal is to stimulate conversation as well as future research about how audiences understand evolutionary information. As Ien Ang writes about television audiences, “audience ethnographies are undertaken because the relation between television and viewers is an empirical question. But the empirical is not the privileged domain of the answers . . . Answers (temporary ones, to be sure) are to be constructed, in the form of interpretations” (Ang, 1996: 318–19).

Questionnaires and interviews To explore visitor perceptions, I employed questionnaires, informal in-depth interviews, and focus groups, including focus groups of schoolchildren that visit the museums (see Appendix 1). As mentioned, I did not aim to get a quantitative sense of learning but to unpack the complicated ways ancestral meanings are made in museums.11 To do so, I incorporated some novel approaches in my methodology, including, for example, using pictures from magazines to focus discussion and having children draw pictures for me. At each museum, I used an in-depth questionnaire to survey a broad sample of museum visitors (with more than 100 at each museum; see the questionnaires in Appendix 2). Through a series of quantitative and qualitative exercises, the surveys were designed to elicit information concerning (1) the museum itself and specific exhibition media, such as reconstructive models and illustrations; (2) general perceptions of human evolution and human evolutionary history; (3) perceptions of Africa and African ancestors; and (4) notions of biological versus cultural evolution, including perceptions of “race” as an evolutionary phenomenon. The questions were designed to gauge visitor familiarity with certain folk or outdated evolutionary ideas (such as conventional racial hierarchies and taxonomies), as well as contemporary evolutionary models (such as the “out-of-Africa” or African Eve model of modern human origins), and the manner in which these ideas are projected onto and received from exhibition media. The majority of survey questions were open-ended, and visitors took an average of 20 to 30 minutes to complete the survey. Many of the survey questions were not intended to determine merely the extent to which visitors’ interpretations were correct or incorrect in light of current scientific orthodoxy. Rather, the surveys were intended to gain insight into the breadth of variation in public opinion, the degree of the public’s exposure to different 13

Rethinking evolution in the museum evolutionary arguments, and the ability of visitors to bring unique perspectives to their understanding of human evolution. The survey questions were systematic across the four museums, though certain questions pertained to particular media at each museum. The choice of wording on questionnaires was modified according to feedback from people that worked at each museum, and I conducted prototype surveys at the British museums. Between 2000 and 2001, I distributed the questionnaires myself in the various human evolution exhibits (though two of the Horniman surveys were fi lled out in my absence and deposited in a collection box). The great majority of surveying was conducted over summer months during peak museum tourism. Respondents were chosen randomly from those museum visitors that engaged the exhibition in a sustained and attentive way. Every visitor that paused at each of the respective exhibition components (not necessarily reading thoroughly, but stopping to observe visual or textual media) was solicited at the end of the exhibition as a potential respondent. More specifically, at the Natural History Museum, I approached visitors at the end of the “Our Place in Nature” exhibition. Horniman Museum visitors were approached toward the exit of the natural history gallery (between the natural history and cultural galleries), and as visitors passed by the human origins display. In the American Museum of Natural History, I solicited visitors toward the end of the human evolution component of the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution, after they had experienced the majority of the exhibition and observed each of the four dioramas. At the National Museums of Kenya, I solicited visitors that passed through the entire gallery, once they exited the hominid diorama alcove. The visitors at the National Museums of Kenya were solicited randomly, though when black and non-black tourists were exiting the hall simultaneously, black visitors were confronted first, biasing the sample toward Kenyan museum visitors.12 Questionnaire respondents were invited in writing, at the end of the questionnaire, to participate in a more extensive interview if they should desire. The interviews were relatively informal, though they followed a similar structure to the questionnaires in the progression of discussion topics; I asked visitors to discuss their (1) general history of interest in museum exhibitions, natural history, and related topics; (2) previous exposure and interest in human evolution exhibitions; (3) specific history with the museum and human origins exhibition in question; (4) general perceptions (likes, dislikes, things that stood out) of the respective human evolution exhibition, and comparison of it to other exhibitions (at the same museum and elsewhere); (5) general interests in human evolution, previous exposure and education in human evolution; (6) perceptions of specific exhibition media (with the museum display or photographs of the exhibition as probes); (7) discussion of a specific set of human evolutionary images; and (8) any additional comments, questions or interests. Interviews only followed the structure generally, and free associations and related digressions were encouraged. All interviews, however, were steered eventually to cover each of the listed discussion topics and all interviewees participated in the image exercises. 14

Introduction As mentioned, interviews allowed me to gather feedback on a range of racially provocative reconstructive images, images spanning from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the present day. Most of the images used were salient landmarks in the history of hominid reconstructions, from such popular artists as Charles Knight, Zdenek Burian, Maurice Wilson, and John Gurche. (The images are sprinkled throughout the book, as in figures 1.2, 2.1, 4.4, 4.5, 5.3; I also used an illustration by Jay Matternes that appeared in the November 1985 National Geographic [Weaver, 1985, 576–7].) With these images, I fi rst conducted a free-association exercise – asking visitors to spontaneously respond to and describe the image, “as if to a friend.” I then used a combination of categorization exercises to determine the visual icons visitors use to identify the primitive. Interviewees were encouraged to arrange images into chronological order and/or to sort images into categories based on any chosen criteria (for example, those criteria the interviewees felt distinguish “cave-man” from “apeman,” African from European, etc.). I also asked interviewees to feel free to deliberate aloud, and paid particular attention to mention of geographic location or environment, presumed species or group identity, and general physical attributes. I was particularly attentive to how notions of savagery and bestiality were invoked, and the ways in which icons of Africa and ape-men related to one another. These image exercises were really productive in generating conversation in both adults and children alike. At each museum, I also interviewed, formally and informally, various museum professionals including members of education departments, exhibition departments, anthropology departments, and paleontology departments, as well as security guards, museum tour guides, and volunteers. I also interviewed some schoolteachers who brought their students to view the human evolution exhibitions. Also, where possible, I interviewed, formally and informally, the curators and artists involved in the production of the human evolution exhibition.

Questioning the quantitative Although a wealth of data was generated by the questionnaires, the book relies heavily upon interview and open-ended questionnaire responses. This is partially because the more I thought about the responses I got from museum visitors, the more I came to question the quantitative approach. By just looking at visitors’ hand-written responses in Appendix 2, it is apparent how difficult it is for visitors to stay within the lines, or to reduce their perceptions to ticked boxes. I have a number of anecdotes that illustrate the limits of the quantitative data for the purposes of my research. Even relatively straightforward questions, such as whether or not humans coexisted with dinosaurs, elicited a surprising range of variability in responses. This was particularly demonstrated during a questionnaire exercise where, rather than forcing visitors to make an artificial decision between true and false, I asked visitors to what extent they believed in certain statements, giving them the options of “very much,” “somewhat,” “not much,” and “not at all.” While I expected visitor responses to be polarized when 15

Rethinking evolution in the museum Very much

Somewhat

Not much

Not at all

NHM

3.51%

8.77%

9.65%

78.07%

HM

8.57%

14.29%

12.38%

64.76%

AMNH

4.20%

9.24%

16.81%

69.75%

14.29%

17.86%

15.18%

52.68%

NMK

they were considering the extent they believe “humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time,” responses fell out along a continuum (see table above). Visitor responses are clearly not very neat and tidy. So when it came to unpacking dense, emotionally loaded questions about race, heritage, and Africa, I let my more textured, qualitative responses, although less in statistical number, do most of the work. There are also questions on the questionnaire that I decided to do very little with in the larger analysis, such as where I asked visitors to “Please rate your impressions of Africa from the following list of stereotypes,” including “place of beautiful animals,” “a place of beautiful people,” “a continent in turmoil,” “a land of primitive cultures,” and “a Garden of Eden.” In its use of stereotypes to get at stereotypes, the question was already risky (although only three out of the more than 400 questionnaire respondents mentioned the categories were too restricting). The bottom fell out of the question when early in my research I asked some interviewees to deliberate aloud their responses to various questionnaire questions. To the question regarding stereotypical images of Africa, one respondent said: “Place of beautiful animals?” Yes. “Place of beautiful cultures?” That’s hard ’cause they have [troubles] and everything else. The “Bushmen” of Kalahari, they’d be more beautiful than Zimbabwe or the Sudan or wherever else. Continent in all? Yes. Primitive tribes? Now that’s being very subjective. “Land of tribes?” OK. (B7) It was clearly very hard for the respondent to pin his perceptions down. Ultimately, the relationships between human evolution exhibitions and their audiences are complex and dynamic, affected by a dizzying array of historical, cultural, popular, religious, political, and personal dimensions. There is no linear relationship between museums and their audiences, and the ways visitors construct perceptions of their African origins and the ways they related those perceptions during the course of research are profoundly complex.

Synopsis In the fi rst chapter of the book, “Up from Africa,” I provide a history of ideas that contributed to representations of Africa as evolutionarily inferior to Europe 16

Introduction and discuss the ways the notion continues to circulate in popular culture. I posit that anthropological science validated pre-existing racial hierarchies and – as the emergence of Darwinian anthropology coincided significantly with the emergence of the Victorian exhibitions bestializing Africans – authorized an image of Africa as both culturally and biologically inferior to Europe. It is important to recognize that the ways museum visitors conceive of race and Africa today are inextricable from historical race science and historical race politics. Nineteenth-century anthropology, even unwillingly, has left an indelible inscription on popular images of the African continent and African peoples. And because of it stereotypical images of Africa linger with a dogged persistence in much of the West. In the second chapter of the book, “Evolving into the familiar,” I illustrate that there is a complex intertextuality between evolutionary images produced within museums and the matrix of anthropological images produced outside of them, thus revealing how human evolution exhibitions and their museum visitors work to co-produce anthropological ideas. Museum visitors bring a fantastic array of cultural preconceptions, accumulated outside of museums, to bear upon their appreciation of human evolution exhibitions, including images derived from popular science sources and other sources, both religious and mythological. Due to the breadth of these cultural, religious, and educational influences, misconceptions abound – particularly misconceptions of teleological progress and gross underappreciation of the scale of evolutionary history. The chapter reveals the complicated ways museum exhibits are dynamic “contact zones,” forums for the two-way interaction between producers and consumers, science and stereotype; in these zones, museum and visitor share in the mutual construction of evolutionary meaning.13 The third chapter, “Revisiting Victorian progress” considers how the image of linear, teleological, evolutionary progress circulates as powerful, though distorting, evolutionary rhetoric and how “progress” is the conceptual apparatus through which visitors historically and presently interpret human evolution exhibitions. This chapter takes the American Museum of Natural History and the Horniman Museum as case studies, considering how the historical socialevolutionist philosophies of these institutions resonate with visitors’ experiences there today. In particular, in responses to the American Museum of Natural History, Hall of Human Biology and Evolution, we see how visitors still see the exhibit as telling a culturally encoded progress narrative from Africa to Europe. At the Horniman Museum, we see simply how museum visitors hold on to and romanticize the museum’s Victorian past. This chapter emphasizes that when visitors visit museums they are not blank slates; they bring their own powerful expectations of the museum and of anthropology along with them. Overall, we see how powerful images of anthropology linger today and provide a common referent against which, in many ways, exhibitions cannot compete. These images limit the latitude available for imagining human ancestors and the museum itself. In chapter four, “Envisioning our evolutionary beginnings,” I consider how visitors generally perceive Africa as “Cradle of Mankind” and African ape-men as 17

Rethinking evolution in the museum “ancestors.” For many, the scientific argument of African origins cannot escape heavy cultural implications. Generally, British and American museum visitors tend to proclaim neutral or romantic images of an abstract Africa as the Cradle of Mankind, while harboring notions of sub-Saharan Africans as biologically and culturally primitive – that is, as living ancestors. My research strongly confi rms that a belief in unilineal progress among races, across continents and nations, is entrenched in the minds of the public and takes hold persistently against more current scientific opinion or moral fashions. Visitors’ readings of a chronometric yardstick of human progress also reveals that there are actually two trajectories of human origins – biological origins in Africa (the first set of hurdles, discussed in chapter four) and cultural origins in Europe (the last set of hurdles, discussed in chapter five). In chapter five, “Envisioning our evolutionary destinies,” I consider how museum visitors envision the origins of our own species, Homo sapiens, or, in other words, how they envision the origins of people just like themselves. This chapter reveals the disconnect between new theories of modern human origins and modern human diversity and the ways visitors imagine it. To do this, I highlight that early in the twentieth century, theories of cultural relativism and advances in human genetics began to dismantle Victorian notions of human biology and culture. Most significantly, throughout the twentieth century, scholars and scientists worked to discredit older theories of “race” and environmental determinism; as a result, they revealed the concept of race to be biologically insignificant, a social rather than biological construct. Furthermore, accumulating research in genetics, paleoanthropology and archaeology have come to reveal Africa as not only the birthplace of our earliest ape-like ancestors but also the birthplace of our culturally sophisticated modern human ancestors (see Stringer and McKie, 1996; McBrearty and Brooks, 2000). Despite these changes in scientific thought, this chapter demonstrates that museum visitors still hold on to commonsense perceptions of race, racial difference, and racial hierarchies, underscoring the resilience of such modes of thinking. Unlike the previous chapters that consider general British and American perceptions of human evolution, chapters six and seven consider the unique ways museum audiences of African descent relate to African origins stories. In chapter six, “The black counter-narrative,” I illustrate that while evolutionary discourses espouse a fundamental “African-ness” for all of humanity, this discourse holds particular meaning for visitors of recent African descent. Black audiences typically relate to human evolution exhibitions uniquely because they are at once intimately connected to Africa, yet alienated by conventional African origins narratives that move up and away from Africa. I also found that black visitors were sensitive to the complicity between racial politics and Western science, something that impacted their experiences in anthropology exhibitions in general and the museum as a whole. Finally, in chapter seven, “‘Out of Africa’ in Kenya,” I highlight the implications of out-of-Africa narratives for people actually living in Africa, a position routinely ignored in evolutionary discourses. The National Museums of Kenya 18

Introduction is a valuable site of discussion because during the twentieth century the museum has served as fertile ground for both an independent postcolonial nation redefi ning its institutions and for Western scientists excavating human origins on the continent. Because of the legacy of the Leakey family in Kenya and in the museum, the National Museums of Kenya also stands at the intersection of the competing interests of white paleoanthropology and black politics, a confl ict imprinted on the museum today in innumerable ways. Like the museum visitor responses discussed in chapter six, Kenyan visitors often read anthropology exhibitions and the museum itself in unique and valuable ways; they resist their interpellation as passive objects in African origins stories and illustrate new ways of envisioning African origins.

19

1 Up from Africa

“I like pretty things. Africa scares me.” (Horniman Museum interviewee)

How do we imagine our African origins? What is the constellation of images, emotions, and ideas that we attribute to our African evolutionary heritage? As this chapter attests, the stereotypical images of the African continent circulating within and outside of museums are not merely visual; they are a dense package of ideas, folklore, ideology, and politics that thrive in cultural memory and our collective imagination.1 By excavating a long genealogy of mythological, religious, and political influences, we can see how “African origins” has come to encompass a complicated array of iconographies that fi x Africa and African people in the deep, evolutionary past.

A short history of a long evolutionary tale Though African people had been figured as pre-humans and proto-humans long before the twentieth century, Africa’s prominence in modern theories of human evolution began with the 1925 discovery of the Taung fossil in South Africa. Challenging popular and scientific predilections to root human origins in either Europe (such as those which motivated the Piltdown European fossil forgery) or Asia (such as those which motivated Henry Fairfield Osborn’s research in Asia), Africa came to dominate the origins map through the diligent work of scientists such as Raymond Dart and Robert Broom in South Africa in the early twentieth century, and later through the work of Mary and Louis Leakey working in Tanzania and Kenya in the mid-twentieth century. Throughout much of the twentieth century, excavation in the East African Rift Valley and Southern Africa was punctuated by a succession of significant fossil finds and generations of celebrated fossil-finders.2 As might be expected, Africa’s designation as the Cradle of Mankind has long met with resistance. In the early twentieth century, African evolutionary origins posed many cumulative ideological hurdles: first, the insult that Europeans evolved from lowly African apes; second, the perhaps greater insult that Europeans evolved from lowly African savages; and, taken together, the overarching 20

Up from Africa insult that God had not in fact created man in his divine, and presumably white, image. To prevail over such psychological affronts, a resolution developed to restore the dignity of Europeans. Divine creation from God was substituted with teleological determinism from African ape to European man. Science was called upon to confi rm this conviction in various ways over the years. Sometimes an evolutionary speciation event could be invoked to propel Europeans forward, ahead of their African predecessors and contemporaries (even though this rationale was anything but viable, as humans are undeniably one species). More often, intraspecific events could be invoked to distinguish Europeans from their African roots – for example, the event scientifically known as the European “Great Leap Forward” or “Human Revolution,” a cultural turning point thought to have happened in Europe forty thousand years ago (though now significantly countered by archaeological and paleontological evidence of modern culture in Africa as early as 100,000 years ago, such as in McBrearty and Brooks, 2000). In the end, Africa’s pre-Darwinian designation as a dark and primitive land simply became overlaid with a new Darwinian distinction – a dark, primitive, and aboriginal land. The West imagined that in Africa humanity could be glimpsed in its most crude and original form. This is a representation that reverberates widely even today from evolution textbooks in the West to eco-tourism on the African continent. Today, then, Africa is often seen by the world outside of it both derogatorily as the “dark continent” and favorably as the “Cradle of Mankind,” a contradiction that has been persistently reconciled through common progressivist logic – Africa serves as the cradle of humanity, while Europe serves as the evolutionary finishing school. This logic has been maintained, and continually reworked, through a long history of representational media.

Africans as mythical European forebears Comprehensive histories of anthropological race science have been written many times over; it is worthwhile here only to recount in brief the key ideas that have contributed to evolutionary representations of Africa that prevail today. 3 Of particular significance are those ideas which culminated in Darwinian anthropology and the Victorian natural history museum in England, an episteme that permeated museums worldwide, particularly those in English-speaking countries, such as the United States, and British colonies, such as Kenya (Bennett, 2004).4 Though much of the most active exploration and imagining of Africa took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Europeans, it is important to remember that the stage was set long before. Through mythological and biblical narratives, many Europeans were already beginning to imagine their forebears. These imagined forebears were often depicted as existing within nature and occasionally alongside monkeys or apes. A significant example is the so-called Plinian races, the wild men of the woods mythologized in folk tales (Stoczkowski, 1997, 259–60; Moser, 1998, 44–52). Most significantly, 21

Rethinking evolution in the museum Herodotus of the fi fth century BC wrote of African cave-dwellers, a significant early articulation of the African as cave-man (Marks, 2002, 166). As Moser has pointed out (1998), during antiquity all of the key icons for describing human prehistory were developed: the club, animal skins, nakedness, hairiness, and dark skin. These were all features used to distinguish the civilized from the outsider, barbarian, or Other (although “civilization” was not thought of in those formal terms until later; see Moser, 1998, 169; Jahoda, 1999, 222–5). A deliberate iconography of origins has existed throughout much of the world at least as long as spiritual and religious ideas. The biblical Adam and Eve, however, were to introduce two new ideologically relentless characters to the origins landscape. As opposed to the European mythological origins tropes emphasizing the bizarre and grotesque, biblical ancestors were an embodiment of human perfection. The contrasts between the wild man and Adam and Eve foreshadow, and were likely influences of, the contrast between images of the African as bestial ancestor and the European as romanticized ancestor. It is worth emphasizing that the forebears that early Europeans imagined were often depicted classically and medievally as natural and beast-like before the theory of evolution materialized or before distant Others were even contacted. Although “black” came to represent a biological race with culturally specific characteristics, mythologies of difference were in place before knowledge of sub-Saharan African peoples even existed in the West. This suggests the powerful ways folklore and politics fuel the scientific narratives that later came to authorize them.

Quantifying Africans as beasts in the Enlightenment A whole nation . . . without the use of speech. This is the case of the Ouran Outangs, that are found in the kingdom of Angola in Africa, and several parts of Asia . . . they make huts of branches and they carry off Negro girls, whom they make slaves of, and use for both work and pleasure. These facts are related of them by Mr. Buffon in his natural history. (James Burnet [1773], quoted in Jahoda, 1999, 44)

Although it stems from the “Scala Naturae” of antiquity, the idea of a Great Chain of Being reached its apex of popularity in the eighteenth century and had incomparable impact on Enlightenment representations of cultural difference in general and blackness specifically. This seductive notion depends upon the continuity or interconnectedness of all beings, and upon a linear ranking of those beings from lowest or most primitive to the most human and eventually God-like (see Lovejoy, 1964). The Great Chain of Being also generated much scientific and religious discussion about the relationships between man and apes (the position of Edward Tyson’s “pygmy,” for example, between apes and men; Tyson, 1751), and among men (the position of the races being wrestled with by such scientists as Linnaeus and Blumenbach). The Chain’s steps were fundamentally discrete and linear, making it necessary for scientists working within 22

Up from Africa Figure 1.1 Racialized ladder of progress from Nott and Gliddon (1861). The size and shape of the “Negro” skull are distorted to exaggerate likenesses to the chimpanzee.

the paradigm to resolve the parameters of variation between human races. It was also necessary to resolve issues of monogenism and polygenism and concerns over whether the stages could grade into each other, even evolve into each other, given the right environment and amount of time (Jahoda, 1999, 32). The Great Chain of Being, an ethos as much as a scientific principle, consumed thought on the diversity of the natural world throughout much of the eighteenth century. Bastardized in various creative ways, it had enough power to maintain itself even after the advent of Darwinian evolution, which suggested that species are not static and ranked. The Great Chain of Being could be appropriated in both polygenist and monogenist arguments. For example, monogenists could claim that humans share one origin yet have since differentiated into various steps on the ladder of progress with “Negroes” in distinct phylogenetic proximity to apes. Regardless, scientific ladders of progress validated the inferiority of African people, as in the work of Nott and Gliddon in 1868 which falsely inflated the similarities between blacks and apes (see figure 1.1 and Gould, 1981). These arguments about the natural inferiority of black people became pressing dialogue for scientists and philosophers and particularly in debates between politicians, slaveholders, and abolitionists. 23

Rethinking evolution in the museum The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a critical expanse of time in Western thought, was crucial to the construction of ideas about Africa. It is generally held that during this period, reason replaced the mythologies of the previous era. The transformation from mythology to science was not very neat, however; cultural mythologies, particularly those about the people and places occupying distant lands, continued to inform European science. The eighteenth-century enthusiasm for classification is perhaps best reflected in the work of Carl Linnaeus (1707–78), the father of modern biological taxonomy. 5 Linnaeus’s enthusiasm for classifying the natural world extended to human variants. Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae of 1735 included a chromatic scale of humanity from black to red and yellow to white. The fi nal tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758), in a remarkable mixture of the scientifically sound and the imaginary, recognized two species of Homo: Homo sapiens (the diurnal species) and Homo sylvestris/troglodytes (the hairy, nocturnal, mythical hodge-podge species that included apes, albinos, and mutes). Systema Naturae also recognized six subcategories of Homo sapiens: (1) Americans, (2) Europeans, (3) Asians, (4) Africans, (5) Homo ferus, the “Wild Man,” and (6) Homo monstruosus (giants, dwarfs, eunuchs, etc.) (see Jahoda, 1999, 40, 41). The reverberations of Linnaean taxonomies of race were profound, and were significant precursors of racial taxonomies to come (Moser, 1998, 139). As Europeans began to formally speculate on the nature of reason, humanity, and civilization, they also sought to position themselves on the world map (Brantlinger, 1985; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991). As European self-consciousness and self-exploration heightened, exploration was enlisted to provide grist for the mill – allowing the creation of a color-calibrated yardstick against which Europeans could judge themselves and others. Africa, then, with its new and strange “darkness” – embodied in its animals, jungles, and people – could be set up as the quintessential Other. Blackness was necessary to legitimize and confi rm whiteness, just as evil confi rmed good and savagery confi rmed civilization. The Enlightenment was also significant because it triggered the beginning of earnest scientific attempts to quantify human difference, and in particular the affi nities between Africans and apes (Jahoda, 1999, xvii).6 It is hard to locate exactly when Africans and apes merged symbolically. Some scholars, most notably Winthrop Jordan (1974), have linked the ideological association between Africans and apes to a simultaneous first contact with each. He writes, If Negroes were likened to beasts, there was in Africa a beast which was likened to men. It was a strange and eventually tragic happenstance of nature that Africa was the habitat of the animal which in appearance most resembles man . . . Accordingly, it happened that Englishmen were introduced to the anthropoid apes and Negroes at the same time and in the same place. (Jordan, 1974, 15)

24

Up from Africa While the coexistence of African people and apes must have profoundly influenced the representative union of the two in the European mind, the union would also gain political significance in the eighteenth century due to the African slave trade. Jahoda argues that it was not the simultaneous fi rst contact with apes and African peoples that generated images of ape-like Africans (since he holds that blacks were known to the West some time before apes were), but the impact of particular political movements of the late eighteenth century. Of particular importance, he contends, was Edward Long’s bestializing of Africans in order to defend their enslavement in the late eighteenth century (Jahoda, 1999, 55–7). In this instance, then, political imperatives fueled the racial mythologies that influenced science as it developed during the Enlightenment. While apes and Africans were not necessarily encountered at the same time, travel narratives and folklore quickly spread in the eighteenth century to link Africans to apes, and the most provocative stories were fantastic accounts about the sexual relations and underlying lasciviousnes shared between the two. As a significant precursor to evolutionary ideas, it was commonly held throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth that African women had sexual relations with apes. Consequently, there was much conversation about whether or not apes and Africans could procreate (Jahoda, 1999, 37, 38). Edward Long later speaks to the topic with the comment, “I do not think that an orangoutang husband would be a dishonour to an Hottentot female; for what are the Hottentots? They are . . . a people certainly very stupid, and very brutal. In many respects they are more like beasts than men” (Jahoda, 1999, 57). Thomas Jefferson also subscribed to the notion that sexual relations existed between apes and Africans, believing that males of one species prefer females of the next highest species. He argues that black males prefer white females “as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species” (Jefferson, 1787, 176). Thus early accounts of African apes were inextricably linked to accounts of Africans, and this link resonated with scholarship, politics, and folklore. One major Enlightenment view that had an impact on representations of indigenous peoples was that savagery was a stage in man’s progress toward civilization. The suggestion afforded a rather romantic view of the primitive state, but, interestingly, this romanticization was not one always extended to the dark-skinned people of Africa. African bodies, denied even the dubious nobility allowed other savages in the Enlightenment, were held with unique curiosity and contempt (Jahoda, 1999, 36). As representing the furthest extreme from whiteness, dark-skinned people slipped scientifically and symbolically between humanity and beasts, a position that accommodated pro-slavery rhetoric. The increased exploration of Africa by Europeans generated an expanded, seemingly scientific, database from which to cull impressions of a pre-European identity as well as to collect data for the reconsideration of the humanity of Africans in the context of the transatlantic slave trade (which ended “officially” in 1808).

25

Rethinking evolution in the museum

Darwinism and the nineteenth century It is . . . not the ape that imitates man in Africa, but man who imitates the ape. (A French writer in 1853, after describing physical likenesses between Africans and apes, comments on the degraded humanity of people in Africa; quoted in Jahoda, 1999, 8)

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, blacks had been fi rmly established in an intermediary though shifting position between apes and Europeans. This representation would congeal further in the nineteenth century. The representation of Africans as ape-like was strengthened by Darwinian evolution, but also by the imperatives of colonial expansion. During the nineteenth century, industrialization widened the economic gulf between Europe and Africa and increased colonial and imperial contact with the continent. European political dominance of Africa, as seen in the 1884–5 Berlin Conference and subsequent carving up of Africa, dramatically changed the political hierarchy between Africans and Europeans and thus the political stakes of anti-black representations. The 1859 publication of the Origin of Species stimulated a revolution in both Western science and culture. The mechanism of evolution by natural selection is perhaps the most significant idea to pervade science, and, at best, provides an exquisite explanation of the relationships between organisms in the natural world. From the outset, though, because of its insult to human vanity, its significance as a scientific construct was overshadowed by its implications for culture and humanity. Such preoccupations led most insidiously to British social evolutionism, which holds that social groups adhere to the biological principles of “survival of the fittest.” Darwinian evolution, far from debunking prevalent ideas about race, was used then to lend significant support to them. Where Africans and apes might have once been deemed to just share superficial characteristics (dark skin crudely equated with dark fur), in the language of Darwinism these characters could now share the weight of evolutionary similarity. Darkness could now be invoked as a shared primitive evolutionary trait, to the neglect of countless other characteristics shared between apes, Europeans and the rest of humanity. Paradoxically, evolutionary thought allowed Africans certain biological affi nities with Europeans through shared ancestry while also significantly distancing them by focusing on biological affinities thought to be shared uniquely among Africans and apes. The reach of British social Darwinism was wide. Although it emerged in the late nineteenth century, most prominently in the widely circulated work of E. B. Tylor (1832–1917) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), social evolutionism had theoretical links to the Great Chain of Being and progressivist ideologies dominant in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth. This disparate collection of ideas was synthesized and articulated into a bio-cultural explanation of human races that relied fundamentally on notions of evolutionary progress. Essentially, environmentally determined racial essences were hierarchically ranked from dark savagery through white civility, and races were often seen 26

Up from Africa as entities fi xed in time and space. As a philosophy, social Darwinism could be employed by proponents both of liberalism to suggest the possibility of uplift for the lower races, and of colonialism to suggest that the lower races indeed required control and separation (Bennett, 2004, 27–32, 99–105). Like the religious doctrines before it, Darwinism proved useful in its political malleability. Darwin is often rightly vindicated against the pernicious social Darwinist offshoots of his work, but his writing did contribute in some ways to the political paradigm. When considering the evolution of man, Darwin undoubtedly called upon the then commonly understood hierarchy of human races to fi ll gaps in the fossil record. For example, in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote, “Differences [in intellect] . . . between the highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages, are connected by the finest gradations. Therefore it is possible that they might pass and be developed into each other” (Darwin, 1871, 35). While clearly calling upon a ladder of progress, Darwin does significantly believe that races are fluid and not fi xed or discrete. Without a doubt, social Darwinism is fundamentally a perversion of the principal tenets of natural selection. Despite the ideological revolutions stimulated by Darwin, it is important to see the continued influence of racial folklore on evolutionary science. In the nineteenth century, fantastic explorers’ tales maintained their grip on both the popular and scientific imagination, such as rumors circulating of an African tribe with tails (Jahoda, 1999, 86). Though slavery in the British empire was abolished in 1833, the explorers and missionaries traveling through Africa continued to provide the raw material for social Darwinism. British missionaries, under humanistic pretenses, did not just aim to protect African people from the savagery of their indigenous religions but also from the savagery inherent to their biology. Increasingly, explorers’ tales of cannibalism and witchcraft, of violent, unintelligent, or over-sexed savages, were disseminated in cartoons, books, music, advertisements, and museums throughout Victorian England. Many Europeans also would have become familiar with the African tales of mid-nineteenth-century explorers such as Livingstone and Stanley, popularized through a series of best-selling books and the legendary 1890 Stanley and African Exhibition in England (Coombes, 1994, 63–108). A growing British middle class, reading the books and touring the museums, indulged the dark fascination with Africa and the regimes of evolutionary order through which the continent and its people were introduced (see Coombes, 1994; see also Brantlinger, 1985; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991).

Exhibiting progress It is important to appreciate social Darwinism as the sociopolitical milieu in which the public was fi rst exposed to the science of race in museums and world’s fairs. The tales of African exploration circulating in nineteenth-century England were compounded by living displays of Africans themselves, as in the Stanley and African Exhibition, which incorporated two “real” African boys 27

Rethinking evolution in the museum from Swaziland. Progress was often the key organizing principle behind world’s fairs, and they frequently introduced the public to symbols of man’s technological development in stages from black to brown to white. For example, London’s 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition served largely as the culmination of a long history of ideas about human civilization and savagery (see Rydell, 1984; Rydell, 1999, 135–55; Stocking, 1987). It allowed people to experience newly discovered savages as newly discovered fossils. American world’s fairs follow largely in the same tradition as British displays of Africa, and attest to the wide circulation of such images. Robert Rydell’s study of world’s fairs in America speaks to the significant relationship between living displays of Africans and government policy toward blacks in the nineteenth century (Rydell, 1984). American world’s fairs from 1893 were important rhetoric for American racial segregation. Such displays were thought to demonstrate what were believed to be the origins, futures, and ultimate best interests of American blacks (see also Africans on Stage by Lindfors, 1999). In the 1890s there was fervent conversation in the United States, both political and scientific in nature, about whether blacks could be biologically uplifted or whether they would ultimately degenerate back into savagery if isolated from whites (see Baker, 1998, 14, 17, 26). (Many figures contributed to the cottage industry of theorizing racial origins, including American figures such as Teddy Roosevelt and W. E. B. Du Bois, in magazines and monthlies [Baker, 1998, 99–126].) Living exhibitions, such as the Dahomey Village at the 1893 Columbian Exposition provided visual testimonies to the black evolutionary possibilities. As a souvenir book said, Perhaps one of the most striking lessons which the Columbian Exposition taught was the fact that African slavery in America had not, after all, been an unmixed evil, for of a truth, the advanced social conditions of American Africans over that of their barbarous countrymen is most encouraging and wonderful. (Rydell, 1984, 53)

Some black Americans concurred that their trajectory out of Africa, as witnessed in the Dahomey Village, had been uplifting. Frederick Douglass writes about the fair, “There is no Negro Problem . . . We have come out of Dahomey into this . . . Measure the Negro . . . not by the standard of the splendid civilization of the Caucasian. Bend down and measure him – from the depths out of which he has risen” (Rydell, 1984, 53). Through world’s fairs and museum exhibitions, Africans were often incorporated as the functional equivalents or living embodiments of the European past. It was here that blackness was popularly established as one of the most significant signifiers of the past. As Moser writes, The recognition of the prehistoric past was taking place at a time when ethnographic peoples were attracting academic interest. The displays of 28

Up from Africa indigenous peoples at world fairs and in exhibitions provided an immediate context for making sense of the past . . . Artists used pictorial conventions to convey physical distance and also to imply historical separation. Thus, the imagery reinforced the belief that white European culture was superior and that people with darker skin were not only less civilized but that they represented an earlier stage of existence. (Moser, 1998, 144–5)

The late nineteenth century is significant because ideas about the inferiority of Africans were not only circulating popularly, but they were authorized by the anthropology taking shape in museums. Significantly, the great natural history museums of both England and the United States were founded at the same time that the ethos of scientific racism was taking shape – for example, the Smithsonian (1846), the American Museum of Natural History (1874), the Field Museum (1893), the Pitt Rivers Museum (1884), and the Horniman Museum (1901) (see Ruffi ns, 1992; Bennett, 2004). The transition to a public museum culture in both British and American museums was directed much by the new discipline of anthropology, and by Darwinian anthropology in particular (the Natural History Museum is an exception because it left cultural objects in the domain of the British Museum from which it separated).7 The emergent anthropological ethos governed natural history museum exhibitions largely through the lens of a teleological evolutionary hierarchy. As an organizing principle, it was quick to overwhelm the majority of museum objects (anthropological artifacts) as well as museum subjects (ethnographic subjects and museum visitors).8 As Bennett points out, evolution museums rearticulated their collections to tell stories of progress. Characterized by the typological method developed at the Pitt Rivers Museum, the methodology made it theoretically possible for all museum collections to be reassembled in accordance with the same principles through the operation of a common grammar across all museums. The combination of lithological, stratigraphical and topographical characteristics found in geological collections; the linear sequencing of developmental stages within and between species; the ordering of human types into evolutionary sequences; the arrangement of tools, weapons and pottery into sequences; the whole of the material world could be lined up and placed before the eyes in a manner which allowed each display to tell its own story seemingly without the need for textual mediation. (Bennett, 2004, 65)

As Bennett (2004) argues, the evolution museum directed, as well as reinforced, prevailing ideologies of progress. At the turn of the century, the natural history museum emerged as an important vehicle for anthropological education, and simultaneously as a vehicle for the codification of racist dogma. In natural history museums the notion of Africa as evolutionary relic was produced, authorized, and reinforced. Through the visual rhetoric of living natives, natural history 29

Rethinking evolution in the museum museums and world’s fairs were pivotal, even necessary, to this public indoctrination of evolutionary ideas. Because one brief period of time, during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, witnessed both the burgeoning display of indigenous people and the display of evolutionary science, the two would be inextricably linked.

The visual rhetoric of Darwinism While not often described explicitly as ape-men in the nineteenth century, African bodies did become visually representative of something biologically and culturally inferior to Europeans and – perhaps more importantly – something vaguely under-developed and intermediary. Africa’s perceived inferiority to Europe was made manifest in a variety of representational media. As previously mentioned, one book that helped catalyze this transformation in representations was Edward Long’s 1774 History of Jamaica, an exhaustive treatise that sought to ground itself in a scientific argument (à la the Great Chain of Being) on the apishness of blacks. This treatise significantly concretized the idea of African bestiality for those taking both a recreational and a professional interest, as slaveholders, in the natural condition of blacks (Jahoda, 1999, 55). By the beginning of the nineteenth century the complex of imagery on savages was well established through many cumulative contributions (such as the images that had circulated of the monstrous races, the fallen biblical Adam, the “ancient warrior,” as well as images circulating of African exploration and apes; see Moser, 1998). These images could easily transmogrify into the savage, violent, dark-skinned, club-wielding, ethnically adorned, cave- and forest-dwelling hairy man that was both distant neighbor and evolutionary ancestor. In effect, there was a whole costume shop of images ready for adoption by Darwinism. Once Darwin argued for a descent from apes, and posited a likely descent from African apes in the 1859 Origin of Species, the visualization of origins required a transformation.9 While images of human origins and ancestors had thousands of years to develop prior to Darwin, there were only a handful of years after Darwinism to conjure up images of an ape-like prehistory. As Stocking (1987) contends, blackness was critical to this evolutionary analogy. As Moser further observes, “The major new visual elements that were appropriated for prehistoric iconography were anatomical features such as semi-erect posture, large lips, sloping forehead and hairiness” (Moser, 1998, 135). Images representing African origins began to emphasize more than black skin color, but dark skin was one of the most significant pictorial symbols linking Africans to ape-men and thus to evolutionary inferiority, and it continues to be today. As Stocking writes, if Caucasian was synonymous with “civilized,” then by extension, “savage” and “barbarian,” implied dark-skinned. Thus J. M. Cattell argued in 1903 that “a savage brought up in a cultivated society will not only retain his dark skin, but is likely also to have the incoherent mind of his race.” 30

Up from Africa In turn-of-the-century evolutionary thinking, savagery, dark skin, and a small brain and incoherent mind were, for many, all part of the single evolutionary picture of “primitive” man, who even yet walked the earth. (Stocking, 1968, 130–1)

It is important to note here that if scientific evidence suggests Africa is the birthplace of human evolution, then the link between dark skin and human ancestors is adequate. The misconception of African inferiority only persists when the image of dark-skinned African ancestors is not balanced with imagery of darkskinned modern humans. This up-from-darkness metaphorical fallacy, however, has circulated as common sense for centuries, irrespective of scientific findings. Besides their emphasis on dark skin, early evolutionary images also grossly exaggerated anatomical and facial features deemed black – protruding lips, prognathism and wooly hair – and ancestors were often portrayed as strong hunters, a pervasive ethnographic and popular stereotype of Africans. Interestingly, such early images of grotesque human evolutionary ancestors were often used not in support but in refutation of human evolution. Their depiction of dark savages and bizarre apes was quite convincing anti-evolution propaganda (Moser, 1998, 135). For this reason, African ape-man imagery became commonplace long before widespread acceptance of African origins. The images changed little, however, once the idea of evolution out of Africa was commonplace. (It is important to bear in mind that African iconography linking Africans and apemen was accompanied by a hodge-podge of other recycled and often conflicting historical metaphors, such as characteristics borrowed from images depicting the Irish; see Curtis, 1997.) An illustration by science writer Pierre Boitard in 1861 was the fi rst evolutionary image to impact the public, and it incorporated elements of what was deemed both African and ape-like. In Antediluvian Studies, Paris before Men, Boitard imagined an ancestor drastically different from ones that had come before. As Moser describes the image, He is black, has ape-like feet and large protruding lips . . . age-old imagery with the European being replaced by the African. Furthermore, the setting and the structure look like ethnographic pictures of Africans or Australian Aboriginal people standing by their makeshift homes . . . The impact of the picture clearly lay in its shock value. (Moser, 1998, 135–6)

Another important early image of evolutionary ancestors came from Henri du Cleuziou’s The Creation of Man and the First Ages of Humanity in 1887, after the “missing link” was purportedly found in Java (see figure 1.2). According to Moser: While he has a modern physical anatomy, this ancestor is characterized by ape-like features, such as the hairiness, ape-like feet and a woolly coat. 31

Rethinking evolution in the museum Figure 1.2 An 1887 illustration for Henri du Cleuziou’s book The Creation of Man and the First Ages of Humanity.

These were primarily inspired by ape iconography, but the figure was also modelled on images of Africans, which accounts for the Black skin colour and thick lips. This marks a significant departure from Figuer’s white European ancestors, reflecting the extent to which ethnographic peoples came to be regarded as fossil representatives of the past. (Moser, 1998, 138–9)

Between Boas and the bell curve: anthropology in the twentieth century While race was the central focus of nineteenth-century anthropology, the discipline significantly began to dismantle the construct in the twentieth century. This was largely due to the growth of cultural anthropology and formal ethnography influenced by prominent figures such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead. With this new cultural anthropology, the focus shifted toward a search for primitive ideals, which for Africa meant a return to somewhat pre-Darwinian images of African savagery (rather than bestiality). The new cultural anthropology emphasized a common sense of humanity, and fieldwork encouraged a new cultural empathy, not unlike that for the ancient noble 32

Up from Africa savage that characterized the Enlightenment. As many historians of evolutionary anthropology have observed, it was Franz Boas’s work that stimulated the most important shift in twentieth-century anthropology. His research redefi ned racial difference as a purely cultural phenomenon devoid of biological significance. Boas urged cultural explanations of race rather than evolutionary ones, and his notion of cultural relativism, the idea that cultural norms vary from one social context to another, was also of great significance to cultural thinking. Boasian anthropology held great sway, extending beyond Boas’s own work at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History to saturate the development of professional anthropology in museums and universities worldwide. The divorce of physical and cultural anthropology was also encouraged by developments in the sciences. Genetic researchers such as Sherwood Washburn spawned a new generation of physical anthropology, emphasizing population-level differences within species and localized adaptations. The ascent of evolutionary and population genetics also led to the dramatic reassessment of human biological diversity as a mere assortment of fluctuating genetic alleles. Furthermore, evidence has steadily accumulated throughout the twentieth century that more physical variation exists within races (94 percent) than between them (6 percent). (See the seminal study by Lewontin [1972], “The apportionment of human diversity.”) Human variation became increasingly recognized as superficial, overlapping, and fluid at both the phenotypic and genotypic levels. Aided by the post-World War II humanism of Ashley Montagu, the man behind the 1964 UNESCO statement on race, the official anthropological line on race at the end of the twentieth century was that it did not exist as a meaningful biological category.10 However, despite the Boasian shift in professional anthropological thought, scientific racism still persisted. Early twentieth-century America, for example, witnessed some of the most grotesque African ape-man imagery, aligned with the anti-black politics still in place in the country (Jahoda, 1999, 91).11 Scientific racism dominated the politics of science in Washington, DC and New York through such powerful social Darwinist proponents as Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935) at the American Museum of Natural History and Aleš Hrdlička (1869–1943) at the Smithsonian (Hrdlička also founded the American Journal of Physical Anthropology). Eugenic philosophies also resonated in the late twentieth-century book The Bell Curve (1994). In this book, social scientists Herrnstein and Murray attributed American achievement gaps to racial differences in intelligence, with black Americans at the low-achieving end of the IQ ladder. This political treatise disguised as science was an international bestseller. Well over a century after Sir Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin) articulated eugenics in 1865, there seems to be a lingering thirst in popular culture and politics for scientifically authorized racial hierarchies.12 Furthermore, despite the wider anthropological discipline officially denouncing race, there are ways in which evolutionary science still worked, as Jahoda attests, to affi rm the idea of black people as apish, childlike and savage. For 33

Rethinking evolution in the museum example, the image of Africans as “ancestor child” (as one and the same) was legitimated through evolutionary theories such as “arrested development,” “biogenetic law,” and “neoteny.” These widely used evolutionary theories were appropriated by twentieth-century race scientists to explain the evolutionary inferiority of Africans, and the proximity of the black race to animals (Jahoda, 1999, 152–3). The seeming failure of Africans to reach the evolutionary heights of Europeans was validated through such evolutionary theories, whether the height is biological progress beyond the original state (as in arrested development and biogenetic law), or the retention of more childlike traits beyond the original state (as in neoteny). Representations of the African state as “childlike” is also found widely outside of science – from fi lms like The Gods Must be Crazy to children’s books like Curious George. Religion, mythology, explorers’ tales, philosophy, science, and popular culture all contribute to widely held assumptions that sub-Saharan African peoples are fundamentally bestial and under developed (Jahoda, 1999, 133).13 Evolutionary anthropology also continues to use native peoples as analogies of distant African evolutionary ancestors, something Wiber sees as one of the widest misapplications of evolutionary theory (Wiber, 1997, 120–52). Following the logic of uniformitarianism, some theorists reason that like conditions (such as hot, dark Africa) irrespective of time beget like organisms (ape-men and Africans). Increasingly, this logic has been called into question because of its inability to recognize the vast complexity of human diversity, human history, and human cultural dynamism, but it continues to maintain itself in popular and scholarly representations. This functionalist and adaptationist reasoning is rooted in nineteenth-century social evolutionism and the British school of cultural anthropology spearheaded largely by E. B. Tylor. African peoples today are still often envisioned as embodiments or analogues of African ancestors. They are still needed, as Wilmsen has asserted, to satisfy a Euroamerican ontological quest (1989, 4). Wiber has dedicated expansive attention to the flaws in evolutionary logic inherent in the use of indigenous others as evolutionary analogies: These arguments over scientific validity [concerning the use of living human groups as evolutionary analogy] have in turn corresponded in complex ways to the changing Euro-american relationships with the so-called Third World. The use of foraging populations and non-human primates as modern-day windows onto our evolutionary past has excited associations of neocolonial exploitation. Deconstructing human evolution imagery requires a better understanding of these several contested analogies, especially with regard to the diachronic picture of the visual representation of human evolution. (Wiber, 1997, 13)

As Gamble writes, the West conceives of the indigenous “Other as a place in time as well as space” (Moser, 1998, x). Africa has long been conceived as a world 34

Up from Africa that is distant in both time and space – where seemingly unreal animals mingle timelessly in jungles with ape-men and African people. Such an Africa is really, then, a fictitious place (which is why, for example, the Horniman Museum’s “African Worlds” exhibition opens with the challenging sentiment “You are not a country, Africa. You are a concept . . .”). This image of wild Africa is unshakable. It can even become realized, for the Westerner, upon traveling to the continent. For example, anthropologists Bruner and Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (1994) found that one of four nature themes motivating tourism in East Africa is the idea that Africa is the “Garden of Eden.” Here, Western tourists today are drawn to Africa as a way of reconnecting with their African evolutionary roots, a reconnection with simultaneously the most primal (apes) and most primitive (Africans). In their words, “The Garden of Eden is the destination of a voyage to the dawn of creation itself, where ‘our primitive ancestors,’ who have not yet eaten of the tree of knowledge that is ‘modern civilization,’ can be found” (Bruner and Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, 1994, 438). It is clear that presentday African people in the flesh can still embody prehistoric Africa to many people. Africa then becomes a self-fulfilling Western prophecy.

