Of Science in Museums

Sophia Vackimes
M
useums as we know them today are con-
sidered to be truly modern institutions.
In them notions of ethnicity, nation
building, and progress have been played out contin-
uously since the nineteenth century. Although
linked historically to Renaissance cabinets of curi-
osities, they have long since ceased being places
where wonders of nature were accumulated and
displayed for their own sake. Eventually, the collec-
tions of dissected butterflies, fossils and other curi-
osities were separated from the materials that
would become the cornerstone of art museum col-
lections, i.e., portraits of kings, placid landscapes,
architectural marvels, and canvases portraying the
mythical acts of gods and goddesses.
Local historical museums and ethnographic
collections took new shapes and directions. In many
cases they became involved in the making of patri-
otic imagery of emerging nation states. Those muse-
ums that began appearing in nineteenth-century
postcolonial states emulated their European coun-
terparts in many ways, but they sought, most im-
portantly, to display an ethnic and national identity
distinct from the background they all once shared.
In this manner museums became political spaces
where "a totalizing classificatory grid [which], could
be applied with endless flexibility to anything un-
der the state's real or contemplated control: peo-
ples, regions, religions, languages, products,
monuments and so forth" (Anderson 1991:184).
Science museums had a different development.
The mysterious collections alchemists and physi-
cists amassed, which were once protected by scien-
tific, ethnological or gentlemen's societies, became
at t ached to research i nst i t ut i ons like the
Jagiellonian University in Poland, the Ashmolean
Museum at Oxford University, or the Museo
Nacional in Mexico. Museums of science, which in-
cluded mathematics, physics, chemistry, electric-
ity, and archaeological collections were regarded as
centers of pure knowledge and considered devoid of
political motives. These views held for most of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Volumes have been written about the impor-
tance of museums in modern societies. However,
and amazingly enough, even though scientific activ-
ity defines much of our everyday activities and the
overall thrust of Western culture, science museums
remain largely unanalyzed. Why have we anthro-
pologists and other cultural thinkers ignored them?
It is urgent to ask whether or not science exhibits
have political motives behind them, especially
when it is obvious that they are an integral part of
the public image of science. Are we being lazy or
derelict in our duty to society? Are we afraid to deal
with the "crises of representation, cultural inter-
pretation, and issues of conflicting epistemologies"
that they represent (Nader 1999:20)?
I will sketch a synopsis of the relationship that
anthropology has borne to museum studies and
then I will propose the issue of science as a particu-
lar type of culture. In drawing such comparisons I
hope to illustrate how much of the issues in anthro-
pological literature are directly relevant when dis-
cussing scientific practice and its ideologically
driven museum representation. As experts in deal-
ing with diverse worldviews it is critical that we re-
alize how science museums contribute iconographic
and stylistic elements to an exhibitionary mes-
sagea message that reflects the "social functions
of ideologiespatterns of symbolic formulations
and figurative languages" of power (Geertz
1973:212-13).
A Brief History of Museum Critique
Museums have been "critical sites of anthropo-
logical research since the modern formation of the
discipline in the 19th century" (Nader 1999:1). They
Museum Anthropology 26(1):3-10. Copyright 2003 American Anthropological Association.
4 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 26 NUMBER 1
have consistently provided the field with fresh and
fertile ground for the development of our discipline.
Since Franz Boas designed the exhibition halls at
the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)
in New York City, notions of culture have been con-
sidered and played out in over a century of museum
exhibits. Over time, however, the intense relation-
ship between museums and anthropology waned,
and the interest in the academic value, history, and
purpose of these institutions was neglected. As our
discipline evolved, the mythical times when Franz
Boas at the AMNH in New York, A.L. Kroeber at
the Anthropology Museum at the University of Cal-
ifornia at Berkeley and others worked at museums
were forgotten. The rich history of the intense rela-
tionships between museums and anthropologists
became covered with dust and shoved into sealed
containers waiting to be deaccessioned. The rift be-
tween museum anthropology and academic anthro-
pology made museums unlikely sites for study since
they were considered step-institutions of the aca-
demic world. Museum curators who shared aca-
demic appointments were seen by colleagues to be
engaged in "less respectable and intellectually de-
manding activity" and tied to "writing elementary
textbooks with a liberal use of visual aids" (Jones
1995:202).
