Governing the Wild: Ecotours of Power

1. Ordering Nature at the American Museum of Natural History

When you enter the American Museum of Natural History in New York from the 77th Street entrance, you encounter a profoundly striking diorama depicting the Dutch colonization of New Amsterdam (now Manhattan). A group of men are foregrounded, two Indigenous and two European. The Europeans, one brandishing a rifle and the other with a hand outstretched, invite the Indigenous men (smaller in size) to approach in supplication and bestow the corn and jewelry they carry, presumably in the form of a gift to the newly minted American settlers. The Indigenous men are shown wearing loincloths and feathers—the quintessential body of the “primitive” marked by its “naturalness.” The diorama is spatially halved, the one side reflecting European mastery of the sea and technology, the other depicting the Native as outside the thrall of modernity . But the ships in the far background herald further settlement of the area: the inevitable march of civilization. This is the story of a sanitized empire. Erased from this diorama is the actuality of colonialism—nothing short of genocide. Instead, we are asked to imagine this diorama as a valuefree depiction of contact and exchange between the Indigenous people who called that land home and the seemingly benevolent European settlers of the New York area. By now, this is a familiar—if hotly contested—narrative of colonization . It has become easy for us to deconstruct this diorama thanks to the work of Haraway (1989), McClintock (1995), T. Mitchell (1988), Said (1979), and others to reveal how it tells the stories about race, gender, nature, and nation that lend it coherence. This, of course, is not an uncommonrepresentation ,andthestoryittellsusservesasaconstanttropeinthe Western imagination of the “other.” Indeed, it is a very convenient retelling of the history of the United States (and “white settler” countries more generally ), which reinscribes Native people as close to nature—hence in need of improvement—and positions the European settlers as the genuine inheritors of the emerging nation. This diorama speaks without speaking of • CHAPTER 1 • Ordering Nature at the American Museum of Natural History • 1 • the ways in which power and oppression are naturalized in the construction of nations. ThisisthekindofnarrativethatIanticipatedfindingatthisresearchsite: theHallofBiodiversityattheAmericanMuseumofNaturalHistory(AmericanMuseum ).IimaginedIwouldbepresentedwithastraightforwardstory linethatlegitimizestheimperialimpulseundertheauspicesofsavingglobal nature. But I was wrong. After completing my research at the Hall of Biodiversity , I came to understand that the governing of nature is at times a subtler and more complicated affair in this exhibit, simultaneously reinforcing andchallengingsomeofthekeynarrativesaboutnature.Indeed,theexhibit is inflected with good intentions and in many ways offers one of the more complex treatments of the entanglements of nature and culture in the making of environmental problems than the other cases presented in Governing the Wild. But I think what the American Museum does through this exhibit is offer an example of governmentality, where particular kinds of science operate as truth-telling mechanisms to construct how nature is understood. So, in examining this site, I attempt to answer the question of how the exhibit works to produce a certain form of “truth” about nature by exploring both what is memorialized and, in the act of remembering, what is forgotten . I also pay attention to what is made legitimate for display and how it is organized, as well as how the visitor’s gaze is constructed. Succinctly, I am interestedinhowpowerandeducationintersectintheHallofBiodiversity. In examining the site with these questions in mind, I came to realize that the Hall of Biodiversity attempts nothing less than an inventory of nature—a complex representation of biodiversity in its totality. It tells the “truth” of the world through science and display, providing characteristic ways of seeing nature, generating biopolitical maps of biodiversity, reinforcing particular narratives of nature and culture, and constructing green subjectivities. By defining what nature is, how it is under threat, why it is important, and how we can mediate its crisis, this exhibition seeks to enframe nature and redeploy it for effective management. In this way, it operates as a producer, instrument, and means for the circulation of particular kind of green governmentality. The History of Natural History Naturalhistoryasasystematizeddisciplineemergedintheseventeenthand eighteenth centuries during a period that Foucault (2004) aptly christened 2 ORDERING NATURE “the age of the catalogue.” To be sure, however, collections of curiosities existed before this time. As Hooper-Greenhill (2001) has described, collections of objects, which might be understood as proto-museums, were common in sixteenth-century Europe. Of these collections, the German Wunderkammer (wonder rooms or cabinet of wonders) is perhaps both...