Evolution and twentieth-century pop culture The two- and three-dimensional images in the natural history museum operate within the greater matrix of cultural production that has circulated and continues to circulate value-laden images of Africa.14 Natural history museums constitute a significant forum for image and ideological exchange, both challenging and reinforcing the sedimented imagery museum visitors bring with them to exhibitions. In July of 1999, the summer before I conducted much of my visitor research at the British museums, a Condé Nast Traveler article featuring the indigenous South African Kung San began As a species, we grew up and moved on, and if your particular adaptation is to be able to plan the future and remember the past, then getting out of the Kalahari will be something of a priority. Run, don’t walk. In a blink of 10,000 years, you can be in downtown Manhattan with air conditioning and Internet pizza delivery . . . But some people stayed behind. (Gill, 1999)

The essay is accompanied by a full-page photograph of one such man “left behind,” who points a bow and arrow through a forest landscape at the cameraman, a scene no doubt staged. Images such as the Condé Nast Traveler “Bushmen” circulate widely in popular culture, resonating with other images such as those that appear on the glossy pages of coffee-table books such as the popular scientific book Dawn of Man: The Story of Human Evolution (the accompaniment to the BBC television series Ape-Man). In the book, the scientific writer Robin McKee reveals his own racism when describing his ancestors’ impulse to 35

Rethinking evolution in the museum get out of Africa and the inherent childhood of the African continent. At a map of Homo erectus migrating out of Africa, and titled “Childhood’s end,” McKee writes, “Africa provided the fertile ground for the genesis of humanity – although our ancestors were not tardy about their birthright. As soon as they reached their evolutionary adolescence, groups of our ancestors quit the continent and headed to new lands with almost indecent haste” (McKie, 2000, 106–7). (The same book also features a picture of modern-day African actors using tools as Homo erectus opposite a picture of chimps using tools, a surprisingly common association in pop culture.) It is readily apparent that popular media have not altogether abandoned the century-old representation of aboriginal Africans as an evolutionarily unique and inferior species. African peoples and a much mythologized African “apeman” are intimately bound to each other by a common continental “belonging,” an enduring association that has long colored images of our earliest human ancestors as well as the continent that cradled them. Visual images (such as photographs and illustrations) and discursive representations (such as travel narratives and ethnographies) of Africans worked historically to substantiate their nature as subhuman, bestial, and “dark,” both biologically and culturally (Brantlinger, 1985; Edwards, 1992; Pieterse, 1992; Coombes, 1994; Baker, 1998; Jahoda, 1999; Lindfors, 1999). Residues of such imagery are found throughout popular culture today (Pieterse, 1992; Lutz and Collins, 1993; Adams and McShane, 1996). This science fiction enters the vernacular in myriad ways, both blatant and subtle – from racial slurs that liken black people to primates (for example, as apes, baboons, “porch monkeys,” “jungle bunnies,” “tree-swingers” or “spearchuckers”) to those folk explanations of black features linking black people uniquely to their animal roots (for example, in hair texture, skin color, or nose shape). In addition to books and magazines, there are also the many cultural allusions in music, art, advertising, and cinema (for instance, the racialized paranoia of the 1970s fi lm franchise Planet of the Apes, along with its recent revival). The list goes on and on.15 As an image, the bestial African is stubbornly entrenched in the collective imagination, perpetuating an unyielding legacy. Finally, it is critical to recognize the African-as-ape-man metaphor as much more than something playful or benign. Throughout a long history of Hottentot Venuses and Ota Bengas (the “Pygmy” exhibited a century ago at the Bronx Zoo), African peoples have been used to perform race according to the whims of this Western ontological quest. The stigmatization of African peoples as bestial and ape-like has left pervasive political and psychological residues throughout much of the world, including Africa itself. A legacy of colonial thinking, “black” often even comes to signify the lowest order within non-white and non-Western cultures. As Jahoda’s historical analysis suggests, “the terms ‘ape’ or ‘monkey’ were applied almost exclusively to darkly pigmented savages from distant parts” (Jahoda, 1999, 215).16 Demarcating the darkest beginning of the colorcoded yardstick of progress, the African is the most dehumanized Other.

36

2 Evolving into the familiar

“All these images are like movies, I’m thinking 1 Million Years BC and CaveMan . . . It just looks to me like I’ve seen these before even though I’ve never been here before.” (American Museum of Natural History visitor)

A canon of evolutionary images has already been inscribed in our imaginations. We carry them around with us, and sometimes bring them with us to the museum. How did certain images become so ubiquitous and entrenched? To understand this, we have to understand how evolutionary images are constructed and circulated as commonsense or consensus narratives. Ultimately, as we have seen with images of Africa, the visual image of human evolution becomes more than just an image; it becomes a dense package of ideas about what it means to be human.

The images that have come before us For the museum visitors considered here, the power of the preconceived evolutionary image is immense. The evolutionary images circulating throughout popular culture – the leopard-draped Flintstone, the hunched Neanderthal (as in this classic image, figure 2.1, by Zdenek Burian) – persist in our minds as the iconographic vocabulary we use to access the past. Functioning almost as scientific documents, they ultimately limit what we see and what we believe, although they often represent very old and outdated ideas. As Stephanie Moser has commented, “our sense of deep time is inherently a visual one,” so visual renderings of human prehistory are ultimately the most satisfying (Moser, 1998, 2, 173). Human origins imagery collapses millions of years into an isolated frame of reference. In doing so, origins imagery not only seduces visitors, but relieves them of the tedium of esoteric evolutionary jargon. Diane GiffordGonzalez has pointed out that “human origins” depictions construct parallel, visually based narratives of the human past that must, because of their pervasiveness and communicative potency, be taken seriously. Through their wide use in museums and popular literature, they literally construct much of the knowledge that laypersons have of the prehistoric past” (Gifford-Gonzalez, 37

Rethinking evolution in the museum

Figure 2.1 A classic representation of a “Neanderthal encampment” by Zdenek Burian for Augusta and Burian’s 1960 Prehistoric Man.

1993, 24). In the museum, visitors again and again privilege the visual over the textual, thereby allowing the images in exhibitions to converge with images they bring with them to the museum. A primary function of origins images, such as the ones incorporated into human evolution exhibitions, is to construct “narratives of human evolution.” This turn of phrase has become a meaningful expression in evolution and cultural studies and refers to the influential text by Misia Landau (Landau, 1991). Landau critiques evolutionary storytelling, the ways textual evolutionary narratives contain distinct patterns or molds that resemble classic fairy tales. Throughout many texts, there is a weak hero who gains some strength, confronts some challenge and triumphs in the end, a structure that makes human origins conceptually and morally satisfying. Specifically, the human evolution narrative reads something like this: Once upon a time a nice but dim-witted and bipedally challenged monkey, the hero, is forced out of his dwindling forest to confront the savanna, and there gains bipedality, a big brain, profound vision, and god-like sensibilities.1 This structure reappears consistently in such writers as Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and Sir Edward Keith, and it reinforces, through such repetition, certain seductive Victorian images of our past. Whether textual or visual, origins narratives often fit set models that both writers and readers find satisfying. 38

Evolving into the familiar Other research has shown how scientific illustrations often fit or harmonize new scientific information into pre-existing images or traditions of representation. This is the premise on which many studies have been built, such as Moser’s Ancestral Images (1998) or Rudwick’s Scenes from Deep Time (1992). In Ancestral Images, a seminal critique of human origins imagery, Moser calls attention to the ways human origins imagery recycles a limited number of certain elemental motifs. According to Moser, eight key stages reappear as themes in origins imagery, and these punctuate human evolution with decided moments of behavioral accomplishment: the “discovery of fi re, combat with wild beasts, hunting, making stone tools, communal feasting, erecting shelter, burying the dead and creating art” (Moser, 1998, 171). Moser also illustrates the many historical antecedents of origins imagery, traditions of representation borrowed from a succession of classical, biblical, medieval, and subsequent artistic genres. This integration of new imagery into the pre-existing often happened as scientists sought to integrate new and uncertain scientific ideas into pre-existing systems of thought (Moser, 1998, 17). The lack of new, alternative visions of human evolution has a self-perpetuating effect, where artistic tradition stifles science, which in turn stifles artistic image, ad infi nitum. This cycle is reproduced among image producers and audiences. As Stoczkowski observes, “The role of conditioned imagination in this process is thus inescapable, for artists draw on the wealth of conventional imagery, whilst the viewer uses it to judge the product’s believability” (Stoczkowski, 1997, 261). Historical momentum is also significant to the process. Certain artistic traditions (such as conventions in landscape painting) or political conditions (such as those in Victorian England) indelibly inscribe origins imagery. An image born in one moment continues to reproduce endlessly that specific moment, extending it generations beyond its lifetime as a viable scientific idea. But as Stoczkowski (1997) points out, the problem with this progression is that, historically, scientific images relied very little on science, or were distinctly unscientific. What is being perpetuated, then, is not only outdated science but outdated mythology. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a recognizable genre of human evolution artwork emerged and with it certain recognizable artists and institutions. The industry of evolutionary artwork underscores how a small and interconnected group of news media, museums, scientists, and artists were responsible for disseminating the wealth of evolutionary images we see today. Significant examples are artist Amadee Forestier working through the Illustrated London News, artist Maurice Wilson working with the British Natural History Museum, and artist Charles Knight working alongside Henry Fairfield Osborn at the American Museum of Natural History (see Moser, 1998, 146–67 and Taylor, 1989). In fact, the images of Charles Knight and Zdenek Burian have circulated so widely that they have become canonical, a reference point for all subsequent images. Ultimately, when museum visitors bring preconceived images to the museum, these are images generated historically within and outside of museums. 2 39

Rethinking evolution in the museum

Bringing evolution to the museum As we know, museum audiences are more than just audiences of museums. These visitors participate in wider cultures, institutions, and practices. The readings they produce are always “intertextual” and “interdiscursive” – that is, symbolic dialogues between the museum visitor, the museum exhibit, and other images individuals bring with them to the museum. I found that museum visitors envision their evolutionary origins and evolutionary ancestors in a myriad of ways, many of which have been ingrained prior to the museum visit. At all four museums – the Natural History Museum, the Horniman Museum, the National Museums of Kenya and the American Museum of Natural History – I used questionnaires to ask visitors about their previous exposure to human evolution information. This helped me to gauge the degree of wider cultural influences acting on visitors as they experience museums. At all of the museums, at least 90 percent of respondents stated that they had had previous exposure to human evolution, either through formal education or, more importantly, through such popular media as fi lms, television, the Internet and newspapers (see the chart of visitors’ responses in table 2.1; note that “museums” was not added as a category on the questionnaire at the two British museums). After formal evolutionary education in schools, visitors cited television and books as the most common educational media. A large number of British visitors, for example, cited the BBC’s 2000 Ape-Man television series, a program to which Natural History Museum curator Chris Stringer contributed. Overwhelmingly, I found that visitors to these large cosmopolitan museums often shared common cultural interests and exposure to a similar range of cultural influences (from actual experiences to virtual ones). They participated in a new global transnational culture (see Muller, 2003). Furthermore, I found that a handful of media, in particular, dramatically impact the ways a large number of people cross-culturally and internationally understand human evolution and Africa. Visitors share common cultural referents, use similar language when discussing their origins, and express familiarity with similar icons: Planet of the Apes fi lms, National Geographic programming, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould books. Again and again, visitors pointed to something learned outside the museum, particularly from television or other visual media, when responding to questions. For example, one visitor revealed some of his own preconceived assumptions when answering the question, “Do you think of African ape-men as ‘ancestors’?” He responded, You know, one of these programs that I was watching said that there was a tribe in Africa that still lives, how we would call, primitively. They reckon that more or less every single human in this world is related to this tribe. They’re saying that Europeans and everyone, there is a common link with this tribe of people who have, you know, obviously not really gone anywhere.

40

Evolving into the familiar Table 2.1 Source of visitors’ previous exposure to human evolution information average

AMNH

NMK

NHM

HM

School

22.19

21.47

21.4

24.18

21.72

Television

16.36

14.31

10.89

20.65

19.57

Magazines

11.44

12.13

10.12

12.77

10.72

News

7.64

5.96

8.95

7.34

8.31

Films

9.17

9.74

7.78

8.15

10.99

Friends

6.53

7.16

5.45

6.52

6.97

Books

15.74

13.12

15.56

17.12

17.16

Museums

16.42

16.1

16.73

Like this man, many visitors invoke television, rather than the museum exhibit they have just experienced, to support their responses. Thus few exhibitions stand alone, and the images my interviewees received in one museum experience stood consciously and subconsciously beside other images they have received throughout time and across space. Books still significantly complement the evolutionary education visitors receive in schools and museums, and over the course of my research I was regaled with an array of titles, particularly Dawkins’s popular Selfi sh Gene (1989) and Blind Watchmaker (1986), Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear (1980), and anything by Stephen Jay Gould. 3 Many visitors also mentioned that their current book of choice was related to or had even motivated their museum trip, such as those reading Darwin for the fi rst time or Richard Leakey: “I was in the middle of the Origin of Species when I went to the NHM . . . That was one of the reasons I wanted to do this, this is where my mind is right now” (B9; see Appendix 1 for an explanation of the coding system). “I brought a little book with me actually [Richard Leakey’s Origins]. These are very nice little books, only 60p . . . They’re very handy little books. There’s quite a lot, a Richard Dawkins one as well, there’s a Charles Darwin one, just an extract from Origin of Species” (B10). Despite the enduring significance of books, I found that the medium was increasingly threatened by the onslaught of more fantastic programming. Television programs such as those provided by Discovery have taken the scientific education arena by storm, managing to occupy a niche that is deemed both scientifically sound and fantastically inspiring by audiences, as indicated by the museum visitor who was struck by the television program suggesting humanity’s link to a “tribe in Africa.” I also often asked visitors to recollect their fi rst exposure to human evolution. Reponses ranged from recollections of museums to early family discussions to

41

Rethinking evolution in the museum the formal classroom, all which shape the lens through which visitors understand human evolution in the museum today: I think I am surprised that [what is presented] is so similar to what I remember from school, like from school history. I guess I thought that with all the archaeological work that it would have changed – I guess a slight finessing in terms of structure. As a little boy of 6, my father had big old natural history books of dinosaurs. I probably had evolution in school, but can’t remember per se. I read books and watch TV. Ape-Man series was good, bit repetitive, but I like that. (H1) Respondents often unexpectedly cited family members as sources of evolutionary information, thus suggesting the importance of social reproduction to the perpetuation of origins knowledge. Childhood recollections were also quite specific as in one notable instance where a respondent recalls learning human evolution in the context of racial diversity from his schooling: When I was like in the 6th grade, there was this thing called “MACOS” where we studied I guess different types of human evolution but we didn’t even go that far back it seems like . . . it wasn’t even that diverse. I remember we studied Eskimos and that’s all I really remember. Generally, visitors were quite familiar with the greater universe of anthropological information. For example: The Cro-Magnon just seems to be fully modern humans out in the wilderness, defi nitely the old Man-the-Hunter thing. It’s alluding to the old classicly strict division of labor thing. And women doing the housekeeping. (B3) What I’ve seen recently on TV documentaries is that Neanderthals weren’t that different. . . . It depends if you want to be separate from animal life. (B9) There’s stuff [in the exhibit] that I would have found very striking if I hadn’t seen it before. I’m reasonably familiar from having read books and seen things on telly. (H2) For citizens of the modern world of media, the evolution theory exhibited in the museum only complements the fanciful television and fi lm images that continually impact us. The museum, then, is less about inspiring wonder than about providing validation. For the children I spoke with, education also often came from their family members and, more often, television. Confronting evolution fi rst through fantastic hi-tech creatures is bound to be penetrating and sometimes haunting. When I asked some children from the Horniman if they had seen the recent Discovery channel Ape-Man program (group referred to as 42

Evolving into the familiar H9), one responded by admitting, “Yes. Interesting. But it was hard to find we come from apes.” Another child of 14 years explained his schoolmate’s comment, unintentionally revealing his own fears: “For little kids, I think it’s quite a bit scary to find out that monkeys are related [to us].” Another member of the same Horniman Museum group also recalled television programs: There was this program I watched about this little monkey, I can’t remember what it’s called. [I ask if he is referring to “Lucy”] . . . Yes, that’s it, that we come from that one. The Neanderthals were often a touchstone for interviewees. Some of the AMNH teenagers I interviewed recalled Neanderthals from school, from cartoons, and because it is “what people call a hairy man” (A15). It was apparent that Neanderthals are widely known to my interviewees from their innumerable cameos in popular culture. One British visitor recalled a commercial depicting a “man getting out of bed, unshaven, hair all over the place looking like a Neanderthal and eventually has his Wheatie bits and looks like modern man” (B7). Since the late nineteenth century, Neanderthals have circulated in popular press as iconic, representing – sometimes comically and sometimes threateningly – human prehistory. Despite being exposed to a wide range of popular evolutionary information, or perhaps because of it, museum visitors possess a number of uncertainties about evolutionary anthropology. For example, visitors were often uncertain about what exactly qualifies as anthropology, and what falls within the domains of such interrelated disciplines as paleontology, archaeology, and ethnography. In other instances, terms such as “apes” and “monkeys” were used interchangeably in evolutionary conversations, and certain primates such as gorillas were sometimes called upon as representatives of the entire order. Despite their confidence in the wealth of evolutionary programming they received both within and outside the museum, visitors still have gaps in their understanding of the discipline. Unquestionably, the most common misunderstandings to pervade visitor discussions concerned the scale of evolutionary time and its relation to the process of evolutionary change. This is probably a symptom of mixed messages in the popular press, with every new fossil species advertised as the “missing link” or oldest ancestor. Often laypersons had only a vague sense of prehistoric climate, geography, and environment, and extrapolated prehistoric conditions from contemporary ones. Visitors frequently voiced, for example, confusion over Pangea and the shifting of the continents. One visitor, resisting the notion of biological evolution, stated, “That’s the thing about all these continents. They weren’t like that in the beginning. I don’t think there was a Cradle of Mankind” (B12). Misconceptions of time and space were also revealed in misunderstandings over the implications of “survival of the fittest” and evolutionary progress. To be sure, misunderstanding of the scale of evolutionary history is the biggest problem to plague the public’s knowledge of human evolution and its racial and cultural implications. 43

Rethinking evolution in the museum The larger matrix of anthropological images is particularly important in the modern age of information, or as Kvale (1996) describes it, the “hyperreality of signs referring to other signs”. From the variety of visitor responses, it appears as though museums exist within an increasingly wide range of cultural forums that impact the public’s understanding of human evolution. The multitude of popular forums for human evolutionary education, despite the benefits of increased educational outreach, increases the potential for sensationalized information, given the many fanciful, flawed, and contradictory images pervading magazines, the Internet, television, and fi lms. This is illustrated by one outstanding case where a questionnaire respondent at the Horniman Museum cited Jurassic Park as a source of human evolutionary education. The wealth of popular information circulating outside the museum continually proves itself a double-edged sword. Seeing Planet of the Apes Perceptions of evolution come not only from popular science but also from popular science fictions, such as the 1967 cult classic film Planet of the Apes. When actor Charlton Heston uttered with disgust, “Get your hands off me, you damn dirty ape!” in the fi lm, much of what he summoned was humanity’s visceral discomfort with their evolutionary proximity to apes, as well as centuries of Western disdain toward Others. The film speaks to the general stigma and vilification of undesirables, and it also reveals the pervasiveness of the Negro–ape metaphor in popular culture even today. The racial implications of the original Planet of the Apes are fairly transparent. Much more could be said about the 2001 remake, which exaggerated the original’s inversion of the social/evolutionary hierarchy (dark, intelligent apes versus white, dim-witted humans) while maintaining color hierarchies within the dominant group (darker apes as an aggressive and athletic police force and lighter apes as the sophisticated, articulate, and educated masterminds). The remake called upon a range of modern-day racial stereotypes. Ape children bounce basketballs and blast boom boxes, for example, thus evoking popular stereotypes of African-Americans. It is uncertain why the production was so seductive to a twenty-fi rst-century audience, but the film was seen by vast numbers of people globally. The film also allowed for a resurgence of racially charged evolution discussions, and vice versa. The following exchange between myself and one interviewee, a fi lm student at NYU, is an excellent example of the advantages of qualitative interview methods in sensitive interview discussions, which, in this case, revealed the extent to which popular culture perpetuates the representation of the bestial black race: Q: A:

44

Did the film make you think about human evolution? Now that you mention it, yeah it did. It made me examine where did we come from, where are we going.

Evolving into the familiar Q: A:

Q: A: Q: A: Q: A:

Thinking about the relationships between humans and apes, did you have any fear about our closeness to them? No. Actually, honestly speaking, I thought more about relationships between people. The thing I could not get out of mind, I was like, wow, that really surprised me, it kind of bothered me a bit . . . I was kind of shocked and surprised at what I felt and I didn’t know if it was good or bad. I was just like . . . I saw . . . All I could think about was, that they were really human beings. It’s hard to describe. I was thinking more about how different races on Earth . . . how they react to each other more than anything. I could not get that out of my mind. The movie did play with a lot of stereotypes. I think so, too. I’m surprised more hasn’t been said about that. And I’ve never really talked about it with anyone because I thought maybe it was just my perception and . . . [trails off in discomfort] What stood out as making you uncomfortable? Honestly, I don’t really feel comfortable talking about it, but if you really want to hear it, I’ll tell you. I would like you to, if you don’t mind. This is all anonymous. There were a couple images, I saw some images of, like, especially like the gorillas that honestly I kinda felt that they reminded me of people I’d personally known that were friends of mine. And they were portrayed as being really evil. That was the thing that really shocked me. And these are not people that I . . . These were friends of mine, people that I grew up with. I found that really disturbing. That kind of stuff was more damaging than not. If they were trying to make a positive statement about something, it made it worse. (A1)

While the overt associations between black people and apes may have been too uncomfortable for public discussion, the film undeniably concerns social order and race. The film’s racial implications were occasionally confi rmed through the fi lm’s publicity, such as when the fi lm’s leading man likened his on-screen kiss with a female ape to kissing Janet Jackson, the African-American singer.4 The likenesses drawn between apes and Africans/African-Americans was, inadvertently, on the tip of many people’s tongues in the summer of 2001, including my museum visitors, and is an important example of the type of cultural baggage museum visitors bring with them to human evolution exhibitions.

Becoming familiar From my conversations with visitors, I found that many people are comfortable evolving into images they are familiar with, and into the image they already have of themselves. Most often, the visual imagination or visual conditioning encourages visitors to imagine human evolution in comforting and familiar ways. Human evolutionary images do not challenge the image we have of ourselves, then; they work to confirm it. 45

Rethinking evolution in the museum Many white visitors I spoke with preferred to insert themselves into rather romantic images of European ancestors such as those they had encountered in popular books. One Natural History Museum interviewee revealed the unique way he connects to his evolutionary ancestors. When he revealed that he lived near the Boxgrove fossil site, I asked him whether or not he identified with the fossils. To my surprise, he admitted that he relates to them quite intimately (B4): A:

Q: A:

I don’t know how to put this. I have a great feeling for past times in history and going to Boxgrove quarry I really get a buzz out of it, and all of history. I go to Stonehenge, too . . . Even weirder – now you’re not going to like this . . . Doing a past-life regression once, I suppose I focused on going back 500,000 years to Boxgrove quarry. And part of this is having [read the] book Fairweather Eden and his excavations there and so on, setting the whole scene. When you imagined these ancestors, what kind of activities did you do? What was your lifestyle like? . . . Hunting. There was one time when about six or eight of us had got a stag caught . . . and it was quite difficult because it’d got big antlers on it. We kept at it with our spearheads. And another time too, one of my companions – I don’t know who it was – had been very badly injured, was crushed on the ground and I was there protecting him from hyenas and so on.

He went on to explain that the activities he returned to always comprised groups of men hunting. When I asked him if there was something particularly appealing about the time period, he said, “Yes, I mean this group of us, this community was really supportive . . . not really the right word but . . . no one trying to get one over on the next person, no sort of superiority.” Consistent with the hallmarks of human evolution described by Moser (1998), this interviewee’s account, only abbreviated here, is imbued with many of the classic, romantic icons of human origins narratives – such as hunting, caves, and male comradery. However, in its deeply personal and alternative approach to uncovering human prehistory, it resists scientific conventions. Together, it encapsulates profoundly one person’s pursuit, and claim, of his evolutionary heritage. Other visitor responses confirmed Moser’s argument regarding the comforting aspect of redundant, familiar evolutionary images. During an exercise with interviewees where I asked them to sort specific images I showed them into any categories of their choosing, visitors repeatedly relied upon the stereotypical assortment of cave-man features to rank representations from prehistoric to modern, such as hairiness, posture, tool use, fi re use, hunting, and meat-eating. These were the key criteria for interviewees as they related to the individuals, landscapes, and overall scenes. In front of museum dioramas, it also became apparent that visitors are most comfortable with images to which they are accustomed, such as the AMNH 46

Evolving into the familiar Neanderthal diorama. The Neanderthals, as a hominid group, have achieved the most widespread iconic popularity beyond the natural history museum, and this is evident in visitor responses. Despite critical advancements in representation – such as more attention to musculature and skin and face details, inclusion of an active female and an advising elder – the AMNH models seem to conform most to visitors’ conceptions of human ancestors. They are cavemen: large-boned, white-skinned, spear-sharpening, hairy pre-humans sitting around a cave. In interviews with the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution visitors, the Neanderthal models emerged as distinctly more human, and more appealing to the gaze than the previous dioramas. A suite of characteristics made them easier to imagine as ancestors – their “calm,” their mastery of tools, their clothing, their skin color and eye color, even their domestic harmony and gender roles. Thus, despite the significant revision in its representation of Neanderthals, this diorama still evoked responses from visitors that have been solidified by classic imagery in popular culture. One respondent, when viewing a Burian image I had brought to the interview in front of the Neanderthal diorama, said, “It’s all really in the same ballpark, mildly different” (A3). Another person commented: All these images are like movies, I’m thinking 1 Million Years BC and CaveMan. All the Hollywood movies that come to Australia . . . It just looks to me like I’ve seen these before even though I’ve never been here before. It’s all very familiar. (A2) Such statements speak to the powerful influences in pop culture that shape visitors’ interpretations of exhibitions, including the global circulation of Hollywood mythmaking (these visitors were Australian). It became clear to me that visitors are interested in evolutionary stories in an effort to uphold the images they have of themselves and their heritage. One visitor nicely sums up the ways museum visitors relate intimately or romantically to their past when he explained his interest in human evolution: “All of humanity likes continuity. If you can identify with it, all the better” (H1). Altogether, it emerges that the museum visitors I dealt with do not come to the museums as blank slates. They relate to the images they encounter very personally, through preconceived images they have of themselves and their own humanity.

The globalized evolutionary image Today, when we consider the ways evolutionary images circulate or are entrenched, we must consider the effect of globalization on the mass media images museum visitors bring with them to the museum. As part of a “global village,” museum visitors are impacted by certain images circulating cross-culturally and cross-nationally. Thus, in addition to the many individual and community lenses shaping visitors’ experiences, there is also the global lens derived from the images audiences receive in an increasingly globalized world. Several 47

Rethinking evolution in the museum of my interactions with visitors bear this out. For example, at all four museums, visitors recalled certain images I showed them during interviews from a National Geographic they had read, or cited common television programs such as the Ape-Man series. Most notably, the Homo erectus interview image from National Geographic (see figure 4.4 in chapter four) is often immediately associated with National Geographic without my disclosure. (The image is also sometimes mistakenly associated with the Discovery channel, further speaking to the interplay and interchangeability of media imagery.) One uncanny example of this global museum culture occurred in a discussion of a particular evolutionary image with a visitor to the Horniman Museum. This British visitor recognized a photograph I showed him of an American Museum of Natural History Neanderthal model from a French magazine he had read. Three countries (the US, France, and England) and three different types of representational media (the photograph, the museum exhibit, and the magazine) are implicated in the way one visitor made meaning. Interestingly, the images visitors bring with them into the museum are both robust – deriving from the hyperkinetic overstimulation of mass media (such as fi lm, internet, television) – and empty – deriving from a small, limited network of Western media corporations (such as Disney, the Discovery channel and National Geographic). There is, then, a paradox of information existing everywhere in context and information existing nowhere at all in content.

48

3 Revisiting Victorian progress

“It’s a weird thing. It starts off in Africa and they’re, like, all hairy apes and then all of a sudden the end of the exhibit is all these perfect white Nordic people.” (American Museum of Natural History interviewee)

A museum’s past no doubt casts a somber shadow over its present. This chapter illustrates how the histories of the American Museum of Natural History and the Horniman Museum resonate with visitors’ experiences today. For the American Museum of Natural History, we can see how, historically, evolution exhibitions have been encoded with socio-evolutionist narratives of progress, something that resonates with museum visitors’ attempts to decode origins exhibitions today. At the Horniman Museum, we can see how the institution itself stands today as a nostalgic emblem of the Victorian era and Victorian evolutionary ideas.

The march of progress The single most powerful and persuasive image of human evolution is the linear march of progress – forward-facing men marching single-file toward the future with a progressive gain in stature, brain size, tool refinement, and striding posture, and progressive decrease in hair and skin color (see figure 3.1). Although the fi rst graphic representation of men marching single-fi le is dated to F. Clark Howell’s 1965 Time-Life book Early Man (Shelley, 1996), images of species evolving linearly have been in place since the fi rst Darwinian discourses of the late nineteenth century, which were themselves anticipated by the eighteenth-century Great Chain of Being. Images from the earliest evolutionary books, newspapers and exhibitions illustrate that from the earliest incarnation of human evolution, the concept has been accompanied by such visual progress narratives. See, for example, figure 3.2, which accompanied the fi rst printing of Huxley’s 1864 book Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, which Bennett describes as opening “the way to an understanding of the course of human history and culture as an additional set of evolutionary processes through which the present structures of human societies could be read as the outcomes of the 49

Rethinking evolution in the museum

Figure 3.1 A standard representation of the “march of progress” by H. T. Dignam for Melanie Wiber’s 1997 book. Erect Men, Undulating Women: The Visual Imagery of Gender, “Race” and Progress in Reconstructive Illustrations of Human Evolution.

pasts that had been stored up within them” (Bennett, 2004, 56). And as figure 3.2 shows, Huxley used visual language to articulate this evolutionary idea. As Gould (1989; 1994; 1995) and Wiber (1997) have commented, the “march of progress” image is the canonical representation of human evolution. As evolutionary shorthand, it strongly influences perceptions of our evolutionary ancestors as well as the evolutionary processes that brought them about. Despite being the predominant icon of human evolution, the “march of progress” image is pretty flawed scientifically. Rather than a straight line, human evolution as we now know it is better represented by a branching tree with various hominid species coexisting at several points in time (see, for example, figure 4.2). Visually, the “march of progress” argues implicitly for progress toward a civilization that is white, Western, and male. The image also suggests that evolution has long been pointed in the direction of modern humans when actually the survival of our species is the result of rather random environmental events. Although the image may seem rather benign or playful, it circulates widely as common sense, shaping and limiting the way we understand ourselves and the world around us. Historically, ladders of progress provided the persuasive rhetoric for Darwinism. Linear and progress-oriented timelines were satisfying due to their simplicity and homocentrism. Such ladders served to convince the public of the emergent principles of Darwinian evolution while comforting them that such seemingly humble and brutish origins were necessary steps in the refi nement of Western civilization. Images such as the march of progress – as well as the brutish Neanderthal and the bestial African – became significant rhetoric for anthropology at the end of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, scientific representations are extremely difficult to replace once they have become entrenched. Even when new scientific evidence is found, the old images doggedly maintain their momentum. This is the result of a number of factors, two of which stand out: fi rst, those who produce images are often unable or unwilling to see alternative visions; and second, publishers often recycle 50

Revisiting Victorian progress

Figure 3.2 A linear representation of primate skeletons found in Huxley’s 1864 book Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature.

images because they are the most easy, economical, and satisfying to viewers. These limitations, both practical and ideological in nature, pose enormous constraints on the production of novel images and, thus, novel ideas.

The “race” of progress Any conception of and claim to community can entail a sense of belonging, a set of shared values, cultural or biological traits and, perhaps fundamentally, the perception of difference from others. (Boswell and Evans, 1999, 11)

We envision our origins according to images we have of ourselves, both personally and as members of communities. As Moser puts it, origins images “satisfy a basic need for narrative and shared experience . . . critical to their success, reflecting how the primary function of the imagery is to reassure us of our relationship or connection to the distant past” (Moser, 1998, 171). Landau’s (1991) work on fairy-tale tropes and Gifford-Gonzalez’s (1993) work on gender tropes underscore this point as well, by showing that origins images utilize established traditions of representation not only because they are established but because they have come tautologically to defi ne what it means to be human. Invariably, what it means to be human is to be civilized and cultured in very specific ways. Evolutionary images inform us who is most evolved biologically and culturally (Europeans) and who is least evolved (Africans). As Moser writes: The way in which the images have conflated geographical distance with depth in time reflects how foreigners were perceived to be in a lower stage 51

Rethinking evolution in the museum of cultural existence. Furthermore, the visual conventions developed for scenes of human origins reveal how explanations of who we are and where we came from depend on an iconography of negation. This refers to the way in which imagery has been used to defi ne an outsider status or otherness . . . in terms of opposition to us. (Moser, 1998, 172)

Wiber (1997) revises the common expression “march of progress” with the suggestive phrase “race of progress.” The iconography of this “race of progress” fi xes the skin colors and technologies associated with indigenous people at the prehistoric beginning of the “march” and the skin colors and technologies associated with the West at the end. Again, however, once such evolutionary reconstructions circulate, they become entrenched as scientific documents; they authorize the use of ethnographic analogy, the primitive African as proxy for the European past. As Wiber points out, “analogous others” in origins imagery represent the “primitive” that serves implicitly to stand in opposition to the white, Western male in evolutionary arguments. In both scientific arguments and their visual imagery, these “analogous others” typically occupy a position of inferiority.1 Likewise, Lutz and Collins, authors of Reading National Geographic (1993), fi nd that social evolutionism, which “entails a law of progress that allows us to know our past through the present of others,” is central to how readers of National Geographic interpret the stark differences between “primitive” and “modern” peoples, or between themselves as white readers and African or dark-skinned peoples (Lutz and Collins, 1993, 236–39). 2 They also point out that the tenets of social evolutionism are “not always clearly in the picture, but are read in.” Thus this social evolutionism is something readers both get out of ethnographic images and something they bring to them (Lutz and Collins, 1993, 238). While visual images of human evolution such as the ubiquitous “race of progress” may be engaging, they are often fundamentally misrepresentative. With a manipulative sleight of hand, human origins imagery collapses evolutionary time and condenses geographic space. The Africa of our origins then becomes an isolated place distant in both prehistoric space and time, often converging symbolically with the imagined dark bodies and dark wilderness of modernday Africa. Furthermore, the tremendous reliance upon inference and analogy in the reconstruction of our human ancestors compounds the misrepresentation. This “imaginative deduction” (as Stoczkowski has coined it) is often grossly unscientific, a mere projection of the present – Condé Nast Traveler’s “Bushmen”, for example – into the evolutionary past (Stoczkowski, 1997, 251). By imagining our forebears in recognizable, but artificial, visual packages, evolutionary reconstructions tend to concretize flaws in scientific logic, becoming both tautological and overly adaptationist in rationale (Gould, 1985, 15). In fact, they conform to what Stephen Jay Gould refers to as the “four horsemen of progress, determinism, gradualism, and adaptationism” (Gould, 1985, 15). 52

Revisiting Victorian progress Similarly, Wiber identifies the four problems that generally plague the science of human origins, and its popular visual representations: functionalism (explaining attributes by reference to their supposed function), presentism (assuming that what exists today must always have existed, and in that form and for that function), essentialism (boiling complex biological and cultural assemblages down to their so-called essential features, which are then explained by reference to their function) and universalism (assuming that specific features have the same characteristics and serve the same functions everywhere they occur and across all time frames). (Wiber, 1997, 14)

She also recognizes the ways in which these flaws in logic are continually perpetuated by visual media. Reconstructions of human ancestors are bound to be fraught with subjectivity because, quite frankly, they concern both humans and ancestors. Thus they cannot avoid being encoded, explicitly and implicitly, with various subjective connotations about what it means to be human. As Boswell and Evans write, Conservative values, as we have seen, are rooted variously in the idea that the national past is an Edenic point of origin from which we derive our present identities as members of a homogenous nation, and in the claim that certain cultural activities represent edifying values that need protecting against the debasement of vulgar popular culture. (Boswell and Evans, 1999, 4)

Though often deemed antiquated popular folklore, racialized progress ladders have maintained their momentum in popular culture as conceptual crutches (Stocking, 1968; Gifford-Gonzalez, 1993; Molyneaux, 1997a). For the nonblack museum visitor, then, human evolution exhibits may validate, rather than challenge, personal and racial identities. If human evolution unfolds as inevitable (even “divine”) progress from apes to men, then the concept of African origins seems to suggest a condition of inevitable (even “divine”) progress from Africans to Europeans. Again, for many white Western museum visitors, origins images continue to comfort them in their own identity and relationship with their past.

Exhibiting Victorian evolution Explicitly and implicitly, the progress narrative has become a fi xture of the human evolution exhibition, and some critics have argued that even the larger museum is organized according to a grand meta-narrative from savagery to civilization (such as M. Bal’s critique [1992] of the American Museum of Natural History and N. Levell’s critique [2000] of the Horniman Museum; also see Bennett [2004, 114–135] and Haraway [1989] on the larger progress motifs 53

Rethinking evolution in the museum incorporated into museums). With her detailed reading of the American Museum of Natural History, for example, Bal analyzes how the museum employs aesthetics of realism and exoticism, and relies upon various visual effects and juxtapositions, to produce a meta-narrative throughout the whole institution: “Showing” natural history employs a rhetoric of persuasion that almost invariably convinces the visitor of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon, largely Christian culture that is supposedly at the top of the evolutionary ladder, [despite the latter being] absent from the museum’s displays. (Bal, 1992, 594)

Historically, museums have played a critical role in perpetuating the myth of an evolutionarily primitive Africa, and this legacy shapes how today’s museum visitors respond to human origins exhibitions. 3 Borrowing from historical accounts of African exploration and ethnographies of Africans, early images of Africa in the museum transformed the continent and its people from ethnographic spectacles to evolutionary spectacles. Racialized ladders of progress, implicit in ethnographic displays and explicit in human evolution exhibitions, have become fi xtures of the natural history museum. The museum played a fundamental role in perpetuating the “march of progress,” and various techniques – aside from the standard, linear timeline – were used to express socio-evolutionist ideology. For example, the progress motif could be incorporated into displays whether objects were organized by style or function, or whether using fossils or cultural objects to tell the evolutionary story. Most importantly, though, in the museum, evolution had to be visually transparent. According to Bennett, The visual technologies developed for evolutionary museum displays can be understood as, in part, a response to these threats of political and ideological mutation. The museum’s task was, so to speak, to batten down a new order of things by reassembling the objects compromising the artefactual domain (bones, fossils, minerals, tools, pottery etc.) in gradual and continuous lines of evolutionary thought. (Bennett, 2004, 160–86)

It is worth underscoring here (as discussed in chapter one) that the racialized progress narratives of the natural history museum are anticipated by a long history of world’s fairs and expositions. As Rydell has pointed out in his critique of world’s fairs, such forums fi rmly situated blacks within a framework of evolutionary and cultural progress (see Rydell, 1984; Rydell, 1999). This is illustrated best in the Midway Plaisance of the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exhibition, where savages were aligned along a color-coded, mile-long strip illustrating man’s progress up to the industrial white city. Rydell also points out that other media of the day conspired with such images: “Cartoonists gave their own slant to this theme, urging their audience to think of Africans as virtually interchangeable with simians” (Rydell, 1999, 140). 54

Revisiting Victorian progress To consider the progress narrative today, one has to recall that at the turn of the twentieth century, evolutionary theory became more palatable with conceptions of an inevitable and linear progress from apes to man, from Africa to Europe.4 Through a complex network of cultural media (including natural history museums), notions of orthogenesis (confounding biological with cultural processes), racial typology, and racial hierarchies prevailed in popular culture. Furthermore, aboriginal Africans, such as the South African “Bushmen,” were long integral to this evolutionary progress narrative constructed in museums and public exhibitions because they seemed to offer bodily proof of African evolutionary history. Anthropology exhibitions convincingly authenticated indigenous African groups as ancestral prototypes and evolutionary intermediates and played a monumental role in disseminating misconceptions of aboriginal Africans that became entrenched in diverse communities internationally. 5 For example, the historical practices of many natural history museums, such as anthropometric research and the casting and display of indigenous Africans such as the “Bushmen” and “Hottentots,” produced images of Africans that traveled widely in museum circles. Museums and world’s fairs trafficked in a universe of anthropological ideas that indelibly imprinted the evolutionary inferiority of African peoples in communities worldwide.6 Furthermore, the progress narratives circulating in museums at the turn of the twentieth century became integral to the ways an increasingly wide class demographic understood race and evolution. For example, because of a new economy, new affluence, and a society increasingly connected through the rail system, a British middle class emerged that considered learning a leisure activity (Moser, 1998, 109). Many within this community quickly cultivated an interest, albeit recreational, in museums and anthropology. Today, many natural history museum visitors, with their often sophisticated science backgrounds, have learned on a rational level that evolution has not proceeded in a goal-oriented or predetermined fashion. I found, however, that there are contradictions between how they intellectually approach evolutionary information and the more tacit, emotional ways they understand evolutionary information, ultimately revealing the complexity of how meanings are made in evolutionary exhibitions. For example, when I asked visitors a question directly on questionnaires (as opposed to ascertaining perceptions through responses to images or dioramas) to ascertain whether they see evolution as part of an ordered plan, visitors were generally quite savvy when deconstructing the implications of evolutionary “progress.” A slight majority of museum visitors did not believe evolution progressed according to an ordered or linear plan (with 75 percent at AMNH disagreeing; 48 percent at NMK; 40 percent at HM; and 40 percent at NHM). One even retorted slyly, “What do you defi ne as progress?” However, in looking at images and museum exhibits (as I’ll get to in chapters four and five), visitors often relied upon hierarchies of progress as a conceptual apparatus. This reveals the disjunction between visitors’ responses to questionnaires and the more complicated responses in interviews, a phenomenon that may mirror the complexity of meaning-making in everyday life.

