Please Increase Your Browser's Memory Partition Individual Action and Collective Blame in the Hall of Biodiversity

The American Museum of Natural History in New York city aims to awe visitors with its sheer, incomprehensible magnitude. As massive as the displays of "preserved" animals, fossils, and cultural exhibits are, museum workers proudly boast that the museum can only display 1% of its holdings at any given time. The museum's numerous exhibits, combined with its enormous halls and labyrinthian rooms, impress upon visitors a feeling of ancient timelessness and irrefutable truths. Significantly, teachers and parents usher children here to expose them to the secrets of nature, past and present. What messages does this museum deliver to these, and other, formative minds? In relating my experiences at this museum, and particularly in the museum's Hall of Biodiversity, I hope to decode some of the many tacit messages conveyed through this museum's exhibits. In an initial, rapid perambulation of the main hallways and staircases, I pause to observe the convening of school children on the museum's lowest level. They sit in orderly groups within this catacomb-like structure and await the special event ahead of them. I catch the tone of anxious nervousness in their chattering, high-pitched voices. Their usual educational routine has been radically altered so that they can learn something majestic. Truths about nature? Their places within the world? How to maneuver with passive conformity from one surrealistic display to the next? I leave them, noting the warm glow falling upon their faces from a strategically placed gift shop, and reflect upon how the museum's serious ambience rekindles in me feelings of respectful reverence and anxiety from my childhood museum trips. Even if my mind forgets the details of those experiences, my body remembers the emotions. I wonder what other truths of worldly comport I physically embody from past and present experiences like museum field trips? For now, I let the cycle of learning continue with this next generation of children and make my way to the African Mammals room. Upon entering the African Mammals room, I find myself staring head on with a "family" of African elephants. While all the other animals in this room are behind glass enclosures in simulated natural habitats, the elephants stand alone, on a raised platform, without any separating glass. The intent, noted by Haraway (1989), is to give visitors the impression of encountering elephants in the wild, but the effect, for me, is much different. I am unable to reconcile myself to the fact that these exhibit props were once living creatures. A coating of plastic over one of the elephants only adds to my suspended belief: he (?) was obviously just delivered from the factory. I blame this mis-reading, in part, on the Disneyfication of my cultural sensibility. As Eco (1986) and Baudrillard (1994) have observed, the unreal and the ersatz strike observers as being much more plausible than the "real" thing. For example, where a crocodile in the wild would probably steer clear of a boat, at Disneyland, one comes to expect an overt display of ferociousness. The simulation becomes more real than the simulated this is the condition of "hyperreality." Anachronism is another reason for my disbelief. My historically specific reverence for living mam-