Stephen T. Asma - Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads. The Culture of Natural History Museums [2001][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: April 5, 2001
The natural history museum is a place where the line between "high" and "low" culture effectively vanishes--where our awe of nature, our taste for the bizarre, and our thirst for knowledge all blend happily together. But as Stephen Asma shows in Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, there is more going on in these great institutions than just smart fun.
Asma takes us on a wide-ranging tour of natural history museums in New York and Chicago, London and Paris, interviewing curators, scientists, and exhibit designers, and providing a wealth of fascinating observations. We learn how the first museums were little more than high-toned side shows, with such garish exhibits as the pickled head of Peter the Great's lover. In contrast, today's museums are hot-beds of serious science, funding major research in such fields as anthropology and archaeology.
"Rich in detail, lucid explanation, telling anecdotes, and fascinating characters.... Asma has rendered a fascinating and credible account of how natural history museums are conceived and presented. It's the kind of book that will not only engage a wide and diverse readership, but it should, best of all, send them flocking to see how we look at nature and ourselves in those fabulous legacies of the curiosity cabinet."--The Boston Herald.

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Science museums can be illuminating, exciting, and disturbing--just like the collectors that make them possible. Scholar Stephen T. Asma turned his professional curiosity about preserving bodies into an engrossing, wide-ranging exploration of the nature of these places and their curators. Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums brings a refreshing vitality to a subject usually thought boring, if not morbid. Asma's writing ranges from expositive to chatty, and it occasionally feels like a travelogue or memoir, as he investigates the American Museum of Natural History, the Galerie d'anatomie comparée, and other collections in the U.S. and Europe. This informality keeps the reader engaged throughout. Referring to the process of skeletonizing specimens--while maintaining his hold on all but the most sensitive--he writes:
I stepped into the foulest, most pestiferous stench you can imagine.... Inside each tank were thousands of dermestid beetles, otherwise known as flesh-eating beetles, blissfully chewing the meaty chunks and strands off the bones. Each bug was no bigger than a watermelon seed, but en masse they could strip a skeleton clean in two short days.
To Asma's credit, the bulk of the text is less a gross-out fest than a consideration of the hard, sometimes obsessive work of the men and women behind the displays. He examines the role of museums and collectors in the great evolutionary debates of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the future of these institutions as they come more and more to depend on corporate largesse. Equally enlightening and entertaining, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads is a perfectly exhibited specimen. --Rob Lightner

From Publishers Weekly
Artfully posed human skeletons and "monster" fetuses in jars are the stuff of Stephen T. Asma's fascinating Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums. A professor of philosophy and interdisciplinary humanities at Chicago's Columbia College, Asma (Buddha for Beginners) dissects and catalogues his extensive research in this rigorous, entertaining work of cultural criticism. He investigates the history of "acceptable" scientific practice and affords philosophical insight into the scientific and human impulse to categorize: "To have a concept... is to have its negation already in tow.... There is a class of things called `dog,' and there is a class of things (quite substantial, in fact) that are `not-dog.'... Language and thought cannot really function without this most basic tool for carving up reality." Photos and illus.

From Library Journal
Do natural history museum visitors ever wonder how exhibits come to be or what, if any, history there may be to the presentation of the exhibits? Asma, a philosophy professor, answers these questions and more. He succeeds admirably in providing a "decoder device that readers can draw upon for future museum visits." Examining seven natural history museums in the United States and Europe, Asma provides a history of wet and dry specimens and taxidermy, how and why collections were accumulated, how taxonomy evolved, and how collections changed over time. The last half of the book explores how evolution and Darwin have influenced natural history collections, "dissects" exhibits at several museums, and, most fascinatingly, discusses how the visual arts are employed both consciously and unconsciously in the creation of natural history displays. For all medium and large collections and especially for history of science collections. Michael D. Cramer, Raleigh Research Triangle Park, NC

From Booklist
Asma, a philosophy professor, takes the reader on a journey through the history and philosophical underpinnings of the natural history museum. Talking with curators, exhibit designers, and scientists from museums in London, Paris, New York, and Chicago (homes of the world's major natural history museums), the author goes behind the scenes to discuss not only how objects are displayed but also why they were chosen. The natural history museum started as a gathering of natural oddities. Early museums often emphasized the macabre, but the author points out that much learning was taking place (almost despite themselves) among museum goers. As he delves into the nuts and bolts of exhibition, specimen preparation, and preservation, Asma shows us flesh-eating beetles (for cleaning bones), the "wet method" of preservation (literally pickling), the artistry of taxidermy, and the preparation of the world's most famous dinosaur fossil. Woven into this museum travelogue are quotes from museum personnel explaining the philosophy behind the writing of signage, the juxtaposition of exhibits, and the presentation of a story line. Nancy Bent

Reviews
"In Stuffed Animals, the natural history museum is a dimly lit stage for scientific dreams. Inside its cabinet of wonder, the mysteries of the natural world are laid bare and the rupture between the scientific and the sublime is momentarily healed."--Voice Literary Supplement

"Rich in detail, lucid explanation, telling anecdotes, and fascinating characters.... Asma has rendered a fascinating and credible account of how natural history museums are conceived and presented. It's the kind of book that will not only engage a wide and diverse readership, but it should, best of all, send them flocking to see how we look at nature and ourselves in those fabulous legacies of the curiosity cabinet."--Boston Herald

"Asma has already established himself as one of the most creative minds working in cultural history and the history of science. Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads is an incredibly stimulating discussion of the role of natural history museums in culture and society. It should be read by all, both practicing scientists and philosophers, and the broadly curious general reader."--Michael Ruse, author of The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw

"Strap yourself into your seat and prepare for a thrilling ride back into history and natural history through Stephen Asma's time machine--two hundred years back into the history of natural history museums, and two million years back into natural history itself. The weird and the wonderful are on display and visually striking, as Asma traces our journey to understand our origins and evolution, and how we have struggled mightily to convey millions of years of time and change to a species whose chronology is set in decades. A gripping tale with great illustrations that are absolutely necessary--for we are the most visual of all the primates, and there is no greater theatre than evolution."--Michael Shermer, author of The Borderlands of Science

About the Author
Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Humanities at Columbia College, in Chicago. He has written articles on a broad range of topics that bridge the humanities and sciences, including pieces in Chronicle of Higher Education and The Humanist, and he is a regular contributor to Skeptic Magazine. The author of the bestselling Buddha for Beginners, he lives in Chicago.