55

Rethinking evolution in the museum

Victorian evolution at the Horniman Museum and American Museum of Natural History By looking at two historically significant natural history museums, the American Museum of Natural History and the Horniman Museum, we can see how the philosophy of social evolutionism informed such museums almost from their origins. Given these origins, it is worth considering how such historical philosophies resonate among museums’ visitors today, either as a result of the museum’s extant exhibitions or through visitors’ lingering expectations of the museum. As I will discuss below, at the American Museum of Natural History the museum’s early twentieth-century allegiance to social-evolutionist progress narratives uncannily echoes visitors’ readings of the dioramas of the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution today. At the Horniman, the lingering traces of Victorian science in the museum’s current natural history displays continue to inspire nostalgia and a certain Victorian sentimentality among its visitors. The Hall of the Age of Man When our understanding of the spiritual, intellectual and moral, as well as physical, values of races become more widespread, the course of the rise of man to Parnassus will again take an upward trend and the future progress of the human race will be secure. Henry Fairfield Osborn, quoted in Porter, 1983, 29

The American Museum of Natural History is renowned as one of the world’s foremost natural history museums, and it boasts both the world’s largest collection of natural history and upwards of two million visitors a year. In front of the museum’s grand Central Park West entrance is the well-known statue of a gallant Teddy Roosevelt on horseback, joined on foot by a Native American and an African-American.7 The walls surrounding Roosevelt are lined with a series of accolades such as “Sportsman,” “Diplomat,” “Naturalist,” and, perhaps most importantly, “Patron,” which indicates his substantial fi nancial contributions to the museum. Given Roosevelt’s evolutionary beliefs – he was particularly influenced by John Burgess of Columbia Law School, who proclaimed a hierarchy of genius among races – one can speculate that this statue makes a statement about the contrast between the evolutionary potentials of the darker races and the white one, as characterized by Roosevelt (Porter, 1983, 26–34). As this monument still greets visitors today, it stands as a reminder of the museum’s historical debt to certain forms of racialized thinking, such as those epitomized by the museum’s fi rst human evolution exhibition, the Hall of the Age of Man (the Hall of the Age of Man was not an exhibition of human evolution alone, though this was certainly the aspect that received the most attention). (On the hall see Clark, 2006, 103–110; Moser, 1998, 156–160.) Osborn’s Hall of the Age of Man opened in 1924, 55 years after the museum’s founding, and in 1933 it was renamed Osborn Hall in its curator’s honor (Porter, 1983, 26). At the time of its opening, the AMNH’s exhibition of 56

Revisiting Victorian progress human evolution was second only to the one at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago (see Field, 1933), and it was at the forefront of exhibitions presenting a controversial subject to the American public. Museum exhibitions often become an expression of an individual scientist’s philosophy, and the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of the Age of Man was certainly no exception, since it dramatizes Osborn’s commitment to eugenics. Opinionated and prolific, Henry Fairfield Osborn took charge of the AMNH collections in 1891, and became president of the museum in 1908.8 Osborn’s strong opinions profoundly influenced the museum’s activities, from its scientific pursuits to its exhibitions. As a strong proponent of human evolution (he studied under Huxley), Osborn was in a unique position to advance Darwinian philosophy, though he did so with a social-Darwinist bent. As Porter points out, Osborn’s famed 1915 Men of the Old Stone Age underwent 13 printings by the time of its author’s death (Porter, 1983, 26). The AMNH invested a relatively enormous budget in the Hall of the Age of Man, and particularly in the murals of Charles Knight. An eminent artist of the prehistoric, Knight had previously painted mammals for the museum and was again commissioned to produce three murals for the Hall of the Age of Man. The murals displayed three successive epochs in human evolution: (1) Neanderthal fl int-workers (the earliest vista, with classic Knight Neanderthals stooped and unsophisticated); (2) Cro-Magnon artists (and the emergence into enlightenment); and (3) the Stag Hunters of the New Stone Age (the Anglo-Saxon apex). Interestingly, Knight did recognize the limitations on accuracy in artistic reconstructions, noting that their function was primarily personal and decorative (Porter, 1983, 30). Despite this recognition by Knight, the murals were nonetheless the most widely requested and reproduced aspects of the exhibition, speaking to their great cultural impact. The Hall of the Age of Man was particularly concerned with the evolutionary origins of race, racial geography, and progress. As an ardent eugenicist, threatened by the onslaught of racial mixing, Osborn used the museum and the hall as a forum for his ideals (Porter, 1983, 26–34).9 As evidence of Osborn’s political motivations, the hall’s emphasis shifted from a display of man’s progressive evolution from nonhumans to a display of progressive racial evolution from lower human “stock” to higher European “stock,” slipping between species evolution and racial evolution. As an interesting window onto ways racial progress narratives were employed by evolutionists, Porter writes, Osborn had been enthusiastic about displaying a primate series to integrate the viewer’s transition from the Hall of the Age of Mammals. Fearing, however, that the resulting exhibition was subject to misinterpretation and “constant attacks” [from creationists], he dismantled it in December. The Hall’s focus shifted to the history of human races, and cases showing “Why Man Walks Upright” and the “Prehistoric Races of Europe.” (Porter, 1983, 28)

57

Rethinking evolution in the museum This encapsulates perfectly the ways in which racial progress is used as a proxy, a moral and conceptual crutch, for evolutionary progress – and one that, while dehumanizing the “lesser” races, redeems the higher character of Europeans. Osborn’s Hall featured a “Family Tree of Man,” a hierarchical classification of the three human stocks recognized by Osborn – the Eurasian stock, the extreme Asiatic stock, and the African stock. For Osborn, the three stocks were actually three taxonomically distinct species, with the European and Asian stocks diverging from African stock before the beginning of the Pleistocene Ice Age. Like other racial taxonomists before him, Osborn’s classification was not only biologically useful but societally purposeful as well. Revealing his beliefs in environmental determinism, he delineated as racial hallmarks agriculture for the African, technology for the Asian, and mastery of the sciences and philosophy for the Eurasian (Porter, 1983, 28). As Porter writes, In the absence of any evidence whatsoever, Osborn rationalized that before moving to France, the Cro-Magnon race must have evolved in Asia, where the open spaces and “exhilarating climate” fostered the “precocious intelligence” necessary for the evolution of an “alert race.” In contrast, regions with more abundant food supplies (such as Osborn’s idea of colonial Africa) had produced the arrested or retrogressive races. (Porter, 1983, 28)

Like most race rankings, Osborn considered Asia superior to Africa and a more suitable origin for modern man, a belief that fueled his research on the continent. Osborn was also a proponent of theories on African childlikeness. As Porter writes, Osborn was quite explicit about the implications of biogenesis for the modern races of man. The average adult Negro, he maintained, possessed intelligence “similar to that of the eleven-year-old youth of the species Homo sapiens.” Indeed, Osborn had participated in at least one symposium at which criminal and behavioral disorders such as exhibitionism were described as the “psychic recapitulation” of early racial history. In this way, the theory of recapitulation distorted evolution to link antisocial behavior and diminished intelligence with descendants of the lowest branches on the Family Tree of Man. (Porter, 1983, 29)

Such an intermingling of science and politics underscores the depths to which scientific racism was ingrained into the history of the museum. The exhibition on the “Fossil Races of Man” included cases of human fossils and casts, as well as partial reconstructions of Java, Piltdown, Heidelberg, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon fossils (Porter, 1983, 31). Although J. Howard McGregor, Columbia University zoologist, was to produce Pithecanthropus 58

Revisiting Victorian progress and Neanderthal models (from fossils), as in the Chicago museum, he never completed them. Knight’s work relied upon the three-dimensional models constructed by McGregor, and they in turn were produced from portraits of racial types – a common tautology. Although blacks were implicitly integral to the greater theoretical narrative of human evolution emerging out of Africa, Osborn refused to have “Negroes” incorporated into the model reconstructions (Porter, 1983, 31). Osborn’s characterization of evolutionary progress was a characterization of distinctly European evolutionary progress, and it incorporated familiar markers of progress (such as clean-shaven faces). Africans were implicated in evolution only as the most distant relatives on the family tree, akin to apes. In this schematic, the evolution of Europeans began and ended in Europe, a strict multi-regionalist stance. According to Porter, the paleontologist Gregory wrote to Osborn: “Knight’s Neanderthals in the frontispiece are plainly white men with certain slight modifications. They lack entirely any distinctive or strange characters” (Porter, 1983, 30). Unfortunately, Osborn’s eugenics-influenced scientific theories did not remain his own. The exhibition made a huge impact on public education. The Hall of the Age of Man generally received tremendous professional and popular acclaim until its closing in 1966. The Hall of Human Biology and Evolution As a cultural segue between early and late twentieth-century evolutionary thinking, the popular 1949 film On the Town devotes a show-stealing musical number to ardent human adoration of an American Museum of Natural History caveman model.10 This cinematic expression highlights the spectacular impact the American Museum of Natural History cave-man dioramas have had on public perceptions of anthropology and the museum itself. Sixty years after the opening of the Hall of the Age of Man, the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Biology and Evolution opened in 1993, and the hall was not a disappointment to diorama enthusiasts. The hall’s artistic reconstructions dominate visitor experiences in the exhibition, revealing how the exhibition of human evolution is often overpowered by its dramatic cave-man models. The evolutionary dioramas of the present Hall of Human Biology and Evolution make it a useful case study on the effect of origins reconstructions on visitors, but they also provide a useful window into the ways museum visitors read from exhibitions strongly articulated narratives of cultural and biological progress. As mentioned, the exhibition is punctuated most significantly by its grand dioramas that encapsulate, in four steps, the defi ning symbols of humanity: (1) a pair-bonded male and female standing upright in the fi rst Australopithecus afarensis diorama, walking along in the volcanic ash, off to their evolutionary destiny (figure 3.3); (2) a male and female scavenging for meat on the African savanna in the Homo erectus diorama, with a hyena and vultures menacing in the periphery (figure 3.4); (3) tool-making and the family unit in the Neanderthal diorama, with a man standing sharpening a tool, a woman 59

Rethinking evolution in the museum

Figure 3.3 The fi rst diorama in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Biology and Evolution depicting A. afarensis in Africa. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Photo Library.

sitting tanning a hide, and, uniquely, an elder female advising the woman in her work (figure 3.5); and lastly, (4) representatives of modern humanity, a Ukrainian family (figure 3.6). In addition to the dioramas, Jay Matternes was commissioned to do most of the exhibition’s illustrations, linking the hall to wider evolutionary media in popular culture. (Matternes’s imprint exists across a variety of popular culture, most notably National Geographic. As most visitors have had exposure to his style, it lends the American Museum of Natural History displays legitimacy through familiarity.) The impact of the American Museum of Natural History dioramas is also seen in the number of appearances the trademark models have made in media outside of the museum. For example, Discover magazine honored the American Museum of Natural History in the November 1993 issue, distinguishing it as one of ten great science museums. The magazine even marked the American Museum of Natural History’s prominence over the other featured museums by choosing the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution australopithecine diorama for the cover of that issue, and the Ukraine diorama to accompany the letter from the editor. On the australopithecine diorama, the article comments:

60

Revisiting Victorian progress

Figure 3.4 The second diorama in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Biology and Evolution depicting Homo erectus in Africa. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Photo Library.

But one diorama in particular haunts me, and I know I will often be returning to it: a full-size, startlingly lifelike Lucy and her mate walk upright across Tanzania. Based partly on scientific fact and partly on “educated guesswork”, these models are deeply evocative . . . Lucy’s head is turned left – she seems startled by us. She does not know what she will become. Glancing to the right, her mate has his arm around her shoulder in a familiar gesture of human tenderness. Are these protohumans really so like us? How do they court? Do they love? What worries them? Do they imagine a future? What delights their senses? How do they comfort their young? I long to meet them face-to-face, to reach through time and space and touch them. It is like recognizing one’s kin across the street in a bustling city. (Ackerman, 1993, 104)

Such sentiments strongly underscore the emotional potency of the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution dioramas, and the magazine profile in turn communicates its emotional impact even to those who have not experienced the models directly. Based on surveys, the American Museum of Natural History’s four hominid dioramas were far more powerful than any of the representational media 61

Rethinking evolution in the museum

Figure 3.5 The third diorama in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Biology and Evolution depicting Neanderthals in the Middle East. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Photo Library.

presented at either the Natural History Museum, the Horniman Museum or the National Museums of Kenya (though they were rivaled by the National Museum of Kenya’s one hominid diorama), allowing for an in-depth exploration of visitor responses to three-dimensional artistic evolutionary displays. For those American Museum of Natural History visitors confronting these compelling dioramas, the models precipitate a kind of double self-consciousness in which visitors must resolve for themselves their present humanity against their prehistoric past, even if they recognize the models as reconstructions. The Hall of Human Biology and Evolution visually articulates human origins, and in that ever-penetrating and convincing medium it seems for visitors to defi ne the hallmarks of humanity. While the sequence of dioramas weaves a narrative of humanity’s progress from ape to humans, for many visitors it also weaves a culturally encoded progress narrative from humanity’s darkest origins in Africa to humanity’s culturally sophisticated peak in the Nordic features and superior cave art and artifacts of European cultures.11 With few exceptions, respondents interpreted the American Museum of Natural History dioramas as one elaborate progress narrative from Africa to Europe. While some visitors regarded the depiction of linearity from 62

Revisiting Victorian progress

Figure 3.6 The fourth and last diorama in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Biology and Evolution depicting modern humans in the Ukraine. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Photo Library.

an African Cradle of Mankind as positive, others found the implications problematic. Visitor comments suggest the complications of speaking from and to what is perceived to be the cultural majority. The following Mexican-American visitor critiqued several aspects of the overall progress narrative at length: I feel like I’m offended. All of a sudden they’re like perfect white Caucasian faces. You know? There’s no heavy brow, there’s a perfect little nose. It’s like, I think, offensive . . . [It shows] that we all came from here [the Ukraine] in that this is the end. It’s a weird thing. It starts off in Africa and they’re, like, all hairy apes and then all of a sudden the end of the exhibit is all these perfect white Nordic people. (A4) Interestingly, the interviewee is able to both uphold stereotypical images of Europe by describing the models as “perfect” white people while resisting it with his critique – a complex, negotiated response. The following exchange between two interviewees underscored both height and skin color as relevant to the progress narrative: A2: Even in terms of overall size, you move from the littlest human and then tall, like us. 63

Rethinking evolution in the museum A3: And the skin tone changes quite dramatically, too. A2: It gets lighter . . . Scandinavia here, Africa there. As I discuss at length in later chapters, visitors often used skin color and, by extension, race as a proxy for progress. When I asked visitors what characteristics distinguished the dioramas from each other, some questionnaire respondents, for example, responded, “skin color and facial bone structure,” “facial features, coloring of the skin,” “skin color and size,” and “the different colors and amount of hair on body.” Another respondent pointed out that “the Neanderthals were black and naked and the Cro-Magnon models are white and clothed. They could’ve been white too back in the Neanderthals.” Clearly, skin color was a functional component of the constellation of features that defines something as primitive or modern. (It is also interesting that the majority of American Museum of Natural History questionnaire respondents said that it was in features of the head and face that the main differences between the dioramas could be discerned. This highlights the importance of visitors generally being able to relate to reconstructions, to make intimate, face-to-face, eye-toeye, connections with these reconstructed ancestors.) At closer analysis, visitor responses to particular models also complicate the relationship between what the dioramas show visitors and how visitors read them. The Homo erectus diorama is particularly intriguing because its combination of features (brown skin, primitive technology, African savanna) makes it a useful representation of the African ape-man. The diorama, however, makes some interesting interventions in conventional representations of African apemen. Despite the iconographically typical backdrop of Africa, artists attempted to make the skin color of the models a rather beige “intermediate,” a modification that confused some visitors who expected the models to be darker. Other visitors thought the diorama fit preconceptions of human evolution very well. For example, one questionnaire respondent described it as his favorite diorama because it felt “closest to what I think about human evolution.” Many visitors, though, found the representation off-putting and in no way endearing, even though they deemed the dioramas lifelike (perhaps because they seemed so lifelike). To many of them, the Homo erectus diorama elicited a sort of visceral disdain (mirroring interviewee responses to an image of Homo erectus from National Geographic, which I will discuss later). Again and again, the distinctive features that arose in interviews were the models’ savagery, meat-eating, and arresting appearance. One interviewee said about the exhibition, “This [Homo erectus diorama] is fierce and threatening (A11).” Visitors also pointed out the racial and cultural overtones of the diorama. Take, for example, this interviewee’s response, which betrays his racial self-consciousness: This is so awful . . . If I saw something like that, I would feel like this would almost be a human of today. Like if I were seeing pictures of aborigines, like, in Australia where the skin is darker and all that and the prominent face. (A4)

64

Revisiting Victorian progress Because of the model’s hair (too straight) and skin color (too fair), some visitors did not consider the erectus model prototypically African. Notable here is that this visitor’s evolutionary imaginings depend upon representations of “typical” Africans (darkest skin, thickest hair): You know, what’s interesting is their hair looks Caucasian too. It’s light and very thin. You would think as hair evolved, it would start off coarser and get finer and not the other way around. (A4) Visitors often referred to the models as “tanned,” as not representing darkest Africa, which typically becomes a source of bewilderment. As in other discussions of images with interviewees, hair and skin become significant proxies for progress, and “primitives” with Caucasian hair and skin seemed to confuse museum visitors. Skin color, however, is a relative feature. The American Museum of Natural History Homo erectus models are “dark” in contrast to what is conceived of as typically “white”, and “fair” in contrast to what is typically “black.” Other visitors still see the darker skin color of the models as evidence of their primitive state of evolution. When I asked some visitors, “What makes the models look like a mixture between apes and humans?”, they respond with, “very dark, the skin color,” and, “looks hairier,” thus emphasizing the lingering significance of conventional markers of evolutionary progress. One visitor described the models with the comment, “It’s a little less hairy [than A. aferensis], a little more African . . . a little more disgusting” (A*). The most important aspect of these visitors’ readings is not what mixed messages visitors receive from the H. erectus models (which can never be accurately isolated), but what assumptions about skin color and evolutionary progress they attempt to project onto the models. This underscores the necessity for museums to break unambiguously the functional associations between dark skin in prehistory and white skin in modernity by creating new associations between darkness and modernity. One American Museum of Natural History docent I talked with addressed the significance of the Homo erectus models by sharing, “I think people are shocked all the time of thinking of themselves that way. I don’t know whether that’s the word or not . . . [Visitors fi nd it] Arresting, thought provoking” (A8). With the combination of humanity and African-ness the Homo erectus diorama is usefully thought-provoking, and does effectively question and confi rm visitors’ preconceived notions about human evolution and race. Following the erectus diorama, the Neanderthal diorama, the third diorama visitors encounter, is presented as the next step toward humanity. At the museum, the Homo erectus diorama and the Neanderthal diorama share an alcove, allowing visitors to juxtapose the two. The juxtaposition emphasized the iconographic difference between Neanderthals as familiar (“us”) and African prehistoric hominids as unfamiliar (“them”). For example, when I asked American Museum of Natural History third-graders what the H. erectus models in the diorama look like, they said “Africa,” and at the Neanderthal diorama, they exclaimed – 65

Rethinking evolution in the museum “cave-men” and “like us!” (A16). Western and white visitors clearly associated the skin colors and technologies of the Neanderthals with images they’d seen before and with themselves (which, as seen in later chapters, is at odds with how black visitors identified with evolutionary reconstructions). I also discussed the Homo erectus and Neanderthal dioramas with two college students conducting an art project in front of them. Instructed by their professor to insert themselves into one of the drawings, both chose to insert themselves into the Neanderthal diorama as opposed to Homo erectus, for interesting reasons: A13: It’s just weird the things they have them doing in that one [H. erectus diorama] ’cause it’s like, “oh my god! These are humans and that’s what they did?” whereas here [Neanderthal diorama] it’s, like, you kinda know about that stuff, like you see it sometimes, like, in movies or whatever, educational movies. But stuff like that [H. erectus] you don’t really see. A12: It’s just, like, it’s not like anything we’ve ever seen before, so that’s kind of scary. By both students choosing to re-create themselves as Neanderthals rather than as Homo erectus, they emphasize the ways museum visitors are most comfortable with images to which they are accustomed, and to images that are most like themselves. The fi nal diorama of modern humans in the Ukraine conforms easily to visitor perceptions of early sophisticated humanity. Even though this diorama inspired many recurring misconceptions – such as the misconception that the large bones of the bone hut were those of dinosaurs – visitors of all ethnicities easily identified this sophisticated, handsome Nordic family as the earliest representatives of our own distinguished species – or race. These are the ancestors, presumably, that painted cave walls, were expert hunters, survived Ice Ages and ultimately took that Great Leap Forward – never mind that this is not the explicit intention of the diorama. Some visitors recalled the so-called Human Revolution while looking at the diorama: “The mammoth bone hut – a cultural explosion around 35 thousand years ago so . . . Is that us? The predecessors are brutal” (A12). According to docents I spoke with, they do attempt to intervene in the seeming linearity of the exhibition’s course. Some of them mention from the outset of their human evolution tours that evolution is not teleological or goal-oriented. Despite the interpretive assistance provided by either docents or the small print of exhibition labels, visitors still read the dioramas as telling a story of biological and cultural progress from the most bestial ape-man to African ape-man to European cave-man to European man. The American Museum of Natural History’s own in-house evaluation also found that visitors interpreted the theme of the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution exhibition as evolutionary progress culminating in Homo sapiens (Giusti, 1993). This goal-oriented view of evolution is apparent in various responses. In that study, some visitors mentioned learning “that we all came 66

Revisiting Victorian progress from white Nordic people” and “that the older ‘humans were black and naked, and that the new ones are Caucasians and clothed.” As Giusti concludes, “The hall promotes the erroneous impression that evolution is goal-oriented. Visitors said evolution progressed from simplest to more complex life forms, with Homo sapiens at the apex of its achievement” (Giusti, 1993, 27). Such persistent readings of color-coded, teleological progress question how far the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution has come from the Hall of the Age of Man or from other flawed representations of human evolution circulating in popular culture. Encoding and decoding dioramas Clearly, the visual images produced by museums communicate ideas far beyond the control of the original scientific or artistic intent, which can be seen, for example, in their ability to project ideas that have not been articulated in the associated text or labels. While many visual images are merely decorative and officially unauthored, they are read as authorized by a scientific establishment lurking behind the walls of the museum. Images suggest scientific consensus even when it is nonexistent, and even when scientific data are tenuous or limited. In doing this, the images obscure the unsteady accumulation of evidence and inference on which paleontogical reconstruction depends.12 For the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution, one can actually examine the sources of disjunction between the way the exhibition was encoded by its producers and the ways it has been decoded by its visitors. The curator of the exhibition, Ian Tattersall, contributed an essay to Scientific American to throw light on the museum reconstruction process (Tattersall, 1992; also see Tattersall, 1993).13 About the process of creating the dioramas, he writes, Our arbitrary decisions were still only beginning. Once I would have laughed if anyone had predicted that I would spend weeks agonizing over Neanderthal eyebrows. Did they even have eyebrows? (Our closest living nonhuman relatives, the chimpanzees, do not.) If Neanderthals did have eyebrows, where were they on those bulbous browridges? Similarly, how long would untended Neanderthal beards have grown? How much body hair did the men and women have? What was its color and texture? What was the skin color? All these details offered endless scope for quibbling. (Tattersall, 1992, 84)

Such curatorial deliberations, while valuable to understanding how museum exhibitions are constructed and how they should be read, are ultimately lost on visitors. Yet, these deliberations about such crucial details as skin color and hair textures are the very same questions museum visitors naively expect science and the museum to answer confidently. A behind-the-scenes look into the exhibition process also reveals the many very eclectic influences on exhibitions. American Museum of Natural History 67

Rethinking evolution in the museum insiders have revealed that stones used in the hall’s dioramas came from an operation manager’s family home in the Catskills, Cro-Magnon bodies were cast from friends, and hair was styled after particularly hirsute subway riders (Miller, 1993).14 Furthermore, the exhibition process also elicited much deliberation over details, mostly stemming from the delicate negotiation of science and aesthetics; for example, there were apparently lengthy discussions over the size of the door to the ice hut and about costly last-minute changes that might have improved scientific accuracy. Additionally, one preparator told me that the greater implications of such dioramas are not only unanticipated, but can be rather surprising once the exhibit is complete. At completion, many people working on the exhibition see the parts as a whole for the fi rst time. Such behind-the-scenes glimpses of the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution illustrate that museum exhibitions of this scale are massive, cumbersome negotiations. Ultimately, the exhibition is a product of collaborating interests, an integration of scientific or physical accuracy, aesthetic interpretation, and financial cost. Unfortunately, because visitors are often unable to disentangle science from artistry in dioramas, they misread such reconstructions as scientific documents. Devices employed in both content and context lend legitimacy to scientific images, obscuring the inaccuracies that are so obvious to scientists and museum staff. The immediate material context of an image (such as the “museumquality” display) often serves to authenticate images while obscuring image production. For example, the authority of the confidently stated label (such as “A. afarensis, 3mya, E. Africa”) disguises the subjective decisions of the artist who has chosen the hair texture and color of a museum model. The museum itself also lends significant contextual authority for its exhibitions (such as the words, “Truth, Knowledge, Vision,” hanging over the main entrance of the American Museum of Natural History). The scientific information is preceded by an atmosphere of authority that predisposes readers or visitors to accept the information before even engaging it (see Gifford-Gonzalez, 1993). The overall context around the image lends it material support, from the text (even if unread) to the building itself, since a veneer of authority is built into the interior and exterior architecture of these museums. Scientific images, then, become inadvertently disconnected from the environmental, historical, and behavioral contexts they represent (such as the original fossil species), as well as the context in which the image is produced (Wiber, 1997). In the economy of information conveyed by a single visual representation, scientific images necessarily, though inadvertently, come then to be an apparently seamless representation of objective scientific truth. Furthermore, as Gifford-Gonzalez has noted, “For most viewers, realism is read as objective truth” (Gifford-Gonzalez, 1993, 28). Many scholars of scientific imagery have considered the persuasive effects of artistic “realism,” a common artistic method. Realism, as Molyneaux states, “or the use of naturalistic imagery implies a direct relationship between the representation and the world, transparent and without interpretive obstacles. The ideas represented claim truth to nature” (Molyneaux, 1997, 2). Gifford-Gonzalez (1993) 68

Revisiting Victorian progress also discusses the significance of the realistic style, and the naturalization of the uncertain. Within the realm of archaeology, she distinguishes between more and less realistic devices, between anatomical reconstructions (straightforward renderings of soft tissues) and illustrative or dioramic reconstructions (more imaginative reconstructions of environment). For example, in paleontology one significant fossil can come to represent the whole skeleton, and one fossil or type specimen often comes to signify the whole species – as in an image of the La Chapelle Aux Saints fossil coming to stand for Neanderthals-at-large in textbooks or museums.15 One American Museum of Natural History diorama alone, for example, can employ a combination of devices, both realist and highly imaginative. It can include an actual stone artifact held in the rather faithfully reconstructed hand of an arbitarily colored man within a rather fancifully imagined background. As Gifford-Gonzalez has noted, “Reconstructions [highlight], in almost surrealist form, the paradoxical mediation of fact and fiction . . . realism visually authorizes the factuality of the contextualizing science that frames them” (Gifford-Gonzalez, 1993, 28). The combination of real and imaginative content allows “borders of scientifi c details [to] frame the . . . dioramic centerpiece, with the aim of convincing the viewer that scientific knowledge is not capriciously derived; its methods are simply unrevealed secrets from the world of experts”(Gifford-Gonzalez, 1993, 27).16 I also noticed in the course of my research that evolutionary images must actually be dated for visitors to see the date – the more modern the representation, the more accurate it seems. Visitors often misinterpreted sophisticated artistry in images such as the AMNH dioramas as unimpeachable evidence of the images’ truth (as opposed to images I showed them from the early twentieth century). It is clear that museum visitors would benefit from more insights into the process of evolutionary reconstruction. As responses to the AMNH dioramas revealed, visitors betray the cognitive dissonance between their formal critiques of evolutionary displays and the latent evolutionary folklores they hold on to – namely that humans are really at their evolutionary apex, a European apex that far exceeds the prehistoric Africa left behind. Finally, I’ll share one last anecdote about the ways museums authorize progress narratives through the larger institutional context, namely in the museum tours. During my research at the Natural History Museum in London, I followed a tour led by a guide with a self-professed enthusiasm for human evolution. To my surprise, the guide directed the tour as one long progress narrative from beginning to end and reinforced several negative stereotypes about Africa in the context of evolution along the way. For example, the guide asked the tour group to point out some differences between ape and man in the opening diorama. A child offered, as a mark of animality, that “[apes] live in the rainforest,” to which the tour guide answered, “Yes, that’s an important thing!” Standing between child and institution, then, this tour guide reconfi rmed that where “we” come from is very different from where “we” now live. In this exchange, the African rainforest is not something occupied by modern humans, as many are, but something distant and isolated, home of apes and ape-men. The tour 69

Rethinking evolution in the museum guide concluded the tour by stating, “As time goes on you get the development of farming, and that’s when we get into the civilized world, basically. And from here on in, you have to go to the British Museum. And that’s how we become what we are now!” Here the British Museum, with its selection of cultures regarded as important, is held up as the apex of the evolutionary ladder. And visitors whose own evolutionary ancestry did not end in England, as the exhibit does, or is not represented in the British Museum, are left unaccounted for. Although comments such as those of the tour guide may seem incidental, for museum visitors they stand in many ways as representative of the museum. They are part of the authoritative architecture of the institution. Altogether, Victorian progress narratives function in complex ways in the modern museum. This is something museum visitors both bring with them to the museum (in visitors’ preference for images that are familiar and valid, and in visitors’ continued reliance on evolutionary trajectories that end in things similar to themselves) and something that is reinforced by museum exhibitions (in their inabilities to truly challenge visitors’ preconceptions and abandon outdated progress motifs). Responses to the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution diorama also reveal that visitors’ expectations of the museum and its representations fundamentally shape their experiences there, a phenomenon that can be seen even more powerfully at the Horniman Museum.

The gift of the Horniman The Horniman Museum and Gardens What a princely gift of treasure To add to London’s wealth! Given for the people’s pleasure With stores of mind and health . . . Words are too feeble to express Appreciation of this deed, But let honour none the less Be given; and for which we plead. Well we know the glorious fact, For never has it been recorded, That generous and noble act Was left by England unrewarded.17 The “generous and noble” 1901 gift of the Horniman Museum does not go unrecognized by its southeast London neighbors, even today. Although this museum is well loved by its twenty-first century audiences, the museum stands as an elegant hallmark of the Victorian era. In fact this most modern of Victorian museums opened enthusiastically to advertise and extol the new principles of social Darwinism.18 Today even the entrance of the Museum is characterized by a large mosaic 70

Revisiting Victorian progress depicting an allegory about humanity and human circumstance. The artwork, for example, represents the limitations of one’s birth, education, and surroundings. As Levell has commented, “The evolutionary rhetoric of progress was effectively inscribed on the building” (Levell, 2000, 3). While the Horniman became a landmark of Darwinian anthropology, it also embodied a unique ethos of humanitarian public education. The Horniman’s humanistic interest in its public did not only concern a desire to enlighten or educate the middle class but involved an interest in uplifting them, of normalizing the “higher pleasures” already cultivated in the elite (Levell, 2000). The museum reflected a sensibility deeply felt by the British intelligentsia, and increasingly so among the working classes, that evolutionary principles could motivate the cultural and social uplift of the lower classes. The real gift to the people of London, then, was a model of evolution-impacted ethnography soon pervasive throughout turn-of-the-century social-Darwinist England. The Horniman Museum’s decision to extol the new science of human evolution, Shelton writes, “was a brave though foolishly ambitious plan, aiming to place every culture on an evolutionary scale in relationship to all others which supported Europe’s imperial desires and engendered a saddening racism that assumed almost scientific status” (Shelton, 2000, 2). It was the fi rst appointed advisory curator of the museum, A. C. Haddon, serving from 1901 to 1915, who made the real ideological contribution to the Horniman Museum. According to curator A. C. Haddon himself, the Horniman was uniquely designed to “illustrate the evolution of culture.” It is no coincidence that Haddon borrowed this phrase from an 1875 lecture by Pitt Rivers, of the Pitt Rivers Museum, since he was the fi rst in a series of Cambridge-trained social Darwinists to govern the museum – aligning the museum closely with the Cambridge School of Anthropology (which emphasizes the circulation of ideas within a particular community of scholars). Under the guidance of Haddon, the tea-merchant Frederick Horniman’s personal collections were reconfigured into an instrument of social-Darwinist education. Most interestingly, in order for the Horniman Museum collections to be rationalized into evolutionary hierarchy, the collection had to be refi ned. Cultural objects that did not fit the tight evolutionary scheme were tactfully deaccessioned, removed to the museum store or to private collections (Levell, 2000, 6). Haddon’s 1898–9 expedition, the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, is often cited as his major contribution to anthropology; Haddon published a popular account of it as Head-Hunters: Black, White and Brown (Shelton, 2000, 22). As a skull-and-bones race scientist (or “head-hunter,” as Shelton dubs him), Haddon enthusiastically measured and statistically quantified the skulls and the nasal and auricular indices of the Islanders – exemplifying this moment in anthropology when cultural and physical anthropology were fused. Methodologically, the research was innovative in using several novel ethnographic techniques, such as interviews and photographs (Shelton, 2000, 22). As an anthropologist, Haddon was also uniquely committed to public education and singularly transformed the public image of anthropology by arguing, for example, that all Europeans traveling to other countries should 71

Rethinking evolution in the museum

Figure 3.7 The Horniman Museum’s natural history gallery in 2000 maintaining its classic, Victorian motif. Author’s photograph, courtesy of the Horniman Museum.

be anthropologically trained. Under his leadership, the Horniman Museum became a pioneering vehicle for social Darwinism – initiating a series of scholarly lectures and providing a variety of evolution-oriented exhibition handouts (Shelton, 2000, 16). Along with colleague Dr. Herbert Spencer Harrison, Haddon reorganized all of the Horniman Museum’s many ethnographic objects (many collected by Horniman himself) – weapons, helmets, paddles, and so forth – along an evolutionary scale. This evolutionary bent infused the entire Horniman Museum, in both its natural history and cultural exhibitions. The museum comprised a heterogeneous mix of two evolutionary organizing principles debated in museums at the turn of the twentieth century. The fi rst approach, most often associated with the Pitt Rivers Museum, is most characterized by the classic typological/functional illustration of evolution expressed among geographically varied artifacts (for example, the evolution of sophistication within ornaments from, say, Polynesia to Central Asia to Europe). The second principle is characterized by the segregation of artifacts by geographic region (for example, a collected assortment of Polynesian hunting weapons aside a collected assortment of European hunting weapons). At its foundation, the Horniman Museum distinctively incorporated evolutionism within multiregionalism, often illustrating evolu72

Revisiting Victorian progress tion of types within geographic region (Levell, 2000, 8, 10). This resolution of the two prevailing but conflicting principles significantly permits evolutionary progress within races without presuming evolutionary affi nities between them. Harrison eventually succeeded A. C. Haddon to become the museum’s longestserving curator, holding the position from 1904 to 1937, and in those years the museum remained committed to the social-Darwinist tradition. In the mid-twentieth century, social Darwinism thoroughly infused the Horniman Museum’s fi rst exhibition of physical anthropology in that the exhibition, part of the legacy of Otto Sampson (1925–75), was primarily an exhibition of human types. Cases displayed “mounted specimens and skeletons of apes; casts of prehistoric man, skulls from ‘modern races,’ and pictures of ‘native types,’ thus intellectually and visually bridging the gap between ethnology and zoology, and therefore concluding the evolutionary narrative, ‘the complete History of Man’” (Levell, 2000, 14). At the turn of the twenty-fi rst century, the Horniman Museum’s natural history gallery remains an important time capsule of the Victorian era (see figure 3.7). During the time of my research, the Horniman Museum was divided rather rigidly between the cultural North Hall and the natural history South Hall. While the Horniman Museum’s South Hall has been radically transformed with avant-garde new approaches to the display of human culture, the natural history gallery remained a museum within a museum, and the exhibition of human evolution within it conformed to the classic natural history motif characterizing the rest of the hall. (In 2002, the Horniman Museum underwent a major expansion. A new, modern wing was added to the museum allowing for several new galleries, including one which features an extraordinary exhibition on the history of the Museum and its collections. The Museum is also planning a major renovation of its natural history gallery.)

The Victorian museum today The transformation of the Horniman Museum’s physical anthropology exhibition into its current form was very much due to the work of now retired assistant keeper of natural history, Leaford Patrick.19 In addition to controlling the content and design of the human evolution exhibition, the artistry characterizing most of the Horniman Museum’s natural history gallery can be attributed to the work of this jack-of-all-natural-history-trades. Now retired, his artistic legacy of hand-drawn illustrations (from mollusk shells to arthropod abdomens) and meticulous attention to detail prevail in the Horniman’s natural history gallery. Patrick is also an important figure because he himself represents the intersection of shifting identities, interests, motivations, and influences of those working within the natural history museum. At small-staffed museums such as the Horniman, professional roles are often fluid and many within the museum wear multiple hats. In my interview with Patrick, he recalled that early in his career he aspired 73

Rethinking evolution in the museum beyond the limitations on him as a Jamaican man within science and the museum. This is clear in his contributions to the Horniman Museum. During his tenure at the museum, Patrick was eventually given the unique responsibility of renovating the exhibition of physical anthropology (again, an exhibition then primarily of human racial types), which he completed in 1980 with D. M. Boston (director) and G. E. Williams (zoology consultant). This project established Patrick’s lengthy investment in evolution and evolutionary representations (more natural historian than anthropologist, he also developed a specific interest in the evolution of horses). As the division between natural history and anthropology was more amorphous then at the Horniman, Patrick recalled the challenges of creating the new exhibition, reflecting on the dilemma “What is natural history? What is anthropology?” These critical questions posed a very interesting dilemma for the museum, as the two departments – natural history and anthropology – were then effectively segregated in museum space and ideology. Also, at this moment in the Horniman’s history, the anthropology department was working to divorce itself from its social-Darwinist roots; hence it was quite opposed, though diplomatically, to the natural history approach to race (taking instead a historical–linguistic approach to human variation). Because of the limitations within the museum, Patrick’s assignment to develop the new physical anthropology exhibition placed him in vigorous exchange with the intellectual anthropological community in and around England (which again exemplifies the cohesive community of anthropological and museum ideas).20 With hindsight, the modifications to the human evolution exhibit that Patrick orchestrated made only small steps philosophically, but the very process urged a transformation in the thinking of some of the natural historians involved (including Patrick himself and Gordon Williams) and presumably of some of the visitors. As Patrick noted, African origins were not yet widely accepted at the time, and the new exhibition stimulated Horniman visitors to gradually modify their many preconceptions. The new 1980 display was still built like a survey of the animal kingdom, and acceded to Carleton Coon’s argument for the separate, parallel evolution of races (see Coon’s 1962 Origin of Races). This model of multiregionalist exhibition was in many ways not far removed from the previous polygenist exhibition. The exhibition incorporated human skulls from four racial groups – “Negroid, Australoid, Mongoloid and Caucasoid” – an approach that stirred controversy for the two years the skulls were on display. In addition to the internal tension the exhibition aroused between the museum’s natural history and cultural sectors, there was also mounting public concern about this seemingly ostentatious display of human skulls. Schoolteachers felt that such exposure to skulls was gratuitous, a complaint as religious as it was racial. There were also quibbles over the racial sub-groupings (for example East Indian at that time belonged to the Caucasian racial group, as did Egyptian), and some growing repatriation concerns (particularly pertaining to the Australoid skulls). As Patrick admits, however, the skull representatives were chosen less because of their ability to typify or signify anthropologically important groups than because of their mere availability to the museum (a significant limiting factor on the breadth of such displays). In the end, the museum 74

Revisiting Victorian progress resolved this problem by replacing the skulls with photographs representing the range of human diversity – something seen in the museum’s “Varieties of Mankind” display (which I return to in chapter six).

Romanticizing the Victorian Like that of the American Museum of Natural History, the history of the Horniman Museum casts a shadow on the experiences of museum visitors today. For the Horniman Museum, the present museum is anchored to the past in its visitors’ fidelity to this time capsule of nineteenth-century science. Here, it is less about how the exhibitions are read as a progress narrative than how the whole museum itself is read as a romanticized emblem of Victorian England. From my conversations with visitors at all four museums, it seems that there are few public institutions that inspire as much nostalgia as the natural history museum. When asked to reflect generally on their perceptions of natural history museums, most visitors conjured up a romantic assortment of connotations and images: innocence, purity, wonder, an appreciation for life revealed through science, a pre-technological and unadulterated admiration of nature (albeit dead, stuffed, and dusty). The imagined institution evokes both a sense of shared community history and an idealized sense of one’s own childhood. Both are probably romantic fictions existing less in the museum space than in the minds of its visitors. At the Horniman Museum, visitors’ romanticization of the museum institution – because the natural history gallery preserves much of its original character – was particularly acute. Again and again, visitors regaled me with their fondness for the museum’s traditional displays and expressed great anxiety over the prospect of change. On top of that, though, I found that for many museum audiences, their nostalgia for traditional natural history museums was often infused with a reverence for the Victorian (which was consistent among British museum visitors, including those at the Natural History Museum). I found that the “Victorian” is a buzzword in museums, and is invoked by visitors to establish the museum as a conduit to the past. The Victorian museum era is distinguished for visitors by certain cultural markers – glass cases, old wood, stuffed animals, dust, and darkness. Visitors are often confident in their characterizations of the Victorian, though the attribution of the quality is a bit erratic and incongruous. Visitors invoked the Victorian in various ways in interviews, ranging from general descriptions of museum culture and aesthetics to specific images. One Natural History Museum visitor reflects on the loss of the Victorian in the museum: I’d pictured the [Natural History Museum] as this grand Victorian thing – I was interested to see the Grand Hall. I thought it would still be more of that, more of the cased rooms. It doesn’t seem to be so much. (B10) And a Horniman visitor comments on his appreciation for the Victorian being retained at the Museum: 75

Rethinking evolution in the museum I love this hall [the Horniman Museum natural history gallery]. It’s a piece of antiquity from the Victorian era – unique, charming. It would be a shame to ruin it. You can see modern museums anywhere in the world. (H*) Visitors’ interest in preserving the “Victorian” quality of the Horniman also often masked a fear of the museum’s increasing association with the unsophisticated masses. Many of them insisted that newer, modern “bells and whistles” are anti-intellectual. One Cambridge-raised Horniman visitor offered a perfect case study of the affectations of a visitor who considers himself a real culturally sophisticated museum-goer. He described himself as an intellectual, and he emphasized his appreciation and reverence for the natural history museum as an institution. His closing comments at the conclusion of the interview were: I hope they don’t renovate [the natural history gallery] completely. It would be a shame if it ended up like the African exhibit which is a bit selfconsciously funky and zappy and interesting. It’s a bit too much human interest. (H2) Visitors’ espoused penchant for the Victorian or traditional natural history museum also illustrates internal inconsistencies found within museum visitors. When asked whether they prefer classic Victorian displays or modern hi-tech displays, visitors (especially British visitors) overwhelmingly expressed a predilection for the classic. More in-depth interview discussion revealed, however, that most visitors seek out, and benefit educationally from, media such as the Discovery channel and museum interactives despite considering them distastefully lowbrow. While interviewees professed affection for the conventional Victorian museum, they also revealed television as a primary source of scientific education. The tension between visitors’ inclination for the traditional and the fantastical also seems to be about the two functions of the natural history museum: first, as a cultured place of recreation; and second, as a stimulating, educational institution. But while visitors seem ambivalent about changes in displays, the relationship between traditional and modern in museums is not a mutually exclusive one. Museum visitors can have a nostalgia and appreciation for the classic in one instance or experience, while being drawn to more dynamic media in another. Museums can learn to enhance natural history displays didactically while not sacrificing their original appeal. Ultimately, there is significant interplay between museum iconography and nostalgic images museum visitors bring with them to the museum, especially expectations about anthropology, human evolution, and the museum itself. The images in museums are more than literal, two-dimensional representations. As visitor experiences at the American Museum of Natural History Museum and the Horniman Museum attest, the images visitors both bring to and get out of museums are a package of ideals.

76

4 Envisioning our evolutionary beginnings

“I kind of have it as a piece of background knowledge that at some unspecified point, a long time but not a very, very long time ago we decided to stop scratching our armpit and stand up straight and take a bit of a wander out of Africa.” (Horniman Museum interviewee)

Since the fi rst well-publicized hominid discoveries of the twentieth century in Africa, much of the world has had time to adjust to the idea of their shared African origins (see figures 4.1 and 4.2; see Gundling, 2005). But how does this idea really impact those whom the rhetoric reaches? As this chapter illustrates, terms such as “Cradle of Mankind” are profoundly multivalent and dynamic.1 While an overwhelming majority of natural history museum visitors believes that they have evolved Out of Africa, visitors understand their evolutionary heritage through their own cultural identities and through stereotypical representations of Africa circulating outside the museum. Ultimately, I found that the ways many non-black museum visitors imagine their earliest bestial origins in Africa (as discussed in this chapter) are quite different from the ways they envision their recent human origins outside of the continent (as discussed in the next). Both, however, are attended by heavy cultural preconceptions about what it means to be human and what it means to be truly evolved.

Acknowledging African origins During my questionnaire research, I asked museum visitors, “Do you think of early African hominids (or ape-men) as ancestors? Why or why not?” and “Do you think of Africa as the Cradle of Mankind?” With these questions I used these weighty expressions to get a sense of how visitors assigned value to such loaded terms. In general, visitors to all four museums concurred with the two statements, with visitors at British and American museums agreeing in relatively similar proportions (85 percent NHM, 81 percent HM, 84 percent AMNH) that African hominids were ancestors, and to a lesser extent, that Africa was the Cradle of Mankind (76 percent NHM, 74 percent HM, 73 percent AMNH). As might be expected, Kenyan museum visitors related to African evolutionary origins in deep and distinctive ways. At the National Museums 77

Rethinking evolution in the museum Figure 4.1 Map of early hominid sites in Africa.

of Kenya, 78 percent of visitors saw African hominids as ancestors, consistent with responses at British and American museums. But an overwhelming 92 percent of visitors saw Africa as the “Cradle of Mankind.” If human origins stories are endowed with significant cultural meaning, those with a closer relationship to Africa, those living in rather than out of Africa, clearly appreciate the continent more fully as the place from which they came. As discussed later in the book, Africa as the Cradle of Mankind is of more personal and cultural relevance for black museum visitors in general and Kenyan museum visitors in particular.2 (See spread of visitors’ responses in figure 4.3.) All of these statistics merely sketch a plot, however; the museum visitors’ actual words tell the full story. Paying attention to the words visitors use to come to terms with their evolutionary heritage reveals the surprising extent to which British and American visitors rely on cultural and racial preconceptions of Africa to understand the science of African origins. From this evidence, we see the tacit assumptions communicated by the human evolution exhibitions as well as the racialized cultural preconceptions visitors use to interpret them, both mutually reinforcing each other to produce an image of a static and primitive Africa.