Museums recovered their importance within
anthropological studies in the 1980's and 1990's as
the nature of ethnographic authority, the creation
of traditions, the examination of colonial and
postcolonial bias in the representation of other cul-
tures, the ethical responsibilities of anthropolo-
gists, and the epistemological status of analytical
categories were challenged in a post Civil Rights,
postcolonial era. Benedict Anderson's analysis of
the creation of postcolonial states in Imagined Com-
munities (first published in 1983) eventually
showed us how museums could be sites for the cre-
ation of distinct political imaginations. Newly cre-
ated nation states utilized museums as showcases
for the development of political unity directed at an
upper middle class that internalized and reified
specific visions of patriotic cohesion and political
power. A whole generation of museum critics has
been influenced by Anderson's work, which shows
how, together with the novel, the newspaper, the
census and the map, museums served as "historical
maps" or nation building blueprints that wove an-
cient prestige to the future ideals of emerging
postcolonial ruling classes. Museums became part
of the "formal ideological programme" of modern so-
cial constructions (Anderson 1991:181).
Flora Kaplan's edited volume Museums and the
Making of Ourselves (1994) attempted an expan-
sion on Anderson's idea, providing numerous case
studies to illustrate how museums, as political arti-
facts, had indeed legitimized power in nations as
apparently dissimilar as Mexico and Greece. How-
ever, this volume did not accomplish all it set out to
do. Since then, views about their purpose have
greatly differed. For less optimistic authors they
are spaces where ideological legitimation or cul-
tural encroachment under the guise of "civilizing
missions" took place. Allison Arieff described muse-
ums as sites for the production and appropriation of
indigenous history built on culturally biased no-
tions of objectivity, progress, and universality
(Arieff 1995:78). Other critics, such as Tony
Bennett (1988), have portrayed museums as spaces
where the state submits the citizen to a hegemonic
gaze through a Foucauldian "exhibitionary com-
plex" akin to the asylum, the clinic, and the prison;
spaces where discursive formations and new tech-
nologies of the state are continuously envisioned
and enacted.
Once exhibits were revealed as carrying specific
cultural and political messages criticism flour-
ished. Academic and political notions were chal-
lenged in written form as well as in the realm of
performance art and the way artifacts were being
represented. One of the first issues to be vigorously
debated was what was perceived as institutional-
ized, exhibitionary racism. The exhibit Primitivism
in 20th Century Art: Affinities of the Tribal and the
Modern, held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
in New York in 1984 elicited a flurry of negative re-
sponses to the term "primitive." The legacy of the
sixties, and budding political awareness as well as
correctness, characterized the term and the mu-
seum's politics as an example of "museological ma-
nipulation" (McEvilley 1984:59). The exhibit was
accused of being a space where non-Western art and
people were treated as "less than human, less than
culturalas shadows of a culture, their selfhood,
their Otherness, wrung out of them" (McEvilley
1984:59).
This position was taken up by numerous au-
thors as well as by artists who challenged "Western
exhibitionary notions. Various artists contributed
to challenging museum and curatorial cultural au-
thority. Fred Wilson's work directly spoke to an
apartheid state of affairs in the art world with
pieces titled "Stolen from the Zonge Tribe, 1899,
Private Collection," in installations such as Mining
the Museum, and Rooms with a View. In both cases
white/black, museum/public notions of power were
subverted. In Rooms With a View, the public could
stare back at mannequins, which donned MoMA's
and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's famous uni-
forms. The trend continued with the work of perfor-
mance ar t i st s Coco Fusco and Gui l l ermo
Gomez-Pena, who, by placing themselves inside a
cage at the American Museum of Natural History,
signaled disgust with t he appropri at i on of
non-Western objects into Western capitalist sys-
tems of values and the violent dismissal of the
voices of those they claimed to celebrate (Clifford
1997:200).
