Natural History – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
There’s a big problem with a lot of older anthropology exhibits in natural history museums around the globe, namely that they were built in the last two centuries often using either old and out of date information about the peoples they seek to describe, or like the old bronzes depicting the variety of humanity in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, they were inherently racist to begin with.
Museums like San Diego’s anthropology museum have sought to rectify this with rebrandings and reorganizations. The museum in question, located in the California Tower building in Balboa Park, has recently renamed itself from the Museum of Man to the Museum of Us. Others like the Musée de l’Homme in Paris have worked to reassess how they display older historic anthropological exhibits like those old bronzes, so that today their primary message is one of “this is how people used to think, but not how we think anymore.” They’ve gone from being scientific teaching tools to historical artifacts.
There needs to be a very fine balance between lumping individual ethnicities with the rest of the natural world and actually considering humanity as a whole as part of nature. We are, after all natural beings, no matter how far we try to remove ourselves from nature with the edifices of civilization we’ve built up around ourselves. In case you’re wondering, this is a pretty central theme to the dissertation that I’m writing. In older generations, the idea of “natural humanity” was inherently understood to mean different peoples who were less civilized than others. It was used in the idea of the savage as a means of demeaning and describing the native peoples of the Americas following the beginning of the Columbian Exchange in 1492 (borrowing a term from one of my favorite historians, Alfred Crosby, here).
I’ve often thought of the world natural as being something good. Natural, or organic, food often tastes far better than the processed stuff. Natural soaps and such are less likely to harm our bodies. There’s even a style of music that I’ve called “natural” before, but only to myself. The liturgical music written by the St. Louis Jesuits, or the album Adiemus by Karl Jenkins would fall into this category.
So, if we’re natural beings, why then shouldn’t we be included in the kaleidoscope of life studied under the big tent of natural history? I for one have developed my own professional career from being an intellectual historian of the Renaissance to being a historian of late Renaissance natural history. That means I study natural history texts written between 1550 and 1600, in particular those which introduced new species from the Americas to audiences in Europe. At the time, natural history was closely related to another field called Cosmography, which while originally a theological study of the Cosmos had by the Renaissance become essentially the study of everything natural and human under the Sun. The first great proto-encyclopedias of our own modern age were descendants of the cosmographies of people like Sebastian Münster and my own focus of study, André Thevet (1516-1590), whose Cosmographie Universelle (1575) basically sought to describe everything, and yes I mean everything, that he knew about.
Today, we live at a turning point in human history. It seems like the last vestiges of the post-World War II order are finally beginning to break off, letting whatever the current century will bring be hatched from that shell born of the last century. Every century’s generations live in the shadows of their forebearers and have to figure out how to deal both with the benefits and the problems those generations left them. So, for us today talking about natural history we have the terrible realities of racism and bigotry which cloud this field and all its constituent studies. I do think humanity ought to be considered a part of natural history, ought to be studied like any other animal, but if we are going to speak of ourselves in those sorts of terms then it ought to do it in the same language across the board for all humanity, recognizing that we are all equal.
Today though, even more than any other time in our past, humanity has a critical role in the future of nature, and the stories that will be told someday in natural history. We’ve entered the beginnings of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, when we are the greatest influencers on the natural order of things. I’m seeing this in how many natural history and science museums have extensive exhibits on climate change, and even the handful of older ones on human biology, like my personal favorite at the Natural History Museum in London. We can try to ignore our part in shaping life on Earth, but at the end of the day as much as we’ll ignore it, we’ll end up like the proverbial unicorns who missed the boat. At that point, we will fall victim to our own pride, to our own endless thirst for more raw materials until the nature we need to survive has been stripped away. Human history has always been a part of natural history. Perhaps that’s a key to solving our current crises and all potential crises in the future: we must reckon with nature and our place within it.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 