African ape-men as “ancestors” Regarding African ape-men as ancestors, several respondents assumed a unique connection between black peoples of today and evolutionarily distant African ancestors. Visitors used various forms of social-evolutionist or progressivist logic to come to terms with their distant African ancestors. Some visitors made the social-evolutionist logic perfectly clear. For example, a Natural History Museum visitor’s questionnaire response revealed poignantly visitors’ racial misconceptions, as well as their sources: “Yes . . . school lessons always linked the 78

Envisioning our evolutionary beginnings

Figure 4.2 Diagram representing hominid fossils through time. Note that the history of fossil species is more branching than linear, with species overlapping at various points. Courtesy of the Yale Peabody Museum.

two [Africa and ape-men] . . . because of appearance and similarities.” A Horniman Museum visitor echoed this misconception rooted in formal education, reasoning on the questionnaire that African ape-men were ancestors because “it is what I have been told at school. Also if you look to a coloured person, their faces have more similarities to hominids than us.” Some visitors made more subtle associations. For example, one Natural History Museum respondent reasoned that African ape-men were ancestors “because they were nomadic,” an inference that associated African nomads of today with the presumed nomads of deep evolutionary history. Again and again, museum visitors typically pointed to modern black people as living emblems of our deep evolutionary history, a lazy extrapolation common to nineteenth-century social evolutionism. Visitors also relied upon their own relationship to contemporary Africa to comprehend their distant African origins. A number of non-black visitors provided affi rmation of their African origins by relating their own travel experiences to or familiarity with the African continent. Some black visitors used themselves 79

Rethinking evolution in the museum

Figure 4.3 Visitors who believe “African ‘ape-men’ are ancestors” and “Africa is the ‘cradle of mankind.’”

as evidence of their evolutionary origins. One black Jamaican visitor to the NHM wrote that he believed in African ape-men as ancestors “because we as Africans possess hair texture unique to animals (of far different quality).” Such self-referential responses reveal just how much folk explanations of race and racial characteristics can distort the way people of color come to see themselves. Racial misconceptions are not unique to Euroamericans, ingrained as they are in popular culture, formal systems of education, and museum institutions. While interviews generally offered the best sense of how visitors negotiated questions about their evolutionary origins, occasionally questionnaires also revealed visitors’ conceptual maneuverings. An AMNH visitor explained his resistance to regarding African ape-men as ancestors with, “Not really. But when one thinks about it, I guess one might consider them ancestors. This is largely because of what society tells us.” Clearly, even on questionnaires, visitors can have trouble being decisive about such weighty and loaded issues. A questionnaire respondent at the American Museum of Natural History admitted his own reluctance to envision African ape-men as ancestors, stating, “No – it’s just not a good feeling.” Here, too, a questionnaire response shows the hazy emotions that shape visitors’ responses to evolving out of Africa. Undoubtedly, however, the richest responses came about during interviews. For example, one Horniman visitor revealed his own evolutionary assumptions when answering the question “Do you think of African ape-men as ‘ancestors’?” He said: No, I do. I think we’re . . . It’s a difficult one because it sort of goes into a lot of sort of spiritual beliefs, and that as well where life is life is life. It’s all the same thing. It’s just the different physical forms that we take . . . (H3) Convoluted responses like these speak to just the degree to which evolution is attended by a wealth of cultural implication. In response to African ape-men as ancestors, other interviewee responses are similarly quite knotty: 80

Envisioning our evolutionary beginnings I suppose if you’re talking technically, you would have to say no simply because you’ve got to try to draw the tree in some way. But I suppose emotionally probably yes. (B10) Maybe this is just received wisdom. But, yeah, paradoxically I believe that [Lucy] is an ancestor more than that Neanderthal, which intellectually I might need to think about. These are not the sort of things I normally think about. Intellectually, I’m not sure if that’s a valid position but emotionally that’s my current of thought. (H1) Visitor responses suggest that perceptions of human evolution and Africa are anything but neat and tidy, and seem to shift in the course of even one interview. To be sure, visitors make ancestral meanings in complex ways, both in natural history museums and in their everyday lives.

Africa as the “Cradle of Mankind” Among questionnaire respondents and interviewees, the notion of Africa as the “Cradle of Mankind” met more resistance than the idea of African hominids as “ancestors,” presumably because of the cultural nuances of the expression. In order to comprehend Africa in this way, museum visitors tended to rely on a number of outdated anthropological rationales. To explain their attitudes regarding Africa as the Cradle of Mankind, visitors routinely called upon associations with African peoples, an imagined African landscape and recent cultural or political criteria. Altogether, this question inspired many British and American visitors to come to terms with significant tensions between “us” and “them,” between biological origins and cultural origins, between Africa and Europe, and between ape-men and ancestors. Not only do visitor responses shed light on the limited vocabulary visitors use when thinking of the “we” and “they” in African origins, they emphasize how the sentiments of scientifically educated museum visitors of today are anchored to nineteenth-century ladders of progress from Africa to Europe. First, asking people to imagine Africa as the Cradle of Mankind elicited responses that depended substantially upon images of modern-day African people as living embodiments of evolutionary ancestors. For example, one Natural History Museum visitor wrote on a questionnaire that, “Yes [I believe Africa is the Cradle of Mankind] because Africa has a black population and we evolved from a black race.” This straightforward rationale was echoed again and again among museum visitors, suggesting the metaphorical significance of black bodies when considering African origins. Similarly, a Horniman visitor reasoned on the questionnaire, “When you think of Australian aborigines . . . I think we come from there. But when you think of Masai, I think maybe the Garden of Eden is in Africa.” As we stood in front of the Horniman evolution exhibition, this visitor invokes various dark-skinned peoples as potential signifiers of her own evolutionary origins (and this visitor, incidentally, was Indian). 81

Rethinking evolution in the museum Indigenous African people were being clearly called upon as conduits to the past, as analogies for distant evolutionary ancestors. The second rationale visitors used to conceptualize the Cradle of Mankind was an imagined African landscape. The visitor that coupled the Masai and the Garden of Eden conjured an image of evolutionary ancestors as well as an image of the prehistoric origins environment. This evolutionary determinism characterizes how many people understood Africa as the Cradle of Mankind – as lush, timeless wilderness devoid of humans. As Adams and McShane have written, “Europeans invented a mythical Africa, which soon claimed a place of privilege in the Western imagination. We cling to our faith in Africa as a glorious Eden for wildlife” (Adams and McShane, 1996: xii). Other visitors focused quite explicitly upon the perceived fertility of the African landscape. For example, a Natural History Museum visitor wrote, “With all the rainforest area and fertile land with plenty of water, it would seem ideal for the early mankind.” These statements suggest that, despite the popularity of the savanna hypothesis (which argues that the savanna environment created a selection pressure for bipedality) and the present-day aridity of the East and South African fossil sites, some museum visitors tended to imagine Africa as a land of lush rainforests and fecund jungle. Interestingly, some visitors responded to this question by simply commenting that Africa “just seems right” or “just feels right” as the Cradle of Mankind, perhaps also expressing the visceral emotions attributed to the African continent and evolutionary information. When I challenged British and American visitors on questionnaires to divulge the stereotypes they hold of the African continent, the majority chose the stereotype of Africa as a “place of beautiful animals” fi rst, then “a place of beautiful people” second (followed by, in descending and surprisingly consistent order, “a continent in turmoil,” “a land of primitive cultures,” and lastly “a Garden of Eden” – here, I believe, visitors resist the religious connotations of the expression). Although the questionnaire question was not as revealing as visitors’ qualitative responses, through both types of questioning Africa seems to be persistently valued for its animals, with its people simply coming along with the package. Generally, I found many visitors call upon perceptions of the present African landscape to rationalize the prehistoric African past, a uniformitarian logic that serves to lock that African continent in a rather remote, timeless, and static prehistory. The third rationale used by visitors denies Africa as the Cradle of Mankind based on stereotypes of contemporary African politics. For example, one Natural History Museum visitor expressed his difficulty envisioning Africa as the Cradle of Mankind by writing, “No. I think Africa’s status as a third-world continent overshadows the role it played in the development of mankind.”3 Another Natural History Museum visitor, a white American visitor who was frustrated with what he saw as Western benevolence toward Africa, also used politicized logic: “There are lots of people who would like us to believe that [Africa is the Cradle of Mankind] in the US now. There is enormous pressure to give Africa her due, as if it needed anything else. Africa is doing fi ne” (NHM*). Other visitors resisted Africa as the Cradle based on Western yardsticks of 82

Envisioning our evolutionary beginnings progress. One American Museum of Natural History visitor resisted the notion, summarily stating, “No. Mankind had more European influence.” Another visitor explained on the questionnaire, “Mankind has developed outside of Africa to a greater degree.” This Horniman visitor’s comment seems to epitomize the culturally biased and progress-driven logic typical of many responses. Clearly, the vision of Africa as a troubled continent today influences perceptions, and even inspires resentment, of Africa’s role in prehistory. Somewhat expectedly, I encountered another contingent of respondents who believe that the expression “Cradle of Mankind” refers to, or should refer to, recent cultural or ethnic origins. For example, one American Museum of Natural History visitor, self-described as Chinese, wrote, “No. Other continents had civilizations just as early” (the reverse is sometimes true – where the phrase “Cradle of Mankind” is considered specifically in the domain of science rather than culture – as in the opinion of one North African Muslim interviewee that expressed disdainfully, “‘Cradle of Mankind’ is an evolution thing” [B12]). Several visitors also articulated a difference between the biological and cultural birthplaces of humanity, expressing their discomfort with Africa being anything other than a distinctly biological birthplace. For example, visitors would qualify Africa’s status as the Cradle of Mankind with statements such as, “biologically maybe, but not culturally.” Along these lines, visitors also assigned different origin values to North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, stating that they imagined North Africa or the Fertile Crescent as the Cradle of Humanity but not sub-Saharan Africa. In these instances, it seemed that distinctions were drawn between the possibilities of a bestial, dark, sub-Saharan Africa and those of a more exotic and romanticized North Africa. In response to the question of the Cradle, I also found that museum visitors tend to cling to multiregionalist explanations. Respondents seem to hold on to the belief that races have prehistorically deep evolutionary origins and that modern humans are not recently associated, despite the wealth of scientific scholarship showing the fluidity of human diversity and the recent common origins shared by all Homo sapiens. For many visitors, Europeans come from Europe, Africans come from Africa, and Asians come from Asia. One black AMNH visitor qualified his response to the question of Africa as Cradle of Mankind by specifying his own African origins: “I’m not sure, but I believe it’s where our black ancestors derived from.” This multiregionalist bent might be a product of museums lagging behind scientific fi ndings pertaining to the genetic homogeneity of the human species; it might also be a product of a general satisfaction people have in fundamental racial dissimilarities. In some of my in-depth interviews, visitors’ complex and tangled perceptions of Africa as the Cradle were particularly apparent. One rather self-conscious interviewee revealed several intersecting lines of thought – political, religious, and intellectual – as he responded to questions regarding the African continent. First, he claims a decided lack of sentimentality toward Africa. When I asked him whether he had “any feelings toward Africa as the Cradle of Mankind,” he said, 83

Rethinking evolution in the museum I don’t know if I have special feelings towards it. I feel that I should point out at this stage I’m about as atheist as is possible . . . Yeah, I kind of have it as a piece of background knowledge that at some unspecified point, a long time but not a very very long time ago we decided to stop scratching our armpits and stand up straight and take a bit of a wander out of Africa and populate the rest of the world. But I don’t have a special attachment to it. (H2) Despite his claims to the contrary, this interviewee does, in fact, exhibit a “special attachment” to Africa, insofar as the continent still performs its traditional role of holding up one end of the evolutionary yardstick. But perceptions are complex, and while visitors are able to incorporate incisive critiques of representations of Africa in one moment, their biases persist in another. This same interviewee intellectually dissected the Horniman’s “Varieties of Mankind” panel by pointing out, It would be fairly appalling if everyone took it too seriously because it’s inaccurate . . . particularly things like picturesque tribes from South Africa, particularly since this exhibit was made. Whatever proportion it is, probably a very large proportion of the population has moved to the cities and basically aren’t being picturesque and living in mud huts any more, basically doing the same thing that people in cities do. And eating McDonald’s and all the rest of it. (H2) However, in another instance, he offered this contradictory sentiment: I’ve never been to Africa. Though I’d quite like to go. I think it would be good to visit as many continents as possible . . . But if I go anywhere I need to have a cheeseburger and basic internet access. They are just the kind of minimum requirements. He then tempered this sentiment with evidence of his moral compass, attempting to distinguish himself from the limited middle-class visions of others: The other thing I want to avoid doing, the British middle-class thing, which is going to Africa by which they mean going to South Africa and being driven around the . . . park in something air-conditioned . . . It’s such an amazingly watered down kind of experience. You might just as well go to the . . . zoo. Taken all together, the interviewee’s perceptions of his African origins and the African continent are complex and shifting. With liberal rationality, he regards Africa not as a place of picturesque tribes but as a place of cities and hamburgers. He also considers traveling to Africa, but then worries over the potential lack of internet and those very McDonald’s hamburgers he had previously mentioned as part of the modern continent. At the same time, he also wants a 84

Envisioning our evolutionary beginnings seemingly authentic African experience, not one that is “watered down.” Again, these perceptions are not necessarily mutually exclusive or contradictory. They merely betray the complications of human perceptions – an amalgamation of education, experience, enculturation, and likely the uniqueness of the interview context. Interestingly, even as tourists in Kenya, museum visitors have trouble accepting Africa as the Cradle. Despite their general respect for the “Leakey Museum,” some visitors walked through the Prehistory Gallery incredulously, including even some Kenyans who asked skeptically, “All this happened in Africa?” Tour guides shared anecdotes with me about European tourists resisting the notion of African origins (and, during my research, one such tourist even asked me, an outsider, to validate the tour guide’s claim regarding Africa as the Cradle of Mankind). Commenting on the disbelief of some white tourists, one Kenyan tour guide said, When you get to the tourists, they don’t agree on that, that being the Cradle of Mankind. Some say it can’t happen. When you try to explain to them the climatic changes that can cause the differences in the coloring and the skin. Some say yes, but some say no, it cannot be like those guys [the diorama models showing African hominids]. Most of them are white people from Europe. They don’t believe they can come from this. Maybe fi fteen or so groups over the ten years. It’s a very interesting gallery because you get different people with different opinions. You have to be careful. You have to know how to handle the group. You get different comments from different people. (K9) Despite the many Westerners who conceive of Africa as a Garden of Eden, a place to experience prehistoric ancestors and origins (as described by KirschenblattGimblett, 1991, 438), apparently some find more opportunities for distancing themselves from the continent than making connections to it. Altogether, this visitor research illuminates the ways the phrase “Cradle of Mankind” is extremely value-laden for museum visitors. It is quite natural for white British and American museum visitors to imagine their recent origins in a place closer to home. More unsettling, however, it seems that many non-black people customarily call upon outdated stereotypes of African cultures and African politics to inform their understanding of African prehistory and the African present.

Color-coding I found that black evolutionary figures come packaged in a few forms with which laypersons have grown comfortable. In the progress narrative from African origins to modern humanity, visitors reveal more comfort with the idea of evolving from African ape-men than from human African ancestors (the fi rst Homo sapiens in Africa). So visitors are more comfortable with ape-like hominids as 85

Rethinking evolution in the museum kin than with dark-skinned hominids as kin (no doubt due in part to the wide circulation of images of apes, “Lucy”-like hominids and relatively few of an African Eve). Increasingly, it became apparent that skin color may be the most important factor museum visitors use when determining whether the “ancestor” is deemed a close or distant one. And many non-black museum visitors quite simply found dark-skinned African people hard to relate to. Generally, visitors have an easier time romanticizing the continent of Africa rather than the people of it. The significance of skin color as a marker of familiarity and difference is not a new concept. Like the National Geographic readers studied by Lutz and Collins, non-black people link dark skin with evolutionary inferiority, brute labor, and undifferentiated masses of people devoid of individual humanity (see Lutz and Collins, 1993, 155–84, 256–8). Lutz and Collins also found that National Geographic readers regarded images of dark-skinned people as depressing, uncomfortable, or devoid of “typical” humanity (that is, viewed as having less personality and human emotion). When dark-skinned Africans were attributed emotions by readers, they were often seen as angry, frightened, cannibalistic, or depressed. These dark-skinned photographic subjects were also viewed as examples of a problematic race. As one would expect from a color-coded yardstick of progress, reactions to bronze peoples fit neatly between negative reactions to black peoples and positive appreciation of white peoples (Lutz and Collins, 1993, 161, 232, 256–7). Melanie Wiber confi rmed these perceptions of skin color and difference as well. Wiber’s study of college student reactions to reconstructions of human ancestors concluded, too, that viewers frequently associated dark skin with the primitive, and white skin with the modern (Wiber, 1997, 16–17). For example, in describing a Matternes illustration of australopithecines (taken from Howell, 1965) one student commented: “The faces are presented in a kind of primitive way. Their skin colour is dark.” She found that students frequently resolve evolutionary ancestors with a line of progress from dark-skinned ancestors to white-skinned Homo sapiens, and students were concerned when this narrative was disrupted. Wiber writes, White is definitely coded as “advanced” in evolutionary terms by student respondents. They connect white with Homo sapiens and persons of colour with more primitive hominids. On several occasions students qualified the relatively advanced evolutionary status of the images in an illustration by prefacing the species name with the term “white” as in: “This one is white Homo sapiens.” Another approach was to speak of “regular skin” in contrast to “too hairy” or “too dark” to be “regular skin.” Without exception, the illustrations containing hairy or dark-skinned figures were identified as “more primitive” or “very primitive” in comparison with lighter-skinned images. (Wiber, 1997, 117)

86

Envisioning our evolutionary beginnings Figure 4.4 A reconstruction of Homo erectus by John Gurche. Courtesy of John Gurche.

Clearly, white skin color has become one of the most significant criteria of the evolved state. My work with museum visitors also testifies to the color-coded yardstick of progress and non-black interviewees’ discomfort with dark skin and darkskinned African peoples. For example, when I showed interviewees a National Geographic image of a H. erectus model reconstructed by John Gurche (Gore, 1997, 93; figure 4.4), the visceral, negative reactions visitors had to the image revealed much of anxieties over “darkest Africa.” People almost immediately found the image arresting and discomforting, despite great appreciation for the model’s craftsmanship (of course, it was arresting because of its craftsmanship). Young people often expressed uncontained repulsion or fear toward the image as a black man. Adults, too, were often quick to mention skin color in their list of descriptives, whereas they took for granted the color of white-skinned reconstructions. Despite fi nding the image discomforting, some respondents connected the image to larger popular culture, by commenting, for example, “It looks like the advertising for the new Planet of the Apes” (A2). The sophisticated artistry of the National Geographic H. erectus image distinguishes it from other such images. In it, the most striking details, a product of the artistry, are the model’s lifelike eyes and skin. The model also has straight hair that contradicts for visitors its animal-like facial features (bear in mind, of course, that apes have straight hair; but African peoples often do not). It forced many visitors to reconcile the model’s impossible humanity (again emerging 87

Rethinking evolution in the museum Figure 4.5 An illustration by Zdenek Burian for the cover of the 1978 Burian and Wolf book The Dawn of Man.

from the artistry, the eyes) and its fundamental bestiality (the dark skin color, the protruding lips and jaw, the brow ridge). In the sorting exercise interviewees invariably placed the H. erectus image before the Neanderthal images. As one visitor commented, “This is a far less human creature [than Neanderthals]” (B3). Even though the erectus species does predate Neanderthals, it is interesting to question what features on the part of artists and audience distinguish the primitive from the advanced. Why is the creature pictured in the image less human? Interviewees pointed out the same set of features, in almost the same order: broad nose, brow ridges, and skin color. There is nothing, however, in the head shot (relative to the Neanderthal images I used) to suggest that the creature does not have command of sophisticated culture. Visitors must draw that conclusion from the combination of brow ridges and brown skin, even though the combination of brow ridges and white skin, as commonly found in Neanderthal images, suggests to them some sort of familiar humanity. The National Geographic image “looks so human” (B3), but is somehow intangibly different. Interestingly, the image reflects simultaneously the most primitive of hominids and racial groups living today. The racial associations that visitors drew from National Geographic H. erectus were hardly subtle: I can see someone actually photographing someone looking close to this. I could see someone in the world looking like this today, maybe not so pronounced eyebrow ridge . . . Like an aboriginal African group. (B7) 88

Envisioning our evolutionary beginnings One visitor was perplexed that such a primitive creature would have “European hair,” thus combining primitive traits (dark skin, brow ridges) and modern traits (straight hair): [it] has a certain quality, it’s like somewhere between gorilla and human. But the hair is weird. It looks like it could be European hair, white European hair. The face is rather gorilla-like. (B9) When asked to compare Burian’s “Dawn of Man” image (figure 4.5) with the National Geographic H. erectus image, this visitor found the Dawn of Man image equally strange because it juxtaposes an aggressive look with pale skin: . . . where in this one [Dawn of Man], there’s a much more aggressive look on the face. It’s paler but it is . . . in some ways it’s more ape-like (B9; emphasis mine) Looking at the National Geographic H. erectus image, another visitor expected certain features rather than others to fit together naturally: That’s really interesting because that looks almost like an attempt to reconcile people and apes by creating a direct merge between the two, in the sense that it has the external color and texture of an ape imposed on a modern human face . . . but with little ape-like details stuck to it, like the really, really broad nose and low continuing ridge of bones sticking out of the face . . . And Al Pacino’s hair . . . It just has the look of too much of a modern skull with too much of an early skin stretched over it. The face is too modern but all of the details of the face are going back to something really, really early. (H2; emphasis mine) Again, this visitor associated dark skin with the primitive; with straight hair the image is seen as anachronistic. Australian aborigines were sometimes invoked in conversations, taken as uniquely related to the National Geographic figure represented. The following conversation about the image slips easily from Australian aborigines to Africa, the two groups interchangeable because of their dark skin color: A3: [These]Aborigines look totally different [from humans]. A2: Yeah, being Australian, Australian aborigines . . . It’s a classic image of Africa. A3: Yeah. Some young people expressed their discomfort with the image outright: B11: No. It’s ugly, I don’t like the color of the face. NHM*: No, I don’t like the color of the skin. 89

Rethinking evolution in the museum Young people were often the most forthcoming. A multiracial group of highschool students at AMNH (A15) mentioned spontaneously, as things that stood out, the model’s coloring and skin, followed by the hair (“looks like dreadlocks”) and nose. They immediately added that “it looks racist” and “it kinda looks [like] the stereotypical black man, big lips and apelike.”4 (Generally, they described the National Geographic H. erectus image as “strange” and overwhelmingly “racist.”) When asked whether or not they liked the image, they responded in chorus, “No!” and, “It scares me.” They also found the racially incongruous straight hair confusing. Despite being keen on the racial implications of images, when asked whether they preferred this image of Homo erectus to the one they have seen in the AMNH diorama, they responded with comments such as, “Their skin [in the AMNH diorama] is lighter. I like them better.” Also of interest, upon learning that the figure in the National Geographic image was a female, these students, like many interviewees, routinely gasped in horror as it also disturbed their ideas about femininity. A group of the Horniman Museum’s young black regulars that I interviewed also had interesting comments regarding the racialized images I discussed with them, which led them to elaborate on the differences between cave-men and ape-men and to question the race of early man. On the National Geographic H. erectus image, the young regulars found the image disagreeable both because it “looks like a monkey,” and, they whispered, because it “looks like a black man” (H8–10). Overall, interviewees found the image of Homo erectus arresting, unpleasant, and ugly. As an evolutionary reconstruction devoid of racial implications these responses would be benign. However, interviewees also clearly associate the image with a black man, and the association therein becomes much more pernicious. For many museum visitors, dark skin color is the most significant signifier of the primitive and all of the cultural misconceptions that attend it, though the problem here is not with the association of dark skin and prehistory but with the lack of association between dark skin and modernity. Dark skin color alone, and not strictly associations with the continent of Africa, frequently stigmatizes a group as evolutionarily inferior. For many people, Australian aborigines are more obviously “African” than, say, light-skinned Africans. Thus “Bushmen” and Australian aborigines become interchangeable as prototypical living fossils, encapsulated in this statement from one of my interviewees, “All Australians look like South Africans” (B12). Skin color – and specifically blackness – stands unchallenged in marking the lowest point on the evolutionary ladder. 5 Ultimately, abstract Africans and bodily Africans (those confronting visitors in exhibition models, reconstruction images, photographs, and real life) are seen differently – the former theoretical brethren, the latter a threatening burden.

90

5 Envisioning our evolutionary destinies

“Why do you care so much where we come from? We come from America.” (Ten-year-old visitor to the American Museum of Natural History)

One of the most significant revolutions within twentieth-century evolutionary science was the reconceptualization of modern human origins (the origin of Homo sapiens) and modern human diversity. Early in the twentieth century, theories of cultural relativism and advances in human genetics began to dismantle Victorian notions of human biology and culture. Most significantly, throughout the twentieth century, scholars and scientists worked to discredit older theories of “race” and environmental determinism; as a result, they revealed the concept of race to be biologically insignificant, a social rather than biological construct. Furthermore, growing research in genetics, paleoanthropology and archaeology has come to reveal Africa as not only the birthplace of our earliest ape-like ancestors but also the birthplace of our culturally sophisticated modern human ancestors (see Stringer and McKie, 1996; McBrearty and Brooks, 2000). Together, the scholarship amassed throughout the twentieth century has strongly undermined ideas of teleological evolutionary progress and racial hierarchy. Despite critical growth in anthropological science, however, outdated Victorian progress motifs often linger in the popular imagination. As this chapter shows, museum visitors still hold on to racial folklore and a seemingly commonsense perception of race despite changes in evolutionary science and museum representation; this, again, emphasizes the struggle between the power of museum visitors’ preconceptions and their intuitive beliefs when confronting science in museums.

“We are indeed all Africans under our skin”: the implications of an African Eve1 Writing from Oxford, England, a British op-ed columnist commented on new scientific evidence for a recent African Eve: “I had my DNA examined by a prominent genetic specialist here, and what do you know! It turns out I’m African-American. The mitochondria in my cells show that I’m descended from 91

Rethinking evolution in the museum Figure 5.1 The map above represents the “out-of-Africa” hypothesis with two major migrations from Africa – an earlier migration (of Homo erectus) and later migration (of Homo sapiens). The map below represents the multiregionalism hypothesis with only one major migration (of Homo erectus) from Africa and Homo sapiens evolving in separate locations around the world.

a matriarch who lived in Africa, possibly in present-day Ethiopia or Kenya” (Kristof, 2003). While playful, this statement shows just how invested modernday humans are in evolutionary information because it seems, on some level, to suggest something fundamental about the essence of humanity on biological, cultural, ethnic, and even national terms. (Înterestingly, the comment also shows the writer’s inclination to defi ne himself African-American rather than “African.”) Generally, evolutionary science itself has moved far from seeing African peoples as evolutionary intermediates. “African origins” has developed complex and ever-changing meanings in scientific discourse over the past century, and these meanings have changed the face of African ancestors (Bowler, 1984; Bowler, 1986; Corbey and Theunissen, 1995; Foley, 1995). Of signal importance to evolutionary narratives, genetic evidence of the 1980s led to the “out-of-Africa” hypothesis, which suggested that all living humans today share a recent African ancestor that lived 100,000–200,000 years ago (see figures 5.1 and 5.2), the mitochondrial Eve (see Cann, Stoneking and Wilson, 1987; Brown, 1990; Wilson and Cann, 1992; Lieberman and Jackson, 1995; Stringer and McKie, 1996). By introducing the idea of a recent “African Eve,” and a second significant (albeit simplified) “migration” out of Africa, this revolutionary fi nding

92

Envisioning our evolutionary destinies

Figure 5.2 Map representing the migration of Homo sapiens within and outside of Africa.

reshaped the way we understand the origin of our own species, Homo sapiens. This shift in scientific thought disrupts conventional evolutionary timelines, revising notions of a static and primitive Cradle of Mankind. Furthermore, in determining a recent common origin for all humans, the out-of-Africa model reveals human diversity to be a recent phenomenon in evolutionary terms. In addition to the genetic research, there is substantial new evidence that Homo sapiens developed culture fi rst in Africa, pre-dating Cro-Magnon culture in Europe by about 60,000 years. 2 Archaeologists working in Kenya, South Africa, and Tanzania, for example, have found many signs of modern human culture – complex tool-making, hunting and fishing, ornamentation, and networks of trade and exchange – beginning well before analogous behaviors in Europe (McBrearty and Brooks, 2000). Also, the fi rst anatomical signs of modernity, such as chins, have been fi rst seen in South African fossils at 100,000 years ago. Genetic, fossil, archaeological, and linguistic data corroborate to urge new images of modern humanity in museums, but these scientifi c advances are undermined by the conventional African imagery that continues to circulate.

93

Rethinking evolution in the museum One reason museums might be sluggish to introduce new images of modern human origins is there has long been a tense political climate surrounding outof-Africa research and researchers, and an entrenched bias even within the discipline toward locating a European origin for modern humans (mirroring battles encountered in the 1920s over Africa as the Cradle of Mankind). This is why we see, for example, the Out-of-Africa model coined the “Killer African Hypothesis” by Milford Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist and ardent multiregionalist (Stringer and McKie, 1996, 81). It has also been coined the “Great Leap Backward” (a play on the European archaeological revolution known as the “Great Leap Forward”). Such culturally charged wordplay within the scientific community does not bode well for the model’s reception outside of it. Natural History Museum curator Chris Stringer chronicled his own battles supporting the Out-of-Africa model in his essay “Out of Eden: a personal history” (Stringer and McKie, 1996, 65–83). Stringer’s story illustrates much of the polemics surrounding modern human origins research and the strong resistance within the discipline to locating the origins of Homo sapiens in Africa. Even the Natural History Museum was pulled into the fray; according to Stringer, the Museum was subject to numerous outside attacks because of his support of the model. Out-of-Africa has, however, come to gain consensus among anthropologists, and offers possibilities for expanding canonical images of African ancestors. Although most museums have not yet incorporated the genetic and fossil evidence for modern humans originating in Africa, scientific research strongly argues for new representations of culturally sophisticated black modern humans in sub-Saharan Africa some 100,000 years ago as the evolutionary ancestors of all humans living today. However, even if the earliest evidence of modern human origins were at some point to be located outside of Africa, the representative images of modern humanity are still in drastic need of revision. In an essay exploring the racial implications of today’s origins models, Lieberman and Jackson carefully point out that linking either argument to egalitarian race politics (i.e. that modern humans originated recently in Africa, so Africans are as good as Europeans) carelessly opens a window for dangerous implications should the data change (Lieberman and Jackson, 1995). Even if research were to show eventually that modern humans did not originate in Africa, the modern-day reality of human equality should not be questioned. The biological insignificance of race depends on only one set of data – the biological equality of races – and that evidence has stood strong for nearly a century. There has long been substantial evidence of early modern human sophistication, both biological and cultural, in Africa, and this alone demands change to traditional origins iconography. Of course, as one museum visitor wisely put it, “if somebody’s going to be racist, they’re going to be racist even if we were out of Africa only ten years ago” (B10).

94

Envisioning our evolutionary destinies

Killer African apes vs. the sympathetic European Neanderthals As icons, both the cave-man/Neanderthal and ape-man/African serve significant symbolic functions as abbreviations of particular prehistoric moments. 3 By far, the image of the Neanderthal is the most common representative of prehistoric man (man as opposed to ape-man). Its suite of characteristics – white skin, disheveled hair, stooped posture, vacant expression (the classic characteristics developed by artists such as Zdenek Burian in figure 4.5.) – has been endlessly repackaged and redistributed. Much scholarship has addressed how the iconic roles of Neanderthals have fluctuated in tandem with theories about their phylogenetic proximity to modern humans (Moser, 1992; Moser, 1996a; Moser, 1996b; Moser, 1998; Moser and Gamble, 1997; Trinkaus and Shipman, 1993). Constance Clark writes about depictions of the classic cave-man as a relatively civilized and sympathetic character due largely to their associations with the origins of art: Monkeys, apes, ape-men, missing links and cave men had populated the public imagination for a long time, having come into vogue in the late nineteenth century in response to Darwinism. The discovery of cave art in Europe beginning in the early twentieth century had added a new dimension to their appeal as symbols. Cave men turned out to be rather protean symbols, adapting easily to Progressive era preoccupations, and by the time of the revitalized evolution debates of the 1920s, had been fi xed in a common cultural vocabulary. The symbolism of the cave man, the apeman and the missing link had become part of the grammar of discussions of race, gender, class, and all manner of cultural concerns. (Clark, 2006, 106)

Many images of the Neanderthal function irrespective of the African apeman, juxtaposed simply against the modern European as his brutish prehistoric ancestor. As comic relief, the Neanderthal provides the best prehistoric mirror for the European and his anxieties about his disheveled and stooped, though still white and empathetic, origins. However, the African ape-man is the natural predecessor of the Neanderthal cave-man, and the two have a symbolic interdependence. In longer narratives of human evolution, such as those incorporated in museums and those played out in linear depictions of the “march of progress,” we see the white-skinned Neanderthal cave-man as an advancement beyond the dark-skinned bestial ape-man. The Neanderthal caveman and African ape-man have a symbolic relationship with one another, and both make significant evolutionary arguments about human progress – the African ape-man represents the beginning, and the European Neanderthal represents the middle. Their roles persist despite the existence of non-white humans who obviously did not evolve from European Neanderthals and despite the scientific evidence suggesting that in actuality no humans evolved from European Neanderthals. 95

Rethinking evolution in the museum The relationship between Neanderthals and dark-skinned ancestors are significantly complicated with the proliferation of the notion of an African Eve, and the thesis that modern humans from Africa outcompeted Neanderthals to become the ancestors of all Homo sapiens. Again, however, an iconographic ploy is often performed to redeem the European character. As Diane GiffordGonzalez (2000) has argued, the European Neanderthal is now often portrayed as succumbing to the physically and sexually violent, spear-wielding darkskinned modern savages newly out of Africa. This is epitomized by a scene in the 2000 BBC production Ape-Man which depicts a gang of black men circling and raping a young, docile Neanderthal woman, thus drawing upon enduring racial stereotypes.4 The scene reveals only thinly veiled racial anxieties about miscegenation, black male sexuality and rape. It is clear that the museum visitors I worked with fi nd the European Neanderthal a more sympathetic ancestor than the early African human, despite being descendants of the latter. Modern humans out of Africa are often envisioned as violent, aggressive, and uncultured vis-à-vis the more beloved Neanderthals, a perception also stirred by popular books and fi lms, such as Golding’s The Inheritors (1955) and Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear (1980), that even predate the genetic out-of-Africa thesis. Commenting on the evidence for earliest modern human origins in Africa and their relationship to pre-existing European forms, one visitor explained what might have happened between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals: War. They beat the daylights out of each other. Well, if you look at the way we behave today, Homo sapiens, we’re quite aggressive in some ways, so it makes you wonder whether we were aggressive then. Neanderthals were a peace-loving group of people and we come in and knock the hell out of them and kill them all. (B14) It is also clear that, despite the lack of attention the out-of-Africa model has received in exhibitions, museum visitors have been somewhat exposed to the model outside the museum. For example, one visitor expressed general interest in the model: That’s something I’ve seen a program on, on the Discovery channel. And one of the things that really fascinated me about that is that they showed this little map of Africa and Europe and they showed how every time these migrations took part and where they went . . . What I can’t get my head around, and what I don’t understand is, like, if you’ve got, if we evolved from something else and that something else had already sort of moved out and spread around, why wasn’t it something that happened all over the place? Why was it something that happened only in Africa? (H3) Visitors often fi nd it a challenge to abandon the seemingly intuitive belief that modern humans evolved where they later came to reside – Africans in Africa, Europeans in Europe and Asians in Asia. When asked where evolution began, 96

Envisioning our evolutionary destinies Figure 5.3 A “Cro-Magnon Hunter” illustrated by Zdenek Burian for Augusta’s 1960 book, Prehistoric Man.

some of the British children interviewed also espoused intuitive beliefs in multiregionalism, making statements such as, “[it] started all around the world, not one single place. Must’ve been because people didn’t know how to travel so they ended up being in quite a few places before we even knew about them” (B11). In addition to holding on to the seemingly intuitive notion of multiregionalism, visitors often simply resist the out-of-Africa thesis because of the persistent association of white skin with modernity (see Burian’s representation of the quite evolved Cro-Magnon man in figure 5.3). The prehistoric matrix of dark skin, savage behavior, and bestiality is pervasive, and seldom accompanied by images linking dark skin and modernity. Like the march of progress itself, one can think of the so-called human cultural revolution in Europe as an oft-recycled yet faulty origins icon. The origins of art in Europe (usually in the caves at Lascaux, France) have long signaled the birth of human creativity and culture – that is, true humanity. European cave painting is one of the most potent symbols of modern humanity and a litmus test for cultural sophistication. 5 That art, as a symbol of humanity, is depicted as occurring singularly in Europe exemplifies how these evolutionary hurdles are thoroughly color-coded, defi ning implicitly who is – and conversely, who is not – fully evolved. At the expense of the increasing evidence for modern humans originating biologically and culturally in Africa (including evidence of things like cave art in Africa), the so-called “Great Leap Forward” or “Human Revolution” resigns the Cradle of Mankind (and its characteristic signs – dark skin, immersion in nature, interaction with wild beasts) to an evolutionary stasis before 97

Rethinking evolution in the museum “civilization.” Again, these motifs persist, comprising scientific accuracy and stifl ing alternative visions, such as that of McBrearty and Brooks, who present new African archaeological evidence that radically changes typical perceptions of early modern human behavior in Africa (McBrearty and Brooks, 2000). I found that even docents at the AMNH distinguished between Africa as the Cradle of Mankind and Europe as the cradle of modern humanity. Although the tour guides were aware that there is evidence of cultural artifacts in Africa pre-dating those in Europe, they told me that on the tours, visitors are “very interested that modern humans were around before you get sophisticated artifacts” (A8; emphasis mine). Overall, this phenomenon is clear. An evolutionarily sophisticated “black” ancestor is often unwelcome to non-black museum visitors. When the fittest survivor is black, that fitness is either denied or contorted into something negative (such as aggression). Early modern human origins in Africa do not reassure such visitors of their own cultural identity, so they fail to serve a primary function of evolutionary narratives.

Rationalizing racial differences “I shall give your white children intelligence and paper and ink so that they may write down their thoughts. To your black children, so that they may feed themselves and procure everything they need, I shall give the hoe, the machete and the axe.” . . . From these ancestors were born innumerable children whom we know today under the names of French, English, Italians, Germans . . ., on the one hand, and Kono, Guuerze, Manon Malinke, and Toma Yacouba on the other.6 This piece of African mythology reveals just one example of human attempts to imagine the origins of the races, using distinctly Western notions of the inherent abilities of the races. Humans have long sought explanations of human diversity and have long been concerned with human differences as a matter and consequence of color. During my research with museum visitors, discussions of the origin of modern humans led organically, again and again, to discussions of the origins of modern races. The museum visitors I talked with had varied conceptions of the evolution of race, and conversations revealed that museum visitors do not often recognize conflicts or incongruities in their own racialized thinking. When asked directly, visitors usually intellectualized race to suggest that it held little or no biological significance for them while emphasizing the influence of culture on human difference. (See visitor responses to a range of related questions in Appendix 3.) For example, one visitor explained racial difference thus: “It’s all equal, just the difference of the culture and where do you live” (B13). Closer investigation revealed, however, that visitors’ explicit racial perceptions were often different from their implicit ones. In fact, many inflated the significance of the biological and geographic parameters of race during interviews.7 For example, one young visitor to the Horniman inadvertently revealed his multiregionalist intuitions 98

Envisioning our evolutionary destinies when I asked my standard interview question, “What makes humans human?” The boy misinterpreted this as a question about race, proudly stating, “Cultural difference doesn’t really matter. They’re all humans but you have different features and different thoughts in your head and the like” (H9). Acknowledging racial equality but endorsing discrete racial categorization, his response is bittersweet. Despite visitors’ insistence on the insignificance of race, the importance of skin color consistently emerged in discussions with interviewees of all cultural backgrounds. Visitors often fi xated on the seeming permanence of various skin colors (and the associated phenotypic divisions between the three races, reduced to three skin colors) and the unlikelihood of singular racial origins (of either an Adam and Eve or a mitochondrial Eve). The impermanence of skin color was often lost on visitors, as they relied upon strains of environmental and ecological determinism to explain differences between groups. Again, this contrasts markedly with the majority of visitors at each museum that responded, on questionnaires, that human races were more cultural than biological. Despite the wealth of genetic research attesting to the fluid nature of human diversity and other research on our recent modern origins in Africa, most museum visitors still maintained a faith – consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally – in geographically discrete racial types. It seems that intuition and novel scientific information are continually struggling for control of human perceptions. A wealth of research in cognitive science confi rms this human difficulty in reconciling seemingly intuitive “perceptions” and novel scientific information (see Cosmides, Toobey and Kurzman, 2003). Despite museum visitors’ most rational inclinations, their responses often reveal their lingering subconscious beliefs in racial differences and racial hierarchies.8 As discussed in Reading National Geographic (Lutz and Collins, 1993), visitors are rarely as unsympathetic in formal audience research as they are in private or casual conversation.9 Candor is hard to come by under the austere visage of the museum, or in the formal context of an arranged anthropological interview. This suggests that the race biases expressed by visitors here provide only a conservative estimate of opinions held by museum visitors at large.

Enduring Adam and Eve Unexpectedly, I found that Adam and Eve continue to play a role in museum visitor perceptions of modern human origins and the origins of human diversity. The pair maintain a tight grip on popular imagination, even among those who do not identify themselves as religious or Christian. For example, visitors’ loyalty to conventional representations of Adam and Eve were revealed when I showed them a provocative Newsweek cover illustration depicting a black man and woman in front of a classic backdrop of Eden. In the image, a lightskinned, curly-haired presumably black couple stands naked in front of a snake-wound tree, Eve tempting Adam with an apple – an image that intentionally plays with classic iconography of Eden. The title of this January 1988 99

Rethinking evolution in the museum issue reads “The Search for Adam and Eve,” and inside, authors Tierney and Wright explore the genetic evidence for modern human origins in Africa. Most people recognized this image as an intentional racial and religious provocation on the part of the magazine (unlike other images of Adam and Eve that are just as constructed though more familiar). The playful nature of the image usually allowed museum visitors to discuss comfortably its racial implications. One visitor to the Natural History Museum comments about the representation: Interesting . . . black people in images of Adam and Eve is quite unusual. It’s quite challenging in that respect. The problem with it is I can see . . . that if a few Homo sapiens originated in Africa its very easy for Africans to be thought of as further back. That is one of the implications that comes about through this theory. (B9) When discussing this image, visitors paid almost obsessive attention to racial signifiers, most notably hair and skin color, because the man and woman depicted did not seem to fit the majority of African peoples. For example, I observed the following exchange between two Horniman interviewees discussing the image’s provocative inauthenticity: H3: I dislike it. I’ll tell you why I dislike it. Because it seems to me, with this particular picture, there seems to be a point made. It looks like, to me, if they’re saying “the search for Adam and Eve” and they’re suggesting that Adam and Eve would have been black, then what they should have done was use images of real black people not people that look to me like they have some European blood in them. So they should look like Africans as opposed to . . . to me they look like Caribbean or something like that. They look fairer-skinned . . . For me, if Adam and Eve were black, if that’s what the point is, then they were black people. They wouldn’t have looked like this. But I can see what the point is. But that’s why I don’t like it. I just feel like they haven’t done their homework, whoever took that image didn’t do their homework . . . H4: That’s the point of it. That’s what they’ve done. It’s not really there as a sort of historical piece of literature. They’ve just jumped aboard an issue. H3: And it would be more acceptable by white people to see two people that were fairly fair-skinned – even though they’re obviously black, they’re fairly fair-skinned than it would be to see two very dark Africans, obviously African-looking people. Preoccupied with true African-ness, this interesting critique underscores the extent to which museum visitors associate Africa with racial extremes and bring all sorts of preconceptions to their notions of African origins. To prove their faithfulness to scientific rather than stereotypical explanations of race, some visitors turned to genetics in their discussions of racial difference, particularly the popularized notion that “we’re all 99 percent similar.” However, such expressions in many ways only mystify the science since visitors often 100

Envisioning our evolutionary destinies were uncertain of the scientific research behind the statistics. For example, many visitors speak of the genetic similarity among humans in the same terms as the genetic similarity shared among all primates and even all life (see Marks, 2002). There is a pervasive slippage between the notion of 98 percent genetic similarity shared between humans and apes and the notion of 99.9 percent genetic similarity shared among humans. The implications of genetic rhetoric are not very well understood, largely because there is a pervasive misunderstanding of genetic methodology, theory, and practice. Museum visitors did express their faith in museums as one of the unique venues for resolving the science of race. One visitor to the Horniman expressed his hope for the natural history museum to explain race: It’d be terribly sad if they didn’t [explain race] ’cause that would indicate a pretty appalling lack of curiosity. I would much prefer that someone who actually knew what they were talking about proposed some information about that rather than just leaving it a blank and letting people make it up as they go along, which you really start to hear insane and unpleasant stuff purely ’cause if you take random people and ask them to make stuff up some proportion of them will make up really insane and unpleasant stuff. What they need is someone with authority saying, “No, you are wrong.” (H*) Demystifying the genetics of race is one of the most useful calls exhibitions should respond to, particularly as genetic technology and projects such as the Human Genome Project progress in the public eye. It is clear that the historical legacy of physical anthropology unfortunately hangs over exhibitions and public perceptions today. Historical polygeny arguments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries foreshadowed newer debates about modern human evolutionary origins, particularly the tension between multiregionalism and “out-of-Africa”. Historically, racial origins debates fundamentally questioned whether Europeans could share their origins with Africans and Asians. After paleontological science determined that Africa was to be the singular birthplace of hominids, attention shifted largely from whether races emerged from distinct biological origins to whether they arose from distinct cultural origins. The controversy over racial origins reveals confl icted uses of science (and religion) by individuals and communities with a diversity of interests and investments, all concerned with the relationship between their origins and their humanity. As long as human origins have been questioned, so have the origins of modern-day human diversity.10 It should be noted that, as far as racial origins were concerned, biblical and Darwinian narratives were aligned in monogenism, in arguing for a single origin for human races (prior to 1859, polygenists often were made up of those religiously irreverent scientists). Ironically, then, the late nineteenth century maintained or resuscitated the life of polygenism largely for political reasons – to satisfy currents in colonialism and slavery. As Stocking writes, “the external forces which nourished a broadly polygenist point of view were if anything 101

Rethinking evolution in the museum intensified: the gap between civilized white and savage black men, and the need to justify the white man’s imperial dominion, were both becoming greater than ever before” (Stocking, 1968, 47). In America, ideas of hybridization, acclimation, and degeneration became of increasing scientific and political concern. Josiah Nott stated in 1854 that “it is evident . . . that the superior races ought to be kept free from all adulterations, otherwise the world will retrograde, instead of advancing, in civilization” (quoted in Stocking, 1968, 48). Alfred Russel Wallace eventually offered an important Darwinian compromise: “The moment of single ancestry lay so far in the past that by the time man’s forebears have acquired the intellectual capacities which made them truly human, the various races had already been differentiated by natural selection” (Stocking, 1968, 46). This compromise is tremendously significant. It helped to establish the color-coded yardstick of progress found echoed not only in Carletoon Coon and other twentieth-century multiregionalist race theorists, but in many narratives of human evolution circulating in popular culture and in many voices of museum visitors confronting their evolutionary and cultural heritage in museums.