Aesthetic considerations also led to conceptual
revisions of the nature of material culture. The par-
adigm that defines an object as art or artifact was
thoroughly deconstructed. Susan Vogel's exhibits
at the Center for African Art rattled the entrenched
notions of primitivism with exhibits that centered
African materials in the trendy SoHo conceptu al art
circuit. These subversions reverberated through-
out the museum community. Eurocentrically moti-
vated concepts t hat had contributed to and
continuously played out the notion that African art
represented the lower rung of an evolutionary
course of art history were questioned. Installations
such as "Perspectives: Angles on African Art,"
which "was one of the first to present non-Western
art from a range of viewpoints, including that of Af-
rican artists" started to change the tide (Jones
1993:206). The ART/Artifact exhibit curated by
Vogel displaced notions of modernity and primitiv-
ism, displaying African objects in non-traditional
manners. A shift in thinking was triggered by what
is known in art circles as "Vogel's Net" a fisher-
man's artifact exhibited as a bundle rather than as
an ethnographic artifact in the style of the Central
Park institution from where it was borrowed. The
SoHo locale continued to host challenges to the
Western cultural coding norm of museums. Ex-
hibits such as Contemporary Art Gallery, Curiosity
Room; Natural History Museum Diorama; and a
videotape of an African ceremony lay bare the
primitivising, exhibitionary conventions used in
art as well as anthropology museums (Jones
1993:206). The main merit of these exhibits was the
beginning of the erosion of the classic opposition be-
tween art and anthropology (Jones 1993:207). But
others disagree. James Clifford, for example, ar-
gues there was no real change, and that these exer-
cises were merely "aestheticized scientism"
(1988:203).
The political events of the 1980's also allowed
for the empowering of Native groups regarding the
display of their cultures. The bulk of anthropologi-
cal literature on museums lies here and centers on
the representation of the "other" and local politics.
Native voices appear in abundance and take center
stage in crafting indigenous, self-representations.
Exemplifying this move is the study of Canadian
Native "voices" done by James Clifford in Routes:
Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Cen-
tury (1997). In his chapter "Four Northwest Coast
Museums: Travel Reflections," he describes differ-
ent museum sites as "tactical approaches" in "the
creation of new interpretive categories (or transla-
tion devices) of art, culture, politics and history"
(Clifford [1991] 1997:212).
A second powerful example of this movement
was the emergence of African American voices and
politics. African Americans appeared in full force at
the National Museum of American History in the
exhibit "From Farm to Factory." The exhibit was
curated by the then director of the museum,
Spencer Crew, an African American historian who
not only directed the exhaustive collection of slave
era artifacts (previously absent from the Smithso-
nian's collections), but who also created powerful
devices through which viewers could interact with
history. "Whites Only" and "Coloreds Only" signs on
doorways at critical junctures in the show dramati-
cally demarcated the plight of people of color in the
United States. The presence of Ku Klux Klan gar-
ments, including a baby's cap and carriage, was an
acrid testimony of the legacy of terror in America.
How museums engage with and respond to com-
munities with vested interests was brought to the
forefront with the passage of the Native American
Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)
in 1990. NAGPRA requires museums and federal
agencies to work with Native groups to "determine
the disposition of human remains and sacred and
cultural objects taken from federal lands or located
in museum collections . . . [It] permanently altered
the relationship between museums and Native
Americans (Lomawalma 2000:41). Today tribal mu-
seums, community centers, and other multicultural
6 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 26 NUMBER 1
spaces continuously challenge the status quo with
exhibits at national and local venues.
The relationship between people and objects
and the vivid contrast of meanings that are con-
ferred upon them by different cultural groups have
been highlighted by a literature that explores is-
sues of "contextualization," "commodification,"
"decontextualization, " and the struggles to
resituate the various meanings of objects. The vol-
ume, The Social Life of Things (1986) edited by
Arjun Appadurai, gave new significance to the no-
tion of an object's life and the trajectory of that life.
The context and the social arenas in which folk ob-
jects and human remains operate take new mean-
ings en route to museum exhibits. Commodities, as
museum objects often are, "represent very complex
social forms and distributions of knowledge... tech-
nical, social, aesthetic and so forth . . . The produc-
tion of knowledge that is read into the commodity is
quite different from the consumption of knowledge
that is read from the commodity" (Appadurai [1986]
2000:41).
Museological critique owes a tremendous debt
to primatology and its intersection with feminist
studies. During the 1980's a generation of women
scientists interested in primate research directly
challenged the male-centric scientific notions in the
discipline. Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Jeanne
Altmann, Alison Richard and Thelma Rowell devel-
oped important epistemological critiques of biologi-
cal functionalism. Feminist-centered theory did not
merely intend to correct male-centered models of
primate behavior but directly challenged the en-
trenched notions of biological essentialism.
