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145 CHAPTER TEN Of Ape-Men, Sex, and Cannibal Kings The natural history diorama frames our way of seeing and knowing nature by telling stories. These stories graft social theory onto the material reality of the world in order to organize knowledge in terms of its value to society. Just as the Enlightenment preempted God’s authority over nature three centuries ago, so science of the early twentieth century sought to wrest power from nature in order to maximize production, as Barber Conable phrases it, “to make most of nature’s resources so that human resourcefulness can make the most of the future.”1 As a confederacy “between words and things, enabling one to see and to say,” the diorama attested to the meaning and importance of nature to society.2 African Hall deploys the weighty authority of science to validate the use of animals as vessels for meaning and then camouflages its content in order to make it appear free of social narrative. The museum tries to preempt any negotiation of meaning by claiming the animals and the places within its halls are not human artifacts but real. When Roosevelt and Burroughs joined forces to attack what they called the “nature fakers” in 1903, they argued that “Truth as pure science” was proof of itself. Anything else distorted the “Truth” and therefore polluted the mind. Roosevelt argued to abolish fanciful stories about nature from the national curriculum. “If the child mind is fed with stories that are false to nature, the children will go to the haunts of the animal only to meet with disappointment,” he wrote. “The result will be disbelief, and the death of interest.”3 The absoluteness with which they regarded the objective facts of science did not allow Roosevelt, Akeley, or Osborn to grasp the fact they were engaged in the creation of a new imperial narrative about nature that credentialed itself as rational, objective, and moral. Roosevelt insisted that nature was a literal text based on self-evident facts. But, as Judge Learned Hand cautioned from the bench in 1944, “There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.”4 Inside Africa Hall, nature was an orderly representation of facts. Outside, away from the legislative halls and political offices that imposed the ideological structures upon those facts, nature continued to wend its own inscrutable path. “Progressive humanism,” wrote Roland Barthes, “must always remember to reverse the terms of this very old imposture, constantly to scour nature, its ‘laws’ and its ‘limits’ in order to discover History there, and at last to establish Nature itself as historical.”5 The discourse of nature inside Africa Hall blends matter and power to formulate a distinctly American environmental and imperial imaginary. 146| Chapter Ten Outside African Hall, however, images of nature had undergone their own revolution through American cinema, which employed a dogma radically divergent from that of the men who zealously promoted the ideology of knowledge and power within cultural institutions such as the natural history museum. Outside African Hall, the cinema produced its own revelations about the relationships of Americans to foreign landscapes. By 1910, the motion picture replaced the picture newspaper and the pulp magazine as the primary vector of images of nature. In that year, 26 million people went to the movies on average once a week. A ticket typically cost five cents, and yet box office receipts topped $91 million that year in a nation with a population of only 92 million.6 The heart of this economic juggernaut was the nickelodeon, which acted as a huge cultural blender by combining into a single program a potpourri of subjects that ranged from vaudeville, current events, melodrama, travelogues, and sports, to “potted culture from the art galleries and the legitimate stage.”7 In the struggling, yet highly competitive film industry, producers concerned themselves more with their own economic viability than with the scientific education or political indoctrination of a nation. Forces in the marketplace (abetted by a lack of formal censorship) and the fierce competition for audiences compromised the idealistic notion that cinema should instruct or uplift the moral tenor of those who watched it rather than pander to their base tastes. As this reality became increasingly obvious during the early years of cinema, those who had insisted that art and entertainment were subordinate to education found themselves succumbing to the demands of dramatic narrative as the only viable way to attract audiences sizeable enough to justify underwriting the...

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