The “Varieties of Mankind” Museum visitors may be less likely to interrogate the subjectivity inherent to sophisticated displays (such as dioramas), but they were often able to critique overtly dated museum representations of race, such as the “Varieties of Mankind” display at the Horniman Museum (figure 5.4). Contradictory to modern anthropological thinking, this image categorizes race into four static groups: Indo-Europe, Northeast Asia and the Americas, Africa, and Australia. At the Horniman Museum, I asked visitors specifically on the questionnaire: “What do you think of the “Varieties of Mankind” panel? Does it seem accurate?” It was surprising that half of the respondents found the display to be quite accurate (49 percent), but just as many mentioned that it either needed more information, seemed outdated, or was entirely inaccurate (51 percent). Given the provocative nature of the panel, this question generated a variety of interesting responses. Some questionnaire respondents summed up their impressions quite simply, with statements such as “people are gorgeous” and “very easy to understand.” Other visitors, though, offered more in-depth critiques such as the visitor that described the display as “dated, limited in value, and stereotypical images.” A woman from Africa argued that such displays should represent people more sensitively and accurately; she commented, “Good but outdated. For example, the African section gives the impression that we are primitive and look like that! We look a little different now!” Other visitors agreed that the display seemed dated, and that its classification system was rather simplistic, remarking, “Old fashioned approach – yes, there are particular regions but what about diversity and change,” and “It looks accurate. Might be worth emphasizing cultural vs. biological differences.” A number of visitors requested that the exhibition section be more detailed, commenting “It may be accurate but it is poorly explained, i.e., perhaps more info on lifestyle, development etc.,” 102

Envisioning our evolutionary destinies Figure 5.4 The “Varieties of Mankind” display at the Horniman Museum. Author’s photograph; courtesy of the Horniman Museum.

and “I would have thought this could evolve into a more detailed section of the exhibition.” Others added that the display is “Interesting though a little too cultural as opposed to biological.” Together these comments suggest that the topic of human biological variation is still of interest to museum visitors, and that the discussion of variation is deemed appropriate in a biological or evolutionary context (or, at the very least, is taken for granted as appropriate). Even though most scientists now believe, as a result of extensive genetic and morphological research, that race is an arbitrary construct biologically, museum visitors still seem to crave some explanation or treatment of race in museums; the concept is anything but moot. Without explicit explanations of race in evolution exhibitions, visitors may just simply read outdated information into the empty spaces. As a useful way to prompt discussion of race, I had interviewees at all four museums share with me their impressions of the Horniman’s “Varieties of Mankind” display. At the Horniman, young black visitors quickly point out the difficulty of finding themselves in the categories: 103

Rethinking evolution in the museum Europe is supposed to have black people and it’s got many white people in there. (H8–10) Other young people, such as the following high-school students at the American Museum of Natural History, pointed out the image’s failure to recognize the present-day transmigration and movement of peoples: I think it really separates but it doesn’t really include everybody, like, if someone moves to a different place and they start a family there and, like, the whole atmosphere of race changes. I don’t think they really include that. (A15) Another museum visitor commented on the stereotypical representations of black people, fi xed seemingly in certain traditional clothing and in a presumably traditional environment: Everyone more or less separates them that way. The only thing is, like, Africa, they don’t go around dressed like that. I mean, some people dress like that. It reinforces . . . I mean, I know a lot of people from the Ivory Coast and Rwanda and they do not dress like that. It’s more or less everyone. There are cities. People more or less look the same, they dress the same. There’s not actually much difference. (B8) Another interviewee challenged the display’s static representation by pointing out that races seem to evolve constantly: I really would like to see something move in this. But really, you’re talking about something that is changing, constantly changing. If you’re talking about evolution, you’re talking about something that’s moving. It’s not something that just stays still. And that, to me, is so very still. This could be lovely. It could be demonstrated like a video, see loads of faces of different kinds of humans from different backgrounds, different parts of the world. (H3) The same visitor, however, added, “I think they’re OK because they’re in the groups that they’re supposed to be in” (H3), thus diluting his critique of the display’s assumptions; again, contradictions like these attest to the complexity of visitor perceptions. Museum visitors, when questioned about such a transparently outdated image, recognize that this representation is flat and somewhat obsolete but, in other ways, they still maintain a faith in the four groups represented. While discussing his general perceptions of the human origins exhibit, one garrulous Horniman visitor saw the “Varieties of Mankind” panel as delightful “kitsch”: That was, in pure comic terms, a masterpiece. It would be a terrible thing if everyone took it 100 percent seriously . . . It would be sad if anyone’s 104

Envisioning our evolutionary destinies world-view was wholly informed by this. But as a piece of wonderful kitsch, it’s magnificent. If they ever get rid of this, I really want it for my wall . . . That would be one of the most entertaining bedroom wall decorations I’ll ever come across . . . It would be rather awful to [take] bits out of museums just because they might be a bit difficult to explain without offending someone. That would be rather sad. I don’t think there’s any kind of evil in it or intended by it. And even, presumably, when this was made. It was just someone doing [their best]. (H2) The comments are useful in illustrating how stereotypical racial imagery can seem passé but benign when, in fact, they still circulate as authorized, anthropological documents, just like the playful image of the “cave-man” or “ape-man.”

The Kenyan looking glass Like in the Horniman human origins exhibition, the evolution display at the National Museums of Kenya is based on multiregionalist principles, the proposition that there were unique and ancient racial origins for Africans, Asians, and Europeans. The National Museums of Kenya subscribes straightforwardly to multiregionalism. The exhibit label at the Homo sapiens display reads: The earliest record of our own species is about 200,000 years old. In Africa fossil remains of early Homo sapiens have come from Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania, Ethiopia and South Africa. The transition between late Homo erectus and early Homo sapiens is not well represented anywhere but specimens from Africa, Europe and Asia suggest that the change occurred almost simultaneously in the three regions. The notion of changes occurring “simultaneously in three regions” is rather outdated archaeologically and scientifically, as one critical Kenyan archaeologist pointed out to me in front of the display: It’s the things they were saying in the ’60s. There are new fi nds in Kenya, more complete range of physical change up to Homo sapiens. . . . Europeans want to believe Neanderthals are their ancestors. Because I noticed NMK visitors often read the Prehistory Gallery’s labels closely, the museum’s support of multiregionalism might actually hold sway with its visitors or at least corroborate multiregionalist notions circulating outside the museum. When asked whether he thought humans originated in Africa, a questionnaire respondent answered: What I think is that evolution took place all over the world, not just Africa. It began in different places at different times, taking different directions. 105

Rethinking evolution in the museum And an interviewee concurred that evolution had occurred in different places: Yes, in different places. That’s why we have different people, different skin, different heights, different races. I think it was in different places. We could have one origin but different ends, if I can call them that way. (K6) Although the concept of multiregionalism is outdated, it still resonates around both the museum and its visitors. I also found that compared to the other three museums, the NMK had the most respondents who believe both in evolution as a progression from simple to complex societies, and in race as a biological category. (On my questionnaires, I asked visitors to determine the extent to which they believed that “Evolution is a progression from simple to complex societies” and “Racial categories are more cultural than biological”; see Appendix 3). Combined with the responses from the Hornimann, with its high proportion of black visitors, these results suggest that black museum-goers, more so than non-black museum-goers, tend to consider race to be real and a product of natural forces. While this might reflect the educations available to Horniman and NMK visitors (compared to NHM and AMNH), it more likely reflects the effects of racist politics and practices on black people and the truism that race is most real to those who suffer most from its consequences. Despite the intention of the museums or the artists, evolution displays often force museum visitors to confront the topic of race and to speculate on the origins of race. This was especially true at the National Museums of Kenya, where respondents posed many questions about the origins of race and the origins of culture. On questionnaires, for example, I often received comments such as: Why did evolution start in Africa? Where did the others come from? I’ve been taught people evolved being dark-skinned. What about the other continents? The skin changed? No, [it couldn’t have because] if you take people back to Africa, they won’t be black. All men didn’t come from Africa because how would you get different skin colors, different languages? There were no boats and no planes then. Also, it became clear that, once asked, NMK museum visitors were uncertain how white-skinned peoples could have evolved from the dark-skinned ancestors portrayed in the diorama. Again, such comments as these betray a miscalculation of evolutionary time and space. In this instance, while evolutionary time continues to be condensed, geographic space is exaggerated. However, Africa and Europe are not so evolutionarily distant or different as visitors imagine; human populations have been immensely fluid and mobile throughout our evolution. How did we go from any one of them, to us, to all of us? This is the question that emerged again and again in my conversations with visitors. When questioned on questionnaires, many respondents stated that racial categories are cultural 106

Envisioning our evolutionary destinies rather than biological, but in conversation with me and when facing museum exhibits they often invoke race as a rationale explaining similarity and difference. Museum visitors at all four museums seem to hold that because race is seemingly real in the present, it must have been real in the distant past. Undoubtedly, the most recurrent question I encountered about evolution among Kenyan museum visitors regarded its ability to explain racial diversity. As an important alternative to those readings offered by typical British and American visitors, many Kenyans offered a certain distrust of evolutionary science and its racial implications. For those Kenyan creationist visitors disinclined to believe in human evolution, the seemingly permanent characteristics of race and skin color became evidence of evolution’s unlikelihood. For example, one creationist visitor explained his distrust by stating, Because I don’t see big changes in the present Homo sapiens. If people evolve from apes, we right now should be able to evolve into something. I question the process. I question the origin of it all, from a cell? Where did it all start? So now I’m a spiritual being. I question the biology of culture. Why did evolution start in Africa? Where did all the others come from? You and me we have different skin. I’ve been taught people evolved being dark-skinned. Then what about the other continents, the skin changed? If you take people back to Africa, they wouldn’t be black. Black Americans come to Africa, 120 years from now they will stay black. So evolution is a theory. It needs to answer “What is the true origin?” “Where will it end?” (K3) I would often ask in discussions with biblically minded interviewees, “But what about the race of Adam and Eve?” to which interviewees responded such as, “So, yeah, it’s a problem, white beginning or black beginning. Yes, that’s food for thought” (K1). It does speak to the depth of social conditioning that creationist visitors took an original white race of Adam and Eve for granted but challenged an original black race of African ancestors. To creationists I spoke with at all four museums, it seemed irrational that black African ancestors could beget all of the human diversity of today. But, for many, the rationale of the reverse escapes scrutiny or critical attention. The classic Adam and Eve icons remain resilient and unchallenged, even for black interviewees. When asked if he thought of human evolution in terms of race, this NMK visitor expressed the inherent contradictions of evolutionary thought: Yes! But because I’ve learned a little about aboriginals, I know he is not a very distant cousin of people in Africa. I’ve seen some evolutionary lines that go from Africa [in prehistory] to Africa [in the present]. The problem of evolution is where it originated and where it ended. Evolution theory needs to explain culture. It needs to explain why the white people evolved faster because that’s a general belief. Because of technology, it is thought white people’s intelligence is higher. (K1) 107

Rethinking evolution in the museum Social conditioning is defi nitely at play here. In rather multiregional terms, the interviewee holds that evolution for the African began in Africa but he has trouble grasping how evolution could explain the evolution of white culture, which in his reading represents the technologically advanced state. Kenyan tour guides also described to me the ways some museum visitors were preoccupied with the origins of the races. One guide discussed his experiences at length: Some ask if we’re proud of it [Kenya as the Cradle of Mankind]. And if we agree. Only one person did not believe in it. He was from Australia. He said he can’t believe all men evolved in Africa, because why would you have differences in skin color, different languages. Climatic changes. He thought everybody evolved separately. He thought how could everyone get out when there were no boats, no planes . . . They ask if their real ancestors evolved from Australopithecus and Homo erectus. They also often ask how come there are wazungus [Kikuyu term for white people] and Africans if we all evolved from one common ancestor. Some say Africans evolved from Australopithecus robustus and white people from erectus. That’s mostly the young schoolchildren because they believe whites are more superior, because erectus is a bit lighter than the others. After explaining, most people believe erectus is our ancestor. (K7) Clearly, the Eurocentric progress narrative even prevails at this Kenyan museum, a dominant reading internalized by Australian tourists and Kenyan schoolchildren alike. I did interview some visitors to the National Museums of Kenya who saw skin color as rather impermanent. A few even saw the microevolution of skin color as evidence of evolution, as in the slightly flawed reasoning of the following interviewee: To me, darker skin comes with the territory. If a white man is here long enough, if he is defi nitely out in the sun long enough, they defi nitely get brown. Your body adapts. If they stay out in the mara for the next hundred years or so, they will adapt to the environment. In order to protect themselves and survive, they will have to get darker. That’s all. You’re just talking about adaptation. The body adapts. If you are in a particular place long enough, you will adapt to the environment. (K5) Later, the same interviewee added: It seems to make a lot of sense [evolution]. It’s adaptation. From my own experience, from my own body, I always adapt to the environment that I’m in whether it’s my ability, I become stronger . . . Like before I never walked around without a jacket and a sweater. I had conditioned my body that way. And then after a while, I shed it off and I got sick for a while but now put a jacket on me, I don’t want it. (K5) 108

Envisioning our evolutionary destinies Looking at the interview images, he added playfully: I fi nd myself getting very light, by the way, in the US. I got there in the winter and I found myself getting lighter and lighter. I was like “Oh shit! – I am not conceiving a child here!” You know what I’m saying? (K5) Although this response is rather tongue-in-cheek, it does emphasize the individual or personal manner in which visitors make sense of evolution and the way evolutionary time can be collapsed or expanded according to one’s own sensibilities and experiences. Based on human evolutionary narratives like those presented in the National Museums of Kenya, visitors generally infer the legitimacy of multiregionalism and discrete racial groups. Long taught in the classroom and museum internationally, it has become the commonsense notion in our present-day racialized societies. By not clearly stating otherwise, museums often endorse the idea that while there may be one common ancestor for the earliest hominids (apemen), there are actually three or so origins of modern humanity. This echoes nineteenth-century thinking and, more recently, race theorists such as Carleton Coon (Coon, 1962). True to Coon’s Origin of Races, the three distinct races represented in museums cross the threshold into modernity at separate times. The natural extension of this multiregionalism and associated environmental determinism is racial hierarchy, usually with African people occupying the lowest position. Museum visitors, as in the following Kenyan questionnaire response, frequently espoused such racially problematic notions: “Being that Africa is a stable environment with few difficulties, we’ve adjusted to living a certain way. Being stable, we haven’t developed in certain ways but we haven’t been faced with challenges. And what shapes your development is the challenges we face.” Ultimately, this racialism contends that humans have always been divided into fi xed categories that are both quantifiable and hierarchical. From the mouths of British visitors to those of Kenyan visitors, such notions are continually circulating between museums and their communities.

Religion, the race alternative Because so many museum visitors questioned the ability of evolutionary theory to explain culture and to account for racial differences, they frequently offered creationism as a resolution. Creationism, like multiregionalism, is thought to provide an explanatory rationale for race, although it relies on the assumption that darkskinned peoples could descend from an ostensibly white-skinned Adam and Eve. The Kenyan creationists I spoke with often saw evolutionary theory as an agent of colonialist and racist thinking, and as something designed to degrade and bestialize the African; thus, the thinking of this counter-narrative goes, in order to remove the association between African apes and African people, human evolution must be debunked. One black creationist’s gut response captures it nicely: “I just don’t think I like it – me? An ape?” (B12). 109

Rethinking evolution in the museum Some museum visitors, reconciling creationism and evolution, supported the idea of different racial origins by claiming African origins for Africans, but biblical origins for Europeans (via Adam and Eve). So each race has its own, unique history and even unique mechanism for arriving where they are today. Some young Kenyan children explained to me: “We don’t believe in Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve are European. They don’t look like us. My father told me about our ancestors. Kikuyu ancestors come from the mountains” (a comment that mirrors the responses of some black children I spoke to at the Horniman Museum). Another NMK visitor expanded upon his origins beliefs: When you talk of Creation, many people, different colors, different abilities, that place where a person comes from. People say we have white and black but my conviction is that Africans are not Africans by mistake. That’s what God sent them to be. Black in color . . . (K3) Some creationists that I spoke with did argue that “Adam” was black: “God created a man like me so I tend to believe he looks just like me. Adam looks just like me because I’m a man” (K10). Presumably, not all black creationists take for granted their white origins. During my time at the National Museums of Kenya, I also observed a white British Kenyan creationist holding court with black Kenyan children at the hominid diorama. He reasoned with the young people: Can you tell me why these people aren’t white? I’ve been here 20 years and I haven’t turned black or brown. If you go to Europe in 50 years, would you be white? . . . Were these Kenyans these people? . . . If I marry one of these [models in the diorama], I could have children! And could you have children with my sister? No, because she doesn’t want kids! [laughter] (K13) Reading the diorama as a scientific argument, his logic here proposed that evolution is untenable because the different races (which his argument presumed to be biologically distinct, if not actually separate species) can have offspring. His comments also associated evolution with colonial degradation: There was much racism in 1950. Kenyans couldn’t do anything! You are my brother. We all come from Adam and Eve. We are all one family. That changed and now Kenyans can go anywhere. Yesterday you were a monkey. Today you are human [because presumably racism has ended]. Evolution is the biggest humbug. Can you use a computer? Can a monkey use a computer? No. I know Richard Leakey. He told me that because his family was all missionaries, they were all crooked. (K13) Natural history museums and the anthropology within them bear the burden of their racist pasts, a legacy that museum visitors carry with them to the museum. Ultimately, when museum visitors make meaning of evolutionary narratives, 110

Envisioning our evolutionary destinies they do so using a profoundly complex mixture of religious, cultural, and political belief systems. Visitors are not blank slates, but people with heavily loaded interpretations and investments that they use to make sense of the museum and its narratives.

Evolution and cultural heritage It is clear that people relate to evolutionary origins stories based on their understandings of their cultural heritage. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, increasingly recognizes many fossil sites as world heritage sites or as part of the heritage industry – “the instrumental (commercially and/or state-funded) use of representations and activities centered upon memorializing, preserving, or re-enacting the past in order to protect and project a nation’s industry” (Boswell and Evans, 1999, 5).11 Such heritage sites and heritage tourism have been increasing worldwide since the 1990s. (The World Trade Organization estimates that in 2002 the number of international tourists exceeded the 700 million mark for the fi rst time; see Muller, 2003, 37). The burgeoning number of heritage sites, and the related tourism, begs the question, “whose heritage is it that is being fulfilled at these heritage sites?” It is a reflection of fluctuating and competing identities when South African australopithecine fossil sites millions of years in prehistory can equally accommodate South African heritage, African heritage and world heritage. Interestingly, these identities become, or aspire to become, one and the same (albeit ironically or anachronistically). Different notions of cultural and evolutionary heritage are always under construction in the museum.12 This occurs most acutely in human origins exhibitions, exhibitions that ostensibly challenge our national, continental, and racial identities with the presupposition that “we are all African under our skin.” As Bennett points out in Representing the Nation (1999), the principle of evolutionary order and progress offered new notions of “we” that drew together the exclusive community of nation and an exclusive imperial culture at the expense of many Others. Despite humanity’s fundamental African-ness, exhibitions and origins rhetoric encourage us to distinguish ourselves in the course of the evolutionary exhibition through our distinct cultural histories and within their implicit cultural hierarchies. Complex, competing politics are defi nitely at play in the heritage and origins industry. In many ways, natural history museums, and the human origins exhibitions within them, appeal to “heritage” by endorsing a conservative view of humanity’s singular, ritualized origins from Africa and continuous trajectory from tribe to nation. At the same time, they contest the notion of heritage by allowing the sense of global humanity to override local culture and by distinguishing certain cultures as evolutionarily privileged. Furthermore, is our “global humanity” achieved by our shared African origins or by the recent homogenizing forces of economic and intellectual globalization? Shifting parameters of global citizenship, changing flows of capital, and new class urgings pose 111

Rethinking evolution in the museum unprecedented challenges to museum constructions of anthropological identity. Natural history museums, and the origins exhibitions within them, must work to redeem an evolutionary history we collectively share while validating the cultural histories that make us unique.

112

6 The black counter-narrative

“The black man is seen as an incomplete white man—‘our ancestors’ . . . Evolution is racist. Look at the dark skin.” (Natural History Museum visitor)

Up until now, I have focused on general British and American museum-visitor perspectives of African origins. It is important, however, to take a closer look at how black museum visitors, as one of several groups marginalized in museums, have a unique relationship to Africa, African origins narratives, and the museum itself.1 Through a variety of visitor responses, it is apparent that black museum visitors constitute a distinct interpretive community which experiences origins images and natural history museums in specific ways. 2 Most significantly, black museum visitors provide important counter-narratives to the conventional “up-and-away-from-Africa” story told by museums. As a black museum visitor myself, I recognize how other black museum visitors often view the museum through distinct “community lenses.” Those who identify culturally with the African continent (such as Kenyan, African-American or Afro-British museum visitors) often have unique relationships to displays of African origins, since they are at once intimately connected to Africa, yet alienated by origins narratives that begin with Africa and end with Europe. Generally, certain trends emerged among the black interviewees I worked with. First, black visitors often identified with Africa not only as an evolutionary birthplace but as an important site of cultural heritage as well, with the term “Cradle of Mankind” taking on much deeper and more intimate meanings for them. Also, among audiences at all the museums, black visitors were more likely to initiate discussions with me regarding the racial implications of exhibitions and generally offered more critical or politicized responses regarding the museum and science. Museums regularly make normative assumptions about who their visitors are and how they will read exhibitions, assumptions based not only on visitor demographics but on how visitors should have been educated and enculturated to fit into the culture of the museum. In doing so, most natural history museums tell “consensus narratives” employing common symbols to which ideal 113

Rethinking evolution in the museum visitors should relate (Thoburn, 1988, quoted in Lutz and Collins, 1993, 220). However, as scholars such as Hooper-Greenhill argue, visitors rarely conform to the normative assumptions made by museums; visitors’ varied and complex cultural identities thoroughly mediate their experiences in the museum (see Hooper-Greenhill, 1994a; Hooper-Greenhill, 1994b; Hooper-Greenhill, 1994c; Hooper-Greenhill, 1997). 3 To begin examining the experiences of culturally under-represented groups in museums, we must consider how such groups construct counter-narratives and “negotiated” responses against the interpretations produced by museum visitors at large. In Stuart Hall’s 1973 conceptualization of “encoding/decoding,” he analyzed the triangular relationship between media producers, the “text” itself and audience reception (here, the museum professionals, the exhibition itself, and visitors’ responses). He argued that an audience’s strategies of decoding the media’s encoded messages were fundamentally polysemic (rather than pluralistic, whereby any meanings are possible). Most significantly, audiences make interpretations based on three different social positions or codes, producing: (1) dominant (or hegemonic) readings by those whose social situation favors the preferred or intended message; (2) negotiated readings that modify the intended message to reflect their own compromised social position, experiences, or interests; and (3) oppositional (or counter-hegemonic) readings that resist the preferred meaning in favor of an alternative reading that reflects a social position at confl ict with that of the producer. Hall’s argument has been critiqued over the last 30 years or so as somewhat reductive in the discrete categorization of relationships. Although the limitations of the encoding/decoding framework are apparent and have been widely recognized (including by Hall himself), the concept still provides a useful platform for conceptualizing the complex nature of audience responses such as those of the black visitors considered here. It is also important to point out that the observations made here by black museum visitors are anything but definitive, or even representative, of black museum visitors at large. They simply provide a small window onto one poorly understood museum community to stimulate further research and discussion. Also, much of the most provocative commentary from visitors was communicated by emotive expressions and gestures that cannot be easily quantified (Falk, 1993, notes the same phenomenon). Racialized perceptions are complicated, and black opinion was not consistent or predictable, as shown across responses to various questions. In several instances the black communities of different museums diverged greatly and, in others, black opinions at one museum were starkly polarized (for example, American and Kenyan visitors respond to the notion of South African “Bushmen” as “living ancestors” quite differently, something I return to later in the chapter). Still, the unique responses of black museum visitors challenge many of the key assumptions made by natural history museums about their visitors.

114

The black counter-narrative

Visiting the museum black Research conducted on culturally marginalized museum visitors confirms “race” as a meaningful influence on how visitors experience exhibitions. Studies have shown that black audiences, the interpretive community of particular interest here, do indeed make unique meanings from museum exhibitions. For example, black visitors often emphasize the cultural or political value of objects and prefer exhibitions that relate to their own cultural and political positions (on this, see Falk, 1993; Hooper-Greenhill, 1997; Small, 1997, and Desai and Thomas, 1998). A wide-ranging study of the museum-going habits of African-Americans found that four factors in particular led to the group’s under-utilization of museums. This study, authored by Falk, describes those factors as primarily socio-economic, cultural, geographic, and institutional in nature (“institutional” meaning, specifically, that African-Americans often consider museums uninviting or inherently racist institutions). The black museum-visiting demographic does not always conform, then, easily to the cultural practices of the larger museum visiting class (though there is overlap). Furthermore, Falk found the biggest impediment to black museum-visiting to be the lack of a museum visiting tradition in the black community. This observation is not wholly tautological, since a culture of museum-visiting begets a culture of museum-visiting. Visiting natural history museums has been largely uncultivated as an activity in black communities because of the historical practices and public image of the museum and museum science. Seeing museum institutions as uninviting or inherently biased is an enormous impediment to black visiting (Falk, 1993, 12). As Falk writes about African-American museum visitors: There are psychological cost variables. Some institutions or activities are perceived as welcoming and some are not. A decision to visit a museum may be influenced by both historical and present-day barriers, which are not easily measured in miles or dollars and cents. Historical patterns of racial bias, or perceived bias, can impose significant impediments to the use of leisure venues. (Falk, 1993, 8)

Local black communities in the US and England still have not developed, for complex reasons, a critical mass of visitors to natural history museums; the ball is stuck in the historical mud. As Stephen Small argues about natural history museums in England: When we look at exhibits [in England] we find that racist and racialized representations are pervasive (stereotypes, savagery, etc.) . . . and black people continue to enjoy limited access to, and are less likely to visit museums (because we do not see museums as places that are friendly or inviting environments). (Small, 1997, 55)

115

Rethinking evolution in the museum British colonial exploitation of Africa lingers in both the natural history museum and in collective memory. This legacy alienates black British museum visitors, a problem exacerbated by many museums’ lack of involvement of black British communities in interpretation and decision-making. As in the United States, black British audiences often relate to museums as largely hegemonic institutions. The strain between museums and their black visitors is especially pronounced in postcolonial African museums. In these museums, the legacy of colonial politics are often even more deeply imprinted upon the museum, particularly in museums whose intended audiences were originally European, even as their subjects and local communities were African. One strong example of the problems of museums in Africa comes from Dawson Munjeri’s essay on developments in the museums of Zimbabwe. Even as blacks gained access to their postcolonial cultural remains, the national museum continued to be a site for the exertion of colonial ideology; that is, African cultural artifacts became instruments to educate black museum visitors about the “natural” hierarchy between the oppressed and their oppressors. This was not lost on the museum’s Zimbabwean public, some of whom suggested the whole institution be disbanded due to the fundamentally European ideology on which it was built (Munjeri, 1991, 448, 452, 454).4 My fi ndings confi rm that black audiences represent a distinct interpretive community that often feels alienated by the museum and its exhibitions. This is particularly true of the natural history museum and its exhibitions of biological anthropology, where black visitors (particularly in Kenya) are keenly aware of the discipline’s historical role as an agent of racism (see Harding, 1994, particularly her editorial comment entitled “Science and black people,” 456–7; see also Roberts, 1997).

Critiquing the museum As oppositional or negotiated museum audiences, black visitors (and other visitors marginalized in the museum) are more likely to see the seams in the seamless museum narrative and less likely to read museum exhibits as representative of objective, uncontested truths. In the course of my research, visitors’ varied socio-political investments in origins images manifested themselves in a number of ways. For example, at the American Museum of Natural History, non-white museumgoers tended to be the only visitors to the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution that critiqued the racial implications of the hall’s displays. One questionnaire response noted, “The diagrams use all white people. Some people of color should be included.” Another non-white visitor commented on the questionnaire, “To make a better exhibit, it would be great to update the dioramas based on what we know now. More diversity or options on what we could have looked like and the separate paths that we’ve taken. I feel there is only one path based on this exhibit.” At the Natural History Museum, the following black creationist used the dark skin color of evolutionary exhibitions to point out in an interview evolution’s inherent racism: “The black man is seen as 116

The black counter-narrative an incomplete white man – ‘our ancestors’ . . . Evolution is racist. Look at the dark skin” (B12). The ways these visitors saw themselves reflected in the glass, or the ways they failed to see themselves, evidently engendered deeply sensitive and politicized readings. Many visitors of African descent resented being objectified in museums and wider popular culture as cultural spectacles. In one interview at the Natural History Museum, two Sudanese women hoped to intervene in stereotypical impressions of the continent today: B12: The thing that irritates me is people think Africa is full of starving people and third world. And there are loads of other places. B13: People think Africans haven’t changed through time, forever primitive. They make them like animals. They’re watched. “Those people” . . . They always think of Africa as the primitives. I think it’s really bad. Q: What can we do to change this? B13: Everybody thinks that from the movies and from everything – Africa, jungle world, you know, and, like human creatures and all that, that’s what they think about it all ’cause of the media and all that. They think that America has all the great places and all the civilization and stuff like that is over there. These comments offer an interesting counter-narrative that underscores the role of media rhetoric from fi lms to news sources to museums in creating powerful stereotypical images. Interestingly, this critique of popular African iconography corresponds to their belief that Africa is not the evolutionary Cradle of Mankind: No. I don’t know about this “Cradle of Mankind” thing. I never thought of it that way, actually. They think of that ’cause they think they were all apes in the beginning. And Africa, you know, is that place with the apes and all. So they think they come from there, but, no, I don’t think so. (B13) There is a long precedent of African-American museum visitors encountering problematic reflections of themselves and their ancestry in scientific, ethnographic, and cultural exhibitions of Africa. One of the earliest examples is African-American responses to the Dahomeyan Village of the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition where this African exhibition polarized the black community and black community leaders. Frederick Douglass, in particular, noted the confl icted ideological effects of the Dahomeyan exhibition which showed that black Americans had developed far beyond their African origins but was still used “to exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage” (Rydell, 1999, 142). As in other non-white cultures turned museum subjects/objects, the history of cultural vandalism and the assumption of authority over cultural objects have strained the relationship between African-American museum visitors and the museum, thus producing within the black community dense, emotionally charged responses (see Karp, Kreamer, and Lavine, 1992). 5 117

Rethinking evolution in the museum Museums must regard the aesthetic representations of race (skin color, hair texture, facial features, and so on) as constitutive of the larger politics of race. Racial iconography – hair, skin color, and other conspicuous markers of race – were especially meaningful to non-white museum visitors and, in the context of evolutionary narratives, were often seen to carry color-coded implications about biological and cultural evolutionary fitness. While skin color operates as a value-laden sign for museum audiences at large, it is particularly so for black museum visitors who often identify uniquely with black evolutionary models and fail to relate to white models in evolutionary images (this is particularly true for Kenyan visitors to the National Museums of Kenya). As for a common ladder-of-progress image concluding in a white man, one Kenyan visitor commented, “The last ones are controversial because some people can identify with this while others can’t. That man, I cannot relate myself to him” (K6). Black respondents’ investment in the representation of race surfaces again and again in visitors’ unique resistance to, or even internalization of, the Eurocentric narratives presented in exhibitions. Many modern-day museums have attempted to produce ostensibly race-neutral representations, but, as I learned, the effect is anything but neutral. The “racially intermediate” representations further reinforce a long history of marginalizing and excluding many black peoples at one end of the color-coded yardstick of progress. Resistance to these “neutral” images was expressed most strongly by black Kenyan museum visitors, who identify with bronze-skinned, longhaired, hazel-eyed images little or no more than they do with white-skinned, long-haired, blue-eyed models. While some black interviewees considered the “neutral” color scheme appealing or unproblematic, they still read a familiar progress narrative in the changing skin colors. As one Kenyan visitor stated in response to a progress ladder I showed him that used intermediate skin colors to represent modern humans, “I saw this somewhere on the internet or somewhere . . . [It says] As you progress, you become lighter” (K5). Responding to a National Geographic image which shows a groups of hominids including a dark-skinned erectus and beige-skinned Neanderthal, this Kenyan visitor still read the image as a color-coded progress narrative, commenting that over time “their hair becomes long and straighter. [The Neanderthals] get lighter, green eyes.” He also commented, “Erectus is human. In a [Kenyan] community, the Luo, you can find these sorts of features. Wide nose, the jaw, and they are generally a very strong community, even the shoulders. They’re very strong, which is unlike Kikuyu” (K5). Color coding is deeply imprinted on black and non-black visitors alike, and the value system can be projected on even those exhibitions museum designers consider to be racially neutral, revealing the latter notion to be oxymoronic. Unfortunately, color matters, and representations of skin color matter most often to people of color. This remarkably simple observation is still necessary to make even in modern, purportedly “color-blind” societies. (Its corollary – that those who do not have to see the significance of race often will not – is worth stating as well.) The potential significance of Africa to those of African 118

The black counter-narrative heritage was not lost even on some of my non-black interviewees. For example, one explained that she did not imbue Africa with personal meaning “maybe because I’m not black or anything, [Africa as Cradle of Mankind] doesn’t have any relevance to me” (B8).

Pride in an African heritage Black visitors also represented a distinct interpretive community insofar as black American, black British or black Kenyan respondents proudly spoke of their African origins, or of early African civilizations, as a privileged heritage. For a contingent of black respondents in America and England, Africa and African people were romanticized in distinctive ways. As an oppositional narrative, the African origins story was sometimes seen as one of cultural decline rather than progress – for example, from an original noble Africa of morality and community to the modern-day bedlam of life in Europe and America. Even African evolutionary ancestors became tied to intimate notions of family and heritage, which produce a genealogy unique to black peoples (though sometimes the genealogy out of Africa is seen as one shared with non-black peoples but one that non-black people choose to disregard or deny, as when one NMK visitor remarked, “It is a privilege to come from Africa. I don’t know why white people don’t see it that way”). This romanticized image of African origins also coalesces in popular culture, from black history month tributes in England and the United States to Henry Louis Gates’s lucrative 1999 Wonders of the African World television program documenting his pilgrimage to ancestral Africa. As popular culture and history widely attest, Africa is the romanticized home away from home for many within the African diaspora. One black British interviewee’s comment encapsulates well the way black museum visitors look for museums to tell distinct sorts of African origins stories. At the Horniman museum, he argued for the museum to do more to highlight Africa’s importance in the human evolution exhibition and in the museum at large: This is the root. This [human origins exhibit] should be at the beginning. Well, I love the mummies but . . . Africa doesn’t really feature in the [human evolution] exhibit . . . How many black boys are out there standing on the corner? If they knew they had this history . . . “You black boy – you have a root!” . . . I mean how many little boys went home and put apples on their head to be American? But Africa! (H*) As discussed in the next chapter, African-Americans visiting the National Museums of Kenya also interpreted exhibitions through African-centered or Afrocentric lenses. For example, a grandmother there shared this enthusiastically with her grandchildren: “These cave paintings are older than the ones in Europe . . . Africa is the origin of man!” (NMK*). Many black visitors look for positive reflections of their African heritage in natural history museums, something that structures and gives value to their museum-going. 119

Rethinking evolution in the museum But black visitors did not attribute meaning to their African evolutionary heritage in consistent ways. As one interviewee cheekily asked me in the middle of an interview, “I’m saying, why is it important to know where we came from or where we’re going?” – a question I am still trying to answer.

The Afrocentric counter-narrative Although I am ambivalent about all the connotations that attend the term “Afrocentrism” in the context of evolutionary discourses, Africa-centered responses serve an important function against conventional Eurocentric tropes. The Afrocentric episteme is usually connected to developments in the 1980s, particularly to the work of Molefi Asante, though historian Wilson Moses points out that the term was used as early as 1962 as part of the “Encyclopedia Africa” project (Moses, 1998, 226). In Afrotopia: The Roots of African-American Popular History, Moses has untangled the many complex nuances of Afrocentric thought, such as the general nostalgia embedded in it, its relations to “Egyptocentrism,” and its relations to narratives of progress and decline. Typically, Afrocentric origins narratives are a form of alternative prehistory in which African descendants dominate European cultures intellectually, culturally, and biologically. Like most alternative prehistories, these iconoclastic narratives conform rather conventionally to Eurocentric narratives by privileging one culture over another and validating it through a variety of disparate criteria. Moses argues, “The practice of creating a monumental past for one’s race or nationality was hardly the invention of African vindicationists. Traditionally, fanciful Englishmen of letters who preferred not to think of their ancestors as crude barbarians could fancy themselves as descendants of Trojan heroes” (Moses, 15). Afrocentric origins narratives are often articulated through conventionally Western civilizationist tropes of progress, revealing their capacity to internalize and succumb to the form of Eurocentrism even as they resist its anti-black content. As Moses writes, Afrocentrism has, paradoxically, manifested itself in terms of both “civilizationism” and “primitivism,” but the human imagination is never daunted by the need to reconcile opposites. Primitivism assumes that Africans are wiser than Europeans, because Africans have not been caught up in the mythology of progress and the mad rush to impose technological slavery on the universe. In a contradictory vein, Afrocentrists are obsessed with demonstrating that black cultures have met the criteria of being called civilized. (Moses, 237)

Nonetheless, Afrocentric origins narratives act as important counter-narratives which attempt to subvert, redefi ne, and expand conventional tales. As such, they perform significant cultural work, particularly for black museum visitors contemplating their evolutionary origins. One Horniman Museum interview in particular illuminated the sort of political, racial, and anticolonial perspectives 120

The black counter-narrative with which some black visitors respond to officially sanctioned origins narratives. A self-proclaimed Afrocentrist, this visitor to the Horniman Museum (H5) critiqued both creationist and evolutionary narratives for their anti-black implications. Weaving a complex counter-narrative, this interviewee used science as a weapon against the irrationality of religion, which he viewed as racist and unprovable, but in a later conversation with a defender of evolutionary science his stance shifted. Below, the interviewee reasons with his friend (H6) – a defender of evolutionary science and a creationist, another complicated persona – who considered human evolution and the existence of the races as proofs of God’s work. This conversation began with an exchange about the validity of religious doctrine: H6: [God] sends proof. You look at the birds, we look at evolution, we look at the different races. These are the proofs. H5: You can say creation or evolution. I’m saying whichever way it started, the story, people do not know. The story has been written by people who have studied, and have learned to satisfy us. Because as the future goes on, a lot that has been written is going to be proven wrong. The interviewee (H5) is skeptical of formal education and institutionalized systems of knowledge, including museums. After my prodding, he then detailed the racism inherent in evolutionary theory, making some necessary correctives to it, such as rightly intuiting that, historically, some apes have been chosen as evolutionary models based on both superficial and artificial connections between those apes and Africans: Europe is saying that we black people came from apes. They’re saying that, then they give out pictures making it look like the apes are blacks. Yet you have white apes – whatever the names given to them. So all of us are coming out of the apes but when they show you on TV, they show you the black-skinned ones, they don’t show you the red-faced baboons or nothing like that. It’s been taught. I’m 45 years old and when I was going to school you could see the racism in the books, in the schoolbooks I was taught in Jamaica. And in some of the drawings, they were hand drawings, they had extra large lips. They were brainwashing [us] telling us that England was heaven and worship the Queen. Even when you go to the courthouse in Jamaica, we don’t say God save Jamaica, we say God save the Queen. It’s a big conspiracy. I’m not trying to tell someone to believe what I believe but don’t kill me for what I believe, ’cause I don’t believe in the slave master. (H5) He went on to discuss the inability of evolutionary scientists to satisfactorily explain the one thing of use to society, the evolution of race: the people that studied this evolution thing, they claim – I don’t remember their name as I speak – but they provide evidence on the talk show or 121

Rethinking evolution in the museum whatever. They come and say, “I study evolution for X amount of years and I haven’t got a clue [about the evolution of race].” (H5) This tremendously rich discussion turned from religion to human evolution to the politics of oppression surrounding the African continent. And, as did other black interviewees, he emphasized the museum’s responsibility – and, specifically, any anthropology exhibition’s responsibility – to correct its historical mistakes and offer new, unbiased visions of race and Africa. Together, the components of the interviewee’s ideology offer a larger, quite complex perspective on how some black museum visitors might respond to the traces of anthropological racism lingering in institutions such as the museum.

Kids reconceiving the cradle My lengthiest interview with children was with three black youth (average age 11) who visited the Horniman Museum regularly (H8). “The Horniman’s” was part of their neighborhood, and they utilized it as an informal after-school program (to the dismay of some of the museum guards I spoke with). They came, as they said, “loads,” and argued among themselves about which of them frequented the Museum more often. As young people, they provided candid insight into their perceptions of race, Africa, evolution, and the museum. These young people voiced many opinions concerning the African continent, and they saw human evolution as distinctly African, as part of the important African cultural education and heritage neglected by their racist school system. When I asked them if they’d learned about human evolution in school, they immediately interpreted the question as being about Africa. One boy commented: “No. No. They don’t talk about African stuff in school. All they’re talking about is Indians and what’s it called, [the] ancient Greek. They don’t talk about black people.” The young men also explained that they learned about human evolution primarily from their parents – inherited beliefs that have already established for them the personal and cultural importance of African origins narratives. I asked the boys to draw pictures of their impressions of their evolutionary ancestors, a project that was extremely productive in stimulating new insights and conversation among the group (see figure 6.1). The images drawn reflected both the boys’ projection of themselves into the images (in the form of black young men with common modern-day features and hairstyles) and their incorporation of stereotypical “cave-men” and “ape-men” features (leopardskin loincloths, clubs) borrowed presumably from cartoons and other pop cultural images. During conversation about their drawings, racial allusions and insults abounded (such as, “His one just looks like Congo Man, a black man”). Most interestingly, our conversation about their drawings prompted an exchange about what makes a figure an “ape-man” rather than a “cave-man.” (The interview was conducted with three people, though responses often came from the most vocal. Separate comments below represent the beginning of a new person speaking): 122

The black counter-narrative Figure 6.1 One young Horniman interviewee’s drawing of “Ape-Man.”

H8-1: It looks like an ape. I forgot to do the nose, make the holes in it. H8-2: You make it look like a black man. Q: Why does it look like a black man? H8-2: I don’t know, ’cause ape-men were black. H8-1: Yeah, ’cause ape-men were black. Q: So do you think that’s a good thing that ape-men were black? H8-1: Yeah. H8-2: No, ’cause they were monkeys. If you come up to white people in school, they call you a monkey. Q: They do? Has that happened to you? H8-2: Yeah. Q: Well, they were monkeys once, too, right? H8-2: No, ’cause they were a white person. Q: Where did white people come from? H8-2: They came from monkeys, but . . . [trails off] When I pressed on with the unexpected question, it led to the following provocative exchange between the boys over racial origins: Q: So where did white people come from? H8-1: I don’t know where they came from but I know that black people came from Africa. White people didn’t. Q: What if all people evolved out of Africa? That means just black people, not white people? H8-2: I don’t know where they came from. 123

Rethinking evolution in the museum I pressed on with my questioning, and to another child I asked: Q: What do you think? Where did white people come from? H8-3: I don’t know. They just came in . . . H8-2: They just came in. Q: [then to the third child] What do you think? H8-3: I think they did . . . [trails off] I think that white and black, when they had babies, they went to England. . . . The conversation developed then into an exquisite example of the type of ideological dilemma encountered by some interviewees when reconciling human origins and racial origins. After some thought, one boy decidedly explained: Jesus made two races, black and white. He made Adam and Eve black and he made the monkeys white . . . [pause] . . . No, he made Adam and Eve white and he made the apes black. And the apes evolved into black people and English people just moved from Egypt . . . In the end, he determines separate origins for the races. This polygenic resolution is not unlike the one made by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century race theorists and is, in the long, complicated way history folds and refolds upon itself, a resolution no doubt influenced in some ways by them. Still, a dogged faith in seemingly visible racial differences precludes unified racial origins; a cohesive human species is unintuitive and unimaginable. Again and again, I came back to this illuminating interview where the young men negotiated a wealth of competing influences and ideas – such as evolution and religion, monogenism and polygenism – while trying to resolve science, religion, and politics in a manner which leaves their own race and identity intact. Throughout the course of my conversation with these young men (including a discussion of a whole range of anthropological images), they provided a unique window into the politics of race and racial resistance as expressed through the developing cultural identities of young black British visitors. Despite not having formally studied human evolution, they have been exposed to it and are keenly aware of its both racially problematic and racially empowering implications. Interviews such as this one are important because they illustrate how black visitors routinely invoke varied strategies to challenge the racism that seems inherent in anthropological narratives.

United under one God Various black visitors, who perceived ladders of racial progress as fundamental to the concept of human evolution, disregarded human evolution for its racist implications. For these visitors, evolution as it is presented today has still not transcended its dubious roots in racist propaganda and still, in effect, promotes racial inequality. This perception often extended to a general distrust of science, 124

The black counter-narrative making it ever-apparent that the history of scientific racism remains in the collective memory of many black communities (and that includes recollections of recent history). Some interviewees, regardless of race, thought of religion as devoid of the political manipulations of science. Biblical narratives were regarded as devoid of racial implications, or as racially inclusive and egalitarian in ethos: [Human evolution, I don’t like] because of the differences in people – black and white are two different species. Asian people are different, their features. It’s either God or evolution. No one knows the truth. (H*; black security guard of 17 years) The message I get from the Bible is it doesn’t matter what you look like, it’s what you are on the inside. So whether you’re black, white, yellow, green, it doesn’t matter, not making a huge amount of difference. Doesn’t matter. (B8) The thing is, we believe the whole world originated from two people. I don’t believe there were races at the beginning. But it’s probably a biological thing after a while. Different chromosomes and genes and stuff like that. Maybe Adam and Eve had different codes. (B12) As exemplified in the latter responses, Adam and Eve, those classic origins icons, often emerged as ancestral signposts, regardless of interviewees’ racial identity or religion. Though Adam and Eve are central to perceptions of our collective past, few of my interviewees had actively critiqued them as such. Through interviews, discussants would arrive, almost without fail, at the incongruity of original white ancestors for multiracial descendants. Both original black ancestors and original white ancestors seemed unlikely, a conclusion resulting again from misconceptions of the nature of human diversity and the timescale of human history. Furthermore, whether descended from a white Adam and Eve or African primates, many black visitors found it a difficult and disheartening puzzle to escape the stigma of a long line of genealogical inferiority.