Intersecting with museum studies and illustra-
tive of these new theoretical formulations is Donna
Haraway's essay "Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxi-
dermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City,
1908-1936," first published in 1984. This piece was
instrumental in offering a specific "viewpoint of'sci-
ence' as a window on the world of nature" (Schudson
1997:383). Haraway was innovative in the way she
treated a museum exhibit as the "readable text"
(Schudson 1997:383) of a male-centered pursuit of
power. The piece is viewed today as a bit
long-winded, pronouncing "central moral truths"
about the "moral state" (Schudson 1997:385) of
white male elites belonging to the American Mu-
seum of Natural History's board of trustees and
benefactors. It nevertheless remains essential
reading not only for its feminist critique but also as
an important contribution to museum studies. It
squarely pointed to the fact that "museums... have
ideologies" (Grana quoted in Schudson 1997:385).
The idea that traditions institutionalize power and
privilege was made abundantly clear through
Haraway's demonstration of how "class, race and
gender" were determining elements in the creation
of the dioramas of the Hall of African Mammals.
Museum studies also owe a serious debt to those
writers who viewed the construction of the body as a
social entity. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret
M. Lock's essay "The Mindful Body: A Prolegome-
non to Future Work in Medical Anthropology"
(1987), contests Western assumptions of medical
theory and show that the body can be viewed: (1) as
a phenomenally experienced individual body-self;
(2) as a social body, a natural symbol for thinking
about relationships among nature, society and cul-
ture; and (3) as a body politic, an artifact of social
and political control (Scheper-Hughes and Lock
1987:6). Anchored in a particular place and time the
body is culturally produced. This argument led to
various studies of representations of the body in the
arts and in exhibitionary culture. Some particu-
larly relevant works dealing with women's bodies in
science are Londa Schiebinger's Nature's Body:
Gender in the Making of Modern Science, (1995) a
genealogy of taxonomical classification and use of
sexual metaphors during the scientific revolution;
Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Ori-
gins, (1998) by Stephanie Moser, looks at the cul-
tural biases in artistic renderings of evolutionary
theory; The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anat-
omy, (1998) by Deanna Petherbridge and Ludmilla
Jordanova and Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen
in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, (1993) by
Barbara Maria Stafford, i l l ust r at e t he
"nonlinguistic paradigms" that science has used in
a radical shift from a text based to a visu-
ally-centered culture. Catherine Cole took the dis-
cussion straight to museum exhibit practices in
Women, Reproduction and Fetuses at Chicago's Mu-
seum of Science and Industry (1993).
The Role of the Science Museum
So if the role museums have taken lately is that
of culture as a self-reflective space, what do they tell
us about ourselves? About politics? About science?
About science in museums? In "American Anthro-
pologists and American Society" (1969), Eric Wolf
noted that contemporary American society lacked
urgent self-criticism. Laura Nader continues to see
this lack and describes the present moment in
museography as one where there is a need for "ur-
gent political and epistemological" questioning
(1999:5). Although there have been great advances
in cultural and anthropological critique of
ethnographic and art museums, and of certain sci-
ences like medicine, some subjects have remained
out-of-bounds for the epistemological questioning
that Nader proposes. While it is true that many
museographic issues or political positions have
been engaged in creating alternate discourses, and
political groups have empowered themselves
enough to share representational modes in major
museum venues science has remained an inexora-
ble Rubicon.
Already in the 1970's and 1980's, as a result of
the Cold War, intellectuals had attempted a critical
view of American scientific ideology. The field of cul-
tural studies is not new, and anthropologists, Marx-
ists, feminists, constructivists, deconstructionists,
have approached science as a particular culture for
a long time now. So why hasn't there been a political
critique of science museums?
Science museums need to be looked at as sites
where "the dynamics of boundary creation, power
and knowledge" are played out (Nader 1996:12).
Perhaps one of the reasons this has not been done is
that "we had not yet achieved the detachment, the
experience, and the critical maturity necessary to
undertake"(Nader 1999:8) such a project. "We first
needed t o. . . problematize the idea of the 'Other' in
order to recognize our roles as natives in our own so-
ciety" (Nader 1999:8).
In the United States science is generally
equated with progress. Presenting a divergent view
proved nearly fatal for "Science in American Life,"
an exhibit which opened at the National Museum of
American History at the Smithsonian Institution in
1994 and discussed by Arthur Molella in this issue.