Shifting communities, knotty responses When I described my research to a 10-year old black child with whom I was chatting, he asked “Why do you care so much where we come from? We come from America” (unfortunately he didn’t end up becoming a formal interviewee). It became again and again very clear to me that the ways black visitors respond to narratives of human evolution are not simplistic or predictable. In addition to more straightforward racialized readings, I did encounter many “negotiated” responses among black audiences. Hall’s formulation of the negotiated reading is particularly useful in considering the tensions inherent in making meaning in origins exhibitions as a black visitor. He describes it as follows: 125

Rethinking evolution in the museum Decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements: it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic defi nitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a more restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules – it operates with exceptions to the rule. It accords the privileged position to the dominant defi nitions of events while reserving the right to make a more negotiated application to “local conditions,” to its own more corporate positions. This negotiated version of the dominant ideology is thus shot through with contradictions, though these are only on certain occasions brought to full visibility. Negotiated codes operate through what we might call particular or situated logics: and these logics are sustained by their differential and unequal relation to the discourses and logics of power. (quoted in During, 1999, 516)

Generally, museum visitors’ perceptions of their evolutionary heritage are tied to dense and often contradictory belief systems. I found that this was particularly true among black interviewees who often found themselves arriving at profound ideological dilemmas when reconciling certain inherited cultural beliefs (descending from a distinguished African culture), religious convictions (descending from a white Adam and Eve), and stereotypical representations of blackness circulating in popular culture and museums. No one museum visitor belongs to his or her cultural community alone; they belong to many overlapping communities and interpretations can shift in the course of one interview. One black interviewee, for example, resisted conventional representations of Africa by commenting, “People should get a little more sophisticated about these things than looking at themselves and saying, “Those Africans, those tribes.” Even the tribe thing, it doesn’t frustrate me. It’s a good thing, the culture, its very interesting, all the music, I’m proud of being African” (B12). However, while discussing an image of Neanderthals, she described the Neanderthal woman as looking “Like [she’s] living in the jungle or something like that, in Africa” thereby subscribing to conventional representations of the continent. Obviously, museum visitors belong to multiple, overlapping communities, and they use various interpretive strategies to make meaning. As this book reveals, the racialized interpretations made by museum audiences are anything but simplistic. Museums, particularly museum exhibitions of anthropology, are no doubt places where hermeneutic struggles ensue. As Karp writes: Every society can be seen as a constantly changing mosaic of multiple communities and organizations. Individual identities and experiences never derive entirely from single segments of society – from merely one of the communities out of which the complex and changing social order is made. An individual can in the space of a short time move from emphasizing the part of his or her identity that comes from membership in an ethnic community to high-lighting his or her participation in a formal organization such as a professional society and then back to being an ethnic commu126

The black counter-narrative nity member again. We experience these identities not as all-encompassing entities but through specific social events: encounters and social settings where identities are made relevant by the people participating in them. (Karp, Kreamer and Lavine, 1992, 3)

Even on questionnaires, responses to certain questions reveal black visitors to be confl icted and sometimes polarized in opinion (refer to Appendix 3). Generally, black museum visitors were more likely (than respondents as a whole) to see Africa as the “Cradle of Mankind” and African ape-men as “ancestors.” But black Horniman Museum visitors proved one exception to the rule. There, black respondents were less likely than other visitors to deem ape-men “ancestors,” something I suspect reflects discomfort with the use of the term “ancestor” to describe ape-men. Also, there was a diversity of opinion among black questionnaire respondents when I asked them to consider evolution as part of an ordered plan, evolution as a progression from simple to complex societies, and “Bushmen” as living ancestors. To my surprise, visitors at National Museums of Kenya were more likely than visitors at the other museums to see evolution as part of an ordered plan, with slightly more than half holding it as true; at the same time, black visitors at the Horniman Museum were the least likely to regard the statement as true. National Museums of Kenya visitors were also more likely to see evolution as a progression from simple to more complex societies, while this question polarized black visitors at the American Museum of Natural History. Regarding African “Bushmen” as “living ancestors,” there are interestingly conflicted opinions among black visitors, something that again may speak to the complexity of perceptions within a cultural community. For example, there is a dichotomy between black American visitors, with the greatest percentage of respondents who believe “African Bushmen are very much living ancestors,” and black Kenyan museum visitors, who are least likely to deem the statement true. I suspect that these readings highlight the differences of perceptions between those that live on the continent and those that live outside of it, but no doubt a lot more than that is going on. Although black visitors often had strong opinions about evolutionary narratives, these opinions were imbued with all sorts of complexities. Clearly, the black museum visitors I dealt with do not have the same racialized experiences or, at the very least, do not relate to my culturally loaded questions in the same way. Ultimately, something more textured than questionnaires are required to unravel the nuances of racial perceptions. Finally, although my research focused attention on black museum visitors, counter-narratives were not constructed by my black interviewees alone. I heard such readings generally among any visitor that felt like an outsider to museum culture or the museum institution. It may be true that negotiated and oppositional readings were most often produced by under-represented ethnic, cultural, and religious groups, but they were also produced by creationists, feminists, college students, or visitors who considered themselves unaligned with the museum’s typical socio-economic elite. To varying degrees certain museum-goers resisted any form of scientific and institutional indoctrination 127

Rethinking evolution in the museum and would, in interviews, typically engage in deconstructing exercises – dissecting the social influences and cultural politics embedded in museum images. For example, one museum outsider explained her perceptions of the AMNH exhibition while artfully deconstructing the politics behind it: I guess I’m sort of tainted because I’m looking at social assumptions now [in university coursework] and the assumptions that are laid above things like bone fragments, weapon fragments, and tools . . . Looking at [the exhibition] from that perspective, it was actually amazing how the whole moving-toward-European-appearances, with almost like a Jesusstyle character – he’s very white and his hair is very straight and fi ne. And if you look back, there’s really, really frizzy hair and completely different face structures. And you can see how easy it would be to place a race analysis on this. There is something happening here about the process of refinement of the human form. (A3) Far from fulfi lling the normative expectations museums make of their white, college-educated museum visitors (as this interviewee was), this American Museum of Natural History visitor’s college training made her less rather than more accepting of the museum’s presented story. All museum visitors bring distinct and personal readings to African origins exhibitions (even those non-black visitors who perceive Africa negatively are bringing emotional responses to the museum), but museums must do more to recognize black people in particular as not simply passive origins icons but as important participants in the creation of origins ideologies.

128

7 “Out of Africa” in Kenya

“It’s always Leakey, Leakey, Leakey” (National Museums of Kenya interviewee)

What does it mean to have evolved “out of Africa” for those within Africa, a position regularly disregarded in evolutionary discourses both inside and outside of museums? Through conventional anthropological language, Africa has been impressed upon many as the continent from which “we” arose and eventually escaped. With this vision of “out of Africa,” the continent, after achieving the once-coveted position of the Cradle of Mankind, struggles against persistent stigmatization as the fundamental, though ignoble, bottom rung. In this chapter, the National Museums of Kenya offers a unique glimpse into the implications of African origins narratives to African people themselves (or at least to some of those who visit the National Museums) and reveals that Kenyan museum visitors, like the black visitors already discussed, produce significant negotiated readings and counter-readings of the museum and its exhibitions.

The colonial heritage of a contemporary museum The National Museums of Kenya (figure 7.1), resembling the British and American museums before it, was born in the intellectual and exploratory spirit of the early twentieth century.1 First a natural history society, the protomuseum was the brainchild of scientists who convened March 25, 1909 in the interest of amassing natural history collections for intellectual investigation and preservation. After accumulating an enormous collection, it was proposed that a museum be erected to store and manage them. On February 19, 1922 Governor Sir Edward Northey opened a museum fi nanced primarily from the private donations of Kenya’s colonial community (Cunningham van Someren, 1983, 2). Like most museums, the National Museums of Kenya soon outgrew its earliest accommodations, and upon the death of naturalist and then-governor Sir Robert Coryndon a new museum was commissioned with funds donated from the governor’s estate. The new museum took its current residence on what is now Museum Hill and was opened to the public by Sir Edward Grigg on September 22, 1930 as the Coryndon Memorial Museum. Despite its extensive 129

Rethinking evolution in the museum

Figure 7.1 Visitors outside the entrance to the National Museums of Kenya. Photograph by Andrew Hill; courtesy of the National Museums of Kenya.

collections and enthusiastic colonial contributors, the museum’s fi rst display cases were spare, and for many years the museum struggled fi nancially (Cunningham van Someren, 1983, 1–2). Renowned paleontologist L. S. B. Leakey played a significant role in the new museum nearly from the outset. In 1940 he succeeded Dr. V. G. D. van Someren as “honorable curator,” becoming a full-time curator in 1945. According to Richard Leakey (personal communication), shortly after his father began his tenure at the National Museums of Kenya he instituted an initiative to bring local Kenyan schoolchildren into the museum. This 1946 inclusion of African children marks a significant shift in the museum’s identity. Although still conforming to models of colonial education and its “civilizing rituals,” the very inclusion of black people in this traditionally white space was a watershed in white Kenyans’ conceptualization of the museum and in their recognition of the intellectual capacities of the “natives.”2 When colonialism was overturned in Kenya with Jomo Kenyatta taking office as the president of Kenya in 1963, the Coryndon Museum became an important symbol of the new state. However, despite its recognition as a significant East African research center in the years immediately following independence (1965–6), the museum received fewer fi nancial resources from European and 130

“Out of Africa” in Kenya American investors and suffered from decreasing trustee and volunteer involvement. As a result, the museum sought government funding to subsidize itself. The National Museums came increasingly to rely once again on Western support (Cunningham van Someren, 1983, 20). Besides local city council grants, the museum depended on grants from American and European foundations, including UNESCO and the Rockefeller Foundation (Cunningham van Someren, 1983, 30). As the Leakeys’ celebrity grew, their relationships, particularly with the National Geographic Society, also benefited the museum. As a result, the Museum moved from having distinctly British influence to participating in a wider Western community of ideas. The National Museums also participated in a wider global network by sending its employees on frequent research trips to the Smithsonian and to various European museums for training in museum and scientific practice (Cunningham van Someren, 1983, 30); such developments certainly helped incorporate the Kenyan museum into the larger museum establishment. The period between 1968 and 1978 was a “New Decade” for the museum, according to Cunningham van Someren. In 1966 Richard Leakey became director of the Centre for Pre-history (the same year he excavated a great elephant in Baringo, which still remains on display in the museum). In 1968 he was appointed administrative director of the Museums. Two years later, Professor Thomas Odhiambo, chair of the Board of Trustees, commented, The past four years have been important for a variety of reasons and perhaps one of the most significant has been the defi nition and moulding of “Museum Policy for Kenya.” The role of our museum must be dual with a strong bias towards education through exhibits and special programmes. Scientific research and large collections of specimens continue to be major aspects of our activities and indeed research has continued to keep the National Museums in the forefront of international scientific opinion. Rising costs are an international problem and the Museums are concentrating on joint research efforts, joining with both local and overseas institutions on a cooperative basis wherever this is possible. (quoted in Cunningham van Someren, 1983, 24)

Summing up the challenges and priorities of the National Museums of Kenya as it entered this new era, Odhiambo thus re-emphasized the significance of the National Museums’ participation in the international, or Western, community of museums. From my conversations with employees of the National Museums of Kenya, many regard the museum’s European influence as both beneficial and harmful to the identity of the institution. The museum’s pedigree appears at each level of the museum, since the museum is modeled closely after the European archetype in internal and external architecture and techniques of display. Grand elephant tusks create an arch over the central entrance to the National Museums, and from there visitors are led into the dioramas of African mammals, 131

Rethinking evolution in the museum setting up a complex of images associating the museum with the colonialist traditions of Western natural history museums (of course this history is Kenyan as well). Like the American Museum of Natural History, which directs visitors’ attention immediately from the entryway to Akeley’s renowned Hall of African Mammals, the identity of the natural history museum depends upon this close connection to African wildlife, as a nostalgic window onto the lost days of big-game hunting. At the National Museums of Kenya, the central staircases above the wildlife dioramas are lined with the National Portrait Collection, watercolors of Kenyan tribespeople painted by the Austrian conservationist Joy Adamson, another conduit to a bygone colonial era. 3 At the top of the stairs are the permanent ethnographic galleries which include classic ethnographic displays – from cases of hunting, leisure, and ceremonial artifacts to cases on cosmetics and hygiene, further traces of the museum’s British past. Still, the National Museums of Kenya does not fit easily within defi nitions of the traditional natural history museum since the National Museums of Kenya is both a natural history museum and a museum of culture and national history. In addition to cases upon cases of fish and stuffed birds, the museum features a fairly wide repertoire of cultural exhibits, both permanent and temporary. During the summer of 2001, for example, the museum featured a progressive exhibition on Asians in Africa (particularly the history of Indians in Kenya) which attracted a great number of Asian visitors (according to museum insiders). The museum has also invited temporary exhibitions such as “100 years of Kisumu” and displays of the Ugandan railway erected in 1901. Most progressively, however, the museum incorporates novel displays of contemporary East African artwork, and even a small gallery where visitors can browse paintings for purchase. Such modern Kenyan exhibitions complicate conventional African iconography, urging tourists, particularly Western tourists, to reconcile conventional and modern conceptions of the country and the continent.

Outsiders inside the museum I found that Kenyan visitors’ responses to the museum were complicated and shifting. Visitors to the National Museums of Kenya appreciated the value of the institution to Kenyan society; this was sometimes reflected in an optimistic faith in the museum’s representations. One questionnaire respondent commented optimistically, for example, that the National Museums of Kenya’s exhibitions were “very accurate according to me because whatever is depicted in the museum is the exact reflection of Africa.” However, others felt the museum was compromised by its colonial and exclusionary policies. Frequently, visitors mentioned the museum’s cost as one of the discriminating policies of the museum, a practice which seemed to discourage Kenyan visitors: [International tourism] is everything in Kenya, whether you’re visiting Masai Mara and the works. It’s always the tourists who actually get to 132

“Out of Africa” in Kenya enjoy the country. They charge exorbitant prices which are way out of most Kenyans’ range . . . [The museum] was created for the tourists, for the British. (K5) Likewise, one visitor suggested that the exclusionary practices of modern-day paleontologists has damaged the public image of NMK among Kenyans themselves: The researchers are so busy getting fossils out, they don’t educate the people around it. These people have not benefited from it. We are happy it is found there, but we have not benefited. (NMK*) Clearly, the NMK has a problem with its public image, tainted as it is by its discriminating, colonialist origins. The museum has a longstanding reputation as an institution created for the white elite rather than black Kenyans, an issue that remains a lingering concern in the museum today.4

The “Leakey Museum” Responses to the Leakey family reveal even more the shifting and complex nature of Kenyan perceptions of anthropology and the museum. As expressed by one Kenyan interviewee who said, “It’s always Leakey, Leakey, Leakey” (K10), the Leakeys are the defi nitive public face of anthropology in Kenya. 5 However, as many hold, in the history of modern Kenya the Leakeys have played major roles as invested Kenyan insiders rather than disinterested Western outsiders. Louis and son Richard Leakey, with their active involvement in Kenyan politics, have been more than mere fossil-hunters. Louis Leakey was adopted into the Kikuyu tribe and wrote a host of books on Kenyan life and politics, including one on the Mau Mau; and he is still notorious for his controversial role as interpreter to Jomo Kenyatta during his trial in 1952–3 (see his 1952 Mau Mau and the Kikuyu, or his 1966 White African). Richard Leakey in particular has had a widespread impact on the present-day country, with his tireless anti-poaching and conservation campaigns (he has been credited, for example, with winning the “ivory wars”) and his political efforts in the government (he headed an anti-corruption drive). He has contributed to the country in a great variety of capacities – from head of the Kenya Wildlife Society to cabinet secretary under President Moi to director of the NMK.6 He even started an opposition political party, Safi na, in 1995. Richard Leakey’s own long, prominent career in politics may have damaged public opinion (for example, the negative publicity he received in the book Richard E. Leakey: Master of Deceit, co-authored by Eustace Gitonga and Martin Pickford in 1995). Today, Meave Leakey, who served as head of paleontology at NMK until 2001, shoulders much of the Leakey legacy. She actively carries out extensive and fruitful excavations of human origins in Kenya and is engaged in a host of public events and evolutionary education initiatives. She has made a number of celebrated fossil fi nds and has named two new species, Australopithecus 133

Rethinking evolution in the museum anamensis and Kenyanthropus platyops, between 1995 and 2001, discoveries that have changed the landscape of hominid origins. Furthering the family tradition, Richard and Meave’s daughter, Louise, represents the third generation of Leakey paleontology. As a 2003 headline in the Guardian stated, “Women: skeletons in the family closet – as two of the world’s leading fossil hunters, mother and daughter Meave and Louise Leakey are carrying on the work of a legendary scientific dynasty” (O’Connell, 2003). To some Kenyans, the contribution of the Leakey dynasty is heavily fraught. The Leakeys symbolize not only the division between paleontologists and the lay public, but also that tension between non-black people who work on Africa and black people who are African (even if the sentiment is complicated by the fact that the Leakeys are Kenyan). These tensions were evident in the diametrically opposed opinions of the Leakeys among Kenyan museum visitors and museum professionals I interviewed. Whether positive or negative, opinions were largely emphatic. Through the Leakeys, some visitors expressed their outsider admiration of science and the museum (for example, one visitor reasoned that the exhibitions are accurate “because the people who excavate include Dr. Leakey”). At the same time, many visitors found the Leakeys – as icons, as scientists, as politicians – to be both profoundly positive and negative for Kenya. Some visitors were critical of the Leakeys for religious reasons, as in the words of one visitor who simply shared, “For the Christians, they are bad” (K10). The issue resurfaced in 2006 as Kenyan evangelists contested the prominence of human evolution in the museum’s ongoing renovation. The debate – staged largely between Richard Leakey and Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, the head of Christ is the Answer Ministries, the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya – made many headlines worldwide. Leakey is quoted as defending the evolution exhibition by emphasizing the value of Kenyan hominid fossils to Kenya’s national identity: “The collection it holds is one of Kenya’s very few global claims to fame and it must be forthright in defending its right to be at the forefront of this branch of science” (see the Telegraph article entitled “Evangelicals urge museum to hide man’s ancestors,” Pflanz, 2006). But typically in my work with museum visitors (as opposed to those creationists outside the museum), when visitors voiced negative opinions about the Leakeys, they pointed to Kenya’s colonial legacy, either implicitly or explicitly: I think the Leakey name pulls visitors. He’s defi nitely a media [persona]. But not Kenyans. I don’t think Kenyans would come here because of Leakey. Colonialism is a bitter experience. So there’s not a lot of “let’s forget about the time when they were in charge.” So you have negative responses to things that the white community does generally. The gut reflex is still there . . . The museum, being associated with this white family, is perhaps suffering for that. (K4) The family was also often critiqued as a unit, and more than once I heard the Leakey family referred to as a monopoly, corporation, or empire, as in the following exchange between an interviewee and myself: 134

“Out of Africa” in Kenya Q: A:

Is paleontological research in Kenya positive or negative? And the contribution of the Leakeys? That’s family work. When Africans happen to fi nd out something, they are still put back. And it’s always the Leakeys that come up.

After discussing Richard Leakey, the conversation progressed to Meave: Q: A: Q: A:

What about Meave Leakey, [do you have the same impressions of] his wife? Meave Leakey, I don’t know much about her. All I know is that she’s grooming her daughter to head the department, to inherit the department, the family department. Do you see that as a good thing or a bad thing? It’s a white thing. And it’s sad that all tourists who come here, they all ask for the Leakey Hall. White tourists. They ask for the Leakey Hall or the Joy Adamson drawings. That’s all they come to look at here . . .

He expands:

Q: A:

[The Leakeys] still carry [colonialism] in their minds. They wish it would go back and they’re not willing to admit their mistakes. They would never admit it so that really puts me off . . . Museums are part of that cycle and they’re still in a way promoting it, probably unconsciously . . . And the fact that we can’t come to terms with what we see everyday. It disgusts me. What we see is what’s happening in the museums, for instance the Leakey Hall is the Leakey Hall. It’s not the Kimeu Hall [for the widely successful Kenyan fossil-finder] or whoever. It’s the Leakey Hall. If you had your way, what would the future of the museum be? One thing I’d rather not have something like a Leakey Hall. I’d rather have an evolutionary hall and not make it look like it’s one man’s job. And for the portraits, I’d rather have an African artist doing them. Make it look more African. Give it an African perspective . . . The museum is just too white. I’d rather we have it a little more black, to look more beautiful. (K11)

Because of the complex tangle of colonialism and paleontology, black Kenyans, as this exchange reveals, tend to approach the institution with apprehension and a unique critical orientation, recognizing (more perhaps than visitors to other museums) that the people behind exhibitions are still shaped by their histories, personalities, and politics. I encountered other impassioned opinions on black Kenyans’ role, or lack thereof, in Kenyan paleontology. One interviewee responded, “Kenyans need to grow up. We have very learned people and we’re letting outside researchers drain us” (K1). These sentiments about outsider paleontology were furthered by a notorious incident in 2001 when French paleontologist Martin Pickford (co-author of Richard Leakey: Master of Deceit) reportedly stole a Kenyan hominid fossil and transported it to France. This incident prompted stony sentiments from 135

Rethinking evolution in the museum museum-goers regarding the relationship between paleontology and nationalism. Visitors commented on questionnaires, for example, “Don’t sell [fossils] to France without our blessings. Artifacts stolen must be returned!” No doubt the discourses around the possession of evolutionary fossils, artifacts, and territories reflect deeper politics and history; they are really controversies of entitlement.7

Kamoya Kimeu and insider Kenyan paleontology As indicated by the suggestion that the “Leakey Hall” be renamed the “Kimeu Hall,” Kenyan visitors did see Kenyan scientists as playing an important though under-valued role in the museum. Working alongside the Leakeys, Kenyan fossilfinder Kamoya Kimeu is perhaps the most significant figure in black Kenyan paleontology. The label “fossil-finder” does not do justice to Kimeu’s work or to the work of the legendary group of Kenyan fossil-finders known as the “Hominid Gang.” The term “fossil-fi nding” connotes lack of formal training but Kimeu is legendary not only for his hands-on skills but for his wide-reaching prowess in paleontology and paleoanthropology. Far from being an unskilled labor, “fossil-finding” on Kimeu’s level includes, among other things, the identification of anatomical minutiae and the taxonomic diagnosis of a wide range of organisms. He is personally responsible for some of the most significant discoveries in paleoanthropology, including the almost complete skeleton of Homo erectus, coined “Nariokotome Boy.” Among some Kenyans, Kimeu is a bit of a local celebrity, but anecdotal accounts hold he retired relatively poor and unacknowledged despite his long career working alongside the Leakeys. (Although I was unable to speak with the retired and reclusive Kimeu, I was fortunate enough to have many discussions with his son Boniface, who has developed a passion and propensity for paleontology like his father’s.) The NMK’s Prehistory Gallery only minimally points to Kimeu’s work. At the fossil display of Nariokotome Boy, the label gestures to the involvement of local Kenyans in paleontological and archaeological excavations. It reads: In August 1984, Kamoya Kimeu discovered a small fragment of fossilized human skull on the rock-covered edge of the Nariokotome River in the Turkana district west of the lake. Subsequent excavations resulted in the recovery of many parts of the skeleton. The fossil skeleton was excavated by a team from the National Museum. It is the most complete specimen of a fossil human ancestor ever to have been found and it ranks as one the most significant discoveries made in this subject. In response to this label, one interviewee addressed the museum’s failure to credit fully the role of black Kenyans in paleontology: All along, I’ve been knowing that it’s the Leakeys that have been discovering these things, not the local people. Then it comes to that corner [of 136

“Out of Africa” in Kenya the exhibition], “The Days of Discovery.” The Kenyans, they haven’t been giving them the right exposure. They should be given the credit. I don’t think they say that a local discovered that thing [Nariokotome Boy] . . . And I think they should be giving them more publicity to make people aware that Kenyans have also discovered such things. (K6) Representations of Kimeu come to embody larger political issues in the following respondent’s comments, which reiterate the importance of black Kenyan involvement in human origins research: There was [a feeling of pride]. I remember being a bit upset that Olduvai was in Tanzania, because it’s fairly close to the Kenyan border. There was pride in the fact that the leading archaeologists were Kenyan even though they were white Kenyans. We never heard of Kamoya Kimeu until much later, in fact at some point when he became an object of pity because he was living so poorly. The newspapers did stories about him and how this guy’s not wealthy and he ought to be . . . [There were] articles about the time when Leakey left the museum, maybe mid-90s, early 90s . . . There was a lot of this “let’s look for our old heroes.” And some newspaper reporters actually found him and asked the question: “How can this guy [Louis Leakey] travel the world exhibiting his fi nds and [Kamoya Kimeu has] got nothing?” There were questions being asked about whether or not he had been treated fairly and that’s when the pride turns into resentment. Yes, we’ve been exploited, but when I was younger, I was very proud of the Cradle of Man theory. (K4) There are many impediments to developing Kenyan paleontology, such as the lack of public and private resources. According to Richard Leakey himself (personal communication), human origins is important to the identity of Kenya but have been subordinated to other pressing national and societal concerns such as Kenyan poverty. Despite this, many Kenyan museum professionals recognize the importance of stimulating local interest in science, and there is a growing commitment to transforming the museum into a more accessible place for black Kenyan visitors and scientists. Despite the disregarded role of black Kenyans in Kenyan paleontology, Kenya’s significance to human evolution is clearly a source of pride for some Kenyan museum visitors. I would guess that not many non-anthropologists have heard of the Kenyanthropus fossil, but according to Meave Leakey (personal communication), Kenyan visitors ask to see the fossil by name. In the words of one Kenyan interviewee: “Defi nitely [human evolution] can build some positive attitudes in people, learning that you are sitting in the country where the fi rst man lived” (K6).

137

Rethinking evolution in the museum

Picturing prehistory in the diorama The importance of human evolution in Kenya is also reflected in the museum’s Prehistory Gallery, which serves primarily as its featured exhibition. Tour guides tell me that if they have only 30 minutes to give a tour, for example, they focus exclusively on prehistory at the expense of the other exhibitions. The popular hominid diorama, tucked away at the far end of the Prehistory Gallery, is a particular museum favorite for both children and adults visiting the museum. Museum designer Eustace Gitonga painted the diorama during his tenure at the NMK.8 The diorama acknowledges its Kenyan artist as “E. Gitonga,” something of which several visitors took note, I observed. The beautifully constructed and detailed diorama depicts three scenes – that is, three species of hominids living contemporaneously: an Australopithecus boisei family group (left), an Australopithecus africanus family group (center) and a Homo erectus family group (right).9 Despite the depiction of cohabitation, museum visitors often read the diorama as moving chronologically from left to right. The label for the diorama reads: This exhibit portrays reconstructions of what scientists believe our ancestors may have looked like 1.5 million years ago. There are 3 separate species which are represented in the fossil record by fossilized skulls, jaws and some limb bones. The models are based upon skeletal remains but are of course artistic reconstructions. A source of fascination, bewilderment, and amusement, the Homo erectus scene was the most popular among the visitors I observed (see figure 7.2). The tableau depicts three individuals carving raw meat on the savanna (similar to the AMNH H. erectus diorama), while the other groups depicted are gathering. At Homo erectus the label reads: H. erectus (on the right): an intelligent species with skills which included language, culture and stone technology. These were people that moved on from Africa and from which all mankind can derive its origins. H. erectus lived at the same time as Australopithecine species but, because of the large and intelligent brain, did not become extinct as they did. On questionnaires, 88 percent of museum visitors indicated that they liked the diorama, perhaps reflecting the effectiveness of the medium itself (despite the apparent creationist fuss surrounding its opening, according to my interviewees). The NMK’s single diorama elicited endless conversation, whispers, giggles, and squeals. Kenyan families often laughed and talked at length in front of the diorama, suggesting its usefulness as a stimulant and conversation piece. Many visitors used the diorama as a photo opportunity; children ran to it en masse; adults recalled it fondly from their adolescence, including one Kenyan woman who exclaimed, “Now, this is the one I always remembered!” (NMK*). Children, sometimes taking the models to be ancestors in the flesh, questioned guards again and again, “How did they get in there?” and “Why did 138

“Out of Africa” in Kenya Figure 7.2 The Homo erectus component of the National Museums of Kenya hominid diorama. Courtesy of the National Museums of Kenya.

the museum do that?” Adults expressed their fondness on questionnaires by explaining that “they are more real-life rather than imaginative,” and that they appreciated “the genius of the casts which are almost like the original”; others asked how the models were created. Arresting and penetrating, the diorama clearly drew attention and questioning. I observed one child, arrested by the diorama, who humorlessly reprimanded his amused parents by saying, “This is not a laughing matter.” What exactly is being reflected through the glass? I found the NMK diorama urged many museum visitors to perform that classic anthropological negotiation between self and other: Where do they end and we begin? For many visitors at the NMK, the lines between them and us were called into question in front of the diorama, revealing much about both the diorama as an artistic medium and the cultural presuppositions that visitors bring to them. At the diorama, I found that a few significant and interrelated issues surfaced as visitors experienced it. Namely, the exhibit seemed to blur the distinction between fact and fiction, with most people interpreting the diorama as an evolutionary argument; to blur the distinction between modern-day and prehistoric Kenyans; and lastly, to provoke questions and concerns about the origins of the races. Whether viewed with pride or disdain, almost all of the responses to the diorama rested upon the unique association the diorama provoked between Kenyan ancestors and Kenyan museum visitors. Sometimes visitors’ responses to my open-ended survey question – “Do you think there are inaccurate representations of Africa or African peoples in museums?” – implicated the diorama. One man answered, “No, I like my skin colour. There’s nothing wrong about their representation.” Skin color here and in many other instances was taken as a signifier of self, and supported the bond uniting the Homo erectus model and the museum visitor. Similar responses to the model also alluded to a common bond of color and culture, even nationality. One museum guard explained his impression of the diorama models, stating: 139

Rethinking evolution in the museum This is part of culture. This is the culture of Africa. We used to look like this. This is us without clothes. This is African culture. [He laughs, then jokes] Meave Leakey, the daughter, told me this, my best friend . . . Culturally people were like this. In 1780s, people were like this [points to boisei] . . . When white people came to Africa, then people started sewing clothes . . . If you work hard, you get clothes. (K12) The models on display repeatedly revealed visitors’ interest in clothing as a signifier (that is, whether or not the H. erectus models should be clothed and how), indicating just how much clothing functions in the modern world as a political sign of progress, class status, sophistication, and integration into Western culture. Some visitors, for example, joked, “They’re suffering. They don’t have clothes!” A skeptical Kenyan creationist visitor – clearly seeing the diorama as constructed – considered the clothes a deliberate manipulation by scientists. When asked how the models differ from us, he replied: Not much. These are naked, we put on clothes . . . People came up with these things after seeing the real man, how the man was. So they made it a little different so they can strongly convince people that this is where man comes from . . . [They looked at African people] because I don’t think they could have come up with these kind of faces. (K3) Such classic African iconography as dark skin, sparse clothing, and intimacy with nature became conduits to the Kenyan past for museum visitors, a complex, “negotiated” reading. Some children expressed an empathy and reverence for the models, including such statements as, “We want to live like them, like our grandparents, with hides. We’re tired of clothes” (K15). It required no great imaginative leap for these museum visitors to embrace this evolutionary past as one unique to them as Kenyans. These same youngsters envisioned their “grandparents” with an additional bit of romantic nostalgia, one that resonated with the Afrocentric readings discussed in chapter six. (Such nostalgic images may seem to parallel Western ideas of the “noble savage,” but the romanticization of Kenyan ancestors by Kenyans is typically devoid of the implications of “imperialist nostalgia” placed onto indigenous Africans by outsiders; see Lutz and Collins, 1993, 246). Visitors projected the African present onto the African past in other ways. Without any specific material in the dioramas to support them, one group of children informed me that the mannequins were “just like the Masai. They drink blood.” They also followed this presumption by asking, “Did Europeans used to look like that? They look African. Their behavior is African.” These comments likely reveal residues of colonial British education particularly as they resonate with logic used by Western museum visitors. Similar to British and American responses, Kenyan visitor responses to the diorama also reveal a distorted sense of the scale of evolutionary time. The time necessary for evolutionary change is condensed into years and generations: Lucy 140

“Out of Africa” in Kenya is our grandmother; Turkana boy, our cousin. One guide informed me that “the children learn that our grandparents used to put on skins,” so to facilitate comprehension and acceptance of human ancestors, the guides respond, “Yes, just like your grandparents.” Ultimately, I think, these associations backfi re. There is a slippery slope from our grandparents as ape-men to we as ape-men. These distortions of evolutionary time inadvertently transform gestures meant to endear and engage Kenyan children into a dangerous exaggeration of their relatedness to early African hominids. Furthermore, visitors also distorted evolutionary time by misreading the chronological flow of the diorama. Adults and children alike interpreted the models in a linear scheme, as representing different time periods (particularly as the models moved left to right, from hairy to less hairy to least hairy). For many, the diorama seemed to jump from two ape scenes to Homo erectus as fully human. One source of this misinterpretation was the presumption that meat-eating is a clear sign of progress: “They’re gathering there. The second point, they’re eating eggs. And the third point, they are hunting” (K6). At the diorama, guides occasionally reinforced this notion by emphasizing meat-eating as a mechanism for human evolution. Because the projection of such a timeline onto the exhibition existed in spite of the signage, it underscores the power of the visual over the textual in exhibitions, as in the AMNH Hall of Human Biology and Evolution. For Kenyan visitors, skin color was one of the most significant features (if not the most significant feature) determining how visitors connected with the models. Unfortunately, skin color functions simultaneously as a proxy for progress, a color-coded yardstick of past and present. Visitors immediately pointed out the skin color of the models when I probed their perceptions of the diorama. One visitor asked skeptically: What is this based on? What about the color? Why should they be grey or whatever color they are? . . . You can’t tell that that’s the original color. It’s just an issue of color in the conscious world. (K4) Visitors clearly regarded skin color as a representation of race and, by extension, Kenyans and Africans. When asked on questionnaires for general perceptions of the diorama, respondents wrote a variety of comments addressing skin color specifically: Personally it’s making a mockery of us, we Africans: the way they’ve depicted these things like the dark skin and everything. It’s like Africans, we are so primitive. I think it is a comment on the color of the first man. No! Though it’s not known which/what colour the ape-man was, the dark colour exposes the African man to ridicule!! In interviews, Kenyan respondents voiced a similar concern over the use of dark skin color as a form of racial mockery: 141

Rethinking evolution in the museum I think it’s a mockery of Africans. They depicted these things with the dark skin and everything. The kids look and say – Africans, we are so primitive. I don’t know. Has anything been discovered about the color of the fi rst man? . . . I think they’re trying, in a racial point of view, to portray Africans as still primitive . . . If I go up there and I’m African I identify myself with that thing. I’m not very comfortable with that . . . (K6) Here, more than in any of the other museums, visitors expressed concern over the manner in which the models were racially encoded. Sometimes visitors would ask me in quiet confidence, “Tell me truthfully. What do you think about the exhibit, the diorama?” before revealing, “It makes black people look primitive. It’s racist, bad” (NMK*). Other questionnaire respondents had strong negative counter-readings of the exhibitions: What they’re trying to say is that evolution took place in Africa and this is where all the primitive apes existed, making the continent look so primitive in a way. I did not [like the diorama]. They display man as primitive creations whose lives revolved under tough and insensitive conditions. They implied that the European is more recent than the African. Other visitors, though, were careful to tease out race from racism in the diorama. When asked if he thought the dioramas’ models make statements about African people, one visitor remarked: Only ignorant people would do that. Because you should judge a person by sitting down with them and talking to them. Look at their level of education, their level of training. There’s a lot of factors that you have to look into. (K5) In response to the diorama, another visitor read positive racial implications into the diorama, finding in it a source of pride: I strongly believe this evolution is such a privilege. Why don’t white people see it as a privilege? I’ve always prided myself in being from the Cradle of Mankind . . . there’s no racism [in the diorama models]. I am proud to be in the continent where people came from, the Cradle of Mankind. All people are still evolving at the same rate, so why do people say we are still apes? So I don’t have a problem seeing black skin in the diorama. I have a problem with people saying we are still apes. (K1) Other visitors found in evolutionary narratives a source of pride, commenting for example,

142

“Out of Africa” in Kenya Yes. [I believe African ape-men are ancestors] because they represent our forefathers. Tracing our genealogy could mean they were the fi rst ancestors of Africans. The first man was a black man. Some questionnaire respondents generally interpreted the exhibition as a positive statement on racial and evolutionary heritage. They mentioned learning that All human beings, even the white man, evolved from a common creative “ape.” We all have the same origin – hence the feeling that one is of a different class and is out of sane mind. I learned [from the exhibition] how white people are our brothers and sisters. Our [ancestors] are the same but how come some of them consider us monkeys? The diorama generated a host of other issues as visitors attempted to negotiate its iconography, particularly the characteristics of the past and present. Confused by the confl icting iconography of Homo erectus, many visitors saw this scene as a mere reflection of modern humanity (“Erectus is a man . . . depicts all Africans,” according to one visitor [NMK*]). Others noted its apparent contradictions: This makes sense [A. africanus models] but this bit here [H. erectus models] does not. Because at this stage [H. erectus] I tend to think . . . the skinning and all, the hunting . . . by this stage, I don’t think they should be without clothing. They should wear the skins or leaves. (K5) Exemplifying the common slippage between the models as ancestors and then as us, one respondent explicitly invoked “Bushmen” as living ancestors: These [H. erectus models] look more human. I think I’ve seen people that look like this . . . Yeah. There are communities that look a bit like that, aboriginal . . . from pictures I’ve seen from Australia and parts of southern Africa, “Bushmen.” (K4) Although this visitor locates these “primitive” characteristics in southern Africa rather than Kenya, one Kenyan archaeologist stated to me, “People think they can go to remote Kenya to see this” (NMK*), emphasizing again the conventional slippage in time and space. Although some Kenyan museum visitors may be inspired by the ape-man models to feel a sense of pride and distinction in their unique bond to African prehistory, most of them revealed perceptions that are tainted by the manner in which Africans have historically figured in evolutionary narratives. Since dark skin and other racialized features have stigmatized Africans with the mark of inferiority, 143

Rethinking evolution in the museum the similarity between present-day people and those ancestors depicted in the diorama does not make modern the models so much as it makes primitive the Kenyan museum visitor. The overarching meaning co-produced by museum and visitor (and influenced by history, society, and education) is that the physical characteristics of modern-day black people still offer bodily proof of our deep evolutionary history, a typical nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century claim. Some visitors suggested improvements to the diorama. As in the Afrocentric counter-narratives discussed before, interviewees subverted the conventional “up-from-Africa” progress narrative: Diorama should explain better. It should teach to classify primitive according to how thin your lips are and how hairy you are. Then white people are more primitive. That’s what I learned . . . I’d put more information, like what I told you about evolution, from my point of view. I’d rather they put that – this also happened in Europe, and what characters should be mostly related or relied upon in terms of classifying how evolved a person is. (K11) Another visitor offered: I would suggest making another model of white people, far away, evolving. (K8) Invoking Afrocentric and multiregionalist narratives, such alternatives would still do little to remedy culturally encoded ladders of progress. More potent interventions must be made to challenge notions of evolution as linear and goaloriented. It is clear that the racially encoded progress narrative creates fundamental problems for many black visitors seeking to understand human evolution. Whether these narratives end with white people or black people, they always imply racial progress: when they begin with black people and end, conventionally, with white people, whiteness serves as the sign of humanity’s culmination; when they begin with black people and end with black people, Europe still haunts the narrative as the deferred ending of progress. When asked if he wanted to have a black person at the end of the exhibition, one visitor addressed the dilemma succinctly, “Yes and no. Yes, to show people that we are complete. No, because they will just say this is the evolution of an African man” (K6). It is not necessary to abandon the representation of dark skin in prehistory but it has to be accompanied by a diversity of skin colors and features in the present. Museums can complicate the story of human evolution by transforming the line of progress into a bush and incorporating multiple phenotypes as representatives of present-day humans. Then, dark-skinned and African people can continue to fi nd pride in their distant evolutionary ancestors as well as in their more recent ancestors and in themselves. 144

“Out of Africa” in Kenya

Evolution and religion in the museum The complexity of Kenyan museum visitor responses also revealed the shifting negotiation of evolutionary and religious beliefs.10 Everyone I talked to at NMK had studied evolution in primary or secondary school, even in missionary or Christian schools. Despite professing Christian beliefs, most Kenyan creationists at the museum (a biased sample, of course, because they are at the museum) expressed less passionate political resistance to evolutionary teaching than creationist visitors I encountered in the United States, where evolution seems to pose a deep personal threat to many Christians. I talked to several visitors who managed a measured ambivalence about religious and evolutionary narratives. To my surprise, even some Kenyan tour guides acknowledged evolutionism and creationism as two frameworks that occupy separate conceptual niches for them. Explaining his reconciliation of the two doctrines, one visitor joked, So I was brought up in a Christian upbringing so I do have some sort of fear of God, not that I understand it. But I don’t want to go to hell also, so I’m just trying to be safe here [he laughs]. (K5) I did find, as discussed in chapter five, that some museum visitors turned to religion because of the perceived inability of evolutionary theory to explain culture and account for racial differences.

The Kenyan counter-narrative Compared to visitors at the other museums, the Kenyan museum-goers I interviewed were more quick to point out the complicity between the museum and colonialism. For example, Kenyan respondents often mentioned the exclusionary historical policies of the museum as an important impediment to Kenyan museum-visiting today. One interviewee had very strong feelings about the racist politics of both the museum and its narratives of human evolution. As a professionally trained black Kenyan scientist working within NMK, he was both insider and outsider to the institution, and thus a useful case study (K11). First, he offered an Afrocentric revision of the conventional progress narrative: There are those who believe that Africans are primitive and whites are not. What I learned is reverse, actually. We were classifying it, in my biology class, with primitivity in terms of the hairiness of the body and the lips, how thin the lips are. The thinner the lips are the closer you are to baboons and monkeys. So, OK, what we view is that a hairy body is closer to the ancestors, the apes, so you haven’t really evolved much . . . You undergo more evolution to lose that hair. We learn that . . . If you look at the apes, they mostly have very thin lips. If you look at most – I don’t mean to be a racist but if I may call them whites – they have thin lips so they resemble the apes. Their hair is straight also like the apes. So in class we figured they were closer to the apes. 145

Rethinking evolution in the museum This alternative prehistory also incorporated some variation on multiregionalism. Regardless of whether blacks or whites are superior, they must be fundamentally different: A: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A:

Q: A: Q: A:

I think evolution took place throughout the world, not in Africa. It began in different places at different times, taking different directions. Europeans evolved from the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnon . . . So races go back pretty far? And that’s why we have different colors. What is the diorama saying? What they are trying to say there is that evolution took place in Africa and all the primitive apes existed in Africa, making the continent look so primitive in a way. That’s how I see it. So you don’t think Africa as Cradle of Mankind is a source of pride? No, no. I think they think of Africans as still primitive and backward. They bring the picture to Africa that that’s where we have the origin of mankind. They’re still trying to point the finger at us. Bloody Africans are primitive. Sorry to use that word. What is the part [of evolution] you disagree with? The part that Africa is the Cradle of Humanity . . . I think that they maybe haven’t done so much in their own countries, as it comes to fossils. Or maybe their nature couldn’t allow some of the fossils to be found. Do you think they looked in Africa intentionally? Yes, because if we look at Russia, they’ve got the mammoth. Why can’t they also say that that’s also part of evolution?

At the end of the interview, he offered these closing comments: We need to change the history. We need to have textbooks and journals and researchers who are more open-minded and less biased when it comes to the race history of mankind . . . Egypt has been at the head of African development . . . Before even Europeans or whites knew that it was healthy to take a shower every day, Africans were bathing almost regularly. We need to look at history not from a racial point of view but in a more scientific, open-minded way. Clearly some visitors’ experiences at the National Museums of Kenya are strongly strained by preconceived notions of the museum and its politics. Altogether, the National Museums of Kenya is at the crossroads between European interests and investments (such as the successive influx of European and American paleontologists, conservationists, anthropologists, and naturalists) and the interests and investments of local Kenyans (scientists, educators, and visitors), making a unique study of the twenty-fi rst-century museum. The museum must wrestle with the healthy apprehensions many black Kenyan visitors bring to the museum and Eurocentric science. More than the other museums discussed in this book, the National Museums of Kenya is a sig146

“Out of Africa” in Kenya nificant site of contestation, but the museum is clearly poised for a new era, one that can preserve its own inherited history of tusks, colonial watercolors, and static glass cases while revamping its image as something post-colonially, proudly, Kenyan. Rather than serving as a stigma of inferiority, then, Africa’s role in human evolution can be a source of empowerment and even entitlement for African people.

147

Postscript The big picture “Meanings are in people” (National Museums of Kenya interviewee)

As one Kenyan visitor shrewdly commented in response to a question I posed to him about the meaning of a diorama, “Meanings are in people.” Indeed, a dizzying network of cultural significations complicates museum visitors’ impressions of human origins exhibitions. While visitors’ preconceptions can certainly be difficult to unpack analytically, we must recognize that museum visitors do not come into exhibitions as indifferent tabulae rasae. They come to the museum saturated with meanings. Despite the distinctive characters of each of the four museums considered here and the specific cultural differences among their audiences, it is clear that museums and their visitors traffic in common anthropological logic – namely the color-coded yardstick of evolutionary progress. In fact, visitors equipped with a weighty set of popular imagery – imagery derived from such things as Condé Nast Traveler magazines, Planet of the Apes fi lms, and National Geographic images – occupy the nexus between the evolutionary folklore circulating outside the museum and that which has been generated within it. This collection of images often urges Western museum visitors to negotiate between the “people who stayed behind” and their own fully evolved selves (defi ned often by such culturally coded “evolutionary leaps” as clean-shaven-ness and white skin).1 As a result of the continued circulation of outdated and biased cultural media, a significant number of visitors still viscerally perceive the African continent as fi xed in remote and static prehistory, falsely envision aboriginal Africans as evolutionary intermediates, and mistakenly believe that the emergence out of Africa signifies the emergence of true humanity. Despite rational inclinations otherwise, people often rely upon an old story to make meanings of human origins: humanity progressed out of the African evolutionary cradle and into the European evolutionary fi nishing school.