The curatorial staff focused on "scientific impact"
instead, and urged the public to think about the
meaning of the contraceptive pill, the atomic bomb,
food additives, scientific education, coal tar prod-
ucts, synthetic fabrics, paints, aspirin, and the ef-
fect of pesticides. Obscure inventors, vaccines and
DNA, medical innovations, dyes for blue jeans, ra-
dio circuits, and hard water in American communi-
ties were all present in the exhibit. This might all
seem quite obvious material to portray since the
show was about American life. However the show
elicited t he ire of scientific and political
communities such as the American Chemical Soci-
ety, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. A fall-
out shelter and a set of photographs of victims of the
nuclear explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
brought threats of staff firings and a Congressional
investigation of the curatorial staff. "The worry
among some scientists on the museum's advisory
board was that the shelter would stand out as a sym-
bol of scientific evil," an argument that echoed the
Science Wars of the mid-nineties (Molella and
Stephens 1995:9). It is lamentable that only three or
four monographs have been written about this ex-
hibit, and that it will be torn down in a couple of
years because of surreptitious "building remodel-
ing."
The assumption of the inherent superiority of
modern science has remained an article of faith
within our culture (Nader 1999:8). Anthropology as
a discipline has matured and is now capable of tack-
ling within museums what various anthropologists
have been tackling in other arenas for years. Sadly
enough, science in museums has not been tapped.
Two authors, however, have dealt with science and
its exhibitionary sphere. Hugh Gusterson has ex-
amined yearly exhibits and commemorations of nu-
clear tests at Los Alamos in his articles "Tales of the
City" (1998), which deals with exhibiting the nu-
clear attack at Hiroshima, and "Nuclear Tourism"
(2001); Dorothy Nelkin approached DNA as a "cul-
tural icon" (1995). Nelkin's treatment of the mate-
rial is different from most work on the body for it
focuses strongly on science as ideology and bound-
aries of power rather than on artistic renderings.
The utility of boundary-work is not limited to
demarcations of science from non-science (Gieryn
1983:792), nor is it limited to gender studies, icono-
graphic analysis, or the study of ethnic communi-
ties. Our complex societies need a closer look at the
"strains" and "interests" that guide the selection of
one or another repertoire for public presentation
(Gieryn 1983:792). Herein lies the importance of
studying science museums.
Museums help mold much of what the general
public understands as and about science. They act
in manners akin to laboratories where information
is processed and reconfigured into useful cultural
artifacts. In laboratories some facts are reified as
scientific knowledge, while others are discarded.
Science museums help transform a public quest for
8 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 26 NUMBER 1
information into acceptable ways of knowing, of be-
having, of understanding nature. Museums are so-
cial laboratories where "enhanced environments"
set up correspondences between natural orders and
social ones (Knorr-Cetina 1999:26). In laboratories
facts are processed, "detached from their natural
environment," moved onto a "symbol based technol-
ogy" and "converted into scales of social order" just
as they are in museums (Knorr-Cetina 1999:28).
If science indeed is capable of engaging (Frank-
lin 1995:177) and thus altering public discourse ,
and if the analysis of sites of the creation of ideology
is one of the ideals of anthropology, then it is time
that science museums as public spaces are taken up
as new sites for research.
Of Science in Museums
The American triumphalism that Eric Wolf
critiqued has been made quite apparent in our lack
of questioning current political and scientific enter-
prise. It takes going abroad to see that exhibits on
science that include social critique are possible. The
new Wellcome Wing of the Science Museum in Lon-
don, is a point in case. Genetic engineering is se-
verely questioned against a backdrop of invited art
works that sort out questions of social impact and
ethics. Here and Now: Contemporary Science and
Technology in Museums and Science Centers, edited
by Farnelo and Carding and published by the Sci-
ence Museum in London (1996), deals with and re-
flects on the past achievements of scientists and
technologists by improving the coverage of the work
they are doing today. The authors are not shy in dis-
cussing issues such as how visitors would react to
controversial biotechnology exhibits. For example:
How would the public, so bent on the promise of
spare body parts generated by genetic research, re-
act to actually viewing a human ear growing on the
back of a laboratory mouse? or an interactive game
called "The Sperminator," in which schoolchildren
use a pinball machine to learn about pregnancy and
infertility?
British Museum's director Robert Anderson
(previously at the Science Museum) has repeatedly
expressed how perplexed he is about the lack of
analysis of the material culture of science in this
country. Useful points of departure are the papers
in The History of Technology at the Science Museum,
London (1996) also published by the Science Mu-
seum in London and edited by Insley and Bud. The
papers deal with research and collecting agendas of
science museums as well as the nature of science
exhibits. Some articles also reflect on the collabora-
tion that goes on among American, British, and
German science museums. Sharon Macdonald has
also broken new ground with an ethnographic ac-
count of the goings on in the creation of science ex-
hibits with her volume Behind the Scenes at the
Science Museum (2002); however, she does not
"study up."
Science museums in the United States have re-
mained attached to merely presenting materials as
wonders of nature or as technological feats. We
must ask ourselves what is left out and what is it
telling us about ideological boundaries. Millions are
spent throughout the United States in the develop-
ment of science centers, yet we continue to disre-
gard such enterprises as out of the realm of
anthropology. The city of Tucson, Arizona, for in-
stance, is gearing up for a ten-year project, which
will be a complex that not only revitalizes its down-
town area but also includes art, culture and science
as part of its mandate. However, will the science
center include an anthropology section? Will it dis-
cuss solar energy as a source of power? Or will it ad-
dress genetically modified organisms? What about
an exhibit on telesurveillance? These notions are
not so farfetched considering that seventy percent
of our foods are genetically modified, or that popu-
lar culture has so effectively shown us Big Brother's
entertainment value.
The American Anthropological Association's
Council for Museum Anthropology hosted a session
on science museums at its 2001 annual meeting in
Washington, D.C. This session, titled "Science and
Cultural Boundaries," was five years in the making.
Tom Gieryn, Indiana University, spoke to the chal-
lenges of telling the truth at museums. The bound-
aries blurred by the enigmatic Museum for Jurassic
Technology are extraordinary examples of such dif-
ficulty. Art Molella, of the National Museum of
American History, Smithsonian Institution, re-
flected on his curatorial work in "Science in Ameri-
can Life." He discussed what writing the script for a
responsible national science exhibit means and how
that effort became a long and winding nightmare.
Hugh Gusterson, who in the midst of becoming a fa-
ther, contributed a marvelously sharp and witty yet
macabre paper on Nuclear Tourism. Tracey Dye,
who helped organize the panel, dramatically up-
dated the discussion Haraway began almost twenty
years ago on dioramas at the American Museum of
Natural History. My own essay took Dorothy
Nelkin's tack on DNA as cultural icon and views The
Genomic Revolution at the American Museum of
Natural History as an exhibit overwhelmed by ref-
erences to obscurantism. Enid Schildkrout served
as our discussant. Her critique was fundamental to
our overall organization and intellectual direction.
The papers presented at the session that appear in
this issue are by Molella, Vackimes, and Dye. In ad-
dition to those, we have added Akiko Kanaya
Mikochi's piece, which is an example of fresh writ-
ing in a sea of obtuse academic referencing.
The thrust of this volume is to strategically po-
sition science museums within the study of power,
hegemony , and a particular aspect of Western ide-
ology. Science is not devoid of motives. Science,
which is not as attached to "truth" as we might have
once thought it was, has lost its "effectiveness" as
monitor of reality. It is
now drifting towards its decline, its civic fall
from grace. . . . As a panic phenomenon-a fat
concealed by the success of its devices and
toolscontemporary science is losing itself in
the very excessiveness of its alleged progress.
Much as a strategy, offensive can wear itself out
by the scale of its tactical conquests, so
techno-science is gradually wrecking the schol-
arly resources of all knowledge (Virilo 2000:2).
Science museums are ripe for serious scrutiny.
Are we willing to tackle them or not? Or shall we let
them continue a slippage into "the future of propa-
ganda"? (Brodsky quoted in Virilio (2002:15), that
propagation of faithand progress [which] is
merely a mystical displacementthe frantic
deployment of a force of physical repulsion and
expulsion of man out of that divine Creation
which had up until then been for him, the world
over, the beginning of all reality[?] (Virilio
2002:15).
Acknowledgments
To Dr. Alan Dundes for everlasting inspiration
and a notion that there are underlying motives in
every human undertaking, and to Dr. Laura Nader
who pointed the way. To the founding ideals of the
Graduate Faculty. Many thanks to Christina Kreps
for her editorial assistance.
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Sophia Vackimes is currently a doctoral student in
Anthropology at the Graduate Faculty of the New
School in New York City. She holds a M.A. in Latin
American Studies with a concentration in Museum
Studies from New York University