Re-envisioning evolution in the museum In reality, visitors bring cultural insights and expectations with them to the museum. This does not lessen the significance of the natural history museum; it 148

Postscript simply places a greater responsibility on museums to produce more challenging and conscientious representations of Africa and human evolution. Anthropology exhibits play an important role in society as sites where identities are challenged, consolidated, and constructed; by being attentive to the ways they communicate ideas to the public, they can be powerful, positive forces in public education. What can natural history museums, and the evolution exhibitions within them, do, then, to better fulfill their educational and social roles in society?2 I have accumulated a few ideas. First and foremost, museums should get better acquainted with their visitors. While investigations of museum visitor perceptions will never provide a blueprint of belief systems, further research can stimulate critical discussions about the ways real visitors negotiate anthropological information. The “ideal” visitor assumed by museums – a product of normative assumptions about visitor values, educations and interests – is far from representative. For too long, the “consensus narratives” employed by natural history museums have excluded the experiences of many museum visitors. For example, the persistence of static, unchanging anthropological representations of Africa works to continually interpellate the black museum visitor as primitive (despite the ways black visitors attempt to resist this). Alternatively, museums can try to include new, more complex representations of the continent that account for the new, more complex perspectives of their black visiting public. Museums can also increasingly work to demystify the museum and science. It is necessary to give museum visitors information about their evolutionary past, but it is far more valuable to impart to visitors the knowledge to understand and critique information about their evolutionary past. Being cognizant of their role in communicating information and ideologies to the public, museums can take responsibility for empowering visitors to examine critically the information presented to them. 3 For example, museums can prepare visitors to think critically by presenting scientific theory and methodology, thus illustrating the processes of evolution and not just the products of it. Museums can also offer their visitors opportunities to have a look behind the scenes in the museum to examine how reconstructions and dioramas are actually produced. Visitors can also be encouraged to perform evolutionary brainstorming – to imagine alternative scenarios, to reconstruct ancestors and create taxonomic classifications of their own, to imagine the future of evolution. Pedagogically, there are endless merits to raising issues merely to stimulate inquiry-based, constructivist learning. Encouraging such intellectual gymnastics allows museum visitors to think critically about evolutionary science and the natural history museum as institution. It also allows visitors to imagine themselves as scientists, removing the disconnect between those who walk the exhibit halls and those elusive figures who work behind the museum walls. Finally, we need to complicate origins images substantially. Anthropological research has expanded upon images of Africa by introducing such characters as a recent African Eve to the prehistoric African landscape, but its theoretical advances often disappear beneath conventional, convenient imagery. Most human 149

Rethinking evolution in the museum origins exhibits often continue to move in discrete packages from black to brown to white, ending in Europe with technology, culture, and civilization. Dark skin and other conspicuous characteristics of Africa become the defining characteristic of prehistory, while – and it is the functional association that is of importance – modernity continues to be represented as something that occurs uniquely in Europe, among white-skinned ancestors. We need to significantly expand the biological and cultural signs of modern humanity, and significantly expand how people imagine the course of evolutionary history. Ending with black figures is probably not enough (because even progress ladders that end with black or brown figures are simply read as unfinished). In addition to providing evidence for modern human origins in Africa and new visual images associating dark skin with modern behaviors, we can offer a diversity of images representing modern humans at the so-called “end” of the evolutionary story. The idea is to encourage people not only to insert new characters into the old, linear evolutionary story but to change the story altogether. As seen in responses to the American Museum of Natural History dioramas and the National Museums of Kenya diorama, evolutionary reconstructions force many museum visitors to ask, “Where do they end and we begin?” This question is fundamental to the human origins exhibition experience, and to appreciating where critical changes in reconstructions must be made. For many, the doctrine of African origins has two dimensions – namely our earliest human origins (that is, bodily, bestial origins), and our most recent human origins (the true “humanity” we recognize as ourselves). Museum visitors must navigate between these two, insinuating themselves among the icons and signifiers they find familiar. This places an enormous responsibility on museums to represent effectively not only the “they” in origins exhibitions (the “ape-men” or the “cave-men”) but the “we” as well (the representatives of modern humanity). Finally, for too long modern-day African people, including those of the African diaspora, have been invisible in “out-of-Africa” scenarios, invisible as representatives of modern humanity and invisible as members of the museum audience. Museums must work to subvert the passive roles African people have played in origins imagery, and allow them to play more active roles in museum and anthropological narratives. Because people look for reflections of themselves in human evolution exhibits, museums should try to recognize how those identities are complicated and diverse. From there, we can vastly improve the representational strategies used to bring prehistoric Africa to a diverse modernday world.

150

Appendix 1 Visitor data

A glimpse of the respondents At the Natural History Museum, I surveyed a total of 120 museum visitors, the majority of whom (59 percent) consisted of international tourists, mostly European tourists, since I conducted my surveys during the summer months of 2000. A majority of respondents were below the age of 40 (75 percent), and there was a bias in the proportion of male to female respondents (M: 58 percent, F: 42 percent). The majority of museum visitors were surveyed on weekdays, also accounting for the large percentage of non-British international tourists (41 percent British, 59 percent non-British). The Natural History Museum requested that I not solicit information about visitors’ ethnicities, so I drew upon the museum’s own marketing and exhibition studies to get a sense of its visitors’ demographics overall. Between 1991 and 1998, the museum observed that there were more males than females, that the bulk of visitors were 25–44 years of age and younger than 11, that there was a distinct “upmarket” profi le with 41 percent in social class AB (compared to 15–16 percent in the UK as a whole), that more than half of visitors had completed full-time education, that one-third had biological science qualifications. The museum also observed at that time more repeat visits, more family groups, fewer overseas and longdistance visitors, and an increase in the average duration of a visit, averaging 1.5 hours to 2.5 hours (compiled from an in-house NHM marketing study conducted in 1991). At the Horniman Museum, I surveyed a total of 115 tourists also during the summer of 2000. The majority of respondents were below the age of 40 (77 percent), and there was a slight bias in the proportion of male to female respondents (M: 51 percent, F: 49 percent). The large majority of visitors were British (75 percent). In general, my sample conformed to the Horniman’s own demographic studies. The Horniman Museum reports over 210,000 visitors annually (150,000 not in organized groups), 25,000–35,000 of which are schoolchildren. They have observed many repeat visitors, and many intergenerational visitors. They have a unique and relatively high number of visitors identified as of an ethnic minority (25 percent). The marketing department acknowledges that sometimes visitor surveys are skewed toward white visitors. But generally the museum’s visitors’ ethnic balance approximates the local (marketing department, personal communication). 151

Rethinking evolution in the museum

Figure A1.1 Nationality of visitors at the four museums.

At the National Museums of Kenya, I surveyed a total of 128 museum visitors during the summer of 2001. Again, the majority of respondents were below the age of 40 and a large majority were Kenyan (66.4 percent). The National Museums of Kenya was unique in that the great majority of respondents were male (M: 72.66 percent, F: 27.34 percent) – this was not a reflection of those that came through the museum exhibition, but rather those most willing to participate. At the American Museum of Natural History, I surveyed a total of 128 museum visitors also during the summer of 2001. The majority of visitors were again below the age of 40, with most falling in their 20s. There was a fairly equal representation of males to females (M: 50.78 percent, F: 49.22 percent), and Americans were in the majority (67.83 percent). A 1993 AMNH exhibition evaluation reports visitors that are 75 percent white and 25 percent ethnic minority (these confi rm similar demographics found in a 1987 study) (Giusti, 1987). Note that a 1993 study of how African-Americans use museums found that African-Americans make up 12.7 percent of all museum visitors, approximating the percentage of African-Americans in the general population. (Falk warns, however, that the findings are likely overestimated; see Falk, 1993.) On my questionnaires, I solicited demographic data, including respondents’ age, gender, nationality, and self-described ethnicity. Note that not all visitors responded to each demographic question, and some questions were answered creatively. For example, to the intentionally open-ended question “race or ethnicity”, some visitors would offer such welcome responses as “human.” Records of visitors that declined to participate in the questionnaire were not kept. However, refusal patterns conformed to recognized trends, such as insufficient time, language barriers, and the care of small children. My questionnaire refusal rate was approximately 1 in 3 visitors. The most common reason for refusal was the lack of time (often associated with the length and extent of the survey), followed by language barriers. This biases respondents toward people with a relatively strong interest in participating, which may correlate with a strong interest in human evolution. It also biases respondents toward those who speak English as their first language. 152

Appendix 1: Visitor data

Figure A1.2 Age of visitors at the four museums.

A glimpse of the interviewees Interviewees were culled from the larger pool of questionnaire respondents. When museum visitors are quoted throughout the book, interviewees are labeled according to the codes below. Quotes from questionnaires are left unmarked. I also engaged in informal interviews while standing in each of the human evolution exhibits. On these occasions, demographic information was not collected and respondents are demarcated throughout the book with an asterisk (*). For interviews where individual voices could not be distinguished on the recording, only one code is given. Most interviews with groups of children or young adults are given one code (these usually comprised groups of 3–6 kids). The Horniman Museum Code

Nationality

H1 UK H2 UK H3 UK H4 UK H5 UK H6 UK H7 (group) UK H8 (group) UK H9 (group) UK H* (informal conversation)

“Race” Gender

Age

White White White White Black Black White Black White

30s 30s 30s 30s 40s 40s 12 10–11 11

Male Male Male Male Male Male Male Male Female and male

153

Rethinking evolution in the museum The Natural History Museum Code

Nationality

“Race” Gender

Age

B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 B10 B11 (group) B12 B13 B14 B* (informal conversation)

UK UK New Zealand UK USA UK Australia UK UK UK UK Sudan Sudan UK

White White White White White White White White White White White Black Black White

13 22 28 70s 40s 50s 33 27 32 26 12–13 19 19 20s

Male Male Female Female Male Male Female and male Female Male Male Female and male Female Female Female

The American Museum of Natural History

154

Code

Nationality

“Race” Gender

Age

A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 A7 A8 A9 A10 A11 A12 A13 A14 A15 (group) A16 (group) A* (informal conversation)

USA Australia Australia USA USA USA USA USA USA USA USA USA USA USA USA USA

White White White Chicano White White White White White White White White White White Mixed White

36 31 27 29 40s 12 15 60s 60s 60s 60s 60s 20s 20s 16–17 8–9

Male Male Female Male Female Female Male Female Female Female Male Female Female Female Female and male Female and male

Appendix 1: Visitor data The National Museums of Kenya Code

Nationality

“Race” Gender

Age

K1 K2 K3 K4 K5 K6 K7 K8 K9 K10 K11 K12 K13 K14 K15 K* (informal conversation)

Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya Kenya

Black Black Black Black Black Black Black Black Black Black Black Black Black Black Black

20s 20s 33 32 20s 30 20s 20s 23 22 28 40s 60s 10–13 10–13

Male Female Male Male Male Male Male Male Male Male Male Male Male Female and male Female and male

155

Appendix 2 Sample questionnaires

156

157

The Natural History Museum

158 The Natural History Museum

159

The Horniman Museum

160 The Horniman Museum

161

The National Museum of Kenya

162 The National Museum of Kenya

163

The American Museum of Natural History

164 The American Museum of Natural History

Appendix 3 Quantifying African visions Over the course of my research, I realized the impossibility of quantifying how visitors envision their African origins. The more I interviewed visitors, the less I valued my ability to use questionnaires to apprehend their perceptions of dense and emotionally loaded topics. Still, there is a set of questionnaire questions that are pertinent to (1) considering how visitors envision Africa, race, and evolutionary progress and (2) illustrating the differences between visitor responses on questionnaires and the latent, racial beliefs revealed in interviews. As a “true-sort-of-false” exercise, I asked visitors to what extent they believed in rather value-laden evolutionary statements, giving them the options of “very much,” “somewhat,” “not much,” and “not at all”. At all four museums, I asked visitors to what extent they believe that “Evolution is a progression from simple to complex societies” and “Racial categories are more cultural than biological.” With these questions, my objective was to get at whether historical anthropological ideas about culture and race still influence notions of evolution (and whether historical anthropological ideas about evolution still influence notions of culture and race). I found that the statements complement each other in an interesting way. Visitors seem to lend some credence to the notion of cultural evolution, with a majority of respondents believing that evolution functions on human societies. At the same time, the majority of visitors believe racial groups are defined more by their distinct cultures than biology, presumably a nod to visitors’ exposure to recent science and popular science discourses on the topic of race (with widespread attention given to things like the Human Genome Project). But, as discussed, acknowledging scientific arguments does not necessarily mean adopting them wholesale. In interviews and more oblique probing, it is clear that visitors strongly adhere to biological explanations of race. I also included a few “true-sort-of-false” statements that gauge whether visitors locate modern human origins in Africa. At all four museums, I asked visitors whether they thought “modern humans evolved in Africa” (I added “both biologically and culturally” to the end of this statement at the National Museums of Kenya and the American Museum of Natural History, where I conducted research subsequent to the British museums). At the British museums, I also asked visitors the extent to which they believe that “Modern humans evolved less than 50 thousand years ago” and whether “The last phase of human evolution occurred in Europe” – both statements an attempt to ascertain how and where visitors locate the origins of modern humans. When I conducted the later research 165

Rethinking evolution in the museum at the National Museums of Kenya and the American Museum of Natural History, I dropped the last two statements and asked more directly whether visitors thought that “Biological evolution took place in Africa and then cultural evolution took place in Europe,” and, rather bluntly, whether visitors regarded “South African ‘Bushmen’ as living ancestors.” In various ways, all these statements attempted to get a sense of visitors’ appreciation for the out-of-Africa hypothesis and their thinking on the evolutionary possibilities and limitations of the African continent. Though a majority of visitors indicated that modern humans arose in Africa, I am not convinced that all positive responses reflect familiarity with the out-of Africa model. It became clear from my conversations with museum visitors that positive responses may just indicate an acknowledgement that humans, loosely defined, arose in Africa. I also assumed that if museum visitors believe modern humans arose less than 50,000 years ago, they were either using cultural criteria (like the popular cave paintings of France at less than 30,000 years old or the origins of agriculture at 10,000 years ago), or out-of-date scientific criteria (ignoring older, anatomically modern finds more recently discovered), or religious criteria (creationists positing creation less than 10,000 years ago). Many respondents did agree with the statement, suggesting some adherence to cultural or religious definitions of humanity. But I think visitors generally interpreted the question in a variety of inconsistent ways. (It also became clear in administering the surveys that the statement’s explicit use of a number intimidated visitors, causing them to reread pieces of the exhibition in pursuit of the correct answer.) I also think visitors interpreted the questions regarding the last phases of evolution in variable and inconsistent ways. Regarding African “Bushmen” as “living ancestors,” the majority of National Museums of Kenya visitors considered the statement “not at all” true while the majority of American Museum of Natural History visitors deemed the statement “somewhat” true. Again, the responses at both museums fell along a continuum revealing the slipperiness of perceptions. Ultimately, I think the set of statements I posed to visitors about race and evolutionary progress did little more than simply hint at the larger universe of visitor perceptions. When I asked some interviewees to freely associate while reading through these statements, my faith in the ability of the questions to uncover visitors’ perceptions quickly diminished. Look at how one interviewee navigated the statements (the questionnaire statements as written on the questionnaire are followed by his spoken response): Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: Q: A: 166

Evolution is a progression from simple to complex societies. [I agree] Very much, but who’s to say our society is any more complex than first century AD? Racial categories are more cultural than biological. [I agree a] Mixture, somewhat and not much. Some are biological, some are cultural. Modern humans evolved in Africa, both biologically and culturally. [I agree for the] Horn or North Africa, MidEast. Modern humans evolved less than 50 thousand years ago. What do you mean by modern humans? [I answer, “us.” He responds] Yes.

Appendix 3: Quantifying African visions Q: A:

The last phase of human evolution occurred in Europe. Not much, no, we evolved and then spread out. It’d be more biological from there, like the Japanese eyes.

Clearly, visitor comments, especially in relation to vexed issues, do anything but easily conform to quantitative data. When trying to gain some purchase on emotionally loaded matters, I found that qualitative research does a better job of exposing the complexities of individual perceptions without artificially forcing order on those human emotions, sentiments, and perceptions that defy simplistic categorization.

Visitor data Visitors decided to what extent they believed in the following statements. Table A3.1 “Evolution is a progression from simple to complex societies.”

HM NHM NMK AMNH

very much

somewhat

not much

not at all

18.45% 30.63% 45.61% 31.36%

43.69% 49.55% 31.58% 45.76%

14.56% 9.91% 15.79% 11.02%

12.30% 9.91% 7.02% 11.86%

Table A3.2 “Racial categories are more cultural than biological.”

HM NHM NMK AMNH

very much

somewhat

not much

not at all

41.18% 53.51% 39.82% 46.61%

38.24% 25.44% 36.28% 34.75%

11.76% 16.67% 10.62% 11.86%

8.82% 4.38% 13.27% 6.78%

Table A3.3 “Modern humans evolved in Africa” (at NMK and AMNH, I added “both biologically and culturally” to this statement).

HM NHM NMK AMNH

very much

somewhat

not much

not at all

48.54% 40.74% 46.36% 30.36%

31.07% 43.52% 34.55% 46.43%

8.74% 8.33% 10.00% 14.29%

11.65% 7.41% 9.09% 8.93%

167

Rethinking evolution in the museum Table A3.4 “Modern humans evolved less than 50,000 years ago.”

HM NHM

very much

somewhat

not much

not at all

40.63% 33.93%

31.25% 33.93%

8.33% 10.71%

19.79% 21.43%

Table A3.5 “The later phases of human evolution took place in Europe.”

HM NHM

very much

somewhat

not much

not at all

12.90% 17.31%

30.11% 43.27%

24.73% 19.23%

32.26% 20.19%

Table A3.6 “Africans such as the South African ‘Bushmen’ are living ancestors.”

NMK AMNH

very much

somewhat

not much

not at all

27.55% 20.72%

24.49% 35.14%

13.27% 23.42%

34.69% 20.72%

Table A3.7 “Biological evolution took place in Africa and then cultural evolution took place in Europe.”

NMK AMNH

very much

somewhat

not much

not at all

17.75% 13.04%

21.50% 36.52%

19.63% 16.52%

41.12% 33.91%

Black visitor data For some questionnaire responses, I did analyze fi ndings in sub-groups. For example, you can see from the charts on the right that black museum visitors primarily conform to general visitation patterns but depart in some intriguing ways as well.

168

Appendix 3: Quantifying African visions

Figure A3.1 “Evolution is a progression from simple to complex societies.”

Figure A3.2 “Racial categories are more cultural than biological.”

Figure A3.3 “Africans such as the South African ‘Bushmen’ are living ancestors.”

169

Appendix 4 Visitors’ path from exhibit to interview

U

170

Notes

Introduction 1 As Doering and Pekarik (1996) write, “When visitors encounter the contents of an exhibition, they necessarily place them within the narrative that they have previously constructed to explain objects and ideas of this type.” See also Thorburn (1988), Carragee (1990), Billig et al. (1988), Silverman (1993, 10). On museum communication, see HooperGreenhill (1999b) and (2000), Ravelli (2006). 2 The names of the museums are abbreviated throughout the book as “NHM,” “HM,” “NMK,” and “AMNH,” respectively. Also note that the title “the Natural History Museum” refers to the British Museum of Natural History. Furthermore, the title “National Museums of Kenya” refers to the flagship museum in Nairobi and not the many satellite museums that are part of the larger institution. 3 On the convention of crouching females and erect males in evolutionary representations, see Gifford-Gonzalez (1993) and Wiber (1997). 4 The controversy over the representation of cladistics raged in the press for years, particularly in the pages of Nature. Consider for example the February 26, 1981 Nature headline, “Darwin’s death in South Kensington,” or the July 30, 1981 Nature headline, “Cladistics and evolution on display?” The controversy emerged in other media as well, such as in the Sunday Times November 23, 1981 article by Bryan Silcock suggestively titled, “Dinosaurs and ape-men rear a Marxist head.” 5 Halstead embroiled himself in other controversies about the nature of the Natural History Museum’s displays. For example, he engaged in a controversy over the nature of physical anthropology at the Natural History Museum. In 1989 he voiced his opinion of anthropology’s detrimental “new left” with the essay “The new left’s assault on science: The case of anthropology at the Natural History Museum.” Here, he accuses the museum of widespread and unwarranted dismissal of the study of intraspecific variation. He attributes this to political sensitivities of the day, such as those concerning intraspecific human variation, or race (Halstead, 1989). 6 “Hominid” is used throughout to refer to two-legged primates of the family Hominidae, including humans and those species that led to humans. Taxonomists have also introduced the term “hominin” to refer to species only on the human lineage. 7 The museum doubled in size in 1953 with the addition of a botanical hall, featuring such new exhibitions as the illustrations of Joy Adamson, and a Mahatma Ghandi Memorial Hall of geology and minerals, featuring the Miocene and Pleistocene faunas of East Africa (Cunningham van Someren, 1983, 9). 8 Much of the history of the exhibition comes from personal communication with museum professionals. 9 The exhibition is a large 7,000 square feet, much larger than the other three exhibitions considered (Giusti, 1993, 4). And there is much evidence of the museum’s investment: the total exhibition cost $6.7 million, including between $150,000 and $200,000 for each diorama; furthermore, it was in the planning over the course of ten years and a great

171

Notes

10

11

12 13

proportion of AMNH staff contributed to its development, including upwards of twenty preparators (Hieres, 1993). It should also be noted that all of the museums are undergoing major renovations of their extant human origins exhibitions, an incentive which partially motivated their interest in being part of this study. For a history of the American Museum of Natural History, see Preston (1986); for a history of the Natural History Museum, see Stearn, (1981); for a history of the Horniman Museum, see Shelton (2001); for a history of the National Museums of Kenya, see Cunningham van Someren (1983). I am indebted much to AMNH exhibition evaluator Ellen Giusti for her insights into the development and analysis of visitor studies. The evaluation of museum visitor perceptions was further informed by many sources, such as Borun and Korn (1999), De Andrade (2000), Diamond (1999), Dean (1994), Falk and Dierking (1992; 2000), Giusti (1993), Griggs (1984), Griggs and Hays-Jackson (1985), Kvale (1996), and Maxwell (1996). The methodology also called upon studies with particular interest in critiquing scientific or evolutionary representations such as Gifford-Gonzalez (1993), Lutz and Collins (1993), Moser (1996a; 2003), and Wiber (1997). Finally, the methodology benefited from studies critiquing the cultural work of museums such as Hooper-Greenhill (1994b; 1999a), Karp and Lavine (1991), Karp, Kreamer, and Lavine (1992), and Schudson (1997). I do acknowledge the fluidity of race and my own biases in targeting “black” visitors. Visitors did, however, determine their own cultural identity on questionnaires. The term “contact zones” was borrowed by James Clifford from Mary Louise Pratt to describe museums in multiracial, multicultural societies: “By thinking of their mission as contact work – decentered and traversed by cultural and political negotiations that are out of any imagined community’s control – museums may begin to grapple with the real difficulties of dialogue, alliance, equality, and translation” (Clifford, 1997, 213).

1 Up from Africa 1 I use Jahoda’s articulation of the concept of “image”: “In spite of the fact that characterizations of the Other remained astonishingly uniform through the ages, I prefer not to call them ‘stereotypes,’ since that is a rather narrowly cognitive concept. The term ‘images’ has the advantage of conveying a far richer range of meanings, encompassing not only perceptions and mental representations but also, importantly, feelings” (Jahoda, 1999, xv). 2 On challenges to accepting African australopithecines as ancestors, see Gundling (2005). 3 Bear in mind that any such sweeping history requires some cognitive shortcuts – for example, when discussing an artificially cohesive timeframe (such as the nineteenth century) or an artificially cohesive population (such as the Europeans); shortcuts are used here merely to distinguish generalized trends recognized by historians. It is also important to emphasize here that from the vantage point of the present day, historical ideologies of race may seem unabashedly pernicious. However, even the most well-intentioned race science, past and present, can provide unlikely fodder for racist discourses. This history reminds us to be ever vigilant of the anthropological representations of race produced in the present and the forms they take in public discourses. 4 Several important works laid the groundwork for the history I am about to recount, such as Jahoda’s Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture (1999), Moser’s Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins (1998), Stocking’s Victorian Anthropology (1987), Gould’s Mismeasure of Man (1981), and Bennett’s Pasts beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (2004). Other works that shed light on anthropological race science are Ames (1992), Baker (1998), Blakey (1987), Coombes (1994), Gould (1981), Haraway (1989), Harding (1994), Kohn (1996), Lindfors (1999), Martin and Veel (1998), and Shipman (1994). 5 Enlightenment ideals are reflected in the work of many noteworthy scientists. Others significant to the developing science of race were Comte de Buffon, Johann Blumenbach, and Georges Cuvier. See Marks (1995).

172

Notes 6 With the onset of intense exploration and the approach of the Enlightenment, apes and Africa gained new currency, though it is difficult to determine exactly when apes and humans merged in the mythical imagination (Jahoda, 1999, 229). It is thought that primates were long known to Japan, India, and the Middle East and they sometimes occupied a fantastic position on the biological and cultural periphery of humans. Apes, though, had been known to the West only since the seventeenth century, as evidenced in texts of comparative anatomy, and Jon Marks has speculated that even in the 1800s, apes likely had a mystique somewhat akin to the mythical Big Foot of today (Marks, 2002, 13). 7 On the historical relationship between museums and the formulation of anthropological ideas, see for example Alderson (1992), Alexander (1996), Ames (1992), Asma (2001), Bouquet (1995), Cooke and Wollen (1995), Dexter (1966), Haas (1996), Hinsley (1991), Jones (1993), Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (1998), Schmidt and Patterson (1995). 8 This evolutionary narrative of progress has been addressed by critics of all “exhibitionary disciplines” and has been observed, for example, throughout exhibitions of art, geology, astronomy, and paleontology, as well as anthropology, world’s fairs, and living performances. “Exhibitionary disciplines” is an expression borrowed from museum scholar Tony Bennett (Bennett, 1999, 332–61). 9 Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859, and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871. This was followed in public impact by Thomas Henry Huxley’s 1864 Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel’s 1876 History of Creation. 10 Also see Baker (1998) on the combined contributions of Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois on dismantling the science of race (Baker 1998, 99–126). On the relationship between museum anthropology and academic anthropology at the turn of the twentieth century, see Conn (1998). Also see Blakey (1987) on the history of race scientists in anthropology. See Marks (1996a) and Marks (1996b) on the modern-day strained relationship between anthropologists and their subjects. See also Martin and Veel (1998). 11 Also note that there was a significant resurgence of African as ape-man with the popularity of theories of sociobiology and “man the hunter” in evolutionary theory of the 1960s, particularly in the depiction of the South African Kung San or “Bushmen” as evolutionary analogy. See Lee and DeVore’s Man the Hunter (1969). Among the groups essentialized as evolutionary originals – the Irish, the Native Americans, the Australian aborigines, the Yanomami – the Kung San is the quintessential aboriginal; living in the Cradle of Mankind adds new weight to the stereotype. 12 On this, see Gould (1981), Kohn (1996), Shipman (1994). 13 Jahoda also makes a psychological critique as to whether terms such as “bestial” and “apish” were used objectively as descriptors of Africans, or whether they always carried a significant pejorative sense (Jahoda, 1999, 44–9). Might Africans once have been rendered, with scientific objectivity, to be apes taxonomically and thus non-human? Certainly some early scientific texts seemed to blur the distinction between humans and apes, converging science and mythology, without overtly implicating African peoples. For example, the first description of the African “pygmy chimp” or bonobo by Edward Tyson in 1699 assumed it to be part human and part ape; see Marks (2002, 17). However, even in moments of genuine scientific pursuit of knowledge, imperial and colonial politics cannot be extricated from the science because information often served political ends directly and indirectly. 14 Much critical scholarship has attested to this. See, for example, Pieterse (1992) and Lindfors (1999). 15 Sports Illustrated is also a common offender, speaking often to the bestiality of black sports celebrities and speculating as to the bogus genetics of sports fitness. Their allusions to the biology of race are widespread. In their Winter 2003 swimsuit edition, for example, the magazine writes – above a two-page spread of a dark-skinned black supermodel, scantily clad save the many Masai adornments – “On the Trail of the Human Animal in Kenya” (2003). Lott (1999) also describes the use of the Negro-ape slur across pop culture from the Los Angeles police attack on Rodney King to companies such as AT&T. The pop culture occurrences of the slur are innumerable.

173

Notes 16 Of course this was not always the case. In the history of the use of “black” as a pejorative, while it derisively labeled all dark savages, in certain historical moments it was attributed to any culture deemed worthy of denigration. Most notably, for nearly a millennium of English occupation and exploitation of the Irish, they were deemed black. See, for example, Curtis (1997). Also, as religion continued to play a role in demarcating who was “savage” and “wild” and who was not, many of the world’s peoples were homogenized as black. This was to change, however, in the eighteenth century, when slavery required blacks to hold a unique position of inferiority and bestiality.

2 Evolving into the familiar 1 As Landau points out, the common evolutionary narrative can be seen, for example, in the table of contents of Darwin’s 1871 The Descent of Man. She writes, “the table of contents reveals the outlines of a story . . . ‘Chapter I The evidence of the descent of man from some lower form (terrestriality) . . . Chapter II On the manner of development from some lower form (bipedalism) . . . Chapter III and IV Comparison of the mental powers of man and the lower animals (encephalization) . . . Chapter V On the development of the intellectual and moral faculties (civilization) . . .’ The order of presentation does not necessarily reflect an evolutionary sequence, but it does follow Darwin’s suggestion that progress has been from the perfection of the human body to ‘the highest standard as yet attained by him in knowledge, morals and religion.’” (Landau, 1991, 42–3). 2 In addition to the works mentioned, additional scholarship critiques popoular representations of archaeological and evolutionary science. See Anderson (1990), Ashworth (1985), Baigrie (1996), Conkey and Williams (1991), Gamble (1992), Gifford-Gonzalez (1992), Jameson (1997), Stringer and Gamble (1993). Also Veel and Martin (1998). 3 Throughout all of my discussions with visitors, a variety of other books was mentioned, from such science fiction classics as William Golding’s The Inheritors (1955) and H. G. Wells’s Food of the Gods (1965) to popular science books such as Seven Daughters of Eve (Sykes, 2001), Fairweather Eden (Pitts, 1998) and Richard Leakey’s Origins (1977). Even some creationist literature was mentioned. 4 Public interviews with those involved in the making of the film – from the costume director of the movie to its leading stars – reveal further the inherent race politics of the Planet of the Apes remake. For example, one Internet news source, The Shine, recounts a then–notorious comment by the film’s leading man, Mark Wahlberg: “How does Mark Wahlberg describe one of the world’s most gorgeous women? Apparently, like a beautiful ape. The Planet of the Apes star told Howard Stern listeners that co-star Helena Bonham Carter, who was covered in tons of fake fur and monkey makeup for her role, looked a lot like [African-American celebrity] Janet Jackson” (2003, http://www.shine.com/new_music_ beatbox.cfm?content_id=wahlberg_apes). Another Internet new source, Urban Cinefile, transcribed one exchange Wahlberg had with interviewer Jenny Cooney Carillo on August 9, 2001: Q: On screen you and Helena Bonham Carter, who plays an ape, have certain chemistry. How did you feel about the relationship? A: . . . You know I was willing to go anywhere with the part . . . But with Helena Bonham Carter being cast in the role, and what she brought to the part, and Rick Baker’s makeup, she kind of looks like Janet Jackson. I don’t want Janet to get upset; I like Janet Jackson. But she was phenomenal in the part. I mean, I was very attracted to her. So were a lot of other guys on the set, actually . . . (2003, http://www.urbancinefile. com.au/home/view.asp?a=5134&s=Interviews)

3 Revisiting Victorian progress 1 Other scholars make this critique as well, such as Gould (1981).

174

Notes 2 Lutz and Collins also add that the “organization of photographs into stories about cultural evolution (couched in more ‘modern’ terms of progress and development) . . . tell the Euramerican public that their race prejudice is not so wrong; that at one point people of color were poor, dirty, technologically backward, and superstitious – and some still are . . . In the context of this story, the fact that bronze peoples are portrayed as slightly less poor [than black people], more technologically adept, serves as proof that progress is possible – and fatalistically links progress to skin color” (Lutz and Collins, 1993, 164). 3 Though it may seem careless to graft the racism of anthropology’s past onto a value-free scientific present, any anthropological practice, regardless of the intent of the practitioner, can become part of the politics of race circulating in popular culture. 4 See other studies examining linear and progress driven conceptions of human evolution: Bowler (1989), Gould (1981; 1985; 1989; 1994), Landau (1991). Also Bowler (1984), Coombes (1994), Passmore (1970), Stocking (1968). 5 See, for example, Bain (1936), Lee and DeVore (1969), Yellen (1977). 6 A large accumulation of scholarship sheds light on representations of Africans in museums. Some which were important to my thinking are Bradford and Blume (1992), Clifford (1997), Davison (1993; 1996), Dubow (1989; 1995), Gordon (1997; 1998), Gould (1981; 1985; 1989), Landau (1991), Lutz and Collins (1993), Morris (1987; 1996), Munjeri (1991), Russel (1997), Skotnes (1996), Stocking (1968), Wiber (1997), Wilmsen (1989). 7 This entrance has come to be very representative of the museum. For example, the entrance appears on the cover of an industry magazine, Photographic Processing, with the issue title “Living on Reputation” (Kingsley, 1991). For a history of the museum, see Preston (1986). 8 For additional history on Osborn as paleontologist and leader of the American Museum of Natural History, see Rainger’s discussion of Osborn’s commitment to eugenics as manifest through the museum’s exhibitions (Rainger, 1991, 149–153). 9 The relationship between hard science and sentimentality is one that history often revises. Hard science is often linked with a presumed objectivity, and soft science with sentimentality. However, any type of information can be hardened with numbers, and any hard data can belie underlying sentimentality. This continues to be an irony in the science of race debates. Proponents of the inequality of the races lay claim to “hard science” but they can be just as inclined to sentimentality as those that dismiss it. This certainly characterizes Osborn’s own approach to the Hall of the Age of Man. While Osborn claimed that the duty of the museum was to “substitute sentimentality” on the issue of the melting pot of the races, the Hall nonetheless betrays a sentimental and politicized science (Porter, 1983, 28). 10 The movie musical, starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, is based on the Broadway play of the same name. In the film, the American Museum of Natural History is diplomatically disguised as “New York’s Museum of Anthropological History,” revealing the significance of the discipline to the public reputation of the museum. 11 This presumption of visitors having exclusively European ancestors continued in the museum’s 2003 temporary exhibition “Atapuerca: The First Europeans.” The Atapuerca exhibition took visitors into the fossil-rich caves of Atapuerca, Spain, and along a dramatic journey through the fossil sites with the paleontologists and archaeologists. The exhibition also works as a narrative of progress by expanding upon the significance of Europe in humanity’s biological and cultural origins (the exhibition was part of an attempt by Spain to raise the visibility in New York of Spanish cultural achievements by donating a tremendous amount of cultural and fossil material to New York museums). What is the subtext of the Atapuerca statement “our European ancestors” – denying museum visitors who locate their cultural origins anywhere other than Europe? Does this assert, ultimately, who should and should not be in the museum? Similar assumptions about visitors was made in a temporary 1986 exhibition at AMNH called “Dark Caves, Bright Visions” on Upper Paleolithic artwork, a precursor of the present exhibition. The assumption that the public is of European descent was also adopted in a Newsweek 1986 article on “The way we were: Our Ice Age heritage: language, art, fashion and the family” (Begley and Lief, 1986; emphasis mine).

175

Notes 12 Occasionally the visual accompaniments to the text intentionally obscure dubious data, working to add what Greg Myers refers to as “gratuitous details.” In his examination of E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, he found that gratuitous detail, here representations of numerical data, such as graphs, are incorporated exactly where the text presents the most abstract or controversial arguments (Gifford-Gonzalez, 1993, 29). 13 Bouquet (1995) also narrates her process of constructing a human evolution exhibition, and of the dilemmas of turning science into ethnography. 14 The information concerning the models’ hairstyles was shared playfully and anecdotally. The insider comments also reveal the playfully personal attachments museum staff make with models. For example, during the exhibition development process, the Neanderthals were given personalized terms of endearment: “Romeo” for the male, “Beast” for the female and “Grandma” for the elder (Hieres, 1993). 15 Here, Moser distinguishes between the two types of realistic imagery as mimetic and didactic; the former represents individual specimens, and the latter represents the general type (Moser 1998, 18). 16 Habitat dioramas are generally regarded as interpretive; they make meaning about specimens (Moser, 1999, 3). 17 The poem, written by Farian Garnett, is cited in Shelton as being written in the first half of the twentieth century (Shelton, 2000, 36). 18 Levell, former Horniman curator of anthropology, reads the architecture of the building in a Foucauldian framework of discipline and punishment. She sees the Horniman Museum’s balconies, glass-walled spaces and layout as a way for the museum to exert control and surveillance over visitor behavior, its grid-like layout regulating flow (Levell, 2000, 2). This reading of the Horniman Museum is an extension of a trend in museum studies (particularly in Australia) of interpreting museum studies in a Foucauldian perspective – teasing out the relationship between governmental policy, social control, and museums. Interestingly, others, such as Tony Bennett in Representing the Nation, have complicated such analyses, arguing that museums opened up visibility rather than restricting it (Bennett, 1999, 6). 19 Much of the history of these exhibitions comes from personal communication with Patrick. He worked first as a technician at the Oxford University Museum from 1956 to 1958, and eventually became assistant keeper (or curator) of natural history at the Horniman Museum from 1963 until his retirement in 1997 (Anon., 2000). 20 Traces of this exchange are recorded throughout museum archival notes and documents. For example, Patrick corresponded with curators and professionals from museums around London such as the Natural History Museum, and with well-known scientists such as Michael Day and Chris Stringer.

4 Envisioning our evolutionary beginnings 1 I recognize the gendered implications of “Cradle of Mankind.” The expression was used in visitor research because of the popular colloquial use of the expression. Also, I probed perceptions of Africa as a continent, rather than as an amalgamation of many diverse countries in recognition of the ways Africa circulates as a singular entity in popular culture. 2 While 100 percent of the visitors I spoke with have heard of the Leakeys, only 43 percent wrote on their surveys that they had heard of “Lucy,” which the exhibition does not mention by name. One visitor even argued, “No, Lucy isn’t an African ancestor cuz [sic] Lucy is an English name.” 3 This comment resonates with the findings of Lutz and Collins in Reading National Geographic. One of their respondents appreciates that in National Geographic “They don’t say that . . . the wealthy nations should give up their wealth . . . they don’t say it’s our duty to bring these people up” (Lutz and Collins, 1993, 229). 4 Yale college students I interviewed separately found the image “scary,” “disturbing,” “ugly,” and a likely candidate for “missing link.” They also said the model looks “like an Australian” and “good at sports, like a football player.”

176

Notes 5 My findings on perceptions of dark skin correspond to the social studies done by Wiber of college students and by Lutz and Collins of readers of National Geographic. Lutz and Collins (1993) also found that readers considered black people from New Guinea “African” and light-skinned Africans non-African.

5 Envisioning our evolutionary destinies 1 In its entirety the quote by Natural History Museum paleontologist Chris Stringer reads: “For decades, Homo sapiens’s global origins were thought to be the vestiges of millionyear-old cleavages in our family tree. Race has a profound biological meaning, it was reckoned. Recent acceptance of the Out of Africa theory has changed that perspective – for it has shown we are indeed all Africans under our skin, and that our differentiation into Eskimos, ‘Bushmen’, Australians, Scandinavians and other populations has merely been a coda to the long song of human evolution” (Stringer and McKie, 1996, 172–3). 2 The work of several researchers has been paramount to the paradigm shift, especially the nearly career-long work of paleontologist Stringer, the 1980s genetic evidence of Cann, Stoneking and Wilson (1987) and, most recently, the presentation and synthesis of a mass of archaeological evidence in McBrearty and Brooks (2000). 3 There is also scholarship critiquing representations of earlier human ancestors than Neanderthals. As “missing link” the great variety of australopithecines (as distinct entities or homogenized whole) have played significant roles on the origins stage since the 1924 discovery of the Taung child. Moser (1996b) thoroughly details revolutionary shifts in paleoanthropological thought, and chronicles the reconstructions that shadowed them. The four significant shifts Moser describes are: (1) tools and hunting (following Raymond Dart’s work), (2) tool-making and living floor (following Mary Leakey’s work at the site FLK), (3) competition among primitive and successor (instigated by the Leakeys’ Zinj and subsequent habilis find), and (4) ancestors as victim (instigated by C. K. Brain’s taphonomic work). She concludes by marking recent pictorial landmarks such as the “family group walking across volcanic ash.” (In another essay, Clive Gamble discusses the Neanderthal burial scene as iconic, since Ralph Solecki wrote “Shanidar, the First Flower People” in 1971 [Moser, 1998, xiv].) Each of these moments generates numerous illustrations in venues such as Illustrated London News and National Geographic, popular illustrated texts (such as Lewin’s In the Age of Mankind), and museum exhibitions. It is quite evident here that illustrations are germane to how scientists and scientific journals “advertise” arguments about not only Neanderthals but all hominid species. Thus we must consider how representations of anatomically modern humans have shifted with changing arguments. As Moser writes, “by emphasizing certain attributes, the picture of “missing links” aims to define the boundary between apes and humans . . . embody a constant tension between the desire to characterize the fossil remains as human-like and this close to us . . . or ape-like” (Moser, 1996b, 185). 4 I am greatly indebted to Gifford Gonzalez (2000) for her insights on the racial implications of human origins representations. I am most thankful for her critique of representations of the Out-of-Africa thesis of modern human origins. Also see the text that accompanied the BBC production (McKie, 2000). 5 However, when I asked visitors on questionnaires which characteristics defined humanity, the majority of respondents leaned toward “brain size” and “language” while one of the options chosen most infrequently was “art and creativity.” I suspect brain size is considered a tangible marker of evolutionary status, while “art and creativity” seems more slippery and intangible. 6 “Death and the Creator,” a Kono story (Guinea), excerpted from Beier (1966). 7 In Reading National Geographic, the readers interviewed by Lutz and Collins (1993) used a variety of explanations to rationalize race differences. To explain racial difference, they relied primarily upon access to education and opportunities, religious differences, ecological adaptations, and evolutionary and geographic isolation (Lutz and Collins, 1993,

177

Notes

8

9

10

11 12

233–6). Lutz and Collins provide two provocative examples of “geographic isolation.” As one reader explains, “Isolation has caused these people, these different cultures, to develop rather than all one culture”; another person explains the human potential to overcome this ecological/evolutionary determinism with, “A few will come over and transplant themselves . . . And gradually [education] spreads and they, they build up and evolve” (Lutz and Collins, 1993, 235). Lutz and Collins also identify distinct contradictions between readers’ belief systems – that is, between readers’ liberalism and their “particularistic nationalism” – and between their twentieth-century values of cultural pluralism and their beliefs in unilineal progress; see for example Lutz and Collins (1993, 245). Further, I witnessed remarkable candor in spontaneous conversations and encounters, although these encounters can only be considered anecdotally. For example, while photocopying an image of Homo erectus to use in interviews, I had a lighthearted exchange with a black British man in the copyshop that shed light on the images’ racial implications. He asked, “Is that a human?” When I returned the question to him, he commented that it looks more human than ape and that “If you go to Australia, you’ll see people like that, aborigines.” I had a strikingly similar exchange with the Hasidic proprietor in a copyshop in downtown Brooklyn, New York. Granted, for a considerable time there was an emphasis on racial description rather than explanation. Eventually, it was no longer sufficient to be descriptive, and scientists began to ask “from where” and “why.” These questions were anachronistically evolutionary. Prior to either, the origins of diversity existed in the realm of the mythological rather than the scientific, as I point out in chapter one. On heritage and museums, see the influential texts Stone and Molyneux (1994), and Boswell and Evans (1999). Archaeology has the potential to offer the public opportunities to construct alternative narratives of the past, and to acknowledge cultural affiliations that exist within nations and across nations. In The Presented Past: Heritage, Museums and Education (1994), Stone and Molyneaux also address practically how archaeologists might better interpret material evidence in classrooms and museums to change the public’s relationship to their “institutionalized past.” Essays generally consider the implications of presenting human history and prehistory to the public, and explore the creation of shared culture in museums and the fabrication of notions of heritage and community. The text pulls together case studies from multiple African countries and communities, considering archaeology and education in Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Kenya. From the local level to the global level, the text optimistically considers the ways in which our intellectual endeavors can mold multiple pasts into a shared future.

6 The black counter-narrative 1 “Black museum visitors” here denotes Kenyan visitors, African-American visitors, AfroBritish visitors, and generally all visitors from Africa or the African diaspora. While I recognize the varied implications of “black” as a label, I use it here as the culturally meaningful shorthand it holds for those communities that identify themselves and are identified as such. And although I describe patterns within “black communities,” I recognize that the construction is also artificial, amorphous, shifting, and inconsistent. 2 Hooper-Greenhill describes different approaches to museum exhibitions as varied “interpretive strategies.” “Interpretive communities,” then, are those that share certain interpretive strategies (Hooper-Greenhill, 1999a, 13). 3 The philosophy expressed in the 1992 American Association of Museums report, “Equity and excellence in education,” regards education on the diversity of cultures as a significant mission of the museum (Hizry, 1992). Perin also addresses the new relationship museum professionals have with their audiences: “Museum visitors receive far more from exhibitions than just information about the objects displayed. Let me suggest that visitors can deduce

178

Notes from their experience what we, the producers of exhibitions, think and feel about them – even if we have not fully articulated those thoughts to ourselves. I will explore the notion that we, consciously or unconsciously, impose learning impediments on our exhibitions for some members of our current and potential audiences” (quoted in Gurian, 1991, 176). 4 There is a growing body of postcolonial work that examines the modern-day African museum: see Diop (1973), Stone (1997), Smardz (1997), Urry (1996); see also Schmidt and Patterson (1995). Much postcolonial scholarship examines the representational strategies used to codify and control Africans politically. For example Brantlinger (1985), Clifford (1997), Comaroff and Comaroff (1991; 1997), Coombes (1994), Dubow (1995), Gordon (1997; 1998), Pietersen (1996), Rankin and Hamilton (1999), Skotnes (1996), Wilmsen (1989). 5 Another example is the mobilization of the black community in Washington, DC, against the representation of racial types in the former Smithsonian exhibition of physical anthropology, ultimately resulting in its dismantling. Yet another is the 1990 poem by black poet Elizabeth Alexander, “The Venus Hottentot.” The poet imagines the Hottentot Venus’s impassioned response to the objectification of her body and the display of her genitals by early nineteenth-century scientist Georges Cuvier (Alexander, 1990).

7 “Out of Africa” in Kenya 1 The history of the National Museum of Kenya poses a challenge because there has been little documentation of the institution’s past. Furthermore, the histories that have been written obfuscate or circumvent the roles of race and colonialism in the development of the museum. There is little recorded history of the negotiations between black and white Kenyans in the development of the museum, and consequently no real prehistory of the tensions underlying those negotiations today. However, the history of those race relations which shadow the museum’s formal history are revealed in the historical brokering of power among varied governing bodies, investors, researchers, and, of course, visitors. Most of the history included here comes from a detailed unpublished history from the museum’s archives (Cunningham van Someren, 1983). This history is augmented by interviews and recollections of varied museum professionals. I am particularly indebted to Richard Leakey, Meave Leakey, and Andrew Hill for sharing the insights gathered from their respective histories with the museum. 2 According to Cunningham van Someren’s figures, in 1940, “School lectures had been commenced and there was an encouraging recovery of interest in the museum . . . Visitors totaled 89,925 compared with 61,369 in 1944.” It was also reported that there were “33,795 African children [and] 30,482 other [children] in 1946” (Cunningham van Someren, 1983, 7). There were other significant shifts in the museum’s relationship to its public at this time. It is most important to bear in mind here the funding bodies that supported the museum’s activities throughout the years. There was the development of the Coryndon Museum Schools Liaison Service under Mrs. A. B. Isaac and Mr. Taliwawa. The School Liaison Service, for example, was funded by the Ford Foundation and then the National Science Foundation (US). The project included a lecture hall and demonstration laboratory for schoolchildren, and it occurred in tandem with a new Center for Pre-history and Palaeontology (with Dr. L. S. B. Leakey as honorary director and Mr. G. Isaac as deputy director). This was funded by the Ford Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and the Wenner Gren Foundation (Cunningham van Someren, 1983, 17). 3 Adamson, best known for authoring Born Free about her work with lion cubs, was notorious for her violent aggression toward her Kenyan employees and was eventually killed by an employee after an argument. See the 2004 Guardian newspaper article entitled “Joy shot me in the leg so I gunned her down” (Vasagar, 2004). 4 At the NMK, more important than the questionnaires I received back were the responses that came from informal conversations with visitors, tour guides, security guards, schoolchildren and teachers. I also benefited from informal interviews with various museum

179

Notes

5

6 7

8

9 10

professionals and paleontology staff working in the museum, as well as with Meave and Richard Leakey themselves. In scientific discourses, “the Leakeys” commonly refers to Louis and Mary, their son Richard and his wife Meave, and Richard and Meave’s daughter Louise. There are other Leakeys, as well, who work for the most part outside of the family’s paleontological tradition. On the generations of Leakeys, see Morrell’s Ancestral Passions (1995). On his conservation efforts, see Richard Leakey’s 2001 book Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa’s Natural Treasures, a book that is as much a political history as it is an environmentalist treatise. There are parallels in other realms of archaeology. For example, Anderson has shown for Asian archaeology that “colonial regimes began attaching themselves to antiquity as much as conquest, originally for quite straightforward Machiavellian–legalistic reasons. As time passed, however, there was less and less openly brutal talk about right of conquest, and more and more effort to create alternative legitimacies. More and more Europeans were being born in Southeast Asia, and being tempted to make it their home. Monumental archaeology, increasingly linked to tourism, allowed the state to appear as the guardian of a generalized, but also local, tradition” (Anderson, 1991, 181). The relationship between Gitonga and the Leakeys would increasingly become strained by differences, culminating in Gitonga’s departure from the museum in the late 1970s. Gitonga’s sentiments are also evident in his continual public attacks on the Leakeys, particularly Richard Leakey, and in his erection of a rival museum called the Community Museums of Kenya. Most of Gitonga’s anti-Leakey endeavors have been in collaboration with French paleontologist Martin Pickford. Pickford and Gitonga co-authored a book, Richard E. Leake: Master of Deceit (Gitonga and Pickford, 1995). Pickford also authored a book attacking Louis Leakey entitled Louis S. B. Leakey: Beyond the Evidence (Pickford, 1998), a play on Louis Leakey’s 1976 memoir By the Evidence. The controversy also appeared much in public press. See, for example, the Nature synopsis of the tensions between Gitonga, Pickford, and Leakey, in Butler (2001). The diorama may have been constructed at a time when A. africanus was thought to have lived in Kenya. Interestingly, there was some public disagreement between former President Moi and Richard Leakey concerning human evolution in Kenya despite his public protests. It is thought, rather, that Kenyatta was resigned to quiet acceptance of human evolution and evolutionary research in Kenya. It is likely that neither president could contest either the potential benefits or the lucrative potential of Kenya’s prominence in origins research.

Postscript: the big picture 1 The “people who stayed behind” refers to the 1999 Condé Nast Traveler description of the South African “Bushmen,” as mentioned in chapter one (Gill, 1999). 2 See also Moser (2003) for strategies to change museum representations of human evolution. 3 One Natural History Museum study tested this notion with an evaluation of a temporary exhibition on “collections”: “The hypothesis presented is that exposure to an exhibition explaining the research work of the Museum should cause a positive attitude shift toward the role of the Museum in society. Though ‘Nature Stored, Nature Studied’ was not found entirely successful, the author believes the hypothesis still holds merit” (Rubenstein, n.d., 1).

180

References

Ackerman, D. (1993) Slices of life. Discover (November): 102–4. Adams, J. S. and T. O. McShane (1996) The Myth of Wild Africa: Conservation without Illusion. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Adkins, L. and R. A. Adkins (1989) Archaeological Illustration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alderson, W. T., ed. (1992) Mermaids, Mummies and Mastodons: The Emergence of the American Museum. Washington, DC: American Association of Museums. Alexander, A. (1996) Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Alexander, E. (1990) The Venus Hottentot. Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia. American Museum of Natural History (1991–2) 123rd Annual Report. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Ames, M. A. (1992) Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums. Vancouver: University of British Columbia. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Refl ections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (revised edition). New York: Verso. Anderson, M. (1990) Fleshing out the past: Reconstructing fossil faces. Discovery 22(1): 11–15. Ang, I. (1996) Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World. London: Routledge. Anon. (2000) Patrick Leaford. The Linnaean (Linnaean Society) 16 (April). Ashworth, W. B. (1985) The persistent beast: Recurring images in early zoological illustration. In Natural Sciences and the Arts: Aspects of Interaction from the Renaissance to the 20th Century, An International Symposium, Uppsala, ed. A. Ellenius, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wicksell International: 46–66. Asma, S. (2001) Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums. New York: Oxford University Press. Auel, J. (1980) Clan of the Cave Bear. New York: Crown. Augusta, J. (1960) Prehistoric Man. London: Paul Hamlyn. Baigrie, B. S., ed. (1996) Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bain, D. (1936) Bushmen of the Kalahari. Johannesburg: Tillett and Sons. Baker, L. (1998) From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bal, M. (1992) Telling, showing, showing off. Critical Inquiry. 18 (spring): 556–94. Becker, K., L. Bloch, R. Campanile, J. Gillis, E. Okone, and D. Sethi (1994) Hall of Human Biology and Evolution Docent Script. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Begley, S. and L. Lief (1986) The way we were: Our Ice Age heritage: Language, art, fashion and the family. Newsweek (November 10): 62.

181

References Beier, U. (1966) The Origin of Life and Death; African Creation Myths. London: Heinemann. Bennett, T. (1999) Useful culture. In Representing the Nation, a Reader: Histories, Heritage and Museums, ed. D. Boswell and J. Evans. New York: Routledge and the Open University: 380–93. —— (2004) Pasts beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism. London: Routledge. Billig, M., S. Condor, D. Edwards, M. Gane, D. Middleton, and A. Radley (1988) Ideological Dilemmas: A Social Psychology of Everyday Thinking. London: Sage. Blakey, M. L. (1987) Skull doctors: Intrinsic social and political bias in the history of American physical anthropology, with special reference to the work of Aleš Hrdlička. Critique of Anthropology 7(2): 7–35. Borun, M. and R. Korn, eds (1999) Introduction to Museum Evaluation. Washington, DC: American Association of Museums. Boswell, D. and J. Evans, eds (1999) Representing the Nation, a Reader: Histories, Heritage and Museums. New York: Routledge and the Open University. Bouquet, M. (1995) Exhibiting knowledge: The trees of Dubois, Haeckel, Jesse and Rivers at the Pithecanthropus centennial exhibition. In Shifting Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge, ed. M. Strathern. New York: Routledge: 31–56. Bowler, P. J. (1984) Evolution: The History of an Idea. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. —— (1986) Theories of Human Evolution: A Century of Debate, 1844–1944. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. —— (1989) The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bradford, P. V. and H. Blume (1992) Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Brantlinger, P. (1985) Victorians and Africans: The genealogy of the myth of the Dark Continent. In Race, Writing, and Difference, ed. H. L. Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 185–222. Brown, M. (1990) The Search for Eve: Have Scientists Found the Mother of Us All? New York: Harper and Row. Bruner, E. and B. Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (1994) Maasai on the lawn: Tourist realism in East Africa. Cultural Anthropology 9(4): 435–70. Burian, Z. and J. Wolf (1978) The Dawn of Man. London: Thames and Hudson. Butler, D. (2001) The battle of Tugen Hills. Nature 410: 8–9. Cann, R. L., M. Stoneking and A. C. Wilson (1987) Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution. Nature 325: 51–5. Carragee, K. M. (1990) Interpretive media study and interpretive social science. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7: 71–96. Cladistics and evolution on display (1981) Nature (July): 395–6. Clark, C. (2006) Ignoring the elephants: Visual images and jazz age critics. Museums and Social Issues 1(1): 103–10. Cleuziou, H. du (1887) La Création de l’homme et les premiers âges de l’humanité. Paris: C. Marpon and E. Flammarion. Clifford, J. (1997) Routes, Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Comaroff, J. and J. Comaroff (1991) Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— (1997) Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity in a South African Frontier, vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Conkey, M. and S. Williams (1991) Original narratives: The political economy of gender in archaeology. In Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge, ed. M. Di Leonardo. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press: 102–39. Conn, S. (1998) Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

182

References Cooke, L. and P. Wollen, eds (1995) Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances. Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Coombes, A. (1994) Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Coon, C. (1962) Origin of Races. New York: Knopf. Corbey, R. and B. Theunissen, eds (1995) Ape, Man, Apeman: Changing Views since 1600. Evaluative Proceedings of the Symposium “Ape, Man, Apeman: Changing Views since 1600,” Leiden, the Netherlands, June 28–July 1, 1993. Department of Prehistory, Leiden University, The Netherlands. Cosmides, L., J. Tooby and R. Kurzban (2003) Perceptions of race. Trends in Cognitive Science 7: 173–9. Cunningham van Someren, G. R. (1983) Fifty Years of the Museum in Kenya: A History. Nairobi: National Museums of Kenya. Curtis, L. (1997) Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Darwin, C. (1859) The Origin of Species. London: John Murray. —— (1871) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray. Darwin’s death in South Kensington (1981) Nature (February): 735. Davison, P. (1993) Human subjects as museum objects: A project to make life-casts of “Bushmen” and “Hottentots” 1907–1924. Annals of the South African Museum 102(5): 165–84. —— (1996) Foreword. In Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen, ed. P. Skotnes. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press: 10–11. Dawkins, R. (1986) The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W. W. Norton. —— (1989) The Selfi sh Gene. New York: Oxford University Press. Dean, D. (1994) Museum Exhibition: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. De Andrade, L. (2000) Negotiating from the inside: Constructing racial and ethnic identity in qualitative research. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 29: 268–90. Desai, P. and A. Thomas (1998) Cultural Diversity: Attitudes of Ethnic Minority Populations towards Museums and Galleries. London: Museums and Galleries Commissions. Dexter, R. W. (1966) Putnam’s problems popularizing anthropology. American Scientist 54 (3): 315–32. Diamond, J. (1999) Practical Evaluation Guide: Tools for Museums and Other Informal Educational Settings. London: AltaMira Press. Diop, A. (1973) Museological activity in African countries: Its role and purpose. Museum 25(4): 250–6. Doering, Z. D. and A. J. Pekarik (1996) Questioning the entrance narrative. Journal of Museum Education 21(3): 20–2. Dubow, S. (1989) The Idea of Race in Early 20th-Century South Africa: Some Preliminary Thoughts. Centre for African Studies Seminar, April 26, 1989. Cape Town: University of Cape Town. —— (1995) Scientifi c Racism in Modern South Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press. During, S. (1999) Encoding, Decoding: The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd edition. London: Routledge. 507–17. Edwards, E. (1992) Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920. London: Royal Anthropological Institute. Falk, J. H. (1993) Leisure Decisions Infl uencing African-American Use of Museums. Washington, DC: American Association of Museums. Falk, J. H. and L. D. Dierking (1992) The Museum Experience. Washington, DC: Whalesback. —— (2000) Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning. London: AltaMira Press. Field, H. (1933) Prehistoric Man: Hall of the Stone Age of the Old World. Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History.

183

References Fish, S. (1980) Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Foley, R. (1995) Humans before Humanity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Gamble, C. (1992) Figures of fun: Theories about cavemen. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 11(2): 354–72. Gifford-Gonzalez, D. (1993) You can hide but you can’t run: Representations of women’s work in illustrations of paleolithic life. Visual Anthropology Review 9: 93–41. —— (2000) Neanderthals and Homo sapiens: What the blank spaces on the canvas reveal. Paper presented at conference, Envisioning the Past: Constructing Knowledge through Pictorial Traditions of Representation, November 10–12, at University of Southampton, Southampton, England. Gill, A. (1999) Grub’s up. Condé Nast Traveler (July). Gitonga, E. and M. Pickford (1995) Richard E. Leakey: Master of Deceit. Nairobi: White Elephant Publications. Giusti, E. (1993) The Hall of Human Biology and Evolution at the American Museum of Natural History: A Summative Evaluation. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Golding, W. (1955) The Inheritors. London: Faber and Faber. Gordon, R. (1997) Picturing Bushmen: The Denver African Expedition of 1925. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. —— (1998) The rise of the Bushman penis: Germans, genitalia and genocide. African Studies 57(1) (July): 27–54. Gore, R. (1997) The dawn of humans. National Geographic (May): 84–109. Gould, S. J. (1981) The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton. —— (1985) The Flamingo’s Smile: Refl ections in Natural History. New York: W. W. Norton. —— (1989) The ladder and the cone: Iconographies of progress. In Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. New York: W. W. Norton: 27–44. —— (1994) The evolution of life on Earth. Scientific American (October): 85–91. —— (1995) Ladders and cones: Constraining evolution by canonical icons. In Hidden Histories of Science, ed. R. B. Silvers. New York: New York Review: 37–67. Griggs, S. (1984) Visitors’ Reception and Evaluations of Seven Exhibitions at the Natural History Museum. March 1984. Unpublished museum document, British Museum of Natural History. Griggs, S., and K. Hays-Jackson (1985) Visitor Perceptions of Cultural Institutions. London: British Museum of Natural History. Gundling, T. (2005) First in Line: Tracing Our Ape Ancestry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gurian, E. H. (1991) Noodling around with exhibition opportunities. In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. I. Karp and S. D. Lavine. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press: 176–90. Haas, J. (1996) Power, objects, and a voice for anthropology. Current Anthropology supplement 37 (February): S1–S22. Haeckel, E. H. (1876) The History of Creation. London: John Murray. Hall, S. ([1973] 1991) Encoding/decoding. In Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79. London: Hutchinson: 128–38. Halstead, B. (1989) The new left’s assault on science: The case of anthropology at the Natural History Museum. Salisbury Review (January): 37–9. Haraway, D. (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. London: Routledge. Harding, S., ed. (1994) The Racial “Economy” of Science: Toward a Democratic Future. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Herrnstein, R. J. and C. Murray (1994) The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Free Press. Hieres, G. N. (1993) Meet our ancestors. Public Employee Press (April 9): 8–11.

184

References Hinsley, C. M. (1991) The world as marketplace: commodification of the exotic at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. I. Karp and S. D. Lavine. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press: 344–65. Hizry, E. C., ed. (1992) Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums. A Report from the American Association of Museums. Washington, DC: American Association of Museums. Hooper-Greenhill, E., (1994a) The Educational Role of the Museum. Leicester Museum Studies Readers. London: Routledge. —— (1994b) Museums and cultural diversity in contemporary Britain. In The Educational Role of the Museum. Leicester Museum Studies Readers. London: Routledge: 288–94. —— (1994c) Museums and Their Visitors. London: Routledge. ——, ed. (1997) Cultural Diversity: Developing Museum Audiences in Britain. London: Leicester University Press. —— (1999a) The Educational Role of the Museum, second edition. Leicester Museum Studies Readers. London: Routledge. —— (1999b) Museum, Media, Message. London: Routledge. —— (2000) Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Howell, F. C. (1965) Early Man. Ontario, Canada and New York: Time Life Inc. Huxley, T. J. (1864) Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. London: Williams and Norgate. Jahoda, G. (1999) Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture. London: Routledge. Jameson, J. H., ed. (1997) Presenting Archaeology to the Public: Digging for Truths. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Jefferson, T. ([1787] 2002). Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. David Waldsteicher. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame. Jones, A. L. (1993) Exploding canons: The anthropology of museums. Annual Review of Anthropology 22: 201–20. Jordan, W. (1974) The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States. London: Oxford University Press. Karp, I. and S. D. Lavine, eds (1991) Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Karp, I., C. M. Kreamer, and S. D. Lavine, eds (1992) Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Kingsley, W. (1991) Photography at the American Museum of Natural History. Photographic Processing (June): 24–7. Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1991) Objects of ethnography. In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. I. Karp and S. D. Lavine. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press: 386–443. Kohn, M. (1996) The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science. London: Vintage. Kristof, N. D. (2003) We all share a family tree. New York Times (July 12). Kvale, S. (1996) Interviews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Landau, M. (1991) Narratives of Human Evolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Landau, T. (1989) About Faces: The Evolution of the Human Face. New York: Doubleday. Leakey, L. (1952) Mau Mau and the Kikuyu. London: Methuen & Co. —— (1966) White African. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing. Leakey, M. (1983) Africa’s Vanishing Art: The Rock Art of Tanzania. London: Hamish Hamilton. Leakey, R. (1977) Origins: What New Discoveries Reveal about the Origin of Our Species. New York: Dutton. Leakey, R. and V. Morell (2001) Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa’s Natural Treasures. London: Macmillan. Lee, R. and I. DeVore (1969) Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine.

185

References Levell, N. (2000) Illustrating evolution: Alfred Cort Haddon and the Horniman Museum, 1901–1915. Autumn term course essay, Approaches to Curatorship. London: Horniman Museum. Lewin, R. (1989) In the Age of Mankind: A Smithsonian Handbook of Human Evolution, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Lewontin, R. C. (1972) The apportionment of human diversity. Evolutionary Biology 6: 381–98. Lieberman, L. and F. Jackson (1995) Race and three models of human origins. American Anthropologist 97(2): 231–42. Lindfors, B., ed. (1999) Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Linnaeus, K. (1758) Systema Naturae, 10th edition. Stockholm: Laurentii Salvii. Long, E. (1774) History of Jamaica. London: T. Lowndes. Lott, T. (1999) Racist discourse and the Negro-ape metaphor. In The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation. New York: Blackwell: 7–13. Lovejoy, A. O. (1964) The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lutz, C. and J. Collins (1993) Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lynch, M. and S. Woolgar, eds (1990) Representation in Scientifi c Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. MacClancy, J. and C. McDonaugh, eds (1996) Popularizing Anthropology. London: Routledge. McBrearty, S. and A. Brooks (2000) The revolution that wasn’t: A new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior. Journal of Human Evolution 39(5): 453–563. McKie, R. (2000) Ape-Man: The Story of Human Evolution. London: BBC Worldwide Ltd. Man’s Place in Evolution Exhibition Catalogue (1980) London: British Museum (Natural History) and Cambridge University Press. Marks, J. (1995) Human Biodiversity. New York: Walter de Gruyter, Inc. —— (1996a) The anthropology of science, part 1: Science as humanities. Evolutionary Anthropology 5: 5–10. —— (1996b) The anthropology of science, part 2: Scientific norms and behaviors. Evolutionary Anthropology 5: 55–80. —— (2002) What it Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People and their Genes. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Martin, J. R. and R. Veel, eds (1998) Reading Science: Critical and Functional Perspectives on Discourses of Race. New York: Routledge. Maxwell, J. A. (1996) Qualitative Research Design: An Interpretive Approach. Applied Social Research Methods Series, vol. 41. London: Sage Publications. Miller, L. (1993) Diorama debut: Name that Cro-Mag. New York Observer (April 26): 1, 20. Molyneaux, B. L., ed. (1997a) The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology. London: Routledge. —— (1997b) The cultural life of images. In The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology, ed. B. L. Molyneaux. London: Routledge: 1–8. Morrell, V. (1995) Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind’s Beginnings. New York: Simon and Schuster. Morris, A. G. (1987) The reflection of the collector: San and Khoi skeletons in museum collections. South African Archaeological Bulletin 42: 12–22. —— (1996) Trophy skulls, museums and the San. In Miscast, Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen, ed. P. Skotnes. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press: 67–80. Moser, S. (1992) The visual language of archaeology: a case study of the Neanderthals. Antiquity 66: 831–44. —— (1996a) Science and social values: Presenting archaeological fi ndings in museum displays. In Issues in Management Archaeology, ed. L. Smith and A. Clarke. St Lucia, QLD: Tempus Press: 32–42.

186

References —— (1996b) Visual representation in archaeology: Depicting the missing link in human origins. In Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science, ed. B. S. Baigrie. Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 184–214. —— (1998) Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —— (1999) The dilemma of didactic displays: Habitat dioramas, life-groups and reconstructions of the past. In Making Early Histories in Museums, ed. N. Merriman. London: Cassell: 65–116. —— (2003) Representing archaeological knowledge in museums: Exhibiting human origins and strategies for change. Public Archaeology 3(1): 3–20. Moser, S. and C. Gamble (1997) Revolutionary images: the iconic vocabulary for representing human antiquity. In The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology, ed. B. L. Molyneaux. London: Routledge: 184–212. Moses, W. J. (1998) Afrotopia: The Roots of African-American Popular History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Muller, K. (2003) The culture of globalization: Can museums offer a new vision of a globalized society? Museum News (May/June): 34–9. Munjeri, D. (1991) Refocusing or reorientation? The exhibit or the populace: Zimbabwe on the threshold. In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. I. Karp and S. D. Lavine. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press: 444–56. O’Connell, S. (2003) Women: Skeletons in the family closet. Guardian (June 23): 8. On the trail of the human animal in Kenya (2003) Sports Illustrated (winter): 60–1. Osborn, H. F. (1915) Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and Art. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Passmore, J. (1970) The Perfectibility of Man. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Perin, C. (1992) The communicative circle: Museums as communities. In Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, ed. I. Karp, C. M. Kreamer and S. D. Lavine. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press: 182–220. Pflanz, M. (2006). Evangelicals urge museum to hide man’s ancestors. The Daily Telegraph, August 12. Available on-line at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/global/main.jhtml?xml=/ global/2006/08/12/wleakey12.xml Pickford, M. (1998) Louis S. B. Leakey: Beyond the Evidence. New York: Janus Publishing Company. Pieterse, J. N. (1992) White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pietersen, C. (1996) Miscast: Negotiating Khoisan history and material culture. South African Historical Journal 35 (November): 135–9. Pitts, M. (1998) Fairweather Eden: Life Half a Million Years Ago as Revealed by the Excavations at Boxgrove. London: Fromm International Publishing Corporation. Porter, C. M. (1983) The rise of Parnassus: Henry Fairfield Osborn and the Hall of the Age of Man. Museum Studies Journal 1: 26–34. Preston, D. (1986) Dinosaurs in the Attic: An Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History. New York City: St. Martin’s Press. Rainger, R. (1991) An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfi eld Osborn and Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890–1935. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Rankin, E. and C. Hamilton (1999) Revision; reaction; re-vision. The role of museums in (a) transforming South Africa. Museum Anthropology (winter): 3–13. Ravelli, L. (2006) Museum Texts: Communication Frameworks. London: Routledge. Roberts, D. G. (1997) Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon Books. Rubenstein, R. W. (n.d.) Visitor Attitudes to the Role of the Natural History Museum in Society: A Pilot Study. London: British Museum of Natural History. Rudwick, M. J. S. (1992) Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

187

References Ruffins, F. D. (1992) Mythos, memory and history: African-American preservation efforts, 1820–1990. In Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, ed. I. Karp, C. M. Kreamer, and S. D. Lavine. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press: 506–611. Russell, L. (1997) Focusing on the past: visual and textual images of Aboriginal Australia in museums. In The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology, ed. B. L. Molyneaux. London: Routledge: 230–48. Rydell, R. (1984) All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— (1999) “Darkest Africa”: African shows at America’s World’s Fairs, 1893–1940. In Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. B. Lindfors. Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 135–55. Schmidt, P. R. and T. C. Patterson (1995) Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-Western Settings. Sante Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Schudson, M. (1997) Cultural studies and the social construction of “social construction:” Notes on “teddy bear patriarchy.” In From Sociology to Cultural Studies: New Perspectives, ed. E. Long. Malden, MA: Blackwell: 379–98. Shelley, C. (1996) Rhetorical and demonstrative modes of visual argument: Looking at images of human evolution. Argumentation and Advocacy, 33(2): 53–68. Shelton, A. (2000) Unpublished history of Frederick Horniman and the Horniman Museum. Anthropology Collections and Research Group. London: Horniman Museum. ——, ed. (2001) Rational passions. Frederick John Horniman and institutional collectors. In Expressions of Self and Other. London and Coimbra: The Horniman Museum and Universidade de Coimbra: 205–23. Shipman, P. (1994) The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science. New York: Simon and Schuster. Silcock, B. (1981) Dinosaurs and ape-men rear a Marxist head. Sunday Times (November 23). Silverman, L. (1993) Making meaning together: Lessons from the field of American history. Journal of Museum Education 18(3): 7–11. —— (1995) Visitor meaning-making in museums for a new age. Curator 38(3): 161–70. Skotnes, P., ed. (1996) Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. Small, S. (1997) Contextualizing the Black presence in British museums: Representations, resources and response. In Cultural Diversity: Developing Museum Audiences in Britain, ed. E. Hooper-Greenhill. London: Leicester University Press. 50–66. Smardz, K. E. (1997) The past through tomorrow: Interpreting Toronto’s heritage to a multicultural public. In Presenting Archaeology to the Public: Digging for Truths, ed. J. H. Jameson. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press: 101–13. Sproul, B. C. (1991) Primal Myths: Creation Myths around the World. San Francisco: Harper. Stearn, W. T. (1981) The Natural History Museum at South Kensington: A History of the British Museum (Natural History) 1753–1980. London: Heinemann. Stocking, G., Jr. (1968) Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— (1987) Victorian Anthropology. New York: Macmillan. Stoczkowski, W. (1997) The painter and prehistoric people: A “hypothesis on canvas.” In The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology, ed. B. L. Molyneaux. London: Routledge: 249–62. Stone, P. G. (1997) Presenting the past: A framework for discussion. In Presenting Archaeology to the Public: Digging for Truths, ed. J. H. Jameson. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press: 23–34. Stone, P. G. and B. L. Molyneaux, eds (1994) The Presented Past: Heritage, Museums and Education. London: Routledge. Stringer, C. and C. Gamble (1993) In Search of the Neanderthals: Solving the Puzzle of Human Origins. New York: Thames and Hudson.

188

References Stringer, C. and R. McKie (1996) African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Sykes, B. (2001) The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science that Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry. New York: W. W. Norton. Tattersall, I. (1992) Evolution comes to life. Scientific American (August): 80–7. —— (1993) The Human Odyssey: Four Million Years of Human Evolution. New York: Prentice Hall. Taylor, L. (1989) A brief history of dioramas: A review of a time-honored museum technique, its past, present, future. Pacific Discovery 42(1) (winter): 30–5. Thorburn, D. (1988) Television as an aesthetic medium. In Media, Myths, and Narratives: Television and the Press, ed. J. Carey. Newbury Park, CA: Sage: 48–66. Tierney, J. and Wright, L. (1988) The search for Adam and Eve. Newsweek (January 11): 46. Trinkaus, E. and P. Shipman (1993) Neanderthals: Images of ourselves. Evolutionary Anthropology 1(6): 194–201. Tyson, E. (1751) The Anatomy of a Pygmy Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape and a Man, 2nd edition. London: T. Osborne. Urry, J. (1996) How societies remember the past. In Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, ed. S. Macdonald and F. Fyfe. Oxford: Blackwell: 45–65. Vasagar, J. (2004) Joy shot me in the leg so I gunned her down. Guardian (February 8): 15. Veel, R. and J. R. Martin, eds (1998) Reading Science: Critical and Functional Perspectives on Discourses of Science. New York: Routledge. Weaver. K. (1985) The search for early man. National Geographic (November): 560–623. Wells, H. G. (1965) Food of the Gods. New York: Airmont Publishing. Wiber, M. (1997) Erect Men, Undulating Women: The Visual Imagery of Gender, “Race” and Progress in Reconstructive Illustrations of Human Evolution. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Willis, D. (1989) The Hominid Gang: Behind the Scenes in the Search for Human Origins. New York: Penguin. Wilmsen, E. N. (1989) Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, A. C. and Cann, R. L. (1992) The recent African genesis of humans. Scientifi c American 266: 68–73. Yellen, J. E. (1977) Archaeological Approaches to the Present: Models for Reconstructing the Past. New York: Academic Press.

189

Index

Page numbers in italics denote illustrations. acclimation 102 Adam and Eve icons 22, 99–100, 107, 109, 110, 125, 126; see also African Eve model Adamson, Joy 132, 135 aesthetics of realism and exoticism 54, 118 African Eve model 13, 91–2, 96, 99 African heritage, pride in 119–20, 142–3 African origins narratives see Cradle of Mankind thesis alienation 3, 18 American Museum of Natural History (New York City) 4, 29, 33, 154; aesthetics of realism and exoticism 54; black visitors 116; Hall of the Age of Man 56–9; Hall of Human Biology and Evolution 1, 9–10, 9, 11, 17, 59–67, 116; Neanderthal diorama 46–7, 65–6; progress narrative 53, 54, 56–70; social-evolutionist philosophy 17, 56; visitor research 14, 152 anthropological racism 116, 122 anthropology: cultural 32, 34, 71; Darwinian 17, 21, 29, 71; evolutionary 33, 34; physical 33, 71, 73, 74, 101; Victorian 2, 11, 17 anti-black politics 33 ape–African ideological association 15, 24–5, 26, 30, 31, 33, 36, 45, 54, 79, 121, 141 Ape-Man (Discovery channel series) 42–3, 48, 96 ape-man ancestors 17–18, 40, 78, 79, 80, 95, 127, 141, 143 archaeology 18, 91, 93 Australian aborigines 89, 90 bestiality, notions of 1, 2, 15, 17, 22, 25, 30, 34, 36, 50, 77, 97, 109 biblical narratives 21, 22, 83, 101, 110, 125;

190

see also creationism bio-cultural explanation of human races 26; see also social evolutionism biogenetics 34, 58 black museum visitors: African-Americans 115–17, 119–20; and African origins stories 3, 18, 77–8, 79–80, 165–9; American Museum of Natural History 116; counter-narratives 3–4, 113–28; Horniman Museum 7, 103–4, 121–2, 122–4, 127; National Museums of Kenya 3, 77–8, 105–9, 118, 127, 132–3, 145–7; Natural History Museum (London) 116–17; under-utilization of museums 115; unique interpretive community 3 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich 22 Boas, Franz 33 Boitard, Pierre 31 Boston, D. M. 74 Broom, Robert 20 Burgess, John 56 Burian, Zdenek 15, 37, 38, 39, 88, 89, 95, 97 Burnet, James 22 “Bushmen” 35, 52, 55, 90, 114, 127, 143, 166 Cambridge School of Anthropology 71 cave art: African 8, 95, 97, 119; European 9, 62, 97 Cheke Rock Shelter 8 Chicago World’s Columbian Exhibition (1893) 28, 54, 117 childlikeness, African 33, 34, 58 civilizationism 120 cladistics 5, 6, 11 Cleuziou, Henri du 31, 32

Index clothing as racial marker 67, 140, 143 colonialism 26, 27, 101, 110; anticolonialism 120–1; ideologies, museums as sites of 4, 116, 129–32, 134, 135, 145; legacy 116, 140 consensus narratives 113–14, 149 Coryndon Memorial Museum (Nairobi) 129–31; see also National Museums of Kenya Cradle of Mankind thesis 17, 18, 20, 21, 77, 78, 81–5, 97, 98; black responses to 77–8, 113, 117, 127, 142, 146, 165–9; cultural implications 18, 78; environmental determinism 82; living ancestors and 81–2; mitochondrial Eve 91–2, 99; multiregional explanations 83; politicized responses 82–3; resistance to 20–1, 82–3, 85; value-laden concept 85; Western neutral or romantic view 18, 21, 35, see also out-of-Africa narratives creationism 21, 107, 109, 110, 145 criminal and behavioral disorders 58 Cro-Magnon culture 58, 64, 93, 97 Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851) 28 cultural heritage 111–12; see also African heritage, pride in cultural identity 2 cultural origins 18, 94; Africa 18, 91, 93, 93–4; Europe 2, 18, 21, 62, 94, 97, 98, see also modern human origins cultural production 4, 35–6, 40–5, 47, 96 cultural relativism 18, 33, 91 Dahomey Village 28, 117 dark continent 21, 24, 27, 83; and modernity 65, see also skin color darkness 36, 52 Dart, Raymond 20 Darwin, Charles 38, 41; Darwinian anthropology 17, 21, 23, 26, 29, 71; Origin of Species 26, 30 Dawkins, Richard 40, 41 degeneration 102 dehumanization 36, 58 dioramas see exhibitions, evolutionary distortions of evolutionary time and space 17, 43, 52, 106, 125, 141 distrust of science 124–5 Douglass, Frederick 28, 117 Du Bois, W. E. B. 28 ecological determinism 99 Enlightenment representations of Africa 22, 24 environmental determinism 18, 26, 58, 82, 91, 99, 109

ethnographic analogy 52 eugenics 33, 57, 59 Eurocentric narratives see progress narratives Europe, cultural origins in 2, 18, 21, 62, 94, 97, 98 evolutionary brainstorming 149 evolutionary education: childhood recollections 42; emotional understandings 55; first exposure to 41–2; formal 40, 41, 42; museums as validation of 29–30, 42; through books 35–6, 40, 41; through family members 42; through television and cinema 40, 41, 42–3, 44–5, 48 evolutionary genetics 33 evolutionary iconography 37–48; African passivity 150; in antiquity 22; ape iconography 15, 24–5, 26, 30, 31, 33, 36, 45, 54, 79, 121, 141; black critique of 116–17; construction and circulation 37, 39; elemental motifs 39; essentialism 53; ethnographic analogy 52; facial features 30, 31, 64, 145; functionalism 53; globalization 4, 47–8; historical antecedents 22, 39, 51; intertextuality 17, 40–5, 76; “march of progress” 49–51, 50, 51, 52, 54; nostalgic 76; persistence of 50–1; popular media influences 47; power of 37; presentism 53; “race of progress” 52–3; and racial politics 118; stereotypical 105; time/space condensation 52; universalism 53; validation function 45–7, 51–2, 53, 66, see also hair texture; skin color evolutionary theory: Darwinian 17, 21, 23, 26, 29, 71; inherent racism 121, 124; natural selection 26, 27; political malleability 27; Victorian 49 exhibitions, evolutionary: American Museum of Natural History 1, 10, 59–67, 60, 61, 62, 63, 69; black critique of 116–17, 119, 138–45; creation process 67–8, 69; eclectic influences on 67–8; emotional potency 61; encoding and decoding 67–70; familiarity element 46–7; Horniman Museum (London) 6–7, 7, 11, 35, 102–5; identity validation 2, 53; National Museums of Kenya 8–9, 62, 105–9, 138–45; Natural History Museum (London) 5–6, 5, 11; ostensibly raceneutral representations 118; persuasive effects of artistic “realism” 68–9; phylogenetic reconstructions 5, 6; racial and cultural overtones 64–5; scientific legitimacy 68

191

Index exotic and romanticized North Africa 83 exploration of Africa 25, 27 facial features 30, 31, 64, 145 Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago) 29, 57 folklore, racial and ethnographic 1, 22, 25, 27, 91, 148 Forestier, Amadee 39 fossil sites 8, 20, 46, 111, 136 Galton, Sir Francis 33 Garden of Eden narrative 35, 81, 82, 85 Gates, Henry Louis 119 genetics 18, 33, 91, 100, 101; evolutionary genetics 33; genetic rhetoric 101; population genetics 33 Gitonga, Eustace 8, 138 global museum culture 48 globalized evolutionary iconography 47–8 goal-oriented view of evolution 66–7 Gould, Stephen Jay 40, 41, 52 Great Chain of Being 22–3, 26, 49 Great Leap Forward 21, 66, 97 Gurche, John 15, 87, 87 Haddon, A. C. 71–2, 73 hair texture as racial signifier 65, 67, 80, 87, 89, 90, 100 Hall, Stuart 3, 114, 125–6 Harrison, Herbert Spencer 72, 73 heritage tourism 111 Herodotus 22 Herrnstein, R. J. 33 homo erectus 1, 10, 36, 59, 66, 90, 92, 140, 143; visual representation 61, 64, 65, 87–90, 87, 118, 138, 139, 139 homo sapiens 18, 67, 85, 92, 93, 93, 94, 96, 105; envisioned origins of 18, 92–4, 96 Horniman Museum (London) 4, 29, 70–6; “African Worlds” 7, 11, 35; black visitors 7, 103–4, 121–2, 122–4, 127; child visitors 122–4; human evolution exhibition 6–7, 7; multiregionalist ethos 6, 72–3, 74; nostalgic reading 17, 75–6; progress narrative 53, 70–3; social-evolutionist tradition 17, 56, 70, 73, 74; “Varieties of Mankind” 102–5, 103; Victorian ethos 6, 7, 17, 70–3, 75–6; visitor demographics 7–8; visitor research 14, 151, 153 Hottentot Venus 36 Hrdlička, Aleš 33 Human Revolution 21, 66, 97 Huxley, Thomas 38, 49, 50, 51, 57 hybridization 102

192

iconography see evolutionary iconography inferiority narrative 11, 16, 17, 23, 29, 30, 31, 34, 36, 52, 55, 86, 125, 143, 147 intelligence, racial difference and 33 Jefferson, Thomas 25 Jordan, Winthrop 24 Jurassic Park 44 Keith, Sir Edward 38 Kimeu, Kamoya 136, 137 Knight, Charles 15, 39, 57, 59 Koobi Fora fossil region 8 ladders of progress 11, 23, 23, 27, 50, 81, 118, 124; Africa-to-Europe 11; racialized 23, 23, 53, 54, see also progress narratives Leakey, Louis 8, 20, 130, 133 Leakey, Louise 134 Leakey, Mary 8–9, 20 Leakey, Meave 8, 133–4, 135, 137, 140 Leakey, Richard 41, 110, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 137 linear, teleological narratives of evolution 1, 2, 11, 21, 49, 50, 55, 62–3; see also progress narratives Linnaeus, Carl 22, 24 living ancestors 18, 32, 81–2, 114, 127, 143, 166 living displays of Africans 27–9 Livingstone, David 27 Long, Edward 25, 30 McGregor, J. Howard 58–9 Malinowski, Bronislaw 32 Matternes, Jay 15, 60, 86 Mead, Margaret 32 meat-eating 64, 138, 141 “missing link” 31–2 missionary activity 27 mitochondrial Eve 91–2, 99 modern human origins: Africa 10, 18, 91–4, 96, 100, see also cultural origins modernity 11, 65, 90, 109; anatomical signs of 93; Eurocentric representation 150; skin color and 65, 90, 97 monogenism 23, 101 Montagu, Ashley 33 multiregionalism 6, 72–3, 74, 83, 92, 97, 98–9, 101, 102, 105–6, 108, 109, 144, 146 Murray, C. 33 museum visitors: active ideological agents 2; children 122–4; cultural preconceptions 17, 47, 70; discursive readings 40; dominant

Index readings 3–4, 114; encoding/decoding practices 114, 126, 142; ideological dilemmas 126; intertextual readings 40, 70, 76; making meaning 2, 3, 4, 110–11; misconceptions of teleological progress 17, 43, 52, 106, 125, 141; multi-layered perceptions 12, 13, 40, 55, 111; negotiated readings 3, 114, 125, 126, 127–8, 140; oppositional readings 3, 114, 127–8, see also black museum visitors; evolutionary education; research methodology mythological narratives: cultural 24; racial 21, 22, 24, 25 Nariokotome Boy 136 National Geographic 40, 48, 52, 86, 87, 88, 90, 118 National Museums of Kenya (Nairobi) 4, 18–19; colonial heritage 4, 129–32, 134, 135, 145; European influences 131–2; evolution displays 62, 105–9; exclusionary practices 132–3, 145; Kenyan visitors 3, 77–8, 118, 127, 132–3, 145–7; Leakey family ties 9, 133–7; multiregionalism 105–6; Prehistory Gallery 8–9, 8, 138–45; visitor research 14, 152, 155 Natural History Museum (London) 4; black visitors 116–17; cladistics, incorporation of 6, 11; “Our Place in Nature” 5–6, 5, 11; progress narrative 69–70; visitor research 14, 151, 154 natural history museums: anthropological education through 29–30; colonial ideologies 116; domain and definition, contested 6; image and ideological exchange 35; postcolonial African museums 116; racialized progress narratives 53–4, 55, 69–70; re-visioning evolution 148–50; romanticization 17, 75–6; scientific racism 29, 33, 110; typological method 29; under-utilization by black people 115; Victorian 4, 21; visitors see museum visitors, see also individual institutions Neanderthals 6, 10, 43, 47, 50, 57, 59, 65; ape-man/Neanderthal relationship 94–5; iconic roles 43, 47, 95, 96, 105; visual representation 38, 43, 46–7, 57, 59, 62, 64, 65–6, 95, 118 neoteny 34, 58 noble savage 32–3 Nott, Josiah 102 origins images see evolutionary iconography origins narratives 2, 11; Afrocentric 120–2,

129; biological 83; black responses to 3, 18, 77–80, 113, 117, 127, 142, 146, 165–9; counter-narratives 113–28; cultural 83; cultural decline narrative 119; fairy-tale motifs 38; iconography of see evolutionary iconography; ideological hurdles 20–1, see also Cradle of Mankind thesis; out-of-Africa narratives; progress narratives orthogenesis 55 Osborn, Henry Fairfield 20, 33, 39, 56, 57, 58, 59 Ota Bengas 36 Othering practices 22, 24, 34–5, 36 out-of-Africa narratives 13, 18–19, 77, 92, 92, 94–7; cultural origins 94; implications for African people 129–47; “Killer African Hypothesis” 94; modern human origins 10, 18, 91–4, 96, 100; in popular culture 96; resistance to 94, 97, 101, see also Cradle of Mankind thesis paleoanthropology 18, 91 paleontology 69; Kenyan 136–7; nationalism and 136; outsider paleontology 135–6 Patrick, Leaford 73–4 phylogenetic reconstruction 5, 6 Pickford, Martin 135 Pitt Rivers, Augustus 71 Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford) 29, 72 Planet of the Apes, racial implications of 36, 44–5 Plinian races 21 politics of oppression 3, 122 polygenism 23, 74, 101–2, 124 popular culture, and evolutionary education 4, 35–6, 40–5, 47, 96 population genetics 33 postcolonial African museums 116; see also National Museums of Kenya (Nairobi) primitivism 120 progress narratives 1, 2, 3, 4, 49–55, 56–70, 144; Africa-to-Europe 10, 11; Afrocentric revision 145–6; cultural 2, 17; Eurocentric 108, 118, 120; “march of progress” imagery 49–51, 50, 51, 52, 54; museum perpetuation of 53–4, 56–70; “race of progress” 51–3; racially encoded 54, 144; socio-evolutionist 49; Victorian 70–3 race: biological construct 33, 103; cultural construct 33, 91, 106–7; folk explanations 80; museum visitor conceptions of 17 race politics 17, 106 race science 17, 21

193

Index racial difference 33, 98–9, 100–1, 107 racial hierarchies 11, 17, 33, 55, 109 racial origins debate 28, 101, 108 racial politics 18, 118, 145 racial segregation 28 racial slurs 36 racial taxonomies 24, 58 recapitulation theory 58 religious narratives 109–11, 121, 145; see also biblical narratives; creationism research methodology 11–16; qualitative data 12, 16, 44; quantitative data 15–16; questionnaires and interviews 11–12, 13–16, 40, 55, 157–69; visitor data 151–5 romantic relation to the past 17, 18, 22, 25, 46, 47, 75–6, 83, 86, 119, 140 Roosevelt, Theodore 28, 56 Sampson, Otto 73 savagery, African 15, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 97 savanna hypothesis 82 scientific illustrations 39, 50; see also evolutionary iconography scientific racism 29, 33, 34, 58, 125 sexual slander and stereotyping 25, 27, 96 skin color 30–1, 52, 63–4, 65, 67, 89, 90; dark skin as signifier of the primitive 29, 30–1, 86, 89, 90, 141–2; impermanence 99, 108; proxy for progress 63–4, 65, 86–7, 97, 118, 141; racial signifier 26, 100, 116–17, 118, 141; relevance to people of color 118–19; self, signifier of 139 slavery 23, 25, 27, 28, 30, 101 Smithsonian Institution 29 social conditioning 107–8 social Darwinism 26, 27, 57, 70, 71, 73, 74; political malleability 27

194

social evolutionism 2, 17, 26, 34, 49, 52, 56, 78, 79; see also scientific racism; social Darwinism Spencer, Herbert 26 Stanley, Henry 27 Stanley and African Exhibition 27–8 stereotypical images of Africa and Africans 17, 20, 31, 69, 82, 104, 105, 117, 122, 126 stigmatization of African peoples 1, 36, 143; political and psychological residues 36 sub-Saharan Africans 18, 83, 94; modern human origins 10, 94; primitivism 18, 83 Taung fossil 20 teleological determinism 21 television, and evolutionary education 40, 41, 42–3 Torres Strait expedition (1898–9) 71 tourism in Africa 35 travel narratives 25 Turkana Boy 8 Tylor, E. B. 26, 34 Tyson, Edward 22 UNESCO 111; statement on race (1964) 33 uniformitarian logic 34 Victorian anthropology 2 Wallace, Alfred Russel 102 Washburn, Sherwood 33 Williams, G. E. 74 Wilson, Maurice 15, 39 world’s fairs and expositions 28, 29, 30, 54, 55 Zimbabwe museums 116